Annotation

DARKLY DREAMING DEXTER: Dexter Morgan can't stand the sight of blood. Which makes his job as a blood spatter analyst for the Miami PD a little tricky. But it means that he's very tidy when it comes to his hobby: murder. After all, even though Dexter only ever kills bad people, he doesn't want to draw attention to it. But now there's another killer out there who's being a whole lot less subtle

DEARLY DEVOTED DEXTER: Miami 's best-dressed serial killer is getting twitchy – he hasn't killed for months. Ever since their paths first crossed, Sergeant Doakes hasn't let Dexter Morgan out of his sight. Then a body turns up, mutilated and barely alive. To trap the torturer, Doakes and Dexter will have to work together, if they can trust each other. It's a devil's pact and one of them will have to be the bait…

DEXTER IN THE DARK: When Dexter is brought in to analyse a charred headless corpse, it seems he's dealing with a killer even more sinister than he is, and one with a personal interest in him. And with Dexter now having a wedding to plan and a family to protect, the stakes are high. As he realises his step-children might share his blood-lust, if he's ever to help them target it, Dexter will first have to stay alive himself.

Jeffry Lindsay

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

EPILOGUE

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jeffry Lindsay

Darkly dreaming Dexter

A book in the Dexter series

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T

HIS BOOK WOULD NOT HAVE BEEN POSSIBLE without the generous technical and spiritual help of Einstein and the Deacon. They represent what is best about Miami cops, and they taught me some of what it means to do this very tough job in a tougher place.

I would also like to thank a number of people who made some very helpful suggestions, especially my wife, the Barclays, Julio S., Dr. and Mrs. A. L. Freundlich, Pookie, Bear, and Tinky.

I am deeply indebted to Jason Kaufman for his wisdom and insight in shaping the book.

Thanks also to Doris, the Lady of the Last Laugh.

And very special thanks to Nick Ellison, who is everything an agent is supposed to be but almost never is.

For Hilary

who is everything to me

CHAPTER 1

M

OON. GLORIOUS MOON. FULL, FAT, REDDISH moon, the night as light as day, the moonlight flooding down across the land and bringing joy, joy, joy. Bringing too the full-throated call of the tropical night, the soft and wild voice of the wind roaring through the hairs on your arm, the hollow wail of starlight, the teeth-grinding bellow of the moonlight off the water.

All calling to the Need. Oh, the symphonic shriek of the thousand hiding voices, the cry of the Need inside,

the entity

, the silent watcher, the cold quiet thing, the one that laughs, the Moondancer. The me that was not-me, the thing that mocked and laughed and came calling with its hunger. With the Need. And the Need was very strong now, very careful cold coiled creeping crackly cocked and ready, very strong, very much ready now-and still it waited and watched, and it made me wait and watch.

I had been waiting and watching the priest for five weeks now. The Need had been prickling and teasing and prodding at me to find one, find the next, find this priest. For three weeks I had known he was it, he was next, we belonged to the Dark Passenger, he and I together. And that three weeks I had spent fighting the pressure, the growing

Need

, rising in me like a great wave that roars up and over the beach and does not recede, only swells more with every tick of the bright night's clock.

But it was careful time, too, time spent making sure. Not making sure of the priest, no, I was long sure of him. Time spent to be certain that it could be done right, made neat, all the corners folded, all squared away. I could not be caught, not now. I had worked too hard, too long, to make this work for me, to protect my happy little life.

And I was having too much fun to stop now.

And so I was always careful. Always tidy. Always prepared ahead of time so it would be

right

. And when it was right, take extra time to be sure. It was the Harry way, God bless him, that farsighted perfect policeman, my foster father. Always be sure, be careful, be exact, he had said, and for a week now I had been sure that everything was just as Harry-right as it could be. And when I left work this night, I knew this was it. This night was the Night. This night felt different. This night it would happen,

had

to happen. Just as it had happened before. Just as it would happen again, and again.

And tonight it would happen to the priest.

His name was Father Donovan. He taught music to the children at St. Anthony's Orphanage in Homestead, Florida. The children loved him. And of course he loved the children, oh very much indeed. He had devoted a whole life to them. Learned Creole and Spanish. Learned their music, too. All for the kids. Everything he did, it was all for the kids.

Everything.

I watched him this night as I had watched for so many nights now. Watched as he paused in the orphanage doorway to talk to a young black girl who had followed him out. She was small, no more than eight years old and small for that. He sat on the steps and talked to her for five minutes. She sat, too, and bounced up and down. They laughed. She leaned against him. He touched her hair. A nun came out and stood in the doorway, looking down at them for a moment before she spoke. Then she smiled and held out a hand. The girl bumped her head against the priest. Father Donovan hugged her, stood, and kissed the girl good night. The nun laughed and said something to Father Donovan. He said something back.

And then he started toward his car. Finally: I coiled myself to strike and-

Not yet. A janitorial service minivan stood fifteen feet from the door. As Father Donovan passed it, the side door slid open. A man leaned out, puffing on a cigarette, and greeted the priest, who leaned against the van and talked to the man.

Luck. Luck again. Always luck on these Nights. I had not seen the man, not guessed he was there. But he would have seen me. If not for Luck.

I took a deep breath. Let it out slow and steady, icy cold. It was only one small thing. I had not missed any others. I had done it all right, all the same, all the way it had to be done. It would be

right

.

Now.

Father Donovan walked toward his car again. He turned once and called something. The janitor waved from the doorway to the orphanage, then stubbed out his cigarette and disappeared inside the building. Gone.

Luck. Luck again.

Father Donovan fumbled for his keys, opened his car door, got into his car. I heard the key go in. Heard the engine turn over. And then-

NOW .

I sat up in his backseat and slipped the noose around his neck. One quick, slippery, pretty twist and the coil of fifty-pound-test fishing line settled tight. He made a small ratchet of panic and that was it.

“You are mine now,” I told him, and he froze as neat and perfect as if he had practiced, almost like he heard the other voice, the laughing watcher inside me.

“Do exactly as I say,” I said.

He rasped half a breath and glanced into his rearview mirror. My face was there, waiting for him, wrapped in the white silk mask that showed only my eyes.

“Do you understand?” I said. The silk of the mask flowed across my lips as I spoke.

Father Donovan said nothing. Stared at my eyes. I pulled on the noose.

“Do you understand?” I repeated, a little softer.

This time he nodded. He fluttered a hand at the noose, not sure what would happen if he tried to loosen it. His face was turning purple.

I loosened the noose for him. “Be good,” I said, “and you will live longer.”

He took a deep breath. I could hear the air rip at his throat. He coughed and breathed again. But he sat still and did not try to escape.

This was very good.

We drove. Father Donovan followed my directions, no tricks, no hesitations. We drove south through Florida City and took the Card Sound Road. I could tell that road made him nervous, but he did not object. He did not try to speak to me. He kept both hands on the wheel, pale and knotted tight, so the knuckles stood up. That was very good, too.

We drove south for another five minutes with no sound but the song of the tires and the wind and the great moon above making its mighty music in my veins, and the careful watcher laughing quietly in the rush of the night's hard pulse.

“Turn here,” I said at last.

The priest's eyes flew to mine in the mirror. The panic was trying to claw out of his eyes, down his face, into his mouth to speak, but-

“Turn!” I said, and he turned. Slumped like he had been expecting this all along, waiting for it forever, and he turned.

The small dirt road was barely visible. You almost had to know it was there. But I knew. I had been there before. The road ran for two and a half miles, twisting three times, through the saw grass, through the trees, alongside a small canal, deep into the swamp and into a clearing.

Fifty years ago somebody had built a house. Most of it was still there. It was large for what it was. Three rooms, half a roof still left, the place completely abandoned now for many years.

Except the old vegetable garden out in the side yard. There were signs that somebody had been digging there fairly recently.

“Stop the car,” I said as the headlights picked up the crumbling house.

Father Donovan lurched to obey. Fear had sealed him into his body now, his limbs and thoughts all rigid.

“Turn off the motor,” I told him, and he did.

It was suddenly very quiet.

Some small something chittered in a tree. The wind rattled the grass. And then more quiet, silence so deep it almost drowned out the roar of the night music that pounded away in my secret self.

“Get out,” I said.

Father Donovan did not move. His eyes were on the vegetable garden.

Seven small mounds of earth were visible there. The heaped soil looked very dark in the moonlight. It must have looked even darker to Father Donovan. And still he did not move.

I yanked hard on the noose, harder than he thought he could live through, harder than he knew could happen to him. His back arched against the seat and the veins stood out on his forehead and he thought he was about to die.

But he was not. Not yet. Not for quite some time, in fact.

I kicked the car door open and pulled him out after me, just to let him feel my strength. He flopped to the sandy roadbed and twisted like an injured snake. The Dark Passenger laughed and loved it and I played the part. I put one boot on Father Donovan's chest and held the noose tight.

“You have to listen and do as I say,” I told him. “You

have

to.” I bent and gently loosened the noose. “You should know that. It's important,” I said.

And he heard me. His eyes, pounding with blood and pain and leaking tears onto his face, his eyes met mine in a rush of understanding and all the things that had to happen were there for him to see now. And he saw. And he knew how important it was for him to be just

right

. He began to know.

“Get up now,” I said.

Slowly, very slowly, with his eyes always on mine, Father Donovan got up. We stood just like that for a long time, our eyes together, becoming one person with one need, and then he trembled. He raised one hand halfway to his face and dropped it again.

“In the house,” I said, so very softly. In the house where everything was ready.

Father Donovan dropped his eyes. He raised them to me but could not look anymore. He turned toward the house but stopped as he saw again the dark dirt mounds of the garden. And he wanted to look at me, but he could not, not after seeing again those black moonlit heaps of earth.

He started for the house and I held his leash. He went obediently, head down, a good and docile victim. Up the five battered steps, across the narrow porch to the front door, pushed shut. Father Donovan stopped. He did not look up. He did not look at me.

“Through the door,” I said in my soft command voice.

Father Donovan trembled.

“Go through the door now,” I said again.

But he could not.

I leaned past him and pushed the door open. I shoved the priest in with my foot. He stumbled, righted himself, and stood just inside, eyes squeezed tight shut.

I closed the door. I had left a battery lamp standing on the floor beside the door and I turned it on.

“Look,” I whispered.

Father Donovan slowly, carefully, opened one eye.

He froze.

Time stopped for Father Donovan.

“No,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Oh, no,” he said.

“Oh, yes,” I said.

He screamed, “NOOOO!”

I yanked on the noose. His scream was cut off and he fell to his knees. He made a wet croaky whimpering sound and covered his face. “Yes,” I said. “It's a terrible mess, isn't it?”

He used his whole face to close his eyes. He could not look, not now, not like this. I did not blame him, not really, it

was

a terrible mess. It had bothered me just to know it was there since I had set it up for him. But he had to see it. He had to. Not just for me. Not just for the Dark Passenger. For

him

. He had to see. And he was not looking.

“Open your eyes, Father Donovan,” I said.

“Please,” he said in a terrible little whimper. It got on my nerves very badly, shouldn't have, icy-clean control, but it got to me, whining in the face of that mess on the floor, and I kicked his legs out from under him. I hauled hard on the noose and grabbed the back of his neck with my right hand, then slammed his face into the filthy warped floorboards. There was a little blood and that made me madder.

“Open them,” I said. “Open your eyes. Open them NOW.

Look

.” I grabbed his hair and pulled his head back. “Do as you're told,” I said. “Look. Or I will cut your eyelids right off your face.”

I was very convincing. And so he did it. He did as he was told. He looked.

I had worked hard to make it right, but you have to use what you've got to work with. I could not have done it at all if they had not been there long enough for everything to dry up, but they were so very dirty. I had managed to clean off most of the dirt, but some of the bodies had been in the garden a very long time and you couldn't tell where the dirt began and the body stopped. You never could tell, really, when you stop to think about it. So dirty-

There were seven of them, seven small bodies, seven extra-dirty orphan children laid out on rubber shower sheets, which are neater and don't leak. Seven straight lines pointing straight across the room.

Pointing right at Father Donovan. So he knew.

He was about to join them.

“Hail Mary, full of grace-” he started. I jerked hard on the noose.

“None of that, Father. Not now. Now is for real truth.”

“Please,” he choked.

“Yes, beg me. That's good. Much better.” I yanked again. “Do you think that's it, Father? Seven bodies? Did they beg?” He had nothing to say. “Do you think that's all of them, Father? Just seven? Did I get them all?”

“Oh, God,” he rasped out, with a pain that was good to hear.

“And what about the other towns, Father? What about Fayetteville? Would you like to talk about Fayetteville?” He just choked out a sob, no words. “And what about East Orange? Was that three? Or did I miss one there? It's so hard to be sure. Was it four in East Orange, Father?”

Father Donovan tried to scream. There was not enough left of his throat for it to be a very good scream, but it had real feeling behind it, which made up for the poor technique. Then he fell forward onto his face and I let him snivel for a while before I pulled him up and onto his feet. He was not steady, and not in control. His bladder had let loose and there was drool on his chin.

“Please,” he said. “I couldn't help myself. I just couldn't help myself. Please, you have to understand-”

“I do understand, Father,” I said, and there was something in my voice, the Dark Passenger's voice now, and the sound of it froze him. He lifted his head slowly to face me and what he saw in my eyes made him very still. “I understand perfectly,” I told him, moving very close to his face. The sweat on his cheeks turned to ice. “You see,” I said, “I can't help myself, either.”

We were very close now, almost touching, and the dirtiness of him was suddenly too much. I jerked up on the noose and kicked his feet out from under him again. Father Donovan sprawled on the floor.

“But

children

?” I said. “I could never do this to children.” I put my hard clean boot on the back of his head and slammed his face down. “Not like you, Father. Never kids. I have to find people like you.”

“What are you?” Father Donovan whispered.

“The beginning,” I said. “And the end. Meet your Unmaker, Father.” I had the needle ready and it went into his neck like it was supposed to, slight resistance from the rigid muscles, but none from the priest. I pushed the plunger and the syringe emptied, filling Father Donovan with quick, clean calm. Moments, only moments, and his head began to float, and he rolled his face to me.

Did he truly see me now? Did he see the double rubber gloves, the careful coveralls, the slick silk mask? Did he really see me? Or did that only happen in the other room, the Dark Passenger's room, the Clean Room? Painted white two nights past and swept, scrubbed, sprayed, cleaned as clean as can be. And in the middle of the room, its windows sealed with thick white rubberized sheets, under the lights in the middle of the room, did he finally see me there in the table I had made, the boxes of white garbage bags, the bottles of chemicals, and the small row of saws and knives? Did he see me at last?

Or did he see those seven untidy lumps, and who knows how many more? Did he see himself at last, unable to scream, turning into that kind of mess in the garden?

He would not, of course. His imagination did not allow him to see himself as the same species. And in a way, he was right. He would never turn into the kind of mess he had made of the children. I would never do that, could never allow that. I am not like Father Donovan, not that kind of monster.

I am a very neat monster.

Neatness takes time, of course, but it's worth it. Worth it to make the Dark Passenger happy, keep him quiet for another long while. Worth it just to do it right and tidy. Remove one more heap of mess from the world. A few more neatly wrapped bags of garbage and my one small corner of the world is a neater, happier place. A better place.

I had about eight hours before I had to be gone. I would need them all to do it right.

I secured the priest to the table with duct tape and cut away his clothes. I did the preliminary work quickly; shaving, scrubbing, cutting away the things that stuck out untidily. As always I felt the wonderful long slow build to release begin its pounding throughout my entire body. It would flutter through me while I worked, rising and taking me with it, until the very end, the Need and the priest swimming away together on a fading tide.

And just before I started the serious work Father Donovan opened his eyes and looked at me. There was no fear now; that happens sometimes. He looked straight up at me and his mouth moved.

“What?” I said. I moved my head a little closer. “I can't hear you.”

I heard him breathe, a slow and peaceful breath, and then he said it again before his eyes closed.

“You're welcome,” I said, and I went to work.

CHAPTER 2

B

Y FOUR-THIRTY IN THE MORNING THE PRIEST WAS all cleaned up. I felt a lot better. I always did, after. Killing makes me feel good. It works the knots out of darling Dexter's dark schemata. It's a sweet release, a necessary letting go of all the little hydraulic valves inside. I enjoy my work; sorry if that bothers you. Oh, very sorry, really. But there it is. And it's not just any killing, of course. It has to be done the right way, at the right time, with the right partner-very complicated, but very necessary.

And always somewhat draining. So I was tired, but the tension of the last week was gone, the cold voice of the Dark Passenger was quiet, and I could be me again. Quirky, funny, happy-go-lucky, dead-inside Dexter. No longer Dexter with the knife, Dexter the Avenger. Not until next time.

I put all the bodies back in the garden with one new neighbor and tidied the little falling-down house as much as I could. I packed my things into the priest's car and drove south to the small side canal where I had left my boat, a seventeen-foot Whaler with a shallow draft and a big engine. I pushed the priest's car into the canal behind my boat and climbed on board. I watched the car settle and disappear. Then I cranked up my outboard and eased out of the canal, heading north across the bay. The sun was just coming up and bouncing off the brightwork. I put on my very best happy face; just another early-morning fisherman heading home. Red snapper, anyone?

By six-thirty I was home in my Coconut Grove apartment. I took the slide from my pocket, a simple, clean glass strip-with a careful single drop of the priest's blood preserved in the center. Nice and clean, dry now, ready to slip under my microscope when I wanted to remember. I put the slide with the others, thirty-six neat and careful very dry drops of blood.

I took an extra-long shower, letting the hot hot water wash away the last of the tension and ease the knots in my muscles, scrubbing off the small final traces of clinging smell from the priest and the garden of the little house in the swamp.

Children.

I should have killed him twice.

Whatever made me the way I am left me hollow, empty inside, unable to feel. It doesn't seem like a big deal. I'm quite sure most people fake an awful lot of everyday human contact. I just fake all of it. I fake it very well, and the feelings are never there. But I like kids. I could never have them, since the idea of sex is no idea at all. Imagine doing those things- How can you? Where's your sense of dignity? But kids-kids are special. Father Donovan deserved to die. The Code of Harry was satisfied, along with the Dark Passenger.

By seven-fifteen I felt clean again. I had coffee, cereal, and headed in for work.

The building where I work is a large modern thing, white with lots of glass, near the airport. My lab is on the second floor, in the back. I have a small office attached to the lab. It is not much of an office, but it's mine, a cubicle off the main blood lab. All mine, nobody else allowed in, nobody to share with, to mess up my area. A desk with a chair, another chair for a visitor, if he's not too big. Computer, shelf, filing cabinet. Telephone. Answering machine.

Answering machine with a blinking light as I came in. A message for me is not a daily thing. For some reason, there are very few people in the world who can think of things to say to a blood spatter pattern analyst during working hours. One of the few people who does have things to say to me is Deborah Morgan, my foster sister. A cop, just like her father.

The message was from her.

I punched the button and heard tinny

Tejano

music, then Deborah's voice. “Dexter, please, as soon as you get in. I'm at a crime scene out on Tamiami Trail, at the Cacique Motel.” There was a pause. I heard her put a hand over the mouthpiece of the telephone and say something to somebody. Then there was a blast of Mexican music again and she was back on. “Can you get out here right away? Please, Dex?”

She hung up.

I don't have a family. I mean, as far as I know. Somewhere out there must be people who carry similar genetic material, I'm sure. I pity them. But I've never met them. I haven't tried, and they haven't tried to find me. I was adopted, raised by Harry and Doris Morgan, Deborah's parents. And considering what I am, they did a wonderful job of raising me, don't you think?

Both dead now. And so Deb is the only person in the world who gives a rusty possum fart whether I live or die. For some reason that I can't fathom, she actually prefers me to be alive. I think that's nice, and if I could have feelings at all I would have them for Deb.

So I went. I drove out of the Metro-Dade parking lot and got onto the nearby Turnpike, which took me south to the section of Tamiami Trail that is home to the Cacique Motel and several hundred of its brothers and sisters. In its own way, it is paradise. Particularly if you are a cockroach. Rows of buildings that manage to glitter and molder at the same time. Bright neon over ancient, squalid, sponge-rotted structures. If you don't go at night, you won't go. Because to see these places by daylight is to see the bottom line of our flimsy contract with life.

Every major city has a section like this one. If a piebald dwarf with advanced leprosy wants to have sex with a kangaroo and a teenage choir, he'll find his way here and get a room. When he's done, he might take the whole gang next door for a cup of Cuban coffee and a

medianoche

sandwich. Nobody would care, as long as he tipped.

Deborah had been spending way too much time out here lately. Her opinion, not mine. It seemed like a good place to go if you were a cop and you wanted to increase your statistical chance of catching somebody doing something awful.

Deborah didn't see it that way. Maybe because she was working vice. A good-looking young woman working vice on the Tamiami Trail usually ends up as bait on a sting, standing outside almost naked to catch men who wanted to pay for sex. Deborah hated that. Couldn't get worked up about prostitution, except as a sociological issue. Didn't think bagging johns was real crime fighting. And, known only to me, she hated anything that overemphasized her femininity and her lush figure. She wanted to be a cop; it was not her fault she looked more like a centerfold.

And as I pulled into the parking lot that linked the Cacique and its neighbor, Tito's Café Cubano, I could see that she was currently emphasizing the hell out of her figure. She was dressed in a neon-pink tube top, spandex shorts, black fishnet stockings, and spike heels. Straight from the costume shop for Hollywood Hookers in 3-D.

A few years back somebody in the Vice Bureau got the word that the pimps were laughing at them on the streets. It seems the vice cops, mostly male, were picking the outfits for the women operatives who worked in the sting operations. Their choice of clothing was showing an awful lot about their preferences in kinkiness, but it did not look much like hooker wear. So everybody on the street could tell when the new girl was carrying a badge and gun in her clutch purse.

As a result of this tip, the vice cops began to insist that the girls who went undercover pick their own outfits for the job. After all, girls know more about what looks right, don't they?

Maybe most of them do. Deborah doesn't. She's never felt comfortable in anything but blues. You should have seen what she wanted to wear to her prom. And now-I had never seen a beautiful woman dressed in such a revealing costume who looked less sexually appealing than Deb did.

But she did stand out. She was working crowd control, her badge pinned to the tube top. She was more visible than the half mile of yellow crime-scene tape that was already strung up, more than the three patrol cars angled in with their lights flashing. The pink tube top flashed a little brighter.

She was off to one side of the parking lot, keeping a growing crowd back from the lab techs who appeared to be going through the Dumpster belonging to the coffee shop. I was glad I hadn't been assigned to that. The stink of it came all the way across the lot and in my car window-a dark stench of Latin coffee grounds mixed with old fruit and rancid pork.

The cop at the entrance to the parking lot was a guy I knew. He waved me in and I found a spot.

“Deb,” I said as I strolled over. “Nice outfit. Really shows your figure to full advantage.”

“Fuck off,” she said, and she blushed. Really something to see in a full-grown cop.

“They found another hooker,” she said. “At least, they think it's a hooker. Hard to tell from what's left.”

“That's the third in the last five months,” I said.

“Fifth,” she told me. “There were two more up in Broward.” She shook her head. “These assholes keep saying that officially there's no connection.”

“It would make for an awful lot of paperwork,” I said helpfully.

Deb showed me her teeth. “How about some basic fucking police work?” she snarled. “A moron could see these kills are connected.” And she gave a little shudder.

I stared at her, amazed. She was a cop, daughter of a cop. Things didn't bother her. When she'd been a rookie cop and the older guys played tricks on Deborah-showing her the hacked-up bodies that turn up in Miami every day-to get her to blow her lunch, she hadn't blinked. She'd seen it all. Been there, done that, bought the T-shirt.

But this one made her shudder.

Interesting

.

“This one is special, is that it?” I asked her.

“This one is on my beat, with the hookers.” She pointed a finger at me. “And THAT means I've got a shot to get in on it, get noticed, and pull a transfer into Homicide Bureau.”

I gave her my happy smile. “Ambition, Deborah?”

“Goddamned right,” she said. “I want out of vice, and I want out of this sex suit. I want into Homicide, Dexter, and this could be my ticket. With one small break-” She paused. And then she said something absolutely amazing. “Please help me, Dex,” she said. “I really hate this.”

“Please, Deborah? You're saying

please

to me? Do you know how nervous that makes me?”

“Cut the crap, Dex.”

“But Deborah, really-”

“Cut it, I said. Will you help me or not?”

When she put it that way, with that strange rare “please” dangling in the air, what else could I say but, “Of course I will, Deb. You know that.”

And she eyed me hard, taking back her please. “I

don't

know it, Dex. I don't know anything with you.”

“Of course I'll help, Deb,” I repeated, trying to sound hurt. And doing a really good imitation of injured dignity, I headed for the Dumpster with the rest of the lab rats.

Camilla Figg was crawling through the garbage, dusting for fingerprints. She was a stocky woman of thirty-five with short hair who had never seemed to respond to my breezy, charming pleasantries. But as she saw me, she came up onto her knees, blushed, and watched me go by without speaking. She always seemed to stare at me and then blush.

Sitting on an overturned plastic milk carton on the far end of the Dumpster, poking through a handful of waste matter, was Vince Masuoka. He was half Japanese and liked to joke that he got the short half. He called it a joke, anyway.

There was something just slightly off in Vince's bright, Asian smile. Like he had learned to smile from a picture book. Even when he made the required dirty put-down jokes with the cops, nobody got mad at him. Nobody laughed, either, but that didn't stop him. He kept making all the correct ritual gestures, but he always seemed to be faking. That's why I liked him, I think. Another guy pretending to be human, just like me.

“Well, Dexter,” Vince said without looking up. “What brings you here?”

“I came to see how real experts operate in a totally professional atmosphere,” I said. “Have you seen any?”

“Ha-ha,” he said. It was supposed to be a laugh, but it was even phonier than his smile. “You must think you're in Boston.” He found something and held it up to the light, squinting. “Seriously, why are you here?”

“Why wouldn't I be here, Vince?” I said, pretending to sound indignant. “It's a crime scene, isn't it?”

“You do blood spatter,” he said, throwing away whatever he'd been staring at and searching for another one.

“I knew that.”

He looked at me with his biggest fake smile. “There's no blood here, Dex.”

I felt light-headed. “What does that mean?”

“There's no blood in or on or near, Dex. No blood at all. Weirdest thing you ever saw,” he said.

No blood at all. I could hear that phrase repeat itself in my head, louder each time. No sticky, hot, messy, awful blood. No splatter. No stain. NO BLOOD AT ALL.

Why hadn't I thought of that?

It felt like a missing piece to something I didn't know was incomplete.

I don't pretend to understand what it is about Dexter and blood. Just thinking of it sets my teeth on edge-and yet I have, after all, made it my career, my study, and part of my real work. Clearly some very deep things are going on, but I find it a little hard to stay interested. I am what I am, and isn't it a lovely night to dissect a child killer?

But this-

“Are you all right, Dexter?” Vince asked.

“I am fantastic,” I said. “How does he do it?”

“That depends.”

I looked at Vince. He was staring at a handful of coffee grounds, carefully pushing them around with one rubber-gloved finger. “Depends on what, Vince?”

“On who

he

is and what

it

he's doing,” he said. “Ha-ha.”

I shook my head. “Sometimes you work too hard at being inscrutable,” I said. “How does the killer get rid of the blood?”

“Hard to say right now,” he said. “We haven't found any of it. And the body is not in real good shape, so it's going to be hard to find much.”

That didn't sound nearly as interesting. I like to leave a neat body. No fuss, no mess, no dripping blood. If the killer was just another dog tearing at a bone, this was all nothing to me.

I breathed a little easier. “Where's the body?” I asked Vince.

He jerked his head at a spot twenty feet away. “Over there,” he said. “With LaGuerta.”

“Oh, my,” I said. “Is LaGuerta handling this?”

He gave me his fake smile again. “Lucky killer.”

I looked. A small knot of people stood around a cluster of tidy trash bags. “I don't see it,” I said.

“Right there. The trash bags. Each one is a body part. He cut the victim into pieces and then wrapped up each one like it was a Christmas present. Did you ever see anything like that before?”

Of course I had.

That's how I do it.

CHAPTER 3

T

HERE IS SOMETHING STRANGE AND DISARMING about looking at a homicide scene in the bright daylight of the Miami sun. It makes the most grotesque killings look antiseptic, staged. Like you're in a new and daring section of Disney World. Dahmer Land. Come ride the refrigerator. Please hurl your lunch in the designated containers only.

Not that the sight of mutilated bodies anywhere has ever bothered

me

, oh no, far from it. I do resent the messy ones a little when they are careless with their body fluids-nasty stuff. Other than that, it seems no worse than looking at spare ribs at the grocery store. But rookies and visitors to crime scenes tend to throw up-and for some reason, they throw up much less here than they do up North. The sun just takes the sting out. It cleans things up, makes them neater. Maybe that's why I love Miami. It's such a

neat

town.

And it was already a beautiful, hot Miami day. Anyone who had worn a suit coat was now looking for a place to hang it. Alas, there was no such place in the grubby little parking lot. There were only five or six cars and the Dumpster. It was shoved over in a corner, next to the café, backed up against a pink stucco wall topped with barbed wire. The back door to the café was there. A sullen young woman moved in and out, doing a brisk business in

café cubano

and

pasteles

with the cops and the technicians on the scene. The handful of assorted cops in suits who hang out at homicide scenes, either to be noticed, to apply pressure, or to make sure they know what's going on, now had one more thing to juggle. Coffee, a pastry, a suit coat.

The crime-lab gang didn't wear suits. Rayon bowling shirts with two pockets was more their speed. I was wearing one myself. It repeated a pattern of voodoo drummers and palm trees against a lime green background. Stylish, but practical.

I headed for the closest rayon shirt in the knot of people around the body. It belonged to Angel Batista-no-relation, as he usually introduced himself. Hi, I'm Angel Batista, no relation. He worked in the medical examiner's office. At the moment he was squatting beside one of the garbage bags and peering inside it.

I joined him. I was anxious to see inside the bag myself. Anything that got a reaction from Deborah was worth a peek.

“Angel,” I said, coming up on his side. “What do we have?”

“What you mean

we

, white boy?” he said. “We got no blood with this one. You're out of a job.”

“I heard.” I crouched down beside him. “Was it done here, or just dumped?”

He shook his head. “Hard to say. They empty the Dumpster twice a week-this has been here for maybe two days.”

I looked around the parking lot, then over at the moldy façade of the Cacique. “What about the motel?”

Angel shrugged. “They're still checking, but I don't think they'll find anything. The other times, he just used a handy Dumpster. Huh,” he said suddenly.

“What?”

He used a pencil to peel back the plastic bag. “Look at that cut.”

The end of a disjointed leg stuck out, looking pale and exceptionally dead in the glare of the sun. This piece ended in the ankle, foot neatly lopped off. A small tattoo of a butterfly remained, one wing cut away with the foot.

I whistled. It was almost surgical. This guy did very nice work-as good as I could do. “Very clean,” I said. And it was, even beyond the neatness of the cutting. I had never seen such clean, dry,

neat

-looking dead flesh. Wonderful.

“Me cago en diez on nice and clean,” he said. “It's not finished.”

I looked past him, staring a little deeper into the bag. Nothing moving in there. “It looks pretty final to me, Angel.”

“Lookit,” he said. He flipped open one of the other bags. “This leg, he cuts it in four pieces. Almost like with a ruler or something, huh? And so

this

one,” and he pointed back to the first ankle that I had admired so deeply, “this one he cuts in two pieces only? How's come, huh?”

“I'm sure I don't know,” I said. “Perhaps Detective LaGuerta will figure it out.”

Angel looked at me for a moment and we both struggled to keep a straight face. “Perhaps she will,” he said, and he turned back to his work. “Why don't you go ask her?”

“Hasta luego, Angel,” I said.

“Almost certainly,” he answered, head down over the plastic bag.

There was a rumor going around a few years back that Detective Migdia LaGuerta got into the Homicide Bureau by sleeping with somebody. To look at her once you might buy into that. She has all the necessary parts in the right places to be physically attractive in a sullen, aristocratic way. A true artist with her makeup and very well dressed, Bloomingdale's chic. But the rumor can't be true. To begin with, although she seems outwardly very feminine, I've never met a woman who was more masculine inside. She was hard, ambitious in the most self-serving way, and her only weakness seemed to be for model-handsome men a few years younger than she was. So I'm quite sure she didn't get into Homicide using sex. She got into Homicide because she's Cuban, plays politics, and knows how to kiss ass. That combination is far better than sex in Miami.

LaGuerta is very very good at kissing ass, a world-class ass kisser. She kissed ass all the way up to the lofty rank of homicide investigator. Unfortunately, it's a job where her skills at posterior smooching were never called for, and she was a terrible detective.

It happens; incompetence is rewarded more often than not. I have to work with her anyway. So I have used my considerable charm to make her like me. Easier than you might think. Anybody can be charming if they don't mind faking it, saying all the stupid, obvious, nauseating things that a conscience keeps most people from saying. Happily, I don't have a conscience. I say them.

As I approached the little group clustered near the café, LaGuerta was interviewing somebody in rapid-fire Spanish. I speak Spanish; I even understand a little Cuban. But I could only get one word in ten from LaGuerta. The Cuban dialect is the despair of the Spanish-speaking world. The whole purpose of Cuban Spanish seems to be to race against an invisible stopwatch and get out as much as possible in three-second bursts without using any consonants.

The trick to following it is to know what the person is going to say before they say it. That tends to contribute to the clannishness non-Cubans sometimes complain about.

The man LaGuerta was grilling was short and broad, dark, with Indio features, and was clearly intimidated by the dialect, the tone, and the badge. He tried not to look at her as he spoke, which seemed to make her speak even faster.

“No, no hay nadie afuera,” he said softly, slowly, looking away. “Todos estan en café.”

Nobody was outside, they were all in the café

.

“Donde estabas?” she demanded.

Where were you?

The man looked at the bags of body parts and quickly looked away. “Cocina.”

The kitchen

. “Entonces yo saco la basura.”

Then I took out the garbage.

LaGuerta went on; pushing at him verbally, asking the wrong questions in a tone of voice that bullied and demeaned him until he slowly forgot the horror of finding the body parts in the Dumpster, and turned sullen and uncooperative instead.

A true master's touch. Take the key witness and turn him against you. If you can screw up the case in the first few vital hours, it saves time and paperwork later.

She finished with a few threats and sent the man away. “ Indio,” she spat, as he lumbered out of earshot.

“It takes all kinds, Detective,” I said. “Even campesinos.” She looked up and ran her eyes over me, slowly, while I stood and wondered why. Had she forgotten what I looked like? But she finished with a big smile. She really did like me, the idiot.

“Hola, Dexter. What brings you here?”

“I heard you were here and couldn't stay away. Please, Detective, when will you marry me?”

She giggled. The other officers within earshot exchanged a glance and then looked away. “I don't buy a shoe until I try it on,” LaGuerta said. “No matter how good the shoe looks.” And while I was sure that was true, it didn't actually explain to me why she stared at me with her tongue between her teeth as she said it. “Now go away, you distracting me. I have serious work here.”

“I can see that,” I said. “Have you caught the killer yet?”

She snorted. “You sound like a reporter. Those assholes will be all over me in another hour.”

“What will you tell them?”

She looked at the bags of body parts and frowned. Not because the sight bothered her. She was seeing her career, trying to phrase her statement to the press.

“It is only a matter of time before the killer makes a mistake and we catch him-”

“Meaning,” I said, “that so far he hasn't made any mistakes, you don't have any clues, and you have to wait for him to kill again before you can do anything?”

She looked at me hard. “I forget. Why do I like you?”

I just shrugged. I didn't have a clue-but then, apparently she didn't either.

“What we got is nada y nada. That Guatemalan,” she made a face at the retreating Indio, “he found the body when he came out with the garbage from the restaurant. He didn't recognize these garbage bags and he opened one up to see if maybe there was something good. And it was the head.”

“Peekaboo,” I said softly.

“Hah?”

“Nothing.”

She looked around, frowning, perhaps hoping a clue would leap out and she could shoot it.

“So that's it. Nobody saw anything, heard anything. Nothing. I have to wait for your fellow nerds to finish up before I know anything.”

“Detective,” said a voice behind us. Captain Matthews strolled up in a cloud of Aramis aftershave, meaning that the reporters would be here very shortly.

“Hello, Captain,” LaGuerta said.

“I've asked Officer Morgan to maintain a peripheral involvement in this case,” he said. LaGuerta flinched. “In her capacity as an undercover operative she has resources in the prostitution community that could assist us in expediting the solution.” The man talked with a thesaurus. Too many years of writing reports.

“Captain, I'm not sure that's necessary,” LaGuerta said.

He winked and put a hand on her shoulder. People management is a skill. “Relax, Detective. She's not going to interfere with your command prerogatives. She'll just check in with you if she has something to report. Witnesses, that sort of thing. Her father was a damn good cop. All right?” His eyes glazed and refocused on something on the other end of the parking lot. I looked. The Channel 7 News van was rolling in. “Excuse me,” Matthews said. He straightened his tie, put on a serious expression, and strolled over toward the van.

“Puta,” LaGuerta said under her breath.

I didn't know if she meant that as a general observation, or was talking about Deb, but I thought it was a good time to slip away, too, before LaGuerta remembered that Officer Puta was my sister.

As I rejoined Deb, Matthews was shaking hands with Jerry Gonzalez from Channel 7. Jerry was the Miami area's leading champion of if-it-bleeds-it-leads journalism. My kind of guy. He was going to be disappointed this time.

I felt a slight quiver pass over my skin.

No blood at all

.

“Dexter,” Deborah said, still trying to sound like a cop, but I could tell she was excited. “I talked to Captain Matthews. He's going to let me in on this.”

“I heard,” I said. “Be careful.”

She blinked at me. “What are you talking about?”

“LaGuerta,” I said.

Deborah snorted. “Her,” she said.

“Yeah. Her. She doesn't like you, and she doesn't want you on her turf.”

“Tough. She got her orders from the captain.”

“Uh-huh. And she's already spent five minutes figuring out how to get around them. So watch your back, Debs.”

She just shrugged. “What did you find out?” she asked.

I shook my head. “Nothing yet. LaGuerta's already nowhere. But Vince said-” I stopped. Even talking about it seemed too private.

“Vince said what?”

“A small thing, Deb. A detail. Who knows what it means?”

“Nobody will ever know if you don't say it, Dexter.”

“There… seems to be no blood left with the body. No blood at all.”

Deborah was quiet for a minute, thinking. Not a reverent pause, not like me. Just thinking. “Okay,” she said at last. “I give up. What does it mean?”

“Too soon to tell,” I said.

“But you think it means something.”

It meant a strange light-headedness. It meant an itch to find out more about this killer. It meant an appreciative chuckle from the Dark Passenger, who should have been quiet so soon after the priest. But that was all rather tough to explain to Deborah, wasn't it? So I just said, “It might, Deb. Who really knows?”

She looked at me hard for half a moment, then shrugged. “All right,” she said. “Anything else?”

“Oh, a great deal,” I said. “Very nice blade work. The cuts are close to surgical. Unless they find something in the hotel, which no one expects, the body was killed somewhere else and dumped here.”

“Where?”

“Very good question. Half of police work is asking the right questions.”

“The other half is answering,” she told me.

“Well then. Nobody knows where yet, Deb. And I certainly don't have all the forensic data-”

“But you're starting to get a feel for this one,” she said.

I looked at her. She looked back. I had developed hunches before. I had a small reputation for it. My hunches were often quite good. And why shouldn't they be? I often know how the killers are thinking. I think the same way. Of course I was not always right. Sometimes I was very wide of the mark. It wouldn't look good if I was always right. And I didn't want the cops to catch

every

serial killer out there. Then what would I do for a hobby? But this one-Which way should I go with this so very interesting escapade?

“Tell me, Dexter,” Deborah urged. “Have you got any guesses about this?”

“Possibly,” I said. “It's a little early yet.”

“Well, Morgan,” said LaGuerta from behind us. We both turned. “I see you're dressed for real police work.”

Something about LaGuerta's tone was like a slap on the face. Deborah stiffened. “Detective,” she said. “Did you find anything?” She said it in a tone that already knew the answer.

A cheap shot. But it missed. LaGuerta waved a hand airily. “They are only putas,” she said, looking hard at Deb's cleavage, so very prominent in her hooker suit. “Just hookers. The important thing here is to keep the press from getting hysterical.” She shook her head slowly, as if in disbelief, and looked up. “Considering what you can do with gravity, that should be easy.” And she winked at me and strolled off, over toward the perimeter, where Captain Matthews was talking with great dignity to Jerry Gonzalez from Channel 7.

“Bitch,” Deborah said.

“I'm sorry, Debs. Would you prefer me to say,

We'll

show her

? Or should I go with

I told you so

?”

She glared at me. “Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said. “I really want to be the one to find this guy.”

And as I thought about that

no blood at all

-

So did I. I really wanted to find him, too.

CHAPTER 4

I

TOOK MY BOAT OUT THAT NIGHT AFTER WORK, TO get away from Deb's questions and to sort through what I was feeling.

Feeling

. Me, feeling. What a concept.

I nosed my Whaler slowly out the canal, thinking nothing, a perfect Zen state, moving at idle speed past the large houses, all separated from each other by high hedges and chain-link fences. I threw an automatic big wave and bright smile to all the neighbors out in their yards that grew neatly up to the canal's seawall. Kids playing on the manicured grass. Mom and Dad barbecuing, or lounging, or polishing the barbed wire, hawkeyes on the kids. I waved to everybody. Some of them even waved back. They knew me, had seen me go by before, always cheerful, a big hello for everybody.

He was such a nice man. Very friendly. I can't believe he did those horrible things

…

I opened up the throttle when I cleared the canal, heading out the channel and then southeast, toward Cape Florida. The wind in my face and the taste of the salt spray helped clear my head, made me feel clean and a little fresher. I found it a great deal easier to think. Part of it was the calm and peace of the water. And another part was that in the best tradition of Miami watercraft, most of the other boaters seemed to be trying to kill me. I found that very relaxing. I was right at home. This is my country; these are my people.

All day long at work I'd gotten little forensic updates. Around lunchtime the story broke national. The lid was coming off the hooker murders after the “grisly discovery” at the Cacique Motel. Channel 7 had done a masterful job of presenting all the hysterical horror of body parts in a Dumpster without actually saying anything about them. As Detective LaGuerta had shrewdly observed, these were only hookers; but once public pressure started to rise from the media, they might as well be senator's daughters. And so the department began to gear up for a long spell of defensive maneuvering, knowing exactly what kind of heartrending twaddle would be coming from the brave and fearless foot soldiers of the fifth estate.

Deb had stayed at the scene until the captain began to worry about authorizing too much overtime, and then she'd been sent home. She started calling me at two in the afternoon to hear what I'd discovered, which was very little. They'd found no traces of anything at the motel. There were so many tire tracks in the parking lot that none were distinct. No prints or traces in the Dumpster, on the bags, or on the body parts. Everything USDA inspection clean.

The one big clue of the day was the left leg. As Angel had noticed, the right leg had been sectioned into several neat pieces, cut at the hip, knee, and ankle. But the left leg was not. It was a mere two sections, neatly wrapped. Aha, said Detective LaGuerta, lady genius. Somebody had interrupted the killer, surprised him, startled him so he did not finish the cut. He panicked when he was seen. And she directed all her effort at finding that witness.

There was one small problem with LaGuerta's theory of interruption. A tiny little thing, perhaps splitting hairs, but-the entire body had still been meticulously cleaned and wrapped, presumably after it had been cut up. And then it had been transported carefully to the Dumpster, apparently with enough time and focus for the killer to make no mistakes and leave no traces. Either nobody pointed this out to LaGuerta or-wonder of wonders!-could it be that nobody else had noticed? Possible; so much of police work is routine, fitting details into patterns. And if the pattern was brand new, the investigation could seem like three blind men examining an elephant with a microscope.

But since I was neither blind nor hampered by routine, it had seemed far more likely to me that the killer was simply unsatisfied. Plenty of time to work, but-this was the fifth murder in the same pattern. Was it getting boring, simply chopping up the body? Was Our Boy searching for something else, something different? Some new direction, an untried twist?

I could almost feel his frustration. To have come so far, all the way to the end, sectioning the leftovers for gift wrapping. And then the sudden realization:

This isn't it. Something is just not right

. Coitus interruptus.

It wasn't fulfilling him this way anymore. He needed a different approach. He was trying to express something, and hadn't found his vocabulary yet. And in my personal opinion-I mean, if it was

me

-this would make him very frustrated. And very likely to look further for the answer.

Soon.

But let LaGuerta look for a witness. There would be none. This was a cold, careful monster, and absolutely fascinating to me. And what should I do about that fascination? I was not sure, so I had retreated to my boat to think.

A Donzi cut across my bow at seventy miles per hour, only inches away. I waved happily and returned to the present. I was approaching Stiltsville, the mostly abandoned collection of old stilt homes in the water near Cape Florida. I nosed into a big circle, going nowhere, and let my thoughts move back into that same slow arc.

What would I do? I needed to decide now, before I got too helpful for Deborah. I could help her solve this, absolutely, no one better. Nobody else was even moving in the right direction. But did I want to help? Did I want this killer arrested? Or did I want to find him and stop him myself? Beyond this-oh, nagging little thought-did I even want him to stop?

What would I do?

To my right I could just see Elliott Key in the last light of the day. And as always, I remembered my camping trip there with Harry Morgan. My foster father. The Good Cop.

You're different, Dexter

.

Yes, Harry, I certainly am.

But you can learn to control that difference and use it constructively.

All right, Harry. If you think I should. How?

And he told me.

There is no starry sky anywhere like the starry sky in South Florida when you are fourteen and camping out with Dad. Even if he's only your foster dad. And even if the sight of all those stars merely fills you with a kind of satisfaction, emotion being out of the question. You don't feel it. That's part of the reason you're here.

The fire has died down and the stars are exceedingly bright and foster dear old dad has been quiet for some time, taking small sips on the old-fashioned hip flask he has pulled from the outside flap of his pack. And he's not very good at this, not like so many other cops, not really a drinker. But it's empty now, and it's time for him to say his piece if he's ever going to say it.

“You're different, Dexter,” he says.

I look away from the brightness of the stars. Around the small and sandy clearing the last glow of the fire is making shadows. Some of them trickle across Harry's face. He looks strange to me, like I've never seen him before. Determined, unhappy, a little dazed. “What do you mean, Dad?”

He won't look at me. “The Billups say Buddy has disappeared,” he says.

“Noisy little creep. He was barking all night. Mom couldn't sleep.”

Mom needed her sleep, of course. Dying of cancer requires plenty of rest, and she wasn't getting it with that awful little dog across the street yapping at every leaf that blew down the sidewalk.

“I found the grave,” Harry says. “There were a lot of bones in there, Dexter. Not just Buddy's.”

There's very little to say here. I carefully pull at a handful of pine needles and wait for Harry.

“How long have you been doing this?”

I search Harry's face, then look out across the clearing to the beach. Our boat is there, moving gently with the surge of the water. The lights of Miami are off to the right, a soft white glow. I can't figure out where Harry is going, what he wants to hear. But he is my straight-arrow foster dad; the truth is usually a good idea with Harry. He always knows, or he finds out.

“A year and a half,” I say.

Harry nods. “Why did you start?”

A very good question, and certainly beyond me at fourteen. “It just-I kind of… had to,” I tell him. Even then, so young but so smooth.

“Do you hear a voice?” he wants to know. “Something or somebody telling you what to do, and you had to do it?”

“Uh,” I say with fourteen-year-old eloquence, “not exactly.”

“Tell me,” Harry says.

Oh for a moon, a good fat moon, something bigger to look at. I clutch another fistful of pine needles. My face is hot, as if Dad has asked me to talk about sex dreams. Which, in a way- “It, uh… I kind of, you know,

feel

something,” I say. “Inside. Watching me. Maybe, um. Laughing? But not really a voice, just-” An eloquent teenaged shrug. But it seems to make sense to Harry.

“And this

something

. It makes you kill things.”

High overhead a slow fat jet crawls by. “Not, um, doesn't

make

me,” I say. “Just-makes it seem like a good idea?”

“Have you ever wanted to kill something else? Something bigger than a dog?”

I try to answer but there is something in my throat. I clear it. “Yes,” I say.

“A person?”

“Nobody in particular, Dad. Just-” I shrug again.

“Why didn't you?”

“It's-I thought you wouldn't like it. You and Mom.”

“That's all that stopped you?”

“I, uh-I didn't want you, um, mad at me. Uh… you know. Disappointed.”

I steal a glance at Harry. He is looking at me, not blinking. “Is that why we took this trip, Dad? To talk about this?”

“Yes,” Harry says. “We need to get you squared away.”

Squared away, oh yes, a completely Harry idea of how life is lived, with hospital corners and polished shoes. And even then I knew; needing to kill something every now and then would pretty much sooner or later get in the way of being squared away.

“How?” I say, and he looks at me long and hard, and then he nods when he sees that I am with him step for step.

“Good boy,” he says. “Now.” And in spite of saying now, it is a very long time before he speaks again. I watch the lights on a boat as it goes past, maybe two hundred yards out from our little beach. Over the sound of their motor a radio is blasting Cuban music. “Now,” Harry says again, and I look at him. But he is looking away, across the dying fire, off into the future over there somewhere. “It's like this,” he says. I listen carefully. This is what Harry says when he is giving you a higher-order truth. When he showed me how to throw a curve ball, and how to throw a left hook.

It's like this

, he would say, and it always was, just like that.

“I'm getting old, Dexter.” He waited for me to object, but I didn't, and he nodded. “I think people understand things different when they get older,” he says. “It's not a question of getting soft, or seeing things in the gray areas instead of black and white. I really believe I'm just understanding things different. Better.” He looks at me, Harry's look, Tough Love with blue eyes.

“Okay,” I say.

“Ten years ago I would have wanted you in an institution somewhere,” he says, and I blink. That almost hurts, except I've thought of it myself. “Now,” he says, “I think I know better. I know what you are, and I know you're a good kid.”

“No,” I say, and it comes out very soft and weak, but Harry hears.

“Yes,” he says firmly. “You're a good kid, Dex, I know that. I

know

it,” almost to himself now, for effect maybe, and then his eyes lock onto mine. “Otherwise, you wouldn't care what I thought, or what Mom thought. You'd just do it. You can't help it, I know that. Because-” He stops and just looks at me for a moment. It's very uncomfortable for me. “What do you remember from before?” he asked. “You know. Before we took you in.”

That still hurts, but I really don't know why. I was only three. “Nothing.”

“Good,” he says. “Nobody should remember that.” And as long as he lives that will be the most he ever says about it. “But even though you don't remember, Dex, it did things to you. Those things make you what you are. I've talked to some people about this.” And strangest of strange, he gives me a very small, almost shy, Harry smile. “I've been expecting this. What happened to you when you were a little kid has shaped you. I've tried to straighten that out, but-” He shrugs. “It was too strong, too much. It got into you too early and it's going to stay there. It's going to make you want to kill. And you can't help that. You can't change that. But,” he says, and he looks away again, to see what I can't tell. “But you can channel it. Control it. Choose-” his words come so carefully now, more careful than I've ever heard him talk “-choose what… or

who

… you kill…” And he gave me a smile unlike any I had ever seen before, a smile as bleak and dry as the ashes of our dying fire. “There are plenty of people who deserve it, Dex…”

And with those few little words he gave a shape to my whole life, my everything, my who and what I am. The wonderful, all-seeing, all-knowing man. Harry. My dad.

If only I was capable of love, how I would have loved Harry.

So long ago now. Harry long dead. But his lessons had lived on. Not because of any warm and gooey emotional feelings I had. Because Harry was right. I'd proved that over and over. Harry knew, and Harry taught me well.

Be careful

, Harry said. And he taught me to be careful as only a cop could teach a killer.

To choose carefully among those who deserved it. To make absolutely sure. Then tidy up. Leave no traces. And always avoid emotional involvement; it can lead to mistakes.

Being careful went beyond the actual killing, of course. Being careful meant building a careful life, too. Compartmentalize. Socialize. Imitate life.

All of which I had done, so very carefully. I was a near perfect hologram. Above suspicion, beyond reproach, and beneath contempt. A neat and polite monster, the boy next door. Even Deborah was at least half fooled, half the time. Of course, she believed what she wanted to believe, too.

Right now she believed I could help her solve these murders, jump-start her career and catapult her out of her Hollywood sex suit and into a tailored business suit. And she was right, of course. I could help her. But I didn't really want to, because I enjoyed watching this other killer work and felt some kind of aesthetic connection, or-

Emotional involvement

.

Well. There it was. I was in clear violation of the Code of Harry.

I nosed the boat back toward my canal. It was full dark now, but I steered by a radio tower a few degrees to the left of my home water.

So be it. Harry had always been right, he was right now.

Don't get emotionally involved

, Harry had said. So I wouldn't.

I would help Deb.

CHAPTER 5

T

HE NEXT MORNING IT WAS RAINING AND THE traffic was crazy, like it always is in Miami when it rains. Some drivers slowed down on the slick roads. That made others furious, and they leaned on their horns, screamed out their windows, and accelerated out onto the shoulder, fishtailing wildly past the slowpokes and waving their fists.

At the LeJeune on-ramp, a huge dairy truck had roared onto the shoulder and hit a van full of kids from a Catholic school. The dairy truck flipped over. And now five young girls in plaid wool skirts were sitting in a huge puddle of milk with dazed looks on their faces. Traffic nearly stopped for an hour. One kid was airlifted to Jackson Hospital. The others sat in the milk in their uniforms and watched the grown-ups scream at each other.

I inched along placidly, listening to the radio. Apparently the police were hot on the trail of the Tamiami Butcher. There were no specifics available, but Captain Matthews got a lovely sound bite. He made it seem like he would personally make the arrest as soon as he finished his coffee.

I finally got off onto surface roads and went only a little faster. I stopped at a doughnut shop not too far from the airport. I bought an apple fritter and a cruller, but the apple fritter was gone almost before I got back into the car. I have a very high metabolism. It comes with living the good life.

The rain had stopped by the time I got to work. The sun shone and steam rose from the pavement as I walked into the lobby, flashed my credentials, and went upstairs.

Deb was already waiting for me.

She did not look happy this morning. Of course, she does not look happy very often any more. She's a cop, after all, and most of them can't manage the trick at all. Too much time on duty trying not to look human. It leaves their faces stuck.

“Deb,” I said. I put the crisp white pastry bag on my desk.

“Where were you last night?” she said. Very sour, as I'd expected. Soon those frown lines would turn permanent, ruining a wonderful face: deep blue eyes, alive with intelligence, and small upturned nose with just a dash of freckles, framed by black hair. Beautiful features, at the moment spattered with about seven pounds of cheap makeup.

I looked at her with fondness. She was clearly coming from work, dressed today in a lacy bra, bright pink spandex shorts, and gold high heels. “Never mind me,” I said. “Where were

you

?”

She flushed. She hated to wear anything but clean, pressed blues. “I tried to call you,” she said.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Yeah. Sure.”

I sat down in my chair and didn't speak. Deb likes to unload on me. That's what family is for. “Why were you so anxious to talk to me?”

“They're shutting me out,” she said. She opened my doughnut bag and looked inside.

“What did you expect?” I said. “You know how LaGuerta feels about you.”

She pulled the cruller out of the bag and savaged it.

“I expect,” she said, mouth full, “to be in on this. Like the captain said.”

“You don't have any seniority,” I said. “Or any political smarts.”

She crumpled the bag and threw it at my head. She missed. “Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said. “You know damned well I deserve to be in Homicide. Instead of-” She snapped her bra strap and waved a hand at her skimpy costume. “This bullshit.”

I nodded. “Although on you it looks good,” I said.

She made an awful face: rage and disgust competing for space. “I hate this,” she said. “I can't do this much longer or I swear, I'll go nuts.”

“It's a little soon for me to have the whole thing figured out, Deb.”

“Shit,” she said. Whatever else you could say about police work, it was ruining Deborah's vocabulary. She gave me a cold, hard cop-look, the first I'd ever had from her. It was Harry's look, the same eyes, same feeling of looking right through you to the truth. “Don't bullshit me, Dex,” she said. “All you have to do half the time is see the body, and you know who did it. I never asked you how you do that, but if you have any hunches on this one, I want 'em.” She kicked out savagely and put a small dent in my metal desk. “Goddamn it, I want out of this stupid outfit.”

“And we'd all love to see that, Morgan,” came a deep and phony voice from behind her in the doorway. I looked up. Vince Masuoka was smiling in at us.

“You wouldn't know what to do, Vince,” Deb told him.

He smiled bigger, that bright, fake, textbook smile. “Why don't we try it and find out?”

“In your dreams, Vince,” Debbie said, slumping into a pout that I hadn't seen since she was twelve.

Vince nodded at the crumpled white bag on my desk. “It

was

your turn, goody. What'd you bring me? Where is it?”

“Sorry, Vince,” I said. “Debbie ate your cruller.”

“I wish,” he said, with his sharp, imitation leer. “Then I could eat her jelly roll. You owe me a big doughnut, Dex,” he said.

“The only big one you'll ever have,” Deborah said.

“It's not the size of the doughnut, it's the skill of the baker,” Vince told her.

“Please,” I said. “You two are going to sprain a frontal lobe. It's too early to be this clever.”

“Ah-ha,” Vince said, with his terrible fake laugh. “Ah-ha ha-ha. See you later.” He winked. “Don't forget my doughnut.” And he wandered away to his microscope down the hall.

“So what have you figured out?” Deb asked me.

Deb believed that every now and then I got hunches. She had reason to believe. Usually my inspired guesses had to do with the brutal whackos who liked to hack up some poor slob every few weeks just for the hell of it. Several times Deborah had seen me put a quick and clean finger on something that nobody else knew was there. She had never said anything, but my sister is a damned good cop, and so she has suspected me of something for quite a while. She doesn't know what, but she knows there is something wrong there and it bothers the hell out of her every now and then, because she does, after all, love me. The last living thing on the earth that does love me. This is not self-pity but the coldest, clearest self-knowledge. I am unlovable. Following Harry's plan, I have tried to involve myself in other people, in relationships, and even-in my sillier moments-in love. But it doesn't work. Something in me is broken or missing, and sooner or later the other person catches me Acting, or one of Those Nights comes along.

I can't even keep pets. Animals hate me. I bought a dog once; it barked and howled-at

me

-in a nonstop no-mind fury for two days before I had to get rid of it. I tried a turtle. I touched it once and it wouldn't come out of its shell again, and after a few days of that it died. Rather than see me or have me touch it again, it died.

Nothing else loves me, or ever will. Not even-especially-me. I know what I am and that is not a thing to love. I am alone in the world, all alone, but for Deborah. Except, of course, for the Thing inside, who does not come out to play too often. And does not actually play with me but must have somebody else.

So as much as I can, I care about her, dear Deborah. It is probably not love, but I would rather she were happy.

And she sat there, dear Deborah, looking unhappy. My family. Staring at me and not knowing what to say, but coming closer to saying it than ever before.

“Well,” I said, “actually-”

“I

knew

it! You

DO

have something!”

“Don't interrupt my trance, Deborah. I'm in touch with the spirit realm.”

“Spit it out,” she said.

“It's the interrupted cut, Deb. The left leg.”

“What about it?”

“LaGuerta thinks the killer was discovered. Got nervous, didn't finish.”

Deborah nodded. “She had me asking hookers last night if they saw anything. Somebody must have.”

“Oh, not you, too,” I said. “

Think

, Deborah. If he was interrupted-too scared to finish-”

“The wrapping,” she blurted. “He still spent a lot of time wrapping the body, cleaning up.” She looked surprised. “Shit.

After

he was interrupted?”

I clapped my hands and beamed at her. “Bravo, Miss Marple.”

“Then it doesn't make sense.”

“Au contraire. If there is plenty of time, but the ritual is not completed properly-and remember, Deb, the ritual is nearly everything-what's the implication?”

“Why can't you just tell me, for God's sake?” she snapped.

“What fun would that be?”

She blew out a hard breath. “Goddamn it. All right, Dex. If he wasn't interrupted, but he didn't finish- Shit. The wrapping-up part was more important than the cutting?”

I took pity on her. “No, Deb. Think. This is the fifth one, exactly like all the others. Four left legs cut perfectly. And now number five-” I shrugged, raised an eyebrow at her.

“Aw, shit, Dexter. How should I know? Maybe he only needed four left legs. Maybe… I don't know, I swear to God. What?”

I smiled and shook my head. To me it was so clear. “The thrill is gone, Deb. Something just isn't right. It isn't working. Some essential bit of the magic that makes it perfect, isn't there.”

“I was supposed to figure that out?”

“Somebody should, don't you think? And so he just sort of dribbles to a stop, looking for inspiration and finding none.”

She frowned. “So he's done. He won't do this again?”

I laughed. “Oh my God, no, Deb. Just the opposite. If you were a priest, and you truly believed in God but couldn't find the right way to worship him, what would you do?”

“Keep trying,” she said, “until I got it right.” She stared hard. “Jesus. That's what you think? He's going to do it again soon?”

“It's just a hunch,” I said modestly. “I could be wrong.” But I was sure I was not wrong.

“We should be setting up a way to catch him when he does,” she said. “Not looking for a nonexistent witness.” She stood and headed out the door. “I'll call later. Bye!” And she was gone.

I poked at the white paper bag. There was nothing left inside. Just like me: a clean, crisp outside and nothing at all on the inside.

I folded the bag and placed it in the trash can beside my desk. There was work to do this morning, real official police lab work. I had a long report to type up, accompanying pictures to sort, evidence to file. It was routine stuff, a double homicide that would probably never go to trial, but I like to make sure that whatever I touch is well organized.

Besides, this one had been interesting. The blood spatter had been very difficult to read; between the arterial spurting, the multiple victims-obviously moving around-and the cast-off pattern from what had to be a chain saw, it had been almost impossible to find an impact site. In order to cover the whole room, I'd had to use two bottles of Luminol, which reveals even the faintest of blood spots and is shockingly expensive at $12 a bottle.

I'd actually had to lay out strings to help me figure the primary spatter angles, a technique ancient enough to seem like alchemy. The splat patterns were startling, vivid; there were bright, wild, feral splatters across the walls, furniture, television, towels, bedspreads, curtains-an amazing wild horror of flying blood. Even in Miami you would think someone would have heard something. Two people being hacked up alive with a chain saw, in an elegant and expensive hotel room, and the neighbors simply turned up their TVs.

You may say that dear diligent Dexter gets carried away in his job, but I like to be thorough, and I like to know where all the blood is hiding. The professional reasons for this are obvious, but not quite as important to me as the personal ones. Perhaps someday a psychiatrist retained by the state penal system will help me discover exactly why.

In any case, the body chunks were very cold by the time we got to the scene, and we would probably never find the guy in the size 71⁄2 handmade Italian loafer. Right-handed and overweight, with a terrific backhand.

But I had persevered and done a very neat piece of work. I don't do my job to catch the bad guys. Why would I want to do that? No, I do my job to make order out of chaos. To force the nasty blood stains to behave properly, and then go away. Others may use my work to catch criminals; that's fine by me, but it doesn't matter.

If I am ever careless enough to be caught, they will say I am a sociopathic monster, a sick and twisted demon who is not even human, and they will probably send me to die in Old Sparky with a smug self-righteous glow. If they ever catch Size 71⁄2, they will say he is a bad man who went wrong because of social forces he was too unfortunate to resist, and he will go to jail for ten years before they turn him loose with enough money for a suit and a new chain saw.

Every day at work I understand Harry a little better.

CHAPTER 6

F

RIDAY NIGHT. DATE NIGHT IN MIAMI. AND believe it or not, Date Night for Dexter. Oddly enough, I had found somebody. What, what? Deeply dead Dexter dating debutante doxies? Sex among the Undead? Has my need to imitate life gone all the way to faking orgasms?

Breathe easy. Sex never entered into it. After years of dreadful fumbling and embarrassment trying to look normal, I had finally hooked up with the perfect date.

Rita was almost as badly damaged as I am. Married too young, she had fought to make it work for ten years and two kids. Her charming life mate had a few small problems. First alcohol, then heroin, believe it or not, and finally crack. He beat her, the brute. Broke furniture, screamed, and threw things and made threats. Then raped her. Infected her with some dreadful crack-house diseases. All this on a regular basis, and Rita endured, worked, fought him through rehab twice. Then he went after the kids one night and Rita finally put her foot down.

Her face had healed by now, of course. And broken arms and ribs are routine for Miami physicians. Rita was quite presentable, just what the monster ordered.

The divorce was final, the brute was locked up, and then? Ah, the mysteries of the human mind. Somehow, somewhy, dear Rita had decided to date again. She was quite sure it was the Right Thing to do-but as a result of her frequent battery at the hands of the Man She Loved, she was completely uninterested in sex. Just, maybe, some masculine company for a while.

She had searched for just the right guy: sensitive, gentle, and willing to wait. Quite a long search, of course. She was looking for some imaginary man who cared more about having someone to talk to and see movies with than someone to have sex with, because she was Just Not Ready for That.

Did I say imaginary? Well, yes. Human men are not like that. Most women know this by the time they've had two kids and their first divorce. Poor Rita had married too young and too badly to learn this valuable lesson. And as a by-product of recovering from her awful marriage, instead of realizing that all men are beasts, she had come up with this lovely romantic picture of a perfect gentleman who would wait indefinitely for her to open slowly, like a little flower.

Well. Really. Perhaps such a man existed in Victorian England-when there was a knocking shop on every corner where he could blow off steam between flowery protestations of frictionless love. But not, to my knowledge, in twenty-first-century Miami.

And yet-I could imitate all those things perfectly. And I actually wanted to. I had no interest in a sexual relationship. I wanted a disguise; Rita was exactly what I was looking for.

She was, as I say, very presentable. Petite and pert and spunky, a slim athletic figure, short blond hair, and blue eyes. She was a fitness fanatic, spending all her off-hours running and biking and so on. In fact, sweating was one of our favorite activities. We had cycled through the Everglades, done 5K runs, and even pumped iron together.

And best of all were her two children. Astor was eight and Cody was five and they were much too quiet. They would be, of course. Children whose parents frequently attempt to kill each other with the furniture tend to be slightly withdrawn. Any child brought up in a horror zone is. But they can be brought out of it eventually-look at me. I had endured nameless and unknown horrors as a child, and yet here I was: a useful citizen, a pillar of the community.

Perhaps that was part of my strange liking for Astor and Cody. Because I did like them, and that made no sense to me. I know what I am and I understand many things about myself. But one of the few character traits that genuinely mystifies me is my attitude toward children.

I like them.

They are important to me. They matter.

I don't understand it, really. I genuinely wouldn't care if every human in the universe were suddenly to expire, with the possible exception of myself and maybe Deborah. Other people are less important to me than lawn furniture. I do not, as the shrinks put it so eloquently, have any sense of the reality of others. And I am not burdened with this realization.

But kids-kids are different.

I had been “dating” Rita for nearly a year and a half, and in that time I had slowly and deliberately won over Astor and Cody. I was okay. I wouldn't hurt them. I remembered their birthdays, report-card days, holidays. I could come into their house and would do no harm. I could be trusted.

Ironic, really. But true.

Me, the only man they could really trust. Rita thought it was part of my long slow courtship of her. Show her that the kids liked me and who knows? But in fact, they mattered to me more than she did. Maybe it was already too late, but I didn't want to see them grow up to be like me.

This Friday night Astor answered the door. She was wearing a large T-shirt that said RUG RATS and hung below her knees. Her red hair was pulled back in two pigtails and she had no expression at all on her small still face.

“Hello Dexter,” she said in her too-quiet way. For her, two words were a long conversation.

“Good evening, beautiful young lady,” I said in my best Lord Mountbatten voice. “May I observe that you are looking very lovely this evening?”

“Okay,” she said, holding the door open. “He's here,” she said over her shoulder to the darkness around the couch.

I stepped past her. Cody was standing behind her, just inside, like he was backing her up, just in case. “Cody,” I said. I handed him a roll of Necco Wafers. He took them without taking his eyes off me and simply let his hand drop to his side without looking at the candy. He wouldn't open them until I was gone, and then he would split them with his sister.

“Dexter?” Rita called from the next room.

“In here,” I said. “Can't you teach these children to behave?”

“No,” said Cody softly.

A joke. I stared at him. What next? Would he sing someday? Tap dance in the streets? Address the Democratic National Convention?

Rita rustled in, fastening a hoop earring. She was rather provocative, considering. She wore a practically weightless light blue silk dress that fell to mid-thigh, and of course her very best New Balance cross-training shoes. I'd never before met, or even heard of, a woman who actually wore comfortable shoes on dates. The enchanting creature.

“Hey, handsome,” Rita said. “Let me talk to the sitter and we're out of here.” She went into the kitchen, where I heard her going over instructions with the teenage neighbor who did her babysitting. Bedtimes. Homework. TV dos and don'ts. Cell phone number. Emergency number. What to do in case of accidental poisoning or decapitation.

Cody and Astor still stared at me.

“Are you going to a movie?” Astor asked me.

I nodded. “If we can find one that doesn't make us throw up.”

“Yuk,” she said. She made a very small sour face and I felt a tiny glow of accomplishment.

“Do you throw up at the movies?” Cody asked.

“Cody,” Astor said.

“Do you?” he insisted.

“No,” I said. “But I usually want to.”

“Let's go,” said Rita, sailing in and bending to give each kid a peck on the cheek. “Listen to Alice. Bedtime at nine.”

“Will you come back?” Cody asked.

“Cody! Of course I'll be back,” Rita said.

“I meant Dexter,” Cody said.

“You'll be asleep,” I said. “But I'll wave at you, okay?”

“I won't be asleep,” he said grimly.

“Then I'll stop in and play cards with you,” I said.

“Really?”

“Absolutely. High-stakes poker. Winner gets to keep the horses.”

“Dexter!” Rita said, smiling anyway. “You'll be asleep, Cody. Now good night, kids. Be good.” And she took my arm and lead me out the door. “Honestly,” she murmured. “You've got those two eating out of your hand.”

The movie was nothing special. I didn't really want to throw up, but I'd forgotten most of it by the time we stopped at a small place in South Beach for a late-night drink. Rita's idea. In spite of living in Miami for most of her life, she still thought South Beach was glamorous. Perhaps it was all the Rollerblades. Or maybe she thought that anyplace so full of people with bad manners

had

to be glamorous.

In any case, we waited twenty minutes for a small table and then sat and waited another twenty for service. I didn't mind. I enjoyed watching good-looking idiots looking at each other. A great spectator sport.

We strolled along Ocean Boulevard afterward, making pointless conversation-an art at which I excel. It was a lovely night. One corner was chewed off the full moon of a few nights ago, when I had entertained Father Donovan.

And as we drove back to Rita's South Miami house after our standard evening out, we passed an intersection in one of Coconut Grove's less wholesome areas. A winking red light caught my eye and I glanced down the side street. Crime scene: the yellow tape was already up, and several cruisers were nosed into a hurried splay.

It's him again

, I thought, and even before I knew what I meant by that I was swinging the car down the street to the crime scene.

“Where are we going?” Rita asked, quite reasonably.

“Ah,” I said. “I'd like to check here and see if they need me.”

“Don't you have a beeper?”

I gave her my best Friday-night smile. “They don't always

know

they need me,” I said.

I might have stopped anyway, to show off Rita. The whole point of wearing a disguise was to be seen wearing her. But in truth, the small irresistible voice yammering in my ear would have made me stop no matter what.

It's him again

. And I had to see what he was up to. I left Rita in the car and hurried over.

He was up to no good again, the rascal. There was the same stack of neatly wrapped body parts. Angel-no-relation bent over it in almost the same position he'd been in when I left him at the last scene.

“

Hijo

de puta

,” he said when I approached him.

“Not me, I trust,” I said.

“The rest of us are complaining that we have to work on Friday night,” Angel said. “You show up with a date. And there is

still

nothing for you here.”

“Same guy, same pattern?”

“Same,” he said. He flipped the plastic away with his pen. “Bone dry, again,” he said. “No blood at all.”

The words made me feel slightly light-headed. I leaned in for a look. Once again the body parts were amazingly clean and dry. They had a near blue tinge to them and seemed preserved in their small perfect moment of time. Wonderful.

“A small difference in the cuts this time,” Angel said. “In four places.” He pointed. “Very rough here, almost emotional. Then here, not so much. Here and here, in between. Huh?”

“Very nice,” I said.

“And then lookit this,” he said. He nudged aside the bloodless chunk on top with a pencil. Underneath another piece gleamed white. The flesh had been flayed off very carefully, lengthwise, to reveal a clean bone.

“Why he would do like that?” Angel asked softly.

I breathed. “He's experimenting,” I said. “Trying to find the right way.” And I stared at the neat, dry section until I became aware that Angel had been looking at me for a very long moment.

“Like a kid playing with his food,” is how I described it to Rita when I returned to the car.

“My God,” Rita said. “That's horrible.”

“I think the correct word is

heinous

,” I said.

“How can you joke about it, Dexter?”

I gave her a reassuring smile. “You kind of get used to it in my line of work,” I said. “We all make jokes to hide our pain.”

“Well, good lord, I hope they catch this maniac soon.”

I thought of the neatly stacked body parts, the variety of the cuts, the wonderful total lack of blood. “Not too soon,” I said.

“What did you say?” she asked.

“I said, I don't think it will be too soon. The killer is extremely clever, and the detective in charge of the case is more interested in playing politics than in solving murders.”

She looked at me to see if I was kidding. Then she sat quietly for a while as we drove south on U.S. 1. She didn't speak until South Miami. “I can never get used to seeing… I don't know. The underside? The way things really are? The way you see it,” she finally said.

She took me by surprise. I had been using the silence to think about the nicely stacked body parts we had just left. My mind had been hungrily circling the clean dry chopped-up limbs like an eagle looking for a chunk of meat to rip out. Rita's observation was so unexpected I couldn't even stutter for a minute. “What do you mean?” I managed to say at last.

She frowned. “I-I'm not sure. Just- We all assume that…

things

… really are a certain way. The way they're supposed to be? And then they never are, they're always more… I don't know. Darker? More human. Like this. I'm thinking, of course the detective wants to catch the killer, isn't that what detectives do? And it never occurred to me before that there could be anything at all political about murder.”

“Practically everything,” I said. I turned onto her street and slowed down in front of her neat and unremarkable house.

“But you,” she said. She didn't seem to notice where we were or what I had said. “That's where you start. Most people would never really think it through that far.”

“I'm not all that deep, Rita,” I said. I nudged the car into park.

“It's like, everything really is two ways, the way we all pretend it is and the way it really is. And you already know that and it's like a game for you.”

I had no idea what she was trying to say. In truth, I had given up trying to figure it out and, as she spoke, I'd let my mind wander back to the newest murder; the cleanness of the flesh, the improvisational quality of the cuts, the complete dry spotless immaculate lack of blood-

“Dexter-” Rita said. She put a hand on my arm.

I kissed her.

I don't know which one of us was more surprised. It really wasn't something I had thought about doing ahead of time. And it certainly wasn't her perfume. But I mashed my lips against hers and held them there for a long moment.

She pushed away.

“No,” she said. “I- No, Dexter.”

“All right,” I said, still shocked at what I had done.

“I don't think I want to-I'm not

ready

for- Damn it, Dexter,” she said. She unclipped her seat belt, opened the car door, and ran into her house.

Oh, dear

, I thought.

What on earth have I done now?

And I knew I should be wondering about that, and perhaps feeling disappointed that I had just destroyed my disguise after a year and a half of hard maintenance.

But all I could think about was that neat stack of body parts.

No blood.

None at all.

CHAPTER 7

T

HIS BODY IS STRETCHED OUT JUST THE WAY I LIKE

it. The

arms and legs are secure and the mouth is stopped with duct tape so there will be no noise and no spill into my work area. And my hand feels so steady with the knife that I am quite sure this will be a good one, very satisfying-

Except it's not a knife, it's some kind of-

Except it's not my hand. Even though my hand is moving with this hand, it's not mine that holds the blade. And the room really is sort of small, it's so narrow, which makes sense because it's-what?

And now here I am floating above this perfect tight work space and its tantalizing body and for the first time I feel the cold blowing around me and even through me somehow. And if I could only feel my teeth I am quite sure they would chatter. And my hand in perfect unison with that other hand goes up and arches back for a perfect cut-

And of course I wake up in my apartment. Standing somehow by the front door, completely naked. Sleepwalking I could understand, but sleep stripping? Really. I stumble back to my little trundle bed. The covers are in a heap on the floor. The air conditioner has kicked the temperature down close to sixty. It had seemed like a good idea at the time, last night, feeling a little estranged from it all after what had happened with Rita. Preposterous, if it had really happened. Dexter, the love bandit, stealing kisses. And so I had taken a long hot shower when I got home and shoved the thermostat all the way down as I climbed into bed. I don't pretend to understand why, but in my darker moments I find cold cleansing. Not refreshing so much as necessary.

And cold it was. Far too cold now, for coffee and the start of the day amid the last tattered pieces of the dream.

As a rule I don't remember my dreams, and don't attach any importance to them if I do. So it was ridiculous that this one was staying with me.

– floating above this perfect tight work space-my hand in perfect unison with that other hand goes up and arches back for a perfect cut-

I've read the books. Perhaps because I'll never be one, humans are interesting to me. So I know all the symbolism: Floating is a form of flying, meaning sex. And the knife-

Ja, Herr Doktor. The knife ist eine mother, ja?

Snap out of it, Dexter.

Just a stupid, meaningless dream.

The telephone rang and I almost jumped out of my skin.

“How about breakfast at Wolfie's?” said Deborah. “My treat.”

“It's Saturday morning,” I said. “We'll never get in.”

“I'll get there first and get a table,” she said. “Meet you there.”

Wolfie's Deli on Miami Beach was a Miami tradition. And because the Morgans are a Miami family, we had been eating there all our lives on those special deli occasions. Why Deborah thought today might be one of those occasions was beyond me, but I was sure she would enlighten me in time. So I took a shower, dressed in my casual Saturday best, and drove out to the Beach. Traffic was light over the new improved MacArthur Causeway, and soon I was politely elbowing my way through the teeming throngs at Wolfie's.

True to her word, Deborah had corralled a corner table. She was chatting with an ancient waitress, a woman even I recognized. “Rose, my love,” I said, bending to kiss her wrinkled cheek. She turned her permanent scowl on me. “My wild Irish Rose.”

“Dexter,” she rasped, with her thick middle-European accent. “Knock off with the kiss, like some faigelah.”

“Faigelah. Is that Irish for fiancé?” I asked her, and slid into my chair.

“Feh,” she said, trudging off to the kitchen and shaking her head at me.

“I think she likes me,” I told Deborah.

“Somebody should,” said Deb. “How was your date last night?”

“A lot of fun,” I said. “You should try it sometime.”

“Feh,” said Deborah.

“You can't spend all your nights standing on Tamiami Trail in your underwear, Deb. You need a life.”

“I need a transfer,” she snarled at me. “To Homicide Bureau. Then we'll see about a life.”

“I understand,” I said. “It would certainly sound better for the kids to say Mommie's in homicide.”

“Dexter, for Christ's sake,” she said.

“It's a natural thought, Deborah. Nephews and nieces. More little Morgans. Why not?”

She blew out a long breath. “I thought Mom was dead,” she said.

“I'm channeling her,” I said. “Through the cherry Danish.”

“Well, change the channel. What do you know about cell crystallization?”

I blinked. “Wow,” I said. “You just blew away all the competition in the Subject Changing Tournament.”

“I'm serious,” she said.

“Then I really am floored, Deb. What do you mean, cell crystallization?”

“From cold,” she said. “Cells that have crystallized from cold.”

Light flooded my brain. “Of course,” I said, “beautiful,” and somewhere deep inside small bells began to ring.

Cold… Clean, pure cold and the cool knife almost sizzling as it slices into the warm flesh. Antiseptic clean coldness, the blood slowed and helpless, so absolutely right and totally necessary; cold.

“Why didn't I-” I started to say. I shut up when I saw Deborah's face.

“What,” Deb demanded. “What of course?”

I shook my head. “First tell me why you want to know.”

She looked at me for a long hard moment and blew out another breath. “I think you know,” she said at last. “There's been another murder.”

“I know,” I said. “I passed it last night.”

“I heard you didn't actually pass it.”

I shrugged. Metro Dade is such a small family.

“So what did that ‘of course' mean?”

“Nothing,” I said, mildly irritated at last. “The flesh of the body just looked a little different. If it was subjected to cold-” I held out my hands. “That's all, okay? How cold?”

“Like meat-packing cold,” she said. “Why would he do that?”

Because it's beautiful

, I thought. “It would slow the flow of blood,” I said.

She studied me. “Is that important?”

I took a long and perhaps slightly shaky breath. Not only could I never explain it, she would lock me up if I tried. “It's vital,” I said. For some reason I felt embarrassed.

“Why vital?”

“It, ah-I don't know. I think he has a thing about blood, Deb. Just a feeling I got from-I don't know, no evidence, you know.”

She was giving me that look again. I tried to think of something to say, but I couldn't. Glib, silver-tongued Dexter, with a dry mouth and nothing to say.

“Shit,” she said at last. “That's it? Cold slows the blood, and that's vital? Come on. What the hell good is that, Dexter?”

“I don't do ‘good' before coffee, Deborah,” I said with a heroic effort at recovery. “Just accurate.”

“Shit,” she said again. Rose brought our coffee. Deborah sipped. “Last night I got an invite to the seventy-two-hour briefing,” she said.

I clapped my hands. “Wonderful. You've arrived. What do you need me for?” Metro Dade has a policy of pulling the homicide team together approximately seventy-two hours after a murder. The investigating officer and her team talk it over with the Medical Examiner and, sometimes, someone from the prosecutor's office. It keeps everyone on the same heading. If Deborah had been invited, she was on the case.

She scowled. “I'm not good at politics, Dexter. I can feel LaGuerta pushing me out, but I can't do anything about it.”

“Is she still looking for her mystery witness?”

Deborah nodded.

“Really. Even after the new kill last night?”

“She says that proves it. Because the new cuts were all complete.”

“But they were all

different

,” I protested.

She shrugged.

“And you suggested-?”

Deb looked away. “I told her I thought it was a waste of time to look for a witness when it was obvious that the killer wasn't interrupted, just unsatisfied.”

“Ouch,” I said. “You really

don't

know anything about politics.”

“Well, goddamn it, Dex,” she said. Two old ladies at the next table glared at her. She didn't notice. “What you said made sense. It

is

obvious, and she's ignoring me. And even worse.”

“What could be worse than being ignored?” I said.

She blushed. “I caught a couple of the uniforms snickering at me afterward. There's a joke going around, and I'm it.” She bit her lip and looked away. “Einstein,” she said.

“I'm afraid I don't get it.”

“If my tits were brains, I'd be Einstein,” she said bitterly. I cleared my throat instead of laughing. “That's what she's spreading about me,” Deb went on. “That kind of crappy little tag sticks to you, and then they don't promote you because they think nobody will respect you with a nickname like that. God

damn

it, Dex,” she said again, “she's ruining my career.”

I felt a little surge of protective warmth. “She's an idiot.”

“Should I tell her that, Dex? Would that be political?”

Our food arrived. Rose slammed the plates down in front of us as though she had been condemned by a corrupt judge to serve breakfast to baby killers. I gave her a gigantic smile and she trudged away, muttering to herself.

I took a bite and turned my thoughts to Deborah's problem. I had to try to think of it that way, Deborah's problem. Not “those fascinating murders.” Not “that amazingly attractive MO,” or “the thing so similar to what I would love to do someday.” I had to stay uninvolved, but this was pulling at me so very hard. Even last night's dream, with its cold air. Pure coincidence, of course, but unsettling anyway.

This killer had touched the heart of what my killing was about. In the way he worked, of course, and not in his selection of victims. He had to be stopped, certainly, no question. Those poor hookers.

Still… The need for cold… So very interesting to explore sometime. Find a nice dark, narrow place…

Narrow? Where had that come from?

My dream, naturally. But that was just saying that my unconscious wanted me to think about it, wasn't it? And narrow felt right somehow. Cold and narrow-

“Refrigerated truck,” I said.

I opened my eyes. Deborah struggled mightily with a mouthful of eggs before she could speak. “What?”

“Oh, just a guess. Not a real insight, I'm afraid. But wouldn't it make sense?”

“Wouldn't what make sense?” she asked.

I looked down at my plate and frowned, trying to picture how this would work. “He wants a cold environment. To slow the blood flow, and because it's, uh-cleaner.”

“If you say so.”

“I do say so. And it has to be a narrow space-”

“Why? Where the hell did that come from, narrow?”

I chose not to hear that question. “So a refrigerated truck would fit those conditions, and it's mobile, which makes it much easier to dump the garbage afterward.”

Deborah took a bite of bagel and thought for a moment while she chewed. “So,” she said at last, and swallowed. “The killer might have access to one of these trucks? Or own one?”

“Mmm, maybe. Except the kill last night was the first that showed signs of cold.”

Deborah frowned. “So he went out and bought a truck?”

“Probably not. This is still experimental. It was probably an impulse to try cold.”

She nodded. “And we would never get lucky enough that he drives one for a living or something, right?”

I gave her my happy shark smile. “Ah, Deb. How quick you are this morning. No, I'm afraid our friend is much too smart to connect himself that way.”

Deborah sipped her coffee, put the cup down, and leaned back. “So we're looking for a stolen refrigerator truck,” she said at last.

“I'm afraid so,” I said. “But how many of those can there be in the last forty-eight hours?”

“In Miami?” She snorted. “Somebody steals one, word gets out that it's worth stealing, and suddenly every goddamn two-bit original gangsta, marielito, crackhead, and junior wise guy has to steal one, just to keep up.”

“Let's hope word isn't out yet,” I said.

Deborah swallowed the last of her bagel. “I'll check,” she said. And then she reached across the table and squeezed my hand. “I really appreciate this,” she said. She gave me a couple of seconds of a shy, hesitant smile. “But I worry about how you come up with this stuff, Dex. I just…” She looked down at the table and squeezed my hand again.

I squeezed back. “Leave the worrying to me,” I said. “You just find that truck.”

CHAPTER 8

I

N THEORY, METRO'S SEVENTY-TWO-HOUR MEETING gives everyone enough time to get somewhere with a case, but is soon enough that the leads are still warm. And so Monday morning, in a conference room on the second floor, the crack crime-fighting team led by the indomitable Detective LaGuerta assembled once again for the seventy-two-hour. I assembled with them. I got some looks, and a few good-hearted remarks from the cops who knew me. Just simple, cheerful wit, like, “Hey, blood boy, where's your squeegee?” Salt of the earth, these people, and soon my Deborah would be one of them. I felt proud and humble to be in the same room.

Unfortunately, these feelings were not shared by all present. “The fuck you doing here?” grunted Sergeant Doakes. He was a very large black man with an injured air of permanent hostility. He had a cold ferocity to him that would certainly come in handy for somebody with my hobby. It was a shame we couldn't be friends. But for some reason he hated all lab techs, and for some additional reason that had always meant especially Dexter. He also held the Metro Dade record for the bench press. So he rated my political smile.

“I just dropped in to listen, Sergeant,” I told him.

“Got no fucking call to be here,” he said. “The fuck outta here.”

“He can stay, Sergeant,” LaGuerta said.

Doakes scowled at her. “The fuck for?”

“I don't want to make anybody unhappy,” I said, edging for the door without any real conviction.

“It's perfectly all right,” LaGuerta said with an actual smile for me. She turned to Doakes. “He can stay,” she repeated.

“Gimme the fucking creeps,” Doakes grumbled. I began to appreciate the man's finer qualities. Of course I gave him the fucking creeps. The only real question was why he was the only one in a room filled with cops who had the insight to get the fucking creeps from my presence.

“Let's get started,” LaGuerta said, cracking her whip gently, leaving no room for doubt that she was in charge. Doakes slouched back in his chair with a last scowl at me.

The first part of the meeting was a matter of routine; reports, political maneuvers, all the little things that make us human. Those of us who are human, anyway. LaGuerta briefed the information officers on what they could and could not release to the press. Things they could release included a new glossy photo of LaGuerta she'd made up for the occasion. It was serious and yet glamorous; intense but refined. You could almost see her making lieutenant in that picture. If only Deborah had that kind of PR smarts.

It took most of an hour before we got around to the actual murders. But finally LaGuerta asked for reports on the progress in finding her mystery witness. Nobody had anything to report. I tried hard to look surprised.

LaGuerta gave the group a frown of command. “Come on, people,” she said. “Somebody needs to find something here.” But nobody did, and there was a pause while the group studied their fingernails, the floor, the acoustic tiles in the ceiling.

Deborah cleared her throat. “I, uh,” she said and cleared her throat again. “I had a, um, an idea. A different idea. About trying something in a slightly different direction.” She said it like it was in quotation marks, and indeed it was. All my careful coaching couldn't make her sound natural when she said it, but she had at least stuck to my carefully worded politically correct phrasing.

LaGuerta raised an artificially perfect eyebrow. “An idea? Really?” She made a face to show how surprised and delighted she was. “Please, by all means, share it with us, Officer Ein-I mean, Officer Morgan.”

Doakes snickered. A delightful man.

Deborah flushed, but slogged on. “The, um, cell crystallization. On the last victim. I'd like to check and see if any refrigerated trucks have been reported stolen in the last week or so.”

Silence. Utter, dumb silence. The silence of the cows. They didn't get it, the brickheads, and Deborah was not making them see it. She let the silence grow, a silence LaGuerta milked with a pretty frown, a puzzled glance around the room to see if anybody else was following this, then a polite look at Deborah.

“Refrigerated… trucks?” LaGuerta said.

Deborah looked completely flustered, the poor child. This was not a girl who enjoyed public speaking. “That's right,” she said.

LaGuerta let it hang, enjoying it. “Mm-hmm,” she said.

Deborah's face darkened; not a good sign. I cleared my throat, and when that didn't do any good I coughed, loud enough to remind her to stay cool. She looked at me. So did LaGuerta. “Sorry,” I said. “I think I'm getting a cold.”

Could anyone really ask for a better brother?

“The, um,

cold

,” Deborah blurted, lunging at my lifeline. “A refrigerated vehicle could probably cause that kind of tissue damage. And it's mobile, so he'd be harder to catch. And getting rid of the body would be a lot easier. So, uh, if one was stolen, I mean a truck… a refrigerated… that might give us a lead.”

Well, that was most of it, and she did get it out there. One or two thoughtful frowns blossomed around the room. I could almost hear gears turning.

But LaGuerta just nodded. “That's a very…

interesting

thought, Officer,” she said. She put just the smallest emphasis on the word

officer

, to remind us all that this was a democracy where anybody could speak up, but really… “But I still believe that our best bet is to find the witness. We know he's out there.” She smiled, a politically shy smile. “Or

she

,” she said, to show that she could be sharp. “But somebody saw something. We know that from the

evidence

. So let's concentrate on that, and leave grasping at straws for the guys in Broward, okay?” She paused, waiting for a little chuckle to run around the room. “But Officer Morgan, I would appreciate your continued help talking to the hookers. They know you down there.”

My God, she was good. She had deflected anyone from possibly thinking about Deb's idea, put Deb in her place, and brought the team back together behind her with the joke about our rivalry with Broward County. All in a few simple words. I felt like applauding.

Except, of course, that I was on poor Deborah's team, and she had just been flattened. Her mouth opened for a moment, then closed, and I watched her jaw muscles knot as she carefully pushed her face back into Cop Neutral. In its own way, a fine performance, but truly, not even in the same league as LaGuerta's.

The rest of the meeting was uneventful. There was really nothing to talk about beyond what had been said. So very shortly after LaGuerta's masterful putdown, the meeting broke up and we were in the hall again.

“Damn her,” Deborah muttered under her breath. “Damn, damn,

damn

her!”

“Absolutely,” I agreed.

She glared at me. “Thanks, bro. Some help you were.”

I raised my eyebrows at her. “But we agreed I would stay out of it. So you would get the credit.”

She snarled. “Some credit. She made me look like an idiot.”

“With absolute respect, sister dear, you met her halfway.”

Deborah looked at me, looked away, threw up her hands with disgust. “What was I supposed to say? I'm not even on the team. I'm just there because the captain said they had to let me in.”

“And he didn't say they had to listen to you,” I said.

“And they don't. And they won't,” Deborah said bitterly. “Instead of getting me into homicide, this is going to kill my career. I'll die a meter maid, Dexter.”

“There is a way out, Deb,” I said, and the look she turned on me now was only about one-third hope.

“What,” she said.

I smiled at her, my most comforting, challenging, I'm-not-really-a-shark smile. “Find the truck,” I said.

It was three days before I heard from my dear foster sister again, a longish period for her to go without talking to me. She came into my office just after lunch on Thursday, looking sour. “I found it,” she said, and I didn't know what she meant.

“Found what, Deb?” I asked. “The Fountain of Grumpiness?”

“The truck,” she said. “The refrigerated truck.”

“But that's great news,” I said. “Why do you look like you're searching for somebody to slap?”

“Because I am,” she said, and flung four or five stapled pages onto my desk. “Look at this.”

I picked it up and glanced at the top page. “Oh,” I said. “How many altogether?”

“Twenty-three,” she said. “In the last month, twenty-three refrigerator trucks have been reported stolen. The guys over on traffic say most of 'em turn up in canals, torched for the insurance money. Nobody pushes too hard to find them. So nobody's been pushing on these, and nobody's going to.”

“Welcome to Miami,” I said.

Deborah sighed and took the list back from me, slouching into my extra chair like she'd just lost all her bones. “There's no way I can check them all, not by myself. It would take months. Goddamn it, Dex,” she said. “Now what do we do?”

I shook my head. “I'm sorry, Deb,” I said. “But now we have to wait.”

“That's it? Just wait?”

“That's it,” I said.

And it was. For two more weeks, that was it. We waited.

And then…

CHAPTER 9

I

WOKE UP COVERED WITH SWEAT, NOT SURE WHERE I was, and absolutely certain that another murder was about to happen. Somewhere not so far away

he

was searching for his next victim, sliding through the city like a shark around the reef. I was so certain I could almost hear the purr of the duct tape. He was out there, feeding his Dark Passenger, and it was talking to mine. And in my sleep I had been riding with him, a phantom remora in his great slow circles.

I sat up in my own little bed and peeled away the twisted sheets. The bedside clock said it was 3:14. Four hours since I'd gone to bed, and I felt like I'd been slogging through the jungle the entire time with a piano on my back. I was sweaty, stiff, and stupid, unable to form any thoughts at all beyond the certainty that it was happening out there without me.

Sleep was gone for the night, no question. I turned on the light. My hands were clammy and trembling. I wiped them on the sheet, but that didn't help. The sheets were just as wet. I stumbled into the bathroom to wash my hands. I held them under the running water. The tap let out a stream that was warm, room temperature, and for a moment I was washing my hands in blood and the water turned red; just for a second, in the half-light of the bathroom, the sink ran bloodred.

I closed my eyes.

The world shifted

.

I had meant to get rid of this trick of light and my half-sleeping brain. Close the eyes, open them, the illusion would be over and it would be simple clean water in my sink. Instead, it was like closing my eyes had opened a second set of eyes into another world.

I was back in my dream, floating like a knife blade above the lights of Biscayne Boulevard, flying cold and sharp and homing in on my target and

-

I opened my eyes again. The water was just water.

But what was I?

I shook my head violently. Steady, old boy; no Dexter off the deep end, please. I took a long breath and peeked at myself. In the mirror I looked the way I was supposed to look. Carefully composed features. Calm and mocking blue eyes, a perfect imitation of human life. Except that my hair stuck up like Stan Laurel's, there was no sign of whatever it was that had just zipped through my half-sleeping brain and rattled me out of my slumber.

I carefully closed my eyes again.

Darkness.

Plain, simple, darkness. No flying, no blood, no city lights. Just good old Dexter with his eyes closed in front of the mirror.

I opened them again. Hello, dear boy, so good to have you back. But where on earth have you been?

That, of course, was the question. I have spent most of my life untroubled by dreams and, for that matter, hallucinations. No visions of the Apocalypse for me; no troubling Jungian icons burbling up from my subconscious, no mysterious recurring images drifting through the history of my unconsciousness. Nothing ever goes bump in Dexter's night. When I go to sleep, all of me sleeps.

So what had just happened? Why were these pictures appearing to me?

I splashed water on my face and pushed my hair down. That did not, of course, answer the question, but it made me feel a little better. How bad could things be if my hair was neat?

In truth, I did not know. Things could be plenty bad. I might be losing all, or many, of my marbles. What if I had been slipping into insanity a piece at a time for years, and this new killer had simply triggered the final headlong fall into complete craziness? How could I hope to measure the relative sanity of somebody like me?

The images had looked and felt so real. But they couldn't be; I had been right here in my bed. Yet I had almost been able to smell the tang of salt water, exhaust, and cheap perfume floating over Biscayne Boulevard. Completely real-and wasn't that one of the signs of insanity, that the delusions were indistinguishable from reality? I had no answers, and no way to find any. Talking to a shrink was out of the question, of course; I would frighten the poor thing to death, and he might feel honor bound to have me locked away somewhere. Certainly I could not argue with the wisdom of that idea. But if I was losing my hold on sanity as I had built it, it was all my problem, and the first part of the problem was that there was no way to know for sure.

Although, come to think of it, there was one way.

Ten minutes later I was driving past Dinner Key. I drove slowly, since I didn't actually know what I was looking for. This part of the city slept, as much as it ever did. A few people still swirled across the Miami landscape: tourists who'd had too much Cuban coffee and couldn't sleep. People from Iowa looking for a gas station. Foreigners looking for South Beach. And the predators, of course-thugs, robbers, crackheads; vampires, ghouls, and assorted monsters like me. But in this area, at this time, very few of them altogether. This was Miami deserted, as deserted as it got, a place made lonely by the ghost of the daytime crowd. It was a city that had whittled itself down to a mere hunting ground, without the gaudy disguises of sunlight and bright T-shirts.

And so I hunted. The other night eyes tracked me and dismissed me as I passed without slowing. I drove north, over the old drawbridge, through downtown Miami, still not sure what I was looking for and still not seeing it-and yet, for some uncomfortable reason, absolutely sure that I would find it, that I was going in the right direction, that

it

was waiting for me ahead.

Just beyond the Omni the nightlife picked up. More activity, more things to see. Whooping on the sidewalks, tinny music coming and going through the car windows. The night girls came out, flocks of them on the street corners, giggling with each other, or staring stupidly at the passing cars. And the cars slowed to stare back, gawking at the costumes and what they left uncovered. Two blocks ahead of me a new Corniche stopped and a pack of the girls flew out of the shadows, off the sidewalk, and into the street, surrounding the car immediately. Traffic stumbled to a half stop, horns blattered. Most of the drivers sat for a minute, content to watch, but an impatient truck pulled around the knot of cars and into the oncoming lane.

A refrigerator truck.

This was nothing, I said to myself. Nighttime yogurt delivery; pork link sausages for breakfast, freshness guaranteed. A load of grouper headed north or to the airport. Refrigerated trucks moved through Miami around the clock, even now, even in the night hours- This it was and nothing more.

But I put my foot down on the gas pedal anyway. I moved up, in and out of traffic. I got within three cars of the Corniche and its besieged driver. Traffic stopped. I looked ahead at the truck. It was running straight up Biscayne, moving into a series of traffic lights. I would lose him if I got too far behind. And I suddenly wanted very badly not to lose him.

I waited for a gap in traffic and quickly nosed out into the oncoming lane. I was around the Corniche and then speeding up, closing on the truck. Trying not to move too fast, not to be conspicuous, but slowly closing the space between us. He was three traffic lights ahead, then two.

Then his light turned red and before I could gloat and catch up, mine did, too. I stopped. I realized with some surprise that I was chewing on my lip. I was tense; me, Dexter the Ice Cube. I was feeling human anxiety, desperation, actual emotional distress. I wanted to catch up to this truck and see for myself, oh how I wanted to put my hand on the truck, open the door to the cabin, look inside-

And then what? Arrest him single-handed? Take him by the hand to dear Detective LaGuerta? See what I caught? Can I keep him? It was just as likely that he would keep me. He was in full hunting mode, and I was merely tagging along behind like an unwanted little brother. And why was I tagging along? Did I just want to prove to myself that it was him,

the

him, that he was out here prowling and I was not crazy? And if I was not crazy-how had I known? What was going on in my brain? Perhaps crazy would be a happier solution after all.

An old man shuffled in front of my car, crossing the street with incredibly slow and painful steps. For a moment I watched him, marveling at what life must be like when you moved that slow, and then I glanced ahead at the refrigerator truck.

His light had turned green. Mine had not.

The truck accelerated quickly, moving north at the upper end of the speed limit, taillights growing smaller as I watched, waiting for my light to change.

Which it refused to do. And so grinding my teeth-steady, Dex!-I ran the light, narrowly missing the old man. He didn't look up or break step.

The speed limit on this stretch of Biscayne Boulevard was thirty-five. In Miami that means if you go under fifty they will run you off the road. I pushed up to sixty-five, moving through the sparse traffic, desperate now to close the distance. The lights of the truck winked out as he went around a curve-or had he turned? I moved up to seventy-five and roared past the turn for the 79th Street Causeway, around the bend by the Publix Market, and into the straightaway, searching frantically for the truck.

And saw it. There-ahead of me-

Moving

toward

me.

The bastard had doubled back. Did he feel me on his tail? Smell my exhaust drifting up on him? No matter-it was him, the same truck, no question, and as I raced past him he turned out onto the causeway.

I squealed into a mall parking lot and slowed, turning the car and accelerating back out onto Biscayne Boulevard, southbound now. Less than a block and I turned onto the causeway, too. Far, far in front, nearly to the first bridge, I saw the small red lights, winking, mocking me. My foot crashed down on the gas pedal and I charged ahead.

He was on the up-slope of the bridge now, picking up speed, keeping the distance steady between us. Which meant he must know, must realize somebody was following. I pushed my car a little harder; I got closer, little by little, a few lengths closer.

And then he was gone, over the hump at the top of the bridge and down the far side, heading much too fast into North Bay Village. It was a heavily patrolled area. If he went too fast he would be seen and pulled over. And then-

I was up the bridge and onto the hump now and below me-

Nothing.

Empty road.

I slowed, looking in all directions from the vantage point at the top of the bridge. A car moved toward me-not the truck, just a Mercury Marquis with one smashed fender. I started down the far side of the bridge.

At the bottom of the bridge North Bay Village split off the causeway into two residential areas. Behind a gas station on the left a row of condos and apartments made a slow circle. To the right were houses; small but expensive. Nothing moved on either side. There were no lights showing, no sign of anything, neither traffic nor life.

Slowly I moved through the village. Empty. He was gone. On an island with only one through street, he had lost me. But how?

I circled back, pulled off onto the shoulder of the road and closed my eyes. I don't know why; perhaps I hoped I might

see

something again. But I didn't. Just darkness, and little bright lights dancing on the inside of my eyelids. I was tired. I felt stupid. Yes, me; ditzy Dexter, trying to be Boy Wonder, using my great psychic powers to track down the evil genius. Pursuing him in my supercharged crime-fighting vehicle. And in all likelihood he was simply a stoked-up delivery boy playing macho head games with the only other driver on the road that night. A Miami thing that happened every day to every driver in our fair city. Chase me, you can't catch me. Then the uplifted finger, the waved gun, ho-hum and back to work.

Just a refrigerated truck, nothing more, now speeding away across Miami Beach with the heavy metal station ripping from the radio speaker. And not my killer, not some mysterious bond pulling me out of bed and across the city in the dead of night. Because that was just too silly for words, and far too silly for level-headed empty-hearted Dexter.

I let my head drop onto the steering wheel. How wonderful to have such an authentic

human

experience. Now I knew what it was like to feel like a total idiot. I could hear the bell on the drawbridge in the near distance, clanging its warning that the bridge was about to go up. Ding ding ding. The alarm bell on my expired intellect. I yawned. Time to go home, go back to bed.

Behind me an engine started. I glanced back.

From behind the gas station at the foot of the bridge he came out fast in a tight circle. He passed me fishtailing and still accelerating and through the blur of motion in the driver's window a shape spun at me, wild and hard. I ducked. Something thumped into the side of my car, leaving behind it the sound of an expensive dent. I waited for a moment, just to be safe. Then I raised my head and looked. The truck was speeding away, crashing the wooden barrier at the drawbridge and powering through, leaping across the bridge as it started to raise up, and making it easily to the other side as the bridge keeper leaned out and yelled. Then the truck was gone, down the far side of the bridge and back into Miami, far away on the other side of the widening gap as the bridge went up. Gone, hopelessly gone, gone as if he had never been. And I would never know if it had been my killer or just another normal Miami jerk.

I got out of my car to look at the dent. It was a big one. I looked around to see what he had thrown.

It had rolled ten or fifteen feet away and wobbled out into the middle of the street. Even from this distance there was no mistaking it, but just to make sure I was absolutely without any doubt, the headlights from an oncoming car lit it up. The car swerved and smashed into a hedge and over the sound of its now-constant horn I could hear the driver screaming. I walked over to the thing to be sure.

Yes indeed. That's what it was.

A woman's head.

I bent to look. It was a very clean cut, very nice work. There was almost no blood around the lip of the wound.

“Thank God,” I said, and I realized I was smiling-and why not?

Wasn't it nice? I wasn't crazy after all.

CHAPTER 10

A

T A LITTLE AFTER 8 AM LAGUERTA CAME OVER TO where I was sitting on the trunk of my car. She leaned her tailored haunch onto the car and slid over until our thighs were touching. I waited for her to say something, but she didn't seem to have any words for the occasion. Neither did I. So I sat there for several minutes looking back at the bridge, feeling the heat of her leg against mine and wondering where my shy friend had gone with his truck. But I was yanked out of my quiet daydream by a pressure on my thigh.

I looked down at my pants leg. LaGuerta was kneading my thigh as if it were a lump of dough. I looked up at her face. She looked back.

“They found the body,” she said. “You know. The rest of it that goes with the head.”

I stood up. “Where?”

She looked at me the way a cop looks at somebody who finds corpseless heads in the street. But she answered. “ Office Depot Center,” she said.

“Where the Panthers play?” I asked, and a little icy-fingered jolt ran through me. “On the ice?”

LaGuerta nodded, still watching me. “The hockey team,” she said. “Is that the Panthers?”

“I think that's what they're called,” I said. I couldn't help myself.

She pursed her lips. “They found it stuffed into the goalie's net.”

“Visitor's or home?” I asked.

She blinked. “Does that make a difference?”

I shook my head. “Just a joke, Detective.”

“Because I don't know how to tell the difference. I should get somebody there who knows about hockey,” she said, her eyes finally drifting away from me and across the crowd, searching for somebody carrying a puck. “I'm glad you can make a joke about it,” she added. “What's a-” she frowned, trying to remember, “-a sam-bolie?”

“A what?”

She shrugged. “Some kind of machine. They use it on the ice?”

“A Zamboni?”

“Whatever. The guy who drives it, he takes it out on the ice to get ready for practice this morning. A couple of the players, they like to get there early? And they like the ice fresh, so this guy, the-” she hesitated slightly “-the sambolie driver? He comes in early on practice days. And so he drives this thing out onto the ice? And he sees these packages stacked up. Down there in the goalie's net? So he gets down and he takes a look.” She shrugged again. “Doakes is over there now. He says they can't get the guy to calm down enough to say any more than that.”

“I know a little about hockey,” I said.

She looked at me again with somewhat heavy eyes. “So much I don't know about you, Dexter. You play hockey?”

“No, I never played,” I said modestly. “I went to a few games.” She didn't say anything and I had to bite my lip to keep from blathering on. In truth, Rita had season tickets for the Florida Panthers, and I had found to my very great surprise that I liked hockey. It was not merely the frantic, cheerfully homicidal mayhem I enjoyed. There was something about sitting in the huge, cool hall that I found relaxing, and I would happily have gone there even to watch golf. In truth, I would have said anything to make LaGuerta take me to the rink. I wanted to go to the arena very badly. I wanted to see this body stacked in the net on the ice more than anything else I could think of, wanted to undo the neat wrapping and see the clean dry flesh. I wanted to see it so much that I felt like a cartoon of a dog on point, wanted to be there with it so much that I felt self-righteous and possessive about the body.

“All right,” LaGuerta finally said, when I was about to vibrate out of my skin. And she showed a small, strange smile that was part official and part-what? Something else altogether, something human, unfortunately, putting it beyond my understanding. “Give us a chance to talk.”

“I'd like that very much,” I said, absolutely oozing charm. LaGuerta didn't respond. Maybe she didn't hear me, not that it mattered. She was totally beyond any sense of sarcasm where her self-image was concerned. It was possible to hit her with the most horrible flattery in the world and she would accept it as her due. I didn't really enjoy flattering her. There's no fun where there's no challenge. But I didn't know what else to say. What did she imagine we would talk about? She had already grilled me mercilessly when she first arrived on the scene.

We had stood beside my poor dented car and watched the sun come up. She had looked out across the causeway and asked me seven times if I had seen the driver of the truck, each time with a slightly different inflection, frowning in between questions. She'd asked me five times if I was sure it had been a refrigerated truck-I'm sure that was subtlety on her part. She wanted to ask about that one a lot more, but held back to avoid being obvious. She even forgot herself once and asked in Spanish. I told her I was

seguro

, and she had looked at me and touched my arm, but she did not ask again.

And three times she had looked up the incline of the bridge, shaken her head, and spat “Puta!” under her breath. Clearly, that was a reference to Officer Puta, my dear sister Deborah. In the face of an actual refrigerator truck as predicted by Deborah, a certain amount of spin control was going to be necessary, and I could tell by the way LaGuerta nibbled at her lower lip that she was hard at work on the problem. I was quite sure she would come up with something uncomfortable for Deb-it was what she did best-but for the time being I was hoping for a modest rise in my sister's stock. Not with LaGuerta, of course, but one could hope that others might notice that her brilliant bit of attempted detective work had panned out.

Oddly enough, LaGuerta did not ask me what I had been doing driving around at that hour. Of course, I'm not a detective, but it did seem like a rather obvious question. Perhaps it would be unkind to say that the oversight was typical of her, but there it is. She just didn't ask.

And yet there was more for us to talk about, apparently. So I followed her to her car, a big two-year-old light blue Chevrolet that she drove on duty. After hours she had a little BMW that nobody was supposed to know about.

“Get in,” she said. And I climbed into the neat blue front seat.

LaGuerta drove fast, in and out of traffic, and in a very few minutes we were over the causeway to the Miami side again, across Biscayne and a half mile or so to I-95. She drove onto the freeway and wove north through traffic at speeds that seemed a little much even for Miami. But we got to 595 and turned west. She looked at me sideways, out of the corner of her eye, three times before she finally spoke. “That's a nice shirt,” she said.

I glanced down at my nice shirt. I had thrown it on to chase out of my apartment and saw it now for the first time, a polyester bowling shirt with bright red dragons on it. I had worn it all day at work and it was a trifle ripe, but yes, more or less clean looking. Somewhat nice, of course, but still-

Was LaGuerta making small talk so I would relax enough to make some damaging admission? Did she suspect that I knew more than I was saying and think she could get me to drop my guard and say it?

“You always wear such nice clothes, Dexter,” she said. She looked over at me with a huge, goofy smile, unaware that she was about to ram her car into a tanker truck. She looked back in time and turned the wheel with one finger and we slid around the tanker and west on I-595.

I thought about the nice clothes that I always wore. Well of course I did. I took pride in being the best-dressed monster in Dade County. Yes, certainly, he chopped up that nice Mr. Duarte, but he was so well dressed! Proper clothing for all occasions-by the way, what did one wear to attend an early-morning decapitation? A day-old bowling shirt and slacks, naturally. I was

à la mode

. But aside from this morning's hasty costume, I really was careful. It was one of Harry's lessons: stay neat, dress nicely, avoid attention.

But why should a politically minded homicide detective either notice or care? It was not as if-

Or was it? A nasty little idea began to grow. Something in the strange smile that flicked across her face and then away gave me the answer. It was ridiculous, but what else could it be? LaGuerta was not looking for a way to put me off my guard and ask more penetrating questions about what I had seen. And she did not truly give a winged fart about my hockey expertise.

LaGuerta was being social.

She

liked

me.

Here I was still trying to recover from the horrible shock of my bizarre, lurching, slobbering attack on Rita-and now this? LaGuerta

liked

me? Had terrorists dumped something in the Miami water supply? Was I exuding some kind of strange pheromone? Had every woman in Miami suddenly realized how hopeless real men are, and I had become attractive by default? What, in all very seriousness, the hell was going on?

Of course I could be wrong. I lunged at the thought like a barracuda at a shiny silver spoon. After all, what colossal egotism to think that a polished, sophisticated, career-track woman like LaGuerta might show any kind of interest in me. Wasn't it more likely that, that-

That what? As unfortunate as it was, it did make a kind of sense. We were in the same line of work and therefore, conventional cop wisdom said, more likely to understand and forgive each other. Our relationship could survive her cop hours and stressful lifestyle. And although I take no credit for it, I am presentable enough; I clean up good, as we natives like to say. And I had put myself out to be charming to her for several years now. It had been purely political schmoozing, but she did not have to know that. I was

good

at being charming, one of my very few vanities. I had studied hard and practiced long, and when I applied myself no one could tell I was faking it. I was really very good at sprinkling seeds of charm. Perhaps it was natural that the seeds would eventually sprout.

But sprout into this? What now? Was she going to propose a quiet dinner some evening? Or a few hours of sweaty bliss at the Cacique Motel?

Happily, we arrived at the arena just before panic took me over completely. LaGuerta circled the building once, looking for the correct entrance. It wasn't too hard to find. A cluster of police cars stood scattered outside one row of double doors. She nosed her big car in among them. I jumped out of the car quickly, before she could put her hand on my knee. She got out and looked at me for a moment. Her mouth twitched.

“I'll take a look,” I said. I did not quite run into the arena. I was fleeing LaGuerta, yes-but I was also very anxious to get inside; to see what my playful friend had done, to be near his work, to inhale the wonder, to learn.

The inside echoed with the organized bedlam typical of any murder scene-and yet it seemed to me that there was a special electricity in the air, a slightly hushed feeling of excitement and tension that you wouldn't find at any ordinary murder, a sense that this one was different somehow, that new and wonderful things might happen because we were out here on the cutting edge. But maybe that was just me. A clot of people stood around the nearby net. Several of them wore Broward uniforms; they had their arms folded and watched as Captain Matthews argued about jurisdiction with a man in a tailored suit. As I got closer I saw Angel-no-relation in an unusual position, standing above a balding man who was on one knee poking at a stack of carefully wrapped packages.

I stopped at the railing to look through the glass. There it was, only ten feet away. It looked so perfect in the cold purity of the newly Zambonied hockey rink. Any jeweler will tell you that finding the right setting is vitally important, and this- It was stunning. Absolutely perfect. I felt just a little dizzy, uncertain of whether the railing would hold my weight, as if I might simply pass straight down through the hard wood like a mist.

Even from the railing I could tell. He had taken the time, he had done it right, in spite of what must have seemed like a very close call on the causeway only minutes before. Or had he known somehow that I meant him no harm?

And since I brought it up anyway, did I, in fact, mean him no harm? Did I truly mean to track him to his lair and come up on point all aquiver for advancing Deborah's career? Of course that was what I thought I was doing-but would I be strong enough to carry through with it if things kept getting so interesting? Here we were at the hockey rink where I had whiled away many pleasant and contemplative hours; wasn't this even more proof that this artist-excuse me, I mean “killer” of course-was moving on a track parallel to mine? Just look at the lovely work he had done here.

And the head-that was the key. Surely it was too important as a piece of what he was doing simply to leave it behind. Had he thrown it to frighten me, send me into paroxysms of terror, horror, and dread? Or had he known somehow that I felt the same way he did? Could he, too, feel the connection between us, and he just wanted to be playful? Was he teasing me? He had to have some important reason for leaving me such a trophy. I was experiencing powerful, dizzying sensations-how could he be feeling nothing?

LaGuerta came up beside me. “You're in such a hurry,” she said, a slight edge of complaint in her voice. “Are you afraid she'll get away?” She nodded at the stacked body parts.

I knew that somewhere inside me was a clever answer, something that would make her smile, charm her a little more, smooth over my awkward run from her clutches. But standing there at the rail, looking down at the body on the ice, in the goalie's net-in the presence of greatness, one might say-no wit came out. I did manage not to yell at her to shut up, but it was a very near thing.

“I had to see,” I said truthfully, and then recovered enough to add, “It's the home team's net.”

She slapped my arm playfully. “You're awful,” she said. Luckily Sergeant Doakes came over to us and the detective didn't have time for a kittenish giggle, which would have been more than I could take. As always, Doakes seemed more interested in finding a way to get a good grip on my ribs and pull me open than anything else, and he gave me such a warm and penetrating look of welcome that I faded quickly away and left him to LaGuerta. He stared after me, watching me with an expression that said I had to be guilty of something and he would very much like to examine my entrails to find out what. I'm sure he would have been happier someplace where the police were permitted to break the occasional tibia or femur. I circled away from him, moving slowly around the rink to the nearest place where I could get in. I had just found it when something came at me on my blind side and hit me, rather hard, in the ribs.

I straightened up to face my assailant with a certain bruise and a strained smile. “Hello, dear sister,” I said. “So nice to see a friendly face.”

“Bastard!” she hissed at me.

“Quite probably,” I said. “But why bring it up now?”

“Because, you miserable son of a bitch, you had a lead and you didn't call me!”

“A lead?” I almost stuttered. “What makes you think-”

“Cut the crap, Dexter,” Deborah snarled. “You weren't driving around at four AM looking for hookers. You knew where he was, goddamn it.”

Light dawned. I had been so wrapped up in my own problems, starting with the dream-and the fact that it had obviously been something more than that-and continuing on through my nightmarish encounter with LaGuerta, that it did not occur to me that I had wronged Deborah. I had not shared. Of course she would be angry. “Not a lead, Deb,” I said, trying to soothe her feelings a bit. “Nothing solid like that. Just-a feeling. A thought, that's all. It was really nothing-”

She shoved again. “Except that it was

something

,” she snarled. “You found him.”

“Actually, I'm not sure,” I said. “I think he found me.”

“Quit being clever,” she said, and I spread my hands to show how impossible that would be. “You promised, goddamn you.”

I did not remember making any kind of promise that might cover calling her in the middle of the night and telling her my dreams, but this didn't seem like a very politic thing to say, so I didn't. “I'm sorry, Deb,” I said instead. “I really didn't think it would pan out. It was just a… a hunch, really.” I was certainly not going to attempt any explanation of the parapsychology involved, even with Deb. Or perhaps especially not with her. But another thought hit me. I lowered my voice. “Maybe you could help me a little. What am I supposed to tell them if

they

ever decide to ask what I was doing driving around down there at four AM?”

“Has LaGuerta interviewed you yet?”

“Exhaustively,” I said, fighting down a shudder.

Deb made a disgusted face. “And she didn't ask.” It was not a question.

“I'm sure the detective has a great deal on her mind,” I said. I did not add that apparently some of it was me. “But sooner or later, somebody will ask.” I looked over to where she was Directing the Operation. “Probably Sergeant Doakes,” I said with real dread.

She nodded. “He's a decent cop. If he could just lose some attitude.”

“Attitude may be all he is,” I said. “But he doesn't like me for some reason. He'll ask anything if he thinks it will make me squirm.”

“So tell him the truth,” Deborah said deadpan. “But first, tell it to me.” And she poked me again in the same spot.

“Please, Deb,” I said. “You know how easily I bruise.”

“I don't know,” she said. “But I feel like finding out.”

“It won't happen again,” I promised. “It was just one of those 3 AM inspirations, Deborah. What would you have said if I had called you about it, and then it turned out to be nothing?”

“But it didn't. It turned out to be something,” she said with another push.

“I really didn't think it would. And I would have felt stupid dragging you in on it.”

“Imagine how I would have felt if he had killed you,” she said.

It took me by surprise. I couldn't even begin to imagine how she would have felt. Regret? Disappointment? Anger? That sort of thing is way beyond me, I'm afraid. So I just repeated, “I'm sorry, Deb.” And then, because I am the kind of cheerful Pollyanna who always finds the bright side, I added, “But at least the refrigerated truck was there.”

She blinked at me. “The truck was where?” she said.

“Oh, Deb,” I said. “They didn't tell you?”

She hit me even harder in the same place. “Goddamn it, Dexter,” she hissed. “What about the truck?”

“It was there, Deb,” I said, somewhat embarrassed by her nakedly emotional reaction-and also, of course, by the fact that a good-looking woman was beating the crap out of me. “He was driving a refrigerated truck. When he threw the head.”

She grabbed my arms and stared at me. “The fuck you say,” she finally said.

“The fuck I do.”

“Jesus-!” she said, staring off into space and no doubt seeing her promotion floating there somewhere above my head. And she was probably going to go on but at that moment Angel-no-relation lifted his voice over the echoing din of the arena. “Detective?” he called, looking over at LaGuerta. It was a strange, unconscious sound, the half-strangled cry of a man who never makes loud noises in public, and something about it brought instant quiet to the room. The tone was part shock and part triumph-I found something important but oh-my-God. All eyes turned to Angel and he nodded down at the crouching bald man who was slowly, carefully, removing something from the top package.

The man finally pulled the thing out, fumbled, and dropped it, and it skittered across the ice. He reached for it and slipped, sliding after the brightly gleaming thing from the package until they both came to rest against the boards. Hand shaking, Angel grabbed for it, got it and held it up for all of us to see. The sudden quiet in the building was awe inspiring, breathtaking, beautiful, like the overwhelming crash of applause at the unveiling of any work of genius.

It was the rearview mirror from the truck.

CHAPTER 11

T

HE GREAT BLANKET OF STUNNED SILENCE LASTED for only a moment. Then the buzz of talk in the arena took on a new note as people strained to see, to explain, to speculate.

A mirror. What the hell did it mean?

Good question. In spite of feeling so very moved by the thing, I didn't have any immediate theories about what it meant. Sometimes great art is like that. It affects you and you can't say why. Was it deep symbolism? A cryptic message? A wrenching plea for help and understanding? Impossible to say, and to me, not the most important thing at first. I just wanted to breathe it in. Let others worry about how it had gotten there. After all, maybe it had just fallen off and he had decided to throw it away in the nearest handy garbage bag.

Not possible, of course not. And now I couldn't help thinking about it. The mirror was there for some very important reason. These were not garbage bags to him. As he had now proved so elegantly with this hockey-rink setting, presentation was an important part of what he was doing. He would not be casual in any detail. And because of that, I began to think about what the mirror might mean. I had to believe that, as improvised as it might be, putting it in with the body parts was exceedingly deliberate. And I had the further feeling, burbling up from somewhere behind my lungs, that this was a very careful, very private message.

To me?

If not me, then whom? The rest of the act was speaking to the world at large: See what I am. See what we all are. See what I am doing about it. A truck's mirror wasn't part of the statement. Segmenting the body, draining the blood-this was necessary and elegant. But the mirror-and especially if it turned out to be from the truck that I had chased-that was different. Elegant, yes; but what did it say about the way things really are? Nothing. It was added on for some other purpose, and that purpose had to be a new and different kind of statement. I could feel the electricity of the thought surging through me. If it was from that truck, it could only be meant for me.

But what did it mean?

“What the hell is that about?” Deb said beside me. “A mirror. Why?”

“I don't know,” I said, still feeling its power throb through me. “But I will bet you dinner at Joe's Stone Crabs that it came from the refrigerator truck.”

“No bet,” she said. “But at least it settles one important question.”

I looked at her, startled. Could she really have made some intuitive jump that I had missed? “What question, sis?”

She nodded at the cluster of management-level cops still squabbling at the edges of the rink. “Jurisdiction. This one is ours. Come on.”

On the surface, Detective LaGuerta was not impressed with this new piece of evidence. Perhaps she was hiding a deep and abiding concern for the symbolism of the mirror and all it implied under a carefully crafted façade of indifference. Either that or she really was dumb as a box of rocks. She was still standing with Doakes. To his credit, he looked troubled, but maybe his face had simply gotten tired from its perpetual mean glare and he was trying something new.

“Morgan,” LaGuerta said to Deb, “I didn't recognize you with clothes on.”

“I guess it's possible to miss a lot of obvious things, Detective,” Deb said before I could stop her.

“It is,” LaGuerta said. “That's why some of us never make detective.” It was a complete and effortless victory, and LaGuerta didn't even wait to see the shot go home. She turned away from Deb and spoke to Doakes. “Find out who has keys to the arena. Who could get in here whenever they wanted.”

“Uh-huh,” said Doakes. “Check all the locks, see if somebody busted in?”

“No,” LaGuerta told him with a pretty little frown. “We got our ice connection now.” She glanced at Deborah. “That refrigerated truck is just to confuse us.” Back to Doakes. “The tissue damage had to come from the ice, from here. So the killer is connected to the ice in this place.” She looked one last time at Deborah. “Not the truck.”

“Uh-huh,” said Doakes. He didn't sound convinced, but he wasn't in charge.

LaGuerta looked over at me. “I think you can go home, Dexter,” she said. “I know where you live when I need you.” At least she didn't wink.

Deborah walked me to the big double doors of the arena. “If this keeps up, I'll be a crossing guard in a year,” she grumbled at me.

“Nonsense, Deb,” I said. “Two months, max.”

“Thanks.”

“Well really. You can't challenge her

openly

like that. Didn't you see how Sergeant Doakes did it? Have some subtlety, for God's sake.”

“Subtlety.” She stopped dead in her tracks and grabbed me. “Listen, Dexter,” she said. “This isn't some kind of game here.”

“But it is, Deb. A political game. And you're not playing it properly.”

“I'm not playing anything,” she snarled. “There are human lives at stake. There's a butcher running loose, and he's going to stay loose as long as that half-wit LaGuerta is running things.”

I fought down a surge of hope. “That may be so-”

“It

is

so,” Deb insisted.

“-but Deborah, you can't change that by getting yourself exiled to Coconut Grove traffic duty.”

“No,” she said. “But I can change it by finding the killer.”

Well there it was. Some people just have no idea how the world works. She was otherwise a very smart person, truly she was. She had simply inherited all of Harry's earthy directness, his straightforward way of dealing with things, without latching on to any of his accompanying wisdom. With Harry, bluntness had been a way to cut through the fecal matter. With Deborah, it was a way of pretending there wasn't any.

I got a ride back to my car with one of the patrol units outside the arena. I drove home, imagining I had kept the head, wrapped it carefully in tissue paper, and placed it in the backseat to take home with me. Terrible and silly, I know. For the first time I understood those sad men, usually Shriners, who fondle women's shoes or carry around dirty underwear. An awful feeling that made me want a shower almost as much as I wanted to stroke the head.

But I didn't have it. Nothing for it but to go home. I drove slowly, a few miles per hour under the speed limit. In Miami that's like wearing a KICK ME sign on your back. No one actually kicked me, of course. They would have had to slow down for that. But I was honked at seven times, flipped off eight, and five cars simply roared around me, either onto the sidewalk or through oncoming traffic.

But today even the energetic high spirits of the other drivers couldn't cheer me. I was dead tired and bemused and I needed to think, away from the echoing din of the arena and the bonehead blather of LaGuerta. Driving slowly gave me time to wonder, to work through the meaning of all that had happened. And I found that one silly phrase kept ringing in my head, bouncing off the rocks and crannies of my exhausted brain. It took on a life of its own. The more I heard it in my thoughts, the more sense it made. And beyond sense, it became a kind of seductive mantra. It became the key to thinking about the killer, the head rolling into the street, the rearview mirror tucked away amid the wonderfully dry body parts.

If it had been me

-

As in, “If it had been me, what would I be saying with the mirror?” and “If it had been me, what would I have done with the truck?”

Of course it had not been me, and that kind of envy is very bad for the soul, but since I was not aware of having one it didn't matter. If it

had

been me, the truck would be run into a ditch somewhere not too far from the arena. And then I would get far away from there fast-in a stashed car? A stolen one? It would depend. If it had been me, would I have planned on leaving the body at the arena all along, or had that come up as a response to the chase on the causeway?

Except that made no sense. He could not have counted on anyone chasing him out to North Bay Village -could he? But then why did he have the head ready to throw? And then why take the rest to the arena? It seemed like an odd choice. Yes, there was a great deal of ice there, and the coldness was all to the good. But the vast clattery space was really not appropriate for my kind of intimate moment-if it had been me. There was a terrible, wide-open desolation that was not at all conducive to real creativity. Fun to visit, but not a real artist's studio. A dumping ground, and not a work space. It just didn't have the proper feeling to it.

If it had been me, that is.

So the arena was a bold stroke into unexplored territory. It would give the police fits, and it would most definitely lead them in the wrong direction. If they ever figured out that there was a direction to be led in, which seemed increasingly unlikely.

And to top it off with the mirror-if I was right about the reasons for selecting the arena, then the addition of the mirror would of course support that. It would be a comment on what had just happened, connected to leaving the head. It would be a statement that would bring together all the other threads, wrap them up as neatly as the stacked body parts, an elegant underlining to a major work. Now what would the statement be, if it was me?

I see you.

Well. Of course that was it, in spite of being somewhat obvious. I see you. I know you're behind me, and I am watching you. But I am far ahead of you, too, controlling your course and setting your speed and watching you follow me. I see you. I know who you are and where you are, and all you know about me is that I am watching. I see you.

That felt right. Why didn't it make me feel better?

Further, how much of this should I tell poor dear Deborah? This was becoming so intensely personal that it was a struggle to remember that there was a public side to it, a side that was important to my sister and her career. I could not begin to tell her-or anyone-that I thought the killer was trying to tell me something, if I had the wit to hear and reply. But the rest-was there something I needed to tell her, and did I actually want to?

It was too much. I needed sleep before I could sort all this out.

I did not quite whimper as I crawled into my bed, but it was a very near thing. I allowed sleep to roll over me quickly, just letting go into the darkness. And I got nearly two and a half full hours of sleep before the telephone rang.

“It's me,” said the voice on the other end.

“Of course it is,” I said. “Deborah, wasn't it?” And of course it was.

“I found the refrigerated truck.”

“Well, congratulations, Deb. That's very good news.”

There was a rather long silence on the other end.

“Deb?” I said finally. “That is good news, isn't it?”

“No,” she said.

“Oh.” I felt the need for sleep thumping my head like carpet beaters on a prayer rug, but I tried to concentrate. “Um, Deb-what did you… what happened?”

“I made the match,” she said. “Made absolutely certain. Pictures and part numbers and everything. So I told LaGuerta like a good scout.”

“And she didn't believe you?” I asked incredulously.

“She probably did.”

I tried to blink, but my eyes wanted to stick shut so I gave it up. “I'm sorry, Deb, one of us isn't making much sense. Is it me?”

“I tried to explain it to her,” Deborah said in a very small, very tired voice that gave me a terrible feeling of sinking under the waves without a bailing bucket. “I gave her the whole thing. I was even polite.”

“That's very good,” I said. “What did she say?”

“Nothing,” Deb said.

“Nothing at all?”

“Nothing at all,” Deb repeated. “Except she just says thanks, in a kind of way like you'd say it to the valet parking attendant. And she gives me this funny little smile and turns away.”

“Well, but Deb,” I said, “you can't really expect her to-”

“And then I found out why she smiled like that,” Deb said. “Like I'm some kind of unwashed half-wit and she's finally figured out where to lock me up.”

“Oh, no,” I said. “You mean you're off the case?”

“We're all off the case, Dexter,” Deb said, her voice as tired as I felt. “LaGuerta's made an arrest.”

There was far too much silence on the line all of a sudden and I couldn't think at all, but at least I was wide awake. “What?” I said.

“LaGuerta has arrested somebody. Some guy who works at the arena. She has him in custody and she's sure he's the killer.”

“That's not possible,” I said, although I knew it was possible, the brain-dead bitch. LaGuerta, not Deb.

“I know that, Dexter. But don't try to tell LaGuerta. She's sure she got the right guy.”

“How sure?” I asked. My head was spinning and I felt a little bit like throwing up. I couldn't really say why.

Deb snorted. “She has a press conference in one hour,” she said. “For her, that's positive.”

The pounding in my head got too loud to hear what Deb might have said next. LaGuerta had made an arrest? Who? Who could she possibly have tagged for it? Could she truly ignore all the clues, the smell and feel and taste of these kills, and arrest somebody? Because nobody who could do what this killer had done-was doing!-could possibly allow a pimple like LaGuerta to catch him. Never. I would bet my life on it.

“No, Deborah,” I said. “No. Not possible. She's got the wrong guy.”

Deborah laughed, a tired, dirty-up-to-here cop's laugh. “Yeah,” she said. “I know it. You know it. But she doesn't know it. And you want to know something funny? Neither does he.”

That made no sense at all. “What are you saying, Deb? Who doesn't know?”

She repeated that awful little laugh. “The guy she arrested. I guess he must be almost as confused as LaGuerta, Dex. Because he confessed.”

“What?”

“He confessed, Dexter. The bastard confessed.”

CHAPTER 12

H

IS NAME WAS DARYLL EARL MCHALE AND HE WAS what we liked to call a two-time loser. Twelve of his last twenty years had been spent as a guest of the State of Florida. Dear Sergeant Doakes had managed to dig his name out of the arena's personnel files. In a computer cross-check for employees with a record of violence or felony convictions, McHale's name had popped up twice.

Daryll Earl was a drunk and a wife beater. Apparently he occasionally knocked over filling stations, too, just for the entertainment value. He could be relied on to hold down a minimum wage job for a month or two. But then some fine Friday night he'd throw back a few six-packs and start to believe he was the Wrath of God. So he'd drive around until he found a gas station that just pissed him off. He'd charge in waving a weapon, take the money, and drive away. Then he'd use his massive $80 or $90 haul to buy a few more six-packs until he felt so good he just had to beat up on somebody. Daryll Earl was not a large man: five six and scrawny. So to play it safe, the somebody he beat on usually turned out to be his wife.

Things being what they were, he'd actually gotten away with it a couple of times. But one night he went a little too far with his wife and put her into traction for a month. She pressed charges, and since Daryll Earl already had a record, he'd done some serious time.

He still drank, but he'd apparently been frightened enough at Raiford to straighten out just a bit. He'd gotten a job as a janitor at the arena and actually held on to it. As far as we could tell, he hadn't beaten up his wife for ages.

And more, Our Boy had even had a few moments of fame when the Panthers made their run at the Stanley Cup. Part of his job had been to run out and clean up when the fans threw objects on the ice. That Stanley Cup year, this had been a major job, since every time the Panthers scored the fans threw three or four thousand plastic rats onto the rink. Daryll Earl had to schlep out and pick them all up, boring work, no doubt. And so encouraged by a few snorts of very cheap vodka one night, he'd picked up one of the plastic rats and done a little “Rat Dance.” The crowd ate it up and yelled for more. They began to call for it when Daryll Earl skidded out onto the ice. Daryll Earl did the dance for the rest of the season.

Plastic rats were forbidden nowadays. Even if they had been required by federal statute, nobody would have been throwing them. The Panthers hadn't scored a goal since the days when Miami had an honest mayor, sometime in the last century. But McHale still showed up at the games hoping for one last on-camera two-step.

At the press conference LaGuerta played that part beautifully. She made it sound like the memory of his small fame had driven Daryll Earl over the edge into murder. And of course with his drunkenness and his record of violence toward women, he was the perfect suspect for this series of stupid and brutal murders. But Miami 's hookers could rest easy; the killing was over. Driven by the overwhelming pressure of an intense and merciless investigation, Daryll Earl had confessed. Case closed. Back to work, girls.

The press ate it up. You couldn't really blame them, I suppose. LaGuerta did a masterful job of presenting just enough fact colored with high-gloss wishful thinking that nearly anyone would have been convinced. And of course you don't actually have to take an IQ test to become a reporter. Even so, I always hope for just the smallest glimmer. And I'm always disappointed. Perhaps I saw too many black-and-white movies as a child. I still thought the cynical, world-weary drunk from the large metropolitan daily was supposed to ask an awkward question and force the investigators to carefully reexamine the evidence.

But sadly, life does not always imitate art. And at LaGuerta's press conference, the part of Spencer Tracy was played by a series of male and female models with perfect hair and tropical-weight suits. Their penetrating questions amounted to, “How did it feel to find the head?” and “Can we have some pictures?”

One lone reporter, Nick Something from the local NBC TV affiliate, asked LaGuerta if she was sure McHale was the killer. But when she said that the overwhelming preponderance of evidence indicated that this was the case and anyway the confession was conclusive, he let it go. Either he was satisfied or the words were too big.

And so there it was. Case closed, justice done. The mighty machinery of Metro Miami's awesome crime-fighting apparatus had once again triumphed over the dark forces besieging Our Fair City. It was a lovely show. LaGuerta handed out some very sinister-looking mug shots of Daryll Earl stapled to those new glossy shots of herself investigating a $250-an-hour high-fashion photographer on South Beach.

It made a wonderfully ironic package; the appearance of danger and the lethal reality, so very different. Because however coarse and brutal Daryll Earl looked, the real threat to society was LaGuerta. She had called off the hounds, closed down the hue and cry, sent people back to bed in a burning building.

Was I the only one who could see that Daryll Earl McHale could not possibly be the killer? That there was a style and wit here that a brickhead like McHale couldn't even understand?

I had never been more alone than I was in my admiration for the real killer's work. The very body parts seemed to sing to me, a rhapsody of bloodless wonder that lightened my heart and filled my veins with an intoxicating sense of awe. But it was certainly not going to interfere with my zeal in capturing the real killer, a cold and wanton executioner of the innocent who absolutely must be brought to justice. Right, Dexter? Right? Hello?

I sat in my apartment, rubbing my sleep-crusted eyes and thinking about the show I had just watched. It had been as near perfect as a press conference could be without free food and nudity. LaGuerta had clearly pulled every string she had ever gotten a hand on in order to make it the biggest, splashiest press conference possible, and it had been. And for perhaps the first time in her Gucci-licking career, LaGuerta really and truly believed she had the right man. She had to believe it. It was kind of sad, really. She thought she had done everything right this time. She wasn't just making political moves; in her mind she was cashing in on a clean and well-lit piece of work. She'd solved the crime, done it her way, caught the bad guy, stopped the killing. Well-earned applause all around for a job well done. And what a lovely surprise she would get when the next body turned up.

Because I knew with no room for doubt that the killer was still out there. He was probably watching the press conference on Channel 7, the channel of choice for people with an eye for carnage. At the moment he would be laughing too hard to hold a blade, but that would pass. And when it did his sense of humor would no doubt prompt him to comment on the situation.

For some reason the thought did not overwhelm me with fear and loathing and a grim determination to stop this madman before it was too late. Instead I felt a little surge of anticipation. I knew it was very wrong, and perhaps that made it feel even better. Oh, I wanted this killer stopped, brought to justice, yes, certainly-but did it have to be soon?

There was also a small trade-off to make. If I was going to do my little part to stop the real killer, then I should at least make something positive happen at the same time. And as I thought it, my telephone rang.

“Yes, I saw it,” I said into the receiver.

“Jesus,” said Deborah on the other end. “I think I'm going to be sick.”

“Well, I won't mop your fevered brow, sis. There's work to be done.”

“Jesus,” she repeated. Then, “What work?”

“Tell me,” I asked her. “Are you in ill odor, sis?”

“I'm tired, Dexter. And I'm more pissed off than I've ever been in my life. What's that in English?”

“I'm asking if you are in what Dad would have called the doghouse. Is your name mud in the department? Has your professional reputation been muddied, damaged, sullied, colored, rendered questionable?”

“Between LaGuerta's backstabbing and the Einstein thing? My professional reputation is shit,” she said with more sourness than I would have thought possible in someone so young.

“Good. It's important that you don't have anything to lose.”

She snorted. “Glad I could help. 'Cause I'm there, Dexter. If I sink any lower in the department, I'll be making coffee for community relations. Where is this going, Dex?”

I closed my eyes and leaned all the way back in my chair. “You are going to go on record-with the captain and the department itself-as believing that Daryll Earl is the wrong man and that another murder is going to take place. You will present a couple of compelling reasons culled from your investigation, and you will be the laughingstock of Miami Metro for a little while.”

“I already am,” she said. “No big deal. But is there some reason for this?”

I shook my head. It was sometimes hard for me to believe she could be so naïve. “Sister dearest,” I said, “you don't truly believe Daryll Earl is guilty, do you?”

She didn't answer. I could hear her breathing and it occurred to me that she must be tired, too, every bit as tired as I was, but without the jolt of energy I got from being certain I was right. “Deb?”

“The guy confessed, Dexter,” she said at last, and I heard the utter fatigue in her voice. “I don't-I've been wrong before, even when- I mean, but he

confessed

. Doesn't that, that… Shit. Maybe we should just let it go, Dex.”

“Oh ye of little faith,” I said. “She's got the wrong guy, Deborah. And you are now going to rewrite the politics.”

“Sure I am.”

“Daryll Earl McHale is not it,” I said. “There's absolutely no doubt about it.”

“Even if you're right, so what?” she said.

Now it was my turn to blink and wonder. “Excuse me?”

“Well, look, if I'm this killer, why don't I realize I'm off the hook now? With this other guy arrested, the heat's off, you know. Why don't I just stop? Or even take off for someplace else and start over?”

“Impossible,” I said. “You don't understand how this guy thinks.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “How come you do?”

I chose to ignore that. “He's going to stay right here and he's going to kill again. He has to show us all what he thinks of us.”

“Which is what?”

“It's not good,” I admitted. “We've done something stupid by arresting an obvious twinky like Daryll Earl. That's funny.”

“Ha, ha,” Deb said with no amusement.

“But we've also insulted him. We've given this lowbrow brain-dead redneck all the credit for his work, which is like telling Jackson Pollock your six-year-old could have painted that.”

“Jackson Pollock? The

painter

? Dexter, this guy's a butcher.”

“In his own way, Deborah, he is an artist. And he thinks of himself that way.”

“For Christ's sake. That's the stupidest-”

“Trust me, Deb.”

“Sure, I trust you. Why shouldn't I trust you? So we have an angrily amused artist who's not going anywhere, right?”

“Right,” I said. “He has to do it again, and it has to be under our noses, and it probably has to be a little bigger.”

“You mean he's going to kill a fat hooker this time?”

“Bigger in scale, Deborah. Larger in concept. Splashier.”

“Oh. Splashier. Sure. Like with a mulcher.”

“The stakes have gone up, Debs. We've pushed him and insulted him a little and the next kill will reflect that.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “And how would that work?”

“I don't really know,” I admitted.

“But you're sure.”

“That's right,” I said.

“Swell,” she said. “Now I know what to watch for.”

CHAPTER 13

I

KNEW WHEN I WALKED IN MY FRONT DOOR AFTER work on Monday that something was wrong. Someone had been in my apartment.

The door was not broken, the windows were not jimmied, and I couldn't see any signs of vandalism, but I knew. Call it sixth sense or whatever you like. Someone had been here. Maybe I was smelling pheromones the intruder had left in my air molecules. Or perhaps my La-Z-Boy recliner's aura had been disturbed. It didn't matter how I knew: I knew. Somebody had been in my apartment while I had been at work.

That might seem like no big deal. This was Miami, after all. People come home every day to find their TVs gone, their jewelry and electronics all taken away; their space violated, their possessions rifled, and their dog pregnant. But this was different. Even as I did a quick search through the apartment, I knew I would find nothing missing.

And I was right. Nothing was missing.

But something had been added.

It took me a few minutes to find it. I suppose some work-induced reflex made me check the obvious things first. When an intruder has paid a visit, in the natural course of events your things are gone: toys, valuables, private relics, the last few chocolate chip cookies. So I checked.

But all my things were unmolested. The computer, the sound system, the TV and VCR-all right where I had left them. Even my small collection of precious glass slides was tucked away on the bookcase, each with its single drop of dried blood in place. Everything was exactly as I had left it.

I checked the private areas next, just to be sure: bedroom, bathroom, medicine cabinet. There were all fine, too, all apparently undisturbed, and yet there was a feeling suspended in the air over every object that it had been examined, touched, and replaced-with such perfect care that even the dust motes were in their proper positions.

I went back into the living room, sank into my chair, and looked around, suddenly unsure. I had been absolutely positive that someone had been here, but why? And who did I imagine was so interested in little old me that they would come in and leave my modest home exactly as it had been? Because nothing was missing, nothing disturbed. The pile of newspapers in the recycle box might be leaning slightly to the left-but was that my imagination? Couldn't it have been a breeze from the air conditioner? Nothing was really different, nothing changed or missing; nothing.

And why would anyone break into my apartment at all? There was nothing special about it-I'd made sure of that. It was part of building my Harry Profile. Blend in. Act normal, even boring. Don't do anything or own anything that might cause comment. So had I done. I had no real valuables other than a stereo and a computer. There were other, far more attractive targets in the immediate neighborhood.

And in any case, why would somebody break in and then take nothing, do nothing, leave no sign? I leaned back and closed my eyes; almost certainly I was imagining the whole thing. This was surely just jangled nerves. A symptom of sleep deprivation and worrying too much about Deborah's critically injured career. Just one more small sign that Poor Old Dexter was drifting off into Deep Water. Making that last painless transition from sociopath to psychopath. It is not necessarily crazy in Miami to assume that you are surrounded by anonymous enemies-but to act like it is socially unacceptable. They would have to put me away at last.

And yet the feeling was so strong. I tried to shake it off: just a whim, a twitch of the nerves, a passing indigestion. I stood up, stretched, took a deep breath, and tried to think pretty thoughts. None came. I shook my head and went into the kitchen for a drink of water and there it was.

There it was.

I stood in front of the refrigerator and looked, I don't know how long, just staring stupidly.

Attached to the refrigerator, hair pinned to the door with one of my small tropical-fruit magnets, was a Barbie doll's head. I did not remember leaving it there. I did not remember ever owning one. It seemed like the kind of thing I would remember.

I reached to touch the little plastic head. It swung gently, thumping against the freezer door with a small

thack

sound. It turned in a tiny quarter circle until Barbie looked up at me with alert, Collie-dog interest. I looked back.

Without really knowing what I was doing or why, I opened the freezer door. Inside, lying carefully on top of the ice basket, was Barbie's body. The legs and arms had been pulled off, and the body had been pulled apart at the waist. The pieces were stacked neatly, wrapped, and tied with a pink ribbon. And stuck into one tiny Barbie hand was a small accessory, a Barbie vanity mirror.

After a long moment I closed the freezer door. I wanted to lie down and press my cheek against the cool linoleum. Instead I reached out with my little finger and flipped Barbie's head. It went

thack

thack

against the door. I flipped it again.

Thack

thack

. Whee. I had a new hobby.

I left the doll where it was and went back to my chair, sinking deep into the cushions and closing my eyes. I knew I should be feeling upset, angry, afraid, violated, filled with paranoid hostility and righteous rage. I didn't. Instead I felt-what? More than a little light-headed. Anxious, perhaps-or was it exhilaration?

There was of course no possible doubt about who had been in my apartment. Unless I could swallow the idea that some stranger, for unknown reasons, had randomly chosen my apartment as the ideal spot to display his decapitated Barbie doll.

No. I had been visited by my favorite artist. How he had found me was not important. It would have been easy enough to jot down my license number on the causeway that night. He'd had plenty of time to watch me from his hiding place behind the filling station. And then anyone with computer literacy could find my address. And having found it, it would be easy enough to slip in, take a careful look around, and leave a message.

And here was the message: the head hung separately, the body parts stacked on my ice tray, and that damned mirror again. Combined with the total lack of interest in everything else in the apartment, it all added up to only one thing.

But what?

What was he saying?

He could have left anything or nothing. He could have jammed a bloody butcher knife through a cow's heart and into my linoleum. I was grateful he hadn't-what a mess-but why Barbie? Aside from the obvious fact that the doll reflected the body of his last kill, why tell me about it? And was this more sinister than some other, gooier message-or less? Was it, “I'm watching and I'll get you”?

Or was he saying, “Hi! Wanna play?”

And I did. Of course I did.

But what about the mirror? To include it this time gave it meaning far beyond the truck and the chase on the causeway. Now it had to mean much more. All I could come up with was, “Look at yourself.” And what sense did that make? Why should I look at myself? I am not vain enough to enjoy that-at least, I am not vain about my physical appearance. And why would I even want to look at myself, when what I really wanted was to see the killer? So there had to be some other meaning to the mirror that I was not getting.

But even here I could not be sure. It was possible that there was no real meaning at all. I did not want to believe that of so elegant an artist, but it was possible. And the message could very well be a private, deranged, and sinister one. There was absolutely no way to know. And so, there was also no way to know what I should do about it. If indeed I should do anything.

I made the human choice. Funny when you think about it; me, making a human choice. Harry would have been proud. Humanly, I decided to do nothing. Wait and see. I would not report what had happened. After all, what was there to report? Nothing was missing. There was nothing at all to say officially except: “Ah, Captain Matthews, I thought you should know that someone apparently broke into my apartment and left a Barbie doll in my freezer.”

That had a very good ring to it. I was sure that would go over well with the department. Perhaps Sergeant Doakes would investigate personally and finally be allowed to indulge some hidden talents for unfettered interrogation. And perhaps they would simply fling me on the Mentally Unable to Perform list, along with poor Deb, since officially the case was closing and even when open had nothing to do with Barbie dolls.

No, there was really nothing to tell, not in any way that I could explain. So at the risk of another savage elbowing, I would not even tell Deborah. For reasons I could not begin to explain, even to myself, this was personal. And by keeping it personal, there was a greater chance that I could get closer to my visitor. In order to bring him to justice, of course. Naturally.

With the decision made I felt much lighter. Almost giddy, in fact. I had no idea what might come of it, but I was ready to go with whatever came. The feeling stayed with me through the night, and even through the next day at work, as I prepared a lab report, comforted Deb, and stole a doughnut from Vince Masuoka. It stayed with me during my drive home through the happily homicidal evening traffic. I was in a state of Zen readiness, prepared for any surprise.

Or so I thought.

I had just returned to my apartment, leaned back in my chair, and relaxed, when the phone rang. I let it ring. I wanted to breathe for a few minutes, and I could think of nothing that couldn't wait. Besides, I had paid almost $50 for an answering machine. Let it earn its keep.

Two rings. I closed my eyes. Breathed in. Relax, old boy. Three rings. Breathe out. The answering machine clicked and my wonderfully urbane message began to play.

“Hello, I'm not in right now, but I'll get back to you right away if you'll please leave a message, after the beep. Thank you.”

What fabulous vocal tone. What acid wit! A truly great message altogether. It sounded nearly human. I was very proud. I breathed in again, listening to the melodic BEEEEP! that followed.

“Hi, it's me.”

A female voice. Not Deborah. I felt one eyelid twitch in irritation. Why do so many people start their messages with “It's me”? Of course it is you. We all know that. But who the hell ARE you? In my case the choices were rather limited. I knew it wasn't Deborah. It didn't sound like LaGuerta, although anything was possible. So that left-

Rita?

“Um, I'm sorry, I-” A long breath sighing out. “Listen, Dexter, I'm sorry. I thought you would call me and then when you didn't I just-” Another long breath out. “Anyway. I need to talk. Because I realized… I mean-oh hell. Could you, um, call me? If-you know.”

I didn't know. Not at all. I wasn't even sure who it was. Could that really be Rita?

Another long sigh. “I'm sorry if-” And a very long pause. Two full breaths. In deeply, out. In deeply, then blown out abruptly. “Please call me, Dexter. Just-” A long pause. Another sigh. Then she hung up.

Many times in my life I have felt like I was missing something, some essential piece of the puzzle that everybody else carried around with them without thinking about it. I don't usually mind, since most of those times it turns out to be an astonishingly stupid piece of humania like understanding the infield fly rule or not going all the way on the first date.

But at other times I feel like I am missing out on a great reservoir of warm wisdom, the lore of some sense I don't possess that humans feel so deeply they don't need to talk about it and can't even put it into words.

This was one of those times.

I knew I was supposed to understand that Rita was actually saying something very specific, that her pauses and stutters added up to a great and marvelous thing that a human male would intuitively grasp. But I had not a single clue as to what it might be, nor how to figure it out. Should I count the breaths? Time the pauses and convert the numbers to Bible verses to arrive at the secret code? What was she trying to tell me? And why, for that matter, was she trying to tell me anything at all?

As I understood things, when I had kissed Rita on that strange and stupid impulse, I had crossed a line we had both agreed to keep uncrossed. With that thing done there was no undoing it, no going back. In its own way the kiss had been an act of murder. At any rate, it was comforting to think so. I had killed our careful relationship by driving my tongue through its heart and pushing it off a cliff. Boom, a dead thing. I hadn't even thought about Rita since. She was gone, shoved out of my life by an incomprehensible whim.

And now she was calling me and recording her breathing for my amusement.

Why? Did she want to chastise me? Call me names, rub my nose in my folly, force me to understand the immensity of my offense?

The whole thing began to irritate me beyond measure. I paced around my apartment. Why should I have to think about Rita at all? I had more important concerns at the moment. Rita was merely my beard, a silly kid's costume I wore on weekends to hide the fact that I was the kind of person who did the things that this other interesting fellow was now doing and I wasn't.

Was this jealousy? Of course I wasn't doing those things. I had just recently finished for the time being. I certainly wouldn't do it again anytime soon. Too risky. I hadn't prepared anything.

And yet-

I walked back into the kitchen and flicked the Barbie head.

Thack

.

Thack thack.

I seemed to be feeling something here. Playfulness? Deep and abiding concern? Professional jealousy? I couldn't say, and Barbie wasn't talking.

It was just too much. The obviously fake confession, the violation of my inner sanctum, and now Rita? A man can take only so much. Even a phony man like me. I began to feel unsettled, dizzy, confused, hyperactive and lethargic at the same time. I walked to the window and looked out. It was dark now and far away over the water a light rose up in the sky and at the sight of it a small and evil voice rose up to meet it from somewhere deep inside.

Moon.

A whisper in my ear. Not even a sound; just the slight sense of someone speaking your name, almost heard, somewhere nearby. Very near, perhaps getting closer. No words at all, just a dry rustle of not-voice, a tone off-tone, a thought on a breath. My face felt hot and I could suddenly hear myself breathing. The voice came again, a soft sound dropped on the outer edge of my ear. I turned, even though I knew no one was there and it was not my ear but my dear friend inside, kicked into consciousness by who knows what and the moon.

Such a fat happy chatterbox moon. Oh how much it had to say. And as much as I tried to tell it that the time was wrong, that this was much too soon, there were other things to do now, important things-the moon had words for all of it and more. And so even though I stood there for a quarter of an hour and argued, there was never really any question.

I grew desperate, fighting it with all the tricks I had, and when that failed I did something that shocked me to my very core. I called Rita.

“Oh, Dexter,” she said. “I just-I was afraid. Thank you for calling. I just-”

“I know,” I said, although of course I did not know.

“Could we-I don't know what you- Can I see you later and just-I would really like to talk to you.”

“Of course,” I told her, and as we agreed to meet later at her place, I wondered what she might possibly have in mind. Violence? Tears of recrimination? Full-throated name-calling? I was on foreign turf here-I could be walking into anything.

And after I hung up, the whole thing distracted me wonderfully for almost half an hour before the soft interior voice came sliding back into my brain with its quiet insistence that tonight really ought to be special.

I felt myself pulled back to the window and there it was again, the huge happy face in the sky, the chuckling moon. I pulled the curtain and turned away, circled my apartment from room to room, touching things, telling myself I was checking once more for whatever might be missing, knowing nothing was missing, and knowing why, too. And each time around the apartment I circled closer and closer to the small desk in the living room where I kept my computer, knowing what I wanted to do and not wanting to do it, until finally, after three-quarters of an hour, the pull was too strong. I was too dizzy to stand and thought I would just slump into the chair since it was close at hand, and since I was there anyway I turned on the computer, and once it was on…

But it's not done

, I thought,

I'm not ready

.

And of course, that didn't matter. Whether I was ready or not made no difference at all.

It

was ready.

CHAPTER 14

I

WAS ALMOST CERTAIN HE WAS THE ONE, BUT ONLY almost, and I had never been only

almost

certain before. I felt weak, intoxicated, half sick with a combination of excitement and uncertainty and complete wrongness-but of course, the Dark Passenger was driving from the backseat now and how I felt was not terribly important anymore because

he

felt strong and cold and eager and ready. And I could feel him swelling inside me, surging up out of the Dexter-dark corners of my lizard brain, a rising and swelling that could only end one way and that being the case it rather had to be with this one.

I had found him several months ago, but after a little bit of observation I'd decided that the priest was a sure thing and this one could wait a little longer until I was positive.

How wrong I had been. I now found he couldn't wait at all.

He lived on a small street in Coconut Grove. A few blocks to one side of his crummy little house the neighborhood was low-income black housing, barbecue joints, and crumbling churches. Half a mile in the other direction the millionaires lived in overgrown modern houses and built coral walls to keep out people like him. But Jamie Jaworski was right in between, in a house he shared with a million palmetto bugs and the ugliest dog I had ever seen.

It was still a house he shouldn't have been able to afford. Jaworski was a part-time janitor at Ponce de Leon Junior High, and as far as I could tell that was his only source of income. He worked three days a week, which might be just enough to live on but not much more. Of course, I was not interested in his finances. I was very interested in the fact that there had been a small but significant increase in runaway children from Ponce since Jaworski had begun to work there. All of them twelve- to thirteen-year-old light-haired girls.

Light-haired. That was important. For some reason it was the kind of detail that police often seem to overlook but always jumped out at someone like me. Perhaps it didn't seem politically correct; dark-haired girls, and dark-skinned girls, should have an equal opportunity to be kidnapped, sexually abused, and then cut up in front of a camera, don't you think?

Jaworski, too, often seemed to be the missing kid's last witness. The police had talked to him, held him overnight, questioned him, and had not been able to make anything stick to him. Of course, they have to meet certain petty legal requirements. Torture, for example, was frowned on lately, for the most part. And without some very forceful persuasion, Jamie Jaworski was never going to open up about his hobby. I know I wouldn't.

But I knew he was doing it. He was helping those girls disappear into very quick and final movie careers. I was almost positive. I had not found any body parts and hadn't seen him do it, but everything fit. And on the Internet I did manage to locate some particularly inventive pictures of three of the missing girls. They did not look very happy in those pictures, although some of the things they were doing were supposed to bring joy, I have been told.

I could not positively connect Jaworski with the pictures. But the mailbox address was South Miami, a few minutes from the school. And he was living above his means. And in any case I was being reminded with increasing force from the dark backseat that I was out of time, that this was not a case where certainty was terribly important.

But the ugly dog worried me. Dogs were always a problem. They don't like me and they quite often disapprove of what I do to their masters, especially since I don't share the good pieces. I had to find a way around the dog to Jaworski. Perhaps he would come out. If not, I had to find a way in.

I drove past Jaworski's house three times but nothing occurred to me. I needed some luck and I needed it before the Dark Passenger made me do something hasty. And just as my dear friend began to whisper imprudent suggestions, I got my small piece of luck. Jaworski came out of his house and climbed into his battered red Toyota pickup as I drove past. I slowed down as much as I could, and in a moment he backed out and yanked his little truck toward Douglas Road. I turned around and followed.

I had no idea how I was going to do this. I was not prepared. I had no safe room, no clean coveralls, nothing but a roll of duct tape and a filet knife under my seat. I had to be unseen, unnoticed, and perfect, and I had no idea how. I hated to improvise, but I was not being offered a choice.

Once again I was lucky. Traffic was very light as Jaworski drove south to Old Cutler Road, and after a mile or so he turned left toward the water. Another huge new development was going up to improve life for all of us by turning trees and animals into cement and old people from New Jersey. Jaworski drove slowly through the construction, past half a golf course with the flags in place but no grass on it, until he came almost to the water. The skeleton of a large, half-finished block of condos blotted out the moon. I dropped far back, turned out my headlights, and then inched close enough to see what my boy was up to.

Jaworski had pulled in beside the block of condos-to-be and parked. He got out and stood between his little truck and a huge pile of sand. For a moment he just looked around and I pulled onto the shoulder and turned off the engine. Jaworski stared at the condos and then down the road toward the water. He seemed satisfied and went into the building. I was quite certain that he was looking for a guard. I was, too. I hoped he had done his homework. Most often in these huge uberdevelopments one guard rides around from site to site in a golf cart. It saves money, and anyway, this is Miami. A certain amount of the overhead on any project is for material that is expected to disappear quietly. It looked to me like Jaworski planned to help the builder meet his quota.

I got out of my car and slipped my filet knife and duct tape into a cheap tote bag I'd brought along. I had already stuffed some rubberized gardening gloves and a few pictures inside it, nothing much. Just trifles I'd downloaded from the Internet. I shrugged the bag onto my shoulder and moved quietly through the night until I came to his grungy little truck. The bed was as empty as the cab. Heaps of Burger King cups and wrappers, empty Camel packs on the floor. Nothing that wasn't small and dirty, like Jaworski himself.

I looked up. Above the rim of the half-condo I could just see the glow of the moon. A night wind blew across my face, bringing with it all the enchanting odors of our tropical paradise: diesel oil, decaying vegetation, and cement. I inhaled it deeply and turned my thoughts back to Jaworski.

He was somewhere inside the shell of the building. I didn't know how long I had, and a certain small voice was urging me to hurry. I left the truck and went into the building. As I stepped through the door I heard him. Or rather, I heard a strange whirring, rattling sound that had to be him, or-

I paused. The sound came from off to one side and I whisper-footed over to it. A pipe ran up the wall, an electrical conduit. I placed a hand on the pipe and felt it vibrate, as if something inside was moving.

A small light went on in my brain. Jaworski was pulling out the wire. Copper was very expensive, and there was a thriving black market for copper in any form. It was one more small way to supplement a meager janitorial salary, helping to cover the long, poverty-strewn stretches between young runaways. He could make several hundred dollars for one load of copper.

Now that I knew what he was up to, a vague outline of an idea began to take root in my brain. From the sound, he was above me somewhere. I could easily track him, shadow him until the time was right, and then pounce. But I was practically naked here, completely exposed and unready. I was used to doing these things a certain way. To step outside my own careful boundaries made me extremely uncomfortable.

A small shudder crawled up my spine. Why was I doing this?

The quick answer, of course, was that I wasn't doing it at all. My dear friend in the dark backseat was doing it. I was just along because I had the driver's license. But we had reached an understanding, he and I. We had achieved a careful, balanced existence, a way to live together, through our Harry solution. And now he was rampaging outside Harry's careful, beautiful chalk lines. Why? Anger? Was the invasion of my home really such an outrage that it woke him to strike out in revenge?

He didn't

feel

angry to me-as always he seemed cool, quietly amused, eager for his prey. And I didn't feel angry either. I felt-half drunk, high as a kite, teetering on the knife edge of euphoria, wobbling through a series of inner ripples that felt curiously like I have always thought emotions must feel. And the giddiness of it had driven me to this dangerous, unclean, unplanned place, to do something on the spur of the moment that always before I had planned carefully. And even knowing all this, I badly wanted to do it.

Had

to do it.

Very well then. But I didn't have to do it undressed. I looked around. A large pile of Sheetrock squatted at the far end of the room, bound with shrink-wrap. A moment's work and I had cut myself an apron and a strange transparent mask from the shrink-wrap; nose, mouth, and eyes sliced away so I could breathe, talk, and see. I pulled it tight, feeling it mash my features into something unrecognizable. I twisted the ends behind my head and tied a clumsy knot in the plastic. Perfect anonymity. It might seem silly, but I was used to hunting with a mask. And aside from a neurotic compulsion to make everything

right

, it was simply one less thing to think about. It made me relax a little, so it was a good idea. I took the gloves from the tote bag and slipped them on. I was ready now.

I found Jaworski on the third floor. A pile of electrical wire pooled at his feet. I stood in the shadows of the stairwell and watched as he pulled out wire. I ducked back into the stairwell and opened my tote bag. Using my duct tape, I hung up the pictures I had brought along. Sweet little photos of the runaway girls, in a variety of endearing and very explicit poses. I taped them to the concrete walls where Jaworski would see them as he stepped through the door onto the stairs.

I looked back in at Jaworski. He pulled out another twenty yards of wire. It stuck on something and would pull no more. Jaworski yanked twice, then pulled a pair of heavy cutters from his back pocket and snipped the wire. He picked up the wire lying at his feet and wound it into a tight coil on his forearm. Then he walked toward the stairs-toward me.

I shrank back into the stairwell and waited.

Jaworski wasn't trying to be quiet. He was not expecting any interruption-and he certainly wasn't expecting me. I listened to his footsteps and the small rattle of the wire coil dragging behind him. Closer-

He came through the door and a step past without seeing me. And then he saw the pictures.

“Whooof,” he said, as though he had been hit hard in the stomach. He stared, slack-jawed, unable to move, and then I was behind him with my knife at his throat.

“Don't move and don't make a sound,” we said.

“Hey, lookit-” he said.

I turned my wrist slightly and pushed the knife point into his skin under the chin. He hissed as a distressing, awful little spurt of blood squirted out. So unnecessary. Why can't people ever listen?

“I said, don't make a sound,” we told him, and now he was quiet.

And then the only sound was the ratcheting of the duct tape, Jaworski's breathing, and the quiet chuckle from the Dark Passenger. I taped over his mouth, twisted a length of the janitor's precious copper wire around his wrists, and dragged him over to another stack of shrink-wrapped Sheetrock. In just a few moments I had him trussed up and secured to the makeshift table.

“Let's talk,” we said in the Dark Passenger's gentle, cold voice.

He didn't know if he was allowed to speak, and the duct tape would have made it difficult in any case, so he stayed silent.

“Let's talk about runaways,” we said, ripping the duct tape from his mouth.

“Yaaaooww- Whu-whataya mean?” he said. But he was not very convincing.

“I think you know what I mean,” we told him.

“Nuh-no,” he said.

“Yuh-yes,” we said.

Probably one word too clever. My timing was off, the whole evening was off. But he got brave. He looked up at me in my shiny face. “What are you, a cop or something?” he asked.

“No,” we said, and sliced off his left ear. It was closest. The knife was sharp and for a moment he couldn't believe it was happening to him, permanent and forever no left ear. So I dropped the ear on his chest to let him believe. His eyes got huge and he filled his lungs to scream, but I stuffed a wad of plastic wrap in his mouth just before he did.

“None of that,” we said. “Worse things can happen.” And they would, oh definitely, but he didn't need to know that yet.

“The runaways?” we asked gently, coldly, and waited for just a moment, watching his eyes, to make sure he wouldn't scream, then removed the gag.

“Jesus,” he said hoarsely. “My ear-”

“You have another, just as good,” we said. “Tell us about the girls in those pictures.”

“Us? What do you mean, us? Jesus, that hurts,” he whimpered.

Some people just don't get it. I put the plastic stuff back in his mouth and went to work.

I almost got carried away; easy to do, under the circumstances. My heart was racing like mad and I had to fight hard to keep my hand from shaking. But I went to work, exploring, looking for something that was always just beyond my fingertips. Exciting-and terribly frustrating. The pressure was rising inside me, climbing up into my ears and screaming for release-but no release came. Just the growing pressure, and the sense that something wonderful was just beyond my senses, waiting for me to find it and dive in. But I did not find it, and none of my old standards gave me any joy at all. What to do? In my confusion I opened up a vein and a horrible puddle of blood formed on the plastic wrap alongside the janitor. I stopped for a moment, looking for an answer, finding nothing. I looked away, out the shell of the window. I stared, forgetting to breathe.

The moon was visible over the water. For some reason I could not explain that seemed so right, so

necessary

, that for a moment I just looked out across the water, watching it shimmer, so very perfect. I swayed and bumped against my makeshift table and came back to myself. But the moon… or was it the water?

So close… I was so close to something I could almost smell-but what? A shiver ran through me-and that was right, too, so right it set off a whole chain of shivers until my teeth chattered. But why? What did it mean? Something was there, something

important

, an overwhelming purity and clarity riding the moon and the water just beyond the tip of my filet knife, and I couldn't catch it.

I looked back at the janitor. He made me so angry, the way he was lying there, covered with improvised marks and unnecessary blood. But it was hard to stay angry, with the beautiful Florida moon pounding at me, the tropical breeze blowing, the wonderful night sounds of flexing duct tape and panic breathing. I almost had to laugh. Some people choose to die for some very unusual things, but this horrid little bug, dying for copper wire. And the look on his face: so hurt and confused and desperate. It would have been funny if I hadn't felt so frustrated.

And he really did deserve a better effort from me; after all, it wasn't his fault I was off my usual form. He wasn't even vile enough to be at the top of my TO DO list. He was just a repulsive little slug who killed children for money and kicks, and only four or five of them as far as I knew. I almost felt sorry for him. He truly wasn't ready for the major leagues.

Ah, well. Back to work. I stepped back to Jaworski's side. He was not thrashing as much now, but he was still far too lively for my usual methods. Of course I did not have all my highly professional toys tonight and the going must have been a little rough for Jaworski. But like a real trouper, he had not complained. I felt a surge of affection and slowed down my slapdash approach, spending some quality time on his hands. He responded with real enthusiasm and I drifted away, lost in happy research.

Eventually it was his muffled screams and wild thrashing that called me back to myself. And I remembered I had not even made sure of his guilt. I waited for him to calm down, then removed the plastic from his mouth.

“The runaways?” we asked.

“Oh Jesus. Oh God. Oh Jesus,” he said weakly.

“I don't think so,” we said. “I think we may have left them behind.”

“Please,” he said. “Oh, please…”

“Tell me about the runaways,” we said.

“Okay,” he breathed.

“You took those girls.”

“Yes…”

“How many?”

He just breathed for a moment. His eyes were closed and I thought I might have lost him a little early. He finally opened his eyes and looked at me. “Five,” he said at last. “Five little beauties. I'm not sorry.”

“Of course you're not,” we said. I placed a hand on his arm. It was a beautiful moment. “And now, I'm not sorry either.”

I stuffed the plastic into his mouth and went back to work. But I had really only just started to recapture my rhythm when I heard the guard arrive downstairs.

CHAPTER 15

I

T WAS THE STATIC OF HIS RADIO THAT GAVE HIM away. I was deeply involved in something I'd never tried before when I heard it. I was working on the torso with the knife point and could feel the first real tinglings of response down my spine and through my legs and I didn't want to stop. But a radio- This was worse news than a mere guard arriving. If he called for backup or to have the road blocked, it was just possible that I might find a few of the things I had been doing a little difficult to explain.

I looked down at Jaworski. He was nearly done now, and yet I was not happy with how things had gone. Far too much mess, and I had not really found what I was looking for. There had been a few moments where I felt on the brink of some wonderful thing, some amazing revelation to do with-what? the water flowing by outside the window?-but it had not happened, whatever it had been. Now I was left with an unfinished, unclean, untidy, unsatisfying child rapist, and a security guard on his way to join us.

I hate to rush the conclusion. It's such an important moment, and a real relief for both of us, the Dark Passenger and I. But what choice did I have? For a long moment-far too long, really, and I'm quite ashamed-I thought about killing the guard and going on. It would be easy, and I could continue to explore with a fresh start-

But no. Of course not. It wouldn't do. The guard was innocent, as innocent as anyone can be and still live in Miami. He'd probably done nothing worse than shoot at other drivers on the Palmetto Expressway a few times. Practically snow-white. No, I had to make a hasty retreat, and that was all there was to it. And if I had to leave the janitor not quite finished and me not quite satisfied-well, better luck next time.

I stared down at the grubby little insect and felt myself fill with loathing. The thing was drooling snot and blood all together, the ugly wet slop burbling across his face. A trickle of awful red came from his mouth. In a quick fit of pique, I slashed across Jaworski's throat. I immediately regretted my rashness. A fountain of horrible blood came out and the sight made it all seem even more regrettable, a messy mistake. Feeling unclean and unsatisfied, I sprinted for the stairwell. A cold and petulant grumbling from my Dark Passenger followed me.

I turned out onto the second floor and slid sideways over to a glassless window. Below me I could see the guard's golf cart parked, pointing in the direction of Old Cutler-meaning, I hoped, that he had come from the other direction and had not seen my car. Standing beside the cart, a fat olive-skinned young man with black hair and a wispy black mustache was looking up at the building-luckily, looking at the other end at the moment.

What had he heard? Was he merely on his regular route? I had to hope so. If he had actually heard something- If he stood outside and called for help, I was probably going to be caught. And as clever and glib-tongued as I was, I did not think I was good enough to talk my way out of this.

The young guard touched a thumb to his mustache and stroked it as if to encourage fuller growth. He frowned, swept his gaze along the front of the building. I ducked back. When I peeked out again a moment later I could just see the top of his head. He was coming in.

I waited until I heard his feet in the stairwell. Then I was out the window, halfway between the first and second floors, hanging by my fingertips from the coarse cement of the windowsill, then dropping. I hit badly, one ankle twisting on a rock, one knuckle skinned. But in my very best rapid limp I hurried into the shadows and scurried for my car.

My heart was pounding when I finally slid into the driver's seat. I looked back and saw no sign of the guard. I started the engine and, with the lights still off, I drove as quickly and quietly as I could out onto Old Cutler Road, heading toward South Miami and taking the long way home along Dixie Highway. My pulse still pounded in my ears. What a stupid risk to take. I had never before done anything so impulsive, never before done anything at all without careful planning. That was the Harry Way: be careful, be safe, be prepared. The Dark Scouts.

And instead, this. I could have been caught. I could have been seen. Stupid, stupid-if I had not heard the young security guard in time I might have had to kill him. Kill an innocent man with violence; I was quite sure Harry would disapprove. And it was so messy and unpleasant, too.

Of course I was still not safe-the guard might easily have written down my license number if he had passed my car in his little golf cart. I had taken brainless, terrible risks, gone against all my careful procedures, gambled my entire carefully built life-and for what? A thrill kill? Shame on me. And deep in the shaded corner of my mind the echo came,

Oh yes, shame

, and the familiar chuckle.

I took a deep breath and looked at my hand on the steering wheel. But it

had

been thrilling, hadn't it? It had been wildly exciting, full of life and new sensations and profound frustration. It had been something entirely new and interesting. And the odd sensation that it was all going somewhere, an important place that was new and yet familiar-I would really have to explore that a little better next time.

Not that there was going to be a next time, of course. I would certainly never again do anything so foolish and impulsive. Never. But to have done it once-kind of fun.

Never mind. I would go home and take an exceptionally long shower, and by the time I was done-

Time

. It came into my mind unwanted and unasked. I had agreed to meet with Rita at-right about now, according to my dashboard clock. And for what dark purpose? I couldn't know what went on in the human female mind. Why did I even have to think about “for what” at a time like this, when all my nerve endings were standing up and yodeling with frustration? I did not care what Rita wanted to yell at me about. It would not really bother me, whatever sharp observations she had to make on my character defects, but it was irritating to be forced to spend time listening when I had other, far more important things to think about. Most particularly, I wanted to wonder what I should have done that I had not done with dear departed Jaworski. Up to the cruelly interrupted and unfinished climax so many new things had happened that needed my very best mental efforts; I needed to reflect, to consider, and to understand where it had all been leading me. And how did it relate to that other artist out there, shadowing me and challenging me with his work?

With all this to think about, why did I need Rita right now?

But of course I would go. And of course, it would actually serve some humble purpose if I should need an alibi for my adventure with the little janitor. “Why, Detective, how could you possibly think that I-? Besides, I was having a fight with my girlfriend at the time. Ah-ex-girlfriend, actually.” Because there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that Rita merely wanted to-what was the word we were all using lately? Vent? Yes, Rita wanted me to come over so she could vent on me. I had certain major character flaws that she needed to point out with an accompanying burst of emotion, and my presence was necessary.

Since this was the case, I took an extra minute to clean up. I circled back toward Coconut Grove and parked on the far side of the bridge over the waterway. A good deep channel ran underneath. I rolled a couple of large coral rocks out of the trees at the edge of the waterway, stuffed them into my tote bag, which was loaded with the plastic, gloves, and knife, and flung the thing into the center of the channel.

I stopped once more, at a small, dark park almost to Rita's house, and washed off carefully. I had to be neat and presentable; getting yelled at by a furious woman should be treated as a semiformal occasion.

But imagine my surprise when I rang her doorbell a few minutes later. She did not fling wide the door and begin to hurl furniture and abuse at me. In fact, she opened the door very slowly and carefully, half hiding behind it, as if badly frightened of what might be waiting for her on the other side. And considering that it was me waiting, this showed rare common sense.

“Dexter?” she said, softly, shyly, sounding like she wasn't sure whether she wanted me to answer yes or no. “I… didn't think you were coming.”

“And yet here I am,” I said helpfully.

She didn't answer for a much longer time than seemed right. Finally, she nudged the door slightly more open and said, “Would you… come in? Please?”

And if her uncertain, limping tone of voice, unlike any I had ever heard her use before, was a surprise, imagine how astonished I was by her costume. I believe the thing was called a peignoir; or possibly it was a negligee, since it certainly was negligible as far as the amount of fabric used in its construction was concerned. Whatever the correct name, she was certainly wearing it. And as bizarre as the idea was, I believe the costume was aimed at me.

“Please?” she repeated.

It was all a little much. I mean, really, what was I supposed to do here? I was bubbling over with unsatisfied experimentation on the janitor; there were still unhappy murmurings filtering through from the backseat. And a quick check of the situation at large revealed that I was being whipsawed between dear Deb and the dark artist, and now I was expected to do some sort of human thing here, like-well, what, after all? She surely couldn't want-I mean, wasn't she MAD at me? What was going on here? And why was it going on with me?

“I sent the kids next door,” Rita said. She bumped the door with her hip.

I went in.

I can think of a great many ways to describe what happened next, but none of them seem adequate. She went to the couch. I followed. She sat down. So did I. She looked uncomfortable and squeezed her left hand with her right. She seemed to be waiting for something, and since I was not quite sure what, I found myself thinking about my unfinished work with Jaworski. If only I'd had a little more time! The things I might have done!

And as I thought of some of those things, I became aware that Rita had quietly started to cry. I stared at her for a moment, trying to suppress the images of a flayed and bloodless janitor. For the life of me I could not understand why she was crying, but since I had practiced long and hard at imitating human beings, I knew that I was supposed to comfort her. I leaned toward her and put an arm across her shoulder. “Rita,” I said. “There, there.” Not really a line worthy of me, but it was well-thought-of by many experts. And it was effective. Rita lunged forward and leaned her face into my chest. I tightened my arm around her, which brought my hand back into view. Less than an hour ago that same hand had been holding a filet knife over the little janitor. The thought made me dizzy.

And really, I don't know how it happened, but it did. One moment I was patting her and saying, “There, there,” and staring at the cords in my hand, feeling the sense memory pulse through the fingers, the surge of power and brightness as the knife explored Jaworski's abdomen. And the next moment-

I believe Rita looked up at me. I am also reasonably certain that I looked back. And yet somehow it was not Rita I saw but a neat stack of cool and bloodless limbs. And it was not Rita's hands I felt on my belt buckle, but the rising unsatisfied chorus from the Dark Passenger. And some little time later-

Well. It's still somewhat unthinkable. I mean, right there on the couch.

How on earth did

that

happen?

By the time I climbed into my little bed I was thoroughly whipped. I don't ordinarily require a great deal of sleep, but I felt as though tonight I might need a nice solid thirty-six hours. The ups and downs of the evening, the strain of so much new experience-it had all been draining. More draining for Jaworski, of course, the nasty wet little thing, but I had used all my adrenaline for the month in this one impetuous evening. I could not even begin to think what any of it meant, from the strange impulse to fly out into the night so madly and rashly, all the way through to the unthinkable things that had happened with Rita. I had left her asleep and apparently much happier. But poor dark deranged Dexter was without a clue once again, and when my head hit the pillow I fell asleep almost instantly.

And there I was out over the city like a boneless bird, flowing and swift and the cold air moved around me and drew me on, pulled me down to where the moonlight rippled on the water and I slash into the tight cold killing room where the little janitor looks up at me and laughs, spread-eagled under the knife and laughing, and the effort of it contorts his face, changes it, and now he is not Jaworski anymore but a woman and the man holding the knife looks up to where I float above the whirling red viscera and as the face comes up I can hear Harry outside the door and I turn just before I can see who it is on the table but-

I woke up. The pain in my head would split a cantaloupe. I felt like I had hardly closed my eyes, but the bedside clock said it was 5:14.

Another dream. Another long-distance call on my phantom party line. No wonder I had steadfastly refused to have dreams for most of my life. So stupid; such pointless, obvious symbols. Totally uncontrollable anxiety soup, hateful, blatant nonsense.

And now I couldn't get back to sleep, thinking of the infantile images. If I had to dream, why couldn't it be more like me, interesting and different?

I sat up and rubbed my throbbing temples. Terrible, tedious unconsciousness dripped away like a draining sinus and I sat on the edge of the bed in bleary befuddlement. What was happening to me? And why couldn't it happen to someone else?

This dream had felt different and I wasn't sure what that difference was or what it meant. The last time I had been absolutely certain that another murder was about to happen, and even knew where. But this time-

I sighed and padded into the kitchen for a drink of water. Barbie's head went

thack

thack

as I opened the refrigerator. I stood and watched, sipping a large glass of cold water. The bright blue eyes stared back at me, unblinking.

Why had I had a dream? Was it just the strain of last evening's adventures playing back from my battered subconscious? I had never felt strain before; actually, it had always been a

release

of strain. Of course, I had never come so close to disaster before, either. But why dream about it? Some of the images were too painfully obvious: Jaworski and Harry and the unseen face of the man with the knife. Really now. Why bother me with stuff from freshman psychology?

Why bother me with a dream at all? I didn't need it. I needed rest-and instead, here I was in the kitchen playing with a Barbie doll. I flipped the head again:

thack

thack

. For that matter, what was Barbie all about? And how was I going to figure this out in time to rescue Deborah's career? How could I get around LaGuerta when the poor thing was so taken with me? And by all that was holy, if anything actually was, why had Rita needed to do THAT to me?

It seemed suddenly like a twisted soap opera, and it was far too much. I found some aspirin and leaned against the kitchen counter as I ate three of them. I didn't much care for the taste. I had never liked medicine of any kind, except in a utilitarian way.

Especially since Harry had died.

CHAPTER 16

H

ARRY DID NOT DIE QUICKLY AND HE DID NOT DIE easily. He took his own terrible long time, the first and last selfish thing he had ever done in his life. Harry died for a year and a half, in little stages, slipping for a few weeks, fighting back to almost full strength again, keeping us all dizzy with trying to guess. Would he go now, this time, or had he beaten it altogether? We never knew, but because it was Harry it seemed foolish for us to give up. Harry would do what was right, no matter how hard, but what did that mean in dying? Was it right to fight and hang on and make the rest of us suffer through an endless death, when death was coming no matter what Harry did? Or was it right to slip away gracefully and without fuss?

At nineteen, I certainly didn't know the answer, although I already knew more about death than most of the other pimple-ridden puddingheads in my sophomore class at the University of Miami.

And one fine autumn afternoon after a chemistry class, as I walked across the campus toward the student union, Deborah appeared beside me. “Deborah,” I called to her, sounding very collegiate, I thought, “come have a Coke.” Harry had told me to hang out at the union and have Cokes. He'd said it would help me pass for human, and learn how other humans behaved. And of course, he was right. In spite of the damage to my teeth, I was learning a great deal about the unpleasant species.

Deborah, at seventeen, already far too serious, shook her head. “It's Dad,” she said. And very shortly we were driving across town to the hospice where they had taken Harry. Hospice was not good news. That meant the doctors were saying that Harry was ready to die, and suggesting that he cooperate.

Harry did not look good when we got there. He looked so green and still against the sheets that I thought we were too late. He was spindly and gaunt from his long fight, looking for all the world as though something inside him was eating its way out. The respirator beside him hissed, a Darth Vader sound from a living grave. Harry was alive, strictly speaking. “Dad,” Deborah said, taking his hand. “I brought Dexter.”

Harry opened his eyes and his head rolled toward us, almost as if some invisible hand had pushed it from the far side of the pillow. But they were not Harry's eyes. They were murky blue pits, dull and empty, uninhabited. Harry's body might be alive, but he was not home.

“It isn't good,” the nurse told us. “We're just trying to make him comfortable now.” And she busied herself with a large hypodermic needle from a tray, filling it and holding it up to squirt out the air bubble.

“Wait…” It was so faint I thought at first it might be the respirator. I looked around the room and my eyes finally fell on what was left of Harry. Behind the dull emptiness of his eyes a small spark was shining. “Wait…,” he said again, nodding toward the nurse.

She either didn't hear him or had decided to ignore him. She stepped to his side and gently lifted his stick arm. She began to swab it with a cotton ball.

“No…,” Harry gasped gently, almost inaudibly.

I looked at Deborah. She seemed to be standing at attention in a perfect posture of formal uncertainty. I looked back at Harry. His eyes locked onto mine.

“No…,” he said, and there was something very close to horror in his eyes now. “No… shot…”

I stepped forward and put a restraining hand on the nurse, just before she plunged the needle into Harry's vein. “Wait,” I said. She looked up at me, and for the tiniest fraction of a second there was something in her eyes. I almost fell backward in surprise. It was a cold rage, an inhuman, lizard-brain sense of I-Want, a belief that the world was her very own game preserve. Just that one flash, but I was sure. She wanted to ram the needle into my eye for interrupting her. She wanted to shove it into my chest and twist until my ribs popped and my heart burst through into her hands and she could squeeze, twist, rip my life out of me. This was a monster, a hunter, a killer. This was a predator, a soulless and evil thing.

Just like me.

But her granola smile returned very quickly. “What is it, honey?” she said, ever so sweetly, so perfectly Last Nurse.

My tongue felt much too large for my mouth and it seemed like it took me several minutes to answer, but I finally managed to say, “He doesn't want the shot.”

She smiled again, a beautiful thing that sat on her face like the blessing of an all-wise god. “Your dad is very sick,” she said. “He's in a lot of pain.” She held the needle up and a melodramatic shaft of light from the window hit it. The needle sparkled like her very own Holy Grail. “He needs a shot,” she said.

“He doesn't want it,” I said.

“He's in pain,” she said.

Harry said something I could not hear. My eyes were locked on the nurse, and hers on mine, two monsters standing over the same meat. Without looking away from her I leaned down next to him.

“I-WANT… pain…,” Harry said.

It jerked my gaze down to him. Behind the emerging skeleton, nestled snugly under the crew cut that seemed suddenly too big for his head, Harry had returned and was fighting his way up through the fog. He nodded at me, reached very slowly for my hand and squeezed.

I looked back at Last Nurse. “He wants the pain,” I told her, and somewhere in her small frown, the petulant shake of her head, I heard the roar of a savage beast watching its prey scuttle down a hole.

“I'll have to tell the doctor,” she said.

“All right,” I told her. “We'll wait here.”

I watched her sail out into the hallway like some large and deadly bird. I felt a pressure on my hand. Harry watched me watching Last Nurse.

“You… can tell…,” Harry said.

“About the nurse?” I asked him. He closed his eyes and nodded lightly, just once. “Yes,” I said. “I can tell.”

“Like… you…,” Harry said.

“What?” Deborah demanded. “What are you talking about? Daddy, are you all right? What does that mean, like you?”

“She likes me,” I said. “He thinks the nurse may have a crush on me, Deb,” I told her, and turned back to Harry.

“Oh, right,” Deborah muttered, but I was already concentrating on Harry.

“What has she done?” I asked him.

He tried to shake his head and managed only a slight wobble. He winced. It was clear to me that the pain was coming back, just liked he'd wanted. “Too much,” he said. “She… gives too much-” he gasped now, and closed his eyes.

I must have been rather stupid that day, because I didn't get what he meant right away. “Too much what?” I said.

Harry opened one pain-blearied eye. “Morphine,” he whispered.

I felt like a great shaft of light had hit me. “Overdose,” I said. “She kills by overdose. And in a place like this, where it's actually almost her job, nobody would question it-why, that's-”

Harry squeezed my hand again and I stopped babbling. “Don't let her,” he said in a hoarse voice with surprising strength. “Don't let her-dope me again.”

“Please,” Deborah said in a voice that hung on the ragged edge, “what are you guys talking about?” I looked at Harry, but Harry closed his eyes as a sudden stab of pain tore at him.

“He thinks, um…,” I started and then trailed off. Deborah had no idea what I was, of course, and Harry had told me quite firmly to keep her in the dark. So how I could tell her about this without revealing anything was something of a problem. “He thinks the nurse is giving him too much morphine,” I finally said. “On purpose.”

“That's crazy,” Deb said. “She's a nurse.”

Harry looked at her but didn't say anything. And to be truthful, I couldn't think of anything to say to Deb's incredible naïveté either.

“What should I do?” I asked Harry.

Harry looked at me for a very long time. At first I thought his mind might have wandered away with the pain, but as I looked back at him I saw that Harry was very much present. His jaw was set so hard that I thought the bones might snap through his tender pale skin and his eyes were as clear and sharp as I had ever seen them, as much as when he had first given me his Harry solution to getting me squared away. “Stop her,” he said at last.

A very large thrill ran through me. Stop her? Was it possible? Could he mean-

stop

her? Until now Harry had helped me control my Dark Passenger, feeding him stray pets, hunting deer; one glorious time I had gone with him to catch a feral monkey that had been terrorizing a South Miami neighborhood. It had been so close, so almost human-but still not right, of course. And we had gone through all the theoretical steps of stalking, disposing of evidence, and so on. Harry knew that someday It would happen and he wanted me to be ready to do It right. He had always held me back from actually Doing It. But now-stop her? Could he mean it?

“I'll go talk to the doctor,” Deborah said. “He'll tell her to adjust your medicine.”

I opened my mouth to speak, but Harry squeezed my hand and nodded once, painfully. “Go,” he said, and Deborah looked at him for a moment before she turned away and went to find the doctor. When she was gone the room filled with a wild silence. I could think of nothing but what Harry had said: “Stop her.” And I couldn't think of any other way to interpret it, except that he was finally turning me loose, giving me permission to do the Real Thing at last. But I didn't dare ask him if that's what he had said for fear he would tell me he meant something else. And so I just stood there for the longest time, staring out the small window into a garden outside, where a splatter of red flowers surrounded a fountain. Time passed. My mouth got dry. “Dexter-” Harry said at last.

I didn't answer. Nothing I could think of seemed adequate. “It's like this,” Harry said, slowly and painfully, and my eyes jerked down to his. He gave me a strained half smile when he saw that I was with him at last. “I'll be gone soon,” Harry said. “I can't stop you from… being who you are.”

“Being

what

I am, Dad,” I said.

He waved it away with a feeble, brittle hand. “Sooner or later… you will-

need

-to do it to a person,” he said, and I felt my blood sing at the thought. “Somebody who…

needs

it…”

“Like the nurse,” I said with a thick tongue.

“Yes,” he says, closing his eyes for a long moment, and when he went on his voice had grown hazy with the pain. “She needs it, Dexter. That's-” He took a ragged breath. I could hear his tongue clacking as if his mouth was overdry. “She's deliberately-overdosing patients… killing them… killing them… on purpose… She's a killer, Dexter… A killer…”

I cleared my throat. I felt a little clumsy and light-headed, but after all this was a very important moment in a young man's life. “Do you want-” I said and stopped as my voice broke. “Is it all right if I… stop her, Dad?”

“Yes,” said Harry. “Stop her.”

For some reason I felt like I had to be absolutely certain. “You mean, you know. Like I've been doing? With, you know, the monkey?”

Harry's eyes were closed and he was clearly floating away on a rising tide of pain. He took a soft and uneven breath. “Stop… the nurse,” he said. “Like… the monkey…” His head arched back slightly, and he began to breathe faster but still very roughly.

Well.

There it was.

“Stop the nurse like the monkey.” It had a certain wild ring to it. But in my madly buzzing brain, everything was music. Harry was turning me loose. I had permission. We had talked about one day doing this, but he had held me back. Until now.

Now.

“We talked… about this,” Harry said, eyes still closed. “You know what to do…”

“I talked to the doctor,” Deborah said, hurrying into the room. “He'll come down and adjust the meds on the chart.”

“Good,” I said, feeling something rise up in me, from the base of my spine and out over the top of my head, an electric surge that jolted through me and covered me like a dark hood. “I'll go talk to the nurse.”

Deborah looked startled, perhaps at my tone. “Dexter-” she said.

I paused, fighting to control the savage glee I felt towering up inside me. “I don't want any misunderstanding,” I said. My voice sounded strange even to me. I pushed past Deborah before she could register my expression.

And in the hallway of that hospice, threading my way between stacks of clean, crisp, white linen, I felt the Dark Passenger become the new driver for the first time. Dexter became understated, almost invisible, the light-colored stripes on a sharp and transparent tiger. I blended in, almost impossible to see, but I was there and I was stalking, circling in the wind to find my prey. In that tremendous flash of freedom, on my way to do the Thing for the first time, sanctioned by almighty Harry, I receded, faded back into the scenery of my own dark self, while the other me crouched and growled. I would do It at last, do what I had been created to do.

And I did.

CHAPTER 17

A

ND I HAD. SO LONG AGO, YET THE MEMORY STILL pulsed in me. Of course, I still had that first dry drop of blood on its slide. It was my first, and I could call up that memory any time by taking out my little slide and looking at it. I did, every so often. It had been a very special day for Dexter. Last Nurse had been First Playmate, and she had opened up so many wonderful doors for me. I had learned so much, found out so many new things.

But why was I remembering Last Nurse now? Why did this whole series of events seem to be whipping me back through time? I could not afford a fond remembrance of my first pair of long pants. I needed to explode into action, make large decisions, and begin important deeds. Instead of strolling sappily down memory lane, wallowing in sweet memories of my first blood slide.

Which, now that I thought of it, I had not collected from Jaworski. It was the kind of tiny, absurdly unimportant detail that turned strong men of action into fidgeting, whimpering neurotics. I

needed

that slide. Jaworski's death was useless without it. The whole idiotic episode was now worse than a stupid and impulsive foolishness; it was incomplete. I had no slide.

I shook my head, trying spastically to rattle two gray cells into the same synapse. I half wanted to take my boat for an early-morning spin. Perhaps the salt air would clear the stupidity from my skull. Or I could head south to Turkey Point and hope that the radiation might mutate me back into a rational creature. But instead, I made coffee. No slide, indeed. It cheapened the whole experience. Without the slide, I might as well have stayed home. Or almost, at any rate. There had been other rewards. I smiled fondly, recalling the mix of moonlight and muffled screams. Oh, what a madcap little monster I had been. An episode unlike any of my others. It was good to break out of dull routine from time to time. And there was Rita, of course, but I had no idea what to think about that, so I didn't. Instead I thought of the cool breeze flowing across the squirming little man who had liked to hurt children. It had almost been a happy time. But of course, in ten years the memory would fade, and without that slide I could not bring it back. I needed my souvenir. Well, we would see.

While the coffee brewed, I checked for the newspaper, more out of hope than expectation. It was rare for the paper to arrive before six-thirty, and on Sundays it often came after eight. It was another clear example of the disintegration of society that had so worried Harry. Really, now: If you can't get me my newspaper on time, how can you expect me to refrain from killing people?

No paper; no matter. Press coverage of my adventures had never been terribly interesting to me. And Harry had warned me about the idiocy of keeping any kind of scrapbook. He didn't need to; I rarely even glanced at the reviews of my performances. This time was a little different, of course, since I had been so impetuous and was mildly worried that I had not covered my tracks properly. I was just a bit curious to see what might be said about my accidental party. So I sat with my coffee for about forty-five minutes until I heard the paper thump against the door. I brought it in and flipped it open.

Whatever else one can say about journalists-and there is a very great deal, almost an encyclopedia-they are very rarely troubled by memory. The same paper that had so recently trumpeted COPS CORRAL KILLER now screamed ICE MAN'S STORY MELTS! It was a long and lovely piece, very dramatically written, detailing the discovery of a badly abused body at a construction site just off Old Cutler Road. “A Metro Miami police spokesperson”-meaning Detective LaGuerta, I was sure-said that it was much too soon to say anything with certainty, but this was probably a copycat killing. The paper had drawn its own conclusions-another thing they are seldom shy about-and was now wondering aloud if the distinguished gentleman in captivity, Mr. Daryll Earl McHale, was actually, in fact, the killer. Or was the killer still at large, as evidenced by this latest outrage upon public morality? Because, the paper carefully pointed out, how could we believe that two such killers could possibly be on the loose at the same time? It was very neatly reasoned, and it occurred to me that if they had spent as much energy and mental power trying to solve the murders, the whole thing would be over by now.

But it was all very interesting reading, of course. And it certainly made me speculate. Good heavens, was it really possible that this mad animal was still running loose? Was anyone safe?

The telephone rang. I glanced at my wall clock; it was 6:45. It could only be Deborah.

“I'm reading it now,” I said into the phone.

“You said bigger,” Deborah told me. “Splashier.”

“And this isn't?” I asked with great innocence.

“It's not even a hooker,” she said. “Some part-time janitor from Ponce Junior High, chopped up at a construction site on Old Cutler. What the hell, Dexter?”

“You did know I'm not perfect, didn't you, Deborah?”

“It doesn't even fit the pattern-where's the cold you said would be there? What happened to the small space?”

“It's Miami, Deb, people will steal anything.”

“It's not even a copycat,” she said. “It isn't anything like the others. Even LaGuerta got that right. She's already said so in print. Damn it all, Dexter. My butt is way out in the wind here, and this is just some random slasher, or a drug thing.”

“It hardly seems fair to blame me for all that.”

“Goddamn it, Dex,” she said, and hung up.

The early-morning TV shows spent a full ninety seconds on the shocking discovery of the shattered body. Channel 7 had the best adjectives. But nobody knew any more than the paper. They radiated outrage and a grim sense of disaster that even carried over into the weather forecast, but I'm sure a large part of it was caused by the lack of pictures.

Another beautiful Miami day. Mutilated corpses with a chance of afternoon showers. I got dressed and went to work.

I admit I had a minor ulterior motive in heading for the office so early, and I beefed it up by stopping for pastries. I bought two crullers, an apple fritter, and a cinnamon roll the size of my spare tire. I ate the fritter and one cruller as I cheerfully threaded through the lethal traffic. I don't know how I get away with eating so many doughnuts. I don't gain weight or get pimples, and although that may seem unfair, I can't find it in my heart to complain. I came out reasonably well in the genetic crapshoot: high metabolism, good size and strength, all of which helped me in my hobby. And I have been told that I am not awful to look at, which I believe is meant to be a compliment.

I also didn't need a great deal of sleep, which was nice this morning. I had hoped to arrive early enough to beat Vince Masuoka to work, and it seemed that I had. His office was dark when I got there, clutching my white paper bag for camouflage-but my visit had nothing whatever to do with doughnuts. I scanned his work area quickly, looking for the telltale evidence box labeled JAWORSKI and yesterday's date.

I found it and quickly lifted out a few tissue samples. There might be enough. I pulled on a pair of latex gloves and in a moment had pressed the samples to my clean glass slide. I do realize how stupid it was to take yet another risk, but I had to have my slide.

I had just tucked it away in a ziplock baggie when I heard him come in behind me. I quickly put things back in place and whirled to face the door, as Vince came through and saw me.

“My God,” I said. “You move so silently. So you

have

had ninja training.”

“I have two older brothers,” Vince said. “It's the same thing.”

I held up the white paper bag and bowed. “Master, I bring a gift.”

He looked at the bag curiously. “May Buddha bless you, grasshopper. What is it?”

I tossed him the bag. It hit him in the chest and slid to the floor. “So much for ninja training,” I said.

“My finely tuned body needs coffee to function,” Vince told me, bending to retrieve the bag. “What's in here? That hurt.” He reached into the bag, frowning. “It better not be body parts.” He pulled out the huge cinnamon roll and eyed it. “Ay, caramba. My village will not starve this year. We are very grateful, grasshopper.” He bowed, holding up the pastry. “A debt repaid is a blessing on us all, my child.”

“In that case,” I said, “do you have the case file on the one they found last night off Old Cutler?”

Vince took a big bite of cinnamon roll. His lips gleamed with frosting as he slowly chewed. “Mmmpp,” he said, and swallowed. “Are we feeling left out?”

“If we means Deborah, yes we are,” I said. “I told her I'd take a look at the file for her.”

“Wulf,” he said, mouth full of pastry, “merf pluddy uh bud is nime.”

“Forgive me, master,” I said. “Your language is strange to me.”

He chewed and swallowed. “I said, at least there's plenty of blood this time. But you're still a wallflower. Bradley got the call for this one.”

“Can I see the file?”

He took a bite. “Ee waf awife-”

“Very true, I'm sure. And in English?”

Vince swallowed. “I said, he was still alive when his leg came off.”

“Human beings are so resilient, aren't they?”

Vince stuck the whole pastry in his mouth and picked up the file, holding it out to me and taking a large bite of the roll at the same time. I grabbed the folder.

“I've got to go,” I said. “Before you try to talk again.”

He pulled the roll from his mouth. “Too late,” he said.

I walked slowly back to my little cubbyhole, glancing at the contents of the folder. Gervasio César Martez had discovered the body. His statement was on top of the folder. He was a security guard, employed by Sago Security Systems. He had worked for them for fourteen months and had no criminal record. Martez had found the body at approximately 10:17 PM and immediately made a quick search of the area before calling police. He wanted to catch the

pendejo

who had done this thing because no one should do such things and they had done it when he, Gervasio, was on the job. That was like they had done it to him, you know? So he would catch the monster himself. But this had not been possible. There was no sign of the perpetrator, not anywhere, and so he had called the police.

The poor man had taken it personally. I shared his outrage. Such brutality should not be allowed. Of course, I was also very grateful that his sense of honor had given me time to get away. And here I had always thought morality was useless.

I turned the corner into my dark little room and walked right into Detective LaGuerta. “Hah,” she said. “You don't see so good.” But she didn't move.

“I'm not a morning person,” I told her. “My biorhythms are all off until noon.”

She looked up at me from an inch away. “They look okay to me,” she said.

I slid around her to my desk. “Can I make some small contribution to the full majesty of the law this morning?” I asked her.

She stared at me. “You have a message,” she said. “On your machine.”

I looked over at my answering machine. Sure enough, the light was blinking. The woman really was a detective.

“It's some girl,” LaGuerta said. “She sounds kind of sleepy and happy. You got a girlfriend, Dexter?” There was a strange hint of challenge in her voice.

“You know how it is,” I said. “Women today are so forward, and when you are as handsome as I am they absolutely fling themselves at your head.” Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words; as I said it I couldn't help thinking of the woman's head flung at me not so long ago.

“Watch out,” LaGuerta said. “Sooner or later one of them will stick.” I had no idea what she thought that meant, but it was a very unsettling image.

“I'm sure you're right,” I said. “Until then, carpe diem.”

“What?”

“It's Latin,” I said. “It means, complain in daylight.”

“What have you got about this thing last night?” she said suddenly.

I held up the case file. “I was just looking at it,” I said.

“It's not the same,” she said, frowning. “No matter what those asshole reporters say. McHale is guilty. He confessed. This one is not the same.”

“I guess it seems like too much of a coincidence,” I said. “Two brutal killers at the same time.”

LaGuerta shrugged. “It's Miami, what do they think? Here is where these guys come on vacation. There's lots of bad guys out there. I can't catch them all.”

To be truthful, she couldn't catch any of them unless they hurled themselves off a building and into the front seat of her car, but this didn't seem like a good time to bring that up. LaGuerta stepped closer to me and flicked the folder with a dark red fingernail. “I need you to find something here, Dexter. To show it's not the same.”

A light dawned. She was getting unpleasant pressure, probably from Captain Matthews, a man who believed what he read in the papers as long as they spelled his name right. And she needed some ammunition to fight back. “Of course it's not the same,” I said. “But why come to me?”

She stared at me for a moment through half-closed eyes, a curious effect. I think I had seen the same stare in some of the movies Rita had dragged me to see, but why on earth Detective LaGuerta had turned the look on me I couldn't say. “I let you in the seventy-two-hour briefing,” she said. “Even though Doakes wants you dead, I let you stay.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Because you have a feeling for these things sometimes. The serial ones. That's what they all say. Dexter has a feeling sometimes.”

“Oh, really,” I said, “just a lucky guess once or twice.”

“And I need somebody in the lab who can find something.”

“Then why not ask Vince?”

“He's not so cute,” she said. “You find something.”

She was still uncomfortably close, so close I could smell her shampoo. “I'll find something,” I said.

She nodded at the answering machine. “You gonna call her back? You don't have time for chasing pussy.”

She still hadn't backed up, and it took me a moment to realize she was talking about the message on my machine. I gave her my very best political smile. “I think it's chasing me, Detective.”

“Hah. You got that right.” She gave me a long look, then turned and walked away.

I don't know why, but I watched her go. I really couldn't think of anything else to do. Just before she passed out of sight around the corner, she smoothed her skirt across her hips and turned to look at me. Then she was gone, off into the vague mysteries of Homicidal Politics.

And me? Poor dear dazed Dexter? What else could I do? I sank into my office chair and pushed the play button on my answering machine. “Hi, Dexter. It's me.” Of course it was. And as odd as it was, the slow, slightly raspy voice sounded like “me” was Rita. “Mm… I was thinking about last night. Call me, mister.” As LaGuerta had observed, she sounded kind of tired and happy. Apparently I had a real girlfriend now.

Where would the madness end?

CHAPTER 18

F

OR A FEW MOMENTS I JUST SAT AND THOUGHT about life's cruel ironies. After so many years of solitary self-reliance, I was suddenly pursued from all directions by hungry women. Deb, Rita, LaGuerta-they were all apparently unable to exist without me. Yet the one person I wanted to spend some quality time with was being coy, leaving Barbie dolls in my freezer. Was any of this fair?

I put my hand in my pocket and felt the small glass slide, snug and secure in its ziplock. For a moment it made me feel a little better. At least I was doing something. And life's only obligation, after all, was to be interesting, which it certainly was at the moment. “Interesting” did not begin to describe it. I would trade a year off my life to find out more about this elusive will-o'-the-wisp who was teasing me so mercilessly with such elegant work. In fact, I had come far too close to trading more than a year with my little Jaworski interlude.

Yes, things were certainly interesting. And were they really saying in the department that I had a feeling for serial homicide? That was very troubling. It meant my careful disguise might be close to unraveling. I had been too good too many times. It could become a problem. But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn't sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation.

Ah, well. I opened the case file on Jaworski, the poor man. After an hour of study, I came to a couple of conclusions. First, and most important, I was going to get away with it, in spite of the unforgivable sloppy impulsiveness of the thing. And second-there might be a way for Deb to cash in on this. If she could prove this was the work of our original artist while LaGuerta committed herself to the copycat theory, Deb could suddenly turn from somebody they didn't trust to get their coffee into flavor of the month. Of course, it was not actually the work of the same guy, but that seemed like a very picky objection at this point. And since I knew without any possibility of doubt that there were going to be more bodies found very soon, it wasn't worth worrying about.

And naturally, at the same time, I had to provide the annoying Detective LaGuerta with enough rope to hang herself. Which might also, it occurred to me, come in handy on a more personal level. Pushed into a corner and made to look like an idiot, LaGuerta would naturally try to pin the blame on the nitwit lab tech who had given her the erroneous conclusion-dull dim Dexter. And my reputation would suffer a much-needed relapse into mediocrity. Of course, it would not jeopardize my job, since I was supposed to analyze blood spatter, not provide profiling services. That being the case, it would help to make LaGuerta look like the nitwit she was, and raise Deborah's stock even more.

Lovely when things work out so neatly. I called Deborah.

At half-past one the next day I met Deb at a small restaurant a few blocks north of the airport. It was tucked into a little strip mall, between an auto parts store and a gun shop. It was a place we both knew well, not too far from Miami-Dade Headquarters, and they made the best Cuban sandwiches in the world right there. Perhaps that seems like a small thing, but I assure you there are times when only a

medianoche

will do, and at such times Café Relampago was the only place to get one. The Morgans had been going there since 1974.

And I did feel that some small light touch was in order-if not an actual celebration, then at least an acknowledgment that things were looking up ever so slightly. Perhaps I was merely feeling chipper because I had let off a little steam with my dear friend Jaworski, but in any case I did feel unaccountably good. I even ordered a

batido

de mamé

, a uniquely flavored Cuban milk shake that tastes something like a combination of watermelon, peach, and mango.

Deb, of course, was unable to share my irrational mood. She looked like she had been studying the facial expressions of large fish, dour and droopy in the extreme.

“Please, Deborah,” I begged her, “if you don't stop, your face will be stuck like that. People will take you for a grouper.”

“They're sure not going to take me for a cop,” she said. “Because I won't be one anymore.”

“Nonsense,” I said. “Didn't I promise?”

“Yeah. You also promised that this was going to work. But you didn't say anything about the looks I'd get from Captain Matthews.”

“Oh, Deb,” I said. “He

looked

at you? I'm so sorry.”

“Fuck you, Dexter. You weren't there, and it's not your life going down the tubes.”

“I told you it was going to be rough for a while, Debs.”

“Well at least you were right about that. According to Matthews, I am this close to being suspended.”

“But he did give you permission to use your free time to look into this a little more?”

She snorted. “He said, ‘I can't stop you, Morgan. But I am very disappointed. And I wonder what your father would have said.'”

“And did you say, ‘My father never would have closed the case with the wrong guy in jail'?”

She looked surprised. “No,” she said. “But I was thinking it. How did you know?”

“But you didn't actually

say

it, did you, Deborah?”

“No,” she said.

I pushed her glass toward her. “Have some

mamé

, sis. Things are looking up.”

She looked at me. “You sure you're not just yanking my chain?”

“Never, Deb. How could I?”

“With the greatest of ease.”

“Really, sis. You need to trust me.”

She held my eye for a moment and then looked down. She still hadn't touched her shake, which was a shame. They were very good. “I trust you. But I swear to God I don't know why.” She looked up at me, a strange expression flitting back and forth across her face. “And sometimes I really don't think I should, Dexter.”

I gave her my very best reassuring big-brother smile. “Within the next two or three days something new will turn up. I promise.”

“You can't know that,” she said.

“I know I can't, Deb. But I do know. I really do.”

“So why do you sound so happy about it?”

I wanted to say it was because the idea made me happy. Because the thought of seeing more of the bloodless wonder made me happier than anything else I could think of. But of course, that was not a sentiment Deb could really share with me, so I kept it to myself. “Naturally, I'm just happy for you.”

She snorted. “That's right, I forgot,” she said. But at least she took a sip of her shake.

“Listen,” I said, “either LaGuerta is right-”

“Which means I'm dead and fucked.”

“Or LaGuerta is

wrong

, and you are alive and virginal. With me so far, sis?”

“Mmm,” she said, remarkably grumpy considering how patient I was being.

“If you were a betting gal, would you bet on LaGuerta being right? About anything?”

“Maybe about fashion,” she said. “She dresses really nice.”

The sandwiches came. The waiter dropped them sourly in the middle of the table without a word and whirled away behind the counter. Still, they were very good sandwiches. I don't know what made them better than all the other

medianoches

in town, but they were; bread crisp on the outside and soft on the inside, just the right balance of pork and pickle, cheese melted perfectly-pure bliss. I took a big bite. Deborah played with the straw in her shake.

I swallowed. “Debs, if my deadly logic can't cheer you up, and one of Relampago's sandwiches can't cheer you up, then it's too late. You're already dead.”

She looked at me with her grouper face and took a bite of her sandwich. “It's very good,” she said without expression. “See me cheer up?”

The poor thing was not convinced, which was a terrible blow to my ego. But after all, I had fed her on a traditional Morgan family delight. And I had brought her wonderful news, even if she didn't recognize it as such. If all this had not actually made her smile-well, really. I couldn't be expected to do everything.

One other small thing I could do, though, was to feed LaGuerta, too-something not quite as palatable as one of Relampago's sandwiches, though delicious in its own way. And so that afternoon I called on the good detective in her office, a lovely little cubby in the corner of a large room containing half a dozen other little cubbies. Hers, of course, was the most elegant, with several very tasteful photographs of herself with celebrities hanging from the fabric of the partitions. I recognized Gloria Estefan, Madonna, and Jorge Mas Canosa. On the desk, on the far side of a jade-green blotter with a leather frame, stood an elegant green onyx pen holder with a quartz clock in the center.

LaGuerta was on the telephone speaking rapid-fire Spanish when I came in. She glanced up at me without seeing me and looked away. But after a moment, her eyes came back to me. This time she looked me over thoroughly, frowned, and said, “Okay-okay. 'Ta luo,” which was Cuban for

hasta

luego

. She hung up and continued to look at me.

“What have you got for me?” she said finally.

“Glad tidings,” I told her.

“If that means good news, I could use some.”

I hooked a folding chair with my foot and dragged it into her cubby. “There is no possible doubt,” I said, sitting in the folding chair, “that you have the right guy in jail. The murder on Old Cutler was committed by a different hand.”

She just looked at me for a moment. I wondered if it took her that long to process the data and respond. “You can back that up?” she asked me at last. “For sure?”

Of course I could back it up for sure, but I wasn't going to, no matter how good confession might be for the soul. Instead, I dropped the folder onto her desk. “The facts speak for themselves,” I said. “There's absolutely no question about it.” And of course there wasn't any question at all, as only I knew very well. “Look-” I told her, and pulled out a page of carefully selected comparisons I had typed out. “First, this victim is male. All the others were female. This victim was found off Old Cutler. All of McHale's victims were off Tamiami Trail. This victim was found relatively intact, and in the spot where he was killed. McHale's victims were completely chopped up, and they were moved to a different location for disposal.”

I went on, and she listened carefully. The list was a good one. It had taken me several hours to come up with the most obvious, ludicrous, transparently foolish comparisons, and I must say I did a very good job. And LaGuerta did her part wonderfully, too. She bought the whole thing. Of course, she was hearing what she wanted to hear.

“To sum up,” I said, “this new murder has the fingerprint of a revenge killing, probably drug related. The guy in jail did the other murders and they are absolutely, positively, 100 percent finished and over forever. Never happen again. Case closed.” I dropped the folder on her desk and held out my list.

She took the paper from me and looked at it for a long moment. She frowned. Her eyes moved up and down the page a few times. One corner of her lower lip twitched. Then she placed it carefully on her desk under a heavy jade-green stapler.

“Okay,” she said, straightening the stapler so it was perfectly aligned with the edge of her blotter. “Okay. Pretty good. This should help.” She looked at me again with her frown of concentration still stitched in place, and then suddenly smiled. “Okay. Thank you, Dexter.”

It was such an unexpected and genuine smile that if I only had a soul I'm sure I would have felt quite guilty.

She stood, still smiling, and before I could retreat she had flung her arms around my neck to give me a hug. “I really do appreciate it,” she said. “You make me feel-VERY grateful.” And she rubbed her body against mine in a way that could only be called suggestive. Surely there could be no question of- I mean, here she was, a defender of public morality, and yet right here in public-and even in the privacy of a bank vault I would have been truly uninterested in being rubbed by her body. Not to mention the fact that I had just handed her a rope with the hope that she would use it to hang herself, which hardly seemed like the sort of thing one would celebrate by- Well really, had the whole world gone mad? What is it with humans? Is this all any of them ever thinks about?

Feeling something very close to panic, I tried to disentangle myself. “Please, Detective-”

“Call me Migdia,” she said, clinging and rubbing harder. She reached a hand down to the front of my pants and I jumped. On the plus side, my action dislodged the amorous detective. On the negative side, she spun sideways, hit the desk with her hip, and tripped over her chair, landing sprawled out on the floor.

“I, ah-I really have to get back to work,” I stammered. “There's an important, ah-” However, I couldn't think of anything more important than running for my life, so I backed out of the cubicle, leaving her looking after me.

It didn't seem to be a particularly friendly look.

CHAPTER 19

I

WOKE UP STANDING AT THE SINK WITH THE WATER running. I had a moment of total panic, a sense of complete disorientation, my heart racing while my crusty eyelids fluttered in an attempt to catch up. The place was wrong. The sink didn't look right. I wasn't even sure who I was-in my dream I had been standing in front of my sink with the water running, but it had not been this sink. I had been scrubbing my hands, working the soap hard, cleansing my skin of every microscopic fleck of horrible red blood, washing it away with water so hot it left my skin pink and new and antiseptic. And the hot of the water bit harder after the cool of the room I had just left behind me; the playroom, the killing room, the room of dry and careful cutting.

I turned off the water and stood for a moment, swaying against the cold sink. It had all been far too real, too little like any kind of dream I knew about. And I remembered so clearly the room. I could see it just by closing my eyes.

I am standing above the woman, watching her flex and bulge against the tape that holds her, seeing the living terror grow in her dull eyes, seeing it blossom into hopelessness, and I feel the great surge of wonder rise up in me and flow down my arm to the knife. And as I lift the knife to begin-

But this is not the beginning. Because under the table there is another one, already dry and neatly wrapped. And in the far corner there is one more, waiting her turn with a hopeless black dread unlike anything I have ever seen before even though it is somehow familiar and necessary, this release of all other possibility so complete it washes me with a clean and pure energy more intoxicating than-

Three.

There are three of them this time.

I opened my eyes. It was me in the mirror. Hello, Dexter. Had a dream, old chap? Interesting, wasn't it? Three of them, hey? But just a dream. Nothing more. I smiled at me, trying out the face muscles, completely unconvinced. And as rapturous as it had been, I was awake now and left with nothing more than a hangover and wet hands.

What should have been a pleasant interlude in my subconscious had me shaking, uncertain. I was filled with dread at the thought that my mind had skipped town and left me behind to pay the rent. I thought of the three carefully trussed playmates and wanted to go back to them and continue. I thought of Harry and knew I couldn't. I was whipsawed between a memory and a dream, and I couldn't tell which was more compelling.

This was just no fun anymore. I wanted my brain back.

I dried my hands and went to bed again, but there was no sleep left in this night for dear decimated Dexter. I simply lay on my back and watched the dark pools flowing across the ceiling until the telephone rang at a quarter to six.

“You were right,” Deb said when I picked up.

“It's a wonderful feeling,” I said with a great effort at being my usual bright self. “Right about what?”

“All of it,” Deb told me. “I'm at a crime scene on Tamiami Trail. And guess what?”

“I was right?”

“It's him, Dexter. It has to be. And it's a whole hell of a lot splashier, too.”

“Splashier how, Deb?” I asked, thinking

three bodies

, hoping she wouldn't say it and thrilled by the certainty that she would.

“There appear to be multiple victims,” she said.

A jolt went through me, from my stomach straight up, as if I had swallowed a live battery. But I made a huge effort to rally with something typically clever. “This is wonderful, Deb. You're talking just like a homicide report.”

“Yeah, well. I'm starting to feel like I might write one someday. I'm just glad it won't be this one. It's too weird. LaGuerta doesn't know what to think.”

“Or even how. What's weird about it, Deb?”

“I gotta go,” she said abruptly. “Get out here, Dexter. You have to see this.”

By the time I got there the crowd was three deep around the barrier, and most of them were reporters. It is always hard work to push through a crowd of reporters with the scent of blood in their nostrils. You might not think so, since on camera they appear to be brain-damaged wimps with severe eating disorders. But put them at a police barricade and a miraculous thing happens. They become strong, aggressive, willing and able to shove anything and anyone out of the way and trample them underfoot. It's a bit like the stories about aged mothers lifting trucks when their child is trapped underneath. The strength comes from some mysterious place-and somehow, when there is gore on the ground, these anorexic creatures can push their way through anything. Without mussing their hair, too.

Luckily for me, one of the uniforms at the barricade recognized me. “Let him through, folks,” he told the reporters. “Let him through.”

“Thanks, Julio,” I told the cop. “Seems like more reporters every year.”

He snorted. “Somebody must be cloning 'em. They all look the same to me.”

I stepped under the yellow tape and as I straightened on the far side I had the odd sensation that someone was tampering with the oxygen content of Miami 's atmosphere. I stood in the broken dirt of a construction site. They were building what would probably be a three-story office building, the kind inhabited by marginal developers. And as I stepped slowly forward, following the activity around the half-built structure, I knew it was not coincidence that we had all been brought here. Nothing was coincidence with this killer. Everything was deliberate, carefully measured for aesthetic impact, explored for artistic necessity.

We were at a construction site because it was necessary. He was making his statement as I had told Deborah he would.

You got the wrong guy,

he was saying.

You locked up a cretin because you are all cretins. You are too stupid to see it unless I rub your noses in it; so here goes

.

But more than that, more than his message to the police and the public, he was talking to me; taunting me, teasing me by quoting a passage from my own hurried work. He had brought the bodies to a construction site because I had taken Jaworski at a construction site. He was playing catch with me, showing all of us just how good he was and telling one of us-me-that he was watching.

I know what you did, and I can do it, too. Better

.

I suppose that should have worried me a little.

It didn't.

It made me feel almost giddy, like a high-school girl watching as the captain of the football team worked up his nerve to ask for a date. You mean me? Little old me? Oh my stars, really? Pardon me while I flutter my eyelashes.

I took a deep breath and tried to remind myself that I was a good girl and I didn't do those things. But I knew

he

did them, and I truly wanted to go out with him. Please, Harry?

Because far beyond simply doing some interesting things with a new friend, I needed to find this killer. I had to see him, talk to him, prove to myself that he was real and that-

That what?

That he wasn't me?

That I was not the one doing such terrible, interesting things?

Why would I think that? It was beyond stupid; it was completely unworthy of the attention of my once-proud brain. Except-now that the idea was actually rattling around in there, I couldn't get the thought to sit down and behave. What if it really was me? What if I had somehow done these things without knowing it? Impossible, of course, absolutely impossible, but-

I wake up at the sink, washing blood off my hands after a “dream” in which I carefully and gleefully got blood all over my hands doing things I ordinarily only dream about doing. Somehow I know things about the whole string of murders, things I couldn't possibly know unless-

Unless nothing. Take a tranquilizer, Dexter. Start again. Breathe, you silly creature; in with the good air, out with the bad. It was nothing but one more symptom of my recent feeble-mindedness. I was merely going prematurely senile from the strain of all my clean living. Granted I had experienced one or two moments of human stupidity in the last few weeks. So what? It didn't necessarily prove that I was human. Or that I had been creative in my sleep.

No, of course not. Quite right; it meant nothing of the kind. So, um-what did it mean?

I had assumed I was simply going crazy, dropping several handfuls of marbles into the recycle bin. Very comforting-but if I was ready to assume that, why not admit that it was possible I had committed a series of delightful little pranks without remembering them, except as fragmented dreams? Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness? After all, it was just a heightened form of sleepwalking. “Sleep murder.” Probably very common. Why not? I already gave away the driver's seat of my consciousness on a regular basis when the Dark Passenger went joyriding. It really wasn't such a great leap to accept that the same thing was happening here, now, in a slightly different form. The Dark Passenger was simply borrowing the car while I slept.

How else to explain it? That I was astrally projecting while I slept and just happened to tune my vibrations to the killer's aura because of our connection in a past life? Sure, that might make sense-if this was southern California. In Miami, it seemed a bit thin. And so if I went into this half building and happened to see three bodies arranged in a way that seemed to be speaking to me, I would have to consider the possibility that I had written the message. Didn't that make more sense than believing I was on some kind of subconscious party line?

I had come to the outside stairwell of the building. I stopped there for a moment and closed my eyes, leaning against the bare concrete block of the wall. It was slightly cooler than the air, and rough. I ground my cheek against it, somewhere between pleasure and pain. No matter how much I wanted to go upstairs and see what there was to see, I wanted just as much not to see it at all.

Talk to me

, I whispered to the Dark Passenger.

Tell me what you have done

.

But of course there was no answer, beyond the usual cool, distant chuckle. And that was no actual help. I felt a little sick, slightly dizzy, uncertain, and I did not like this feeling of having feelings. I took three long breaths, straightened up and opened my eyes.

Sergeant Doakes stared at me from three feet away, just inside the stairwell, one foot on the first step. His face was a dark carved mask of curious hostility, like a rottweiler that wants to rip your arms off but is mildly interested in knowing first what flavor you might be. And there was something in his expression that I had never seen on anybody's face before, except in the mirror. It was a deep and abiding emptiness that had seen through the comic-strip charade of human life and read the bottom line.

“Who are you talkin' to?” he asked me with his bright hungry teeth showing. “You got somebody else in there with you?”

His words and the knowing way he said them cut right through me and turned my insides to jelly. Why choose those words? What did he mean by “in there with me”? Could he possibly know about the Dark Passenger? Impossible! Unless…

Doakes knew me for what I was.

Just as I had known Last Nurse.

The Thing Inside calls out across the emptiness when it sees its own kind. Was Sergeant Doakes carrying a Dark Passenger, too? How could it be possible? A homicide sergeant, a Dexter-dark predator? Unthinkable. But how else to explain? I could think of nothing and for much too long I just stared at him. He stared back.

Finally he shook his head, without looking away from me. “One of these days,” he said. “You and me.”

“I'll take a rain check,” I told him with all the good cheer I could muster. “In the meantime, if you'll excuse me…?”

He stood there taking up the entire stairwell and just staring. But finally he nodded slightly and moved to one side. “One of these days,” he said again as I pushed past him and onto the stairs.

The shock of this encounter had snapped me instantly out of my sniveling little self-involved funk. Of course I wasn't committing unconscious murders. Aside from the pure ridiculousness of the idea, it would be an unthinkable waste to do these things and not remember. There would be some other explanation, something simple and cold. Surely I was not the only one within the sound of my voice capable of this kind of creativity. After all, I was in Miami, surrounded by dangerous creatures like Sergeant Doakes.

I went quickly up the stairs, feeling the adrenaline rushing through me, almost myself again. There was a healthy spring in my step that was only partly because I was escaping the good sergeant. Even more, I was eager to see this most recent assault on the public welfare-natural curiosity, nothing more. I certainly wasn't going to find any of my own fingerprints.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor. Some of the framing had been knocked into place, but most of the floor was still without walls. As I stepped off the landing and onto the main area of the floor, I saw Angel-no-relation squatting in the center of the floor, unmoving. His elbows were planted on his knees, his hands cupped his face, and he was just staring. I stopped and looked at him, startled. It was one of the most remarkable things I had ever seen, a Miami homicide technician swatted into immobility by what he had found at a crime scene.

And what he had found was even more interesting.

It was a scene out of some dark melodrama, a vaudeville for vampires. Just as there had been at the site where I had taken Jaworski, there was a stack of shrink-wrapped drywall. It had been pushed over against a wall and was now flooded with light from the construction lights and a few more the investigating team had set up.

On top of the drywall, raised up like an altar, was a black portable workbench. It had been neatly centered so the light hit it just right-or rather, so the light illuminated just right the thing that sat on top of the workbench.

It was, of course, a woman's head. Its mouth held the rearview mirror from some car or truck, which stretched the face into an almost comical look of surprise.

Above it and to the left was a second head. The body of a Barbie doll had been placed under its chin so it looked like a huge head with a tiny body.

On the right side was the third head. It had been neatly mounted on a piece of drywall, the ears carefully tacked on with what must be drywall screws. There was no mess of blood puddling around the exhibit. All three heads were bloodless.

A mirror, a Barbie, and drywall.

Three kills.

Bone dry.

Hello, Dexter.

There was absolutely no question about it. The Barbie body was clearly a reference to the one in my freezer. The mirror was from the head left on the causeway, and the drywall referred to Jaworski. Either someone was so far inside my head they might as well be me, or they actually were me.

I took a slow and very ragged breath. I'm quite sure my emotions were not the same as his, but I wanted to squat down in the middle of the floor beside Angel-no-relation. I needed a moment to remember how to think, and the floor seemed a great place to start. Instead, I found myself moving slowly toward the altar, pulled forward as if I was on well-oiled rails. I could not make myself stop or slow down or do anything but move closer. I could only look, marvel, and concentrate on getting the breath to come in and go out in the right place. And all around me I slowly became aware that I was not the only one who couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

In the course of my job-to say nothing of my hobby-I had been on the scene of hundreds of murders, many of them so gruesome and savage that they shocked even me. And at each and every one of those murders the Miami-Dade team had set up and gone on with their job in a relaxed and professional manner. At each and every one of them someone had been slurping coffee, someone had sent out for

pasteles

or doughnuts, someone was joking or gossiping as she sponged up the gore. At each and every crime scene I had seen a group of people who were so completely unimpressed with the carnage that they might as well have been bowling with the church league.

Until now.

This time the large, bare concrete room was unnaturally quiet. The officers and technicians stood in silent groups of two and three, as if afraid to be alone, and simply looked at what had been displayed at the far end of the room. If anybody accidentally made a small sound, everyone jumped and glared at the noisemaker. The whole scene was so positively comically strange that I certainly would have laughed out loud if I hadn't been just as busy staring as all the other geeks.

Had I done this?

It was beautiful-in a terrible sort of way, of course. But still, the arrangement was perfect, compelling, beautifully bloodless. It showed great wit and a wonderful sense of composition. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make this into a real work of art. Somebody with style, talent, and a morbid sense of playfulness. In my whole life I had only known of one such somebody.

Could that somebody possibly be darkly dreaming Dexter?

CHAPTER 20

I

STOOD AS CLOSE AS I COULD GET TO THE TABLEAU without actually touching it, just looking. The little altar had not been dusted for prints yet; nothing had been done to it at all, although I assumed pictures had been taken. And oh how I wanted a copy of one of those pictures to take home. Poster sized, and in full, bloodless color. If I

had

done this, I was a much better artist than I had ever suspected. Even from this close the heads seemed to float in space, suspended above the mortal earth in a timeless, bloodless parody of paradise, literally cut off from their bodies-

Their bodies: I glanced around. There was no sign of them, no telltale stack of carefully wrapped packages. There was only the pyramid of heads.

I stared some more. After a few moments Vince Masuoka swam slowly over, his mouth open, his face pale. “Dexter,” he said, and shook his head.

“Hello, Vince,” I said. He shook his head again. “Where are the bodies?”

He just stared at the heads for a long moment. Then he looked at me with a face full of lost innocence. “Somewhere else,” he said.

There was a clatter on the stairs and the spell was broken. I moved away from the tableau as LaGuerta came in with a few carefully selected reporters-Nick Something and Rick Sangre from local TV, and Eric the Viking, a strange and respected columnist from the newspaper. For a moment the room was very busy. Nick and Eric took one look and ran back down the stairs with their hands covering their mouths. Rick Sangre frowned deeply, looked at the lights, and then turned to LaGuerta.

“Is there a power outlet? I gotta get my camera guy,” he said.

LaGuerta shook her head. “Wait for those other guys,” she said.

“I need pictures,” Rick Sangre insisted.

Sergeant Doakes appeared behind Sangre. The reporter looked around and saw him. “No pictures,” Doakes said. Sangre opened his mouth, looked at Doakes for a moment, and then closed his mouth again. Once again the sterling qualities of the good sergeant had saved the day. He went back and stood protectively by the displayed body parts, as if it was a science-fair project and he was its guardian.

There was a strained coughing sound at the door, and Nick Something and Eric the Viking returned, shuffling slowly up the stairs and back onto the floor like old men. Eric wouldn't look at the far end of the room. Nick tried not to look, but his head kept drifting around toward the awful sight, and then he would snap it back to face LaGuerta again.

LaGuerta began to speak. I moved close enough to hear. “I asked you three to come see this thing before we allow any official press coverage,” she said.

“But we can cover it unofficially?” Rick Sangre interrupted.

LaGuerta ignored him. “We don't want any wild speculation in the press about what has happened here,” she said. “As you can see, this is a vicious and bizarre crime-” she paused for a moment and then said very carefully, “Unlike Anything We Have Ever Seen Before.” You could actually hear her capitalize the letters.

Nick Something said, “Huh,” and looked thoughtful. Eric the Viking got it immediately. “Whoa, wait a minute,” he said. “You're saying this is a brand-new killer? A whole different set of murders?”

LaGuerta looked at him with great significance. “Of course it's too soon to say anything for sure,” she said, sounding sure, “but let's look at this thing logically, okay? First,” she held up a finger, “we got a guy who confessed the other stuff. He's in jail, and we didn't let him out to do this. Second, this doesn't look like anything I ever saw, does it? 'Cause there's three and they're stacked up all pretty, okay?” Bless her heart, she had noticed.

“Why can't I get my camera guy?” Rick Sangre asked.

“Wasn't there a mirror found at one of the other murders?” Eric the Viking said weakly, trying very hard not to look.

“Have you identified the, uh-” Nick Something said. His head started to turn toward the display and he caught himself, snapped back around to LaGuerta. “Are the victims prostitutes, Detective?”

“Listen,” LaGuerta said. She sounded a little annoyed, and a small trace of Cuban accent showed in her voice for just a second. “Let me

esplain

something. I don't care if they're prostitutes. I don't care if they got a mirror. I don't care about any of that.” She took a breath and went on, much calmer. “We got the other killer locked up in the jail. We've got a confession. This is a whole new thing, okay? That's the important thing. You can see it-this is different.”

“Then why are you assigned to it?” asked Eric the Viking, very reasonably, I thought.

LaGuerta showed shark teeth. “I solved the other one,” she said.

“But you're sure this is a brand-new killer, Detective?” Rick Sangre asked.

“There's no question. I can't tell you any details, but I got lab work to back me up.” I was sure she meant me. I felt a small thrill of pride.

“But this is kind of close, isn't it? Same area, same general technique-” Eric the Viking started. LaGuerta cut him off.

“Totally different,” she said. “Totally different.”

“So you're completely satisfied that McHale committed all those other murders and this one is different,” Nick Something said.

“One hundred percent,” LaGuerta said. “Besides, I never said McHale did the others.”

For a second, the reporters all forgot the horror of not having pictures. “What?” Nick Something finally said.

LaGuerta blushed, but insisted, “I never said McHale did it. McHale said he did it, okay? So what am I supposed to do? Tell him go away, I don't believe you?”

Eric the Viking and Nick Something exchanged a meaningful glance. I would have, too, if only there had been someone for me to look at. So instead I peeked at the central head on the altar. It didn't actually wink at me, but I'm sure it was just as amazed as I was.

“That's nuts,” Eric muttered, but he was overrun by Rick Sangre.

“Are you willing to let us interview McHale?” Sangre demanded. “With a camera present?”

We were saved from LaGuerta's answer by the arrival of Captain Matthews. He clattered up the stairs and stopped dead as he saw our little art exhibit. “Jesus Christ,” he said. Then his gaze swung to the group of reporters around LaGuerta. “What the hell are you guys doing up here?” he asked.

LaGuerta looked around the room, but nobody volunteered anything. “I let them in,” she said finally. “Unofficially. Off the record.”

“You didn't say off the record,” Rick Sangre blurted out. “You just said unofficially.”

LaGuerta glared at him. “Unofficially

means

off the record.”

“Get out,” Matthews barked. “Officially and on the record. Out.”

Eric the Viking cleared his throat. “Captain, do you agree with Detective LaGuerta that this is a brand-new string of murders, a different killer?”

“Out,” Matthews repeated. “I'll answer questions downstairs.”

“I need footage,” Rick Sangre said. “It will only take a minute.”

Matthews nodded toward the exit. “Sergeant Doakes?”

Doakes materialized and took Rick Sangre's elbow. “Gentlemen,” he said in his soft and scary voice. The three reporters looked at him. I saw Nick Something swallow hard. Then they all three turned without a sound and trooped out.

Matthews watched them go. When they were safely out of earshot he turned on LaGuerta. “Detective,” he said in a voice so venomous he must have learned it from Doakes, “if you ever pull this kind of shit again you'll be lucky to get a job doing parking lot security at Wal-Mart.”

LaGuerta turned pale green and then bright red. “Captain, I just wanted-” she said. But Matthews had already turned away. He straightened his tie, combed his hair back with one hand, and chased down the stairs after the reporters.

I turned to look at the altar again. It hadn't changed, but they were starting to dust for prints now. Then they would take it apart to analyze the pieces. Soon it would all be just a beautiful memory.

I trundled off down the stairs to find Deborah.

Outside, Rick Sangre already had a camera rolling. Captain Matthews stood in the wash of lights with microphones thrusting at his chin, giving his official statement. “… always the policy of this department to leave the investigating officer autonomy on a case, until such time as it becomes evident that a series of major errors in judgment call the officer's competence into question. That time has not yet arrived, but I am monitoring the situation closely. With so much at stake for the community-”

I spotted Deborah and moved past them. She stood at the barrier of yellow tape, dressed in her blue patrol uniform. “Nice suit,” I told her.

“I like it,” she said. “You saw?”

“I saw,” I told her. “I also saw Captain Matthews discussing the case with Detective LaGuerta.”

Deborah sucked in her breath. “What did they say?”

I patted her arm. “I think I once heard Dad use a very colorful expression that would cover it. He was ‘reaming her a new asshole.' Do you know that one?”

She looked startled, then pleased. “That's great. Now I really need your help, Dex.”

“As opposed to what I've been doing, of course?”

“I don't know what you think you've been doing, but it isn't enough.”

“So unfair, Deb. And so very unkind. After all, you are actually at a crime site, and wearing your uniform, too. Would you prefer the sex suit?”

She shuddered. “That's not the point. You've been holding back something about this all along and I want it now.”

For a moment I had nothing to say, always an uncomfortable feeling. I'd had no idea she was this perceptive. “Why, Deborah-”

“Listen, you think I don't know how this political stuff works, and maybe I'm not as smart about it as you are, but I know they're all going to be busy covering their own asses for a while. Which means nobody is going to be doing any real police work.”

“Which means you see a chance to do some of your own? Bravo, Debs.”

“And it also means I need your help like never before.” She put a hand out and squeezed mine. “Please, Dexy?”

I don't know what shocked me more-her insight, her hand-squeezing, or her use of the nickname “Dexy.” I hadn't heard her say that since I was ten years old. Whether she intended it or not, when she called me Dexy she put us both firmly back in Harry Land, a place where family mattered and obligations were as real as headless hookers. What could I say?

“Of course, Deborah,” I said. Dexy indeed. It was almost enough to make me feel emotion.

“Good,” she said, and she was all business again, a wonderfully quick change that I had to admire. “What's the one thing that really sticks out right now?” she asked with a nod toward the second floor.

“The body parts,” I said. “As far as you know, is anybody looking for them?”

Deborah gave me one of her new Worldly Cop looks, the sour one. “As far as I know, there are more officers assigned to keeping the TV cameras out than to doing any actual work on this thing.”

“Good,” I said. “If we can find the body parts, we might get a small jump on things.”

“Okay. Where do we look?”

It was a fair question, which naturally put me at a disadvantage. I had no idea where to look. Would the limbs be left in the killing room? I didn't think so-it seemed messy to me, and if he wanted to use that same room again, it would be impossible with that kind of nasty clutter lying around.

All right, then I would assume that the rest of the meat had gone somewhere else. But where?

Or perhaps, it slowly dawned on me, the real question should be: Why? The display of the heads was for a reason. What would be the reason for putting the rest of the bodies somewhere else? Simple concealment? No-nothing was simple with this man, and concealment was evidently not a virtue he prized too highly. Especially right now, when he was showing off a bit. That being the case, where would he leave a stack of leftovers?

“Well?” Deborah demanded. “How about it? Where should we look?”

I shook my head. “I don't know,” I said slowly. “Wherever he left the stuff, it's part of his statement. And we're not really sure what his statement is yet, are we?”

“Goddamn it, Dexter-”

“I know he wants to rub our noses in it. He needs to say that we did something incredibly dumb, and even if we hadn't he's still smarter than we are.”

“So far he's right,” she said, putting on her grouper face.

“So… wherever he dumped the stuff, it has to continue that statement. That we're stupid- No, I'm wrong. That we DID something stupid.”

“Right. Very important difference.”

“Please, Deb, you'll hurt your face like that. It is important, because he's going to comment on the ACT, and not on the ACTORS.”

“Uh-huh. That's really good, Dex. So we should probably head for the nearest dinner theater and look around for an actor with blood up to his elbows, right?”

I shook my head. “No blood, Deb. None at all. That's one of the most important things.”

“How can you be so sure?”

“Because there's been no blood at any of the scenes. That's deliberate, and it's vital to what he's doing. And this time, he'll repeat the important parts, but comment on what he's already done, because we've missed it, don't you see?”

“Sure, I see. Makes perfect sense. So why don't we go check Office Depot Center? He's probably got the bodies stacked up in the net again.”

I opened my mouth to make some wonderfully clever reply. The hockey rink was all wrong, completely and obviously wrong. It had been an experiment, something different, but I knew he wouldn't repeat it. I started to explain this to Deb, that the only reason he would ever repeat the rink would be- I stopped dead, my mouth hanging open.

Of course

, I thought.

Naturally

.

“Now who's making a fish face, huh? What is it, Dex?”

For a moment I didn't say anything. I was far too busy trying to catch my whirling thoughts.

The only reason he would repeat the hockey rink was to show us we had the wrong guy locked up.

“Oh, Deb,” I said at last. “Of course. You're right, the arena. You are right for all the wrong reasons, but still-”

“Beats the hell out of being wrong,” she said, and headed for her car.

CHAPTER 21

“Y

OU DO UNDERSTAND IT'S A LONG SHOT?” I SAID. “Probably we won't find anything at all.”

“I know that,” Deb said.

“And we don't actually have any jurisdiction here. We're in Broward. And the Broward guys don't like us, so-”

“For Christ's sake, Dexter,” she snapped. “You're chattering like a schoolgirl.”

Perhaps that was true, although it was very unkind of her to say so. And Deborah, on the other hand, appeared to be a bundle of steely, tightly wrapped nerves. As we turned off the Sawgrass Expressway and drove into the parking lot of the Office Depot Center she bit down harder. I could almost hear her jaw creak. “Dirty Harriet,” I said to myself, but apparently Deb was eavesdropping.

“Fuck off,” she said.

I looked from Deborah's granite profile to the arena. For one brief moment, with the early-morning sunlight hitting it just right, it looked like the building was surrounded by a fleet of flying saucers. Of course it was only the outdoor lighting fixtures that sprouted around the arena like oversized steel toadstools. Someone must have told the architect they were distinctive. “Youthful and vigorous,” too, most likely. And I'm sure they were, in the right light. I did hope they would find the right light sometime soon.

We drove one time around the arena, looking for signs of life. On the second circuit, a battered Toyota pulled up beside one of the doors. The passenger door was held closed with a loop of rope that ran out the window and around the doorpost. Opening the driver's door as she parked, Deborah was already stepping out of the car while it was still rolling.

“Excuse me, sir?” she said to the man getting out of the Toyota. He was fifty, a squat guy in ratty green pants and a blue nylon jacket. He glanced at Deb in her uniform and was instantly nervous.

“Wha'?” he said. “I din't do nothin'.”

“Do you work here, sir?”

“Shoor. 'Course, why you think I'm here, eight o'clock in the morning?”

“What's your name, please sir?”

He fumbled for his wallet. “Steban Rodriguez. I got a ID.”

Deborah waved that off. “That's not necessary,” she said. “What are you doing here at this hour, sir?”

He shrugged and pushed his wallet back into the pocket. “I s'posed to be here earlier most days, but the team is on the road-Vancouver, Ottawa, and L.A. So I get here a little later.”

“Is anyone else here right now, Steban?”

“Naw, jus' me. They all sleep late.”

“What about at night? Is there a guard?”

He waved an arm around. “The security goes around the parking lot at night, but not too much. I the first one here mos' days.”

“The first one to go inside, you mean?”

“Yeah, tha's right, what I say?”

I climbed out of the car and leaned across the roof. “Are you the guy who drives the Zamboni for the morning skate?” I asked him. Deb glanced at me, annoyed. Steban peered at me, taking in my natty Hawaiian shirt and gabardine slacks. “Wha' kinda cop you are, ha?”

“I'm a nerd cop,” I said. “I just work in the lab.”

“Ooohhh, shoor,” he said, nodding his head as if that made sense.

“Do you run the Zamboni, Steban?” I repeated.

“Yeah, you know. They don' lemme drive her in the games, you know. Tha's for the guys with suits. They like to put a kid, you know. Some celebrity maybe. Ride around and wave, that shit. But I get to do it for the morning skate, you know. When the team is in town. I run the Zamboni just the morning, real early. But they on the road now so I come later.”

“We'd like to take a look inside the arena,” Deb said, clearly impatient with me for speaking out of turn. Steban turned back to her, a crafty gleam lighting up half of one eye.

“Shoor,” he said. “You got a warrant?”

Deborah blushed. It made a wonderful contrast to the blue of her uniform, but it was possibly not the most effective choice for reinforcing her authority. And because I knew her well, I knew she would realize she had blushed and get mad. Since we did not have a warrant and did not, in fact, have any business here whatsoever that could remotely be considered officially sanctioned, I did not think that getting mad was our best tactical maneuver.

“Steban,” I said before Deb could say anything regrettable.

“Hah?”

“How long have you worked here?”

He shrugged. “Since the place open. I work at the old arena two year before that.”

“So you were working here last week when they found the dead body on the ice?”

Steban looked away. Under his tan, his face turned green. He swallowed hard. “I never want to see something like that again, man,” he said. “Never.”

I nodded with genuine synthetic sympathy. “I really don't blame you,” I said. “And that's why we're here, Steban.”

He frowned. “Wha' you mean?”

I glanced at Deb to make sure she wasn't drawing a weapon or anything. She glared at me with tight-lipped disapproval and tapped her foot, but she didn't say anything.

“Steban,” I said, moving a little closer to the man and making my voice as confidential and manly as I could, “we think there's a chance that when you open those doors this morning, you might find the same kind of thing waiting for you.”

“Shit!” he exploded. “I don' want nothin' to do with that.”

“Of course you don't.”

“

Me cago en diez

with that shit,” he said.

“Exactly,” I agreed. “So why not let us take a peek first? Just to be sure.”

He gaped at me for a moment, then at Deborah, who was still scowling-a very striking look for her, nicely set off by her uniform.

“I could get in trouble,” he said. “Lose my job.”

I smiled with authentic-looking sympathy. “Or you could go inside and find a stack of chopped-up arms and legs all by yourself. A lot more of them this time.”

“Shit,” he said again. “I get in trouble, lose my job, huh? Why I should do that, huh?”

“How about civic duty?”

“Come on, man,” he said. “Don't fuck with me. What do you care about if I lose my job?”

He did not actually hold out his hand, which I thought was very genteel, but it was clear that he hoped for a small present to insulate him against the possible loss of his job. Very reasonable, considering that this was Miami. But all I had was $5, and I really needed to get a cruller and a cup of coffee. So I just nodded with manly understanding.

“You're right,” I said. “We hoped you wouldn't have to see all the body parts-did I say there were quite a few this time? But I certainly don't want you to lose your job. Sorry to bother you, Steban. Have a nice day!” I smiled at Deborah. “Let's go, Officer. We should get back to the other scene and search for the fingers.”

Deborah was still scowling, but at least she had the native wit to play along. She opened her car door as I cheerfully waved to Steban and climbed in.

“Wait!” Steban called. I glanced at him with an expression of polite interest. “I swear to God, I don' wanna find that shit ever again,” he said. He looked at me for a moment, perhaps hoping I would loosen up and hand him a fistful of Krugerands, but as I said, that cruller was weighing heavily on my mind and I did not relent. Steban licked his lips, then turned away quickly and jammed a key into the lock of the large double door. “Go 'head. I wait out here.”

“If you're sure-” I said.

“Come on, man, what you want from me? Go 'head!”

I stood up and smiled at Deborah. “He's sure,” I said. She just shook her head at me, a strange combination of little-sister exasperation and cop sour humor. She walked around the car and led the way in through the door and I followed.

Inside, the arena was cool and dark, which shouldn't have surprised me. It was, after all, a hockey rink early in the morning. No doubt Steban knew where the light switch was, but he had not offered to tell us. Deb unsnapped the large flashlight from her belt and swung the beam around the ice. I held my breath as the light picked out one goalie's net, then the other. She swept back around the perimeter one time, slowly, pausing once or twice, then back to me.

“Nothing,” she said. “Jack shit.”

“You sound disappointed.”

She snorted at me and headed back out. I stayed in the middle of the rink, feeling the cool radiate up off the ice, and thinking my happy thoughts. Or, more precisely, not quite

my

happy thoughts.

Because as Deb turned to go out I heard a small voice from somewhere over my shoulder; a cool and dry chuckle, a familiar feather touch just under the threshold of hearing. And as dear Deborah departed, I stood motionless there on the ice, closed my eyes and listened to what my ancient friend had to say. It was not much-just a sub-whisper, a hint of unvocal, but I listened. I heard him chuckle and mutter soft and terrible things in one ear, while the other ear let me know that Deborah had told Steban to come in and turn on the lights. Which moments later he did, as the small off-voice whisper rose in a sudden crescendo of rattling jolly humor and good-natured horror.

What is it?

I asked politely. My only answer was a surge of hungry amusement. I had no idea what it meant. But I was not greatly surprised when the screaming started.

Steban was really terrible at screaming. It was a hoarse, strangled grunting that sounded more like he was being violently sick than anything else. The man brought no sense of music to the job.

I opened my eyes. It was impossible to concentrate under these circumstances, and anyway there was nothing more to hear. The whispering had stopped when the screaming began. After all, the screams said it all, didn't they? And so I opened my eyes just in time to see Steban catapult out of the little closet at the far end of the arena and vault onto the rink. He went clattering across the ice, slipping and sliding and moaning hoarsely in Spanish and finally hurling headlong into the boards. He scrabbled up and skittered toward the door, grunting with horror. A small splotch of blood smeared the ice where he had fallen.

Deborah came quickly through the door, her gun drawn, and Steban clawed past her, stumbling out into the light of day. “What is it?” Deborah said, holding her weapon ready.

I tilted my head, hearing one last echo of the final dry chuckle, and now, with the grunting horror still ringing in my ears, I understood.

“I believe Steban has found something,” I said.

CHAPTER 22

P

OLICE POLITICS, AS I HAD TRIED SO HARD TO impress on Deborah, was a slippery and many-tentacled thing. And when you brought together two law enforcement organizations that really didn't care for each other, mutual operations tended to go very slowly, very much by the book, and with a good deal of foot-dragging, excuse-making, and veiled insults and threats. All great fun to watch, of course, but it did draw out the proceedings just a trifle more than necessary. Consequently it was several hours after Steban's dreadful yodeling exhibition before the jurisdictional squabbling was straightened out and our team actually began to examine the happy little surprise our new friend Steban had discovered when he opened the closet door.

During that time Deborah stood off to one side for the most part, working very hard at controlling her impatience but not terribly hard at hiding it. Captain Matthews arrived with Detective LaGuerta in tow. They shook hands with their Broward County counterparts, Captain Moon and Detective McClellan. There was a lot of barely polite sparring, which boiled down to this: Matthews was reasonably certain that the discovery of six arms and six legs in Broward was part of his department's investigation of three heads lacking the same pieces in Miami-Dade. He stated, in terms that were far too friendly and simple, that it seemed a bit farfetched to think that he would find three heads without bodies, and then three totally different bodies without heads would turn up here.

Moon and McClellan, with equal logic, pointed out that people found heads in Miami all the time, but in Broward it was a little more unusual, and so maybe they took it a bit more seriously, and anyway there was no way to know for sure they were connected until some preliminary work had been done, which clearly ought to be done by them, since it was in their jurisdiction. Of course they would cheerfully pass on the results.

And of course that was unacceptable to Matthews. He explained carefully that the Broward people didn't know what to look for and might miss something or destroy a piece of key evidence. Not, of course, through incompetence or stupidity; Matthews was quite sure the Broward people were perfectly competent, considering.

This was naturally not taken in a cheerful spirit of cooperation by Moon, who observed with a little bit of feeling that this seemed to imply that his department was full of second-rate morons. By this point Captain Matthews was mad enough to reply much too politely, oh, no, not second-rate at all. I'm sure it would have ended in a fistfight if the gentleman from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement had not arrived to referee.

The FDLE is a sort of state-level FBI. They have jurisdiction anywhere in the state at any time, and unlike the feds they are respected by most of the local cops. The officer in question was a man of average height and build with a shaved head and a close-cropped beard. He didn't really seem out of the ordinary to me, but when he stepped between the two much larger police captains they instantly shut up and took a step back. In short order he had things settled down and organized and we got quickly back to being the neat and well-ordered scene of a multiple homicide.

The man from FDLE had ruled that it was Miami-Dade's investigation unless and until tissue samples proved the body parts here and the heads down there were unrelated. In practical and immediate terms, this meant that Captain Matthews got to have his picture taken first by the mob of reporters already clustering outside.

Angel-no-relation arrived and went to work. I was not at all sure what to make of it, and I don't mean the jurisdictional squabbling. No, I was far more concerned with the event itself, which had left me with a great deal to think about-not merely the fact of the killings and the redistribution of the meat, which was piquant enough. But I had of course managed to sneak a peak into Steban's little closet of horrors earlier, before the troops arrived-can you blame me, really? I had only wanted to sample the carnage and try to understand why my dear unknown business associate had chosen to stack the leftovers there; truly, just a quick look-see.

So immediately after Steban had skidded out the door squealing and grunting like a pig choking on a grapefruit, I had skipped eagerly back to the closet to see what had set him off.

The parts were not wrapped carefully this time. Instead, they were laid out on the floor in four groups. And as I looked closer I realized a wonderful thing.

One leg had been laid straight along the left-hand side of the closet. It was a pale, bloodless blue-white, and around the ankle there was even a small gold chain with a heart-shaped trinket. Very cute, really, unspoiled by awful bloodstains; truly elegant work. Two dark arms, equally well cut, had been bent at the elbow and placed alongside the leg, with the elbow pointing away. Right next to this the remaining limbs, all bent at the joint, had been arranged in two large circles.

It took me a moment. I blinked, and suddenly it swam into focus and I had to frown very hard to keep myself from giggling out loud like the schoolgirl Deb had accused me of being.

Because he had arranged the arms and legs in letters, and the letters spelled out a single small word: BOO.

The three torsos were carefully arranged below the BOO in a quarter-circle, making a cute little Halloween smile.

What a scamp.

But even as I admired the playful spirit this prank exposed, I wondered why he had chosen to put the display here, in a closet, instead of out on the ice where it could gain the recognition of a wider audience. It was a very spacious closet, granted, but still close quarters, just enough room for the display. So why?

And as I wondered, the outer door of the arena swung open with a clatter-the first of the arriving rescue team, no doubt. And the door crashing wide sent, a moment later, a draft of cool air over the ice and onto my back-

The cold air went over my spine and was answered by a flow of warmth moving upward along the same pathway. It ran light-fingered up into the unlit bottom of my consciousness and something changed somewhere deep in the moonless night of my lizard brain and I felt the Dark Passenger agree violently with something that I did not even hear or understand except that it had to do somehow with the primal urgency of cool air and the walls closing in and an attacking sense of-

Rightness. No question about it. Something here was just plain right and made my obscure hitchhiker pleased and excited and satisfied in a way I did not begin to understand. And floating in above all that was the strange notion that this was very familiar. None of it made any sense to me, but there it was. And before I could explore these strange revelations any further I was being urged by a squat young man in a blue uniform to step away and keep my hands in plain sight. No doubt he was the first of the arriving troops, and he was holding his weapon on me in a very convincing way. Since he had only one dark eyebrow running all the way across his face and no apparent forehead, I decided it would be a very good idea to go along with his wishes. He looked to be just the sort of dull-witted brute who might shoot an innocent person-or even me. I stepped away from the closet.

Unfortunately, my retreat revealed the little diorama in the closet, and the young man was suddenly very busy finding someplace to put his breakfast. He made it to a large trash can about ten feet away before commencing his ugly blargging sounds. I stood quite still and waited for him to finish. Nasty habit, hurling half-digested food around like that. So unsanitary. And this was a guardian of public safety, too.

More uniforms trotted in, and soon my simian friend had several buddies sharing the trash can with him. The noise was extremely unpleasant, to say nothing of the smell now wafting my way. But I waited politely for them to finish, since one of the fascinating things about a handgun is that it can be fired almost as well by someone who is throwing up. But one of the uniforms eventually straightened up, wiped his face on his sleeve, and began to question me. I was soon sorted out and pushed over to one side with instructions not to go anywhere or touch anything.

Captain Matthews and Detective LaGuerta had arrived soon after, and when they finally took over the scene I relaxed a bit. But now that I could actually go somewhere and touch something, I simply sat and thought. And the things I thought about were surprisingly troublesome.

Why had the display in the closet seemed familiar?

Unless I was going to return to my idiocy of earlier in the day and persuade myself that I had done this, I was at a loss as to why it should seem so delightfully unsurprising. Of course I hadn't done it. I was already ashamed of the stupidity of that notion. Boo, indeed. It was not even worth taking the time to scoff at the idea. Ridiculous.

So, um-why did it seem familiar?

I sighed and experienced one more new feeling, befuddlement. I simply had no notion of what was going on, except that somehow I was a part of it. This did not seem a terribly helpful revelation, since it matched exactly all my other closely reasoned analytical conclusions so far. If I ruled out the absurd idea that I had done this without knowing it-and I did-then each subsequent explanation became even more unlikely. And so Dexter's summary of the case reads as follows: he is involved somehow, but doesn't even know what that means. I could feel the little wheels in my once-proud brain leaping off their tracks and clattering to the floor. Clang-clang. Whee. Dexter derailed.

Luckily, I was saved from complete collapse by the appearance of dear Deborah. “Come on,” she said brusquely, “we're going upstairs.”

“May I ask why?”

“We're going to talk to the office staff,” she said. “See if they know anything.”

“They must know something if they have an office,” I offered.

She looked at me for a moment, then turned away. “Come on,” she said.

It may have been the commanding tone in her voice, but I went. We walked to the far side of the arena from where I had been sitting and into the lobby. A Broward cop stood beside the elevator there, and just outside the long row of glass doors I could see several more of them standing at a barrier. Deb marched up to the cop at the elevator and said, “I'm Morgan.” He nodded and pushed the up button. He looked at me with a lack of expression that said a great deal. “I'm Morgan, too,” I told him. He just looked at me, then turned his head away to stare out the glass doors.

There was a muted chime and the elevator arrived. Deborah stalked in and slammed her hand against the button hard enough to make the cop look up at her and the door slid shut.

“Why so glum, sis?” I asked her. “Isn't this what you wanted to do?”

“It's make-work, and everybody knows it,” she snarled.

“But it's detective-type make-work,” I pointed out.

“That bitch LaGuerta stuck her oar in,” she hissed. “As soon as I'm done spinning my wheels here, I have to go back out on hooker duty.”

“Oh, dear. In your little sex suit?”

“In my little sex suit,” she said, and before I could really formulate any magical words of consolation we arrived at the office level and the elevator doors slid open. Deb stalked out and I followed. We soon found the staff lounge, where the office workers had been herded to wait until the full majesty of the law had the time to get around to them. Another Broward cop stood at the door of the lounge, presumably to make certain that none of the staff made a break for the Canadian border. Deborah nodded to the cop at the door and went into the lounge. I trailed behind her without much enthusiasm and let my mind wander over my problem. A moment later I was startled out of my reverie when Deborah jerked her head at me and led a surly, greasy-faced young man with long and awful hair toward the door. I followed again.

She was naturally separating him from the others for questioning, very good police procedure, but to be perfectly honest it did not light a fire in my heart. I knew without knowing why that none of these people had anything meaningful to contribute. Judging from this first specimen, it was probably safe to apply that generalization to his life as well as to this murder. This was just dull routine make-work that had been doled out to Deb because the captain thought she had done something good, but she was still a pest. So he had sent her away with a piece of real detective drudgery to keep her busy and out of sight. And I had been dragged with her because Deb wanted me along. Possibly she wanted to see if my fantastic ESP powers could help determine what these office sheep had eaten for breakfast. One look at this young gentleman's complexion and I was fairly sure he had eaten cold pizza, potato chips, and a liter of Pepsi. It had ruined his complexion and given him an air of vacuous hostility.

Still, I followed along as Mr. Grumpy directed Deborah to a conference room at the back of the building. There was a long oak table with ten black high-backed chairs in the center of the room, and a desk in the corner with a computer and some audio-visual equipment. As Deb and her pimply young friend sat and began trading frowns, I wandered over to the desk. A small bookshelf sat under the window beside the desk. I looked out the window. Almost directly below me I could see the growing crowd of reporters and squad cars that now surrounded the door where we had gone in with Steban.

I looked at the bookshelf, thinking I would clear a small space and lean there, tastefully away from the conversation. There was a stack of manila folders and perched on top of it was a small gray object. It was squarish and looked to be plastic. A black wire ran from the thing over to the back of the computer. I picked it up to move it.

“Hey!” the surly geek said. “Don't mess with the webcam!”

I looked at Deb. She looked at me and I swear I saw her nostrils flair like a racehorse at the starting gate. “The what?” she said quietly.

“I had it focused down on the entrance,” he said. “Now I gotta refocus it. Man, why do you have to mess with my stuff?”

“He said webcam,” I said to Deborah.

“A camera,” she said to me.

“Yes.”

She turned to young Prince Charming. “Is it on?”

He gaped at her, still concentrating on maintaining his righteous frown. “What?”

“The camera,” Deborah said. “Does it work?”

He snorted, and then wiped his nose with a finger. “What do you think, I would get all worked up if it didn't? Two hundred bucks. It totally works.”

I looked out the window where the camera had been pointing as he droned on in his surly grumble. “I got a Web site and everything. Kathouse.com. People can watch the team when they get here and when they leave.”

Deborah drifted over and stood beside me, looking out the window. “It was pointed at the door,” I said.

“Duh,” our happy pal said. “How else are people on my Web site gonna see the team?”

Deborah turned and looked at him. After about five seconds he blushed and dropped his eyes to the table. “Was the camera turned on last night?” she said.

He didn't look up, just mumbled, “Sure. I mean, I guess so.”

Deborah turned to me. Her computer knowledge was confined to knowing enough to fill out standardized traffic reports. She knew I was a little more savvy.

“How do you have it set up?” I asked the top of the young man's head. “Do the images automatically archive?”

This time he looked up. I had used archive as a verb, so I must be okay. “Yeah,” he said. “It refreshes every fifteen seconds and just dumps to the hard drive. I usually erase in the morning.”

Deborah actually clutched my arm hard enough to break the skin. “Did you erase this morning?” she asked him.

He glanced away again. “No,” he said. “You guys came stomping in and yelling and stuff. I didn't even get to check my e-mail.”

Deborah looked at me. “Bingo,” I said.

“Come here,” she said to our unhappy camper.

“Huh?” he said.

“Come here,” she repeated, and he stood up slowly, mouth hanging open, and rubbed his knuckles.

“What,” he said.

“Could you please come over here, sir?” Deborah ordered with truly veteran-cop technique, and he stuttered into motion and came over. “Can we see the pictures from last night, please?”

He gaped at the computer, then at her. “Why?” he said. Ah, the mysteries of human intelligence.

“Because,” Deborah said, very slowly and carefully. “I think you might have taken a picture of the killer.”

He stared at her and blinked, then blushed. “No way,” he said.

“Way,” I told him.

He stared at me, and then at Deb, his jaw hanging open. “Awesome,” he breathed. “No shit? I mean- No, really? I mean-” He blushed even harder.

“Can we look at the pictures?” Deb said. He stood still for a second, then plunged into the chair at the desk and touched the mouse. Immediately the screen came to life, and he began typing and mouse-clicking furiously. “What time should I start?”

“What time did everybody leave?” Deborah asked him.

He shrugged. “We were empty last night. Everybody gone by, what-eight o'clock?”

“Start at midnight,” I said, and he nodded.

“'Kay,” he said. He worked quietly for a moment, then, “Come on,” he mumbled. “It's only like a six hundred megaherz,” he said. “They won't update. They keep saying it's fine, but sooooo freaking slow, and it won't- Okay,” he said, breaking off suddenly.

A dark image appeared on the monitor: the empty parking lot below us. “Midnight,” he said, and stared at the screen. After fifteen seconds, the picture changed to the same picture.

“Do we have to watch five hours of this?” Deborah asked.

“Scroll through,” I said. “Look for headlights or something moving.”

“Riiiiiight,” he said. He did some rapid point-and-click, and the pictures began to flip past at one per second. They didn't change much at first; the same dark parking lot, one bright light out at the edge of the picture. After about fifty frames had clicked past, an image jumped into view. “A truck!” Deborah said.

Our pet nerd shook his head. “Security,” he said, and in the next frame the security car was visible.

He kept scrolling, and the pictures rolled by, eternal and unchanging. Every thirty or forty frames we would see the security truck pass, and then nothing. After several minutes of this, the pattern stopped, and there was a long stretch of nothing. “Busted,” my greasy new friend said.

Deborah gave him a hard look. “The camera is broken?”

He looked up at her, blushed again, and looked away. “The security dudes,” he explained. “They totally suck. Every night at, like, three? They park over at the other side and go to sleep.” He nodded at the unchanging pictures scrolling past. “See? Hello! Mr. Security Dude? Hard at work?” He made a wet sound deep in his nose that I had to assume was meant to be laughter. “Not very!” He repeated the snorting sound and started the pictures scrolling again.

And then suddenly- “Wait!” I called out.

On-screen, a van popped into view at the door below us. There was another pop as the image changed, and a man stood beside the truck. “Can you make it go closer?” Deborah asked.

“Zoom in,” I said before he could do more than frown a little. He moved the cursor, highlighted the dark figure on the screen, and clicked the mouse. The picture jumped to a closer look.

“You're not gonna get much more resolution,” he said. “The pixels-”

“Shut up,” said Deborah. She was staring at the screen hard enough to melt it, and as I stared too I could see why.

It was dark, and the man was still too far away to be certain, but from the few details I could make out, there was something oddly familiar about him; the way he stood frozen in the image on the computer, his weight balanced on both feet, and the overall impression of the profile. Somehow, as vague as it was, it added up to something. And as a very loud wave of sibilant chuckling erupted from deep in the backseat of my brain, it fell on me with the impact of a concert grand piano that, actually, he looked an awful lot like-

“Dexter…?” Deborah said, in a sort of hushed and strangled croak.

Yes indeed.

Just like Dexter.

CHAPTER 23

I

AM PRETTY SURE THAT DEBORAH TOOK YOUNG MR. Bad Hair Day back to the lounge, because when I looked up again, she was standing in front of me, alone. In spite of her blue uniform she did not look at all like a cop right now. She looked worried, like she couldn't decide whether to yell or to cry, like a mommy whose special little boy had let her down in a big way.

“Well?” she demanded, and I had to agree that she had a point.

“Not terribly,” I said. “You?”

She kicked a chair. It fell over. “Goddamn it, Dexter, don't give me that clever shit! Tell me something. Tell me that wasn't you!” I didn't say anything. “Well then, tell me it

is

you! Just tell me SOMETHING! Anything at all!”

I shook my head. “I-” There was really nothing to say, so I just shook my head again. “I'm pretty sure it isn't me,” I said. “I mean, I don't think so.” Even to me that sounded like I had both feet firmly planted in the land of lame answers.

“What does that mean, ‘pretty sure'?” Deb demanded. “Does that mean you're not sure? That it might be you in that picture?”

“Well,” I said, a truly brilliant riposte, considering. “Maybe. I don't know.”

“And does ‘I don't know' mean you don't know whether you're going to tell me, or does it mean that you really don't know if that's you in the picture?”

“I'm pretty sure it isn't me, Deborah,” I repeated. “But I really don't know for sure. It looks like me, doesn't it?”

“Shit,” she said, and kicked the chair where it lay. It slammed into the table. “How can you not know, goddamn it?!”

“It

is

a little tough to explain.”

“Try!”

I opened my mouth, but for once in my life nothing came out. As if everything else wasn't bad enough, I seemed to be all out of clever, too. “I just-I've been having these… dreams, but-Deb, I really don't know,” I said, and I may have actually mumbled it.

“Shit shit SHIT!” said Deborah. Kick kick kick.

And it was very hard to disagree with her analysis of the situation.

All my stupid, self-mutilating musings swam back at me with a bright and mocking edge.

Of course it wasn't me-how could it be me? Wouldn't I know it if it was me?

Apparently not, dear boy. Apparently you didn't actually know anything at all. Because our deep dark dim little brains tell us all kinds of things that swim in and out of reality, but pictures do not lie.

Deb unleashed a new volley of savage attacks on the chair, and then straightened up. Her face was flushed very red and her eyes looked more like Harry's eyes than they ever had before. “All right,” she said. “It's like this,” and she blinked and paused for a moment as it occurred to both of us that she had just said a Harry thing.

And for a second Harry was there in the room between me and Deborah, the two of us so very different, and yet still both Harry's kids, the two strange fists of his unique legacy. Some of the steel went out of Deb's back and she looked human, a thing I hadn't seen for a while. She stared at me for a long moment, and then turned away. “You're my brother, Dex,” she said. I was very sure that was not what she had originally intended to say.

“No one will blame you,” I told her.

“Goddamn you, you're my

brother

!” she snarled, and the ferocity of it took me completely by surprise. “I don't know what went on with you and Dad. The stuff you two never talked about. But I know what he would have done.”

“Turned me in,” I said, and Deborah nodded. Something glittered in the corner of her eye. “You're all the family I have, Dex.”

“Not such a great bargain for you, is it?”

She turned to me, and I could see tears in both eyes now. For a long moment she just looked at me. I watched the tear run from her left eye and roll down her cheek. She wiped it, straightened up, and took a deep breath, turning away to the window once again.

“That's right,” she said. “He would've turned you in. Which is what I am going to do.” She looked away from me, out the window, far out to the horizon.

“I have to finish these interviews,” she said. “I'm leaving you in charge of determining if this evidence is relevant. Take it to your computer at home and figure out whatever you have to figure out. And when I am done here, before I go back out on duty, I am coming to get it, to hear what you have to say.” She glanced at her watch. “Eight o'clock. And if I have to take you in then, I will.” She looked back at me for a very long moment. “Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said softly, and she left the room.

I moved over to the window and had a look for myself. Below me the circus of cops and reporters and gawking geeks was swirling, unchanged. Far away, beyond the parking lot, I could see the expressway, filled with cars and trucks blasting along at the Miami speed limit of ninety-five miles per hour. And beyond that in the dim distance was the high-rise skyline of Miami.

And here in the foreground stood dim dazed Dexter, staring out the window at a city that did not speak and would not have told him anything even if it did.

Goddamn it, Dexter.

I don't know how long I stared out the window, but it eventually occurred to me that there were no answers out there. There might be some, though, on Captain Pimple's computer. I turned to the desk. The machine had a CD-RW drive. In the top drawer I found a box of recordable CDs. I put one into the drive, copied the entire file of pictures, and took the CD out. I held it, glanced at it; it didn't have much to say, and I probably imagined the faint chuckling I thought I heard from the dark voice in the backseat. But just to be safe, I wiped the file from the hard drive.

On my way out, the Broward cops on duty didn't stop me, or even speak, but it did seem to me that they looked at me with a very hard and suspicious indifference.

I wondered if this was what it felt like to have a conscience. I supposed I would never really know-unlike poor Deborah, being torn apart by far too many loyalties that could not possibly live together in the same brain. I admired her solution, leaving me in charge of determining if the evidence was relevant. Very neat. It had a very Harry feel to it, like leaving a loaded gun on the table in front of a guilty friend and walking away, knowing that guilt would pull the trigger and save the city the cost of a trial. In Harry's world, a man's conscience couldn't live with that kind of shame.

But as Harry had known very well, his world was long dead-and I did not have any conscience, shame, or guilt. All I had was a CD with a few pictures on it. And of course, those pictures made even less sense than a conscience.

There had to be some explanation that did not involve Dexter driving a truck around Miami in his sleep. Of course, most of the drivers on the road seemed to manage it, but they were at least partially awake when they started out, weren't they? And here I was, all bright-eyed and cheerfully alert and not at all the kind of guy who would ever prowl the city and kill unconsciously; no, I was the kind of guy who wanted to be awake for every moment of it. And to get right down to the bottom line, there was the night on the causeway. It was physically impossible that I could have thrown the head at my own car, wasn't it?

Unless I had made myself believe that I could be in two places at once, which made a great deal of sense-considering that the only alternative I could come up with was believing that I only

thought

I had been sitting there in my car watching someone else throw the head, when in fact I had actually thrown the head at my own car and then-

No. Ridiculous. I could not ask the last few shreds of my brain to believe in this kind of fairy tale. There would be some very simple, logical explanation, and I would find it, and even though I sounded like a man trying to convince himself that there was nothing under the bed, I said it out loud.

“There is a simple, logical explanation,” I said to myself. And because you never know who else is listening, I added, “And there is nothing under the bed.”

But once again, the only reply was a very meaningful silence from the Dark Passenger.

In spite of the usual cheerful bloodlust of the other drivers, I found no answers on the drive home. Or to be perfectly truthful, I found no answers that made sense. There were plenty of stupid answers. But they all revolved around the same central premise, which was that all was not well inside the skull of our favorite monster, and I found this very hard to accept. Perhaps it was only that I did not feel any crazier than I had ever felt. I did not notice any missing gray tissue, I did not seem to be thinking any slower or more strangely, and so far I'd had no conversations with invisible buddies that I was aware of.

Except in my sleep, of course-and did that really count? Weren't we all crazy in our sleep? What was sleep, after all, but the process by which we dumped our insanity into a dark subconscious pit and came out on the other side ready to eat cereal instead of the neighbor's children?

And aside from the dreams I'd had, everything made sense: someone else had thrown the head at me on the causeway, left a Barbie in my apartment, and arranged the bodies in intriguing ways. Someone else, not me. Someone other than dear dark Dexter. And that someone else was finally captured, right here, in the pictures on this CD. And I would look at the pictures and prove once and for all that-

That it looked very much like the killer might be me?

Good, Dexter. Very good. I told you there was a logical explanation. Someone else who was actually me. Of course. That made wonderful sense, didn't it?

I got home and peeked into my apartment carefully. There did not appear to be anyone waiting for me. There was no reason why there should have been, of course. But knowing that this archfiend who was terrorizing the metropolis knew where I lived was a little unsettling. He had proven he was the kind of monster who might do anything-he could even come in and leave more doll parts at any time. Especially if he was me.

Which of course he was not. Certainly not. The pictures would show some small something to prove that the resemblance was only coincidental-and the fact that I was so strangely attuned to the murders was also coincidental, no doubt. Yes, this was clearly a series of perfectly logical monstrous coincidences. Perhaps I should call the Guinness Book people. I wondered what the world record was for not being sure whether you committed a string of murders?

I put on a Philip Glass CD and sat in my chair. The music stirred the emptiness inside me and after a few minutes something like my usual calm and icy logic returned. I went to my computer and turned it on. I put the CD into the drive and looked at the pictures. I zoomed in and out and did everything I knew how to do in an attempt to clean up the images. I tried things I had only heard about and things that I made up on the spot, and nothing worked. At the end I was no further along than I had been when I started. It was just not possible to get enough resolution to make the face of the man in the picture come clear. Still I stared at the pictures. I moved them around to different angles. I printed them out and held them up to the light. I did everything a normal person would do, and while I was pleased with my imitation, I did not discover anything except that the man in the picture looked like me.

I just could not get a clear impression of anything, even his clothing. He wore a shirt that could have been white, or tan, or yellow, or even light blue. The parking lot light that shone on him was one of the bright Argon anticrime lights and it cast a pinkish-orange glow; between that and the lack of resolution in the picture it was impossible to tell any more. His pants were long, loosely cut, light-colored. Altogether a standard outfit that anyone might have worn-including me. I had clothing just like it several times over, enough to outfit an entire platoon of Dexter lookalikes.

I did manage to zoom in on the side of the truck enough to make out the letter “A” and, below it, a “B,” followed by an “R” and either a “C” or an “O.” But the truck was angled away from the camera and that was all I could see.

None of the other pictures offered me any hints. I watched the sequence again: the man vanished, reappeared, and then the van was gone. No good angles, no fortuitous accidental glimpses of his license plate-and no reason to say with any authority that either it was or was not deftly dreaming Dexter.

When I finally looked up from the computer night had come and it was dark outside. And I did what a normal person almost certainly would have done several hours ago: I quit. There was nothing else I could do except wait for Deborah. I would have to let my poor tormented sister haul me away to jail. After all, one way or another I was guilty. I really should be locked up. Perhaps I could even share a cell with McHale. He could teach me the rat dance.

And with that thought I did a truly wonderful thing.

I fell asleep.

CHAPTER 24

I

HAD NO DREAMS, NO SENSE OF TRAVELING OUTSIDE my body; I saw no parade of ghostly images or headless, bloodless bodies. No visions of sugarplums danced in my head. There was nothing there, not even me, nothing but a dark and timeless sleep. And yet when the telephone woke me up I knew that the call was about Deborah, and I knew that she was not coming. My hand was already sweating as I grabbed up the receiver. “Yes,” I said.

“This is Captain Matthews,” the voice said. “I need to speak to Detective Morgan, please.”

“She isn't here,” I said, a small part of me sinking from the thought and what it meant.

“Hmmp. Aahh, well, that's not- When did she leave?”

I glanced at the clock instinctively; it was a quarter after nine and I fell deeper into the sweats. “She was never here,” I told the captain.

“But she's signed out to your place. She's on duty-she's supposed to be there.”

“She never got here.”

“Well goddamn it,” he said. “She said you have some evidence we need.”

“I do,” I said. And I hung up the telephone.

I did have some evidence, I was terribly sure of that. I just didn't quite know what it was. But I had to figure it out, and I did not think I had a great deal of time. Or to be more accurate, I did not think Deb had a great deal of time.

And again, I was not aware of how I knew this. I did not consciously say to myself, “He has Deborah.” No alarming pictures of her impending fate popped into my brain. And I did not have to experience any blinding insights or think, “Gee, Deb should have been here by now; this is unlike her.” I simply knew, as I had known when I woke up, that Deb had come for me, and she had not made it. And I knew what that meant.

He had her.

He had taken her entirely for my benefit, this I knew. He had been circling closer and closer to me-coming into my apartment, writing small messages with his victims, teasing me with hints and glimpses of what he was doing. And now he was as close as he could get without being in the same room. He had taken Deb and he was waiting with her. Waiting for me.

But where? And how long would he wait before he became impatient and started to play without me?

And without me, I knew very well who his playmate would be-Deborah. She had turned up at my place dressed for work in her hooker outfit, absolutely gift-wrapped for him. He must have thought it was Christmas. He had her and she would be his special friend tonight. I did not want to think of her like that, taped and stretched tight and watching slow awful pieces of herself disappear forever. But that was how it would be. Under other circumstances, it might make a wonderful evening's entertainment-but not with Deborah. I was pretty sure I didn't want that, didn't want him to do anything permanent and wonderful, not tonight. Later, perhaps, with someone else. When we knew each other a little better. But not now. Not with Deborah.

And with that thought of course everything seemed better. It was just so nice to have that settled. I preferred my sister alive, rather than in small bloodless sections. Lovely, almost human of me. Now that was settled: What next? I could call Rita, perhaps take in a movie, or a walk in the park. Or, let's see-maybe, I don't know… save Deborah? Yes, that sounded like fun. But-

How?

I had a few clues, of course. I knew the way he thought-after all, I had been thinking that way myself. And he wanted me to find him. He had been sending that message loud and clear. If I could put all the distracting stupidity out of my head-all the dreams and New Age fairy-chasing and everything else-then I was certain that I could arrive at the logical and correct location. He would not have taken Deb unless he thought he had given me everything a clever monster would need to know in order to find him.

All right then, clever Dexter-find him. Track down the Deb-napper. Let your relentless logic slash across the back trail like an icy wolf pack. Kick the giant brain into high gear; let the wind race across the rocketing synapses of your powerful mind as it speeds to its beautiful, inevitable conclusion. Go, Dexter, go!

Dexter?

Hello? Is anybody in there?

Apparently not. I heard no wind from rocketing synapses. I was as empty as if I had never been. There was no swirl of debilitating emotions, of course, since I didn't have any emotions to swirl. But the result was just as daunting. I was as numb and drained as if I really could feel something. Deborah was gone. She was in terrible danger of becoming a fascinating work of performance art. And her only hope of maintaining any kind of existence beyond a series of still pictures tacked up on a police lab board was her battered, brain-dead brother. Poor dog-dumb Dexter, sitting in a chair with his brain running in circles, chasing its tail, howling at the moon.

I took a deep breath. Of all the times I had ever needed to be me, this was one of the foremost. I concentrated very hard and steadied me, and as a small amount of Dexter returned to fill the echo in my brain cavity, I realized just how human and stupid I had become. There was really no great mystery here. In fact, it was patently obvious. My friend had done everything but send a formal invitation reading, “The honor of your presence is requested at the vivisection of your sister. Black heart optional.” But even this small blob of logic was wiped out of my throbbing skull by a new thought that wormed its way in, oozing rotten logic.

I had been asleep when Deb disappeared.

Could that mean that once again I had done it without knowing it? What if I had already taken Deb apart somewhere, stacked the pieces in some small, cold storage room and-

Storage room? Where had that come from?

The closed-in feeling… the rightness of the closet at the hockey rink… the cool air blowing across my spine

… Why did that matter? Why did I keep coming back to that? Because no matter what else happened, I did; I returned to those same illogical sense memories, and there was no reason for them that I could see. What did it mean? And why did I actually give a single hummingbird's fart what it meant? Because whether it meant something or not, it was all I had to go on. I had to find a place that matched that sense of cool and pressing rightness. There was simply no other way to go: find the box. And there I would find Deb, too, and find either myself or my not-self. Wasn't that simple?

No. It wasn't simple at all, just simpleminded. It made absolutely no sense to pay any attention to the ghostly secret messages floating up at me from my dreams. Dreams had no existence in reality, left no Freddy Krueger-crossover claw marks on our wake-up world. I couldn't very well dash out of the house and drive aimlessly around in a psychic funk. I was a cool and logical being. And so it was in a cool and logical manner that I locked my apartment door and strolled to the car. I still had no idea where I was going, but the need to get there quickly had grabbed the reins and whipped me down to the building's parking area, where I kept my car. But twenty feet away from my trusty vehicle I slammed to a stop as though I had run into an invisible wall.

The dome light was on.

I had certainly not left it on-it had been daylight when I parked, and I could see that the doors were closed tightly. A casual thief would have left the door ajar to avoid the noise from closing it.

I approached slowly, not at all sure what I expected to see or whether I really wanted to see it. From five feet away I could see something in the passenger seat. I circled the car carefully and peered down at it, my nerves tingling, and peeked in. And there it was.

Barbie again. I was getting quite a collection.

This one was dressed in a little sailor hat and a shirt with a bare midriff, and tight pink hot pants. In one hand she clutched a small suitcase that said CUNARD on the side.

I opened the door and picked up the doll. I pulled the little suitcase from Barbie's hand and popped it open. Some small something fell out and rolled onto the floorboard. I picked it up. It looked an awful lot like Deborah's class ring. On the inside of the band was etched D.M., Deborah's initials.

I collapsed onto the seat, clutching Barbie in my sweaty hands. I turned her over. I bent her legs. I waved her arms. And what did you do last night, Dexter? Oh, I played with my dolls while a friend chopped up my sister.

I did not waste any time wondering how Cruise Line Hooker Barbie had gotten into my car. This was clearly a message-or a clue? But clues really ought to hint at something, and this one seemed to lead in the wrong direction. Clearly he had Debbie-but Cunard? How did that fit in with tight cold killing space? I could see no connection. But there was really only one place in Miami where it did fit.

I drove up Douglas and turned right through Coconut Grove. I had to slow down to thread my way through the parade of happy imbeciles dancing between the shops and cafés. They all seemed to have far too much time and money and very few clues beyond that, and it took me much longer than it should have to get through them, but it was hard to be too upset since I didn't actually know where I was going. Onward to somewhere; along Bayfront Drive, over to Brickle, and into downtown. I saw no huge neon signs bedecked with flashing arrows and encouraging words to direct me: “This way to the dissection!” But I drove on, approaching American Airlines Arena and, just beyond, MacArthur Causeway. In the quick glimpse I got on the near side of the arena, I could see the superstructure of a cruise ship in Government Cut, not a Cunard Lines ship, or course, but I peered anxiously for some sign. It seemed obvious that I was not actually being directed onto a cruise ship; too crowded, too many snooping officials. But somewhere nearby, somewhere related-which of course had to mean what? No further clues. I looked hard enough at the cruise ship to melt the poop deck, but Deborah did not spring from the hold and dance down the gangway.

I looked some more. Beside the ship, cargo cranes reared up into the night sky like abandoned props from

Star Wars

. A little farther and the stacks of cargo boxes were just barely visible in the dark below the cranes, great untidy heaps of them, scattered across the ground as if a gigantic and very bored child had flung out his toy box full of building blocks. Some of the storage boxes were refrigerated. And then beyond these boxes-

Back up just for a moment, dear boy.

Who was that whispering to me, muttering what soft words to all-alone darkly driving Dexter? Who sat behind me now; whose dry chuckling filled the backseat? And why? What message was rattling into my brainless, echo-empty head?

Storage boxes.

Some of them refrigerated.

But why the storage boxes? What possible reason could I have to be interested in a pile of cold, tightly enclosed spaces?

Oh, yes. Well. Since you put it that way.

Could this be the place, the future home of the Dexter's Birthplace Museum? With authentic, lifelike exhibits, including a rare live performance by Dexter's only sister?

I yanked my steering wheel hard, cutting off a BMW with a very loud horn. I extended my middle finger, for once driving like the Miami native I was, and accelerated over the causeway.

The cruise ship was off to the left. The area with all the boxes was on the right, surrounded by a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. I drove around one time on the access road, wrestling a rising tide of certainty and a swelling chorus of what sounded like college fight songs from the Dark Passenger. The road dead-ended at a guard booth well before I got to the containers. There was a gate with several uniformed gentlemen lounging about, and no way through without answering some fairly embarrassing questions. Yes, officer, I wondered if I could come in and look around? You see, I thought it might be a good place for a friend of mine to slice up my sister.

I cut through a line of orange cones in the middle of the road thirty feet from the gate and turned around, back the way I had come. The cruise ship loomed on the right now. I turned left just before I came to the bridge back to the mainland and drove into a large area with a terminal on one end and a chain-link fence on the other. The fence was gaily decorated with signs that threatened dire punishment to anyone who strayed into the area, signed by U.S. Customs.

The fence led back to the main road along a large parking lot, empty at this time of night. I cruised its perimeter slowly, staring at the containers on the far side. These would be from foreign ports, needing to go through customs, access tightly controlled. It would be much too difficult for anyone to get in and out of this area, especially if they were carrying questionable loads of body parts and the like. I would either need to find a different area or admit that chasing vague feelings dredged up from a series of taunting dreams and a scantily clad doll was a waste of time. And the sooner I admitted that, the better my chance of finding Deb. She was not here. There was no reason she should be.

At last, a logical thought. I felt better already, and certainly would have been smug about it-if I had not seen a familiar panel truck parked right up against the inside of the fence, parked to display the lettering on the side that said ALLONZO BROTHERS. My private crowd in the basement of my brain sang too loudly for me to hear myself smirk, so I pulled over and parked. The clever-boy part of me was knocking on the front door of my brain and calling out, “Hurry! Hurry! Go-go-go!” But around back the lizard slithered up to the window and flicked its cautious tongue, and so I sat for a long moment before I finally climbed out of the car.

I walked to the fence and stood like a bit-part actor in a World War II prison camp movie, my fingers locked in the mesh of the fence, peering hungrily at what lay beyond, only a few impossible yards away. I was sure that there must be a very simple way for a marvelously intelligent creature like me to get in, but it was some indication of the state I was in that I could not seem to fasten one thought onto another. I had to get in, but I could not. And so I stood there clinging to the fence and looking in, knowing full well that everything that mattered was right there, only a few yards away, and I was completely unable to fling my giant brain at the problem and catch a solution as it bounced back. The mind picks some very bad times to take a walk, doesn't it?

My backseat alarm clock went off. I had to move away, and right now. I was standing suspiciously in a well-guarded area, and it was night; any moment one of the guards was certain to take an interest in the handsome young man peering intelligently through the fence. I would have to move on and find some way in as I rolled along in my car. I stepped back from the fence, giving it one last, loving look. Right there where my feet had touched the fence, a break was barely visible. The fence links had been snipped just enough to allow entry for one human being, or even a good copy like me. The flap was pinned in place by the weight of the parked truck so it would not swing out and give itself away. It must have been done recently, this evening, since the truck had arrived.

My final invitation.

I backed away slowly, feeling an automatic hello-there kind of absentminded smile climb up on my face as a disguise. Hello there, officer, just out for a walk. Lovely evening for a dismemberment, isn't it? I cheerfully scuffed over to my car, looking around at nothing but the moon over the water, whistling a happy tune as I climbed in and drove away. No one seemed to be paying any attention whatsoever-except, of course, for the Hallelujah chorus in my mind. I nudged my car into a parking place over by the cruise ship office, perhaps one hundred yards from my little handmade gate into Paradise. A few other cars were scattered nearby. No one would pay any mind to mine.

But as I parked another car slid into the spot next to me, a light blue Chevy with a woman behind the wheel. I sat still for a moment. So did she. I opened my door and got out.

So did Detective LaGuerta.

CHAPTER 25

I

HAVE ALWAYS BEEN VERY GOOD AT AWKWARD social situations, but I must admit that this one had me stumped. I just didn't know what to say, and for a moment I stared at LaGuerta and she looked back at me with her eyes unblinking and her fangs slightly exposed, like a predatory feline trying to decide whether to play with you or eat you. I could think of no remark that did not begin with a stammer, and she seemed interested only in watching me. So we simply stood there for a long moment. At last she broke the ice with a light quip.

“What's in there?” she asked, nodding toward the fence, some one hundred yards away.

“Why, Detective!” I gushed, hoping that she wouldn't notice what she had said, I suppose. “What are you doing here?”

“I followed you. What's in there?”

“In there?” I said. I know, a really dumb remark, but honestly, I had just about run out of the smart ones and I can't be expected to come up with something good under such circumstances.

She cocked her head to one side and poked her tongue out, letting it run along her bottom lip; slowly to the left, right, left, and back into her mouth again. Then she nodded. “You must think I'm stupid,” she said. And of course that thought had crossed my mind fleetingly once or twice, but it didn't seem politic to say so. “But you got to remember,” she went on, “I'm a full detective, and this is Miami. How do you think I got that, huh?”

“Your looks?” I asked, giving her a dashing smile. It never hurts to compliment a woman.

She showed me her lovely set of teeth, even brighter in the high crime lights that lit up the parking area. “That's good,” she said, and she moved her lips into a strange half smile that hollowed her cheeks and made her look old. “That's the kind of shit I used to fall for when I thought you liked me.”

“I do like you, Detective,” I told her, perhaps a little too eagerly. She didn't seem to hear me.

“But then you push me on the floor like I'm some kind of pig, and I wonder what's wrong with me? I got bad breath? And it hits me. It's not me. It's you. There's something wrong about you.”

Of course she was right, but it still hurt to hear her say so. “I don't- What do you mean?”

She shook her head again. “Sergeant Doakes wants to kill you and he doesn't even know why. I should've listened to him. Something is wrong about you. And you're connected to this hooker stuff some way.”

“Connected- What do you mean?”

This time there was an edge of savage glee to the smile she showed me and the trace of accent snuck back into her voice. “You can save the cute acting for your lawyer. And maybe a judge. 'Cause I think I got you now.” She looked at me for a long hard moment and her dark eyes glittered. She looked as inhuman as I am and it made a small shiver run across the back of my neck. Had I truly underestimated her? Was she really this good?

“And so you followed me?”

More teeth. “That's right, yeah,” she said. “Why are you looking around at the fence? What's in there?”

I am sure that under ordinary circumstances I would have thought of this before, but I plead duress. It truly didn't occur to me until that very moment. But when it did, it was like a small and painful light flashing on. “When did you pick me up? At my house? At what time?”

“Why do you keep changing the subject? Something's in there, huh?”

“Detective, please-this could be very important. When and where did you start to follow me?”

She studied me for a minute, and I began to realize that I had, in fact, underestimated her. There was a great deal more to this woman than political instinct. She really did seem to have something extra. I was still not convinced that any of it was intelligence, but she did have patience, and sometimes that was more important than smarts in her line of work. She was willing to simply wait and watch me and keep repeating her question until she got an answer. And then she would probably ask the same question a few more times, wait and watch some more, to see what I would do. Ordinarily I could outwit her, but I could not possibly outwait her, not tonight. So I put on my best humble face and repeated myself. “Please, Detective…”

She stuck her tongue out again, and then finally put it away. “Okay,” she said. “When your sister was gone for a few hours and no word where, I started to think maybe she's up to something. And I know she can't do anything herself, so where would she go?” She arched an eyebrow at me, then continued in a triumphant tone. “To your place, that's where! To talk with you!” She bobbed her head, pleased with her deductive logic. “And so I think about you for a while. How you're always showing up and looking, even when you don't have to. How you figure out those serial killers sometimes, except this one? And then how you fuck me over with that stupid list, make me look stupid, push me on the fucking floor-” Her face looked harder, a little older again for a moment. Then she smiled and went on. “I said something out loud, in my office, and Sergeant Doakes says, ‘I told you about him but you don't listen.' And all of a sudden it's your big handsome face all over the place and it shouldn't be.” She shrugged. “So I went to your place, too.”

“When? At what time, did you notice?”

“Naw,” she said. “But I'm only there like twenty minutes and then you come out and play with your faggot Barbie doll and then drive over here.”

“Twenty minutes-” So she hadn't been there in time to see who or what had taken Deborah. And quite probably she was telling the truth and had simply followed me to see-to see what?

“But why follow me at all?”

She shrugged. “You're connected to this thing. Maybe you didn't do it, I don't know. But I'm gonna find out. And some of what I find is gonna stick to you. What's in there, in those boxes? You gonna tell me, or we just going to stand here all night?”

In her own way, she had put her finger right on it. We could not stand here all night. We could not, I was sure, stand here much longer at all before terrible things happened to Deborah. If they hadn't already happened. We had to go, right now, go find him and stop him. But how did I do that with LaGuerta along for the ride? I felt like a comet with a tail I didn't want.

I took a deep breath. Rita had once taken me to a New Age Health Awareness Workshop which had stressed the importance of deep cleansing breaths. I took one. I did not feel any cleaner after my breath, but at least it made my brain whirl into brief action, and I realized I would have to do something I had rarely done before-tell the truth. LaGuerta was still staring at me, waiting for an answer.

“I think the killer is in there,” I told LaGuerta. “And I think he has Officer Morgan.”

She watched me for a moment without moving. “Okay,” she said at last. “And so you come stand at the fence and look in? 'Cause you love your sister so much you want to watch?”

“Because I wanted to get in. I was looking for a way in through the fence.”

“Because you forget that you work for the police?”

Well there it was, of course. She had actually jumped right to the real problem spot, and all by herself, too. I had no good answer for that. This whole business of telling the truth just never seems to work without some kind of awkward unpleasantness. “I just-I wanted to be sure, before I made a big fuss.”

She nodded. “Uh-huh. That's really good,” she said. “But I tell you what I think. Either you did something bad, or you know about it. And you're either hiding it, or you wanna find it by yourself.”

“By myself? But why would I want that?”

She shook her head to show how stupid that was. “So you get all the credit. You and that sister of yours. Think I didn't figure that out? I told you I'm not stupid.”

“I'm not your slasher, Detective,” I said, throwing myself on her mercy and now completely confident that she had even less than I did. “But I think he's in there, in one of the storage boxes.”

She licked her lips. “Why do you think that?”

I hesitated, but she kept her unblinking lizard stare on me. As uncomfortable as it made me, I had to tell her one more piece of truth. I nodded at the Allonzo Brothers van parked just inside the fence. “That's his truck.”

“Ha,” she said, and at last she blinked. Her focus left me for a moment and seemed to wander away into some deep place. Her hair? Her makeup? Her career? I couldn't tell. But there were a lot of awkward questions a good detective might have asked here: How did I know that was his truck? How had I found it here? Why was I so sure he hadn't simply dumped the truck and gone somewhere else? But in the final analysis LaGuerta was not a good detective; she simply nodded, licked her lips again, and said, “How are we gonna find him in there in all that?”

Clearly, I really had underestimated her. She had gone from “you” to “we” with no visible transition. “Don't you want to call for backup?” I asked her. “This is a very dangerous man.” I admit I was only needling her. But she took it very seriously.

“If I don't catch this guy by myself, in two weeks I'm a meter maid,” she said. “I got my weapon. Nobody's gonna get away from me. I'll call for backup when I have him.” She studied me without blinking. “And if he's not in there, I'll give them you.”

It seemed like a good idea to let that go. “Can you get us through the gate?”

She laughed. “'Course I can. I got my badge, get us through anywhere. And then what?”

This was the tricky part. If she went for this, I might well be home free. “Then we split up and search until we find him.”

She studied me. Again I saw in her face the thing I had seen when she first got out of her car-the look of a predator weighing her prey, wondering when and where to strike, and how many claws to use. It was horrible-I actually found myself warming to the woman. “Okay,” she said at last, and tilted her head toward her car. “Get in.”

I got in. She drove us back out onto the road and over to the gate. Even at this hour there was some traffic. Most of it seemed to be people from Ohio looking for their cruise ship, but a few of them wound up at the gate, where the guards sent them back the way they came. Detective LaGuerta cut ahead of them all, bulling her big Chevy to the front of the line. Their Midwest driving skills were no match for a Miami Cuban woman with good medical insurance driving a car she didn't care about. There was a blare of horns and some muffled shouting and we were at the guard booth.

The guard leaned out, a thin, muscular black man. “Lady, you can't-”

She held up her badge. “Police. Open the gate.” She said it with such hard-edged authority that I almost jumped out of the car to open the gate myself.

But the guard froze, took a breath through his mouth, and glanced nervously back into the booth. “What you want with-”

“Open the fucking gate, Rental,” she told him, jiggling her badge, and he finally unfroze.

“Lemme see the badge,” he said. LaGuerta held it up limply, making him take the extra step over to peer at it. He frowned at it and found nothing to object to. “Uh-huh,” he said. “Can you tell me what you want in there?”

“I can tell you that if you don't open the gate in two seconds I'm gonna put you in the trunk of my car and take you downtown to a holding cell full of gay bikers and then I'm gonna forget where I put you.”

The guard stood up. “Just trying to help,” he said, and called over his shoulder, “Tavio, open the gate!”

The gate went up and LaGuerta gunned her car through. “Sonnova bitch got something going he doesn't want me to know about,” she said. There was amusement in her voice to go with the rising edge of excitement. “But I don't care about smuggling tonight.” She looked at me. “Where we going?”

“I don't know,” I said. “I guess we should start over where he left his truck.”

She nodded, accelerating down the path between stacks of storage boxes. “If he's got a body to carry, he probably parked pretty close to wherever he was going.” As we got closer to the fence she slowed down, nosing the car quietly to within fifty feet of the truck and then stopping. “Let's take a look at the fence,” she said, slamming the transmission into park and sliding out of the car as it rocked to a stop.

I followed. LaGuerta stepped in something she didn't like and lifted her foot to look at her shoe. “Goddamint,” she said. I moved past her, feeling my pulse hammering loud and fast, and went to the truck. I walked around it, trying the doors. They were locked, and although there were two small back windows, these were painted over from the inside. I stood on the bumper and tried to peek in anyway, but there were no holes in the paint job. There was nothing more to be seen on this side, but I squatted anyway and looked on the ground. I felt rather than heard LaGuerta slither up behind me.

“What you got?” she asked, and I stood.

“Nothing,” I said. “The back windows are painted over on the inside.”

“Can you see in the front?”

I went around to the front of the truck. It was bare of any hint as well. Inside the windshield, a pair of the sunscreens so popular in Florida had been unfolded across the dashboard, blocking out any possible view into the cab. I climbed on the front bumper and up onto the hood, crawled along it from right to left, but there were no gaps in the sunscreen. “Nothing,” I said and climbed down.

“Okay,” LaGuerta said, looking at me with lidded eyes and just the smallest tip of her tongue protruding. “Which way you wanna go?”

This way

, someone whispered deep inside my brain.

Over here.

I glanced to the right, where the chuckling mental fingers had pointed and then back to LaGuerta, who was staring at me with her unblinking hungry tiger stare. “I'll go left and circle around,” I said. “Meet you halfway.”

“Okay,” LaGuerta said with a feral smile. “But I go left.”

I tried to look surprised and unhappy, and I suppose I managed a reasonable facsimile, because she watched me and then nodded. “Okay,” she repeated, and turned down the first row of stacked shipping containers.

Then I was alone with my shy interior friend. And now what? Now that I had tricked LaGuerta into leaving me the right-hand path, what did I do with it? After all, I had no reason to think it was any better than the left-hand, or for that matter, better than standing by the fence and juggling coconuts. There was only my sibilant internal clamor to direct me, and was that really enough? When you are an icy tower of pure reason as I have always been, you naturally look for logical hints to direct your course of action. Just as naturally, you ignore the nonobjective irrational screeching of loud musical voices from the bottom floor of your brain that try to send you reeling along the path, no matter how urgent they have become in the rippling light of the moon.

And as to the rest, the particulars of where I should go now-I looked around, down the long irregular rows of containers. Off to the side where LaGuerta had gone spike-heeling along, there were several rows of brightly colored truck trailers. And in front of me, stretching off to the right, were the shipping containers.

Suddenly, I was very uncertain. I didn't like the feeling. I closed my eyes. The moment I did, the whispering became a cloud of sound and without knowing why I found myself moving toward a clutter of shipping containers down near the water. I had no conscious notion that these particular containers were any different or better or that this direction was more proper or rewarding. My feet simply jerked into motion and I followed them. It was as if they were tracing some path only the toes could see, or as if some compelling pattern was being sung by the whisper-wail of my internal chorus, and my feet translated and dragged me along.

As they moved the sound grew inside me, a muted hilarious roar, pulling me faster than my feet, yanking me clumsily down the crooked path between boxes with powerful invisible jerks. And yet at the same time a new voice, small and reasonable, was pushing me backward, telling me I did not want to be here of all places, yammering at me to run, go home, get away from this place, and it made no more sense than any of the other voices. I was pulled forward and pushed back at the same time so powerfully that I could not make my legs work properly and I stumbled and fell flat-faced onto the hard rocky ground. I rose to my knees, mouth dry and heart pounding, and paused to finger a rip in my beautiful Dacron bowling shirt. I pushed my fingertip through the hole and wiggled it at myself. Hello, Dexter, where are you going? Hello, Mr. Finger. I don't know, but I'm almost there. I hear my friends calling.

And so I climbed to suddenly unsteady feet and listened. I heard it clearly now, even with my eyes open, and felt it so strongly I could not even walk. I stood for a moment, leaning against one of the containers. A very sobering thought, as if I needed one. Something nameless was born in this place, something that lived in the darkest hidey-hole of the thing that was Dexter, and for the first time that I could remember I was scared. I did not want to be here where horrible things lurked. Yet I had to be here to find Deborah. I was being ripped in half by an invisible tug-of-war. I felt like Sigmund Freud's poster child, and I wanted to go home and go to bed.

But the moon roared in the dark sky above me, the water howled along Government Cut, and the mild night breeze shrieked over me like a convention of banshees, forcing my feet forward. And the singing swelled within me like some kind of gigantic mechanical choir, urging me on, reminding me of how to move my feet, pushing me lock-kneed down the rows of boxes. My heart hammered and yammered, my short gasps of breath were much too loud, and for the first time I could remember I felt weak, woozy, and stupid-like a human being, like a very small and helpless human being.

I staggered along the strangely familiar path on borrowed feet until I could stagger no more and once again I put an arm out to lean against a box, a box with an air-conditioning compressor attached, pounding away at the back and mixing with the shriek of the night, all thumping in my head so loudly now that I could hardly see. And as I leaned against the box the door swung open.

The inside of the box was lit by a pair of battery-powered hurricane lamps. Against the back wall there was a temporary operating table made of packing crates.

And held unmoving in place on the table was my dear sister Deborah.

CHAPTER 26

F

OR A FEW SECONDS IT DIDN'T REALLY SEEM necessary to breathe. I just looked. Long, slick strands of duct tape wrapped around my sister's arms and legs. She wore gold lamé hot pants and a skimpy silk blouse tied above her navel. Her hair was pulled back tight, her eyes were unnaturally wide, and she breathed rapidly through her nose, since her mouth, too, was held closed by a strip of duct tape that went across her lips and down to the table to hold her head still.

I tried to think of something to say, but realized my mouth was too dry to say it and so I just looked. Deborah looked back. There were many things in her eyes, but the plainest was fear, and that held me there in the doorway. I had never seen that look on her before and I was not sure what to think about it. I took half a step toward Deborah and she flinched against the duct tape. Afraid? Of course-but afraid of me? I was here to rescue her, most likely. Why should she be afraid of me? Unless-

Had I done this?

During my little “nap” earlier this evening what if Deborah had arrived at my apartment, as scheduled, and found my Dark Passenger behind the wheel of the Dexter-mobile? And unknown to me I had brought her here and taped her so tantalizingly to the table without consciously realizing it-which made absolutely no sense, naturally. Had I raced home and left myself the Barbie doll, then gone upstairs and flopped on the bed and woke up as “me” again, like I was running some kind of homicidal relay race? Impossible: but…

How else had I known to come here?

I shook my head; there was no way I could have picked this one cold box out of all the places in Miami, unless I already knew where it was. And I did. The only way that could be possible was if I had been here before. And if not tonight with Deb, then when and with whom?

“I was almost sure this was the right spot,” a voice said, a voice so very like my own that for a moment I thought I had said it, and I wondered what I meant by that.

The hair went up on the back of my neck and I took another half step toward Deborah-and he came forward out of the shadow. The soft light of the lanterns lit him up and our eyes met; for a moment the room spun back and forth and I did not quite know where I was. My sight shifted between me at the door and him at the small makeshift worktable, and I saw me seeing him, then I saw him seeing me. In a blinding flash I saw me on the floor, sitting still and unmoving, and I did not know what that vision meant. Very unsettling-and then I was myself again, although I was somewhat uncertain what that meant.

“Almost sure,” he said again, a soft and happy voice like Mr. Rogers's troubled child. “But now here you are, so this must be the right place. Don't you think?”

There is no pretty way for me to say this, but the truth is, I stared at him with my mouth hanging open. I am quite sure I was almost drooling. I just stared. It was him. There was no question about it. Here was the man in the pictures we had found on the webcam, the man both Deb and I had thought might very well be me.

This close I could see that he was not, in fact, me; not quite, and I felt a small wave of gratitude at that realization. Hurray-I was someone else. I was not completely crazy yet. Seriously antisocial, of course, and somewhat sporadically homicidal, nothing wrong with that. But not crazy. There was somebody else, and he was not me. Three cheers for Dexter's brain.

But he was very much like me. Perhaps an inch or two taller, thicker through the shoulders and chest as though he had been doing a great deal of heavy weight lifting. That, combined with the paleness of his face, made me think that he might have been in prison recently. Behind the pallor, though, his face was very similar to mine; the same nose and cheekbones, the same look in the eyes that said the lights were on but nobody was home. Even his hair had the same awkward half wave to it. He did not really look like me, but very similar.

“Yes,” he said. “It is a little bit of a shock the first time, isn't it?”

“Just a little,” I said. “Who are you? And why is all this so-” I left it unfinished, because I did not know what all this was.

He made a face, a very Dexter-disappointed face. “Oh, dear. And I was so sure you had figured it out.”

I shook my head. “I don't even know how I got here,” I said.

He smiled softly. “Somebody else driving tonight?” As the hair stood up on the back of my neck he chuckled just a little, a mechanical sound that was not worth mentioning-except that the lizard voice from the underside of my brain matched it note for note. “And it isn't even a full moon, is it?”

“But not actually an empty moon,” I said. Hardly great wit, but some kind of attempt, which under the circumstances seemed significant. And I realized that I was half drunk with the realization that here at last was someone who

knew

. He was not making idle remarks that coincidentally stabbed into my own personal bull's-eye. It was his bull's-eye, too. He knew. For the first time I could look across the gigantic gulf between my eyes and someone else's and say without any kind of worry,

He is like me

.

Whatever it was that I was, he was one, too.

“But seriously,” I said. “Who are you?”

His face stretched into a Dexter-the-Cheshire-Cat smile, but because it was so much like my own I could see there was no real happiness behind it. “What do you remember from before?” he said. And the echo of that question bounced off the container's walls and nearly shattered my brain.

CHAPTER 27

W

HAT DO YOU REMEMBER FROM BEFORE? HARRY had asked me.

Nothing, Dad.

Except-

Images tugged at my underbrain. Mental pictures-dreams? memories?-very clear visions, whatever they were. And they were here-this room? No; impossible. This box could not have been here very long, and I had certainly never been in it before. But the tightness of the space, the cool air flowing from the thumping compressor, the dim light-everything called out to me in a symphony of homecoming. Of course it had not been this same box-but the pictures were so clear, so similar, so completely almost-right, except for-

I blinked; an image fluttered behind my eyes. I closed them.

And the inside of a different box jumped back out at me. There were no cartons in this other box. And there were-things over there. Over by… Mommy? I could see her face there, and she was somehow hiding and peeking up over the-things-just her face showing, her unwinking unblinking unmoving face. And I wanted to laugh at first, because Mommy had hidden so well. I could not see the rest of her, just her face. She must have made a hole in the floor. She must be hiding in the hole and peeking up-but why didn't she answer me now that I saw her? Why didn't she even wink? And even when I called her really loud she didn't answer, didn't move, didn't do anything but look at me. And without Mommy, I was alone.

But no-not quite alone.

I turned my head and the memory turned with me. I was not alone. Someone was with me. Very confusing at first, because it was me-but it was someone else-but it looked like me-but we both looked like me-

But what were we doing here in this box? And why wasn't Mommy moving? She should help us. We were sitting here in a deep puddle, of, of-Mommy should move, get us out of this, this-

“Blood…?” I whispered.

“You remembered,” he said behind me. “I'm so happy.”

I opened my eyes. My head was pounding hideously. I could almost see the other room superimposed on this one. And in this other room tiny Dexter sat right

there

. I could put my feet on the spot. And the other me sat beside me, but he was not me, of course; he was some other someone, a someone I knew as well as myself, a someone named-

“Biney…?” I said hesitantly. The sound was the same, but the name did not seem quite right.

He nodded happily. “That's what you called me. At the time you had trouble saying Brian. You said Biney.” He patted my hand. “That's all right. It's nice to have a nickname.” He paused, his face smiling but his eyes locked onto my face. “Little brother.”

I sat down. He sat next to me.

“What-” was all I could manage to say.

“Brother,” he repeated. “Irish twins. You were born only one year after me. Our mother was somewhat careless.” His face twisted into a hideous, very happy smile. “In more ways than one,” he said.

I tried to swallow. It didn't work. He-Brian-my brother-went on.

“I'm just guessing with some of this,” he said. “But I had a little time on my hands, and when I was encouraged to learn a useful trade, I did. I got very good at finding things with the computer. I found the old police files. Mommy dearest hung out with a very naughty crowd. In the import business, just like me. Of course, their product was a little more sensitive.” He reached behind him into a carton and pulled out a handful of hats with a springing panther on them. “My things are made in Taiwan. Theirs came from Colombia. My best guess is that Mumsy and her friends tried a little independent project with some product that strictly speaking did not actually belong to her, and her business associates were unhappy with her spirit of independence and decided to discourage her.”

He put the hats carefully back in the carton and I felt him looking at me, but I could not even turn my head. After a moment he looked away.

“They found us here,” he said. “Right here.” His hand went to the floor and touched the exact spot where the small other not-me had been sitting in that long-ago other box. “Two and a half days later. Stuck to the floor in dried blood, an inch deep.” His voice here was grating, horrible; he said that awful word,

blood

, just the way I would have said it, with contemptuous and utter loathing. “According to the police reports, there were several men here, too. Probably three or four. One or more of them may well have been our father. Of course, the chain saw made identification very difficult. But they are fairly sure there was only one woman. Our dear old mother. You were three years old. I was four.”

“But,” I said. Nothing else came out.

“Quite true,” Brian told me. “And you were very hard to find, too. They are so fussy with adoption records in this state. But I did find you, little brother. I did, didn't I?” Once again he patted my hand, a strange gesture I had never seen from anyone in my life. Of course, I had never before seen a flesh-and-blood sibling, either. Perhaps hand-patting was something I should practice with my brother, or with Deborah-and I realized with a small flutter of concern that I had forgotten all about Deborah.

I looked over at her, some six feet away, all neatly taped into place.

“She's fine,” my brother said. “I didn't want to begin without you.”

It may seem a very strange thing for my first coherent question, but I asked him, “How did you know I would want to?” Which perhaps made it sound as though I truly did want to-and of course I didn't really want to explore Deborah. Certainly not. And yet-here was my big brother, wanting to play, surely a rare enough opportunity. More than our ties of mutual parent, far more, was the fact that he was like me. “You couldn't really know,” I said, sounding far more uncertain than I would have thought possible.

“I didn't know,” he said. “But I thought there was a very good chance. The same thing happened to both of us.” His smile broadened and he lifted a forefinger into the air. “The Traumatic Event-you know that term? Have you done any reading on monsters like us?”

“Yes,” I said. “And Harry-my foster father-but he would never say exactly what had happened.”

Brian waved a hand around at the interior of the little box. “This happened, little brother. The chain saw, the flying body parts, the…

blood

-” With that same fearful emphasis again. “Two and a half days of sitting in the stuff. A wonder we survived at all, isn't it? Almost enough to make you believe in God.” His eyes glittered and, for some reason or other, Deborah squirmed and made a muffled noise. He ignored her. “They thought you were young enough to recover. I was just a bit over the age limit. But we both suffered a classic Traumatic Event. All the literature agrees. It made me what I am-and I had a thought that it might do the same for you.”

“It did,” I said, “exactly the same.”

“Isn't that nice,” he said. “Family ties.”

I looked at him. My brother. That alien word. If I had said it aloud I am sure I would have stuttered. It was utterly impossible to believe-and even more absurd to deny it. He looked like me. We liked the same things. He even had my wretched taste in jokes.

“I just-” I shook my head.

“Yes,” he said. “It takes a minute to get used to the idea that there are two of us, doesn't it?”

“Perhaps slightly longer,” I said. “I don't know if I-”

“Oh, dear, are we being squeamish? After what happened? Two and a half days of sitting here, bubba. Two little boys, sitting for two and a half days in

blood

,” he said, and I felt sick, dizzy, heart floundering, head hammering.

“No,” I gagged, and I felt his hand on my shoulder.

“It doesn't matter,” he said. “What matters is what happens now.”

“What-happens,” I said.

“Yes. What happens. Now.” He made a small, strange, snuffling, gurgling noise that was surely intended to sound like laughter, but perhaps he had not learned to fake it as well as I had. “I think I should say something like: My whole life has been leading up to this!” He repeated the snuffling sound. “Of course, neither one of us could manage that with real feeling. After all, we can't actually feel anything, can we? We've both spent our lives playing a part. Moving through this world reciting lines and pretending we belong in a world made for human beings, and never really human ourselves. And always, forever, reaching for a way to

feel

something! Reaching, little brother, for a moment just like this! Real, genuine, unfaked feeling! It takes your breath away, doesn't it?”

And it did. My head was whirling and I did not dare to close my eyes again for fear of what might be waiting there for me. And, far worse, my brother was right beside me, watching me, demanding that I be myself, be just like him. And to be myself, to be his brother, to be who I was, I had to, had to-what? My eyes turned, all by themselves, toward Deborah.

“Yes,” he said, and all the cold happy fury of the Dark Passenger was in his voice now. “I knew you'd figure it out. This time we do it together,” he said.

I shook my head, but not very convincingly. “I can't,” I said.

“You have to,” he said, and we were both right. The feather touch on my shoulder again, almost matching the push from Harry that he could never understand and yet seemed every bit as powerful as my brother's hand, as it lifted me to my feet and pushed me forward; one step, two-Deborah's unblinking eyes were locked onto mine, but with that other presence behind me I couldn't tell her that I was certainly not going to-

“Together,” he said. “One more time. Out with the old. In with the new. Onward, upward, inward-!” Another half step-Deborah's eyes were yelling at me, but-

He was beside me now, standing with me, and something gleamed in his hand, two somethings. “One for all, both for one- Did you ever read

The Three Musketeers

?” He flipped one knife into the air; it arced up and into his left hand and he held it out toward me. The weak dim light grew on the flat of the blades he held up and burned into me, matched only by the gleam in Brian's eyes. “Come on, Dexter. Little brother. Take the knife.” His teeth shone like the knives. “Showtime.”

Deborah in her tightly wrapped tape made a thrashing sound. I looked up at her. There was frantic impatience in her eyes, and a growing madness, too. Come on, Dexter! Was I really thinking of doing this to her? Cut her loose and let's go home. Okay, Dexter? Dexter? Hello, Dexter? It is you, isn't it?

And I didn't know.

“Dexter,” Brian said. “Of course I don't mean to influence your decision. But ever since I learned I had a brother just like me, this is all I could think about. And you feel the same, I can see it in your face.”

“Yes,” I said, still not taking my eyes off Deb's very anxious face, “but does it have to be her?”

“Why not her? What is she to you?”

What indeed. My eyes were locked onto Deborah's. She was not actually my sister, not really, not a real relation of any kind, not at all. Of course I was very fond of her, but-

But what? Why did I hesitate? Of course the thing was impossible. I knew it was unthinkable, even as I thought it. Not just because it was Deb, although it was, of course. But such a strange thought came into my poor dismal battered head and I could not bat it away:

What would Harry say?

And so I stood uncertain, because no matter how much I wanted to begin I knew what Harry would say. He had already said it. It was unchangeable Harry truth:

Chop up the bad guys, Dexter. Don't chop up your sister

. But Harry had never foreseen anything like this-how could he? He had never imagined when he wrote the Code of Harry that I would be faced with a choice like this; to side with Deborah-not my real sister-or to join my authentic 100 percent real live brother in a game that I so very much wanted to play. And Harry could not have conceived that when he set me on my path. Harry had never known that I had a brother who would-

But wait a moment. Hold the phone, please. Harry did know-Harry had been there when it happened, hadn't he? And he had kept it to himself, never told me I had a brother. All those lonely empty years when I thought I was the only me there was-and he knew I was not, knew and had not told me. The most important single fact about me-I was not alone-and he had kept it from me. What did I really owe Harry now, after this fantastic betrayal?

And more to the immediate point, what did I owe this squirming lump of animal flesh quivering beneath me, this creature masquerading as my sibling? What could I possibly owe her in comparison to my bond with Brian, my own flesh, my brother, a living replication of my selfsame precious DNA?

A drop of sweat rolled across Deborah's forehead and into her eye. She blinked at it frantically, making ugly squinting faces in an effort to keep watching me and clear the sweat out of her eye at the same time. She really looked somewhat pathetic, helplessly taped and struggling like a dumb animal; a dumb, human animal. Not at all like me, like my brother; not at all clever clean no-mess bloodless razor-sharp Moondancer snicker-snee Dexter and his very own brother.

“Well?” he said, and I heard impatience, judgment, the beginning of disappointment.

I closed my eyes. The room dove around me, got darker, and I could not move. There was Mommy watching me, unblinking. I opened my eyes. My brother stood so close behind me I could feel his breath on my neck. My sister looked up at me, her eyes as wide and unblinking as Mommy's. And the look she gave me held me, as Mommy's had held me. I closed my eyes; Mommy. I opened my eyes; Deborah.

I took the knife.

There was a small noise and a rush of warm wind came into the cool air of the box. I spun around.

LaGuerta stood in the doorway, a nasty little automatic pistol in her hand.

“I knew you'd try this,” she said. “I should shoot you both. Maybe all three,” she said, glancing at Deborah, then back at me. “Hah,” she said, looking at the blade in my hand. “Sergeant Doakes should see this. He was right about you.” And she pointed the gun toward me, just for half a second.

It was long enough. Brian moved fast, faster than I would have thought possible. Still, LaGuerta got off one shot and Brian stumbled slightly as he slid the blade into LaGuerta's midsection. For a moment they stood like that, and then both of them were on the floor, unmoving.

A small pool of blood began to spread across the floor, the mingled blood of them both, Brian and LaGuerta. It was not deep, it did not spread far, but I shrank away from it, the horrible stuff, with something very near to panic. I only took two backward steps and then I bumped into something that made muffled sounds to match my own panic.

Deborah. I ripped the duct tape off her mouth.

“Jesus Christ that hurt,” she said. “For God's sake let me out of this shit and quit acting like a fucking lunatic.”

I looked down at Deborah. The tape had left a ring of blood around the outside of her lips, awful red blood that drove me back behind my eyes and into the yesterday box with Mommy. And she lay there-just like Mommy. Just like last time with the cool air of the box lifting the hair on my neck and the dark shadows chattering around us. Just exactly like last time in the way she lay there all taped and staring and waiting like some kind of-

“Goddamn it,” she said. “Come on, Dex. Snap out of it.”

And yet this time I had a knife, and she was still helpless, and I could change everything now, I could-

“Dexter?” said Mommy.

I mean, Deborah. Of course that's what I meant. Not Mommy at all who had left us here in this same place just like this, left us in this place where it began and now might finally finish, with a burning absolutely must-do-it already on its large dark horse and galloping along under the wonderful moon and the one thousand intimate voices whispering,

Do it-do it now-do it and everything can change-the way it should be-back with-

“Mommy?” someone said.

“Dexter, come on,” said Mommy. I mean Deborah. But the knife was moving. “Dexter, for Christ's sake, cut the shit! It's me! Debbie!”

I shook my head and of course it was Deborah, but I could not stop the knife. “I know, Deb. I'm really very sorry.” The knife crept higher. I could only watch it, couldn't stop it now for anything. One small spiderweb touch of Harry still whipped at me, demanding that I pay attention and get squared away, but it was so small and weak, and the need was big, strong, stronger than it had ever been before, because this was everything, the beginning and the end, and it lifted me up and out of myself and sent me washing away down the tunnel between the boy in the blood and the last chance to make it right. This would change everything, would pay back Mommy, would show her what she had done. Because Mommy should have saved us, and this time had to be different. Even Deb had to see that.

“Put the knife down, Dexter.” Her voice was a little calmer now, but those other voices were so much louder that I could barely hear her. I tried to put the knife down, really I did, but I only managed to lower it a few inches.

“I'm sorry, Deb, I just can't,” I said, fighting to speak at all with the rising howl around me of the storm that had built for twenty-five years-and now with my brother and me brought together like thunderheads on a dark and moony night-

“Dexter!” said wicked Mommy, who wanted to leave us here alone in the awful cold blood, and the voice of my brother inside hissed out with mine, “Bitch!” and the knife went all the way back up-

A noise came from the floor. LaGuerta? I couldn't tell, and it didn't matter. I had to finish, had to do this, had to let this happen now.

“Dexter,” Debbie said. “I'm your sister. You don't want to do this to me. What would Daddy say?” And that hurt, I'll admit it, but- “Put down the knife, Dexter.”

Another sound behind me, and a small gurgle. The knife in my hand went up.

“Dexter, look out!” Deborah said and I turned.

Detective LaGuerta was on one knee, gasping, straining to raise her suddenly very heavy weapon. Up came the barrel, slowly, slowly-pointed at my foot, my knee-

But did it matter? Because this was going to happen now no matter what and even though I could see LaGuerta's finger tighten on the trigger the knife in my hand did not even slow down.

“She's going to shoot you, Dex!” Deb called, sounding somewhat frantic now. And the gun was pointed at my navel, LaGuerta's face was screwing itself into a frown of tremendous concentration and effort and she really was going to shoot me. I half turned toward LaGuerta but my knife was still fighting its way down toward-

“Dexter!” said Mommy/Deborah on the table, but the Dark Passenger called louder and moved forward, grabbing my hand and guiding the knife down-

“Dex-!”

“

You're a good kid, Dex

,” whispered Harry from behind in his feather-hard ghost voice, just enough to twitch the knife so very little up again.

“I can't help it,” I whispered back, so very much growing into the handle of the quivering blade.

“

Choose what… or WHO… you kill

,” he said with the hard and endless blue of his eyes now watching me from Deborah's same eyes, watching now loud enough to push the knife a full half inch away. “

There are plenty of people who deserve it

,” said Harry so softly above the rising angry yammer of the stampede inside.

The tip of the knife winked and froze in place. The Dark Passenger could not send it down. Harry could not pull it away. And there we were.

Behind me I heard a rasping sound, a heavy thump, and then a moan so very full of emptiness that it crawled across my shoulders like a silk scarf on spider legs. I turned.

LaGuerta lay with her gun hand stretched out, pinned to the floor by Brian's knife, her lower lip trapped between her teeth and her eyes alive with pain. Brian crouched beside her, watching the fear scamper across her face. He was breathing hard through a dark smile.

“Shall we clean up, brother?” he said.

“I… can't,” I said.

My brother lurched to his feet and stood in front of me, weaving slightly from side to side. “Can't?” he said. “I don't think I know that word.” He pried the knife from my fingers and I could not stop him and I could not help him.

His eyes were on Deborah now, but his voice whipped across me and blasted at the phantom Harry fingers on my shoulder. “Must, little brother. Absolutely

must

. No other way.” He gasped and bent double for a moment, slowly straightening, slowly raising the knife. “Do I have to remind you of the importance of family?”

“No,” I said, with both my families, living and dead, crowded around me clamoring for me to do and not do. And with one last whisper from the Harry-blue eyes of my memory, my head began to shake all by itself and I said it again, “No,” and this time I meant it, “No. I can't. Not Deborah.”

My brother looked at me. “Too bad,” he said. “I'm so disappointed.”

And the knife came down.

EPILOGUE

I

KNOW IT IS A NEARLY HUMAN WEAKNESS, AND IT may be no more than ordinary sentimentality, but I have always loved funerals. For one thing they are so clean, so neat, so completely given over to careful ceremonies. And this was really a very good one. It had rows of blue-uniformed policemen and -women, looking solemn and neat and-well, ceremonial. There was the ritual salute with the guns, the careful folding of the flag, all the trimmings-a proper and wonderful show for the deceased. She had been, after all, one of our own, a woman who had served with the few, the proud. Or is that the marines? No matter, she had been a Miami cop, and Miami cops know how to throw a funeral for one of their own. They have had so much practice.

“Oh, Deborah,” I sighed, very softly, and of course I knew she couldn't hear me, but it really did seem like the right thing to do, and I wanted to do this right.

I almost wished I could summon up a tear or two to wipe away. She and I had been very close. And it had been a messy and unpleasant death, no way for a cop to go, hacked to death by a homicidal maniac. Rescue had come too late; it was all over long before anyone could get to her. And yet, by her example of selfless courage, she had helped to show how a cop should live and die. I'm quoting, of course, but that's the gist of it. Really very good stuff, quite moving if one has anything inside that can be moved. Which I don't, but I know it when I hear it and this was the real thing. And very much caught up in the silent bravery of the officers in their clean blues and the weeping of the civilians, I could not help myself. I sighed heavily. “Oh, Deborah,” I sighed, a little louder this time, almost feeling it. “Dear, dear Deborah.”

“Quiet, you moron!” she whispered, and poked me hard with her elbow. She looked lovely in her new outfit-a sergeant at last, the least they could do for her after all her hard work identifying and nearly catching the Tamiami Slasher. With the APB out on him, no doubt they would find my poor brother sooner or later-if he didn't find them first, of course. Since I had just been reminded so forcefully that family is important, I did hope he could stay free. And Deborah would come around, now that she had accepted her promotion. She really wanted to forgive me, and she was already more than half convinced of the Wisdom of Harry. We were family, too, and that had shown in the end, hadn't it? It was not such a great leap to accept me as I was after all, was it? Things being what they are. What they have, in fact, always been.

I sighed again. “Quit it!” she hissed, and nodded at the far end of the line of stiff Miami cops. I glanced where she indicated; Sergeant Doakes glared at me. He had not taken his eyes off me, not once the whole time, even when he had dropped his handful of earth on Detective LaGuerta's coffin. He was so very sure that things were not what they seemed. I knew with a total certainty that he would come for me now, track me like the hound he was, snort at my footsteps and sniff my back trail and hunt me down, bring me to bay for what I had done and what I would quite naturally do again.

I squeezed my sister's hand and with my other hand I fingered the cool hard edge of the glass slide in my pocket, one small drop of dried blood that would not go into the grave with LaGuerta but live forever on my shelf. It gave me comfort, and I did not mind Sergeant Doakes, or whatever he thought or did. How could I mind? He could no more control who he was and what he did than anyone else could. He would come for me. Truly, what else could he do?

What can any of us do? Helpless as we all are, in the grip of our own little voices, what indeed can we do?

I really wished I could shed a tear. It was all so beautiful. As beautiful as the next full moon would be, when I would call on Sergeant Doakes. And things would go on as they were, as they had always been, beneath that lovely bright moon.

The wonderful, fat, musical red moon.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

JEFF LINDSAY lives in South Florida with his wife and three daughters. He is currently finishing a second novel featuring Dexter.

***

Annotation

Dexter the Demon, Dexter the Avenger-whatever he chooses to call himself, the hero of this intelligent, darkly humorous series knows he's a monster who loves slicing people into little pieces. That Dexter limits his killing to "acceptable" victims-usually other serial killers-is designed to keep the reader from having to worry too much about the morality of his avocation. Dexter's just added his 40th victim, a homicidal pedophile, and is eagerly looking ahead to number 41 when he becomes involved in a case through his job as a blood spatter analyst at the Miami-Dade police forensics lab. A man is found with "everything on [his] body cut off, absolutely everything"-a piece of work that makes Dexter's own tidy killings look like child's play. This madman, nicknamed Danco, spends weeks surgically removing his victims' ears, lips, nose, arms, legs, etc., while keeping them alive to watch their own mutilation. Despite a certain professional admiration for Danco's dexterity, Dexter decides to take on the case. It's the contradictions in Dexter's character that make it all work-he's smart, he's funny, he cares for children, and yet he has no normal human responses or emotions. The first book in the series, Darkly Dreaming Dexter, was very well received; this one should be as well, and deservedly so.

Jeffry P. Lindsay

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

EPILOGUE

Jeffry P. Lindsay

Dearly devoted Dexter

A book in the Dexter series

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Nothing is remotely possible without Hilary.

I would also like to thank Julio, the Broccolis, Deacon and Einstein and, as always, Bear, Pook, and Tinky.

Additionally, I am indebted to Jason Kaufman for his steady and wise guiding hand, and to Nick Ellison, who has made all the difference.

FOR TOMMIE AND GUS,

WHO HAVE CERTAINLY WAITED LONG ENOUGH

CHAPTER 1

IT’S THAT MOON AGAIN, SLUNG SO FAT AND LOW IN THE tropical night, calling out across a curdled sky and into the quivering ears of that dear old voice in the shadows, the Dark Passenger, nestled snug in the backseat of the Dodge K-car of Dexter’s hypothetical soul.

That rascal moon, that loudmouthed leering Lucifer, calling down across the empty sky to the dark hearts of the night monsters below, calling them away to their joyful playgrounds. Calling, in fact, to that monster right there, behind the oleander, tiger-striped with moonlight through the leaves, his senses all on high as he waits for just the right moment to leap from the shadows. It is Dexter in the dark, listening to the terrible whispered suggestions that come pouring down breathlessly into my shadowed hiding place.

My dear dark other self urges me to pounce-now-sink my moonlit fangs into the oh-so-vulnerable flesh on the far side of the hedge. But the time is not right and so I wait, watching cautiously as my unsuspecting victim creeps past, eyes wide, knowing that something is watching but not knowing that I am

here

, only three steely feet away in the hedge. I could so easily slide out like the knife blade I am, and work my wonderful magic-but I wait, suspected but unseen.

One long stealthy moment tiptoes into another and still I wait for just the right time; the leap, the outstretched hand, the cold glee as I see the terror spread across the face of my victim-

But no. Something is not right.

And now it is Dexter’s turn to feel the queasy prickling of eyes on his back, the flutter of fear as I become more certain that something is now hunting

me

. Some other night stalker is feeling the sharp interior drool as he watches

me

from somewhere nearby-and I do not like this thought.

And like a small clap of thunder the gleeful hand comes down out of nowhere and onto

me

blindingly fast, and I glimpse the gleaming teeth of a nine-year-old neighbor boy. “Gotcha! One, two, three on Dexter!” And with the savage speed of the very young the rest of them are there, giggling wildly and shouting at me as I stand in the bushes humiliated. It is over. Six-year-old Cody stares at me, disappointed, as though Dexter the Night God has let down his high priest. Astor, his nine-year-old sister, joins in the hooting of the kids before they skitter off into the dark once more, to new and more complicated hiding places, leaving me so very alone in my shame.

Dexter did not kick the can. And now Dexter is

It

. Again.

You may wonder, how can this be? How can Dexter’s night hunt be reduced to this? Always before there has been some frightful twisted predator awaiting the special attention of frightful twisted Dexter-and here I am, stalking an empty Chef Boyardee ravioli can that is guilty of nothing worse than bland sauce. Here I am, frittering away precious time losing a game I have not played since I was ten. Even worse, I am IT.

“One. Two. Three-” I call out, ever the fair and honest gamesman.

How can this be? How can Dexter the Demon feel the weight of that moon and not be off among the entrails, slicing the life from someone who needs very badly to feel the edge of Dexter’s keen judgment? How is it possible on this kind of night for the Cold Avenger to refuse to take the Dark Passenger out for a spin?

“Four. Five. Six.”

Harry, my wise foster father, had taught me the careful balance of Need and Knife. He had taken a boy in whom he saw the unstoppable need to kill-no changing that-and Harry had molded him into a man who only killed the killers; Dexter the no-bloodhound, who hid behind a human-seeming face and tracked down the truly naughty serial killers who killed without code. And I would have been one of them, if not for the Harry Plan.

There are plenty of people who deserve it, Dexter

, my wonderful foster-cop-father had said.

“Seven. Eight. Nine.”

He had taught me how to find these special playmates, how to be sure they deserved a social call from me and my Dark Passenger. And even better, he taught me how to get away with it, as only a cop could teach. He had helped me to build a plausible hidey-hole of a life, and drummed into me that I must fit in, always, be relentlessly normal in all things.

And so I had learned how to dress neatly and smile and brush my teeth. I had become a perfect fake human, saying the stupid and pointless things that humans say to each other all day long. No one suspected what crouched behind my perfect imitation smile. No one except my foster sister, Deborah, of course, but she was coming to accept the real me. After all, I could have been much worse. I could have been a vicious raving monster who killed and killed and left towers of rotting flesh in my wake. Instead, here I was on the side of truth, justice, and the American way. Still a monster, of course, but I cleaned up nicely afterward, and I was OUR monster, dressed in red, white, and blue 100 percent synthetic virtue. And on those nights when the moon is loudest I find the others, those who prey on the innocent and do not play by the rules, and I make them go away in small, carefully wrapped pieces.

This elegant formula had worked well through years of happy inhumanity. In between playdates I maintained my perfectly average lifestyle from a persistently ordinary apartment. I was never late to work, I made the right jokes with co-workers, and I was useful and unobtrusive in all things, just as Harry had taught me. My life as an android was neat, balanced, and had real redeeming social value.

Until now. Somehow, here I was on a just-right night playing kick the can with a flock of children, instead of playing Slice the Slasher with a carefully chosen friend. And in a little while, when the game was over, I would take Cody and Astor into their mother, Rita’s, house, and she would bring me a can of beer, tuck the kids into bed, and sit beside me on the couch.

How could this be? Was the Dark Passenger slipping into early retirement? Had Dexter mellowed? Had I somehow turned the corner of the long dark hall and come out on the wrong end as Dexter Domestic? Would I ever again place that one drop of blood on the neat glass slide, as I always did-my trophy from the hunt?

“Ten! Ready or not, here I come!”

Yes, indeed. Here I came.

But to what?

It started, of course, with Sergeant Doakes. Every superhero must have an archenemy, and he was mine. I had done absolutely nothing to him, and yet he had chosen to hound me, harry me from my good work. Me and my shadow. And the irony of it: me, a hardworking blood-spatter-pattern analyst for the very same police force that employed him-we were on the same team. Was it fair for him to pursue me like this, merely because every now and then I did a little bit of moonlighting?

I knew Sergeant Doakes far better than I really wanted to, much more than just from our professional connection. I had made it my business to find out about him for one simple reason: he had never liked me, in spite of the fact that I take great pride in being charming and cheerful on a world-class level. But it almost seemed like Doakes could tell it was all fake; all my handmade heartiness bounced off him like June bugs off a windshield.

This naturally made me curious. I mean, really; what kind of person could possibly dislike me? And so I had studied him just a little, and I found out. The kind of person who could possibly dislike Debonair Dexter was forty-eight, African American, and held the department’s record for the bench press. According to the casual gossip I had picked up, he was an army vet, and since coming to the department had been involved in several fatal shootings, all of which Internal Affairs had judged to be righteous.

But more important than all this, I had discovered firsthand that somewhere behind the deep anger that always burned in his eyes there lurked an echo of a chuckle from my own Dark Passenger. It was just a tiny little chime of a very small bell, but I was sure. Doakes was sharing space with something, just like I was. Not the same thing, but something very similar, a panther to my tiger. Doakes was a cop, but he was also a cold killer. I had no real proof of this, but I was as sure as I could be without seeing him crush a jaywalker’s larynx.

A reasonable being might think that he and I could find some common ground; have a cup of coffee and compare our Passengers, exchange trade talk and chitchat about dismemberment techniques. But no: Doakes wanted me dead. And I found it difficult to share his point of view.

Doakes had been working with Detective LaGuerta at the time of her somewhat suspicious death, and since then his feelings toward me had grown to be a bit more active than simple loathing. Doakes was convinced that I’d had something to do with LaGuerta’s death. This was totally untrue and completely unfair. All I had done was watch-where’s the harm in that? Of course I had helped the real killer escape, but what could you expect? What kind of person would turn in his own brother? Especially when he did such neat work.

Well, live and let live, I always say. Or quite often, anyway. Sergeant Doakes could think what he wanted to think, and that was fine with me. There are still very few laws against thinking, although I’m sure they’re working hard on that in Washington. No, whatever suspicions the good sergeant had about me, he was welcome to them. But now that he had decided to act on his impure thoughts my life was a shambles. Dexter Derailed was fast becoming Dexter Demented.

And why? How had this whole nasty mess begun? All I had done was try to be myself.

CHAPTER 2

THERE ARE NIGHTS EVERY NOW AND THEN WHEN THE Dark Passenger really must get out to play. It’s like walking a dog. You can ignore the barking and scratching at the door for only so long, and then you must take the beast outside.

Not too long after Detective LaGuerta’s funeral, there came a time when it seemed reasonable to listen to the whispers from the backseat and start to plan a small adventure.

I had located a perfect playmate, a very plausible real estate salesman named MacGregor. He was a happy, cheerful man who loved selling houses to families with children. Especially young boys-MacGregor was extremely fond of boys between the ages of five and seven. He had been lethally fond of five that I was sure of, and quite likely several more. He was clever and careful, and without a visit from Dark Scout Dexter he would probably stay lucky for a long time. It’s hard to blame the police, at least this once. After all, when a young child goes missing, very few people would say, “Aha! Who sold his family their house?”

But of course, very few people are Dexter. This is generally a good thing, but in this case it came in handy to be me. Four months after reading a story in the paper about a missing boy, I read a similar story. The boys were the same age; details like that always ring a small bell and send a Mister Rogers whisper trickling through my brain: “Hello, neighbor.”

And so I dug up the first story and compared. I noticed that in both cases the paper milked the grief of the families by mentioning that they had recently moved into new homes; I heard a small chuckle from the shadows, and I looked a little closer.

It really was quite subtle. Detective Dexter had to dig quite a bit, because at first there didn’t seem to be any connection. The families in question were in different neighborhoods, which ruled out a great many possibilities. They went to different churches, different schools, and used different moving companies. But when the Dark Passenger laughs, somebody is usually doing something funny. And I finally found the connection; both houses had been listed with the same real estate agency, a small outfit in South Miami, with only one agent, a cheerful and friendly man named Randy MacGregor.

I dug a little more. MacGregor was divorced and lived alone in a small concrete-block house off Old Cutler Road in South Miami. He kept a twenty-six-foot cabin cruiser at Matheson Hammock Marina, which was relatively close to his house. The boat would also be an extremely convenient playpen, a way to get his little chums off alone on the bounding main where he would not be seen or heard while he explored, a real Columbus of pain. And for that matter, it would provide a splendid way to dispose of the messy leftovers; just a few miles out from Miami, the Gulf Stream provided a nearly bottomless dumping ground. No wonder the boys’ bodies were never found.

The technique made such good sense that I wondered why I hadn’t thought of it to recycle my own leftovers. Silly me; I only used my little boat for fishing and riding around the bay. And here MacGregor had come up with a whole new way to enjoy an evening on the water. It was a very neat idea, and it instantly moved MacGregor right to the top of my list. Call me unreasonable, even illogical since I generally have very little use for humans, but for some reason I care about kids. And when I find someone who preys on children it is very much as if they have slipped the Dark Maître d’ twenty dollars to move to the front of the line. I would happily unclip the velvet rope and bring MacGregor right in-assuming he was doing what it looked like he was doing. Of course, I had to be absolutely certain. I had always tried to avoid slicing up the wrong person, and it would be a shame to start now, even with a real estate salesman. It occurred to me that the best way to make sure would be to visit the boat in question.

Happily for me, the very next day it was raining, as it generally rains every day in July. But this had the look of an all-day storm, which made it just what the Dexter ordered. I left my job at the Miami-Dade police forensics lab early and cut over to LeJeune, taking it all the way to Old Cutler Road. I turned left into Matheson Hammock; as I’d hoped, it seemed deserted. But about one hundred yards ahead I knew there was a guard booth, where someone would be waiting eagerly to take four dollars from me for the great privilege of entering the park. It seemed like a good idea not to make an appearance at the guard booth. Of course saving the four dollars was very important, but even more so was that on a rainy day in the middle of the week I might be just a little bit conspicuous, which is something I like to avoid, particularly in the course of my hobby.

On the left side of the road was a small parking lot that served the picnic area. An old coral-rock picnic shelter stood beside a lake on the right. I parked my car and pulled on a bright yellow foul-weather jacket. It made me feel very nautical, just the thing to wear for breaking into a homicidal pedophile’s boat. It also made me highly visible, but I was not terribly worried about that. I would take the bicycle path that ran parallel to the road. It was screened in by mangroves, and in the unlikely event that the guard stuck his head out of the booth and into the rain, he would see nothing but a bright yellow blur jogging by. Just a determined runner out for his afternoon trot, come rain or shine.

And trot I did, moving about a quarter of a mile down the path. As I had hoped, there was no sign of life at the guard booth and I jogged to the large parking lot by the water. The last row of docks off to the right was home to a cluster of boats slightly smaller than the big sports fishermen and millionaires’ toys tied up closer to the road. MacGregor’s modest twenty-six footer, the

Osprey

, was near the end.

The marina was deserted and I went blithely through the gate in the chain-link fence, past a sign that said ONLY BOAT OWNERS PERMITTED ON DOCKS. I tried to feel guilty about violating such an important command, but it was beyond me. The lower half of the sign said NO FISHING OFF DOCKS OR IN MARINA AREA, and I promised myself that I would avoid fishing at all costs, which made me feel better about breaking the other rule.

The

Osprey

was five or six years old and showed only a few signs of wear from the Florida weather. The deck and rails were scrubbed clean and I was careful not to leave scuff marks as I climbed aboard. For some reason the locks on boats are never very complicated. Perhaps sailors are more honest than landlubbers. In any case, it took only a few seconds for me to pick the lock and slip inside the

Osprey

. The cabin did not have the musty smell of baked mildew that so many boats get when they are sealed up even for a few hours in the subtropical sun. Instead there was a faint tang of Pine-Sol in the air, as though someone had scrubbed so thoroughly that no germs or odors could hope to survive.

There was a small table, a galley, and one of those little TV/VCR units on a railed shelf with a stack of movies beside it:

Spider-Man

,

Brother Bear

,

Finding Nemo

. I wondered how many boys MacGregor had sent over the side to find Nemo. I dearly hoped that soon Nemo would find him. I stepped to the galley area and began to open drawers. One was filled with candy, the next with plastic action figures. And the third was absolutely crammed with rolls of duct tape.

Duct tape is a wonderful thing, and as I know very well, it can be used for many remarkable and useful things. But I did think that having ten rolls of it stuffed in a drawer on your boat was a bit excessive. Unless, of course, you were using it for some specific purpose that required a great deal of it. Perhaps a science project involving multiple young boys? Just a hunch, of course, based on the way I use it-not on young boys, of course, but on upstanding citizens like, for instance… MacGregor. His guilt had started to seem very likely, and the Dark Passenger flicked his dry lizard tongue with anticipation.

I went down the steps into the small forward area the salesman probably called the stateroom. It wasn’t a terribly elegant bed, just a thin foam-rubber pad on a raised shelf. I touched the mattress and it crackled under the fabric; a rubber casing. I rolled the mattress to one side. There were four ring bolts screwed into the shelf, one on each corner. I lifted the hatch beneath the mattress.

One might reasonably expect to find a certain amount of chain on a boat. But the accompanying handcuffs did not strike me as being quite so nautical. Of course, there might be a very good explanation. It was possible that MacGregor used them on quarrelsome fish.

Under the chain and handcuffs there were five anchors. That could very well be a good idea on a yacht that was meant to cruise around the world, but it seemed a bit much for a small weekend boat. What on earth could they be for? If I was taking my little boat out into the deep water with a series of small bodies I wished to dispose of cleanly and completely, what would I do with so many anchors? And, of course, when you put it that way, it seemed obvious that the next time MacGregor went cruising with a little friend he would come back with only four anchors under the bunk.

I was certainly gathering enough small details to make a very interesting picture. Still life without children. But so far I had not found anything that could not be explained away as massive coincidence, and I needed to be absolutely sure. I had to have one overwhelmingly conclusive piece of evidence, something so completely unambiguous that it would satisfy the Harry Code.

I found it in a drawer to the right of the bunk.

There were three small drawers built into the bulkhead of the boat. The interior of the bottom one seemed to be a few inches shorter than the other two. It was possible that it was supposed to be, that it was shortened by the curve of the hull. But I have studied humans for many years now, and this has made me deeply suspicious. I pulled the drawer all the way out and, sure enough, there was a small secret compartment on the back end of the drawer. And inside the secret compartment-

Since I am not actually a real human being, my emotional responses are generally limited to what I have learned to fake. So I did not feel shock, outrage, anger, or even bitter resolve. They’re very difficult emotions to do convincingly, and there was no audience to do them for, so why bother? But I did feel a slow cold wind from the Dark Backseat sweep up my spine and blow dry leaves over the floor of my lizard brain.

I could identify five different naked boys in the stack of photographs, arranged in a variety of poses, as if MacGregor was still searching for a defining style. And yes indeed, he really was a spendthrift with his duct tape. In one of the pictures, the boy looked like he was in a silver-gray cocoon, with only certain areas exposed. What MacGregor left exposed told me a great deal about him. As I had suspected, he was not the kind of man most parents would wish for a scoutmaster.

The photos were good quality, taken from many different angles. One series in particular stood out. A pale, flabby naked man in a black hood stood beside the tightly taped boy, almost like a trophy shot. From the shape and coloring of the body I was quite sure the man was MacGregor, even though the hood covered his face. And as I flipped through the pictures I had two very interesting thoughts. The first was, Aha! Meaning, of course, that there was absolutely no doubt about what MacGregor had been doing, and he was now the lucky Grand Prize Winner in the Dark Passenger’s Clearinghouse Sweepstakes.

And the second thought, somewhat more troubling, was this: Who was taking the pictures?

There were too many different angles for the pictures to have been taken automatically. And as I flipped through them a second time I noticed, in two shots that had been snapped from above, the pointy toe of what looked like a red cowboy boot.

MacGregor had an accomplice. The word sounded so very Court TV, but there it was and I could not think of a better way to say it. He had not done all this alone. Someone had gone along and, if nothing else, had watched and taken pictures.

I blush to admit that I have some modest knowledge and talent in the area of semiregular mayhem, but I had never before run into anything like this. Trophy shots, yes-after all, I had my little box of slides, each with single drop of blood on them, to commemorate every one of my adventures. Perfectly normal to keep some kind of souvenir.

But to have a second person present, watching and taking pictures, turned a very private act into a kind of performance. It was absolutely indecent-the man was a pervert. If only I had been capable of moral outrage, I am quite sure I would have been full of it. As it was, though, I found myself more eager than ever to get viscerally acquainted with MacGregor.

It was stiflingly hot on the boat, and my wonderfully chic foul-weather suit was not helping. I felt like a bright yellow tea bag. I picked several of the clearest pictures and put them in my pocket. I returned the rest to their compartment, tidied the bunk, and went back up into the main cabin. As far as I could tell from peeking out the window-or did I have to call it a porthole?-there was no one lurking about and observing me in a furtive manner. I slipped out the door, making sure it locked behind me, and strolled off through the rain.

From the many movies I have seen over the years, I knew very well that walking in the rain is the correct setting for reflecting on human perfidy, and so I did just that. Oh that wicked MacGregor and his shutterbug friend. How could they be such vile wretches. That sounded about right, and it was all I could come up with; I hoped it was enough to satisfy the formula. Because it was far more fun to reflect on my own perfidy, and how I might feed it by arranging a playdate with MacGregor. I could feel a rising tide of dark delight flooding in from the deepest dungeons of Castle Dexter and building up at the spillways. And soon it would pour out on MacGregor.

There was no longer any room for doubt, of course. Harry himself would acknowledge that the photographs were more than enough proof, and an eager chuckle from the Dark Backseat sanctified the project. MacGregor and I would go exploring together. And then the special bonus of finding his friend in the cowboy boots-he would have to follow MacGregor as soon as possible, of course; no rest for the wicked. It was like a two-for-the-price-of-one sale, absolutely irresistible.

Filled with my happy thoughts, I didn’t even notice the rain as I strode manfully and rapidly back to my car. I had a great deal to do.

CHAPTER 3

IT IS ALWAYS A BAD IDEA TO FOLLOW A REGULAR ROUTINE, particularly if you are a homicidal pedophile who has come to the attention of Dexter the Avenger. Happily for me, no one had ever given MacGregor this vital bit of information, and so it was quite easy for me to find him leaving his office at 6:30 PM, as he did every day. He came out the back door, locked it, and climbed into his big Ford SUV; a perfect vehicle for hauling people around to look at houses, or for carrying bundled-up little boys down to the dock. He pulled out into the traffic and I followed him home to his modest concrete-block house on S.W. 80th Street.

There was quite a bit of traffic going by the house. I turned onto a small side street half a block away and parked unobtrusively where I had a good view. There was a tall, thick hedge running down the far side of MacGregor’s lot that would keep the neighbors from seeing anything that went on in his yard. I sat in my car and pretended to look at a map for about ten minutes, just long enough to scheme and be sure that he wasn’t going anywhere. When he came out of his house and began to putter around the yard, shirtless and wearing a pair of battered madras shorts, I knew how I would do it. I headed for home to get ready.

In spite of the fact that I normally have a robust and healthy appetite, I always find it difficult to eat before one of my little adventures. My interior associate quivers with rising anticipation, the moon burbles louder and louder in my veins as the night slides over the city, and thoughts of food begin to seem so very ordinary.

And so instead of enjoying a leisurely high-protein dinner, I paced my apartment, eager to begin but still cool enough to wait, letting Daytime Dexter melt quietly into the background and feeling the intoxicating surge of power as the Dark Passenger slowly took the wheel and checked the controls. It was always an exhilarating sensation to allow myself to be pulled into the backseat and let the Passenger drive. Shadows seem to grow sharper edges and the darkness fades into a lively gray that brings everything into much sharper focus. Small sounds become loud and distinct, my skin tingles, my breath roars in and out, and even the air comes alive with smells that were certainly not noticeable during the boring and normal day. I was never more alive than when the Dark Passenger was driving.

I forced myself to sit in my easy chair and I held myself in, feeling the Need roll over me and leave behind a high tide of readiness. Each breath felt like a blast of cold air sweeping through me and pumping me up bigger and brighter until I was like an enormous invincible beacon of steel ready to slash through the now-dark city. And then my chair became a stupid little thing, a hiding place for mice, and only the night was big enough.

And it was time.

Out we went, into the bright night, the moonlight hammering at me and the dead-roses breath of the Miami night blowing across my skin, and in almost no time at all I was there, in the shadows cast by MacGregor’s hedge, watching and waiting and listening, just for now, to the caution that curled around my wrist and whispered

patience

. It seemed pathetic that he could not see something that gleamed as brightly as I did, and the thought gave me another surge of strength. I pulled on my white silk mask and I was ready to begin.

Slowly, invisibly, I moved from the darkness of the hedge and placed a child’s plastic piano keyboard beneath his window, putting it under a gladiolus bush so it would not be seen immediately. It was bright red and blue, less than a foot long, and only had eight keys, but it would repeat the same four melodies endlessly until the battery died. I switched it on and stepped back into my place in the hedge.

“Jingle Bells” played, and then “Old MacDonald.” For some reason, a key phrase was missing in each song, but the little toy piped on and into “ London Bridge ” in the same cheerfully lunatic tone.

It was enough to make anyone crazy, but it probably had an extra effect on someone like MacGregor who lived for children. At any rate, I certainly hoped so. I had quite deliberately chosen the little keyboard to lure him out, and I sincerely hoped, in fact, that he would think he had been found out-and that a toy had come from Hell to punish him. After all, why shouldn’t I enjoy what I do?

It seemed to work. We were only on the third repetition of “ London Bridge ” when he came stumbling out of his house with a look of wide-eyed panic. He stood there for a moment, gaping around, his receding reddish hair looking like it had gone through a storm and his pale belly hanging slightly over the waist of his dingy pajama bottoms. He did not look terribly dangerous to me, but of course I was not a five-year-old boy.

After a moment, in which he stood with his mouth open, and scratched himself, and looked like he was modeling for a statue of the Greek god of Stupidity, MacGregor located the source of the sound-“Jingle Bells” again by now. He stepped over and bent slightly to touch the little plastic keyboard and did not even have the time to be surprised before I had a noose of fifty-pound-test fishing line pulled tight around his throat. He straightened and thought he might struggle for a moment. I pulled tighter and he changed his mind.

“Stop fighting,” we said in our cold and commanding Passenger voice. “You’ll live longer.” And he heard his future in the words and thought he might change it, so I pulled hard on his leash and held it like that until his face turned dark and he dropped to his knees.

Just before he passed out completely I eased the pressure. “Now do as you’re told,” we said. He didn’t say anything; he just choked in a few large and painful breaths, so I tweaked the line a touch. “Understand?” we said, and he nodded so I let him breathe.

He did not try to fight anymore as I frog-marched him into the house for his car keys and then back out into his big SUV. I climbed into the seat behind him, holding the leash in a very tight grip and allowing him only enough breath to stay alive, for now.

“Start the car,” we told him, and he paused.

“What do you want?” he said in a voice that was rough with new-made gravel.

“Everything,” we said. “Start the car.”

“I have money,” he said.

I pulled hard on his cord. “Buy me a little boy,” we said. I held it tight for a few seconds, too tight for him to breathe and just long enough to let him know that

we

were in charge,

we

knew what he had done, and

we

would let him breathe only at our pleasure from now on, and when I loosened the line again he had nothing to say.

He drove as we told him to, back up S.W. 80th Street to Old Cutler Road and then south. There was almost no traffic this far out, not at this time of night, and we turned into a new development that had been going up on the far side of Snapper Creek. Construction had halted due to the owner’s conviction for money laundering, and we would not be disturbed. We guided MacGregor through a half-built guard booth, around a small traffic circle, east toward the water, and to a halt beside a small trailer, the temporary office of the site, now left to teen thrill seekers and others, like me, who only wanted a little privacy.

We sat for just a moment, enjoying the view-moon over the water, with pedophile in noose in the foreground, very beautiful.

I got out and pulled MacGregor out after me, pulled him hard so that he fell to his knees and clawed at the line around his neck. For a moment I watched him choking and drooling in the dirt, his face turning dark again and his eyes going red. Then I pulled him to his feet and pushed him up the three wooden steps and into the trailer. By the time he had recovered enough to know what was going on, I had him tied to the top of a desk, hands and feet secured with duct tape.

MacGregor tried to speak and just coughed instead. I waited; now there was plenty of time. “Please,” he said finally, in a voice like sand on glass, “I’ll give you whatever you want.”

“Yes, you will,” we said, and saw the sound of it cut into him, and even though he couldn’t see it through my white silk mask we smiled. I took out the photos I had taken from his boat and showed them to him.

He stopped moving completely and his mouth hung open. “Where did you get those?” he said, sounding rather petulant for someone who was about to be cut into small pieces.

“Tell me who took these pictures.”

“Why should I?” he said.

I used a pair of tin snips and cut off the first two fingers of his left hand. He thrashed and screamed and the blood came, which always makes me angry, so I shoved a tennis ball into his mouth and cut off the first two fingers of his right hand. “No reason,” I said, and I waited for him to slow down just a little bit.

When he finally did, he rolled an eye to me and his face was filled with that understanding that comes when you have gone beyond pain into knowing that the rest of this was forever. I took the tennis ball out of his mouth.

“Who took the pictures?”

He smiled. “I hope one of them was yours,” he said, which made the next ninety minutes a lot more rewarding.

CHAPTER 4

NORMALLY I FEEL PLEASANTLY MELLOW FOR SEVERAL days after one of my Nights Out, but the very next morning after MacGregor’s hasty exit I was still all aquiver with eagerness. I wanted very badly to find the photographer in the red cowboy boots and make a clean sweep of it. I am a tidy monster, and I do like to finish whatever I begin, and to know that someone was out there clumping around in those ridiculous shoes, carrying a camera that had seen far too much, made me anxious to follow those footprints and wrap up my two-part project.

Perhaps I had been too hasty with MacGregor; I should have given him a little more time and encouragement, and he would have told me everything. But it had seemed like something I could easily find by myself-when the Dark Passenger is driving, I am quite sure I can do anything. So far I have not been wrong, but it had put me in a bit of an awkward spot this time, and I had to find Mr. Boots on my own.

I knew from my earlier research that MacGregor did not have a social life beyond his occasional evening cruises. He belonged to a couple of business organizations, which was to be expected from a realtor, but I had not discovered anyone in particular that he seemed to pal around with. I also knew he had no criminal record, so there was no file to pull and search for known associates. The court records on his divorce simply listed “irreconcilable differences” and left the rest to my imagination.

And there I was stuck; MacGregor had been a classic loner, and in all my careful study of him I had never seen an indication that he had any friends, companions, dates, mates, or cronies. No poker night with the boys-no boys at all, except for the young ones. No church group, no Elks, no neighborhood bar, no weekly square-dancing society-which might have explained the boots-no nothing, except the photographs with those stupid pointed red toes sticking out.

So who was Cowboy Bob, and how did I find him?

There was really only one place I could go for an answer, and that would have to be soon, before someone noticed that MacGregor was missing. In the distance I heard thunder rumble, and I glanced at the wall clock with surprise. Sure enough, it was 2:15, time for the daily afternoon storm. I had moped all the way through my lunch hour, very unlike me.

Still, the storm would once again give me a little cover, and I could stop for something to eat on the way back. So with my immediate future neatly and pleasantly planned, I headed out to the parking lot, got into my car, and drove south.

The rain had started by the time I got to Matheson Hammock, and so once again I pulled on my sporty yellow foul-weather gear and jogged down the path to MacGregor’s boat.

I picked the lock again quite easily and slipped inside the cabin. During my first visit to the boat, I had been looking for signs that MacGregor was a pedophile. Now I was trying to find something a little bit more subtle, some small clue to the identity of MacGregor’s photographer friend.

Since I had to start somewhere, I went back down to the sleeping area. I opened the drawer with the false bottom and flipped through the pictures again. This time I checked the back as well as the front. Digital photography has made sleuthing a great deal more difficult, and there were no marks of any kind on the pictures and no empty film packets with traceable serial numbers, either. Any clod in the world could simply download the pictures to his hard drive and print them out at will, even someone with such hideous taste in footgear. It didn’t seem fair: Weren’t computers supposed to makes things easier?

I closed the drawer and searched through the rest of the area, but there was nothing that I hadn’t seen before. Somewhat discouraged, I went back upstairs to the main cabin. There were several drawers there, too, and I flipped through them. Videotapes, action figures, the duct tape-all things I had already noticed, and none of them would tell me anything. I pulled the stack of duct tape out, thinking, perhaps, that there was no sense in letting it go to waste. Idly, I turned over the bottom roll.

And there it was.

It really is better to be lucky than to be good. In a million years I could not have hoped for something this good. Stuck to the bottom of the duct-tape roll was a small scrap of paper, and written on the paper was, “Reiker,” and under that a telephone number.

Of course there was no guarantee that Reiker was the Red Ranger, or even that he was a human being. It could well be the name of a marine plumbing contractor. But in any case, it was far more of a starting place than I’d had, and I needed to get off the boat before the storm stopped. I stuck the paper inside my pocket, buttoned up my rain slicker, and snuck off the boat and onto the footpath again.

Perhaps I was feeling so happily mellow from the aftereffects of my evening out with MacGregor, but as I drove home I found myself humming a catchy little Philip Glass tune from

1000 Airplanes on the Roof

. The key to a happy life is to have accomplishments to be proud of and purpose to look forward to, and at the moment I had both. How wonderful it was to be me.

My good mood lasted only as far as the traffic circle where Old Cutler blends into LeJeune, and then a routine glance in my rearview mirror froze the music on my lips.

Behind me, practically nosing into my backseat, was a maroon Ford Taurus. It looked very much like the sort of car the Miami-Dade Police Department maintained in large numbers for the use of plainclothes personnel.

I did not see how this could possibly be a good thing. A patrol car might follow for no real reason, but someone in a motor-pool car would have some kind of purpose, and it looked like that purpose was to make me aware I was being followed. If so, it was working perfectly. I could not see through the glare of the windshield to know who was driving the other car, but it suddenly seemed very important to know just how long the car had been following me, who was driving, and how much the driver had seen.

I turned down a small side street, pulled over, and parked, and the Taurus parked right behind me. For a moment, nothing happened; we both sat there in our cars, waiting. Was I going to be arrested? If someone had followed me from the marina, it could be a very bad thing for Dashing Dexter. Sooner or later, MacGregor’s absence would be noticed, and even the most routine investigation would reveal his boat. Someone would go to see if it was there, and then the fact that Dexter had been there in the middle of the day might seem very significant.

It’s little things like this that make for successful police work. Cops look for these funny coincidences, and when they find them they can get very serious with the person who is in too many interesting places by mere happenstance. Even if that person has a police ID and an amazingly charming fake smile.

There really seemed nothing for me to do except bluff my way through: find out who was following me and why, and then convince them it was a silly way to waste time. I put on my very best Official Greeting face, got out of my car, and stepped briskly up to the Taurus. The window rolled down and the always angry face of Sergeant Doakes looked out at me, like an idol for some wicked god, carved from a piece of dark wood.

“Why you leaving work in the middle of the day so much lately?” he asked me. His voice had no real expression in it but still managed to give the impression that whatever I said would be a lie and he would like to hurt me for it.

“Why, Sergeant Doakes!” I said cheerfully. “What an amazing coincidence. What are you doing here?”

“You got something to do more important than your job?” he said. He really seemed uninterested in maintaining any sort of flow in the conversation, so I shrugged. When faced with people who have very limited conversational skills and no apparent desire to cultivate any, it’s always easier simply to go along.

“I, um-I had some personal things to take care of,” I said. Very weak, I agree, but Doakes displayed an unnerving habit of asking the most awkward questions, and with such an understated viciousness, that I found it hard enough not to stutter, let alone come up with something clever.

He looked at me for several endless seconds, the way a starving pit bull looks at raw meat. “Personal things,” he said without blinking. It sounded even stupider when he repeated it.

“That’s right,” I said.

“Your dentist is over in the Gables,” he said.

“Well-”

“Your doctor, too, over on Alameda. Got no lawyer, sister still at work,” he said. “What kind of

personal things

did I leave out?”

“Actually, um, I, I-” I said, and I was amazed to hear myself stammer, but nothing else came out, and Doakes just looked at me as though he was begging me to make a run for it so he could practice his wing shot.

“Funny,” he said at last, “I got

personal things

to do out here, too.”

“Really?” I said, relieved to find that my mouth was once again capable of forming human speech. “And what would that be, Sergeant?”

It was the first time I had ever seen him smile, and I have to say that I would have greatly preferred it if he had simply jumped out of the car and bitten me. “I’m watching YOU,” he said. He gave me a moment to admire the high gloss of his teeth, and then the window rolled up and he vanished behind the tinted glass like the Cheshire cat.

CHAPTER 5

GIVEN ENOUGH TIME, I AM SURE I COULD COME UP with an entire list of things more unpleasant than having Sergeant Doakes turn into my own personal shadow. But as I stood there in my high-fashion foul-weather gear and thought of Reiker and his red boots slipping away from me, it seemed bad enough, and I was not inspired to think of anything worse. I simply climbed into my car, started the engine, and drove through the rain to my apartment. Ordinarily, the homicidal antics of the other drivers would have comforted me, made me feel right at home, but for some reason the maroon Taurus following so close behind took away the glow.

I knew Sergeant Doakes well enough to know that this was not simply a rainy-day whim on his part. If he was watching me, he would keep watching me until he caught me doing something naughty. Or until he was unable to watch me anymore. Naturally enough, I could readily think of a few intriguing ways to make sure he lost interest. But they were all so permanent, and while I did not actually have a conscience, I did have a very clear set of rules that worked somewhat the same way.

I had known that sooner or later Sergeant Doakes would do something or other to discourage my hobby, and I had thought long and hard about what to do when he did. The best I had come up with, alas, was wait and see.

“Excuse me?” you might say, and you have every right. “Can we truly ignore the obvious answer here?” After all, Doakes might be strong and lethal, but the Dark Passenger was much more so, and no one could stand against him when he took the wheel. Perhaps just this once…

No

, said the small soft voice in my ear.

Hello, Harry. Why not? And as I asked, I thought back to the time he had told me.

There are rules, Dexter

, Harry had said.

Rules, Dad?

It was my sixteenth birthday. There was never much of a party, since I had not learned yet to be wonderfully charming and chummy, and if I was not avoiding my drooling contemporaries then they were generally avoiding me. I lived my adolescence like a sheepdog moving through a flock of dirty, very stupid sheep. Since then, I had learned a great deal. For example, I was not that far off at sixteen-people really are hopeless!-but it just doesn’t do to let on.

So my sixteenth birthday was a rather restrained affair. Doris, my foster mom, had recently died of cancer. But my foster sister, Deborah, made me a cake and Harry gave me a new fishing rod. I blew out the candles, we ate the cake, and then Harry took me into the backyard of our modest Coconut Grove house. He sat at the redwood picnic table that he had built by the brick barbecue oven and motioned me to sit, too.

“Well, Dex,” he said. “Sixteen. You’re almost a man.”

I wasn’t sure what that was supposed to mean-me? a man? as in human?-and I did not know what sort of response was expected of me. But I did know that it was usually best not to make clever remarks with Harry, so I just nodded. And Harry gave me a blue-eyed X-ray. “Are you interested in girls at all?” he asked me.

“Um-in what way?” I said.

“Kissing. Making out. You know. Sex.”

My head whirled at the thought as though a cold dark foot were kicking at the inside of my forehead. “Not, uh, no. I, um,” I said, silver-tongued even then. “Not like that.”

Harry nodded as if that made sense. “Not boys, though,” he said, and I just shook my head. Harry looked at the table, then back at the house. “When I turned sixteen my father took me to a whore.” He shook his head and a very small smile flickered across his face. “It took me ten years to get over that.” I could think of absolutely nothing to say to that. The idea of sex was completely alien to me, and to think of

paying

for it, especially for your child, and when that child was

Harry

-well really. It was all too much. I looked at Harry with something close to panic and he smiled.

“No,” said Harry. “I wasn’t going to offer. I expect you’ll get more use out of that fishing rod.” He shook his head slowly and looked away, far out over the picnic table, across the yard, down the street. “Or a fillet knife.”

“Yes,” I said, trying not to sound too eager.

“No,” he said again, “we both know what you want. But you’re not ready.”

Since the first time Harry had talked to me about what I was, on a memorable camping trip a couple of years ago, we had been getting me ready. Getting me, in Harry’s words,

squared away

. As a muttonheaded young artificial human I was eager to get started on my happy career, but Harry held me back, because Harry always knew.

“I can be careful,” I said.

“But not perfect,” he said. “There are rules, Dexter. There have to be. That’s what separates you from the other ones.”

“Blend in,” I said. “Clean up, don’t take chances, um…”

Harry shook his head. “More important. You have to be sure before you start that this person really deserves it. I can’t tell you the number of times I knew somebody was guilty and I had to let them go. To have the bastard look at you and smirk, and you know and he knows, but you have to hold the door for him and let him go-” He clenched his jaw and tapped a fist on the picnic table. “You won’t have to. BUT… you have to be sure. Dead sure, Dexter. And even if you’re absolutely positive-” He held his hand up in the air, palm facing me. “Get some proof. It doesn’t have to hold up in court, thank God.” He gave a small and bitter laugh. “You’d never get anywhere. But you need proof, Dexter. That’s the most important thing.” He tapped the table with his knuckle. “You have to have proof. And even then-”

He stopped, an uncharacteristic Harry pause, and I waited, knowing something difficult was coming. “Sometimes even then, you let them go. No matter how much they deserve it. If they’re too…

conspicuous

, for example. If it would raise too much attention, let it go.”

Well, there it was. As always, Harry had the answer for me. Whenever I was unsure, I could hear Harry whispering in my ear. I was sure, but I had no proof that Doakes was anything except a very angry and suspicious cop, and chopping up a cop was certainly the sort of thing the city got indignant about. After the recent untimely demise of Detective LaGuerta, the police hierarchy would almost certainly be a little sensitive about a second cop going out in the same way.

No matter how necessary it seemed, Doakes was out of bounds for me. I could look out the window at the maroon Taurus nosed under a tree, but I could do nothing about it except wish for some other solution to spontaneously arise-for example, a piano falling on his head. Sadly enough, I was left hoping for luck.

But there was no luck tonight for poor Disappointed Dexter, and lately there had been a tragic lack of falling pianos in the Miami area. So here I was in my little hovel, pacing the floor with frustration, and every time I casually peeked out the window, there was the Taurus parked across the way. The memory of what I had been so happily contemplating only an hour ago pounded in my head.

Can Dexter come out and play?

Alas, no, dear Dark Passenger. Dexter is in time-out.

There was, however, one constructive thing I could do, even cooped up in my apartment. I took the crumpled piece of paper from MacGregor’s boat out of my pocket and smoothed it out, which left my fingers sticky from the leftover gunk off the roll of duct tape to which the paper had been stuck. “Reiker,” and a phone number. More than enough to feed to one of the reverse directories I could access from my computer, and in just a few minutes I had done so.

The number belonged to a cell phone, which was registered to a Mr. Steve Reiker of Tigertail Avenue in Coconut Grove. A little bit of cross-checking revealed that Mr. Reiker was a professional photographer. Of course, it could have been a coincidence. I am sure that there are many people named Reiker around the world who are photographers. I looked in the Yellow Pages and found that this particular Reiker had a specialty. He had a quarter-page ad that said, “Remember Them as They Are Now.”

Reiker specialized in pictures of children.

The coincidence theory might have to go.

The Dark Passenger stirred and gave a small chuckle of anticipation, and I found myself planning a trip over to Tigertail for a quick look around. In fact, it wasn’t terribly far away. I could drive over now, and-

And let Sergeant Doakes follow along playing Pin the Tail on the Dexter. Splendid idea, old chum. That would save Doakes a great deal of boring investigative work when Reiker finally disappeared some day. He could cut through all the dull routine and just come get me.

And at this rate, when would Reiker disappear? It was terribly frustrating to have a worthwhile goal in sight, and yet to be held in check like this. But after several hours Doakes was still parked across the street and I was still here. What to do? On the plus side, it seemed obvious that Doakes had not seen enough to take any action beyond following me. But leading the way in the very large minus column, if he continued to follow me I would be forced to stay in character as the mild-mannered forensic lab rat, carefully avoiding anything more lethal than rush hour on the Palmetto Expressway. That would never do. I felt a certain pressure, not just from the Passenger but from the clock. Before too much time passed I needed to find some proof that Reiker was the photographer who took MacGregor’s pictures, and if he was, have a sharp and pointed chat with him. If he realized MacGregor had gone the way of all flesh he would most likely run for the hills. And if my associates at police headquarters realized it, things could get very uncomfortable for Dashing Dexter.

But Doakes had apparently settled in for a long stay, and at the moment there was nothing I could do about it. It was terribly frustrating to think of Reiker walking around instead of thrashing against the duct tape. Homicidus interruptus. A soft moan and a gnashing of mental teeth came from the Dark Passenger, and I knew just how he felt, but there seemed to be very little I could do except pace back and forth. And even that wasn’t very helpful: if I kept it up I would wear a hole in the carpet and then I would never get back my security deposit on the apartment.

My instinct was to do something that would throw Doakes off the track-but he was no ordinary bloodhound. I could think of only one thing that might take the scent out of his quivering, eager snout. It was just barely possible that I could wear him down, play the waiting game, be relentlessly normal for so long that he would have to give it up and return to his real job of catching all the truly horrible residents on the underside of our fair city. Why even now they were out there double parking, littering, and threatening to vote Democratic in the next election. How could he waste time on little old Dexter and his harmless hobby?

All right then: I would be unstintingly ordinary until it made his teeth hurt. It might take weeks rather than days, but I would do it. I would live fully the synthetic life I had created in order to appear human. And since humans are generally ruled by sex, I would start with a visit to my girlfriend Rita.

It’s an odd term, “girlfriend,” particularly for grown persons. And in practice an even odder concept. Generally speaking, in adults it described a woman, not a girl, who was willing to provide sex, not friendship. In fact, from what I had observed it was quite possible for one to actively dislike one’s girlfriend, although of course true hatred is reserved for marriage. I had so far been unable to determine what women expect in return from a boyfriend, but apparently I had it as far as Rita was concerned. It certainly wasn’t sex, which to me seemed about as interesting as calculating foreign trade deficits.

Luckily, Rita also was uninterested in sex, for the most part. She was the product of a disastrous early marriage to a man whose idea of a good time turned out to be smoking crack and beating her. Later he branched out into infecting her with several intriguing diseases. But when he battered the kids one night Rita’s marvelous country-song loyalty ruptured, and she flung the swine out of her life and, happily, into prison.

As a result of all this turmoil, she had been looking for a gentleman who might be interested in companionship and conversation, someone who did not need to indulge the crude animal urges of base passion. A man, in other words, who would value her for her finer qualities and not her willingness to indulge in naked acrobatics. Ecce, Dexter. For almost two years she had been my ideal disguise, a key ingredient of Dexter as the world at large knew him. And in return I had not beaten her, had not infected her with anything, had not forced my animal lust on her, and she actually seemed to enjoy my company.

And as a bonus, I had become quite fond of her children, Astor and Cody. Strange, perhaps, but nonetheless true, I assure you. If everyone else in the world were to mysteriously disappear, I would feel irritated about it only because there would be no one to make me doughnuts. But children are interesting to me and, in fact, I like them. Rita’s two kids had been through a traumatic early childhood, and maybe because I had, too, I felt a special attachment to them, an interest that went beyond maintaining my disguise with Rita.

Aside from the bonus of her children, Rita herself was quite presentable. She had short and neat blond hair, a trim and athletic body, and she seldom said things that were outright stupid. I could go in public with her and know that we looked like an appropriately matched human pair, which was really the whole point. People even said we were an attractive couple, although I was never sure what that meant. I suppose Rita found me attractive somehow, although her track record with men didn’t make that too flattering. Still, it’s always nice to be around somebody who thinks I am wonderful. It confirms my low opinion of people.

I looked at the clock on my desk. Five thirty-two: within the next fifteen minutes Rita would be home from her job at Fairchild Title Agency, where she did something very complicated involving fractions of percentage points. By the time I got to her house, she should be there.

With a cheerful synthetic smile I headed out the door, waved to Doakes, and drove over to Rita’s modest South Miami house. The traffic wasn’t too bad, which is to say that there were no fatal accidents or shootings, and in just under twenty minutes I parked my car in front of Rita’s bungalow. Sergeant Doakes cruised past to the end of the street and, as I knocked on the front door, he parked across the way.

The door swung open and Rita peered out at me. “Oh!” she said. “Dexter.”

“In person,” I said. “I was in the neighborhood and wondered if you were home yet.”

“Well, I-I just walked in the door. I must look like a mess… Um-come on in. Would you like a beer?”

Beer; what a thought. I never touch the stuff-and yet, it was so amazingly normal, so perfectly visit-the-girlfriend-after-work, even Doakes had to be impressed. It was just the right touch. “I would love a beer,” I said, and I followed her into the relative cool of the living room.

“Have a seat,” she said. “I’m just going to freshen up a little.” She smiled at me. “The kids are out back, but I’m sure they’ll be all over you when they find out you’re here.” And she swished off down the hall, returning a moment later with a can of beer. “I’ll be right back,” she said, and went away to her bedroom at the back of the house.

I sat on the sofa and looked at the beer in my hand. I am not a drinker-really, drinking is not a recommended habit for predators. It slows the reflexes, dulls the perceptions, and knits up the raveled sleeve of care, which always sounded to me like a very bad thing. But here I was, a demon on vacation, attempting the ultimate sacrifice by giving up my powers and becoming human-and so a beer was just the thing for Dipsophobic Dexter.

I took a sip. The taste was bitter and thin, just as I would be if I had to keep the Dark Passenger buckled into his seat belt for very long. Still, I suppose beer is an acquired taste. I took another sip. I could feel it gurgle all the way down and splash into my stomach, and it occurred to me that with all the excitement and frustration of the day I hadn’t eaten lunch. But what the hell-it was just a light beer; or as the can proudly proclaimed: LITE BEER. I suppose we should be very grateful they hadn’t thought of a cuter way to spell beer.

I took a big sip. It wasn’t that bad when you got used to it. By golly, it really WAS relaxing. I, at any rate, felt more relaxed with each swig. Another refreshing sip-I couldn’t remember that it had tasted this good when I’d tried it in college. Of course, I was just a boy then, not the manly mature hardworking upright citizen I was now. I tilted the can, but nothing came out.

Well-somehow the can was empty. And yet I was still thirsty. Could this unpleasant situation really be tolerated? I thought not. Absolutely intolerable. In fact, I did not plan to tolerate it. I stood up and proceeded to the kitchen in a firm and unyielding manner. There were several more cans of lite beer in the refrigerator and I took one back to the couch.

I sat. I opened the beer. I took a sip. Much better. Damn that Doakes anyway. Maybe I should take him a beer. It might relax him, get him to loosen up and call the whole thing off. After all, we were on the same side, weren’t we?

I sipped. Rita came back wearing a pair of denim shorts and a white tank top with a tiny satin bow at the neckline. I had to admit, she looked very nice. I could really pick a disguise. “Well,” she said as she slid onto the couch next to me, “it’s nice to see you, out of the blue like this.”

“It certainly must be,” I said.

She cocked her head to one side and looked at me funny. “Did you have a hard day at work?”

“An awful day,” I said, and took a sip. “Had to let a bad guy go. Very bad guy.”

“Oh.” She frowned. “Why did-I mean, couldn’t you just…”

“I wanted to just,” I said. “But I couldn’t.” I raised the beer can to her. “Politics.” I took a sip.

Rita shook her head. “I still can’t get used to the idea that, that-I mean, from the outside it seems so cut-and-dried. You find the bad guy, you put him away. But politics? I mean, with-what did he do?”

“He helped to kill some kids,” I said.

“Oh,” she said, and looked shocked. “My God, there must be something you can do.”

I smiled at her. By gum, she had seen it right away. What a gal. Didn’t I say I could pick ’em? “You have put your finger right on it,” I said, and I took her hand to look at that finger. “There is something I can do. And very well, too.” I patted her hand, spilling only a little bit of beer. “I knew you’d understand.”

She looked confused. “Oh,” she said. “What kind of-I mean- What will you do?”

I took a sip. Why shouldn’t I tell her? I could see she already got the idea. Why not? I opened my mouth, but before I could whisper even one syllable about the Dark Passenger and my harmless hobby, Cody and Astor came racing into the room, stopped dead when they saw me, and stood there looking from me to their mother.

“Hi Dexter,” Astor said. She nudged her brother.

“Hi,” he said softly. He was not a big talker. In fact, he never said much of anything. Poor kid. The whole thing with his father had really messed him up. “Are you drunk?” he asked me. It was a big speech for him.

“Cody!” Rita said. I waved her off bravely and faced him.

“Drunk?” I said. “Me?”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“Certainly not,” I said firmly, giving him my very best dignified frown. “Possibly a little bit tipsy, but that’s not the same thing at all.”

“Oh,” he said, and his sister chimed in, “Are you staying for dinner?”

“Oh, I think I should probably be going,” I said, but Rita put a surprisingly firm hand on my shoulder.

“You’re not driving anywhere like this,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Tipsy,” said Cody.

“I’m not tipsy,” I said.

“You said you were,” said Cody. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d heard him put four words in a row like that, and I was very proud of him.

“You did,” Astor added. “You said you’re not drunk, you’re just a little tipsy.”

“I said that?” They both nodded. “Oh. Well then-”

“Well then,” Rita chimed in, “I guess you’re staying for dinner.”

Well then. I guess I did. I am pretty sure I did, anyway. I do know that at some point I went to the refrigerator for a lite beer and discovered they were all gone. And at some later point I was sitting on the couch again. The television was on and I was trying to figure out what the actors were saying and why an invisible crowd thought it was the most hilarious dialogue of all time.

Rita slid onto the couch next to me. “The kids are in bed,” she said. “How do you feel?”

“I feel wonderful,” I said. “If only I could figure out what’s so funny.”

Rita put a hand on my shoulder. “It really bothers you, doesn’t it? Letting the bad guy go. Children…” She moved closer and put her arm all the way around me, laying her head on my shoulder. “You’re such a good guy, Dexter.”

“No, I’m not,” I said, wondering why she would say something so very strange.

Rita sat up and looked from my left eye to my right eye and back again. “But you are, you KNOW you are.” She smiled and nestled her head back down on my shoulder. “I think it’s… nice that you came here. To see me. When you were feeling bad.”

I started to tell her that wasn’t quite right, but then it occurred to me: I

had

come here when I felt bad. True, it was only to bore Doakes into going away, after the terrible frustration of losing my playdate with Reiker. But it had turned out to be a pretty good idea after all, hadn’t it? Good old Rita. She was very warm and she smelled nice. “Good old Rita,” I said. I pulled her against me as tight as I could and leaned my cheek against the top of her head.

We sat that way for a few minutes, and then Rita wiggled to her feet and pulled me up by the hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let’s get you to bed.”

Which we did, and when I had flopped down under the top sheet and she crawled in beside me, she was just so nice and smelled so good and felt so warm and comfortable that-

Well. Beer really is amazing stuff, isn’t it?

CHAPTER 6

I WOKE UP WITH A HEADACHE, A FEELING OF TREMENDOUS self-loathing, and a sense of disorientation. There was a rose-colored sheet against my cheek. My sheets-the sheets I woke up to every day in my little bed-were not rose-colored, and they did not smell like this. The mattress seemed too spacious to be my modest trundle bed, and really-I was quite sure this was not my headache either.

“Good morning, handsome,” said a voice somewhere over my feet. I turned my head and saw Rita standing at the foot of the bed, looking down at me with a happy little smile.

“Ung,” I said in a voice that sounded like a toad’s croak and hurt my head even more. But apparently it was an amusing kind of pain, because Rita’s smile widened.

“That’s what I thought,” she said. “I’ll get you some aspirin.” She leaned over and rubbed my leg. “Mmm,” she said, and then turned and went into the bathroom.

I sat up. This may have been a strategic mistake, as it made my head pound a great deal more. I closed my eyes, breathed deeply, and waited for my aspirin.

This normal life was going to take a little getting used to.

But oddly enough it didn’t, not really. I found that if I limited myself to one or two beers, I could relax just enough to blend in with the slipcover on the couch. And so several nights a week, with ever-faithful Sergeant Doakes in my rearview mirror, I would stop over at Rita’s house after work, play with Cody and Astor, and sit with Rita after the kids were in bed. Around ten I would head for the door. Rita seemed to expect to be kissed when I left, so I generally arranged to kiss her standing in the open front door where Doakes could see me. I used all the technique I could muster from the many movies I have seen, and Rita responded happily.

I do like routine, and I settled into this new one to a point where I almost began to believe in it myself. It was so boring that I was putting my real self to sleep. From far away in the backseat of the deepest darkest corner of Dexterland I could even hear the Dark Passenger starting to snore gently, which was a little scary and made me feel a tiny bit lonesome for the first time. But I stayed the course, making a small game of my visits to Rita to see how far I could push it, knowing that Doakes was watching and, hopefully, beginning to wonder just a little bit. I brought flowers, candy, and pizza. I kissed Rita ever more outlandishly, framed in the open front door to give Doakes the best possible picture. I knew it was a ridiculous display, but it was the only weapon I had.

For days on end Doakes stayed with me. His appearances were unpredictable, which made him seem even more threatening. I never knew when or where he might turn up, and that made me feel like he was always there. If I went into the grocery store, Doakes was waiting by the broccoli. If I rode my bicycle out Old Cutler Road, somewhere along the way I would see the maroon Taurus parked under a banyan tree. A day might go by without a Doakes sighting, but I could feel him out there, circling downwind and waiting, and I did not dare hope that he had given up; if I could not see him, he was either well hidden or waiting to spring another surprise appearance on me.

I was forced into being Daytime Dexter on a full-time basis, like an actor trapped in a movie, knowing that the real world was right there, just beyond the screen, but as unreachable as the moon. And like the moon, the thought of Reiker pulled at me. The thought of him clomping through his unworried life in those absurd red boots was almost more than I could stand.

Of course I knew that even Doakes could not keep this up forever. He was, after all, receiving a handsome salary from the people of Miami for performing a job, and every now and then he had to perform it. But Doakes understood the rising interior tide that battered at me, and he knew that if he kept the pressure on long enough, the disguise would slip, HAD to slip, as the cool whispers from the backseat became more urgent.

And so there we were, balanced on a knife edge that was unfortunately only metaphorical. Sooner or later, I had to be me. But until then I would see an awful lot of Rita. She couldn’t hold a candle to my old flame, the Dark Passenger, but I did need my secret identity. And until I escaped Doakes, Rita was my cape, red tights, and utility belt-almost the entire costume.

Very well: I would sit on the couch, can of beer in hand, watching

Survivor

and thinking of an interesting variation of the game that would never make it to the network. If you simply add Dexter to the castaways and interpret the title a bit more literally…

It was not all dismal, bleak, and wretched. Several times a week I got to play kick the can with Cody and Astor and the other assorted wild creatures of the neighborhood, which brings us back to where we began: Dexter Dismasted, unable to sail through his normal life, anchored instead to a gaggle of kids and a ravioli can. And on evenings when it was raining, we stayed inside around the dining table, while Rita bustled about doing laundry, washing dishes, and otherwise perfecting the domestic bliss of her little nest.

There are only so many indoor games one can play with two children of such tender ages and damaged spirits as Cody and Astor; most of the board games were uninteresting or incomprehensible to them, and too many of the card games seemed to require a lighthearted simplemindedness that even I could not fake convincingly. But we finally hit on hangman; it was educational, creative, and mildly homicidal, which made everyone happy, even Rita.

If you had asked me pre-Doakes if a life of hangman and Miller Lite sounded like my cup of tea, I would have been forced to confess that Dexter Oolong was somewhat darker. But as the days piled up and I slipped further into the reality of my disguise, I had to ask myself: Was I enjoying the life of Mr. Suburban Householder just a little too much?

Still, it was very comforting somehow to see the predatory zest Cody and Astor brought to something as harmless as hangman. Their enthusiasm for hanging the little stick figures made me feel a bit more like we might all be part of the same general species. As they happily murdered their anonymous hanged men, I felt a certain kinship.

Astor quickly learned to draw the gallows and the lines for the letters. She was, of course, much more verbal about it. “Seven letters,” she would say, then tucking her upper lip between her teeth add, “Wait. Six.” As Cody and I missed on our guesses she would pounce and call out, “An

ARM

! Ha!” Cody would stare at her without expression, and then look down to the doodled figure hanging from its noose. When it was his turn and we missed a guess, he would say in his soft voice, “Leg,” and look up at us with something that might almost have been triumph in someone who showed emotion. And when the line of dashes under the gallows was finally filled in with the spelled-out word, they would both look at the dangling man with satisfaction, and once or twice Cody even said, “Dead,” before Astor bounced up and down and said, “Again, Dexter! My turn!”

All very idyllic. Our perfect little family of Rita, the kids, and Monster makes four. But no matter how many stick figures we executed, it did nothing to kill my worry that time was gurgling rapidly down the drain and soon I would be a white-haired old man, too feeble to lift a carving knife, tottering through my horrifyingly ordinary days, shadowed by an ancient Sergeant Doakes and a sense of missed opportunity.

As long as I couldn’t think of a way out, I was in the noose as surely as Cody and Astor’s stick figures. Very depressing, and I am ashamed to admit that I almost lost hope, which I never would have done if I had remembered one important thing.

This was Miami.

CHAPTER 7

OF COURSE IT COULDN’T LAST. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that such an unnatural state of affairs had to give way, yield to the natural order of things. After all, I lived in a city where mayhem was like the sunshine, always right behind the next cloud. Three weeks after my first unsettling encounter with Sergeant Doakes, the clouds finally broke.

It was just a piece of luck, really-not quite the falling piano I had been hoping for, but still a happy coincidence. I was having lunch with my sister, Deborah. Excuse me; I should have said, SERGEANT Deborah. Like her father, Harry, Debs was a cop. Owing to the happy outcome of recent events, she had been promoted, pulled out of the prostitute costume she had been forced to wear by her assignment with vice, whisked off the street corner at last and into her very own set of sergeant’s stripes.

It should have made her happy. After all, this was what she thought she wanted; an end to her tenure as a pretend hooker. Any young and reasonably attractive female officer assigned to vice would sooner or later find herself in a prostitution sting operation, and Deborah was very attractive. But her lush figure and healthy good looks had never done anything for my poor sister except embarrass her. She hated to wear anything that even hinted at her physical charms, and standing on the street in hot pants and a tube top had been sheer torture for her. She had been in danger of growing permanent frown lines.

Because I am an inhuman monster, I tend to be logical, and I had thought that her new assignment would end her martyrdom as Our Lady of Perpetual Grumpiness. Alas, even her transfer to homicide had failed to bring a smile to her face. Somewhere along the way she had decided that serious law enforcement personnel must reshape their faces until they look like large, mean-spirited fish, and she was still working very hard to accomplish this.

We had come to lunch together in her new motor-pool car, another of the perks of her promotion that really should have brought a small ray of sunshine into her life. It didn’t seem to. I wondered if I should worry about her. I watched her as I slid into a booth at Café Relampago, our favorite Cuban restaurant. She called in her location and status and then sat across from me with a frown.

“Well, Sergeant Grouper,” I said as we picked up our menus.

“Is that funny, Dexter?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very funny. And a little sad, too. Like life itself. Especially your life, Deborah.”

“Fuck you, Charlie,” she said. “My life is fine.” And to prove it, she ordered a

medianoche

sandwich, the best in Miami, and a

batido de mamey

, a milk shake made from a unique tropical fruit that tastes something like a combination of peach and watermelon.

My life was every bit as fine as hers, so I ordered the same thing. Because we were regulars here, and had been coming here most of our lives, the aging, unshaven waiter snatched away our menus with a face that might have been the role model for Deborah’s, and stomped off to the kitchen like Godzilla on his way to Tokyo.

“Everyone is so cheerful and happy,” I said.

“This isn’t

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

, Dex. It’s Miami. Only the bad guys are happy.” She looked at me without expression, a perfect cop stare. “How come you’re not laughing and singing?”

“Unkind, Deb. Very unkind. I’ve been good for months.”

She took a sip of water. “Uh-huh. And it’s making you crazy.”

“Much worse than that,” I said with a shudder. “I think it’s making me normal.”

“Coulda fooled me,” she said.

“Sad but true. I’ve become a couch potato.” I hesitated, then blurted it out. After all, if a boy can’t share his problems with his family, who can he confide in? “It’s Sergeant Doakes,” I said.

She nodded. “He’s got a real hard-on for you,” she said. “You better keep away from him.”

“I would love to,” I said. “But HE won’t keep away from ME.”

Her cop stare got harder. “What do you plan to do about it?”

I opened my mouth to deny all the things I had been thinking, but happily for the good of my immortal soul, before I could lie to her we were interrupted by the sound of Deb’s radio. She cocked her head to one side, snatched up the radio, and said she was on her way. “Come on,” she snapped, heading for the door. I followed meekly behind, pausing only to throw some money on the table.

Deborah was already backing out her car by the time I came out of Relampago’s. I hurried over and lunged for the door. She was moving forward and out of the parking lot before I even got both feet in. “Really, Deb,” I said. “I almost lost a shoe. What’s so important?”

Deborah frowned, accelerating through a small gap in traffic that only a Miami driver would have attempted. “I don’t know,” she said as she turned on the siren.

I blinked and raised my voice over the noise. “Didn’t the dispatcher tell you?”

“Have you ever heard the dispatcher stutter, Dexter?”

“Why no, Deb, I haven’t. Did this one do that?”

Deb swerved around a school bus and roared up onto 836. “Yeah,” she said. She turned hard to avoid a BMW full of young men, who all flipped her off. “I think it’s a homicide.”

“You think,” I said.

“Yeah,” she answered, and then she concentrated on driving and I let her. High speeds always remind me of my own mortality, especially on Miami ’s roads. And as for the Case of the Stuttering Dispatcher-well, Sergeant Nancy Drew and I would find out soon enough, particularly at this speed, and a little excitement is always welcome.

In a very few minutes Deb managed to get us over near the Orange Bowl without causing major loss of life, and we came down onto the surface roads and made a few quick turns before sliding into the curb at a small house on N.W. 4th Street. The street was lined with similar houses, all small and close together and each one with its own wall or chain-link fence. Many of them were brightly colored and had paved yards.

Two patrol cars had already pulled up in front of the house, their lights flashing. A pair of uniformed cops were rolling out the yellow crime-scene tape around the place, and as we got out, I saw a third cop sitting in the front seat of one of the cars, his head in his hands. On the porch of the house a fourth cop stood beside an elderly lady. There were two small steps leading up to the porch and she sat on the top one. She seemed to be alternating weeping with throwing up. Somewhere nearby a dog was howling, the same note over and over.

Deborah marched up to the nearest uniform. He was a square, middle-aged guy with dark hair and a look on his face that said he wished he was sitting in his car with his head in his hands, too. “What have we got?” Deb asked him, holding up her badge.

The cop shook his head without looking at us and blurted out, “I’m not going in there again, not if it costs me my pension.” And he turned away, almost walking into the side of a patrol car, rolling out the yellow tape like it could protect him from whatever was in the house.

Deborah stared after the cop, then looked at me. Quite frankly, I could think of nothing really useful or clever to say, and for a moment we just stood there looking at each other. The wind rattled the crime-scene tape, and the dog continued to howl, a kind of weird yodeling sound that did nothing to increase my affection for the canine species. Deborah shook her head. “Somebody should shut that fucking dog up,” she said, and she ducked under the yellow tape and started up the walk to the house. I followed. After a few steps I realized that the dog sound was getting closer; it was in the house, probably the victim’s pet. Quite often an animal reacts badly to its owner’s death.

We stopped at the steps and Deborah looked up at the cop, reading his name tag. “Coronel. Is this lady a witness?”

The cop didn’t look at us. “Yeah,” he said. “Mrs. Medina. She called it in,” and the old woman leaned over and retched.

Deborah frowned. “What’s with that dog?” she asked him.

Coronel made a sort of barking noise halfway between laughing and gagging, but he didn’t answer and he didn’t look at us.

I suppose Deborah had had enough, and it’s hard to blame her. “What the fuck is going on here?” she demanded.

Coronel turned his head to look at us. There was no expression at all on his face. “See for yourself,” he said, and then he turned away again. Deborah thought she was going to say something, but changed her mind. She looked at me instead and shrugged.

“We might as well take a look,” I told her, and I hoped I didn’t sound too eager. In truth, I was anxious to see anything that could create this kind of reaction in Miami cops. Sergeant Doakes might very well prevent me from doing anything of my own, but he couldn’t stop me from admiring someone else’s creativity. After all, it was my job, and shouldn’t we enjoy our work?

Deborah, on the other hand, showed uncharacteristic reluctance. She glanced back at the patrol car where the cop still sat unmoving, head in hands. Then she looked back to Coronel and the old lady, then at the front door of the little house. She took a deep breath, blew it out hard, and said, “All right. Let’s have a look.” But she still didn’t move, so I slipped past her and pushed open the door.

The front room of the little house was dark, curtains and blinds all pulled closed. There was one easy chair that looked like it had come from a thrift shop. It had a slipcover that was so dirty it was impossible to tell what color it was supposed to be. The chair sat in front of a small TV on a folding card table. Other than that the room was empty. A doorway opposite the front door showed a small patch of light, and that seemed to be where the dog was yowling, so I headed that way, toward the back of the house.

Animals do not like me, which proves they are smarter than we think. They seem to sense what I am, and they disapprove, often expressing their opinion in a very pointed way. So I was a little bit reluctant to approach a dog already so obviously upset. But I moved through the doorway, slowly, calling out hopefully, “Nice doggie!” It didn’t really sound like a very nice doggie; it sounded like a brain-damaged pit bull with rabies. But I do try to put a good face on things, even with our canine friends. With a kind and animal-loving expression on my face, I stepped to the swinging door that led to what was obviously the kitchen.

As I touched the door I heard a soft and uneasy rustling from the Dark Passenger and I paused.

What?

I asked, but there was no reply. I closed my eyes for just a second, but the page was blank; no secret message flashed onto the back of my eyelids. I shrugged, pushed open the door, and stepped into the kitchen.

The upper half of the room was painted a faded, greasy yellow, and the lower half was lined with old, blue pinstriped white tiles. There was a small refrigerator in one corner and a hot plate on the counter. A palmetto bug ran across the counter and dove behind the refrigerator. A sheet of plywood had been nailed across the room’s only window, and there was a single dim lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

Under the lightbulb was a large, heavy old table, the kind with square legs and a white porcelain finish. A large mirror hung on the wall at an angle that allowed it to reflect whatever was on the table. And in that reflection, lying in the middle of the table was a… um…

Well. I assume it had started life as a human being of some kind, quite probably male and Hispanic. Very difficult to say in its present state which, I admit, left even me a bit startled. Still, in spite of being surprised, I had to admire the thoroughness of the work, and the neatness. It would have made a surgeon very jealous, although it seems likely that very few surgeons would be able to justify this kind of work to an HMO.

I would never have thought, for instance, of cutting off the lips and eyelids like that, and although I pride myself on my neat work, I could never have done so without damage to the eyes, which in this case were rolling wildly back and forth, unable to close or even blink, always returning to that mirror. Just a hunch, but I guessed that the eyelids had been done last, long after the nose and ears had been oh-so-neatly removed. I could not decide, however, if I would have done these before or after the arms, legs, genitals, etc. A difficult series of choices, but from the look of things, it had all been done properly, even expertly, by someone who’d had plenty of practice. We often speak of very neat body work as “surgical.” But this was actual surgery. There was no bleeding at all, even from the mouth, where the lips and tongue had been removed. Even the teeth; one had to admire such amazing thoroughness. Every cut had been professionally closed; a white bandage was neatly taped to each shoulder where arms had once hung, and the rest of the cuts had already healed, in a way you might hope to find in the very best of hospitals.

Everything on the body had been cut off, absolutely everything. There was nothing left of it but a bare and featureless head attached to an unencumbered body. I could not imagine how it was possible to do this without killing the thing, and it was certainly far beyond me why anyone would want to. It revealed a cruelty that really made one wonder if the universe was such a good idea after all. Pardon me if this sounds a tad hypocritical coming from Death-head Dexter, but I know very well what I am and it is nothing like this. I do what the Dark Passenger deems necessary, to someone who truly deserves it, and it always ends in death-which I am sure the thing on the table would agree was not such a bad thing.

But this-to do all this so patiently and carefully and leave it alive in front of a mirror… I could feel a sense of black wonder drifting up from deep inside, as if for the very first time my Dark Passenger was feeling just a little bit insignificant.

The thing on the table did not appear to register my presence. It just kept making that deranged doggie sound, nonstop, the same horrible wavering note over and over.

I heard Deb scuffle to a halt behind me. “Oh Jesus,” she said. “Oh God… What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But at least it’s not a dog.”

CHAPTER 8

THERE WAS A VERY QUIET RUSH OF AIR, AND I LOOKED beyond Deborah to see that Sergeant Doakes had arrived. He glanced once around the room and then his eyes settled on the table. I admit that I had been curious to see what his reaction would be to something this extreme, and it was well worth the wait. When Doakes saw the kitchen’s central exhibit his eyes locked onto it and he stopped moving so completely that he could have been a statue. After a long moment he moved toward it, gliding slowly as if pulled on a string. He slid past us without noticing that we were there and came to a stop at the table.

For several seconds he stared down at the thing. Then, still without even blinking, he reached inside his sport coat and drew out his pistol. Slowly, with no expression, he aimed it between the unblinkable eyes of the still-yowling thing on the table. He cocked the pistol.

“Doakes,” said Deborah in a dry croak of a voice, and she cleared her throat and tried again. “Doakes!”

Doakes did not answer nor look away, but he didn’t pull the trigger, which seemed a shame. After all, what were we going to do with this thing? It wasn’t going to tell us who had done this. And I had a feeling its days as a useful member of society had come to an end. Why not let Doakes put it out of its misery? And then Deb and I would reluctantly be compelled to report what Doakes had done, he would be fired and even imprisoned, and my problems would be over. It seemed like such a neat solution, but of course it was not the kind of thing Deborah would ever agree to. She can get so fussy and official at times.

“Put away your weapon, Doakes,” she said, and although the rest of him remained absolutely motionless, he swiveled his head to look at her.

“Only thing to do,” he said. “Believe me.”

Deborah shook her head. “You know you can’t,” she said. They stared at each other for a moment, then his eyes clicked onto me. It was exceptionally hard for me to look back without blurting out something like, “Oh, what the hell-go for it!” But I managed somehow, and Doakes turned the pistol up into the air. He looked back at the thing, shook his head, and put the pistol away. “Shit,” he said. “Shoulda let me.” And he turned, walking rapidly out of the room.

Within the next few minutes the room became crowded with people who tried desperately not to look while they went to work. Camilla Figg, a stocky, short-haired lab tech who had always seemed to be limited in expression to either blushing or staring, was crying quietly as she dusted for fingerprints. Angel Batista, or Angel-no-relation as we called him, since that is how he always introduced himself, turned pale and clamped his jaw tightly shut, but he stayed in the room. Vince Masuoka, a co-worker who normally acted like he was only pretending to be human, trembled so badly he had to go outside and sit on the porch.

I began to wonder if I should pretend to be horrified, too, just to avoid being too noticeable. Perhaps I should go out and sit beside Vince. What did one talk about at such times? Baseball? The weather? Surely one wouldn’t talk about the thing we were running from-and yet, I found to my surprise that I would not mind talking about it. In truth, the thing was beginning to raise a mild twitch of interest from a Certain Interior Party. I had always worked so hard to avoid any kind of notice at all, and here was someone doing just the opposite. Clearly this monster was showing off for some reason, and it may have been only a perfectly natural competitive spirit, but that seemed a little irritating, even while it made me want to know more. Whoever did this was unlike anyone else I had ever encountered. Should I move this anonymous predator onto my list? Or should I pretend to swoon with horror and go sit outside on the porch?

As I pondered this difficult choice, Sergeant Doakes brushed past me again, for once barely even pausing to glower at me, and I recalled that because of him I had no chance to work through a list at the moment. It was mildly disconcerting, but it did make the decision seem a little easier. I started composing a properly unsettled facial expression, but got no further than raising my eyebrows. Two paramedics came rushing in, all focused importance, and stopped dead when they saw the victim. One of them immediately ran from the room. The other, a young black woman, turned to me and said, “What the fuck are

we

supposed to do?” Then she started crying, too.

You have to agree she had a point. Sergeant Doakes’s solution was starting to look more practical, even elegant. There seemed very little point in whisking this thing onto a gurney and dashing through Miami traffic to deliver it to a hospital. As the young lady had so elegantly put it, what the fuck were they supposed to do? But clearly somebody had to do something. If we just left it there and stood around like this, eventually someone would complain about all the cops throwing up in the yard, which would be very bad for the department’s image.

It was Deborah who finally got things organized. She persuaded the paramedics to sedate the victim and take it away, which allowed the surprisingly squeamish lab techs to come back inside and go to work. The quiet in the little house as the drugs took hold of the thing was close to ecstatic. The paramedics got the thing covered and onto their gurney without dropping it and wheeled it off into the sunset.

And just in time; as the ambulance pulled away from the curb the news trucks started to arrive. In a way it was a shame; I would love to have seen the reaction of one or two of the reporters, Rick Sangre in particular. He had been the area’s leading devotee of “If it bleeds, it leads,” and I had never seen him express any sense of pain or horror, except on camera or if his hair was mussed. But it was not to be. By the time Rick’s cameraman was ready to roll, there was nothing left to see other than the little house fenced in by the yellow tape, and a handful of cops with clamped jaws who wouldn’t have had much to say to Sangre on a good day, and today probably wouldn’t have told him his own name.

There was really not a great deal for me to do. I had come in Deborah’s car and so I did not have my kit, and in any case there was no visible blood spatter anywhere that I could see. Since that was my area of expertise, I felt I should find something and be useful, but our surgical friend had been too careful. Just to be sure I looked through the rest of the house, which wasn’t much. There was one small bedroom, an even smaller bathroom, and a closet. They all seemed to be empty, except for a bare, battered mattress on the floor of the bedroom. It looked like it had come from the same thrift shop as the living-room chair and had been pounded flat like a Cuban steak. No other furniture or utensils, not even a plastic spoon.

The only thing that showed even the smallest hint of personality was something Angel-no-relation found under the table as I finished my quick tour of the house. “Hola,” he said, and pulled a small piece of notepaper off the floor with his tweezers. I stepped over to see what it might be. It was hardly worth the effort; nothing but a single small page of white paper, ripped slightly at the top where a little rectangle had been torn away. I looked just above Angel’s head and sure enough, there on the side of the table was the missing rectangle of paper, held to the table with a strip of Scotch tape. “Mira,” I said, and Angel looked. “Aha,” he said.

As he examined the tape carefully-tape holds fingerprints wonderfully well-he put the paper on the floor and I squatted down to look at it. There were some letters written on it in a spidery hand; I leaned over farther to read them: LOYALTY.

“Loyalty?” I said.

“Sure. Isn’t that an important virtue?”

“Let’s ask him,” I said, and Angel shuddered hard enough that he almost dropped his tweezers.

“Me cago en diez with that shit,” he said, and reached for a plastic bag to put the paper into. It hardly seemed like something worth watching, and there was really nothing else to see, so I headed for the door.

I certainly am not a professional profiler, but because of my dark hobby I often have a certain amount of insight into other crimes that seem to come from the same neighborhood. This, however, was far outside the bounds of anything I had ever seen or imagined. There was no hint of any kind that pointed toward personality or motivation, and I was intrigued nearly as much as I was irritated. What kind of predator would leave the meat lying around and still wiggling like that?

I went outside and stood on the porch. Doakes was huddled with Captain Matthews, telling him something that had the captain looking worried. Deborah was crouched beside the old lady, talking quietly with her. I could feel a breeze picking up, the squall breeze that comes right before the afternoon thunderstorm, and as I looked up the first hard spatters of rain pelted down on the sidewalk. Sangre, who had been standing at the tape waving his microphone and trying to get the attention of Captain Matthews, looked up at the clouds too and, as the thunder began to rumble, threw his microphone at his producer and lurched into the news van.

My stomach rumbled, too, and I remembered that I had missed my lunch in all the excitement. This would never do; I needed to keep up my strength. My naturally high metabolism needed constant attention: no diet for Dexter. But I had to depend on Deborah for a ride, and I had the feeling, just a hunch, that she would not be sympathetic about any mention of eating at the moment. I looked at her again. She was cradling the old lady, Mrs. Medina, who had apparently given up retching and was concentrating on sobbing.

I sighed and walked to the car through the rain. I didn’t really mind getting wet. It looked like I was going to have a long wait to dry off.

It was indeed a long wait, well over two hours. I sat in the car and listened to the radio and tried to picture, bite by bite, what it was like to eat a

medianoche

sandwich: the crackle of the bread crust, so crisp and toasty it scratches the inside of your mouth as you bite down. Then the first taste of mustard, followed by the soothing cheese and the salt of the meat. Next bite-a piece of pickle. Chew it all up; let the flavors mingle. Swallow. Take a big sip of Iron Beer (pronounced Ee-roan Bay-er, and it’s a soda). Sigh. Sheer bliss. I would rather eat than do anything else except play with the Passenger. It’s a true miracle of genetics that I am not fat.

I was on my third imaginary sandwich when Deborah finally came back to the car. She slid into the driver’s seat, closed the door, and just sat there, staring ahead through the rain-splattered windshield. And I knew it wasn’t the best thing I could have said, but I couldn’t help myself. “You look beat, Deb. How about lunch?”

She shook her head but didn’t say anything.

“Maybe a nice sandwich. Or a fruit salad-get your blood sugar back up? You’ll feel so much better.”

Now she looked at me, but it was not a look that showed any real promise of lunch at any time in the near future. “This is why I wanted to be a cop,” she said.

“The fruit salad?”

“That thing in there-” she said, and then turned to look out the windshield again. “I want to nail that-that, whatever it is that could do that to a human being. I want it so bad I can

taste

it.”

“Does it taste like a sandwich, Deborah? Because-”

She smacked the heels of her palms onto the rim of the steering wheel, hard. Then she did it again. “GodDAMN it,” she said. “God-fucking-DAMN it!”

I sighed. Clearly long-suffering Dexter was going to be denied his crust of bread. And all because Deborah was having some kind of epiphany from seeing a piece of wiggling meat. Of course it was a terrible thing, and the world would be a much better place without someone in it who could do that, but did that mean we had to miss lunch? Didn’t we all need to keep up our strength to catch this guy? Still, it did not seem like the very best time to point this out to Deborah, so I simply sat there with her, watching the rain splat against the windshield, and ate imaginary sandwich number four.

The next morning I had hardly settled into my little cubicle at work when my phone rang. “Captain Matthews wants to see everybody who was there yesterday,” Deborah said.

“Good morning, Sis. Fine, thanks, and you?”

“Right now,” she said, and hung up.

The police world is made up of routine, both official and unofficial. This is one of the reasons I like my job. I always know what’s coming, and so there are fewer human responses for me to memorize and then fake at the appropriate times, fewer chances for me to be caught off guard and react in a way that might call into question my membership in the race.

As far as I knew, Captain Matthews had never before called in “everybody who was there.” Even when a case was generating a great deal of publicity, it was his policy to handle the press and those above him in the command structure, and let the investigating officer handle the casework. I could think of absolutely no reason why he would violate this protocol, even with a case as unusual as this one. And especially so soon-there had barely been enough time for him to approve a press release.

But “right now” still meant right now, as far as I could tell, so I tottered down the hall to the captain’s office. His secretary, Gwen, one of the most efficient women who had ever lived, sat there at her desk. She was also one of the plainest and most serious, and I found it almost impossible to resist tweaking her. “Gwendolyn! Vision of radiant loveliness! Fly away with me to the blood lab!” I said as I came into the office.

She nodded at the door at the far end of the room. “They’re in the conference room,” she said, completely stone-faced.

“Is that a no?”

She moved her head an inch to the right. “That door over there,” she said. “They’re waiting.”

They were indeed. At the head of the conference table Captain Matthews sat with a cup of coffee and a scowl. Ranged around the table were Deborah and Doakes, Vince Masuoka, Camilla Figg, and the four uniformed cops who had been setting the perimeter at the little house of horror when we arrived. Matthews nodded at me and said, “Is this everybody?”

Doakes stopped glaring at me and said, “Paramedics.”

Matthews shook his head. “Not our problem. Somebody will talk to them later.” He cleared his throat and looked down, as though consulting an invisible script. “All right,” he said, and cleared his throat again. “The, uh, the event of yesterday which occurred at, um, N.W. 4th Street has been interdicted, ah, at the very highest level.” He looked up, and for a moment I thought he was impressed. “

Very

highest,” he said. “You are all hereby ordered to keep to yourselves what you may have seen, heard, or surmised in connection with this event and its location. No comment, public or private, of any kind.” He looked at Doakes, who nodded, and then he looked around the table at all of us. “Therefore, ah…”

Captain Matthews paused and frowned as he realized that he didn’t actually have a “therefore” for us. Luckily for his reputation as a smooth talker, the door opened. We all turned to look.

The doorway was filled with a very big man in a very nice suit. He wore no tie and the top three buttons of his shirt were undone. A diamond pinkie ring glittered on the little finger of his left hand. His hair was wavy and artfully mussed. He looked to be in his forties, and time had not been kind to his nose. A scar ran across his right eyebrow and another down one side of his chin, but the overall impression was not disfigurement so much as decoration. He looked at us all with a cheerful grin and bright, empty blue eyes, pausing in the doorway for a dramatic moment before he looked to the head of the table and said, “Captain Matthews?”

The captain was a reasonably large man and masculine in a very well-kept way, but he looked small and even effeminate compared to the man in the doorway, and I believe he felt it. Still, he clenched his manly jaw and said, “That’s right.”

The big man strode in to Matthews and held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Captain. I’m Kyle Chutsky. We talked on the phone.” As he shook hands, he glanced around the table, pausing at Deborah before moving back to Matthews. But after only half a second his head snapped back around and he locked stares with Doakes, just for a moment. Neither one of them said anything, moved, twitched, or offered a business card, but I was absolutely positive they knew each other. Without acknowledging this in any way, Doakes looked down at the table in front of him and Chutsky returned his attention to the captain. “You have a great department here, Captain Matthews. I hear nothing but good things about you guys.”

“Thank you… Mr. Chutsky,” Matthews said stiffly. “Have a seat?”

Chutsky gave him a big, charming smile. “Thanks, I will,” he said, and slid into the empty seat next to Deborah. She didn’t turn to look at him, but from my spot across the table I could see a slow flush climbing up her neck, all the way to her scowl.

And at this point, I could hear a little voice in the back of Dexter’s brain clearing its throat and saying, “Excuse me, just a minute-but what the hell is going on here?” Perhaps someone had slipped some LSD into my coffee, because this entire day was beginning to feel like Dexter in Wonderland. Why were we even here? Who was the battered big guy who made Captain Matthews nervous? How did he know Doakes? And why, for the love of all that is shiny, bright, and sharp, was Deborah’s face turning such an unbecoming shade of red?

I often find myself in situations where it seems to me like everyone else has read the instruction book while poor Dexter is in the dark and can’t even match tab A with slot B. It usually relates to some natural human emotion, something that is universally understood. Unfortunately, Dexter is from a different universe and does not feel nor understand such things. All I can do is gather a few quick clues to help me decide what kind of face to make while I wait for things to settle back onto the familiar map.

I looked at Vince Masuoka. I was probably closer to him than any of the other lab techs, and not just because we took turns bringing in doughnuts. He always seemed to be faking his way through life, too, as if he had watched a series of videos to learn how to smile and talk to people. He was not quite as talented at pretending as I was, and the results were never as convincing, but I felt a certain kinship.

Right now he looked flustered and intimidated, and he seemed to be trying hard to swallow without any real luck. No clue there.

Camilla Figg was sitting at attention, staring at a spot on the wall in front of her. Her face was pale, but there was a small and very round spot of red color on each cheek.

Deborah, as mentioned, was slumping down in her chair and seemed very busily engaged in turning bright scarlet.

Chutsky slapped the palm of his hand on the table, looked around with a big happy smile, and said, “I want to thank you all for your cooperation with this thing. It’s very important that we keep this quiet until my people can move in on it.”

Captain Matthews cleared his throat. “Ahem. I, uh, I assume you will want us to continue our routine investigative procedures and the, uh, interrogating of witnesses and so on.”

Chutsky shook his head slowly. “Absolutely not. I need your people all the way out of the picture immediately. I want this whole thing to cease and desist, disappear-as far as your department is concerned, Captain, I want it never to have happened at all.”

“Are YOU taking over this investigation?” Deborah demanded.

Chutsky looked at her and his smile got bigger. “That’s right,” he said. And he probably would have kept smiling at her indefinitely if not for Officer Coronel, the cop who had sat on the porch with the weeping and retching old lady. He cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, okay, just a minute here,” and there was a certain amount of hostility in his voice that made his very slight accent a little more obvious. Chutsky turned to look at him, and the smile stayed on his face. Coronel looked flustered, but he met Chutsky’s happy stare. “Are you trying to stop us from doing our jobs here?”

“Your job is to protect and serve,” Chutsky said. “In this case that means to protect this information and serve me.”

“That’s bullshit,” Coronel said.

“It doesn’t matter what kind of shit it is,” Chutsky told him. “You’re gonna do it.”

“Who the fuck are you to tell me that?”

Captain Matthews tapped the table with his fingertips. “That’s enough, Coronel. Mr. Chutsky is from Washington, and I have been instructed to render him every assistance.”

Coronel was shaking his head. “He’s no goddamn FBI,” he said.

Chutsky just smiled. Captain Matthews took a deep breath to say something-but Doakes moved his head half an inch toward Coronel and said, “Shut your mouth.” Coronel looked at him and some of the fight went out of him. “Don’t want to mess with this shit,” Doakes went on. “Let his people handle it.”

“It isn’t right,” said Coronel.

“Leave it,” said Doakes.

Coronel opened his mouth, Doakes raised his eyebrows-and on reflection, looking at the face underneath those eyebrows, perhaps, Officer Coronel decided to leave it.

Captain Matthews cleared his throat in an attempt to take back control. “Any more questions? All right then-Mr. Chutsky. If there’s any other way we can help…”

“As a matter of fact, Captain, I would appreciate it if I could borrow one of your detectives for liaison. Somebody who can help me find my way around, dot all the t’s, like that.”

All the heads around the table swung to Doakes in perfect unison, except for Chutsky’s. He turned to his side, to Deborah, and said, “How about it, Detective?”

CHAPTER 9

I HAVE TO ADMIT THE SURPRISE ENDING TO CAPTAIN Matthew’s meeting caught me off guard, but at least I now knew why everyone was acting so much like lab rats thrown into a lion’s cage. No one likes to have the Feds come in on a case; the only joy in it is making things as hard as possible for them when they do. But Chutsky was apparently such a very heavy hitter that even this small pleasure would be denied to us.

The significance of Deborah’s bright red skin condition was a deeper mystery, but it wasn’t my problem. My problem had suddenly become a little bit clearer. You may think that Dexter is a dull boy for not putting it together sooner, but when the nickel finally dropped it was accompanied by a desire to smack myself on the head. Perhaps all the beer at Rita’s house had short-sheeted my mental powers.

But clearly this visitation from Washington had been called down upon us by none other than Dexter’s personal nemesis, Sergeant Doakes. There had been some vague rumors that his service in the army had been somewhat irregular, and I was starting to believe them. His reaction when he saw the thing on the table had not been shock, outrage, disgust, or anger, but something far more interesting: recognition. Right at the scene he had told Captain Matthews what this was, and who to talk to about it. That particular who had sent Chutsky. And therefore when I had thought Chutsky and Doakes had recognized each other at the meeting, I had been right-because whatever was going on that Doakes knew about, Chutsky knew about it, too, probably even more so, and he had come to squash it. And if Doakes knew about something like this, there had to be a way to use his background against him in some small way, thus flinging the chains off poor Detained Dexter.

It was a brilliant train of pure cool logic; I welcomed the return of my giant brain and mentally patted myself on the head. Good boy, Dexter. Arf arf.

It is always nice to see the synapses clicking in a way that lets you know your opinion of yourself is sometimes justified. But in this particular case, there was just a chance that more was at stake than Dexter’s self-esteem. If Doakes had something to hide, I was a step closer to being back in business.

There are several things that Dashing Dexter is good at, and some of them can actually be legally performed in public. One of these things is using a computer to find information. This was a skill I had developed to help me be absolutely sure about new friends like MacGregor and Reiker. Aside from avoiding the unpleasantness of cutting up the wrong person, I like to confront my fellow hobbyists with the evidence of their past indiscretions before I send them off to dreamland. Computers and the Internet were wonderful means of finding this stuff.

So if Doakes had something to hide, I thought I could probably find it, or at least some small thread of it that I could yank on until his whole dark past began to unravel. Knowing him as I did, I was quite sure it would be dismal and Dexter-like. And when I found that certain something… Perhaps I was being naïve to think I could use this hypothetical information to get him off my case, but I thought there was a very good chance. Not by confronting him directly and demanding that he cease and desist or else, which might not be entirely wise with someone like Doakes. Besides, that was blackmail, which I am told is very wrong. But information is power, and I would certainly find some small way to use whatever I found-a way to give Doakes something to think about that did not involve shadowing Dexter and curtailing his Crusade for Decency. And a man who discovers his pants are on fire tends to have very little time to worry about somebody else’s box of matches.

I went happily down the hall from the captain’s office, back to my little cubicle off the forensics lab, and got right to work.

A few hours later I had just about all I could find. There were surprisingly few details in Sergeant Doakes’s file. The few that I found left me gasping for breath: Doakes had a first name! It was Albert-had anyone ever really called him that? Unthinkable. I had assumed his name was Sergeant. And he had been born, too-in Waycross, Georgia. Where would the wonders end? There was more, even better; before he had come to the department, Sergeant Doakes had been-Sergeant Doakes! In the army-the Special Forces, of all things! Picturing Doakes in one of those jaunty green beanies marching alongside John Wayne was almost more than I could think about without bursting into military song.

Several commendations and medals were listed, but I could find no mention of any heroic actions that had earned them. Still, I felt much more patriotic just knowing the man. The rest of his record was almost completely empty of details. The only thing that stood out at all was an eighteen-month stretch of something called “detached service.” Doakes had served it as a military adviser in El Salvador, returned home to a six-month stretch at the Pentagon, and then retired to our fortunate city. Miami ’s police department had been happy to scoop up a decorated veteran and offer him gainful employment.

But El Salvador -I was not a history buff, but I seemed to recall that it had been something of a horror show. There had been protest marches down on Brickell Avenue at the time. I didn’t remember why, but I knew how to find out. I fired up my computer again and went online, and oh dear-find out I did. El Salvador at the time Doakes was there had been a true three-ring circus of torture, rape, murder, and name-calling. And no one had thought to invite me.

I found an awful lot of information posted by various human rights groups. They were quite serious, almost shrill, in the things they had to say about what had been done down there. Still, as far as I could tell, nothing had ever come of their protests. After all, it was only human rights. It must be terribly frustrating; PETA seems to get much better results. These poor souls had done their research, published their results detailing rapes, electrodes, and, cattle prods, complete with photos, diagrams, and the names of the hideous inhuman monsters who reveled in inflicting this suffering on the masses. And the hideous inhuman monsters in question retired to the south of France, while the rest of the world boycotted restaurants for mistreating chickens.

It gave me a great deal of hope. If I was ever caught, perhaps I could simply protest dairy products and they’d let me go.

The El Salvadoran names and historical details I found meant very little to me. Neither did the organizations involved. Apparently it had developed into one of those wonderful free-for-alls where there were no actual good guys, merely several teams of bad guys with the campesinos caught in the middle. The United States had covertly backed one side, however, in spite of the fact that this team seemed just as eager to hammer suspicious poor persons into paste. And it was this side that got my attention. Something had turned the tide in their favor, some terrible threat that was not specified, something that was apparently so awful it left people nostalgic for cattle prods in the rectum.

Whatever it was, it seemed to coincide with the period of Sergeant Doakes’s detached service.

I sat back in my rickety swivel chair. Well, well, well, I thought. What an interesting coincidence. At approximately the same time, we had Doakes, hideous unnamed torture, and covert U.S. involvement all buzzing about together. Naturally enough there was no proof that these three things were in any way linked, no reason at all to suspect any kind of connection. Just as naturally, I was as sure as I could be that they were very much three peas in one pod. Because twenty-some years later they had all come back together for a reunion party in Miami: Doakes, Chutsky, and whatever had made the thing on the table. It was starting to look like tab A would fit into slot B after all.

I had found my little string. And if only I could think of a way to pull on it-

Peekaboo, Albert.

Of course, having information to use is one thing. Knowing what it means and how to use it is a different story. And all I really knew was that Doakes had been there when some bad things happened. He probably hadn’t done them himself, and in any case they were sanctioned by the government. Covertly, of course-which made one wonder how everyone knew about it.

On the other hand, there was certainly somebody out there who still wanted to keep this quiet. And at the moment, that somebody was represented by Chutsky-who was being chaperoned by my dear sister, Deborah. If I could get her help, I might be able to squeeze a few details out of Chutsky. What I could do then remained to be seen, but at least I could begin.

It sounded too simple, and of course it was. I called Deborah right away, and got her answering machine. I tried her cell phone and it was the same thing. For the rest of the day, Debs was out of the office please leave a message. When I tried her at home that evening it was the same thing. And when I hung up the phone and looked out the window of my apartment, Sergeant Doakes was parked in his favorite spot across the street.

A half-moon came out from behind a tattered cloud and muttered at me, but it was wasting its breath. No matter how much I wanted to slip away and have an adventure named Reiker, I could not; not with that awful maroon Taurus parked there like a discount conscience. I turned away, looking for something to kick. Here it was Friday night, and I was prevented from stepping out and strolling through the shadows with the Dark Passenger-and now I couldn’t even get my sister on the phone. What a terrible thing life can be.

I paced around my apartment for a while but accomplished nothing except stubbing my toe. I called Deborah two more times and she was not home two more times. I looked out the window again. The moon had moved slightly; Doakes had not.

All righty then. Back to plan B.

Half an hour later I was sitting on Rita’s couch with a can of beer in my hand. Doakes had followed me, and I had to assume he was waiting across the street in his car. I hoped he was enjoying this as much as I was, which was to say not very much at all. Was this what it was like to be human? Were people actually so miserable and brainless that they looked forward to this-to spending Friday night, precious time off from wage slave drudgery, sitting in front of a television with a can of beer? It was mind-numbingly dull, and to my horror, I found that I was getting used to it.

Curses on you, Doakes. You’re driving me normal.

“Hey, mister,” Rita said, plunking herself down next to me, where she curled her feet under her, “why so quiet?”

“I think I’m working too hard,” I told her. “And enjoying it less.”

She was quiet for a moment, then she said, “It’s that thing with the guy you had to let go, isn’t it? The guy who was… he killed the kids?”

“That’s part of it,” I said. “I don’t like unfinished business.”

Rita nodded, almost as if she actually understood what I was saying. “That’s very… I mean, I can tell it’s bothering you. Maybe you should- I don’t know. What do you usually do to relax?”

It certainly conjured up some funny pictures to think of telling her what I did to relax, but it was probably not a very good idea. So instead I said, “Well, I like to take my boat out. Go fishing.”

And a small, very soft voice behind me said, “Me, too.” Only my highly trained nerves of steel prevented me from bumping my head on the ceiling fan; I am nearly impossible to sneak up on, and yet I’d had no idea there was anyone else in the room. But I turned around and there was Cody, looking at me with his large, unblinking eyes. “You too?” I said. “You like to go fishing?”

He nodded; two words at a time was close to his daily limit.

“Well, then,” I said. “I guess it’s settled. How about tomorrow morning?”

“Oh,” Rita said, “I don’t think- I mean, he isn’t- You don’t have to, Dexter.”

Cody looked at me. Naturally enough he didn’t say anything, but he didn’t need to. It was all there in his eyes. “Rita,” I said, “sometimes the boys need to get away from the girls. Cody and I are going fishing in the morning. Bright and early,” I said to Cody.

“Why?”

“I don’t know why,” I said. “But you’re supposed to go early, so we will.” Cody nodded, looked at his mother, and then turned around and walked down the hall.

“Really, Dexter,” Rita said. “You really don’t have to.”

And, of course, I knew I didn’t have to. But why shouldn’t I? It probably wouldn’t cause me actual physical pain. Besides that, it would be nice to get away for a few hours. Especially from Doakes. And in any case-again, I don’t know why it should be, but kids really do matter to me. I certainly don’t get all gooey-eyed at the sight of training wheels on a bicycle, but on the whole I find children far more interesting than their parents.

The next morning, as the sun was coming up, Cody and I were motoring slowly out of the canal by my apartment in my seventeen-foot Whaler. Cody wore a blue-and-yellow life vest and sat very still on the cooler. He slumped down just a little so that his head almost vanished inside the vest, making him look like a brightly colored turtle.

Inside the cooler was soda and a lunch Rita had made for us, a light snack for ten or twelve people. I had brought frozen shrimp for bait, since this was Cody’s first trip and I didn’t know how he might react to sticking a sharp metal hook into something that was still alive. I rather enjoyed it, of course-the more alive, the better!-but one can’t expect sophisticated tastes from a child.

Out the canal, into Biscayne Bay, and I headed across to Cape Florida, steering for the channel that cut past the lighthouse. Cody didn’t say anything until we came within sight of Stiltsville, that odd collection of houses built on pilings in the middle of the bay. Then he tugged at my sleeve. I bent down to hear him over the roar of the engine and the wind.

“Houses,” he said.

“Yes,” I yelled. “Sometimes there are even people in them.”

He watched the houses go by and then, when they began to disappear behind us, he sat back down on the cooler. He turned around once more to look at them when they were almost out of sight. After that he just sat until we got to Fowey Rock and I idled down. I put the motor in neutral and slid the anchor over the bow, waiting to make sure it caught before turning the engine off.

“All right, Cody,” I said. “It’s time to kill some fish.”

He smiled, a very rare event. “Okay,” he said.

He watched me with unblinking attention as I showed him how to thread the shrimp onto the hook. Then he tried it himself, very slowly and carefully pushing the hook in until the point came out again. He looked at the hook and then up at me. I nodded, and he looked back at the shrimp, reaching out to touch the place where the hook broke through the shell.

“All right,” I said. “Now drop it in the water.” He looked up at me. “That’s where the fish are,” I said. Cody nodded, pointed his rod tip over the side of the boat, and pushed the release button on his little Zebco reel to drop the bait into the water. I flicked my bait over the side, too, and we sat there rocking slowly on the waves.

I watched Cody fish with his fierce blank concentration. Perhaps it was the combination of open water and a small boy, but I couldn’t help but think of Reiker. Even though I could not safely investigate him, I was assuming that he was guilty. When would he know that MacGregor was gone, and what would he do about it? It seemed most likely that he would panic and try to disappear-and yet, the more I thought about it, the more I wondered. There is a natural human reluctance to abandon an entire life and start over somewhere else. Perhaps he would just be cautious for a while. And if so, I could fill my time with the new entry on my rather exclusive social register, whoever had created the Howling Vegetable of N.W. 4th Street, and the fact that this sounded rather like a Sherlock Holmes title made it no less urgent. Somehow I had to neutralize Doakes. Somehow someway sometime soon I had to-

“Are you going to be my dad?” Cody asked suddenly.

Luckily I had nothing in my mouth which might choke me, but for a moment it felt like there was something in my throat, something the approximate size of a Thanksgiving turkey. When I could breathe again, I managed to stammer out, “Why do you ask?”

He was still watching his rod tip. “Mom says maybe,” he said.

“Did she?” I said, and he nodded without looking up.

My head whirled. What was Rita thinking? I had been so wrapped up in the hard work of ramming my disguise down Doakes’s throat that I had never really thought about what was going on in Rita’s head. Apparently, I should have. Could she truly be thinking that, that-it was unthinkable. But I suppose in a strange way it might make sense if one was a human being. Fortunately I am not, and the thought seemed completely bizarre to me.

Mom says maybe?

Maybe I would be Cody’s dad? Meaning, um-

“Well,” I said, which was a very good start considering I had absolutely no idea what I might say next. Happily for me, just as I realized nothing resembling a coherent answer was going to come out of my mouth, Cody’s rod tip jerked savagely. “You have a fish!” I said, and for the next few minutes it was all he could do to hang on as the line whirred off his reel. The fish made repeated ferocious, slashing zigzags to the right, the left, under the boat, and then straight for the horizon. But slowly, in spite of several long runs away from the boat, Cody worked the fish closer. I coached him to keep the rod tip up, wind in the line, work the fish in to where I could get a hand on the leader and bring it into the boat. Cody watched it flop on the deck, its forked tail still flipping wildly.

“A blue runner,” I said. “That is one wild fish.” I bent to release it, but it was bucking too much for me to get a hand on it. A thin stream of blood came from its mouth and onto my clean white deck, which was a bit upsetting. “Ick,” I said. “I think he swallowed the hook. We’ll have to cut it out.” I pulled my fillet knife from its black plastic sheath and laid it on the deck. “There’s going to be a lot of blood,” I warned Cody. I do not like blood, and I did not want it in my boat, not even fish blood. I took the two steps forward to open the dry locker and get an old towel I kept for cleaning up.

“Ha,” I heard behind me, softly. I turned around.

Cody had taken the knife and stuck it into the fish, watching it struggle away from the blade, and then carefully sticking the point in again. This second time he pushed the blade deep into the fish’s gills, and a gout of blood ran out onto the deck.

“Cody,” I said.

He looked up at me and, wonder of wonders, he smiled. “I like fishing, Dexter,” he said.

CHAPTER 10

BY MONDAY MORNING I STILL HAD NOT GOTTEN IN touch with Deborah. I called repeatedly, and although I became so familiar with the sound of the tone that I could hum it, Deborah did not respond. It was increasingly frustrating; here I was with a possible way out of the stranglehold Doakes had put me in, and I could get no further with it than the telephone. It’s terrible to have to depend on someone else.

But I am persistent and patient, among my many other Boy Scout virtues. I left dozens of messages, all of them cheerful and clever, and that positive attitude must have done the trick, because I finally got an answer.

I had just settled into my desk chair to finish a report on a double homicide, nothing exciting. A single weapon, probably a machete, and a few moments of wild abandon. The initial wounds on both victims had been delivered in bed, where they had apparently been caught in flagrante delicto. The man had managed to raise one arm, but a little too late to save his neck. The woman made it all the way to the door before a blow to the upper spine sent a spurt of blood onto the wall beside the door frame. Routine stuff, the kind of thing that makes up most of my work, and extremely unpleasant. There is just so very much blood in two human beings, and when somebody decides to let it all out at once it makes a terrible and unattractive mess, which I find deeply offensive. Organizing and analyzing it makes me feel a great deal better, and my job can be deeply satisfying on occasion.

But this one was a real mess. I had found spatter on the ceiling fan, most likely from the machete blade as the killer raised his arm between strokes. And because the fan was on, it flung more spatter to the far corners of the room.

It had been a busy day for Dexter. I was just trying to word a paragraph in the report properly to indicate that it had been what we like to call a “crime of passion” when my phone rang.

“Hey, Dex,” the voice said, and it sounded so relaxed, even sleepy, that it took me a moment to realize it was Deborah.

“Well,” I said. “The rumors of your death were exaggerated.”

She laughed, and again the sound of it was downright mellow, unlike her usual hard-edged chuckle. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m alive. But Kyle has kept me pretty busy.”

“Remind him of the labor laws, Sis. Even sergeants need their rest.”

“Mm, I don’t know about that,” she said. “I feel pretty good without it.” And she gave a throaty, two-syllable chuckle that sounded as unlike Debs as if she had asked me to show her the best way to cut through living human bone.

I tried to remember when I had heard Deborah say she felt pretty good and actually sound like she meant it at the same time. I came up blank. “You sound very unlike yourself, Deborah,” I said. “What on earth has gotten into you?”

This time her laugh was a bit longer, but just as happy. “The usual,” she said. And then she laughed again. “Anyway, what’s up?”

“Oh, not a thing,” I said, with innocence blooming from my tongue. “My only sister disappears for days and nights on end without a word and then turns up sounding like she stepped out of

Stepford Sergeants

. So I am naturally curious to know what the hell is going on, that’s all.”

“Well, hell,” she said. “I’m touched. It’s almost like having a real human brother.”

“Let’s hope it goes no further than almost.”

“How about we get together for lunch?” she said.

“I’m already hungry,” I said. “Relampago’s?”

“Mm, no,” she said. “How about Azul?”

I suppose her choice of restaurant made as much sense as everything else about her this morning, because it made no sense at all. Deborah was a blue-collar diner, and Azul was the kind of place where Saudi royalty ate when they were in town. Apparently her transformation into an alien was now complete.

“Certainly, Deb, Azul. I’ll just sell my car to pay for it and meet you there.”

“One o’clock,” she said. “And don’t worry about the money. Kyle will pick up the tab.” She hung up. And I didn’t actually say AHA! But a small light flickered on.

Kyle would pay, would he? Well, well. And at Azul, too.

If the glittery ticky-tack of South Beach is the part of Miami designed for insecure wannabe celebrities, Azul is for people who find the glamour amusing. The little cafés that crowd South Beach compete for attention with a shrill clamor of bright and cheap gaudiness. Azul is so understated by comparison that you wonder if they had ever seen even a single episode of

Miami Vice

.

I left my car with the mandatory valet parking attendant in a small cobblestone circle out front. I am fond of my car, but I will admit that it did not compare favorably to the line of Ferraris and Rolls-Royces. Even so, the attendant did not actually decline to park it for me, although he must have guessed that it would not result in the kind of tip he was used to. I suppose my bowling shirt and khaki pants were an unmistakable clue that I didn’t have even a single bearer bond or Krugerrand for him.

The restaurant itself was dark and cool and so quiet you could hear an American Express Black Card drop. The far wall was tinted glass with a door that led out to a terrace. And there was Deborah, sitting at a small corner table outside, looking out over the water. Across from her, facing back toward the door in to the restaurant, sat Kyle Chutsky, who would pick up the tab. He was wearing very expensive sunglasses, so perhaps he really would. I approached the table and a waiter materialized to pull out a chair that was certainly far too heavy for anyone who could afford to eat here. The waiter didn’t actually bow, but I could tell that the restraint was an effort.

“Hey, buddy,” Kyle said as I sat down. He stretched his hand across the table. Since he seemed to believe I was his new best friend, I leaned in and shook hands with him. “How’s the spatter trade?”

“Always plenty of work,” I said. “And how’s the mysterious visitor from Washington trade?”

“Never better,” he said. He held my hand in his just a moment too long. I looked down at it; his knuckles were enlarged, as if he had spent too much time sparring with a concrete wall. He slapped his left hand on the table, and I got a glimpse of his pinkie ring. It was startlingly effeminate, almost an engagement ring. When he finally let go of my hand, he smiled and swiveled his head toward Deborah, although with his sunglasses it was impossible to tell if he was looking at her or just moving his neck around.

Deborah smiled back at him. “Dexter was worried about me.”

“Hey,” Chutsky said, “what are brothers for?”

She glanced at me. “Sometimes I wonder,” she said.

“Why Deborah, you know I’m only watching your back,” I said.

Kyle chuckled. “Good deal. I got the front,” he said, and they both laughed. She reached across and took his hand.

“All the hormones and happiness are setting my teeth on edge,” I said. “Tell me, is anybody actually trying to catch that inhuman monster, or are we just going to sit around and make tragic puns?”

Kyle swiveled his head back to me and raised an eyebrow. “What’s your interest in this, buddy?”

“Dexter has a fondness for inhuman monsters,” Deborah said. “Like a hobby.”

“A hobby,” Kyle said, keeping the sunglasses turned to my face. I think it was supposed to intimidate me, but for all I knew his eyes could be closed. Somehow, I managed not to tremble.

“He’s kind of an amateur profiler,” Deborah said.

Kyle didn’t move for a moment and I wondered if he had gone to sleep behind his dark lenses. “Huh,” he finally said, and he leaned back in his chair. “Well, what do you think about this guy, Dexter?”

“Oh, just the basics so far,” I said. “Somebody with a lot of training in the medical area and in covert activities who came unhinged and needs to make a statement, something to do with Central America. He’ll probably do it again timed for maximum impact, rather than because he feels he

has

to. So he’s not really a standard serial type of- What?” I said. Kyle had lost his laid-back smile and was sitting straight up with his fists clenched.

“What do you mean, Central America?”

I was fairly sure we both knew exactly what I meant by Central America, but I thought saying El Salvador might have been a bit too much; it wouldn’t do to lose my casual, it’s-just-a-hobby credentials. But my whole purpose for coming had been to find out about Doakes, and when you see an opening-well, I admit it had been a little obvious, but it had apparently worked. “Oh,” I said. “Isn’t that right?” All those years of practice in imitating human expressions paid off for me here as I put on my best innocently curious face.

Kyle apparently couldn’t decide if that was right. He worked his jaw muscles and unclenched his fists.

“I should have warned you,” Deborah said. “He’s good at this.”

Chutsky let out a big breath and shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. With a visible effort he leaned back and flicked on his smile again. “Pretty good, buddy. How’d you come up with all that?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said modestly. “It just seemed obvious. The hard part is figuring out how Sergeant Doakes is involved.”

“Jesus H. Christ,” he said, and clenched his fists again. Deborah looked at me and laughed, not exactly the same kind of laugh she had given Kyle, but still, it felt good to know she could remember now and then that we were on the same team. “I told you he’s good,” she said.

“Jesus Christ,” Kyle said again. He pumped one index finger unconsciously, as if squeezing an invisible trigger, then turned his sunglasses in Deb’s direction. “You’re right about that,” he said, and turned back to me. He watched me hard for a moment, possibly to see if I would bolt for the door or start speaking Arabic, and then he nodded. “What’s this about Sergeant Doakes?”

“You’re not just trying to drop Doakes in the shit, are you?” Deborah asked me.

“In Captain Matthews’s conference room,” I said, “when Kyle saw Doakes for the first time, there was a moment when I thought they recognized each other.”

“I didn’t notice that,” Deborah said with a frown.

“You were busy blushing,” I said. She blushed again, which I thought was a little redundant. “Besides, Doakes was the one who knew who to call when he saw the crime scene.”

“Doakes knows some stuff,” Chutsky admitted. “From his military service.”

“What kind of stuff?” I asked. Chutsky looked at me for a long time, or anyway his sunglasses did. He tapped on the table with that silly pinkie ring and the sunlight flashed off the large diamond in the center. When he finally spoke it felt like the temperature at our table had dropped ten degrees.

“Buddy,” he said, “I don’t want to cause you any trouble, but you have to let go of this. Back off. Find a different hobby. Or else you are in a world of shit-and you will get flushed.” The waiter materialized at Kyle’s elbow before I could think of something wonderful to say to that. Chutsky kept the sunglasses turned toward me for a long moment. Then he handed the menu to the waiter. “The bouillabaisse is really good here,” he said.

Deborah disappeared for the rest of the week, which did very little for my self-esteem, because no matter how terrible it was for me to admit it, without her help I was stuck. I could not come up with any sort of alternative plan for ditching Doakes. He was still there, parked under the tree across from my apartment, following me to Rita’s house, and I had no answers. My once-proud brain chased its tail and caught nothing but air.

I could feel the Dark Passenger roiling and whimpering and struggling to climb out and take the steering wheel, but there was Doakes looming up through the windshield, forcing me to clamp down and reach for another can of beer. I had worked too hard and too long to achieve my perfect little life and I was not going to ruin it now. The Passenger and I could wait a bit longer. Harry had taught me discipline, and that would have to see me through to happier days.

____________________

“Patience,” Harry said. He paused to cough into a Kleenex. “Patient is more important than smart, Dex. You’re already smart.”

“Thank you,” I said. And I meant it politely, really, because I was not at all comfortable sitting there in Harry’s hospital room. The smell of medicine and disinfectant and urine mixed with the air of restrained suffering and clinical death made me wish I was almost anywhere else. Of course, as a callow young monster, I never wondered if Harry might not feel the same.

“In your case, you have to be

more

patient, because you’ll be thinking you’re clever enough to get away with it,” he said. “You’re not. Nobody is.” He paused to cough again, and this time it took longer and seemed to go deeper. To see Harry like this-indestructible, supercop, foster-father Harry, shaking, turning red and weepy-eyed from the strain-was almost too much. I had to look away. When I looked back a moment later, Harry was watching me again.

“I know you, Dexter. Better than you know yourself.” And this was easy to believe until he followed up with, “You’re basically a good guy.”

“No I’m not,” I said, thinking of the wonderful things I had not yet been allowed to do; even wanting to do them pretty much ruled out any kind of association with goodness. There was also the fact that most of the other pimple-headed hormone-churning twinkies my age who were considered good guys were no more like me than an orangutan was. But Harry wouldn’t hear it.

“Yes, you are,” he said. “And you have to believe that you are. Your heart is pretty much in the right place, Dex,” he said, and with that he collapsed into a truly epic fit of coughing. It lasted for what seemed like several minutes, and then he leaned weakly back onto his pillow. He closed his eyes for a moment, but when he opened them again they were steely Harry blue, brighter than ever in the pale green of his dying face. “Patience,” he said. And he made it sound strong, in spite of the terrible pain and weakness he must have felt. “You still have a long way to go, and I don’t have a whole lot of time, Dexter.”

“Yes, I know,” I said. He closed his eyes.

“That’s just what I mean,” he said. “You’re supposed to say no, don’t worry, you have plenty of time.”

“But you don’t,” I said, not sure where this was going.

“No, I don’t,” he said. “But people pretend. To make me feel better about it.”

“Would you feel better?”

“No,” he said, and opened his eyes again. “But you can’t use logic on human behavior. You have to be patient, watch and learn. Otherwise, you screw up. Get caught and… Half my legacy.” He closed his eyes again and I could hear the strain in his voice. “Your sister will be a good cop. You,” he smiled slowly, a little sadly, “you will be something else. Real justice. But only if you’re patient. If your chance isn’t there, Dexter, wait until it is.”

It all seemed so overwhelming to an eighteen-year-old apprentice monster. All I wanted was to do The Thing, very simple really, just go dancing in the moonlight with the bright blade flowing free-such an easy thing, so natural and sweet-to cut through all the nonsense and right down to the heart of things. But I could not. Harry made it complicated.

“I don’t know what I’ll do when you’re dead,” I said.

“You’ll do fine,” he said.

“There’s so much to remember.”

Harry reached a hand out and pushed the button that hung on a cord beside his bed. “You’ll remember it,” he said. He dropped the cord and it was almost as though it pulled the last of the strength from him as it flopped back down by the bedside. “You’ll remember.” He closed his eyes and for a moment I was all alone in the room. Then the nurse bustled in with a syringe and Harry opened one eye. “We can’t always do what we think we have to do. So when there’s nothing else you can do, you wait,” he said, and held out his arm for his shot. “No matter what… pressure… you might feel.”

I watched him as he lay there, taking the needle without flinching and knowing that even the relief it brought was temporary, that his end was coming and he could not stop it-and knowing, too, that he was not afraid, and that he would do this the right way, as he had done everything else in his life the right way. And I knew this, too: Harry understood me. No one else ever had, and no one else ever would, through all time in all the world. Only Harry.

The only reason I ever thought about being human was to be more like him.

CHAPTER 11

AND SO I WAS PATIENT. IT WAS NOT AN EASY THING, but it was the Harry thing. Let the bright steely spring inside stay coiled and quiet and wait, watch, hold the hot sweet release locked tight in its cold box until it was Harry-right to let it skitter out and cartwheel through the night. Sooner or later some small opening would show and we could vault through it. Sooner or later I would find a way to make Doakes blink.

I waited.

Some of us, of course, find that harder to do than others, and it was several days later, a Saturday morning, that my telephone rang.

“Goddamn it,” said Deborah without any preamble. It was almost a relief to hear that she was her recognizable cranky self again.

“Fine, thanks, and you?” I said.

“Kyle is making me nuts,” she said. “He says there’s nothing we can do but wait, but he won’t tell me what we’re waiting for. He disappears for ten or twelve hours and won’t tell me where he was. And then we just wait some more. I am so fucking tired of waiting my teeth hurt.”

“Patience is a virtue,” I said.

“I’m tired of being virtuous, too,” she said. “And I am sick to death of Kyle’s patronizing smile when I ask him what we can do to find this guy.”

“Well, Debs, I don’t know what I can do except offer my sympathy,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I think you can do a whole hell of a lot more than that, Bro,” she said.

I sighed heavily, mostly for her benefit. Sighs register so nicely on the telephone. “This is the trouble with having a reputation as a gunslinger, Debs,” I said. “Everybody thinks I can shoot the eye out of a jack at thirty paces, every single time.”

“I still think it,” she said.

“Your confidence warms my heart, but I don’t understand a thing about this kind of adventure, Deborah. It leaves me completely cold.”

“I have to find this guy, Dexter. And I want to rub Kyle’s nose in it,” she said.

“I thought you liked him.”

She snorted. “Jesus, Dexter. You don’t know anything about women, do you? Of course I like him. That’s

why

I want to rub his nose in it.”

“Oh, good,

now

it makes sense,” I said.

She paused, and then very casually said, “Kyle said some interesting things about Doakes.”

I felt my long-fanged friend inside stretch just a little and absolutely purr. “You’re getting very subtle all of a sudden, Deborah,” I said. “All you had to do was ask me.”

“I just asked, and you gave me all that crap about how you can’t help,” she said, suddenly good old plain-speaking Debs again. “So how about it. What have you got?”

“Nothing at the moment,” I said.

“Shit,” said Deborah.

“But I might be able to find something.”

“How soon?”

I admit that I was feeling irked by Kyle’s attitude toward me. What had he said? I would be “in the shit and you will get flushed”? Seriously-who wrote his dialogue? And Deborah’s sudden onset of subtlety, which had been my traditional bailiwick, had done nothing to calm me down. So I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. “How about by lunchtime?” I said. “Let’s say I’ll have something by one o’clock. Baleen, since Kyle can pick up the check.”

“This I gotta see,” she said, and then added, “The stuff about Doakes? It’s pretty good.” She hung up.

Well, well,

I said to myself. Suddenly, I did not mind the thought of working a little bit on a Saturday. After all, the only alternative was to hang out at Rita’s and watch moss grow on Sergeant Doakes. But if I found something for Debs, I might at long last have the small opening I had hoped for. I merely had to be the clever boy we all believed I was.

But where to start? There was precious little to go on, since Kyle had pulled the department away from the crime scene before we had done much more than dust for prints. Many times in the past I had earned a few modest brownie points with my police colleagues by helping them track down the sick and twisted demons who lived only to kill. But that was because I understood them, since I am a sick and twisted demon myself. This time, I could not rely on getting any hints from the Dark Passenger, who had been lulled into an uneasy sleep, poor fellow. I had to depend on my own bare-naked native wit, which was also being alarmingly silent at the moment.

Perhaps if I gave my brain some fuel, it would kick into high gear. I went to the kitchen and found a banana. It was very nice, but for some reason it did not launch any mental rockets.

I threw the peel in the garbage and looked at the clock. Well, dear boy, that was five whole minutes gone by. Excellent. And you have already managed to figure out that you can’t figure anything out. Bravo, Dexter.

There really were very few places to start. In fact, all I had was the victim and the house. And since I was fairly certain that the victim would not have a lot to say, even if we gave him back his tongue, that left the house. Of course it was possible that the house belonged to the victim. But the decor had such a temporary look to it, I was sure it did not.

Strange to simply walk away from an entire house like that. But he had done so, and with no one breathing down his neck and forcing a hasty and panicked retreat-which meant that he had done it deliberately, as part of his plan.

And that should imply that he had somewhere else to go. Presumably still in the Miami area, since Kyle was here looking for him. It was a starting point, and I thought of it all by myself. Welcome home, Mr. Brain.

Real estate leaves fairly large footprints, even when you try to cover them up. Within fifteen minutes of sitting down at my computer I had found something-not actually a whole footprint, but certainly enough to make out the shape of a couple of toes.

The house on N.W. 4th Street was registered to Ramon Puntia. How he expected to get away with that in Miami, I don’t know, but Ramon Puntia was a Cuban joke name, like “Joe Blow” in English. But the house was paid for and no taxes were due, a sound arrangement for someone who valued privacy as much as I assumed our new friend did. The house had been bought with a single cash payment, a wire transfer from a bank in Guatemala. This seemed a bit odd; with our trail starting in El Salvador and leading through the murky depths of a mysterious government agency in Washington, why take a left turn into Guatemala? But a quick online study of contemporary money laundering showed that it fit very well. Apparently Switzerland and the Cayman Islands were no longer à la mode, and if one wished for discreet banking in the Spanish-speaking world, Guatemala was all the rage.

This raised the interesting question of how much money Dr. Dismember had, and where it came from. But it was a question that led nowhere at the moment. I had to assume that he had enough for another house when he was done with the first one, and probably in the same approximate price range.

All right then. I went back to my Dade County real estate database and looked for other properties recently purchased the same way, from the same bank. There were seven; four of them had sold for more than a million dollars, which struck me as a bit high for disposable property. They had probably been bought by nothing more sinister than run-of-the-mill drug lords and Fortune 500 CEOs on the run.

That left three properties that seemed possible. One of them was in Liberty City, a predominantly black inner-city area of Miami. But on closer inspection, it turned out to be a block of apartments.

Of the two remaining properties, one was in Homestead, within sight of the gigantic dump heap of city garbage known locally as Mount Trashmore. The other was also in the south end of town, just off Quail Roost Drive.

Two houses: I was willing to bet that someone new had just moved in to one of them, and was doing things that might startle the ladies from the welcome wagon. No guarantees, of course, but it certainly seemed likely, and it was, after all, just in time for lunch.

Baleen was a very pricey place that I would not have attempted on my own modest means. It has the kind of oak-paneled elegance that makes you feel the need for a cravat and spats. It also has one of the best views of Biscayne Bay in the city, and if one is lucky there are a handful of tables that take advantage of this.

Either Kyle was lucky or his mojo had bowled over the headwaiter, because he and Deborah were waiting outside at one of these tables working on a bottle of mineral water and a plate of what appeared to be crab cakes. I grabbed one and took a bite as I slid into a chair facing Kyle.

“Yummy,” I said. “This must be where good crabs go when they die.”

“Debbie says you have something for us,” Kyle said. I looked at my sister, who had always been Deborah or Debs but certainly never Debbie. She said nothing, however, and appeared willing to let this egregious liberty go by, so I turned my attention back to Kyle. He was wearing the designer sunglasses again, and his ridiculous pinkie ring sparkled as he brushed the hair carelessly back from his forehead.

“I hope I have something,” I said. “But I do want to be careful not to get flushed.”

Kyle looked at me for a long moment, then he shook his head and a reluctant smile moved his mouth perhaps a quarter of an inch upward. “All right,” he said. “Busted. But you’d be surprised how often that kind of line really works.”

“I’m sure I’d be flabbergasted,” I said. I passed him the printout from my computer. “While I catch my breath, you might want to look at this.”

Kyle frowned and unfolded the paper. “What’s this?”

Deborah leaned forward, looking like the eager young police hound she was. “You found something! I knew you would,” she said.

“It’s just two addresses,” said Kyle.

“One of them may very well be the hiding place of a certain unorthodox medical practitioner with a Central American past,” I said, and I told him how I found the addresses. To his credit, he looked impressed, even with the sunglasses on.

“I should have thought of this,” he said. “That’s very good.” He nodded and flicked the paper with a finger. “Follow the money. Works every time.”

“Of course I can’t be positive,” I said.

“Well, I’d bet on it,” he said. “I think you found Dr. Danco.”

I looked at Deborah. She shook her head, so I looked back at Kyle’s sunglasses. “Interesting name. Is it Polish?”

Chutsky cleared his throat and looked out over the water. “Before your time, I guess. There was a commercial back then. Danco presents the autoveggie. It slices, it dices-” He swiveled his dark lenses back to me. “That’s what we called him. Dr. Danco. He made chopped-up vegetables. It’s the kind of joke you like when you’re far from home and seeing terrible things,” he said.

“But now we’re seeing them close to home,” I said. “Why is he here?”

“Long story,” Kyle said.

“That means he doesn’t want to tell you,” Deborah said.

“In that case, I’ll have another crab cake,” I said. I leaned over and took the last one off the plate. They really were quite good.

“Come on, Chutsky,” Deborah said. “There’s a good chance we know where this guy is. Now what are you going to do about it?”

He put a hand on top of hers and smiled. “I’m going to have lunch,” he said. And he picked up a menu with his other hand.

Deborah looked at his profile for a minute. Then she pulled her hand away. “Shit,” she said.

The food actually was excellent, and Chutsky tried very hard to be chummy and pleasant, as if he had decided that when you can’t tell the truth you might as well be charming. In fairness, I couldn’t complain, since I generally get away with the same trick, but Deborah didn’t seem very happy. She sulked and poked at her food while Kyle told jokes and asked me if I liked the Dolphins’ chances to go all the way this year. I didn’t really care if the Dolphins won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but as a well-designed artificial human I had several authentic-sounding prepared remarks on the subject, which seemed to satisfy Chutsky, and he chattered on in the chummiest way possible.

We even had dessert, which seemed to me to be pushing the distract-them-with-food ploy a little far, particularly since neither Deborah nor I was at all distracted. But it was quite good food, so it would have been barbaric of me to complain.

Of course, Deborah had worked very hard her whole life to become barbaric, so when the waiter placed an enormous chocolate thing in front of Chutsky, who turned to Debs with two forks and said, “Well…” she took the opportunity to fling a spoon into the center of the table.

“No,” she said to him. “I don’t want another fucking cup of coffee, and I don’t want a fucking chocolate foo-foo. I want a fucking answer. When are we going to go get this guy?”

He looked at her with mild surprise and even a certain fondness, as though people in his line of work found spoon-throwing women quite useful and charming, but he thought her timing might be slightly off. “Can I finish my dessert first?” he said.

CHAPTER 12

DEBORAH DROVE US SOUTH ON DIXIE HIGHWAY. YES, I did say “us.” To my surprise, I had become a valuable member of the Justice League and was informed that I was being honored with the opportunity to put my irreplaceable self in harm’s way. Although I was far from delighted, one small incident almost made it worthwhile.

As we stood outside the restaurant waiting for the valet to bring Deborah’s car, Chutsky had quietly muttered, “What the fuck…?” and sauntered away down the driveway. I watched him as he walked out to the gate and gestured at a maroon Taurus that had casually parked there beside a palm tree. Debs glared at me as if it was all my fault, and we both watched Chutsky wave at the driver’s window, which rolled down to reveal, of course, the ever-watchful Sergeant Doakes. Chutsky leaned on the gate and said something to Doakes, who glanced up the drive to me, shook his head, and then rolled up the window and drove away.

Chutsky didn’t say anything when he rejoined us. But he did look at me a little differently before he climbed into the front seat of the car.

It was a twenty-minute drive south to where Quail Roost Drive runs east and west and crosses Dixie Highway, right beside a mall. Just two blocks in, a series of side streets leads into a quiet, working-class neighborhood made up of small, mostly neat houses, usually with two cars in the short driveway and several bicycles scattered across the lawn.

One of these streets bent to the left and led to a cul-de-sac, and it was here, at the end of the street, that we found the house, a pale yellow stucco dwelling with an overgrown yard. There was a battered gray van in the driveway with dark red lettering that said HERMANOS CRUZ LIMPIADORES-Cruz Brothers Cleaners.

Debs drove around the cul-de-sac and up the street about half a block to a house with half a dozen cars parked out front and on the lawn, and loud rap music coming from inside. Debs turned our car around to face our target and parked under a tree. “What do you think?” she said.

Chutsky just shrugged. “Uh-huh. Could be,” he said. “Let’s watch a while.” And that was the entire extent of our sparkling conversation for a good half hour. Hardly enough to keep the mind alive, and I found myself mentally drifting off to the small shelf in my apartment, where a little rosewood box holds a number of glass slides, the kind you place under a microscope. Each slide contained a single drop of blood-very well-dried blood, of course. I wouldn’t have the nasty stuff in my home otherwise. Forty tiny windows into my shadow other self. One drop from each of my small adventures. There had been First Nurse, so long ago, who had killed her patients by careful overdose, under the guise of easing pain. And the very next slot in the box, the high-school shop teacher who strangled nurses. Wonderful contrast, and I do love irony.

So many memories, and as I stroked each one it made me even more eager to make a new one, number forty-one, even though number forty, MacGregor, was hardly dry. But because it was connected to my next project, and therefore felt incomplete, I was anxious to get on with it. As soon as I could be sure about Reiker and then find some way-

I sat up. Perhaps the rich dessert had clogged my cranial arteries, but I had temporarily forgotten Deborah’s bribe. “Deborah?” I said.

She glanced back at me, with a small frown of concentration on her face. “What.”

“Here we are,” I said.

“No shit.”

“None whatsoever. A complete lack of shit, in fact-and all thanks to my mighty mental labors. Wasn’t there some mention of a few things you were going to tell me?”

She glanced at Chutsky. He was staring straight ahead, still wearing the sunglasses, which did not blink. “Yeah, all right,” she said. “In the army Doakes was in Special Forces.”

“I know that. It’s in his personnel file.”

“What you don’t know, buddy,” said Kyle without moving, “is that there’s a dark side to Special Forces. Doakes was with them.” A very tiny smile creased his face for just a second, so small and sudden I might have imagined it. “Once you go over to the dark side, it’s forever. You can’t go back.”

I watched Chutsky sit completely motionless for a moment longer and then I looked at Debs. She shrugged. “Doakes was a shooter,” she said. “The army let the guys in El Salvador borrow him, and he killed people for them.”

“Have gun will travel,” Chutsky said.

“That explains his personality,” I said, thinking it also explained a great deal more, like the echo I heard coming from his direction when my Dark Passenger called out.

“You have to understand how it was,” Chutsky said. It was a little eerie to hear his voice coming from a completely unmoving and unemotional face, as if the voice was really coming from a tape recorder somebody had put in his body. “We believed we were saving the world. Giving up our lives and any hope for something normal and decent, for the cause. Turns out we were just selling our souls. Me, Doakes…”

“And Dr. Danco,” I said.

“And Dr. Danco.” Chutsky sighed and finally moved, turning his head briefly to Deborah, then looking forward again. He shook his head, and the movement seemed so large and theatrical after his stillness that I felt like applauding. “Dr. Danco started out as an idealist, just like the rest of us. He found out in med school there was something missing inside him and he could do things to people and not feel any empathy at all. Nothing at all. It’s a lot rarer than you think.”

“Oh, I’m sure it is,” I said, and Debs glared at me.

“Danco loved his country,” Chutsky went on. “So he switched to the dark side, too. On purpose, to use this talent. And in El Salvador it… blossomed. He would take somebody that we brought him and just-” He paused and took a breath, blew it out slowly. “Shit. You saw what he does.”

“Very original,” I said. “Creative.”

Chutsky gave a small snort of laughter that had no humor in it. “Creative. Yeah. You could say that.” Chutsky swung his head slowly left, right, left. “I said it didn’t bother him to do that stuff-in El Salvador he got to like it. He’d sit in on the interrogation and ask personal questions. Then when he started to- He’d call the person by name, like he was a dentist or something, and say, ‘Let’s try number five,’ or number seven, whatever. Like there were all these different patterns.”

“What kind of patterns?” I asked. It seemed like a perfectly natural question, showing polite interest and keeping the conversation moving. But Chutsky swiveled around in his seat and looked at me as if I was something that might require a whole bottle of floor cleaner.

“This is funny to you,” he said.

“Not yet,” I said.

He stared at me for what seemed like an awfully long time; then he just shook his head and faced front again. “I don’t know what kind of pattern, buddy. Never asked. Sorry. Probably something to do with what he cut off first. Just something to keep himself amused. And he’d talk to them, call them by name, show them what he was doing.” Chutsky shuddered. “Somehow that made it worse. You should have seen what it did to the other side.”

“How about what it did to you?” Deborah demanded.

He let his chin fall forward to his chest, then straightened again. “That too,” he said. “Anyway, something finally changed at home, the politics, back in the Pentagon. New regime and all that, and they didn’t want anything to do with what we had been doing down there. So very quietly the word came that Dr. Danco might buy us a small piece of political accommodation with the other side if we delivered him.”

“You gave up your own guy to be killed?” I asked. It hardly seemed fair-I mean, I may be untroubled by a sense of morals, but at least I play by the rules.

Kyle was silent for a long moment. “I told you we sold our souls, buddy,” he said at last. He smiled again, a little longer this time. “Yeah, we set him up and they took him down.”

“But he’s not dead,” Deborah said, always practical.

“We got scammed,” Chutsky said. “The Cubans took him.”

“What Cubans?” Deborah asked. “You said El Salvador.”

“Back in the day, anytime there was trouble in the Americas, there were Cubans. They were propping up one side, just like we did with the other. And they wanted our doctor. I told you, he was special. So they took him, tried to turn him. Put him in the Isle of Pines.”

“Is that a resort?” I asked.

Chutsky gave a single small snort of a laugh. “The last resort, maybe. Isle of Pines is one of the hardest prisons in the world. Dr. Danco spent some real quality time there. They let him know his own side had given him up, and they really put him through it. And a few years later, one of our guys gets caught and turns up like that. No arms or legs, the whole deal. Danco is working for them. And now-” He shrugged. “Either they turned him loose or he skipped. Doesn’t matter which. He knows who set him up, and he’s got a list.”

“Is your name on that list?” Deborah demanded.

“Maybe,” Chutsky said.

“Is Doakes’s?” I asked. After all, I can be practical, too.

“Maybe,” he said again, which didn’t seem very helpful. All the stuff about Danco was interesting, of course, but I was here for a reason. “Anyway,” Chutsky said, “that’s what we’re up against.”

Nobody seemed to have much to say to that, including me. I turned the things I’d heard from side to side, looking for some way to make it help me with my Doakes infestation. I will admit that I saw nothing at the moment, which was humbling. But I did seem to have a slightly better understanding of dear Dr. Danco. So he was empty inside, too, was he? A raptor in sheep’s clothing. And he, too, had found a way to use his talent for the greater good-again, just like dear old Dexter. But now he had come off the rails, and he began to seem a little bit more like just another predator, no matter the unsettling direction his technique took him.

And oddly enough, with that insight, another thought nosed its way back into the bubbling cauldron of Dexter’s dark underbrain. It had been a passing fancy before-now it began to seem like a very good idea. Why not find Dr. Danco myself, and do a little Dark Dance with him? He was a predator gone bad, just like all the others on my list. No one, not even Doakes, could possibly object to his demise. If I had wondered casually about finding the Doctor before, now it began to take on an urgency that drove away my frustration with missing out on Reiker. So he was like me, was he? We would see about that. A jolt of something cold bristled up my spine and I found that I truly looked forward to meeting the Doctor and discussing his work in depth.

In the distance I heard the first rumble of thunder as the afternoon storm moved in. “Shit,” said Chutsky. “Is it going to rain?”

“Every day at this time,” I said.

“That’s no good,” he said. “We gotta do something before it rains. You’re up, Dexter.”

“Me?” I said, startled out of my meditations on maverick medical malpractice. I had adjusted to going along for the ride, but to actually have to

do

something was a little more than I had bargained for. I mean, here we had two hardened warriors sitting idly by, while we sent Delicate Dimpled Dexter into danger? Where’s the sense in that?

“You,” Chutsky said. “I need to hang back and see what happens. If it’s him, I can take him out better. And Debbie-” He smiled at her, even though she seemed to be scowling at him. “Debbie is too much of a cop. She walks like a cop, she stares like a cop, and she might try to write him a ticket. He’d make her from a mile away. So it’s you, Dex.”

“It’s me doing what?” I asked, and I admit that I was still feeling some righteous indignation.

“Just walk by the house one time, around the cul-de-sac and back. Keep your eyes and ears open, but don’t be too obvious.”

“I don’t know how to be obvious,” I said.

“Great. Then this should be a piece of cake.”

It was clear that neither logic nor completely justified irritation was going to do any good, so I opened the door and got out, but I couldn’t resist a parting shot. I leaned in Deborah’s window and said, “I hope I live to regret this.” And very obligingly, the thunder rumbled again nearby.

I strolled down the sidewalk toward the house. There were leaves underfoot, a couple of crushed juice cartons from some kid’s lunch box. A cat rushed out onto a lawn as I passed and sat down very suddenly to lick its paws and stare at me from a safe distance.

At the house with all the cars in front the music changed and someone yelled, “Whoo!” It was nice to know that somebody was having a good time while I strolled into mortal danger.

I turned left and began to walk the curve around the cul-de-sac. I glanced at the house with the van in front, feeling very proud of the completely nonobvious way I pulled it off. The lawn was shaggy and there were several soggy newspapers in the driveway. There didn’t seem to be any visible pile of discarded body parts, and no one rushed out and tried to kill me. But as I passed by I could hear a TV blaring a game show in Spanish. A male voice rose above the hysterical announcer’s and a dish clattered. And as a puff of wind brought the first large and hard raindrops, it also carried the smell of ammonia from the house.

I continued on past the house and back to the car. A few more drops of rain pelted down and a rumble of thunder rolled by, but the downpour held off. I climbed back into the car. “Nothing terribly sinister,” I reported. “The lawn needs mowing and there’s a smell of ammonia. Voices in the house. Either he talks to himself or there’s more than one of him.”

“Ammonia,” Kyle said.

“Yes, I think so,” I said. “Probably just cleaning supplies.”

Kyle shook his head. “Cleaning services don’t use ammonia, the smell’s too strong. But I know who does.”

“Who?” Deborah demanded.

He grinned at her. “I’ll be right back,” he said, and got out of the car.

“Kyle!” Deborah said, but he just waved a hand and walked right up to the front door of the house. “Shit,” Deborah muttered as he knocked and stood glancing up at the dark clouds of the approaching storm.

The front door opened. A short and stocky man with a dark complexion and black hair falling over his forehead stared out. Chutsky said something to him and for a moment neither of them moved. The small man looked up the street, then at Kyle. Kyle slowly pulled a hand from his pocket and showed the dark man something-money? The man looked at whatever it was, looked at Chutsky again, and then held the door open. Chutsky went in. The door slammed shut.

“Shit,” Deborah said again. She chewed on a fingernail, a habit I hadn’t seen from her since she was a teenager. Apparently it tasted good, because when it was gone she started on another. She was on her third fingernail when the door to the little house opened and Chutsky came back out, smiling and waving. The door closed and he disappeared behind a wall of water as the clouds finally opened wide. He came pounding up the street to the car and slid into the front seat, dripping wet.

“GodDAMN!” he said. “I’m totally soaked!”

“What the fuck was that all about?” Deborah demanded.

Chutsky cocked an eyebrow at me and pushed the hair off his forehead. “Don’t she talk elegant?” he said.

“Kyle, goddamn it,” she said.

“The smell of ammonia,” he said. “No surgical use, and no commercial cleaning crew would use it.”

“We did this already,” Deborah snapped.

He smiled. “But ammonia IS used for cooking methamphetamine,” he said. “Which turns out to be what these guys are doing.”

“You just walked right into a meth kitchen?” Deb said. “What the hell did you do in there?”

He smiled and pulled a Baggie out of his pocket. “Bought an ounce of meth,” he said.

CHAPTER 13

DEBORAH DIDN’T SPEAK FOR ALMOST TEN MINUTES, just drove the car and stared ahead with her jaw clamped shut. I could see the muscles flexing along the side of her face and all the way down into her shoulders. Knowing her as I did I was quite sure that an explosion was brewing, but since I knew nothing at all about how Debs in Love might behave, I couldn’t tell how soon. The target of her impending meltdown, Chutsky, sat beside her in the front seat, equally silent, but apparently quite happy to sit quietly and look at the scenery.

We were almost to the second address and well into the shadow of Mount Trashmore when Debs finally erupted.

“Goddamn it, that’s

illegal!

” she said, smacking the steering wheel with the palm of her hand for emphasis.

Chutsky looked at her with mild affection. “Yes, I know,” he said.

“I am a sworn fucking officer of the law!” Deborah told him. “I took an oath to stop this kind of shit-and you-!” She sputtered to a halt.

“I had to be sure,” he said calmly. “This seemed like the best way.”

“I ought to put the cuffs on

YOU

!” she said.

“That might be fun,” he said.

“You SON of a bitch!”

“At least.”

“I will not cross over to your motherfucking dark side!”

“No, you won’t,” he said. “I won’t let you, Deborah.”

The breath whooshed out of her and she turned to look at him. He looked back. I had never seen a silent conversation, and this one was a doozy. Her eyes clicked anxiously from the left side of his face to the right and then left again. He simply looked back, calm and unblinking. It was elegant and fascinating and almost as interesting as the fact that Debs had apparently forgotten she was driving.

“I hate to interrupt,” I said. “But I believe that’s a beer truck right ahead?”

Her head snapped back around and she braked, just in time to avoid turning us into a bumper sticker on a load of Miller Lite. “I’m calling that address in to vice. Tomorrow,” she said.

“All right,” Chutsky said.

“And you’re throwing away that Baggie.”

He looked mildly surprised. “It cost me two grand,” he said.

“You’re throwing it away,” she repeated.

“All right,” he said. They looked at each other again, leaving me to watch for lethal beer trucks. Still, it was nice to see everything settled and harmony restored to the universe so we could get on with finding our hideous inhuman monster of the week, secure in the knowledge that love will always prevail. And so it was a great satisfaction to cruise down South Dixie Highway through the last of the rainstorm, and as the sun broke out of the clouds we turned onto a road that led us into a twisty series of streets, all with a terrific view of the gigantic pile of garbage known as Mount Trashmore.

The house we were looking for was in the middle of what looked like the last row of houses before civilization ended and garbage reigned supreme. It was at the bend of a circular street and we went past it twice before we were sure that we had found it. It was a modest dwelling of the three-bedroom two-mortgage kind, painted a pale yellow with white trim, and the lawn was very neatly cropped. There was no car visible in the driveway or the carport, and a FOR SALE sign on the front lawn had been covered with another that said SOLD! in bright red letters.

“Maybe he hasn’t moved in yet,” Deborah said.

“He has to be somewhere,” Chutsky said, and it was hard to argue with his logic. “Pull over. Have you got a clipboard?”

Deborah parked the car, frowning. “Under the seat. I need it for my paperwork.”

“I won’t smudge it,” he said, and fumbled under the seat for a second before pulling out a plain metal clipboard with a stack of official forms clamped onto it. “Perfect,” he said. “Gimme a pen.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked, handing him a cheap white ballpoint with a blue top.

“Nobody ever stops a guy with a clipboard,” Chutsky said with a grin. And before either of us could say anything, he was out of the car and walking up the short driveway in a steady, nine-to-five-bureaucrat kind of pace. He stopped halfway and looked at the clipboard, turning over a couple of pages and reading something before looking at the house and shaking his head.

“He seems very good at this kind of thing,” I said to Deborah.

“He’d goddamned well better be,” she said. She bit another nail and I worried that soon she would run out.

Chutsky continued up the drive, consulting his clipboard, apparently unaware that he was causing a fingernail shortage in the car behind him. He looked natural and unrushed, and had obviously had a lot of experience at either chicanery or skulduggery, depending on which word was better suited for describing officially sanctioned mischief. And he had Debs biting her nails and almost ramming beer trucks. Perhaps he was not a good influence on her after all, although it was nice to have another target for her scowling and her vicious arm punches. I am always willing to let someone else wear the bruises for a while.

Chutsky paused outside the front door and wrote something down. And then, although I did not see how he did it, he unlocked the front door and went in. The door closed behind him.

“Shit,” said Deborah. “Breaking and entering on top of possession. He’ll have me hijacking an airliner next.”

“I’ve always wanted to see Havana,” I said helpfully.

“Two minutes,” she said tersely. “Then I call for backup and go in after him.”

To judge from the way her hand was twitching toward the radio, it was one minute and fifty-nine seconds when the front door opened again and Chutsky came back out. He paused in the driveway, wrote something on the clipboard, and returned to the car.

“All right,” he said as he slid into the front seat. “Let’s go home.”

“The house is empty?” Deborah demanded.

“Clean as a whistle,” he said. “Not a towel or a soup can anywhere.”

“So now what?” she asked as she put the car in gear.

He shook his head. “Back to plan A,” he said.

“And what the hell is plan A?” Deborah asked him.

“Patience,” he said.

And so in spite of a delightful lunch and a truly original little shopping trip afterward, we were back to waiting. A week passed in the now typically boring way. It didn’t seem like Sergeant Doakes would give up before my conversion to a beer-bellied sofa ornament was complete, and I could see nothing else to do except play kick the can and hangman with Cody and Astor, performing outrageously theatrical good-bye kisses with Rita afterward for the benefit of my stalker.

Then came the telephone ringing in the middle of the night. It was Sunday night, and I had to leave for work early the next day; Vince Masuoka and I had an arrangement, and it was my turn to pick up doughnuts. And now here was the telephone, brazenly ringing as if I had no cares in the world and the doughnuts would deliver themselves. I glanced at the clock on my bedside table: 2:38. I admit I was somewhat cranky as I lifted the receiver and said, “Leave me alone.”

“Dexter. Kyle is gone,” Deborah said. She sounded far beyond tired, totally tense, and unsure whether she wanted to shoot someone or cry.

It took me just a moment to get my powerful intellect up to speed. “Uh, well Deb,” I said, “a guy like that, maybe you’re better off-”

“He’s

gone

, Dexter. Taken. The, the guy has him. The guy who did that thing to the guy,” she said, and although I felt like I was suddenly thrust into an episode of

The Sopranos

, I knew what she meant. Whoever had turned the thing on the table into a yodeling potato had taken Kyle, presumably to do something similar to him.

“Dr. Danco,” I said.

“Yes.”

“How do you know?” I asked her.

“He said it could happen. Kyle is the only one who knows what the guy looks like. He said when Danco found out Kyle was here, he’d make a try. We had a-a signal set up, and- Shit Dexter, just get over here. We have to find him,” she said, and hung up.

It’s always me, isn’t it? I’m not really a very nice person, but for some reason it’s always me that they come to with their problems.

Oh, Dexter, a savage inhuman monster has taken my boyfriend!

Well damn it, I’m a savage inhuman monster, too-didn’t that entitle me to some rest?

I sighed. Apparently not.

I hoped Vince would understand about the doughnuts.

CHAPTER 14

IT WAS A FIFTEEN-MINUTE DRIVE TO DEBORAH’S HOUSE from where I lived in the Grove. For once, I did not see Sergeant Doakes following me, but perhaps he was using a Klingon cloaking device. In any case, the traffic was very sparse and I even made the light at U.S. 1. Deborah lived in a small house on Medina in Coral Gables, overgrown with some neglected fruit trees and a crumbling coral-rock wall. I nosed my car in next to hers in the short driveway and was only two steps away when Deborah opened her front door. “Where have you been?” she said.

“I went to yoga class, and then out to the mall to buy shoes,” I said. In truth, I had actually hurried over, getting there less than twenty minutes after her call, and I was a little miffed at the tone she was taking.

“Get in here,” she said, peering around into the darkness and holding on to the door as if she thought it might fly away.

“Yes, O Mighty One,” I said, and I got in.

Deborah’s little house was lavishly decorated in I-have-no-life modern. Her living area generally looked like a cheap hotel room that had been occupied by a rock band and looted of everything except a TV and VCR. There was a chair and a small table by French doors that led out to a patio that was almost lost in a tangle of bushes. She had found another chair somewhere, though, a rickety folding chair, and she pulled it over to the table for me. I was so touched by her hospitable gesture that I risked life and limb by sitting in the flimsy thing. “Well,” I said. “How long has he been gone?”

“Shit,” she said. “About three and a half hours. I think.” She shook her head and slumped into the other chair. “We were supposed to meet here, and-he didn’t show up. I went to his hotel, and he wasn’t there.”

“Isn’t it possible he just went away somewhere?” I asked-and I’m not proud of it, but I admit I sounded a little hopeful.

Deborah shook her head. “His wallet and keys were still on the dresser. The guy has him, Dex. We gotta find him before-” She bit her lip and looked away.

I was not at all sure what I could do to find Kyle. As I said, this was not the kind of thing I generally had any insight into, and I had already given it my best shot tracking down the real estate. But since Deborah was already saying “we” it seemed that I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Family ties and all that. Still, I tried to make a little bit of wiggle room. “I’m sorry if this sounds stupid, Debs, but did you report this?”

She looked up with a half snarl. “Yeah, I did. I called Captain Matthews. He sounded relieved. He told me not to get hysterical, like I’m some kind of old lady with the vapors.” She shook her head. “I asked him to put out an APB, and he said, ‘For what?’” She hissed out her breath. “For what… Goddamn it, Dexter, I wanted to strangle him, but…” She shrugged.

“But he was right,” I said.

“Yeah. Kyle is the only one who knows what the guy looks like,” she said. “We don’t know what he’s driving or what his real name is or- Shit, Dexter. All I know is he’s got Kyle.” She took a ragged breath. “Anyway, Matthews called Kyle’s people in Washington. Said that was all he could do.” She shook her head and looked very bleak. “They’re sending somebody Tuesday morning.”

“Well then,” I said hopefully. “I mean, we know that this guy works very slowly.”

“Tuesday morning,” she said. “Almost two days. Where do you think he starts, Dex? Does he take a leg off first? Or an arm? Will he do them both at the same time?”

“No,” I said. “One at a time.” She looked at me hard. “Well, it just makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Not to me,” she said. “Nothing about this makes sense.”

“Deborah, cutting off the arms and legs is not

what

this guy wants to do. It’s just

how

he does it.”

“Goddamn it, Dexter, talk English.”

“What he

wants

to do is totally destroy his victims. Break them inside and out, way beyond repair. Turn them into musical beanbags that will never again have a moment of anything except total endless insane horror. Cutting off limbs and lips is just the way he- What?”

“Oh, Jesus, Dexter,” Deborah said. Her face had screwed up into something I hadn’t seen since our mom died. She turned away, and her shoulders began to shake. It made me just a little uneasy. I mean, I do not feel emotions, and I know Deborah quite often does. But she was not the kind of person who showed them, unless irritation is an emotion. And now she was making wet snuffly sounds, and I knew that I should probably pat her shoulder and say, “There there,” or something equally profound and human, but I couldn’t quite make myself do it. This was Deb, my sister. She would know I was faking it and-

And what? Cut off my arms and legs? The worst she would do would be to tell me to stop it, and go back to being Sergeant Sourpuss again. Even that would be a great improvement over her wilting-lily act. In any case, this was clearly one of those times where some human response was called for, and since I knew from long study what a human would do, I did it. I stood up and stepped over to her. I put my arm on her shoulder, patted her, and said, “All right, Deb. There there.” It sounded even stupider than I had feared, but she leaned against me and snuffled, so I suppose it was the right thing to do after all.

“Can you really fall in

love

with somebody in a week?” she asked me.

“I don’t think I can do it at all,” I said.

“I can’t take this, Dexter,” she said. “If Kyle gets killed, or turned into- Oh, God, I don’t know what I’ll do.” And she collapsed against me again and cried.

“There there,” I said.

She gave a long hard snuffle, and then blew her nose on a paper towel from the table beside her. “I wish you’d stop saying that,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“Tell me what this guy is up to. Tell me how to find him.”

I sat back down in the wobbly little chair. “I don’t think I can, Debs. I don’t really have much of a feel for what he’s doing.”

“Bullshit,” she said.

“Seriously. I mean, technically speaking, he hasn’t actually killed anybody, you know.”

“Dexter,” she said, “you already understand more about this guy than Kyle did, and he knows who it is. We’ve got to find him. We’ve GOT to.” She bit her lower lip, and I was afraid she would start blubbering again, which would have left me totally helpless since she had already told me I couldn’t say “There there” again. But she pulled it together like the tough sergeant sister she was and merely blew her nose again.

“I’ll try, Deb. Can I assume that you and Kyle have done all the basic work? Talked to witnesses and so on?”

She shook her head. “We didn’t need to. Kyle knew-” She paused at that past tense, and then went on, very determined. “Kyle KNOWS who did it, and he KNOWS who should be next.”

“Excuse me. He knows who’s next?”

Deborah frowned. “Don’t sound like that. Kyle said there are four guys in Miami who are on the list. One of them is missing, Kyle figured he was already taken, but that gave us a little time to set up surveillance on the other three.”

“Who are these four guys, Deborah? And how does Kyle know them?”

She sighed. “Kyle didn’t tell me their names. But they were all part of a team of some kind. In El Salvador. Along with this… Dr. Danco guy. So-” She spread her hands and looked helpless, a new look for her. And although it gave her a certain little-girl charm, the only thing it did for me was to make me feel even more put-upon. The whole world goes spinning merrily along, getting itself into the most God-awful trouble, and then it’s all up to Dashing Dexter to tidy things up again. It didn’t seem fair, but what can you do?

More to the point-what could I do now? I didn’t see any way to find Kyle before it was too late. And although I am fairly sure I didn’t say that out loud, Deborah reacted as if I had. She slapped one hand on the table and said, “We have to find him before he starts on Kyle. Before he even STARTS, Dexter. Because-I mean, am I supposed to hope Kyle will only lose an arm before we get there? Or a leg? Either way, Kyle is…” She turned away without finishing, looking out into the darkness through the French doors by the little table.

She was right, of course. It looked like there was very little we could do to get Kyle back intact. Because with all the luck in the world, even my dazzling intellect couldn’t possibly lead us to him before the work started. And then-how long could Kyle hold out? Presumably he’d had some sort of training in dealing with this sort of thing, and he knew what was coming, so-

But wait a moment. I closed my eyes and tried to think about it. Dr. Danco would know that Kyle was a pro. And as I had already told Deborah, the whole purpose was to shatter the victim into screaming unfixable pieces. Therefore…

I opened my eyes. “Deb,” I said. She looked at me. “I am in the rare position of having some hope to offer.”

“Spill it,” she said.

“This is only a guess,” I said. “But I think Dr. Demented will probably keep Kyle around for a while, without working on him.”

She frowned. “Why would he do that?”

“To make it last longer, and to soften him up. Kyle knows what’s coming. He’s braced for it. But now, imagine he’s just left lying in the dark, tied up, so his imagination goes to work. And so I think maybe,” I added as it occurred to me, “there’s another victim ahead of him. The guy who’s missing. So Kyle hears it-the saws and scalpels, the moans and whispers. He even smells it, knows it’s coming but doesn’t know when. He’ll be half crazy before he even loses a toenail.”

“Jesus,” she said. “That’s your version of hope?”

“Absolutely. It gives us a little extra time to find him.”

“Jesus,” she said again.

“I could be wrong,” I said.

She looked back out the window. “Don’t be wrong, Dex. Not this time,” she said.

I shook my head. This was going to be pure drudgery, no fun at all. I could only think of two things to try, and neither of them were possible until the morning. I glanced around for a clock. According to the VCR, it was 12:00. 12:00. 12:00. “Do you have a clock?” I asked.

Deborah frowned. “What do you want a clock for?”

“To find out what time it is,” I said. “I think that’s the usual purpose.”

“What the hell difference does that make?” she demanded.

“Deborah. There is very little to go on here. We will have to go back and do all the routine stuff that Chutsky pulled the department away from. Luckily, we can use your badge to barge around and ask questions. But we will have to wait until morning.”

“Shit,” she said. “I hate waiting.”

“There there,” I said. Deborah gave me a very sour look, but didn’t say anything.

I didn’t like waiting either, but I had done so much of it lately that perhaps it came easier to me. In any case, wait we did, dozing in our chairs until the sun came up. And then, since I was the domestic one lately, I made coffee for the two of us-one cup at a time, since Deborah’s coffeemaker was one of those single-cup things for people who don’t expect to be entertaining a great deal and don’t actually have a life. There was nothing in the refrigerator remotely worth eating, unless you were a feral dog. Very disappointing: Dexter is a healthy boy with a high metabolism, and facing what was sure to be a difficult day on an empty stomach was not a happy thought. I know family comes first, but shouldn’t that mean after breakfast?

Ah, well. Dauntless Dexter would make the sacrifice once again. Pure nobility of spirit, and I could expect no thanks, but one does what one must.

CHAPTER 15

DR. MARK SPIELMAN WAS A LARGE MAN WHO LOOKED more like a retired linebacker than an ER physician. But he had been the physician on duty when the ambulance delivered The Thing to Jackson Memorial Hospital, and he was not at all happy about it. “If I ever have to see something like that again,” he told us, “I will retire and raise dachshunds.” He shook his head. “You know what the ER at Jackson is like. One of the busiest. All the crazy stuff comes here, from one of the craziest cities in the world. But this-” Spielman knocked twice on the table in the mild green staff lounge where we sat with him. “Something else,” he said.

“What’s the prognosis?” Deborah asked him, and he looked at her sharply.

“Is that a joke?” he said. “There’s no prognosis, and there’s not going to be one. Physically, there’s not enough left to do anything but sustain life, if you want to call it that. Mentally?” He put both hands palm up and then dropped them on the table. “I’m not a shrink, but there’s nothing left in there and no way that he’ll ever have a single lucid moment, ever again. The only hope he has is that we keep him so doped up he doesn’t know who he is, until he dies. Which for his sake we should all hope is soon.” He looked at his watch, a very nice Rolex. “Is this going to take long? I am on duty, you know.”

“Were there traces of any drugs in the blood?” Deborah asked.

Spielman snorted. “Traces, hell. The guy’s blood is a cocktail sauce. I’ve never seen such a mix before. All designed to keep him awake, but deaden the physical pain so the shock of the multiple amputations didn’t kill him.”

“Was there anything unusual about the cuts?” I asked him.

“The guy’s had training,” Spielman said. “They were all done with very good surgical technique. But any medical school in the world could have taught him that.” He blew out a breath and an apologetic smile flickered quickly across his face. “Some of them were already healed.”

“What kind of time frame does that give us?” Deborah asked him.

Spielman shrugged. “Four to six weeks, start to finish,” he said. “He took at least a month to surgically dismember this guy, one small piece at a time. I can’t imagine anything more horrible.”

“He did it in front of a mirror,” I said, ever-helpful. “So the victim had to watch.”

Spielman looked appalled. “My God,” he said. He just sat there for a minute, and then said, “Oh, my God.” Then he shook his head and looked at his Rolex again. “Listen, I’d like to help out here, but this is…” He spread his hands and then dropped them on the table again. “I don’t think there’s really anything I can tell you that’s going to do any good. So let me save you some time here. That Mister, uh-Chesney?”

“Chutsky,” Deborah said.

“Yes, that was it. He called in and suggested I might get an ID with a retinal scan at, um, a certain database in Virginia.” He raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Anyway. I got a fax yesterday, with a positive identification of the victim. I’ll get it for you.” He stood up and disappeared into the hall. A moment later he returned with a sheet of paper. “Here it is. Name is Manuel Borges. A native of El Salvador, in the import business.” He put the paper down in front of Deborah. “I know it’s not much, but believe me, that’s it. The shape he’s in…” He shrugged. “I didn’t think we’d get this much.”

A small intercom speaker in the ceiling muttered something that might have come from a TV show. Spielman cocked his head, frowned, and said, “Gotta go. Hope you catch him.” And he was out the door and down the hall so quickly that the fax paper he had dropped on the table fluttered.

I looked at Deborah. She did not seem particularly encouraged that we had found the victim’s name. “Well,” I said. “I know it isn’t much.”

She shook her head. “Not much would be a big improvement. This is nothing.” She looked at the fax, read it through one time. “ El Salvador. Connected to something called FLANGE.”

“That was our side,” I said. She looked up at me. “The side the United States supported. I looked it up on the Internet.”

“Swell. So we just found out something we already knew.” She got up and headed for the door, not quite as quickly as Dr. Spielman but fast enough that I had to hurry and I didn’t catch up until she was at the door to the parking lot.

Deborah drove rapidly and silently, with her jaw clenched, all the way to the little house on N.W. 4th Street where it had all started. The yellow tape was gone, of course, but Deborah parked haphazardly anyway, cop fashion, and got out of the car. I followed her up the short walkway to the house next door to the one where we had found the human doorstop. Deborah rang the bell, still without speaking, and a moment later it swung open. A middle-aged man wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a tan guayabera shirt looked out at us inquiringly.

“We need to speak to Ariel Medina,” Deborah said, holding up her badge.

“My mother is resting now,” he said.

“It’s urgent,” Deborah said.

The man looked at her, then at me. “Just a moment,” he said. He closed the door. Deborah stared straight ahead at the door, and I watched her jaw muscles working for a couple of minutes before the man opened the door again and held it wide. “Come in,” he said.

We followed him into a small dark room crowded with dozens of end tables, each one festooned with religious articles and framed photographs. Ariel, the old lady who had discovered the thing next door and cried on Deb’s shoulder, sat on a large overstuffed sofa with doilies on the arms and across the back. When she saw Deborah she said, “Aaahhh,” and stood up to give her a hug. Deborah, who really should have been expecting an

abrazo

from an elderly Cuban lady, stood stiffly for a moment before awkwardly returning the embrace with a few pats on the woman’s back. Deborah backed off as soon as she decently could. Ariel sat back down on the couch and patted the cushion beside her. Deborah sat.

The old lady immediately launched into a very rapid stream of Spanish. I speak some Spanish, and often I can even understand Cuban, but I was getting only one word in ten of Ariel’s harangue. Deborah looked at me helplessly; for whatever quixotic reasons, she had chosen to study French in school, and as far as she was concerned the woman might as well have been speaking ancient Etruscan.

“Por favor, Señora,” I said. “Mi hermana no habla español.”

“Ah?” Ariel looked at Deborah with a little less enthusiasm and shook her head. “Lázaro!” Her son stepped forward, and as she resumed her monologue with barely a pause, he began to translate for her. “I came here from Santiago de Cuba in 1962,” Lázaro said for his mother. “Under Batista I saw some terrible things. People disappeared. Then Castro came and for a while I had hope.” She shook her head and spread her hands. “Believe it or not, but this is what we thought at the time. Things would be different. But soon it was the same thing again. Worse. So I came here. To the United States. Because here, people don’t disappear. People are not shot in the street or tortured. That’s what I thought. And now this.” She waved an arm toward the house next door.

“I need to ask you a few questions,” Deborah said, and Lázaro translated.

Ariel simply nodded and went right on with her riveting tale. “Even with Castro, they would never do a thing like that,” she said. “Yes, they kill people. Or they put you in the Isle of Pines. But never a thing like this. Not in Cuba. Only in America,” she said.

“Did you ever see the man next door?” Deborah interrupted. “The man who did this?” Ariel studied Deborah for a moment. “I need to know,” Deb said. “There’s going to be another one if we can’t find him.”

“Why is it you who asks me?” Ariel said through her son. “This is no job for you. A pretty woman like you, you should have a husband. A family.”

“El victimo proximo es el novio de mi hermana,” I said.

The next victim is my sister’s sweetheart

. Deborah glared at me, but Ariel said, “Aaahhh,” clucked her tongue, and nodded her head. “Well, I don’t know what I can tell you. I did see the man, maybe two times.” She shrugged and Deborah leaned forward impatiently. “Always at night, never very close. I can say, the man was small, very short. And skinny as well. With big glasses. More than this, I don’t know. He never came out, he was very quiet. Sometimes we would hear music.” She smiled just a little and added, “Tito Puente.” And Lázaro echoed unnecessarily, “Tito Puente.”

“Ah,” I said, and they all looked at me. “It would hide the noise,” I said, a little embarrassed at all the attention.

“Did he have a car?” Deborah asked, and Ariel frowned.

“A van,” she said. “He drove an old white van with no windows. It was very clean, but had many rust spots and dents. I saw it a few times, but he usually kept it in his garage.”

“I don’t suppose you saw the license plate?” I asked her, and she looked at me.

“But I did,” she said through her son, and held up one hand, palm outward. “Not to get the number, that only happens in the old movies. But I know it was a Florida license plate. The yellow one with the cartoon of a child,” she said, and she stopped talking and glared at me, because I was giggling. It’s not at all dignified, and certainly not something I practice on a regular basis, but I was actually giggling and I could not help myself.

Deborah glared at me, too. “What is so goddamned funny?” she demanded.

“The license plate,” I said. “I’m sorry, Debs, but my God, don’t you know what the yellow Florida plate is? And for this guy to have one and do what he does…” I swallowed hard to keep from laughing again, but it took all my self-control.

“All right, damn it, what’s so funny about the yellow license plate?”

“It’s a specialty plate, Deb,” I said. “The one that says, CHOOSE LIFE.”

And then, picturing Dr. Danco carting around his wriggling victims, filling them with chemicals and cutting so very perfectly to keep them alive through it all, I’m afraid I giggled again. “Choose life,” I said.

I really wanted to meet this guy.

We walked back to the car in silence. Deborah got in and called in the description of the van to Captain Matthews, and he agreed that he could probably put out an APB. While she talked to the captain, I looked around. Neatly manicured yards, mostly consisting of colored rocks. A few children’s bicycles chained to the front porch, and the Orange Bowl looming in the background. A nice little neighborhood to live in, work in, raise a family in-or chop off somebody’s arms and legs.

“Get in,” said Deborah, interrupting my rustic reverie. I got in and we drove off. At one point, stopped at a red light, Deb glanced at me and said, “You pick a funny time to start laughing.”

“Really, Deb,” I said. “This is the first hint of personality we’ve got from the guy. We know he has a sense of humor. I think that’s a big step forward.”

“Sure. Maybe we’ll catch him at a comedy club.”

“We will catch him, Deb,” I said, although neither one of us believed me. She just grunted; the light changed and she stomped on the gas as if she was killing a poisonous snake.

We moved through the traffic back to Deb’s house. The morning rush hour was coming to an end. At the corner of Flagler and 34th a car had run up onto the sidewalk and smacked into a light pole in front of a church. A cop stood beside the car between two men who were screaming at each other. A little girl sat on the curb crying. Ah, the enchanting rhythms of another magical day in paradise.

A few moments later we turned down Medina and Deborah parked her car beside mine in the driveway. She switched off the engine and for a moment we both just sat there listening to the ticking of the cooling motor. “Shit,” she said.

“I agree.”

“What do we do now?” she said.

“Sleep,” I said. “I’m too tired to think.”

She pounded both hands on the steering wheel. “How can I sleep, Dexter? Knowing that Kyle is…” She hit the wheel again. “Shit,” she said.

“The van will turn up, Deb. You know that. The database will spit out every white van with a CHOOSE LIFE tag, and with an APB out it’s just a matter of time.”

“Kyle doesn’t have time,” she said.

“Human beings need sleep, Debs,” I said. “And so do I.”

A courier’s van squealed around the corner and clunked to a halt in front of Deborah’s house. The driver jumped out with a small package and approached Deb’s front door. She said, “Shit,” one last time and got out of the car to collect the package.

I closed my eyes and sat for just a moment longer, pondering, which is what I do instead of thinking when I am very tired. It really seemed like wasted effort; nothing came to me except to wonder where I’d left my running shoes. With my new sense of humor apparently still idling, that seemed funny to me and, to my great surprise I heard a very faint echo from the Dark Passenger.

Why is that funny?

I asked.

Is it because I left the shoes at Rita’s?

Of course it didn’t answer. The poor thing was probably still sulking. And yet it had chuckled.

Is it something else altogether that seems funny?

I asked. But again there was no answer; just a faint sense of anticipation and hunger.

The courier rattled and roared away. Just as I was about to yawn, stretch, and admit that my finely tuned cerebral powers were on hiatus, I heard a kind of retching moan. I opened my eyes and looked up to see Deborah stagger forward a step and then sit down hard on her front walk. I got out of the car and hurried over to her.

“Deb?” I said. “What is it?”

She dropped the package and hid her face in her hands, making more unlikely noises. I squatted beside her and picked up the package. It was a small box, about the right size to hold a wristwatch. I pried the end up. Inside was a ziplock bag. And inside the bag was a human finger.

A finger with a big, flashy pinkie ring.

CHAPTER 16

IT TOOK A VERY GREAT DEAL MORE THAN PATTING DEBORAH on the shoulder and saying “There there” to get her calmed down this time. In fact I had to force-feed her a large glass of peppermint schnapps. I knew that she needed some kind of chemical help to relax and even sleep if possible, but Debs had nothing in her medicine chest stronger than Tylenol, and she was not a drinker. I finally found the schnapps bottle under her kitchen sink, and after making sure it wasn’t actually drain cleaner I made her chug down a glass of it. From the apparent taste, it might as well have been drain cleaner. She shuddered and gagged but she drank it, too bone weary and brain numb to fight.

While she slumped in her chair I threw a few changes of her clothing into a grocery bag and dropped it by the front door. She stared at the bags and then at me. “What are you doing,” she said. Her voice was slurred and she sounded uninterested in the answer.

“You’re staying at my place for a few days,” I said.

“Don’t want to,” she said.

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “You have to.”

She shifted her gaze to the bag of clothing by the door. “Why.”

I walked over to her and squatted beside her chair. “Deborah. He knows who you are and where you are. Let’s try to make it just a little bit of a challenge for him, all right?”

She shuddered again, but she didn’t say anything more as I helped her to her feet and out the door. Half an hour and one more slug of peppermint schnapps later she was in my bed, snoring lightly. I left her a note to call me when she woke up, and then I took her little surprise package with me and headed in to work.

I didn’t expect to find any important clues from running the finger through a lab check, but since I do forensics for a living it seemed like I really ought to give it a professional once-over. And because I take all my obligations very seriously, I stopped on the way and bought doughnuts. As I approached my second-floor cubbyhole, Vince Masuoka came down the hall from the opposite direction. I bowed humbly and held up the bag. “Greetings, Sensei,” I said. “I bring gifts.”

“Greetings, Grasshopper,” he said. “There is a thing called time. You must explore its mysteries.” He held up his wrist and pointed to his watch. “I’m on my way to lunch, and now you bring me my breakfast?”

“Better late than never,” I said, but he shook his head.

“Nah,” he said. “My mouth has already changed gears. I’m gonna go get some

ropa vieja

and

plátanos

.”

“If you spurn my gift of food,” I said, “I will give you the finger.” He raised an eyebrow, and I handed him Deb’s package. “Can I have half an hour of your time before lunch?”

He looked at the small box. “I don’t think I want to open this on an empty stomach, do I?” he said.

“Well then, how about a doughnut?”

It took more than half an hour, but by the time Vince left for lunch we had learned that there was nothing to learn from Kyle’s finger. The cut was extremely clean and professional, done with a very sharp instrument that left no trace behind in the wound. There was nothing under the fingernail except a little dirt that could have come from anywhere. I removed the ring, but we found no threads or hairs or telltale fabric swatches, and Kyle had somehow failed to etch an address or phone number onto the inside of the ring. Kyle’s blood type was AB positive.

I put the finger into cold storage, and slipped the ring into my pocket. That wasn’t exactly standard procedure, but I was fairly sure that Deborah would want it if we didn’t get Kyle back. As it was, it looked like if we did get him back it would be by messenger, one piece at a time. Of course, I’m not a sentimental person, but that didn’t seem like something that would warm her heart.

By now I was very tired indeed, and since Debs hadn’t called yet I decided that I was well within my rights to head for home and take a nap. The afternoon rain started as I climbed into my car. I shot straight down LeJeune in the relatively light traffic and got home after being screamed at only one time, which was a new record. I dashed in through the rain and found Deborah gone. She had scribbled a note on a Post-it saying she would call later. I was relieved, since I had not been looking forward to sleeping on my half-size couch. I crawled right into my own bed and slept without interruption until a little after six o’clock in the evening.

Naturally, even the mighty machine that is my body needs a certain amount of maintenance, and when I sat up in bed I felt very much in need of an oil change. The long night with so little sleep, the missed breakfast, the tension and suspense of trying to think of something besides “There there” to say to Deborah-all these things had taken their toll. I felt as though someone had snuck in and packed my head with beach sand, even including the bottle caps and cigarette butts.

There is only one solution to this occasional condition, and that is exercise. But as I decided that what I really needed was a pleasant two- or three-mile jog, I remembered again that I had misplaced my running shoes. They were not in their usual spot by the door, and they were not in my car. This was Miami, so it was possible that someone had broken into my apartment and stolen them; they were, after all, very nice New Balance shoes. But I thought it more likely that I had left them over at Rita’s. For me, to decide is to act. I toddled down to my car and drove over to Rita’s house.

The rain was long gone-it seldom lasts even an hour-and the streets were already dry and filled with the usual cheerfully homicidal crowd. My people. The maroon Taurus showed up behind me at Sunset, and stayed with me all the way. It was nice to see Doakes back on the job. I had felt just a little bit neglected. Once again he parked across the street as I knocked on the door. He had just turned off the engine when Rita opened the door. “Well,” she said. “What a surprise!” She lifted her face for a kiss.

I gave her one, putting a little extra English on it to entertain Sergeant Doakes. “There’s no easy way to say this,” I said, “but I’ve come for my running shoes.”

Rita smiled. “Actually, I just put mine on. Care to get sweaty together?” And she held the door wide for me.

“That’s the best invitation I’ve had all day,” I said.

I found my shoes in her garage beside the washing machine, along with a pair of shorts and a sleeveless sweatshirt, laundered and ready to go. I went into the bathroom and changed clothes, leaving my work clothes folded neatly on the toilet seat. In just a few minutes Rita and I were trotting up the block together. I waved to Sergeant Doakes as we went by. We ran down the street, turned right for a few blocks, and then around the perimeter of the nearby park. We had run this route together before, had even measured it out at just under three miles, and we were used to each other’s pace. And so about half an hour later, sweaty and once again willing to face the challenges of another evening of life on Planet Earth, we stood at the front door of Rita’s house.

“If you don’t mind, I’ll take the first shower,” she said. “That way I can start dinner while you clean up.”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I’ll just sit out here and drip.”

Rita smiled. “I’ll get you a beer,” she said. A moment later she handed me one and then went in and closed the door. I sat on the step and sipped my beer. The last few days had gone by in a savage blur, and I had been so entirely upended from my normal life that I actually enjoyed the moment of peaceful contemplation, calmly sitting there and drinking a beer while somewhere in the city Chutsky was shedding spare parts. Life whirled on around me with its sundry slashings, strangulations, and dismemberings, but in Dexter’s Domain it was Miller Time. I raised the can in a toast to Sergeant Doakes.

Somewhere in the house I heard a commotion. There was shouting and a little bit of squealing, as if Rita had just discovered the Beatles in her bathroom. Then the front door slammed open and Rita grabbed me around the neck in a stranglehold. I dropped my beer and gasped for air. “What? What did I do?” I said. I saw Astor and Cody watching from just inside the door. “I’m terribly sorry, and I’ll never do it again,” I added, but Rita kept squeezing.

“Oh, Dexter,” she said, and now she was crying. Astor smiled at me and clasped her hands together under her chin. Cody just watched, nodding a little bit. “Oh, Dexter,” Rita said again.

“Please,” I said, struggling desperately to get some air, “I promise it was an accident and I didn’t mean it. What did I do?” Rita finally relented and loosened her death grip.

“Oh, Dexter,” she said one more time, and she put her hands on my face and looked at me with a blinding smile and a faceful of tears. “Oh, YOU!” she said, although to be honest it didn’t seem very much like me at the moment. “I’m sorry, it was an accident,” she said, snuffling now. “I hope you didn’t have anything really special planned.”

“Rita. Please. What is going on?”

Her smile got bigger and bigger. “Oh, Dexter. I really-it was just- Astor needed to use the toilet, and when she picked up your clothes, it just fell out onto the floor and- Oh, Dexter, it’s so beautiful!” She had now said Oh Dexter so many times that I began to feel Irish, but I still had no idea what was going on.

Until Rita lifted up her hand in front of her. Her left hand. Now with a large diamond ring sparkling on her ring finger.

Chutsky’s ring.

“Oh, Dexter,” she said again, and then buried her face in my shoulder. “Yes yes YES! Oh, you’ve made me so happy!”

“All right,” Cody said softly.

And after that, what can you say except congratulations?

The rest of the evening passed in a blur of disbelief and Miller Lite. I knew very well that hovering somewhere out in space was a perfect, calm, logical series of words that I could put together and say to Rita to make her understand that I had not actually proposed to her, and we would all have a good laugh and say good night. But the harder I searched for that magical elusive sentence, the faster it ran away from me. And I found myself reasoning that perhaps one more beer would unlock the doors of perception, and after several cans Rita went up to the corner store and returned with a bottle of champagne. We drank the champagne and everyone seemed so very happy, and one thing led to another and somehow I ended up in Rita’s bed once again, witness to some exceedingly unlikely and undignified events.

And once again I found myself wondering, as I drifted off to stunned and unbelieving sleep:

How do these terrible things always happen to me?

Waking up after a night like that is never very pleasant. Waking up in the middle of the night and thinking,

Oh God-Deborah!

is even worse. You may think I was guilty or uneasy about neglecting someone who depended on me, in which case you would be very wrong. As I have said, I don’t really feel emotions. I can, however, experience fear, and the idea of Deborah’s potential rage pulled the trigger. I hurried into my clothes and managed to slip out to my car without waking anyone. Sergeant Doakes was no longer in his position across the street. It was nice to know that even Doakes needed to sleep sometime. Or perhaps he had thought that someone who just got engaged deserved a little privacy. Knowing him as I did, however, this didn’t seem likely. It was far more likely that he had been elected pope and had to fly off to the Vatican.

I drove home quickly, and checked my answering machine. There was one automated message urging me to buy a new set of tires before it was too late, which seemed ominous enough, but no message from Debs. I made coffee and waited for the thump of the morning paper against my door. There was a sense of unreality to the morning that was not entirely caused by the aftereffects of the champagne. Engaged, was I? Well well. I wished that I could scold myself and demand to know what I thought I had been doing. But the truth was that, unfortunately, I hadn’t been doing anything wrong; I was entirely clothed in virtue and diligence. And I had done nothing that could be called spectacularly stupid-far from it. I had been proceeding with life in a noble and even exemplary manner, minding my own business and trying to help my sister recover her boyfriend, exercising, eating plenty of green vegetables, and not even slicing up other monsters. And somehow all this pure and decent behavior had snuck around behind me and bitten me on the ass. Never a good deed goes unpunished, as Harry used to say.

And what could I do about it now? Surely Rita would come to her senses. I mean, really:

ME?

Who could possibly want to marry

ME?!

There had to be better alternatives, like becoming a nun, or joining the Peace Corps. This was Dexter we were talking about. In a city the size of Miami, couldn’t she find somebody who was at least human? And what was her rush to get married again anyway? It hadn’t worked out terribly well for her the first time, but she was apparently willing to plunge right back into it again. Were women really this desperate to get married?

Of course there were the children to think about. Conventional wisdom would say they needed a father, and there was something to that, because where would I have been without Harry? And Astor and Cody had looked so happy. Even if I made Rita see that a comical mistake had happened, would the kids ever understand?

I was on my second cup of coffee when the paper came. I glanced through the main sections, relieved to find that terrible things were still happening almost everywhere. At least the rest of the world hadn’t gone crazy.

By seven o’clock I thought it would be safe to call Deborah on her cell phone. There was no answer; I left a message, and fifteen minutes later she called back. “Good morning, Sis,” I said, and I marveled at the way I managed to sound cheerful. “Did you get some sleep?”

“A little,” she grumbled. “I woke up around four yesterday. I traced the package to a place in Hialeah. I drove around the area most of the night looking for the white van.”

“If he dropped the package way up in Hialeah, he probably drove in from Key West to do it,” I said.

“I know that, goddamn it,” she snapped. “But what the hell else am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But doesn’t the guy from Washington get here today?”

“We don’t know anything about him,” she said. “Just because Kyle is good, doesn’t mean this guy will be.”

She apparently didn’t remember that Kyle had not shown himself to be particularly good, at least in public. He’d done nothing at all, in fact, except get himself captured and have his finger nipped off. But it didn’t seem politic for me to comment on how good he was, so I simply said, “Well, we have to assume the new guy knows something about this that we don’t know.”

Deborah snorted. “That wouldn’t be too hard,” she said. “I’ll call you when he gets in.” She hung up, and I got ready for work.

CHAPTER 17

AT 12:30 DEB STALKED INTO MY MODEST RETREAT OFF the forensics lab and threw a cassette tape on my desk. I looked up at her; she didn’t seem happy, but that really wasn’t much of a novelty. “From my answering machine at home,” she said. “Listen to it.”

I lifted the hatch on my boom box and put in the tape Deb had flung at me. I pushed play: the tape beeped loudly, and then an unfamiliar voice said, “Sergeant, um, Morgan. Right? This is Dan Burdett, from uh- Kyle Chutsky said I should call you. I’m on the ground at the airport, and I’ll call you about getting together when I get to my hotel, which is-” There was a rustling sound and he obviously moved the cell phone away from his mouth, since his voice got fainter. “What? Oh, hey, that’s nice. All right, thanks.” His voice got louder again. “I just met your driver. Thanks for sending somebody. All right, I’ll call from the hotel.”

Deborah reached across my desk and switched off the machine. “I didn’t send anybody to the fucking airport,” she said. “And Captain Matthews damn sure didn’t either. Did you send somebody to the fucking airport, Dexter?”

“My limo was out of gas,” I said.

“Well then GOD

DAMN

it!” she said, and I had to agree with her analysis.

“Anyway,” I said, “at least we found out how good Kyle’s replacement is.”

Deborah slumped into the folding chair by my desk. “Square fucking one,” she said. “And Kyle is…” She bit her lip and didn’t finish the sentence.

“Did you tell Captain Matthews about this yet?” I asked her. She shook her head. “Well, he has to call them. They’ll send somebody else.”

“Sure, great. They send somebody else, who might make it all the way to baggage claim this time. Shit, Dexter.”

“We have to tell them, Debs,” I said. “By the way, who are

them

? Did Kyle ever tell you exactly who he works for?”

She sighed. “No. He joked about working for the OGA, but he never said why that was funny.”

“Well, whoever they are, they need to know,” I said. I pried the cassette out of my boom box and put it on the desk in front of her. “There has to be something they can do.”

Deborah didn’t move for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling they’ve already done it, and Burdett was it?” she said. Then she scooped up the tape and trudged out of my office.

I was sipping coffee and digesting my lunch with the help of a jumbo chocolate-chip cookie when the call came to report to the scene of a homicide in the Miami Shores area. Angel-no-relation and I drove over to where a body had been found in the shell of a small house on a canal that was being ripped apart and rebuilt. Construction had been temporarily halted while the owner and the contractor sued each other. Two teenaged boys skipping school had snuck into the house and found the body. It was laid out on heavy plastic on top of a sheet of plywood which had been placed over two sawhorses. Someone had taken a power saw and neatly lopped off the head, legs, and arms. The whole thing had been left like that, with the trunk in the middle and the pieces simply trimmed off and moved a few inches away.

And although the Dark Passenger had chuckled and whispered little dark nothings in my ear, I put it down to pure envy and went on with my work. There was certainly plenty of blood spatter for me to work with, still very fresh, and I probably would have spent a cheerfully efficient day finding and analyzing it if I hadn’t happened to overhear the uniformed officer who had been first on the scene talking with a detective.

“The wallet was right there by the body,” Officer Snyder was saying. “Got a Virginia driver’s license in the name of Daniel Chester Burdett.”

Oh, well then

, I said to the happy chattering voice in the backseat of my brain.

That would certainly explain a lot, wouldn’t it?

I looked again at the body. Although the removal of the head and limbs had been fast and savage, there was a neatness to the arrangement that I could now recognize as slightly familiar, and the Dark Passenger chuckled happily in agreement. Between the trunk and each part, the gap was as precise as if it had been measured, and the whole presentation was arranged almost like an anatomy lesson. The hip bone disconnected from the leg bone.

“Got the two boys who found it in the squad car,” Snyder said to the detective. I glanced back at the two of them, wondering how to tell them my news. Of course, it was possible that I was wrong, but-

“Sonamabeech,” I heard someone mutter. I looked back to where Angel-no-relation was squatting on the far side of the body. Once again he was using his tweezers to hold up a small piece of paper. I stepped behind him and looked over his shoulder.

In a clear and spidery hand, someone had written “POGUE,” and crossed it out with a single line. “Whassa pogue?” Angel asked. “His name?”

“It’s somebody who sits behind a desk and orders around the real troops,” I told him.

He looked at me. “How you know all this shit?” he asked.

“I see a lot of movies,” I said.

Angel glanced back down at the paper. “I think the handwriting is the same,” he said.

“Like the other one,” I said.

“The one that never happened,” he said. “I know, I was there.”

I straightened up and took a breath, thinking how nice it was to be right. “This one never happened, either,” I said, and walked over to where Officer Snyder was chatting with the detective.

The detective in question was a pear-shaped man named Coulter. He was sipping from a large plastic bottle of Mountain Dew and looking out at the canal that ran by the backyard. “What do you think a place like this goes for?” he asked Snyder. “On a canal like that. Less than a mile from the bay, huh? Figure maybe what. Half a million? More?”

“Excuse me, Detective,” I said. “I think we have a situation here.” I’d always wanted to say that, but it didn’t seem to impress Coulter.

“A situation. You been watching

CSI

or something?”

“Burdett is a federal agent,” I said. “You have to call Captain Matthews right away and tell him.”

“I

have

to,” Coulter said.

“This is connected to something we’re not supposed to touch,” I said. “They came down from Washington and told the captain to back off.”

Coulter took a swig from his bottle. “And did the captain back off?”

“Like a rabbit in reverse,” I said.

Coulter turned and looked at Burdett’s body. “A fed,” he said. He took one more swig as he stared at the severed head and limbs. Then he shook his head. “Those guys always come apart under pressure.” He looked back out the window and pulled out his cell phone.

Deborah got to the scene just as Angel-no-relation was putting his kit back in the van, which was three minutes before Captain Matthews. I don’t mean to seem critical of the captain. To be perfectly fair, Debs didn’t have to put on a fresh spray of Aramis, and he did, and redoing the knot in his tie must have taken some time, too. Just moments behind Matthews came a car I had come to know as well as my own; a maroon Ford Taurus, piloted by Sergeant Doakes. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” I said cheerfully. Officer Snyder looked at me like I had suggested we dance naked, but Coulter just pushed his index finger into the mouth of his soda bottle and let it dangle as he walked away to meet the captain.

Deborah had been looking the scene over from the outside and directing Snyder’s partner to move the perimeter tape back a little. By the time she finally walked over to talk to me, I had reached a startling conclusion. It had started as an exercise in ironic whimsy, but it grew into something that I couldn’t argue with, as much as I tried. I stepped over to Coulter’s expensive window and stared out, leaning on the wall and looking hard at the idea. For some reason, the Dark Passenger found the notion hugely amusing and began whispering frightful counterpoint. And finally, feeling like I was selling nuclear secrets to the Taliban, I realized it was all we could do. “Deborah,” I said as she stalked over to where I stood by the window, “the cavalry isn’t coming this time.”

“No shit, Sherlock,” she said.

“We are all there is, and we are not enough.”

She pushed a lock of hair away from her face and blew out a deep breath. “What have I been saying?”

“But you didn’t take the next step, Sis. Since we are not enough, we need help, somebody who knows something about this-”

“For Christ’s sake, Dexter! We’ve been

feeding

people like that to this guy!”

“Which means the only remaining candidate at the moment is Sergeant Doakes,” I said.

It might not be fair to say that her jaw dropped. But she did stare at me with her mouth open before turning to look at Doakes, where he stood beside Burdett’s body, talking to Captain Matthews.

“Sergeant Doakes,” I repeated. “Formerly

Sergeant

Doakes. Of the Special Forces. On detached service in El Salvador.”

She looked back at me, and then at Doakes again.

“Deborah,” I said, “if we want to find Kyle, we need to know more about this. We need to know the names on Kyle’s list and we need to know what kind of team it was and why all this is happening. And Doakes is the only one I can think of who knows any of it.”

“Doakes wants you dead,” she said.

“No working situation is ever ideal,” I said with my best smile of cheerful perseverance. “And I think he wants this to go away as badly as Kyle does.”

“Probably not as much as Kyle,” Deborah said. “Not as much as I do, either.”

“Well then,” I said. “This looks like your best shot.”

Deborah still didn’t look convinced for some reason. “Captain Matthews won’t want to lose Doakes for this. We’d have to clear it with him.”

I pointed to where that very same captain was conferring with Doakes. “Behold,” I said.

Deborah chewed her lip for a moment before she finally said, “Shit. It might work.”

“I can’t think of anything else that might,” I said.

She took another breath, and then as if someone had clicked a switch, she stepped toward Matthews and Doakes with her jaw clenched. I trailed along behind, trying hard to blend in with the bare walls so Doakes wouldn’t pounce and rip out my heart.

“Captain,” Deborah said, “we need to get proactive with this.”

Even though “proactive” was one of his favorite words, Matthews stared at her like she was a cockroach in the salad. “What we need,” he said, “is for these…

people

… in Washington to send somebody competent to clean up this situation.”

Deborah pointed at Burdett. “They sent him,” she said.

Matthews glanced down at Burdett and pushed his lips out thoughtfully. “What do you suggest?”

“We have a couple of leads,” she said, nodding toward me. I really wished she hadn’t, since Matthews swung his head in my direction and, much worse, so did Doakes. If his hungry-dog expression was any indication, he apparently hadn’t mellowed in his feelings toward me.

“What is your involvement with this?” Matthews asked me.

“He’s providing forensic assistance,” Deborah said, and I nodded modestly.

“Shit,” Doakes said.

“There’s a time factor here,” Deborah said. “We need to find this guy before he-before more of these turn up. We can’t keep a lid on it forever.”

“I think the term ‘media feeding frenzy’ might be appropriate,” I offered, always helpful. Matthews glared at me.

“I know the overall shape of what Kyle-of what Chutsky was trying to do,” Deborah went on. “But I can’t go on with it because I don’t know any background details.” She stuck her chin out in the direction of Doakes. “Sergeant Doakes does.”

Doakes looked surprised, which was obviously an expression he hadn’t practiced enough. But before he could speak Deborah plowed ahead. “I think the three of us together can catch this guy before another fed gets on the ground and catches up to what’s happened so far.”

“Shit,” Doakes said again. “You want me to work with

him

?” He didn’t need to point to let everyone know he meant me, but he did anyway, pushing a muscular, knobby index finger at my face.

“Yeah, I do,” Deborah said. Captain Matthews was chewing on his lip and looking undecided, and Doakes said, “Shit,” again. I did hope that his conversational skills would improve if we were going to work together.

“You said you know something about this,” Matthews said to Doakes, and the sergeant reluctantly turned his glare away from me and onto the captain.

“Uh-huh,” said Doakes.

“From your, uh- From the army,” Matthews said. He didn’t seem terribly frightened by Doakes’s expression of petulant rage, but perhaps that was just the habit of command.

“Uh-huh,” Doakes said again.

Captain Matthews frowned, looking as much as he possibly could like a man of action making an important decision. The rest of us managed to control our goose bumps.

“Morgan,” Captain Matthews finally said. He looked at Debs, and then he paused. A van that said Action News on the side pulled up in front of the little house and people began to get out. “Goddamn it,” Matthews said. He glanced at the body and then at Doakes. “Can you do it, Sergeant?”

“They’re not going to like it in Washington,” Doakes said. “And I don’t much like it here.”

“I’m beginning to lose interest in what they like in Washington,” Matthews said. “We have our own problems. Can you handle this?”

Doakes looked at me. I tried to look serious and dedicated, but he just shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “I can do this.”

Matthews clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man,” he said, and he hurried away to talk to the news crew.

Doakes was still looking at me. I looked back. “Think how much easier it’s going to be to keep track of me,” I said.

“When this is over,” he said. “Just you and me.”

“But not until it’s over,” I said, and he finally nodded, just once.

“Until then,” he said.

CHAPTER 18

DOAKES TOOK US TO A COFFEE SHOP ON CALLE OCHO, just across the street from a car dealership. He led us to a small table in the back corner and sat down facing the door. “We can talk here,” he said, and he made it sound so much like a spy movie that I wished I had brought sunglasses. Still, perhaps Chutsky’s would come in the mail. Hopefully without his nose attached.

Before we could actually talk, a man came from the back room and shook Doakes’s hand. “Alberto,” he said. “ Como estas?” And Doakes answered him in very good Spanish-better than mine, to be honest, although I do like to think that my accent is better. “Luis,” he said. “Mas o menos.” They chattered away for a minute, and then Luis brought us all tiny cups of horribly sweet Cuban coffee and a plate of

pastelitos

. He nodded once at Doakes and then disappeared into the back room.

Deborah watched the whole performance with growing impatience, and when Luis finally left us she opened up. “We need the names of everybody from El Salvador,” she blurted out.

Doakes just looked at her and sipped his coffee. “Be a big list,” he said.

Deborah frowned. “You know what I mean,” she said. “Goddamn it, Doakes, he’s got Kyle.”

Doakes showed his teeth. “Yeah, Kyle getting old. Never would have got him in his prime.”

“What exactly were

you

doing down there?” I asked him. I know it was a bit off message, but my curiosity about how he would answer got the best of me.

Still smiling, if that’s what it was, Doakes looked at me and said, “What do you think?” And just underneath the threshold of hearing there came a quiet rumble of savage glee, answered right away from deep inside my dark backseat, one predator calling across a moonlit night to another. And really and truly, what else could he have been doing? Just as Doakes knew me, I knew Doakes for what he was: a cold killer. Even without what Chutsky had said, it was very clear what Doakes would have been doing in a homicidal carnival like El Salvador. He would have been one of the ringmasters.

“Cut the staring contest,” Deborah said. “I need some names.”

Doakes picked up one of the

pastelitos

and leaned back. “Why don’t you-all bring me up to date,” he said. He took a bite, and Deborah tapped a finger on the table before deciding that made sense.

“All right,” she said. “We got a rough description of the guy who’s doing this, and his van. A white van.”

Doakes shook his head. “Don’t matter. We

know

who’s doing this.”

“We also got an ID on the first victim,” I said. “A man named Manuel Borges.”

“Well, well,” Doakes said. “Old Manny, huh? Really should’ve let me shoot him.”

“A friend of yours?” I asked, but Doakes ignored me.

“What else you got?” he said.

“Kyle had a list of names,” Deborah said. “Other men from the same unit. He said one of them would be the next victim. But he didn’t tell me the names.”

“No, he wouldn’t,” Doakes said.

“So we need you to tell us,” she said.

Doakes appeared to think this over. “If I was a hotshot like Kyle, I’d pick one of these guys and stake him out.” Deborah pursed her lips and nodded. “Problem is, I am

not

a hotshot like Kyle. Just a simple cop from the country.”

“Would you like a banjo?” I asked, but for some reason he didn’t laugh.

“I only know about one guy from the old team here in Miami,” he said, after a quick and savage glance at me. “Oscar Acosta. Saw him at Publix two years ago. We could run him down.” He pointed his chin at Deborah. “Two other names I can think of. You look ’em up, see if they’re here.” He spread his hands. “About all I got. I could maybe call some old buddies in Virginia, but no telling what that might stir up.” He snorted. “Anyway, take them two days to decide what I was really asking and what they ought to do about it.”

“So what do we do?” Deborah said. “We stake this guy out? The one you saw? Or do we talk to him?”

Doakes shook his head. “He remembered me. I can talk to him. You try to watch him, he’ll know it and probably disappear.” He looked at his watch. “Quarter of three. Oscar be home in a couple of hours. You-all wait for my call.” And then he gave me his 150-watt I’m-watching-you smile, and said, “Why don’t you go wait with your pretty fiancée?” And he got up and walked out, leaving us with the check.

Deborah stared at me. “Fiancée?” she said.

“It’s not really definite,” I said.

“You’re

engaged

!?”

“I was going to tell you,” I said.

“When? On your third anniversary?”

“When I know how it happened,” I said. “I still don’t really believe it.”

She snorted. “I don’t either.” She stood up. “Come on. I’ll take you back to work. Then you can go wait with your

fiancée

,” she said. I left some money on the table and followed meekly.

Vince Masuoka was passing by in the hall when Deborah and I got off the elevator. “Shalom, boy-chick,” he said. “How’s by you?”

“He’s engaged,” Deborah said before I could speak. Vince looked at her like she had said I was pregnant.

“He’s

what

?” he said.

“Engaged. About to be married,” she said.

“

Married

? Dexter?” His face seemed to struggle with finding the right expression, which was not an easy task since he always seemed to be faking it, one of the reasons I got along with him; two artificial humans, like plastic peas in a real pod. He finally settled on what looked like delighted surprise-not very convincing, but still a sound choice. “Mazel tov!” he said, and gave me an awkward hug.

“Thank you,” I said, still feeling completely baffled by the whole thing and wondering if I would actually have to go through with it.

“Well then,” he said, rubbing his hands together, “we can’t let this go unpunished. Tomorrow night at my house?”

“For what?” I asked.

He gave me his very best phony smile. “Ancient Japanese ritual, dating back to the Tokugawa shogunate. We get smashed and watch dirty movies,” he said, and then he turned to leer at Deborah. “We can get your sister to jump out of a cake.”

“How about if you jump up your ass instead?” Debs said.

“That’s very nice, Vince, but I don’t think-” I said, trying to avoid anything that made my engagement more official, and also trying to stop the two of them from trading their clever put-downs before I got a headache. But Vince wouldn’t let me finish.

“No, no,” he said, “this is highly necessary. A matter of honor, no escape. Tomorrow night, eight o’clock,” he said, and, looking at Deborah as he walked away, he added, “and you only have twenty-four hours to practice twirling your tassels.”

“Go twirl your own tassel,” she said.

“Ha! Ha!” he said with his terrible fake laugh, and he disappeared down the hall.

“Little freak,” Deborah muttered, and she turned to go in the other direction. “Stick with your

fiancée

after work. I’ll call you when I hear from Doakes.”

There wasn’t a great deal left of the workday. I filed a few things, ordered a case of Luminol from our supplier, and acknowledged receiving half a dozen memos that had piled up in my e-mail in-box. And with a feeling of real accomplishment, I headed down to my car and drove through the soothing carnage of rush hour. I stopped at my apartment for a change of clothes; Debs was nowhere to be seen, but the bed was unmade so I knew she had been here. I stuffed my things into a carry-on bag and headed for Rita’s.

It was fully dark by the time I got to Rita’s house. I didn’t really want to go there, but was not quite sure what else to do. Deborah expected me to be there if she needed to find me, and she was using my apartment. So I parked in Rita’s driveway and got out of my car. Purely from reflex, I glanced across the street to Sergeant Doakes’s parking spot. It was empty, of course. He was occupied talking with Oscar, his old army buddy. And the sudden realization grew on me that I was free, away from the unfriendly bloodhound eyes that had for so long now kept me from being me. A slow, swelling hymn of pure dark joy rose up inside me and the counterpoint thumped down from a sudden moon oozing out from a low cloud bank, a lurid, guttering three-quarter moon still low and huge in the dark sky. And the music blared from the loudspeakers and climbed into the upper decks of Dexter’s Dark Arena, where the sly whispers grew into a roaring cheer to match the moon music, a rousing chant of

Do it, do it, do it

, and my body quivered from the inside out as I came up on point and thought,

Why not?

Why not indeed? I could slip away for a few happy hours-taking my cell phone with me, of course, I wouldn’t want to be irresponsible about it. But why not take advantage of the Doakes-less moony night and slide away into the dark breeze? The thought of those red boots pulled at me like a spring tide. Reiker lived just a few miles from here. I could be there in ten minutes. I could slip in and find the proof I needed, and then-I suppose I would have to improvise, but the voice just under the edge of sound was full of ideas tonight and we could certainly come up with something to lead to the sweet release we both needed so much.

Oh, do it, Dexter

, the voices howled and as I paused on tiptoe to listen and think again

Why not?

and came up with no reasonable answer…

… the front door of Rita’s house swung wide and Astor peered out. “It’s him!” she called back into the house. “He’s here!”

And so I was. Here, instead of there. Reeling in to the couch instead of dancing away into darkness. Wearing the weary mask of Dexter the Sofa Spud instead of the bright silver gleam of the Dark Avenger.

“Come on in, you,” Rita said, filling the doorway with such warm good cheer that I felt my teeth grind together, and the crowd inside howled with disappointment but slowly filed out of the stadium, game over, because after all, what could we do? Nothing, of course, which was what we did, trailing meekly into the house behind the happy parade of Rita, Astor, and ever-quiet Cody. I managed not to whimper, but really: Wasn’t this pushing the envelope a tiny bit? Weren’t we all taking advantage of Dexter’s cheerful good nature just a trifle too much?

Dinner was annoyingly pleasant, as if to prove to me that I was buying into a lifetime of happiness and pork chops, and I played along even though my heart was not in it. I cut the meat into small chunks, wishing I was cutting something else and thinking of the South Pacific cannibals who referred to humans as “long pork.” It was appropriate, really, because it was that other pork I truly longed to slice into and not this tepid mushroom soup-covered thing on my plate. But I smiled and stabbed the green beans and made it all the way through to coffee somehow. Ordeal by pork chop, but I survived.

After dinner, Rita and I sipped our coffee as the kids ate small portions of frozen yogurt. Although coffee is supposed to be a stimulant, it gave me no help in thinking of a way out of this-not even a way to slip out for a few hours, let alone avoid this lifelong bliss that had snuck up behind me and grabbed me around the neck. I felt like I was slowly fading away at the edges and melting into my disguise, until eventually the happy rubber mask would meld with my actual features and I would truly become the thing I had been pretending to be, taking the kids to soccer, buying flowers when I drank too many beers, comparing detergents and cutting costs instead of flensing the wicked of their unneeded flesh. It was a very depressing line of thought, and I might have grown unhappy if the doorbell had not rung just in time.

“That must be Deborah,” I said. I’m fairly sure I kept most of the hope for rescue out of my voice. I got up and went to the front door, swinging it open to reveal a pleasant-looking, overweight woman with long blond hair.

“Oh,” she said. “You must be, ahm- Is Rita here?”

Well, I suppose I was ahm, although until now I hadn’t been aware of it. I called Rita to the door and she came, smiling. “Kathy!” she said. “So nice to see you. How are the boys? Kathy lives next door,” she explained to me.

“Aha,” I said. I knew most of the kids in the area, but not their parents. But this one was apparently the mother of the faintly sleazy eleven-year-old boy next door, and his nearly always-absent older brother. Since that meant she was probably not carrying a car bomb or a vial of anthrax, I smiled and went back to the table with Cody and Astor.

“Jason’s at band camp,” she said. “Nick is lounging around the house trying to reach puberty so he can grow a mustache.”

“Oh Lord,” Rita said.

“Nicky is a creep,” Astor whispered. “He wanted me to pull down my pants so he could see.” Cody stirred his frozen yogurt into a frozen pudding.

“Listen, Rita, I’m sorry to bother you at dinnertime,” Kathy said.

“We just finished. Would you like some coffee?”

“Oh, no, I’m down to one cup a day,” she said. “Doctor’s orders. But it’s about our dog-I just wanted to ask if you had seen Rascal? He’s been missing for a couple of days now, and Nick is so worried.”

“I haven’t seen him. Let me ask the kids,” Rita said. But as she turned to ask, Cody looked at me, got up without a sound, and walked out of the room. Astor stood up, too.

“We haven’t seen him,” she said. “Not since he knocked over the trash last week.” And she followed Cody out of the room. They left their desserts on the table, still only half eaten.

Rita watched them go with her mouth open, and then turned back to her neighbor. “I’m sorry, Kathy. I guess nobody’s seen him. But we’ll keep an eye open, all right? I’m sure he’ll turn up, tell Nick not to worry.” She prattled on for another minute with Kathy, while I looked at the frozen yogurt and wondered what I had just seen.

The front door closed and Rita came back to her cooling coffee. “Kathy’s a nice person,” she said. “But her boys can be a handful. She’s divorced, her ex bought a place in Islamorada, he’s a lawyer? But he stays down there, so Kathy’s had to raise the boys alone and I don’t think she’s very firm sometimes. She’s a nurse with a podiatrist over by the university.”

“And her shoe size?” I asked.

“Am I blathering?” Rita asked. She bit her lip. “I’m sorry. I guess I was just worrying a little bit… I’m sure it’s just…” She shook her head and looked at me. “Dexter. Did you-”

I never got to find out if I did, because my cell phone chirped. “Excuse me,” I said, and I went over to the table by the front door where I had left it.

“Doakes just called,” Deborah said to me without even saying hello. “The guy he went to talk to is running. Doakes is following to see where he goes, but he needs us for backup.”

“Quickly, Watson, the game’s afoot,” I said, but Deborah was not in a literary mood.

“I’ll pick you up in five minutes,” she said.

CHAPTER 19

I LEFT RITA WITH A HURRIED EXPLANATION AND WENT outside to wait. Deborah was as good as her word, and in five and a half minutes we were heading north on Dixie Highway.

“They’re out on Miami Beach,” she told me. “Doakes said he approached the guy, Oscar, and told him what’s up. Oscar says, let me think about it, Doakes says okay, I’ll call you. But he watches the house from up the street, and ten minutes later the guy is out the door and into his car with an overnight bag.”

“Why would he run now?”

“Wouldn’t you run if you knew Danco was after you?”

“No,” I said, thinking happily of what I might actually do if I came face-to-face with the Doctor. “I would set some kind of trap for him, and let him come.”

And then

, I thought, but did not say aloud to Deborah.

“Well, Oscar isn’t you,” she said.

“So few of us are,” I said. “Where is he headed?”

She frowned and shook her head. “Right now he’s just cruising around, and Doakes is tailing him.”

“Where do we think he’s going to lead us?” I asked.

Deborah shook her head and cut around an old ragtop Cadillac loaded with yelling teenagers. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and headed up the on-ramp onto the Palmetto Expressway with the pedal to the floor. “Oscar is still our best chance. If he tries to leave the area we’ll pick him up, but until then we need to stick with him to see what happens.”

“Very good, a really terrific idea-but what exactly do we think might happen?”

“I don’t know, Dexter!” she snapped at me. “But we know this guy is a target sooner or later, all right? And now he knows it, too. So maybe he’s just trying to see if he’s being followed before he runs. Shit,” she said, and swerved around an old flatbed truck loaded with crates of chickens. The truck was going possibly thirty-five miles per hour, had no taillights, and three men sat on top of the load, hanging on to battered hats with one hand and the load with the other. Deborah gave them a quick blast of the siren as she pulled around them. It didn’t seem to have any effect. The men on top of the load didn’t even blink.

“Anyway,” she said as she straightened out the wheel and accelerated again, “Doakes wants us on the Miami side for backup. So Oscar can’t get too fancy. We’ll run parallel along Biscayne.”

It made sense; as long as Oscar was on Miami Beach, he couldn’t escape in any other direction. If he tried to dash across a causeway or head north to the far side of Haulover Park and cross, we were there to pick him up. Unless he had a helicopter stashed, we had him cornered. I let Deborah drive, and she headed north rapidly without actually killing anyone.

At the airport we swung east on the 836. The traffic picked up a little here, and Deborah wove in and out, concentrating fiercely. I kept my thoughts to myself and she displayed her years of training with Miami traffic by winning what amounted to a nonstop free-for-all high-speed game of chicken. We made it safely through the interchange with I-95 and slid down onto Biscayne Boulevard. I took a deep breath and let it out carefully as Deborah eased back into street traffic and down to normal speed.

The radio crackled once and Doakes’s voice came over the speaker. “Morgan, what’s your twenty?”

Deborah lifted the microphone and told him. “Biscayne at the MacArthur Causeway.”

There was a short pause, and then Doakes said, “He’s pulled over by the drawbridge at the Venetian Causeway. Cover it on your side.”

“Ten-four,” Deborah said.

And I couldn’t help saying, “I feel so

official

when you say that.”

“What does that mean?” she said.

“Nothing, really,” I said.

She glanced at me, a serious cop look, but her face was still young and for just a moment it felt like we were kids again, sitting in Harry’s patrol car and playing cops and robbers-except that this time, I got to be a good guy, a very unsettling feeling.

“This isn’t a game, Dexter,” she said, because of course she shared that same memory. “Kyle’s life is at stake here.” And her features dropped back into her Serious Large-Fish Face as she went on. “I know it probably doesn’t make sense to you, but I care about that man. He makes me feel so- Shit. You’re getting

married

and you still won’t ever get it.” We had come to the traffic light at N.E. 15th Street and she turned right. What was left of the Omni Mall loomed up on the left and ahead of us was the Venetian Causeway.

“I’m not very good at feeling things, Debs,” I said. “And I really don’t know at all about this marriage thing. But I don’t much like it when you’re unhappy.”

Deborah pulled off opposite the little marina by the old Herald building and parked the car facing back toward the Venetian Causeway. She was quiet for a moment, and then she hissed out her breath and said, “I’m sorry.”

That caught me a bit off guard, since I admit that I had been preparing to say something very similar, just to keep the social wheels greased. Almost certainly I would have phrased it in a slightly more clever way, but the same essence. “For what?”

“I don’t mean to- I know you’re different, Dex. I’m really trying to get used to that and- But you’re still my brother.”

“Adopted,” I said.

“That’s horseshit and you know it. You’re my brother. And I know you’re only here because of me.”

“Actually, I was hoping I’d get to say ‘ten-four’ on the radio later.”

She snorted. “All right, be an asshole. But thanks anyway.”

“You’re welcome.”

She picked up the radio. “Doakes. What’s he doing?”

After a brief pause, Doakes replied, “Looks like he’s talking on a cell phone.”

Deborah frowned and looked at me. “If he’s running, who’s he going to talk to on the phone?”

I shrugged. “He might be arranging a way out of the country. Or-”

I stopped. The idea was far too stupid to think about, and that should have kept it out of my head automatically, but somehow there it was, bouncing off the gray matter and waving a small red flag.

“What?” Deborah demanded.

I shook my head. “Not possible. Stupid. Just a wild thought that won’t go away.”

“All right. How wild?”

“What if- Now I did say this was stupid.”

“It’s a lot stupider to dick around like this,” she snapped. “What’s the idea?”

“What if Oscar is calling the good Doctor and trying to bargain his way out?” I said. And I was right; it did sound stupid.

Debs snorted. “Bargain with what?”

“Well,” I said, “Doakes said he’s carrying a bag. So he could have money, bearer bonds, a stamp collection. I don’t know. But he probably has something that might be even more valuable to our surgical friend.”

“Like what?”

“He probably knows where everybody else from the old team is hiding.”

“Shit,” she said. “Give up everybody else in exchange for his life?” She chewed on her lip as she thought that over. After a minute she shook her head. “That’s pretty far-fetched,” she said.

“Far-fetched is a big step up from stupid,” I said.

“Oscar would have to know how to get in touch with the Doctor.”

“One spook can always find a way to get to another. There are lists and databases and mutual contacts, you know that. Didn’t you see

Bourne Identity

?”

“Yeah, but how do we know Oscar saw it?” she said.

“I’m just saying it’s possible.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. She looked out the window, thinking, then made a face and shook her head. “Kyle said something-that after a while you’d forget what team you were on, like baseball with free agency. So you’d get friendly with guys on the other side, and- Shit, that’s stupid.”

“So whatever side Danco is on, Oscar

could

find a way to reach him.”

“So fucking what. We can’t,” she said.

We were both quiet for a few minutes after that. I suppose Debs was thinking about Kyle and wondering if we would find him in time. I tried to imagine caring about Rita the same way and came up blank. As Deborah had so astutely pointed out, I was engaged and still didn’t get it. And I never would, either, which I usually regard as a blessing. I have always felt that it was preferable to think with my brain, rather than with certain other wrinkled parts located slightly south. I mean, seriously, don’t people ever

see

themselves, staggering around drooling and mooning, all weepy-eyed and weak-kneed and rendered completely idiotic over something even animals have enough sense to finish quickly so they can get on with more sensible pursuits, like finding fresh meat?

Well, as we all agreed, I didn’t get it. So I just looked out across the water to the subdued lights of the homes on the far side of the causeway. There were a few apartment buildings close to the toll booth, and then a scattering of houses almost as big. Maybe if I won the lottery I could get a real estate agent to show me something with a small cellar, just big enough for one homicidal photographer to fit in snugly under the floor. And as I thought it a soft whisper came from my personal backseat voice, but of course there was nothing I could do about that, except perhaps applaud the moon that hung over the water. And across that same moon-painted water floated the sound of a clanging bell, signaling that the drawbridge was about to go up.

The radio crackled. “He’s moving,” Doakes said. “Gonna run the drawbridge. Watch for him-white Toyota 4Runner.”

“I see him,” Deborah said into the radio. “We’re on him.”

The white SUV came across the causeway and onto 15th Street just moments before the bridge went up. After a slight pause to let him get ahead, Deborah pulled out and followed. At Biscayne Boulevard he turned right and a moment later we did, too. “He’s headed north on Biscayne,” she said into the radio.

“Copy that,” Doakes said. “I’ll follow out here.”

The 4Runner moved at normal speed through moderate traffic, keeping to a mere five miles per hour above the speed limit, which in Miami is considered tourist speed, slow enough to justify a blast of the horn from the drivers who passed him. But Oscar didn’t seem to mind. He obeyed all the traffic signals and stayed in the right lane, cruising along as if he had no particular place to go and was merely out for a relaxing after-dinner drive.

As we came up on the 79th Street Causeway, Deborah picked up the radio. “We’re passing 79th Street,” she said. “He’s in no hurry, proceeding north.”

“Ten-four,” Doakes said, and Deborah glanced at me.

“I didn’t say anything,” I said.

“You thought the hell out of it,” she said.

We moved on north, stopping twice at traffic signals. Deborah was careful to stay several cars behind, no mean feat in Miami traffic, with most of the cars trying to go around, over, or through all the others. A fire engine went wailing past in the other direction, blasting its horn at the intersections. For all the effect it had on the other drivers, it might have been a lamb bleating. They ignored the siren and clung to their hard-won places in the scrambled line of traffic. The man behind the wheel of the fire engine, being a Miami driver himself, simply wove in and out with the horn and siren playing: Duet for Traffic.

We reached 123d Street, the last place to cross back to Miami Beach before 826 ran across at North Miami Beach, and Oscar kept heading north. Deborah told Doakes by radio as we passed it.

“Where the hell is he going?” Deborah muttered as she put down the radio.

“Maybe he’s just driving around,” I said. “It’s a beautiful night.”

“Uh-huh. You want to write a sonnet?”

Under normal circumstances, I would have had a splendid comeback for that, but perhaps due to the thrilling nature of our chase, nothing occurred to me. And anyway, Debs looked like she could use a victory, however small.

A few blocks later, Oscar suddenly accelerated into the left lane and turned left across oncoming traffic, raising an entire concerto of angry horns from drivers moving in both directions.

“He’s making a move,” Deborah told Doakes, “west on 135th Street.”

“I’m crossing behind you,” Doakes said. “On the Broad Causeway.”

“What’s on 135th Street?” Debs wondered aloud.

“ Opa-Locka Airport,” I said. “A couple of miles straight ahead.”

“Shit,” she said, and picked up the radio. “Doakes- Opa-Locka Airport is out this way.”

“On my way,” he said, and I could hear his siren cutting on before his radio clicked off.

Opa-Locka Airport had long been popular with people in the drug trade, as well as with those in covert operations. This was a handy arrangement, considering that the line between the two was often quite blurry. Oscar could very easily have a small plane waiting there, ready to whisk him out of the country and off to almost anyplace in the Caribbean or Central or South America-with connections to the rest of the world, of course, although I doubted he would be headed for the Sudan, or even Beirut. Someplace in the Caribbean was more likely, but in any case fleeing the country seemed like a reasonable move under the circumstances, and Opa-Locka Airport was a logical place to start.

Oscar was going a little faster now, although 135th Street was not as wide and well traveled as Biscayne Boulevard. We came up over a small bridge across a canal and as Oscar came down the far side he suddenly accelerated, squealing through traffic around an S curve in the road.

“Goddamn it, something spooked him,” Deborah said. “He must have spotted us.” She sped up to stay with him, still keeping two or three cars back, even though there seemed little point now to pretending we weren’t following him.

Something had indeed spooked him, because Oscar was driving wildly, dangerously close to slamming into the traffic or running up onto the sidewalk, and naturally enough, Debs was not going to let herself lose this kind of pissing contest. She stayed with him, swerving around cars that were still trying to recover from their encounters with Oscar. Just ahead he swung into the far left lane, forcing an old Buick to spin away, hit the curb, and crash through a chain-link fence into the front yard of a light blue house.

Would the sight of our little unmarked car be enough to cause Oscar to behave this way? It was nice to think so and made me feel very important, but I didn’t believe it-so far, he had acted in a cool and controlled way. If he wanted to ditch us it seemed more likely that he would have made some kind of sudden and tricky move, like going over the drawbridge as it went up. So why had he suddenly panicked? Just for something to do, I leaned forward and looked into the side mirror. The block letters on the surface of the mirror told me that objects were closer than they appeared. Things being what they were, this was a very unhappy thought, because only one object appeared in the mirror at the moment.

It was a battered white van.

And it was following us, and following Oscar. Matching our speed, moving in and out of traffic. “Well,” I said, “not stupid after all.” And I raised my voice to go over the squeal of tires and the horns of the other motorists.

“Oh, Deborah?” I said. “I don’t want to distract you from your driving chores, but if you have a moment, could you look in your rearview mirror?”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean,” she snarled, but she flicked her eyes to the mirror. It was a piece of good luck that we were on a straight stretch of road, because for just a second she almost forgot to steer. “Oh, shit,” she whispered.

“Yes, that’s what I thought,” I said.

The I-95 overpass stretched across the road directly ahead, and just before he passed under it Oscar swerved violently to the right across three lanes and turned down a side street that ran parallel to the freeway. Deborah swore and wrenched her car around to follow. “Tell Doakes!” she said, and I obediently picked up the radio.

“Sergeant Doakes,” I said. “We are not alone.”

The radio hissed once. “The fuck does that mean?” Doakes said, almost as if he had heard Deborah’s response and admired it so much he had to repeat it.

“We have just turned right on 6th Avenue, and we are being followed by a white van.” There was no answer, so I said again, “Did I mention that the van is white?” and this time I had the great satisfaction of hearing Doakes grunt, “Motherfucker.”

“That’s exactly what we thought,” I said.

“Let the van in front and stay with him,” he said.

“No shit,” Deborah muttered through clenched teeth, and then she said something much worse. I was tempted to say something similar, because as Doakes clicked off his radio, Oscar headed up the on-ramp onto I-95 with us following, and at the very last second he yanked his car back down the paved slope and onto 6th Avenue. His 4Runner bounced as it hit the road and teetered drunkenly to the right for a moment, then accelerated and straightened up. Deborah hit the brakes and we spun through half a turn; the white van slid ahead of us, bounced down the slope, and closed the gap with the 4Runner. After half a second, Debs straightened us out of our slide and followed them down onto the street.

The side road here was narrow, with a row of houses on the right and a high yellow-cement embankment on the left with I-95 on top. We ran along for several blocks, picking up speed. A tiny old couple holding hands paused on the sidewalk to watch our strange parade rocket past. It may have been my imagination, but they seemed to flutter in the wind from Oscar’s car and the van going by.

We closed the gap just a little, and the white van closed on the 4Runner, too. But Oscar picked up the pace; he ran a stop sign, leaving us to veer around a pickup truck that was spinning in a circle in its attempt to avoid the 4Runner and the van. The truck wobbled through a clumsy doughnut turn and slammed into a fire hydrant. But Debs just clamped her jaw tight and squealed around the truck and through the intersection, ignoring the horns and the fountain of water from the ruptured hydrant, and closing the gap again in the next block.

Several blocks ahead of Oscar I could see the red light of a major cross street. Even from this far I could see a steady stream of traffic moving through the intersection. Of course nobody lives forever, but this was really not the way I would choose to die if given a vote. Watching TV with Rita suddenly seemed a lot more attractive. I tried to think of a polite but very convincing way to persuade Deborah to stop and smell the roses for a moment, but just when I needed it the most my powerful brain seemed to shut down, and before I could get it going again Oscar was approaching the traffic light.

Quite possibly Oscar had been to church this week, because the light turned green as he rocketed through the intersection. The white van followed close behind, braking hard to avoid a small blue car trying to beat the light, and then it was our turn, with the light fully green now. We swerved around the van and almost made it through-but this was Miami, after all, and a cement truck ran the red light behind the blue car, right in front of us. I swallowed hard as Deborah stood on the brake pedal and spun around the truck. We thumped hard against the curb, running the two left wheels up onto the sidewalk for just a moment before bouncing down onto the road again. “Very nice,” I said as Deborah accelerated once again. And quite possibly, she might have taken the time to thank me for my compliment, if only the white van had not chosen that moment to take advantage of our slow-down to drop back beside our car and swerve into us. The rear end of our car slewed around to the left, but Deborah fought it back around again.

The van popped us again, harder, right behind my door, and as I lurched away from the blow the door sprung open. Our car swerved and Deborah braked-perhaps not the best strategy, since the van accelerated at the same moment and this time clipped my door so hard that it came loose and bounced away, hitting the van a solid smack near the rear wheel before spinning off like a deformed wheel, spitting sparks.

I saw the van wobble slightly, and heard the slack rattling sound of a blown tire. Then the wall of white slammed into us one more time. Our car bucked violently, lurched to the left, hopped the curb and burst through a chain-link fence separating the side road from the ramp leading down off I-95. We twirled around as if the tires were made of butter. Deborah fought the wheel with her teeth showing, and we very nearly made it across the off-ramp. But of course, I had

not

been to church this week, and as our two front wheels hit the curb on the far side of the off-ramp, a large red SUV banged into our rear fender. We spun up onto the grassy area of the freeway intersection that surrounded a large pond. I had only a moment to notice that the cropped grass seemed to be switching places with the night sky. Then the car bounced hard and the passenger air bag exploded into my face. It felt like I had been in a pillow fight with Mike Tyson; I was still stunned as the car flipped onto its roof, hit the pond, and began to fill with water.

CHAPTER 20

I AM NOT SHY ABOUT ADMITTING MY MODEST TALENTS. For example, I am happy to admit that I am better than average at clever remarks, and I also have a flair for getting people to like me. But to be perfectly fair to myself, I am ever-ready to confess my shortcomings, too, and a quick round of soul-searching forced me to admit that I had never been any good at all at breathing water. As I hung there from the seat belt, dazed and watching the water pour in and swirl around my head, this began to seem like a very large character flaw.

The last look I had at Deborah before the water closed over her head was not encouraging, either. She was hanging from her seat belt unmoving, with her eyes closed and her mouth open, just the opposite of her usual state, which was probably not a good sign. And then the water flooded up around my eyes, and I could see nothing at all.

I also like to think that I react well to the occasional unexpected emergency, so I’m quite sure my sudden stunned apathy was the result of being rattled around and then smacked with an air bag. In any case, I hung there upside down in the water for what seemed like quite a long time, and I am ashamed to admit that for the most part, I simply mourned my own passing. Dear Departed Dexter, so much potential, so many dark fellow travelers still to dissect, and now so tragically cut short in his prime. Alas, Dark Passenger, I knew him well. And the poor boy was finally just about to get married, too. How more than sad-I pictured Rita in white, weeping at the altar, two small children wailing at her feet. Sweet little Astor, her hair done up in a bouffant bubble, a pale green bridesmaid dress now soaked with tears. And quiet Cody in his tiny tuxedo, staring at the back of the church and waiting, thinking of our last fishing trip and wondering when he would ever get to push the knife in again and twist it so slowly, watching the bright red blood burble out onto the blade and smiling, and then-

Slow down, Dexter. Where did that thought come from? Rhetorical question, of course, and I did not need the low rumble of amusement from my old interior friend to give me the answer. But with his prompting I put together a few scattered pieces into half a puzzle and realized that Cody-

Isn’t it odd what we think about when we’re dying? The car had settled onto its flattened roof, moving with no more than a gentle rocking now and completely filled with water so thick and mucky that I could not have seen a flare gun firing from the end of my nose. And yet I could see Cody perfectly clearly, more clearly now than the last time we had been in the same room together; and standing behind this sharp image of his small form towered a gigantic dark shadow, a black shape with no features that somehow seemed to be laughing.

Could it be? I thought again about the way he had put the knife so happily into his fish. I thought about his strange reaction to the neighbor’s missing dog-much like mine when I had been asked as a boy about a neighborhood dog I had taken and experimented with. And I remembered that he, too, had gone through a traumatic event like I had, when his biological father had attacked him and his sister in a terrifying drug-induced rage and beat them with a chair.

It was a totally unthinkable thing to think. A ridiculous thought, but- All the pieces were there. It made perfect, poetic sense.

I had a son.

Someone Just Like Me.

But there was no wise foster father to guide his first baby steps into the world of slice and dice; no all-seeing Harry to teach him how to be all he could be, to help change him from an aimless child with a random urge to kill into a caped avenger; no one to carefully and patiently steer him past the pitfalls and into the gleaming knife blade of the future-no one at all for Cody, not if Dexter died here and now.

It would sound far too melodramatic for me to say, “The thought spurred me to furious action,” and I am only melodramatic on purpose, when there is an audience. However, as the realization of Cody’s true nature hit me, I also heard, almost like an echo, a deep unbodied voice saying, “Undo the seat belt, Dexter.” And somehow I managed to make my suddenly huge and clumsy fingers move to the belt’s lock and fumble with the release. It felt like trying to thread a needle with a ham, but I poked and pushed and finally felt something give. Of course this meant that I bumped down onto the ceiling on my head, a little hard considering that I was under water. But the shock of getting thumped on the head cleared away a few more cobwebs, and I righted myself and reached for the opening where the car’s door had been knocked away. I managed to pull myself through and face-first into several inches of muck on the bottom of the pond.

I righted myself and kicked hard for the surface. It was a fairly feeble kick, but quite good enough since the water was only about three feet deep. The kick sent me shooting up to my knees and then staggering to my feet, and I stood there in the water for just a moment retching and sucking in the wonderful air. A marvelous and underrated thing, air. How true it was that we never appreciate things until we must do without them. What a terrible thought to picture all the poor people of this world who must do without air, people like…

… Deborah?

A real human being might have thought of his drowning sister much sooner, but really, let’s be fair, one can only expect so much from an imitation after what I had been through. And I did actually think of her now, possibly still in time to do something meaningful. But although I was not really reluctant to rush to the rescue, I couldn’t help thinking that we were asking a bit much of Dutifully Dashing Dexter this evening, weren’t we? No sooner out of it than I had to go right back in again.

Still, family was family, and complaining had never done me a bit of good. I took a deep breath and slid back under the muddy water, feeling my way through the doorway and into the front seat of Deborah’s topsy-turvy car. Something smacked me across the face and then grabbed me brutally by the hair-Debs herself, I hoped, since anything else moving around in the water would surely have much sharper teeth. I reached up and tried to pry apart her fingers. It was hard enough to hold my breath and fumble around blindly without receiving an impromptu haircut at the same time. But Deborah held tight-which was a good sign, in a way, since it meant she was still alive, but it left me wondering whether my lungs or my scalp would give out first. This would never do; I put both my hands on the job and managed to pry her fingers away from my poor tender hairdo. Then I followed her arm up to the shoulder and felt across her body until I found the strap of the seat belt. I slid my hand down the strap to the buckle and pushed the release.

Well of course it was jammed. I mean, we already knew it was one of those days, didn’t we? It was one thing after another, and really, it would have been far too much to hope that even one small thing might go right. Just to underline the point, something went

blurp

in my ear, and I realized that Deborah had run out of time and was now trying her luck at breathing water. It was possible that she would be better at it than I was, but I didn’t think so.

I slid lower in the water and braced my knees against the roof of the car, wedging my shoulder against Deb’s midsection and pushing up to take her weight off the seat belt. Then I pulled as much slack as I could get down to the buckle and slid it through, making the belt very floppy and loose. I braced my feet and pulled Deborah through the belt and toward the door. She seemed a bit loose and floppy herself; perhaps after all my valiant effort I was too late. I squeezed through the door and pulled her after me. My shirt caught on something in the doorway and ripped, but I pulled myself through anyway, staggering upright once again into the night air.

Deborah was dead weight in my arms and a thin stream of mucky water dribbled from the corner of her mouth. I hoisted her onto my shoulder and sloshed through the muck to the grass. The muck fought back every step of the way, and I lost my left shoe before I got more than three steps from the car. But shoes are, after all, much easier to replace than sisters, so I soldiered on until I could climb up onto the grass and dump Deborah on her back on the solid earth.

In the near distance a siren wailed, and was almost immediately joined by another. Joy and bliss: help was on the way. Perhaps they would even have a towel. In the meantime, I was not certain it would arrive in time to do Deborah any good. So I dropped down beside her, slung her facedown over my knee, and forced out as much water as I could. Then I rolled her onto her back, cleared a finger-load of mud from her mouth, and began to give her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

At first my only reward was another gout of mucky water, which did nothing to make the job more pleasant. But I kept at it, and soon Debs gave a convulsive shudder and vomited a great deal more water-most of it on me, unfortunately. She coughed horribly, took a breath that sounded like rusty door hinges swinging open, and said, “Fuck…”

For once, I truly appreciated her hard-boiled eloquence. “Welcome back,” I said. Deborah rolled weakly onto her face and tried to push herself up onto her hands and knees. But she collapsed onto her face again, gasping with pain.

“Oh, God. Oh, shit, something’s broken,” she moaned. She turned her head to the side and threw up a little more, arching her back and sucking in great ratcheting breaths in between spasms of nausea. I watched her, and I admit I felt a little pleased with myself. Dexter the Diving Duck had come through and saved the day. “Isn’t throwing up great?” I asked her. “I mean, considering the alternative?” Of course a really biting reply was beyond the poor girl in her weakened condition, but I was pleased to see that she was strong enough to whisper, “Fuck you.”

“Where does it hurt?” I asked her.

“Goddamn it,” she said, sounding very weak, “I can’t move my left arm. The whole arm-” She broke off and tried to move the arm in question and succeeded only in causing herself what looked like a great deal of pain. She hissed in a breath, which set her coughing weakly again, and then just flopped over onto her back and gasped.

I knelt beside her and probed gently at the upper arm. “Here?” I asked her. She shook her head. I moved my hand up, over the shoulder joint and to the collarbone, and I didn’t have to ask her if that was the place. She gasped, her eyes fluttered, and even through the mud on her face I could see her turn several shades paler. “Your collarbone is broken,” I said.

“It can’t be,” she said with a weak and raspy voice. “I have to find Kyle.”

“No,” I said. “You have to go to the emergency room. If you go stumbling around like this you’ll end up right next to him, all tied and taped, and that won’t do anyone any good.”

“I

have

to,” she said.

“Deborah, I just pulled you out of an underwater car, ruining a very nice bowling shirt. Do you want to waste my perfectly good heroic rescue?”

She coughed again, and grunted from the pain of her collarbone as it moved with her spasmodic breathing. I could tell that she wasn’t finished arguing yet, but it was starting to register with her that she was in a great deal of pain. And since our conversation was going nowhere, it was just as well that Doakes arrived, followed almost immediately by a pair of paramedics.

The good sergeant looked hard at me, as if I had personally shoved the car into the pond and flipped it on its back. “Lost ’em, huh,” he said, which seemed terribly unfair.

“Yes, it turned out to be much harder than I thought to follow him when we were upside down and under water,” I said. “Next time you try that part and we’ll stand here and complain.”

Doakes just glared at me and grunted. Then he knelt beside Deborah and said, “You hurt?”

“Collarbone,” she said. “It’s broken.” The shock was wearing off rapidly and she was fighting the pain by biting her lip and taking ragged breaths. I hoped the paramedics had something a little more effective for her.

Doakes said nothing; he just lifted his glare up to me. Deborah reached out with her good arm and grabbed his arm. “Doakes,” she said, and he looked back at her. “Find him,” she said. He just watched her as she gritted her teeth and gasped through another wave of pain.

“Coming through here,” one of the paramedics said. He was a wiry young guy with a spiky haircut, and he and his older, thicker partner had maneuvered their gurney through the chain-link fence where Deb’s car had torn a gap. Doakes tried to stand to let them get to Deborah, but she pulled on his arm with surprising strength.

“Find him,” she said again. Doakes just nodded, but it was enough for her. Deborah let go of his arm and he stood up to give the paramedics room. They swooped in and gave Debs a once-over, and they moved her onto their gurney, raised it up, and began to wheel her toward the waiting ambulance. I watched her go, wondering what had happened to our dear friend in the white van. He had a flat tire-how far could he get? It seemed likely that he would try to switch to a different vehicle, rather than stop and call AAA to help him change the tire. So somewhere nearby, we would be very likely to find the abandoned van and a missing car.

Out of an impulse that seemed extremely generous, considering his attitude toward me, I moved over to tell Doakes my thoughts. But I only made it a step and a half in his direction when I heard a commotion coming our way. I turned to look.

Running at us up the middle of the street was a chunky middle-aged guy in a pair of boxer shorts and nothing else. His belly hung over the band of his shorts and wobbled wildly as he came and it was clear that he had not had much practice at running, and he made it harder on himself by waving his arms around over his head and shouting, “Hey! Hey! Hey!” as he ran. By the time he crossed the ramp from I-95 and got to us he was breathless, gasping too hard to say anything coherent, but I had a pretty good idea what he wanted to say.

“De bang,” he gasped out, and I realized that his breathlessness and his Cuban accent had combined, and he was trying to say, “The van.”

“A white van? With a flat tire? And your car is gone,” I said, and Doakes looked at me.

But the gasping man was shaking his head. “White van, sure. I hear I thought it’s a dog inside, maybe hurt,” he said, and paused to breath deeply so he could properly convey the full horror of what he had seen. “And then-”

But he was wasting his precious breath. Doakes and I were already sprinting up the street in the direction he had come from.

CHAPTER 21

SERGEANT DOAKES APPARENTLY FORGOT HE WAS SUPPOSED to be following me, because he beat me to the van by a good twenty yards. Of course he had the very large advantage of having both shoes, but still, he moved quite well. The van was run up on the sidewalk in front of a pale orange house surrounded by a coral-rock wall. The front bumper had thumped a rock corner post and toppled it, and the rear of the vehicle was skewed around to face the street so we could see the bright yellow of the Choose Life license plate.

By the time I caught up with Doakes he already had the rear door open and I heard the mewling noise coming from inside. It really didn’t sound quite so much like a dog this time, or maybe I was just getting used to it. It was a slightly higher pitch than before, and a little bit choppier, more of a shrill gurgle than a yodel, but still recognizable as the call of one of the living dead.

It was strapped to a backless car seat that had been turned sideways, so it ran the length of the interior. The eyes in their lidless sockets were rolling wildly back and forth, up and down, and the lipless, toothless mouth was frozen into a round O and it was squirming the way a baby squirms, but without arms and legs it couldn’t manage any significant movement.

Doakes was crouched over it, looking down at the remainder of its face with an intense lack of expression. “Frank,” he said, and the thing rolled its eyes to him. The yowling paused for just a moment, and then resumed on a higher note, keening with a new agony that seemed to be begging for something.

“You recognize this one?” I asked.

Doakes nodded. “Frank Aubrey,” he said.

“How can you tell?” I asked. Because really, you would think that all former humans in this condition would be awfully hard to tell apart. The only distinguishing mark I could see was forehead wrinkles.

Doakes kept looking at it, but he grunted once and nodded at the side of the neck. “Tattoo. It’s Frank.” He grunted again, leaning forward and flicking a small piece of notepaper taped to the bench. I leaned in for a look: in the same spidery hand I had seen before Dr. Danco had written HONOR.

“Get the paramedics,” Doakes said.

I hurried over to where they were just closing the back doors of the ambulance. “Do you have room for one more?” I asked. “He won’t take up a lot of space, but he’ll need heavy sedation.”

“What kind of condition is he in?” the spike-haired one asked me.

It was a very good question for someone in his profession to ask, but the only answers that occurred to me seemed a little flippant, so I just said, “I think you may want heavy sedation, too.”

They looked at me like they thought I was kidding and didn’t really appreciate the seriousness of the situation. Then they looked at each other and shrugged. “Okay, pal,” the older one said. “We’ll squeeze him in.” The spike-haired paramedic shook his head, but he turned and opened the back door of the ambulance again and began pulling out the gurney.

As they wheeled down the block to Danco’s crashed van I climbed in the back of the ambulance to see how Debs was doing. Her eyes were closed and she was very pale, but she seemed to be breathing easier. She opened one eye and looked up at me. “We’re not moving,” she said.

“Dr. Danco crashed his van.”

She tensed and tried to sit up, both eyes wide open. “You got him?”

“No, Debs. Just his passenger. I think he was about to deliver it, because it’s all done.”

I had thought she was pale before, but she almost vanished now. “Kyle,” she said.

“No,” I told her. “Doakes says it’s someone named Frank.”

“Are you sure?”

“Apparently positive. There’s a tattoo on his neck. It’s not Kyle, Sis.”

Deborah closed her eyes and drifted back down onto the cot as if she was a deflating balloon. “Thank God,” she said.

“I hope you don’t mind sharing your cab with Frank,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t mind,” she said, and then her eyes opened again. “Dexter. No fucking around with Doakes. Help him find Kyle. Please?”

It must have been the drugs working on her, because I could count on one finger the number of times I had heard her ask anything so plaintively. “All right, Debs. I’ll do my best,” I said, and her eyes fluttered closed again.

“Thanks,” she said.

I got back to Danco’s van just in time to see the older paramedic straighten up from where he had obviously been vomiting, and turn to talk to his partner, who was sitting on the curb mumbling to himself over the sounds that Frank was still making inside. “Come on, Michael,” the older guy said. “Come on, buddy.”

Michael didn’t seem interested in moving, except for rocking back and forth as he repeated, “Oh God. Oh Jesus. Oh God.” I decided he probably didn’t need my encouragement, and went around to the driver’s door of the van. It was sprung open and I peeked in.

Dr. Danco must have been in a hurry, because he had left behind a very pricey-looking scanner, the kind that police groupies and newshounds use to monitor emergency radio traffic. It was very comforting to know that Danco had been tracking us with this and not some kind of magic powers.

Other than that, the van was clean. There was no telltale matchbook, no slip of paper with an address or a cryptic word in Latin scribbled on the back. Nothing at all that could give us any kind of clue. There might turn out to be fingerprints, but since we already knew who had been driving that didn’t seem very helpful.

I picked up the scanner and walked around to the rear of the van. Doakes was standing beside the open back door as the older paramedic finally got his partner onto his feet. I handed Doakes the scanner. “It was in the front seat,” I said. “He’s been listening.”

Doakes just glanced at it and put it down inside the back door of the van. Since he didn’t seem terribly chatty I asked, “Do you have any ideas about what we should do next?”

He looked at me and didn’t say anything and I looked back expectantly, and I suppose we could have stood like that until the pigeons began to nest on our heads, if it hadn’t been for the paramedics. “Okay, guys,” the senior one said, and we moved aside to let them get to Frank. The stocky paramedic seemed to be perfectly all right now, as if he was here to put a splint on a boy with a twisted ankle. His partner still looked quite unhappy, however, and even from six feet away I could hear his breathing.

I stood beside Doakes and watched them slide Frank onto the gurney and then wheel him away. When I looked back at Doakes he was staring at me again. Once more he gave me his very unpleasant smile. “Down to you and me,” he said. “And I don’t know about you.” He leaned against the battered white van and crossed his arms. I heard the paramedics slam the ambulance door, and a moment later the siren started up. “Just you and me,” Doakes said again, “and no more referee.”

“Is this more of your simple country wisdom?” I said, because here I was, having sacrificed an entire left shoe and a very nice bowling shirt, to say nothing of my hobby, Deborah’s collarbone, and a perfectly good motor-pool car-and there he stood without so much as a wrinkle in his shirt, making cryptically hostile remarks. Really, the man was too much.

“Don’t trust you,” he said.

I thought it was a very good sign that Sergeant Doakes was opening up to me by sharing his doubts and feelings. Still, I felt like I should try to keep him focused. “That doesn’t matter. We’re running out of time,” I said. “With Frank finished and delivered, Danco will start on Kyle now.”

He cocked his head to one side and then shook it slowly. “Don’t matter about Kyle,” he said. “Kyle knew what he was getting into. What matters is catching the Doctor.”

“Kyle matters to my sister,” I said. “That’s the only reason I’m here.”

Doakes nodded again. “Pretty good,” he said. “Could almost believe that.”

For some reason, it was then that I had an idea. I admit that Doakes was monumentally irritating-and it wasn’t just because he had kept me from my important personal research, although that was clearly bad enough. But now he was even critiquing my acting, which was beyond the boundaries of all civilized behavior. So perhaps irritation was the mother of invention; it doesn’t seem all that poetic, but there it is. In any case, a little door opened up in Dexter’s dusty cranium and a small light came shining out; a genuine piece of mental activity. Of course, Doakes might not think much of it, unless I could help him to see what a good idea it actually was, so I gave it a shot. I felt a little bit like Bugs Bunny trying to talk Elmer Fudd into something lethal, but the man had it coming. “Sergeant Doakes,” I said, “Deborah is my only family, and it is not right for you to question my commitment. Particularly,” I said, and I had to fight the urge to buff my fingernails, Bugs-style, “since so far you have not done doodley-squat.”

Whatever else he was, cold killer and all, Sergeant Doakes was apparently still capable of feeling emotion. Perhaps that was the big difference between us, the reason he tried to keep his white hat so firmly cemented to his head and fight against what should have been his own side. In any case, I could see a surge of anger flicker across his face, and deep down inside there was an almost audible growl from his interior shadow. “Doodley-squat,” he said. “That’s good, too.”

“Doodley-squat,” I said firmly. “Deborah and I have done all the legwork and taken all the risks, and you know it.”

For just a moment his jaw muscles popped straight out as if they were going to leap out of his face and strangle me, and the muted interior growl surged into a roar that echoed down to my Dark Passenger, which sat up and answered back, and we stood like that, our two giant shadows flexing and facing off invisibly in front of us.

Quite possibly, there might have been ripped flesh and pools of blood in the street if a squad car hadn’t chosen that moment to screech to a halt beside us and interrupt. A young cop jumped out and Doakes reflexively took out his badge and held it toward them without looking away from me. He made a shooing motion with his other hand, and the cop backed off and stuck his head into the car to consult with his partner.

“All right,” Sergeant Doakes said to me, “you got something in mind?”

It wasn’t really perfect. Bugs Bunny would have made him think of it himself, but it was good enough. “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I do have an idea. But it’s a little risky.”

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Thought it might be.”

“If it’s too much for you, come up with something else,” I said. “But I think it’s all we can do.”

I could see him thinking it over. He knew I was baiting him, but there was just enough truth to what I had said, and enough pride or anger in him that he didn’t care.

“Let’s have it,” he said at last.

“Oscar got away,” I said.

“Looks like it.”

“That only leaves one person we can be sure Dr. Danco might be interested in,” I said, and I pointed right at his chest. “You.”

He didn’t actually flinch, but something twitched on his forehead and he forgot to breathe for a few seconds. Then he nodded slowly and took a deep breath. “Slick motherfucker,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” I admitted. “But I’m right, too.”

Doakes picked up the scanner radio and moved it to one side so he could sit on the open back gate of the van. “All right,” he said. “Keep talking.”

“First, I’m betting he’ll get another scanner,” I said, nodding at the one beside Doakes.

“Uh-huh.”

“So if we know he’s listening, we can let him hear what we want him to hear. Which is,” I said with my very best smile, “who you are, and where you are.”

“And who am I?” he said, and he didn’t seem impressed by my smile.

“You are the guy who set him up to get taken by the Cubans,” I said.

He studied me for a moment, then shook his head. “You really putting my pecker on the chopping block, huh?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “But you’re not worried, are you?”

“He got Kyle, no trouble.”

“You’ll know he’s coming,” I said. “Kyle didn’t. Besides, aren’t you supposed to be just a little bit better than Kyle at this kind of thing?”

It was shameless, totally transparent, but he went for it. “Yes, I am,” he said. “You’re a good ass-kisser, too.”

“No ass-kissing at all,” I said. “Just the plain, simple truth.”

Doakes looked at the scanner beside him. Then he looked up and away over the freeway. The streetlights made an orange flare off a drop of sweat that rolled across his forehead and down into one eye. He wiped at it unconsciously, still staring away over I-95. He had been staring at me without blinking for so long that it was a little bit unsettling to be in his presence and have him look somewhere else. It was almost like being invisible.

“All right,” he said as he looked back at me at last, and now the orange light was in his eyes. “Let’s do it.”

CHAPTER 22

SERGEANT DOAKES DROVE ME BACK TO HEADQUARTERS. It was a strange and unsettling experience to sit so close to him, and we found very little to say to each other. I caught myself studying his profile out of the corner of my eye. What went on in there? How could he be what I knew he was without actually

doing

something about it? Holding back from one of my playdates was setting my teeth on edge, and yet Doakes apparently didn’t have any such trouble. Perhaps he had gotten it all out of his system in El Salvador. Did it feel any different to do it with the official blessings of the government? Or was it simply easier, not having to worry about being caught?

I could not know, and I certainly could not see myself asking him. Just to underline the point, he came to a halt at a red light and turned to look at me. I pretended not to notice, staring straight ahead through the windshield, and he faced back around when the light changed to green.

We drove right to the motor pool and Doakes put me in the front seat of another Ford Taurus. “Gimme fifteen minutes,” he said, nodding at the radio. “Then call me.” Without another word, he got back into his car and drove away.

Left to my own devices, I pondered the last few surprise-filled hours. Deborah in the hospital, me in league with Doakes-and my revelation about Cody during my near-death experience. Of course, I could be totally wrong about the boy. There might be some other explanation for his behavior at the mention of the missing pet, and the way he shoved the knife so eagerly into his fish could have been perfectly normal childish cruelty. But oddly enough, I found myself wanting it to be true. I wanted him to grow up to be like me-mostly, I realized, because I wanted to shape him and place his tiny feet onto the Harry Path.

Was this what the human reproductive urge was like, a pointless and powerful desire to replicate wonderful, irreplaceable me, even when the me in question was a monster who truly had no right to live among humans? That would certainly explain how a great many of the monumentally unpleasant cretins I encountered every day came to be. Unlike them, however, I was perfectly aware that the world would be a better place without me in it-I simply cared more about my own feelings in the matter than whatever the world might think. But now here I was eager to spawn more of me, like Dracula creating a new vampire to stand beside him in the dark. I knew it was wrong-but what fun it would be!

And what a total muttonhead I was being! Had my interval on Rita’s sofa really turned my once-mighty intellect into such a quivering heap of sentimental mush? How could I be thinking such absurdities? Why wasn’t I trying to devise a plan to escape marriage instead? No wonder I couldn’t get away from Doakes’s cloying surveillance-I had used up all my brain cells and was now running on empty.

I glanced at my watch. Fourteen minutes of time wasted on absurd mental blather. It was close enough: I lifted the radio and called Doakes.

“Sergeant Doakes, what’s your twenty?”

There was a pause, then a crackle. “Uh, I’d rather not say just now.”

“Say again, Sergeant?”

“I have been tracking a perp, and I’m afraid he made me.”

“What kind of perp?”

There was a pause, as though Doakes was expecting me to do all the work and hadn’t figured out what to say. “Guy from my army days. He got captured in El Salvador, and he might think it was my fault.” Pause. “The guy is dangerous,” he said.

“Do you want backup?”

“Not yet. I’m going to try to dodge him for now.”

“Ten-four,” I said, feeling a little thrill at getting to say it at last.

We repeated the basic message a few times more, just to be sure it would get through to Dr. Danco, and I got to say “ten-four” each time. When we called it a night around 1:00 AM, I was exhilarated and fulfilled. Perhaps tomorrow I would try to work in “That’s a copy” and even “Roger that.” At last, something to look forward to.

I found a squad car headed south and persuaded the cop driving to drop me at Rita’s. I tiptoed over to my car, got in, and drove home.

When I got back to my little bunk and saw it in a state of terrible disarray, I remembered that Debs should have been here but was, instead, in the hospital. I would go see her tomorrow. In the meantime, I’d had a memorable but exhausting day; chased into a pond by a serial limb-barber, surviving a car crash only to be nearly drowned, losing a perfectly good shoe, and on top of all that, as if that wasn’t bad enough, forced to buddy up with Sergeant Doakes. Poor Drained Dexter. No wonder I was so tired. I fell into bed and went to sleep at once.

Early the next day Doakes pulled his car in beside mine in the parking lot at headquarters. He got out carrying a nylon gym bag, which he set down on the hood of my car. “You brought your laundry?” I asked politely. Once again my lighthearted good cheer went right by him.

“If this works at all, either he gets me or I get him,” he said. He zipped open the bag. “If I get him, it’s over. If he gets me…” He took out a GPS receiver and placed it on the hood. “If he gets me, you’re my backup.” He showed me a few dazzling teeth. “Think how good that makes me feel.” He took out a cell phone and placed it next to the GPS unit. “This is my insurance.”

I looked at the two small items on the hood of my car. They did not seem particularly menacing to me, but perhaps I could throw one and then hit someone on the head with the other. “No bazooka?” I asked.

“Don’t need it. Just this,” he said. He reached into the gym bag one more time. “And this,” he said, holding out a small steno notebook, flipped open to the first page. It seemed to have a string of numbers and letters on it and a cheap ballpoint was shoved through the spiral.

“The pen is mightier than the sword,” I said.

“This one is,” he said. “Top line is a phone number. Second line is an access code.”

“What am I accessing?”

“You don’t need to know,” he said. “You just call it, punch in the code, and give ’em my cell phone number. They give you a GPS fix on my phone. You come get me.”

“It sounds simple,” I said, wondering if it really was.

“Even for you,” he said.

“Who will I be talking to?”

Doakes just shook his head. “Somebody owes me a favor,” he said, and pulled a handheld police radio out of the bag. “Now the easy part,” he said. He handed me the radio and got back into his car.

Now that we had clearly laid out the bait for Dr. Danco, step two was to get him to a specific place at the right time, and the happy coincidence of Vince Masuoka’s party was too perfect to ignore. For the next few hours we drove around the city in our separate cars and repeated the same message back and forth a couple of times with subtle variations, just to be sure. We had also enlisted a couple of patrol units Doakes said just possibly might not fuck it up. I took that to be his understated wit, but the cops in question did not seem to get the joke and, although they did not actually tremble, they did seem to go a little overboard in anxiously assuring Sergeant Doakes that they would not, in fact, fuck it up. It was wonderful to be working with a man who could inspire such loyalty.

Our little team spent the rest of the day pumping the airwaves full of chatter about my engagement party, giving directions to Vince’s house and reminding people of the time. And just after lunch, our coup de grâce. Sitting in my car in front of a Wendy’s, I used the handheld radio and called Sergeant Doakes one last time for a carefully scripted conversation.

“Sergeant Doakes, this is Dexter, do you copy?”

“This is Doakes,” he said after a slight pause.

“It would mean a lot to me if you could come to my engagement party tonight.”

“I can’t go anywhere,” he said. “This guy is too dangerous.”

“Just come for one drink. In and out,” I wheedled.

“You saw what he did to Manny, and Manny was just a grunt. I’m the one gave this guy to some bad people. He gets his hands on me, what’s he gonna do to me?”

“I’m getting married, Sarge,” I said. I liked the Marvel Comics flavor of calling him Sarge. “That doesn’t happen every day. And he’s not going to try anything with all those cops around.”

There was a long dramatic pause in which I knew Doakes was counting to seven, just as we had written it down. Then the radio crackled again. “All right,” he said. “I’ll come by around nine o’clock.”

“Thanks, Sarge,” I said, thrilled to be able to say it again, and just to complete my happiness, I added, “This really means a lot to me. Ten-four.”

“Ten-four,” he said.

Somewhere in the city I hoped that our little radio drama was playing out to our target audience. As he scrubbed up for his surgery, would he pause, cock his head, and listen? As his scanner crackled with the beautiful mellow voice of Sergeant Doakes, perhaps he’d put down a bone saw, wipe his hands, and write the address on a scrap of paper. And then he would go happily back to work-on Kyle Chutsky?-with the inner peace of a man with a job to do and a full social calendar when he was done for the day.

Just to be absolutely sure, our squad-car friends would breathlessly repeat the message a few times, and without fucking it up; that Sergeant Doakes himself would be at the party tonight, live and in person, around nine o’clock.

And for my part, with my work done for a few hours, I headed for Jackson Memorial Hospital to look in on my favorite bird with a broken wing.

Deborah was wrapped in an upper-body cast, sitting in bed in a sixth-floor room with a lovely view of the freeway, and although I was sure they were giving her some kind of painkiller, she did not look at all blissful when I walked into her room. “Goddamn it, Dexter,” she greeted me, “tell them to let me the hell out of here. Or at least give me my clothes so I can leave.”

“I’m glad to see you’re feeling better, sister dear,” I said. “You’ll be on your feet in no time.”

“I’ll be on my feet the second they give me my goddamn clothes,” she said. “What the hell is going on out there? What have you been doing?”

“Doakes and I have set a rather neat trap, and Doakes is the bait,” I said. “If Dr. Danco bites, we’ll have him tonight at my, um, party. Vince’s party,” I added, and I realized I wanted to distance myself from the whole idea of being engaged and it was a silly way to do it, but I felt better anyway-which apparently brought no comfort to Debs.

“Your engagement party,” she said, and then snarled. “Shit. You got Doakes to set himself up for you.” And I admit it sounded kind of elegant when she said it, but I didn’t want her thinking such things; unhappy people heal slower.

“No, Deborah, seriously,” I said in my best soothing voice. “We’re doing this to catch Dr. Danco.”

She glared at me for a long time and then, amazingly, she sniffled and fought back a tear. “I have to trust you,” she said. “But I hate this. All I can think about is what he’s doing to Kyle.”

“This will work, Debs. We’ll get Kyle back.” And because she was, after all, my sister, I did not add, “or most of him anyway.”

“Christ, I hate being stuck here,” she said. “You need me there for backup.”

“We can handle this, Sis,” I said. “There will be a dozen cops at the party, all armed and dangerous. And I’ll be there, too,” I said, feeling just a little miffed that she so undervalued my presence.

But she continued to do so. “Yeah. And if Doakes gets Danco, we get Kyle back. If Danco gets Doakes, you’re off the hook. Real slick, Dexter. You win either way.”

“That had never occurred to me,” I lied. “My only thought is to serve the greater good. Besides, Doakes is supposed to be very experienced at this sort of thing. And he knows Danco.”

“Goddamn it, Dex, this is killing me. What if-” She broke off and bit her lip. “This better work,” she said. “He’s had Kyle too long.”

“This will work, Deborah,” I said. But neither one of us really believed me.

____________________

The doctors quite firmly insisted on keeping Deborah for twenty-four hours, for observation. And so with a hearty hi-ho to my sister, I galloped off into the sunset, and from there to my apartment for a shower and change of clothes. What to wear? I could think of no guidelines on what we were wearing this season to a party forced on you to celebrate an unwanted engagement that might turn into a violent confrontation with a vengeful maniac. Clearly brown shoes were out, but beyond that nothing really seemed de rigueur. After careful consideration I let simple good taste guide me, and selected a lime green Hawaiian shirt covered with red electric guitars and pink hot rods. Simple but elegant. A pair of khaki pants and some running shoes, and I was ready for the ball.

But there was still an hour left before I had to be there, and I found my thoughts turning again to Cody. Was I right about him? If so, how could he deal with his awakening Passenger on his own? He needed my guidance, and I found that I was eager to give it to him.

I left my apartment and drove south, instead of north to Vince’s house. In fifteen minutes I was knocking at Rita’s door and staring across the street at the empty spot formerly occupied by Sergeant Doakes in his maroon Taurus. Tonight he was no doubt at home preparing, girding his loins for the coming conflict and polishing his bullets. Would he try to kill Dr. Danco, secure in the knowledge that he had legal permission to do so? How long had it been since he killed something? Did he miss it? Did the Need come roaring over him like a hurricane, blowing away all the reason and restraints?

The door opened. Rita beamed and lunged at me, wrapping me in a hug and kissing me on the face. “Hey, handsome,” she said. “Come on in.”

I hugged back briefly for form’s sake and then disengaged myself. “I can’t stay very long,” I said.

She beamed bigger. “I know,” she said. “Vince called and told me. He was so cute about the whole thing. He promised he would keep an eye on you so you wouldn’t do anything too crazy. Come inside,” she said, and dragged me in by the arm. When she closed the door she turned to me, suddenly serious. “Listen Dexter. I want you to know that I am not the jealous type and I trust you. You just go and have fun.”

“I will, thank you,” I said, although I doubted that I would. And I wondered what Vince had said to her to make her think that the party would be some kind of dangerous pit of temptation and sin. For that matter, it might well be. Since Vince was largely synthetic, he could be somewhat unpredictable in social situations, as shown by his bizarre duels of sexual innuendo with my sister.

“It was sweet of you to stop here before the party,” Rita said, leading me to the couch where I had spent so much of my recent life. “The kids wanted to know why they couldn’t go.”

“I’ll talk to them,” I said, eager to see Cody and try to discover if I had been right.

Rita smiled, as if thrilled to learn that I would actually talk to Cody and Astor. “They’re out back,” she said. “I’ll go get them.”

“No, stay here,” I said. “I’ll go out.”

Cody and Astor were in the yard with Nick, the surly clot from next door who had wanted to see Astor naked. They looked up as I slid the door open, and Nick turned away and scurried back to his own yard. Astor ran over to me and gave me a hug, and Cody trailed behind, watching, no emotion at all on his face. “Hi,” he said, in his quiet voice.

“Greetings and salutations, young citizens,” I said. “Shall we put on our formal togas? Caesar calls us to the senate.”

Astor cocked her head to one side and looked at me as if she had just seen me eat a raw cat. Cody merely said, “What,” very quietly.

“Dexter,” Astor said, “

why

can’t we go to the party with you?”

“In the first place,” I told her, “it’s a school night. And in the second place, I am very much afraid this is a grown-up party.”

“Does that mean there will be naked girls there?” she asked.

“What kind of a person do you think I am?” I said, scowling fiercely. “Do you really think I would

ever

go to a party with no naked girls?”

“Eeeeeewwww,” she said, and Cody whispered, “Ha.”

“But more important, there will also be stupid dancing and ugly shirts, and these are not good for you to see. You would lose all your respect for grown-ups.”

“What respect?” Cody said, and I shook him by the hand.

“Well said,” I told him. “Now go to your room.”

Astor finally giggled. “But we want to go to the party,” she said.

“I’m afraid not,” I said. “But I brought you a piece of treasure so you won’t run away.” I handed her a roll of Necco wafers, our secret currency. She would split it evenly with Cody later, out of sight of all prying eyes. “Now then, young persons,” I said. They looked up at me expectantly. But at that point I was stuck, all aquiver with eagerness to know the answer but not at all sure where or even how to start asking. I could not very well say, “By the way, Cody, I was wondering if you like to kill things?” That, of course, was exactly what I wanted to know, but it didn’t really seem like the kind of thing you could say to a child-especially Cody, who was generally about as talkative as a coconut.

His sister, Astor, though, often seemed to speak for him. The pressures of spending their early childhood together with a violent ogre for a father had created a symbiotic relationship so close that when he drank soda she would burp. Whatever might be going on inside Cody, Astor would be able to express it.

“Can I ask something very serious?” I said, and they exchanged a look that contained an entire conversation, but said nothing to anyone else. Then they nodded to me, almost as if their heads were mounted together on a Foosball rod.

“The neighbor’s dog,” I said.

“Told you,” Cody said.

“He was always knocking over the garbage,” Astor said. “And pooping in our yard. And Nicky tried to make him bite us.”

“So Cody took care of him?” I asked.

“He’s the boy,” said Astor. “He likes to do that stuff. I just watch. Are you going to tell Mom?”

There it was.

He likes to do that stuff.

I looked at the two of them, watching me with no more worry than if they had just said they liked vanilla ice cream better than strawberry. “I won’t tell your mom,” I said. “But you can’t tell anybody else in the world, not ever. Just the three of us, nobody else, understand?”

“Okay,” Astor said, with a glance at her brother. “But why, Dexter?”

“Most people won’t understand,” I said. “Not even your mom.”

“You do,” said Cody in his husky near-whisper.

“Yes,” I said. “And I can help.” I took a deep breath and felt an echo rolling through my bones, down across the years from Harry so long ago to me right now, under the same Florida nightscape Harry and I had stood under when he said the same thing to me. “We have to get you squared away,” I said, and Cody looked at me with large blinkless eyes and nodded.

“Okay,” he said.

CHAPTER 23

VINCE MASUOKA HAD A SMALL HOUSE IN NORTH Miami, at the end of a dead-end street off N.E. 125th Street. It was painted pale yellow with pastel purple trim, which really made me question my taste in associates. There were a few very well-barbered bushes in the front yard and a cactus garden by the front door, and he had a row of those solar-powered lamps lighting the cobblestone walkway to his front door.

I had been there once before, a little more than a year ago, when Vince had decided for some reason to have a costume party. I had taken Rita, since the whole purpose of having a disguise is to be seen wearing it. She had gone as Peter Pan, and I was Zorro, of course; the Dark Avenger with a ready blade. Vince had answered the door in a body-hugging satin gown with a basket of fruit on his head.

“J. Edgar Hoover?” I asked him.

“You’re very close. Carmen Miranda,” he had said before leading us in to a fountain of lethal fruit punch. I had taken one sip and decided to stick with the sodas, but of course that had been before my conversion to a beer-swilling red-blooded male. There had been a nonstop soundtrack of monotonous techno-pop music turned up to a volume designed to induce voluntary self-performed brain surgery, and the party had gotten exceedingly loud and hilarious.

As far as I knew, Vince had not entertained since then, at least not on that scale. Still, the memory apparently lingered, and Vince had no trouble in gathering an enthusiastic crowd to join in my humiliation with only twenty-four-hours’ notice. True to his word, there were dirty movies playing all over the house on a number of video monitors he had set up, even out back on his patio. And, of course, the fruit-punch fountain was back.

Because the rumors of that first party were still fresh on the grapevine, the place was packed with rowdy people, mostly male, who attacked the punch like they had heard there was a prize for the first one to achieve permanent brain damage. I even knew a few of the partiers. Angel Batista-no-relation was there from work, along with Camilla Figg and a handful of other forensic lab geeks, and a few cops I knew, including the four who had not fucked it up for Sergeant Doakes. The rest of the crowd seemed to be pulled off South Beach at random, chosen for their ability to make a loud, high-pitched WHOO! sound when the music changed or the video monitor showed something particularly undignified.

It didn’t take long at all for the party to settle into something we would all regret for a very long time. By a quarter of nine I was the only one left who could still stand upright unassisted. Most of the cops had camped out by the fountain in a grim clot of rapidly bending elbows. Angel-no-relation was lying under the table sound asleep with a smile on his face. His pants were gone and someone had shaved a bare streak down the center of his head.

Things being as they were, I thought this would be an ideal time to slip outside undetected to see if Sergeant Doakes had arrived yet. As it turned out, however, I was wrong. I had taken no more than two steps toward the door when a great weight came down on me from behind. I spun around quickly to find that Camilla Figg was attempting to drape herself across my back. “Hi,” she said with a very bright and somewhat slurred smile.

“Hello,” I said cheerfully. “Can I get you a drink?”

She frowned at me. “Don’t need drink. Jus wanna say hello.” She frowned harder. “Jeez Christ you’re cute,” she said. “Always wand to tell you that.”

Well, the poor thing was obviously drunk, but even so- Cute? Me? I suppose too much alcohol can blur the sight, but come on-what could possibly be cute about someone who would rather cut you open than shake your hand? And in any case, I was already way over my limit for women with one, Rita. As far as I could recall, Camilla and I had rarely said more than three words to each other. She had never before mentioned my alleged cuteness. She had seemed to avoid me, in fact, preferring to blush and look away rather than say a simple good morning. And now she was practically raping me. Did that make sense?

In any case, I had no time to waste on deciphering human behavior. “Thank you very much,” I said as I tried to undrape Camilla without causing any serious injuries to either of us. She had locked her hands around my neck and I pried at them, but she clung like a barnacle. “I think you need some fresh air, Camilla,” I said, hoping that she might take the hint and wander away out back. Instead she lunged closer, mashing her face against mine as I frantically backpedaled away.

“I’ll take my fresh air right here,” she said. She squeezed her lips into a pouty kissy-face and pushed me back until I bumped into a chair and nearly fell over.

“Ah-would you like to sit down?” I asked hopefully.

“No,” she said, pulling me downward toward her face with what felt like at least twice her actual weight, “I would like to screw.”

“Ah, well,” I stammered, overcome by the absolute shocking effrontery and absurdity of it-were all human women crazy? Not that the men were any better. The party around me looked like it had been arranged by Heironymus Bosch, with Camilla ready to drag me behind the fountain where no doubt a gang with bird beaks was waiting to help her ravish me. But it hit me that I now had the perfect excuse to avoid ravishment. “I am getting married, you know.” As difficult as it was to admit, it was only fair that it come in handy once in a while.

“Bassurd,” Camilla said. “Beautiful bassurd.” She slumped suddenly and her arms flopped off my neck. I barely managed to catch her and keep her from falling to the floor.

“Probably so,” I said. “But in any case I think you need to sit down for a few minutes.” I tried to ease her into the chair, but it was like pouring honey onto a knife blade, and she flowed off onto the floor.

“Beautiful bassurd,” she said, and closed her eyes.

It’s always nice to learn that you are well regarded by your co-workers, but my romantic interlude had used up several minutes and I very much needed to get out front and check in with Sergeant Doakes. And so leaving Camilla to slumber sweetly amid her dewy dreams of love, I headed for the front door once again.

And once again I was waylaid, this time by a savage attack on my upper arm. Vince himself grabbed my bicep and pulled me away from the door and back into surrealism. “Hey!” he yodeled. “Hey, party boy! Where ya going?”

“I think I left my keys in my car,” I said, trying to disengage from his death grip. But he just yanked at me harder.

“No, no, no,” he said, pulling me toward the fountain. “It’s your party, you’re not going anywhere.”

“It’s a wonderful party, Vince,” I said. “But I really need to-”

“Drink,” he said, splashing a cup into the fountain and pushing it at me so it slopped onto my shirt. “That’s what you need. Banzai!” He held his own cup up in the air and then drained it. Happily for all concerned, the drink sent him into a coughing fit, and I managed to slip away as he doubled over and struggled for air.

I made it all the way out the front door and partway down the walk before he appeared at the door. “Hey!” he yelled at me. “You can’t leave yet, the strippers are coming!”

“I’ll be right back,” I called. “Fix me another drink!”

“Right!” he said with his phony smile. “Ha! Banzai!” And he went back in to the party with a cheery wave. I turned to look for Doakes.

He had been parked right across the street from wherever I was for so long that I should have spotted him immediately, but I didn’t. When I finally saw the familiar maroon Taurus, I realized what a clever thing he had done. He was parked up the street under a large tree, which blocked any light from the streetlights. It was the kind of thing a man trying to hide might do, but at the same time it would allow Dr. Danco to feel confident that he could get close without being seen.

I walked over to the car and as I approached the window slid down. “He’s not here yet,” Doakes said.

“You’re supposed to come in for a drink,” I said.

“I don’t drink.”

“You obviously don’t go to parties, either, or you would know that you can’t do them properly sitting across the street in your car.”

Sergeant Doakes didn’t say anything, but the window rolled up and then the door opened and he stepped out. “What’re you gonna do if he comes now?” he asked me.

“Count on my charm to save me,” I said. “Now come on in while there’s still someone conscious in there.”

We crossed the street together, not actually holding hands, but it seemed so odd under the circumstances that we might as well have. Halfway across a car turned the corner and came down the street toward us. I wanted to run and dive into a row of oleanders, but was very proud of my icy control when instead I merely glanced at the oncoming car. It cruised slowly along, and Sergeant Doakes and I were all the way across the street by the time it got to us.

Doakes turned to look at the car, and I did, too. A row of five sullen teen faces looked out at us. One of them turned his head and said something to the others, and they laughed. The car rolled on by.

“We better get inside,” I said. “They looked dangerous.”

Doakes didn’t respond. He watched the car turn around at the end of the street and then continued on his way to Vince’s front door. I followed along behind, catching up with him just in time to open the front door for him.

I had only been outside for a few minutes, but the body count had grown impressively. Two of the cops beside the fountain were stretched out on the floor, and one of the South Beach refugees was throwing up into a Tupperware container that had held Jell-O salad a few minutes ago. The music was pounding louder than ever, and from the kitchen I heard Vince yelling, “Banzai!” joined by a ragged chorus of other voices. “Abandon all hope,” I said to Sergeant Doakes, and he mumbled something that sounded like, “Sick motherfuckers.” He shook his head and went in.

Doakes did not take a drink and he didn’t dance, either. He found a corner of the room with no unconscious body in it and just stood there, looking like a cut-rate Grim Reaper at a frat party. I wondered if I should help him get into the spirit of the thing. Perhaps I could send Camilla Figg over to seduce him.

I watched the good sergeant stand in his corner and look around him, and I wondered what he was thinking. It was a lovely metaphor: Doakes standing silent and alone in a corner while all around him human life raged riotously on. I probably would have felt a wellspring of sympathy for him bubbling up, if only I could feel. He seemed completely unaffected by the whole thing, not even reacting when two of the South Beach gang ran past him naked. His eyes fell on the nearest monitor, which was portraying some rather startling and original images involving animals. Doakes looked at it without interest or emotion of any kind; just a look, then his gaze moved on to the cops on the floor, Angel under the table, and Vince leading a conga line in from the kitchen. His gaze traveled all the way over to me and he looked at me with the exact same lack of expression. He crossed the room and stood in front of me.

“How long we got to stay?” he asked.

I gave him my very best smile. “It is a bit much, isn’t it? All this happiness and fun-it must make you nervous.”

“Makes me want to wash my hands,” he said. “I’ll wait outside.”

“Is that really a good idea?” I asked.

He tilted his head at Vince’s conga line, which was collapsing in a heap of spastic hilarity. “Is that?” he said. And of course he had a point, although in terms of sheer lethal pain and terror a conga line on the floor couldn’t really compete with Dr. Danco. Still, I suppose one has to consider human dignity, if it truly exists somewhere. At the moment, looking around the room, that didn’t seem possible.

The front door swung open. Both Doakes and I turned to face it, all our reflexes up on tiptoe, and it was a good thing we were ready for danger because otherwise we might have been ambushed by two half-naked women carrying a boom box. “Hello?” they called out, and were rewarded with a ragged high-pitched roar of “WHOOOO!” from the conga line on the floor. Vince struggled out from under the pile of bodies and swayed to his feet. “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey everybody! Strippers are here! Banzai!” There was an even louder “WHOOOO!” and one of the cops on the floor struggled to his knees, swaying gently and staring as he mouthed the word, “Strippers…”

Doakes looked around the room and back at me. “I’ll be outside,” he said, and turned for the door.

“Doakes,” I said, thinking it really wasn’t a good idea. But I got no more than one step after him when once again I was savagely ambushed.

“Gotcha!” Vince roared out, holding me in a clumsy bear hug.

“Vince, let me go,” I said.

“No way!” he chortled. “Hey, everybody! Help me out with the blushing bridegroom!” There was a surge of ex-conga liners from the floor and the last standing cop by the fountain and I was suddenly at the center of a mini-mosh pit, the press of bodies heaving me toward the chair where Camilla Figg had passed out and rolled onto the floor. I struggled to get away, but it was no use. There were too many of them, too filled with Vince’s rocket juice. I could do nothing but watch as Sergeant Doakes, with a last molten-stone glare, went through the front door and out into the night.

They levered me into the chair and stood around me in a tight half-circle and it was obvious that I was going nowhere. I hoped Doakes was as good as he thought he was, because he was clearly on his own for a while.

The music stopped, and I heard a familiar sound that made the hairs on my arms stand up straight: it was the ratchet of duct tape spooling off the roll, my own favorite prelude to a Concerto for Knife Blade. Someone held my arms and Vince wrapped three big loops of tape around me, fastening me to the chair. It was not tight enough to hold me, but it would certainly slow me enough to allow the crowd to keep me in the chair.

“All righty then!” Vince called out, and one of the strippers turned on her boom box and the show began. The first stripper, a sullen-looking black woman, began to undulate in front of me while removing a few unnecessary items of clothing. When she was almost naked, she sat on my lap and licked my ear while wiggling her butt. Then she forced my head between her breasts, arched her back, and leaped backward, and the other stripper, a woman with Asian features and blond hair, came forward and repeated the whole process. When she had wiggled around on my lap for a few moments, she was joined by the first stripper, and the two of them sat together, one on each side of me. Then they leaned forward so that their breasts rubbed my face, and began to kiss each other.

At this point, dear Vince brought them each a large glass of his murderous fruit punch, and they drank it off, still wiggling rhythmically. One of them muttered, “Whoo. Good punch.” I couldn’t tell which one of them said it, but they both seemed to agree. The two women began to writhe a great deal more now and the crowd around me began to howl like it was full moon at a rabies convention. Of course, my view was somewhat obscured by four very large and unnaturally hard breasts-two in each shade-but at least it sounded like everyone except me was having a great deal of fun.

Sometimes you have to wonder if there is some kind of malign force with a sick sense of humor running our universe. I knew enough about human males to know that most of them would happily trade their excess body parts to be where I was. And yet, all I could think of was that I would be equally pleased to trade a body part or two to get out of this chair and away from the naked squirming women. Of course, I would have preferred it to be somebody else’s body part, but I would cheerfully collect it.

But there was no justice; the two strippers sat there on my lap, bouncing to the music and sweating all over my beautiful rayon shirt and each other, while around us the party raged on. After what seemed like an endless spell in purgatory, broken only by Vince bringing the strippers two more drinks, the two roiling women finally moved off my lap and danced around the circling crowd. They touched faces, sipped from the partyers’ drinks, and grabbed at an occasional crotch. I used the distraction to free my hands and remove the duct tape, and it was only then that I noticed that no one was paying any attention at all to Dimpled Dexter, the theoretical Man of the Hour. One quick look around showed me why: everyone in the room was standing in a slack-jawed circle watching the two strippers as they danced, completely naked now, glistening with sweat and spilled drinks. Vince looked like a cartoon the way he stood there with his eyes almost bulged out of his head, but he was in good company. Everyone who was still conscious was in a similar pose, staring without breathing, swaying slightly from side to side. I could have barreled through the room blasting away on a flaming tuba and no one would have paid me any attention.

I stood up, walked carefully around behind the crowd, and slipped out the front door. I had thought that Sergeant Doakes would wait somewhere near the house, but he was nowhere to be seen. I walked across the street and looked in his car. It was empty, too. I looked up and down the street and it was the same. There was no sign of him.

Doakes was gone.

CHAPTER 24

THERE ARE MANY ASPECTS OF HUMAN EXISTENCE THAT I will never understand, and I don’t just mean intellectually. I mean that I lack the ability to empathize, as well as the capacity to feel emotion. To me it doesn’t seem like much of a loss, but it does put a great many areas of ordinary human experience completely outside my comprehension.

However, there is one almost overwhelmingly common human experience I feel powerfully, and that is temptation. And as I looked at the empty street outside Vince Masuoka’s house and realized that somehow Dr. Danco had taken Doakes, I felt it wash over me in dizzying, nearly suffocating waves.

I was free

. The thought surged around me and pummeled me with its elegant and completely justified simplicity. It would be the easiest thing in the world just to walk away. Let Doakes have his reunion with the Doctor, report it in the morning, and pretend that I’d had too much to drink-my engagement party, after all!-and I wasn’t really sure what had happened to the good sergeant. And who would contradict me? Certainly no one inside at the party could say with anything approaching realistic certainty that I was not watching the peep show with them the whole time.

Doakes would be gone. Whisked away forever into a final haze of lopped off limbs and madness, never to lighten my dark doorway again. Liberty for Dexter, free to be me, and all I had to do was absolutely nothing. Even I could handle that.

So why not walk away? For that matter, why not take a slightly longer stroll, down to Coconut Grove, where a certain children’s photographer had been waiting for my attentions much too long? So simple, so safe-why, indeed, not? A perfect night for dark delight with a downbeat, the moon nearly full and that small missing edge lending the whole thing a casual, informal air. The urgent whispers agreed, rising in a hissed insistent chorus.

It was all there. Time and target and most of a moon and even an alibi, and the pressure had been growing for so long now that I could close my eyes and let it happen all by itself, walk through the whole happy thing on autopilot. And then the sweet release again, the afterglow of buttery muscles with all the knots drained out, the happy coasting into my first complete sleep of far too long now. And in the morning, rested and relieved, I would tell Deborah…

Oh. Deborah. There was that, wasn’t there?

I would tell Deborah that I had taken the sudden opportunity of a no-Doakes zone and gone dashing into the darkness with a Need and a Knife as the last few fingers of her boyfriend trickled away into a trash heap? Somehow, even with my inner cheerleaders insisting that it would be all right, I didn’t think she would go for it. It had the feel of something final in my relationship with my sister, a small lapse in judgment, perhaps, but one she would find a bit hard to forgive, and even though I am not capable of feeling actual love, I did want to keep Debs relatively happy with me.

And so once again I was left with virtuous patience and a feeling of long-suffering rectitude. Dour Dutiful Dexter.

It will come

, I told my other self.

Sooner or later, it will come. Has to come; it will not wait forever, but this must come first

. And there was some grumbling, of course, because it had not come in far too long, but I soothed the growls, rattled the bars with false good cheer one time, and pulled out my cell phone.

I dialed the number Doakes had given me. After a moment there was a tone, and then nothing, just a faint hiss. I punched in the long access code, heard a click, and then a neutral female voice said, “Number.” I gave the voice Doakes’s cell number. There was a pause, and then it read me some coordinates; I hurriedly scribbled them down on the pad. The voice paused, and then added, “Moving due west, 65 miles per hour.” The line went dead.

I never claimed to be an expert navigator, but I do have a small GPS unit that I use on my boat. It comes in handy for marking good fishing spots. So I managed to put in the coordinates without bumping my head or causing an explosion. The unit Doakes had given me was a step up from mine and had a map on the screen. The coordinates on the map translated to Interstate 75, heading for Alligator Alley, the corridor to the west coast of Florida.

I was mildly surprised. Most of the territory between Miami and Naples is Everglades, swamp broken up by small patches of semidry land. It was filled with snakes, alligators, and Indian casinos, which did not seem at all like the kind of place to relax and enjoy a peaceful dismemberment. But the GPS could not lie, and supposedly neither could the voice on the phone. If the coordinates were wrong, it was Doakes’s doing, and he was lost anyway. I had no choice. I felt a little guilty about leaving the party without thanking my host, but I got into my car and headed for I-75.

I was up on the interstate in just a few minutes, then quickly north to I-75. As you head west on 75 the city gradually thins away. Then there is one final furious explosion of strip malls and houses just before the toll booth for Alligator Alley. At the booth I pulled over and called the number again. The same neutral female voice gave me a set of coordinates and the line went dead. I took it to mean that they were no longer moving.

According to the map, Sergeant Doakes and Dr. Danco were now settling comfortably into the middle of an unmarked watery wilderness about forty miles ahead of me. I didn’t know about Danco, but I didn’t think Doakes would float very well. Perhaps the GPS could lie after all. Still, I had to do something, so I pulled back onto the road, paid my toll, and continued westward.

At a spot parallel to the location on the GPS, a small access road branched off to the right. It was nearly invisible in the dark, especially since I was traveling at seventy miles per hour. But as I saw it whiz past I braked to a stop on the shoulder of the road and backed up to peer at it. It was a one-lane dirt road that led nowhere, up over a rickety bridge and then straight as an arrow into the darkness of the Everglades. In the headlights of the passing cars I could only see about fifty yards down the road, and there was nothing to see. A patch of knee-high weeds grew up in the center of the road between the two deeply rutted tire tracks. A clump of short trees hung over the road at the edge of darkness, and that was it.

I thought about getting out and looking for some kind of clue, until I realized how silly that was. Did I think I was Tonto, faithful Indian guide? I couldn’t look at a bent twig and tell how many white men had been past in the last hour. Perhaps Dexter’s dutiful but uninspired brain pictured him as Sherlock Holmes, able to examine the wheel ruts and deduce that a left-handed hunchback with red hair and a limp had gone down the road carrying a Cuban cigar and a ukelele. I would find no clues, not that it mattered. The sad truth was, this was either it or I was all done for the night, and Sergeant Doakes was done for considerably longer.

Just to be absolutely sure-or at any rate, absolutely free of guilt-I called Doakes’s top secret telephone number again. The voice gave me the same coordinates and hung up; wherever they were, they were still there, down this dark and dirty little road.

I was apparently out of choices. Duty called, and Dexter must answer. I turned the wheel hard and started down the road.

According to the GPS, I had about five and a half miles to travel before I got to whatever was waiting for me. I put my headlights on low and drove slowly, watching the road carefully. This gave me plenty of time to think, which is not always a good thing. I thought about what might be there at the end of the road, and what I would do when I got there. And although it was a rather bad time for this to occur to me, I realized that even if I found Dr. Danco at the end of this road I had no idea what I was going to do about it. “Come get me,” Doakes had said, and it sounded simple enough until you were driving into the Everglades on a dark night with no weapon more threatening than a steno pad. And Dr. Danco had apparently not had much trouble with any of the others he had taken, in spite of the fact that they were rough, well-armed customers. How could poor, helpless Docile Dexter hope to thwart him when the Mighty Doakes had gone down so fast?

And what would I do if he got me? I did not think I would make a very good yodeling potato. I was not sure if I could go crazy, since most authorities would most likely say that I already was. Would I snap anyway and go burbling out of my brain to the land of the eternal scream? Or because of what I am, would I remain aware of what was happening to me? Me, precious me, strapped to a table and offering a critique of the dismemberment technique? The answer would certainly tell me a great deal about what I was, but I decided that I didn’t really want to know the answer that badly. The very thought was almost enough to make me feel real emotion, and not the kind that one is grateful for.

The night had closed in around me, and not in a good way. Dexter is a city boy, used to the bright lights that leave dark shadows. The farther along this road I went, the darker it seemed to get, and the darker it got the more this whole thing began to seem like a hopeless, suicidal trip. This situation clearly called for a platoon of Marines, not an occasionally homicidal forensic lab geek. Who did I really think I was? Sir Dexter the Valiant, galloping to the rescue? What could I possibly hope to do? For that matter, what could anyone do except pray?

I don’t pray, of course. What would something like me pray to, and why should It listen to me? And if I found Something, whatever It was, how could It keep from laughing at me, or flinging a lightning bolt down my throat? It would have been very comforting to be able to look to some kind of higher power, but of course, I only knew one higher power. And even though it was strong and swift and clever, and very good at stalking silently through the nightscape, would even the Dark Passenger be enough?

According to the GPS unit I was within a quarter of a mile of Sergeant Doakes, or at least his cell phone, when I came to a gate. It was one of those wide gates made of aluminum that they use on dairy farms to keep the cows in. But this was no dairy farm. A sign that hung on the gate said,

BLALOCK GATOR FARM

Trespassers Will Be Eaten

This seemed like a very good place for a gator farm, which did not necessarily make it the kind of place I wanted to be. I am ashamed to admit that even though I have lived my entire life in Miami, I know very little about gator farms. Did the animals roam freely through watery pastures, or were they penned in somehow? It seemed like a very important question at the moment. Could alligators see in the dark? And how hungry were they, generally? All good questions, and very relevant.

I switched off my headlights, stopped the car, and got out. In the sudden silence I could hear the engine ticking, the keening of mosquitoes, and, in the distance, music was playing on a tinny speaker. It sounded like Cuban music. Possibly Tito Puente.

The Doctor was in.

I approached the gate. The road on the far side still ran straight, up to an old wooden bridge and then into a grove of trees. Through the branches I could see a light. I did not see any alligators basking in the moonlight.

Well, Dexter, here we are. And what would you like to do tonight? At the moment, Rita’s couch didn’t seem like such a bad place to be. Especially compared to standing here in the nighttime wild. On the far side of this gate were a maniacal vivisectionist, hordes of ravenous reptiles, and a man I was supposed to rescue even though he wanted to kill me. And in this corner, wearing dark trunks, the Mighty Dexter.

I certainly seemed to be asking this an awful lot lately, but why was it always me? I mean, really. Me, braving all this to rescue Sergeant Doakes of all people? Hello? Isn’t there something wrong with this picture? Like the fact that I am in it?

Nevertheless, I was here, and might as well go through with it. I climbed over the gate and headed toward the light.

The normal night sounds started to return a few at a time. At least I assumed they were normal for out here in the savage primeval forest. There were clicks and hums and buzzes from our insect friends, and a mournful sort of shriek that I very much hoped was only some kind of owl; a small one, please. Something rattled the shrubbery off to my right and then went completely silent. And happily for me, instead of getting nervous or scared like a human being, I found myself slipping into nightstalker mode. Sounds shifted down, movement around me slowed, and all my senses seemed to come slightly more alive. The darkness bleached out a little lighter; details sprang into focus from the night around me, and a slow cold careful silent chuckle began to grow just under the surface of my awareness. Was poor misunderstood Dexter feeling out of his element and over his head? Then let the Passenger take the wheel. He would know what to do, and he would do it.

And why, after all, not? At the end of this driveway and over the bridge, Dr. Danco was waiting for us. I had been wanting to meet him, and now I would. Harry would approve of anything I did to this one. Even Doakes would have to admit that Danco was fair game-he would probably thank me for it. It was dizzying; this time I had permission. And even better, it had poetry to it. For so very long Doakes had kept my genie trapped in its bottle. There would be a certain justice if his rescue were to let it out again. And I would rescue him, certainly, of course I would. Afterward…

But first.

I crossed the wooden bridge. Halfway over a board creaked and I froze for a moment. The night sounds did not change, and from up ahead I heard Tito Puente say, “Aaaaaahh-YUH!” before returning to his melody. I moved on.

On the far side of the bridge the road widened into a parking area. To the left was a chain-link fence and straight ahead was a small, one-story building with a light shining in the window. It was old and battered and needed paint, but perhaps Dr. Danco wasn’t as thoughtful of appearances as he should have been. Off to the right a chickee hut moldered quietly beside a canal, chunks of its palm-frond roof dangling like tattered old clothes. An airboat was tied to a dilapidated dock jutting out into the canal.

I slid into the shadows cast by a row of trees and felt a predator’s cool poise take control of my senses. I circled carefully around the parking area, to the left, along the chain-link fence. Something grunted at me and then splashed into the water, but it was on the other side of the fence so I ignored it and moved on. The Dark Passenger was driving and did not stop for such things.

The fence ended in a right-angle turn away from the house. There was one last stretch of emptiness, no more than fifty feet, and one last stand of trees. I moved to the last tree for a good long look at the house, but as I paused and placed my hand on the trunk something crashed and fluttered in the branches above me and a horribly loud bugling shriek split the night. I jumped back as whatever it was smashed down through the leaves of the tree and onto the ground.

Still making a sound like an insane over-amplified trumpet, the thing faced me. It was a large bird, bigger than a turkey, and it was apparent from the way he hissed and hooted that he was angry at me. It strutted a step forward, whisking a massive tail across the ground, and I realized that it was a peacock. Animals do not like me, but this one seemed to have formed an extreme and violent hatred. I suppose it did not understand that I was much bigger and more dangerous. It seemed intent on either eating me or driving me away, and since I needed the hideous caterwauling din to stop as quickly as possible I obliged him with a dignified retreat and hurried back along the fence to the shadows by the bridge. Once I was safely tucked into a quiet pool of darkness I turned to look at the house.

The music had stopped, and the light was out.

I stood frozen in my shadow for several minutes. Nothing happened, except that the peacock quit its bugling and, with a final mean-spirited mutter in my direction, fluttered back up into his tree. And then the night sounds came back again, the clicks and whines of the insects and another snort and splash from the alligators. But no more Tito Puente. I knew that Dr. Danco was watching and listening just as I was, that each of us was waiting for the other to make some move, but I could wait longer. He had no idea what might be out there in the dark-for all he could tell it might be either a SWAT team or the Delta Rho Glee Club-and I knew that there was only him. I knew where he was, and he could not know if there was someone on the roof or even if he was surrounded. And so he would have to do something first, and there were just two choices. Either he had to attack, or-

At the far end of the house there came the sudden roar of an engine and as I tensed involuntarily the airboat leaped away from the dock. The engine revved higher and the boat raced off down the canal. In less than a minute it was gone, around a bend and away into the night, and with it went Dr. Danco.

CHAPTER 25

FOR A FEW MINUTES I JUST STOOD AND WATCHED THE house, partly because I was being cautious. I had not actually seen the driver of the airboat, and it was possible that the Doctor was still lurking inside, waiting to see what would happen. And to be honest, I did not wish to be savaged by any more gaudy predatory chickens, either.

But after several minutes when nothing at all happened, I knew I had to go into the house and take a look. And so, circling widely around the tree where the evil bird roosted, I approached the house.

It was dark inside, but not silent. As I stood outside next to the battered screen door that faced the parking area, I heard a kind of quiet thrashing coming from somewhere inside, followed after a moment by a rhythmic grunting and an occasional whimper. It did not seem like the kind of noise someone would make if they were hiding in a lethal ambush. Instead, it was very much the kind of sound somebody might make if they were tied up and trying to escape. Had Dr. Danco fled so quickly that he had left Sergeant Doakes behind?

Once again I found the entire cellar of my brain flooded with ecstatic temptation. Sergeant Doakes, my nemesis, tied up inside, gift-wrapped and delivered to me in the perfect setting. All the tools and supplies I could want, no one around for miles-and when I was done I only had to say, “Sorry, I got there too late. Look what that awful Dr. Danco did to poor old Sergeant Doakes.” The idea was intoxicating, and I believe I actually swayed a little as I tasted it. Of course it was just a thought, and I would certainly never do anything of the kind, would I? I mean, would I really? Dexter? Hello? Why are you salivating, dear boy?

Certainly not, not me. Why, I was a moral beacon in the spiritual desert of South Florida. Most of the time. I was upright, scrubbed clean, and mounted on a Dark Charger. Sir Dexter the Chaste to the rescue. Or at any rate, probably to the rescue. I mean, all things considered. I pulled open the screen door and went in.

Immediately inside the door I flattened against the wall, just to be cautious, and felt for a light switch. I found one right where it should be and flipped it up.

Like Danco’s first den of iniquity, this one was sparsely furnished. Once again, the main feature of the place was a large table in the center of the room. A mirror hung on the opposite wall. Off to the right a doorway without a door led to what looked like the kitchen, and on the left a closed door, probably a bedroom or bathroom. Directly across from where I stood was another screen door leading outside, presumably the way Dr. Danco had made his escape.

And on the far side of the table, now thrashing more furiously than ever, was something dressed in a pale orange coverall. It looked relatively human, even from across the room. “Over here, oh please, help me, help me,” it said, and I crossed the room and knelt beside it.

His arms and legs were bound with duct tape, naturally, the choice of every experienced, discriminating monster. As I cut the tape I examined him, listening but not really hearing his constant blubbering of, “Oh thank God, oh please, oh God, get me loose, buddy, hurry hurry for God’s sake. Oh Christ, what took you so long, Jesus, thank you, I knew you’d come,” or words to that effect. His skull was completely shaved, even the eyebrows. But there was no mistaking the rugged manly chin and the scars festooning his face. It was Kyle Chutsky.

Most of him, anyway.

As the tape came off and Chutsky was able to wiggle up to a sitting position, it became apparent that he was missing his left arm up to the elbow and his right leg up to the knee. The stumps were wrapped with clean white gauze, nothing leaking through; again, very nice work, although I did not think Chutsky would appreciate the care Danco had used in taking his arm and leg. And how much of Chutsky’s mind was also missing was not yet clear, although his constant wet yammering did nothing to convince me that he was ready to sit at the controls of a passenger jet.

“Oh, God, buddy,” he said. “Oh Jesus. Oh thank God, you came,” and he leaned his head onto my shoulder and wept. Since I had some recent experience with this, I knew just what to do. I patted him on the back and said, “There there.” It was even more awkward than when I had done it with Deborah, since the stump of his left arm kept thumping against me and that made it much harder to fake sympathy.

But Chutsky’s crying jag lasted only a few moments, and when he finally pulled away from me, struggling to stay in an upright position, my beautiful Hawaiian shirt was soaked. He gave a huge snuffle, a little too late for my shirt. “Where’s Debbie?” he said.

“She broke her collarbone,” I told him. “She’s in the hospital.”

“Oh,” he said, and he snuffled again, a long wet sound that seemed to echo somewhere inside him. Then he glanced quickly behind him and tried to struggle to his feet. “We better get out of here. He might come back.”

It hadn’t occurred to me that Danco might come back, but it was true. It’s a time-honored predator’s trick to run off and then circle back to see who’s sniffing your spoor. If Dr. Danco did that, he would find a couple of fairly easy targets. “All right,” I said to Chutsky. “Let me have a quick look around.”

He snaked a hand out-his right hand, of course-and grabbed my arm. “Please,” he said. “Don’t leave me alone.”

“I’ll just be a second,” I said and tried to pull away. But he tightened his grip, still surprisingly strong considering what he had gone through.

“Please,” he repeated. “At least leave me your gun.”

“I don’t have a gun,” I said, and his eyes got much bigger.

“Oh, God, what the hell were you thinking? Christ, we’ve got to get out of here.” He sounded close to panic, as though any second now he would begin to cry again.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s get you up on your, ah, foot.” I hoped he didn’t catch my glitch; I didn’t mean to sound insensitive, but this whole missing-limbs thing was going to require a bit of retooling in the area of vocabulary. But Chutsky said nothing, just held out his arm. I helped him up, and he leaned against the table. “Just give me a few seconds to check the other rooms,” I said. He looked at me with moist, begging eyes, but he didn’t say anything and I hurried off through the little house.

In the main room, where Chutsky was, there was nothing to be seen beyond Dr. Danco’s working equipment. He had some very nice cutting instruments, and after carefully considering the ethical implications, I took one of the nicest with me, a beautiful blade designed for cutting through the stringiest flesh. There were several rows of drugs; the names meant very little to me, except for a few bottles of barbiturates. I didn’t find any clues at all, no crumpled matchbook covers with phone numbers written in them, no dry-cleaning slips, nothing.

The kitchen was practically a duplicate of the kitchen at the first house. There was a small and battered refrigerator, a hot plate, a card table with one folding chair, and that was it. Half a box of doughnuts sat on the counter, with a very large roach munching on one of them. He looked at me as if he was willing to fight for the doughnut, so I left him to it.

I came back in to the main room to find Chutsky still leaning on the table. “Hurry up,” he said. “For Christ’s sake let’s go.”

“One more room,” I said. I crossed the room and opened the door opposite the kitchen. As I had expected, it was a bedroom. There was a cot in one corner, and on the cot lay a pile of clothing and a cell phone. The shirt looked familiar, and I had a thought about where it might have come from. I pulled out my own phone and dialed Sergeant Doakes’s number. The phone on top of the clothing began to ring.

“Oh, well,” I said. I pushed disconnect and went to get Chutsky.

He was right where I had left him, although he looked like he would have run away if he could have. “Come on, for Christ’s sake, hurry up,” he said. “Jesus, I can almost feel his breath on my neck.” He twisted his head to the back door and then over to the kitchen and, as I reached to support him, he turned and his eyes snapped onto the mirror that hung on the wall.

For a long moment he stared at his reflection and then he slumped as if all the bones had been pulled out of him. “Jesus,” he said, and he started to weep again. “Oh, Jesus.”

“Come on,” I said. “Let’s get moving.”

Chutsky shuddered and shook his head. “I couldn’t even move, just lying there listening to what he was doing to Frank. He sounded so happy-‘What’s your guess? No? All right, then-an arm.’ And then the sound of the saw, and-”

“Chutsky,” I said.

“And then when he got me up there and he said, ‘Seven,’ and ‘What’s your guess.’ And then-”

It’s always interesting to hear about someone else’s technique, of course, but Chutsky seemed like he was about to lose whatever control he had left, and I could not afford to let him snuffle all over the other side of my shirt. So I stepped close and grabbed him by the good arm. “Chutsky. Come on. Let’s get out of here,” I said.

He looked at me like he didn’t know where he was, eyes as wide as they could go, and then turned back to the mirror. “Oh Jesus,” he said. Then he took a deep and ragged breath and stood up as if he was responding to an imaginary bugle. “Not so bad,” he said. “I’m alive.”

“Yes, you are,” I said. “And if we can get moving we might both stay that way.”

“Right,” he said. He turned his head away from the mirror decisively and put his good arm around my shoulder. “Let’s go.”

Chutsky had obviously not had a great deal of experience at walking with only one leg, but he huffed and clumped along, leaning heavily on me between each hopping step. Even with the missing parts, he was still a big man, and it was hard work for me. Just before the bridge he paused for a moment and looked through the chain-link fence. “He threw my leg in there,” he said, “to the alligators. He made sure I was watching. He held it up so I could see it and then he threw it in and the water started to boil like…” I could hear a rising note of hysteria in his voice, but he heard it, too, and stopped, inhaled shakily, and said, somewhat roughly, “All right. Let’s get out of here.”

We made it back to the gate with no more side trips down memory lane, and Chutsky leaned on a fence post while I got the gate open. Then I hopped him around to the passenger seat, climbed in behind the wheel, and started the car. As the headlights flicked on, Chutsky leaned back in his seat and closed his eyes. “Thanks, buddy,” he said. “I owe you big-time. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” I said. I turned the car around and headed back toward Alligator Alley. I thought Chutsky had fallen asleep, but halfway along the little dirt road he began to talk.

“I’m glad your sister wasn’t here,” he said. “To see me like this. It’s- Listen, I really have to pull myself together before-” He stopped abruptly and didn’t say anything for half a minute. We bumped along the dark road in silence. The quiet was a pleasant change. I wondered where Doakes was and what he was doing. Or perhaps, what was being done to him. For that matter, I wondered where Reiker was and how soon I could take him somewhere else. Someplace quiet, where I could contemplate and work in peace. I wondered what the rent might be on the Blalock Gator Farm.

“Might be a good idea if I don’t bother her anymore,” Chutsky said suddenly, and it took me a moment to realize he was still talking about Deborah. “She’s not going to want anything to do with me the way I am now, and I don’t need anybody’s pity.”

“Nothing to worry about,” I said. “Deborah is completely without pity.”

“You tell her I’m fine, and I went back to Washington,” he said. “It’s better that way.”

“It might be better for you,” I said. “But she’ll kill me.”

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“No,

you

don’t understand. She told me to get you back. She’s made up her mind and I don’t dare disobey. She hits very hard.”

He was silent for a while. Then I heard him sigh heavily. “I just don’t know if I can do this,” he said.

“I could take you back to the gator farm,” I said cheerfully.

He didn’t say anything after that, and I pulled onto Alligator Alley, made the first U-turn, and headed back toward the orange glow of light on the horizon that was Miami.

CHAPTER 26

WE RODE IN SILENCE ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE first real clump of civilization, a housing development and a row of strip malls on the right, a few miles past the toll booth. Then Chutsky sat up and stared out at the lights and the buildings. “I have to use a phone,” he said.

“You can use my phone, if you’ll pay the roaming charges,” I said.

“I need a land line,” he said. “A pay phone.”

“You’re out of touch with the times,” I said. “A pay phone might be a little hard to find. Nobody uses them anymore.”

“Take this exit here,” he said, and although it was not getting me any closer to my well-earned good night’s sleep, I drove down the off-ramp. Within a mile we found a mini-mart that still had a pay phone stuck to the wall beside the front door. I helped Chutsky hop over to the phone and he leaned up against the shield around it and lifted the receiver. He glanced at me and said, “Wait over there,” which seemed a little bit bossy for somebody who couldn’t even walk unassisted, but I went back to my car and sat on the hood while Chutsky chatted.

An ancient Buick chugged into the parking spot next to me. A group of short, dark-skinned men in dirty clothes got out and walked toward the store. They stared at Chutsky standing there on one leg with his head so very shaved, but they were too polite to say anything. They went in and the glass door whooshed behind them and I felt the long day rolling over me; I was tired, my neck muscles felt stiff, and I hadn’t gotten to kill anything. I felt very cranky, and I wanted to go home and go to bed.

I wondered where Dr. Danco had taken Doakes. It didn’t really seem important, just idle curiosity. But as I thought about the fact that he had indeed taken him somewhere and would soon begin doing rather permanent things to the sergeant, I realized that this was the first good news I’d had in a long time, and I felt a warm glow spread through me. I was free. Doakes was gone. One small piece at a time he was leaving my life and releasing me from the involuntary servitude of Rita’s couch. I could live again.

“Hey, buddy,” Chutsky called. He waved the stump of his left arm at me and I stood up and walked over to him. “All right,” he said. “Let’s get going.”

“Of course,” I said. “Going where?”

He looked off in the distance and I could see the muscles along the side of his jaw tighten. The security lights of the mini-mart’s parking lot lit up his coveralls and gleamed off his head. It’s amazing how different a face looks if you shave off the eyebrows. There’s something freakish to it, like the makeup in a low-budget science-fiction movie, and so even though Chutsky should have looked tough and decisive as he stared at the horizon and clenched his jaw, he instead looked like he was waiting for a blood-curdling command from Ming the Merciless. But he just said, “Take me back to my hotel, buddy. I got work to do.”

“What about a hospital?” I asked, thinking that he couldn’t be expected to cut a walking stick from a sturdy yew tree and stump on down the trail. But he shook his head.

“I’m okay,” he said. “I’ll be okay.”

I looked pointedly at the two patches of white gauze where his arm and leg used to be and raised an eyebrow. After all, the wounds were still fresh enough to be bandaged, and at the very least Chutsky had to be feeling somewhat weak.

He looked down at his two stumps, and he did seem to slump just a little and become slightly smaller for a moment. “I’ll be fine,” he said, and he straightened up a bit. “Let’s get going.” And he seemed so tired and sad that I didn’t have the heart to say anything except, “All right.”

He hopped back to the passenger door of my car, leaning on my shoulder, and as I helped ease him into the seat the passengers of the old Buick trooped out carrying beer and pork rinds. The driver smiled and nodded at me. I smiled back and closed the door. “Crocodilios,” I said, nodding at Chutsky.

“Ah,” the driver said back. “Lo siento.” He got behind the wheel of his car, and I walked around to get into mine.

Chutsky had nothing at all to say for most of the drive. Right after the interchange onto I-95, however, he began to tremble badly. “Oh fuck,” he said. I looked over at him. “The drugs,” he said. “Wearing off.” His teeth began to chatter and he snapped them shut. His breath hissed out and I could see sweat begin to form on his bald face.

“Would you like to reconsider the hospital?” I asked.

“Do you have anything to drink?” he asked, a rather abrupt change of subject, I thought.

“I think there’s a bottle of water in the backseat,” I said helpfully.

“Drink,” he repeated. “Some vodka, or whiskey.”

“I don’t generally keep any in the car,” I said.

“Fuck,” he said. “Just get me to my hotel.”

I did that. For reasons known only to Chutsky, he was staying at the Mutiny in Coconut Grove. It had been one of the first luxury high-rise hotels in the area and had once been frequented by models, directors, drug runners, and other celebrities. It was still very nice, but it had lost a little bit of its cachet as the once-rustic Grove became overrun with luxury high-rises. Perhaps Chutsky had known it in its heyday and stayed there now for sentimental reasons. You really had to be deeply suspicious of sentimentality in a man who had worn a pinkie ring.

We came down off 95 onto Dixie Highway, and I turned left on Unity and rolled on down to Bayshore. The Mutiny was a little ways ahead on the right, and I pulled up in front of the hotel. “Just drop me here,” Chutsky said.

I stared at him. Perhaps the drugs had affected his mind. “Don’t you want me to help you up to your room?”

“I’ll be fine,” he said. That may have been his new mantra, but he didn’t look fine. He was sweating heavily now and I could not imagine how he thought he would get up to his room. But I am not the kind of person who would ever intrude with unwanted help, so I simply said, “All right,” and watched as he opened the door and got out. He held on to the roof of the car and stood unsteadily on his one leg for a minute before the bell captain saw him swaying there. The captain frowned at this apparition with the orange jumpsuit and the gleaming skull. “Hey, Benny,” Chutsky said. “Gimme a hand, buddy.”

“Mr. Chutsky?” he said dubiously, and then his jaw dropped as he noticed the missing parts. “Oh, Lord,” he said. He clapped his hands three times and a bellboy ran out.

Chutsky looked back at me. “I’ll be fine,” he said.

And really, when you’re not wanted there’s not much you can do except leave, which is what I did. The last I saw of Chutsky he was leaning on the bell captain as the bellboy pushed a wheelchair toward them out the front door of the hotel.

It was still a little bit shy of midnight as I drove down Main Highway and headed for home, which was hard to believe considering all that had happened tonight. Vince’s party seemed like several weeks ago, and yet he probably hadn’t even unplugged his fruit-punch fountain yet. Between my Trial by Stripper and rescuing Chutsky from the gator farm, I had earned my rest tonight, and I admit that I was thinking of little else except crawling into my bed and pulling the covers over my head.

But of course, there’s no rest for the wicked, which I certainly am. My cell phone rang as I turned left on Douglas. Very few people call me, especially this late at night. I glanced at the phone; it was Deborah.

“Greetings, sister dear,” I said.

“You asshole, you said you’d call!” she said.

“It seemed a little late,” I said.

“Did you really think I could fucking

SLEEP?

!” she yelled, loud enough to cause pain to people in passing cars. “What happened?”

“I got Chutsky back,” I said. “ But Dr. Danco got away. With Doakes.”

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know, Debs, he got away in an airboat and-”

“Kyle, you idiot. Where is Kyle? Is he all right?”

“I dropped him at the Mutiny. He’s, um… He’s almost all right,” I said.

“What the fuck does that mean?!?” she screamed at me, and I had to switch my phone to the other ear.

“Deborah, he’s going to be okay. He’s just-he lost half of his left arm and half the right leg. And all his hair,” I said. She was quiet for several seconds.

“Bring me some clothes,” she said at last.

“He’s feeling very uncertain, Debs. I don’t think he wants-”

“Clothes, Dexter. Now,” she said, and she hung up.

As I said, no rest for the wicked. I sighed heavily at the injustice of it all, but I obeyed. I was almost back to my apartment, and Deborah had left some things there. So I ran in and, although I paused to look longingly at my bed, I gathered a change of clothing for her and headed for the hospital.

Deborah was sitting on the edge of her bed tapping her feet impatiently when I came in. She held her hospital gown closed with the hand that protruded from her cast, and clutched her gun and badge with the other. She looked like Avenging Fury after an accident.

“Jesus Christ,” she said, “where the hell have you been? Help me get dressed.” She dropped her gown and stood up.

I pulled a polo shirt over her head, working it awkwardly around the cast. We just barely had the shirt in place when a stout woman in a nurse’s uniform hurried into the room. “What you think you’re doing?” she said in a thick Bahamian accent.

“Leaving,” Deborah said.

“Get back in that bed or I will call doctor,” the nurse said.

“Call him,” Deborah said, now hopping on one foot as she struggled into her pants.

“No you don’t,” the nurse said. “You get back in the bed.”

Deborah held up her shield. “This is a police emergency,” she said. “If you impede me I am authorized to arrest you for obstruction of justice.”

The nurse thought she was going to say something very severe, but she opened her mouth, looked at the shield, looked at Deborah, and changed her mind. “I will have to tell doctor,” she said.

“Whatever,” Deborah said. “Dexter, help me close my pants.” The nurse watched disapprovingly for another few seconds, then turned and whisked away down the hall.

“Really, Debs,” I said. “Obstruction of justice?”

“Let’s go,” she said, and marched out the door. I trailed dutifully behind.

Deborah was alternately tense and angry on the drive back over to the Mutiny. She would chew on her lower lip, and then snarl at me to hurry up, and then as we came close to the hotel, she got very quiet. She finally looked out her window and said, “What’s he like, Dex? How bad is it?”

“It’s a very bad haircut, Debs. It makes him look pretty weird. But the other stuff… He seems to be adjusting. He just doesn’t want you to feel sorry for him.” She looked at me, again chewing her lip. “That’s what he said,” I told her. “He wanted to go back to Washington rather than put up with your pity.”

“He doesn’t want to be a burden,” she said. “I know him. He has to pay his own way.” She looked back out the window again. “I can’t even imagine what it was like. For a man like Kyle to lie there so helpless as-” She shook her head slowly, and a single tear rolled down her cheek.

Truthfully, I could imagine very well what it had been like, and I had done so many times already. What I was having difficulty with was this new side of Deborah. She had cried at her mother’s funeral, and at her father’s, but not since then, as far as I knew. And now here she was practically flooding the car over what I had come to regard as an infatuation with someone who was a little bit of an oaf. Even worse, he was now a disabled oaf, which should mean that a logical person would move on and find somebody else with all the proper pieces still attached. But Deborah seemed even more concerned with Chutsky now that he was permanently damaged. Could this be love after all? Deborah in love? It didn’t seem possible. I knew that theoretically she was capable of it, of course, but-I mean, after all, she was my sister.

It was pointless to wonder. I knew nothing at all about love and I never would. It didn’t seem like such a terrible lack to me, although it does make it difficult to understand popular music.

Since there was nothing else I could possibly say about it, I changed the subject. “Should I call Captain Matthews and tell him that Doakes is gone?” I said.

Deborah wiped a tear off her cheek with one fingertip and shook her head. “That’s for Kyle to decide,” she said.

“Yes, of course, but Deborah, under the circumstances-”

She slammed a fist onto her leg, which seemed pointless as well as painful. “GodDAMN it, Dexter, I won’t lose him!”

Every now and then I feel like I am only receiving one track of a stereo recording, and this was one such time. I had no idea what-well, to be honest, I didn’t even have an idea what to have an idea about. What did she mean? What did it have to do with what I had said, and why had she reacted so violently? And how can so many fat women think they look good in a belly shirt?

I suppose some of my confusion must have showed on my face, because Deborah unclenched her fist and took a deep breath. “Kyle is going to need to stay focused, keep working. He needs to be in charge, or this will finish him.”

“How can you know that?”

She shook her head. “He’s always been the best at what he does. That’s his whole-it’s who he is. If he gets to thinking about what Danco did to him-” She bit her lip and another tear rolled down her cheek. “He has to stay who he is, Dexter. Or I’ll lose him.”

“All right,” I said.

“I can’t lose him, Dexter,” she said again.

There was a different doorman on duty at the Mutiny, but he seemed to recognize Deborah and simply nodded as he held the door open for us. We walked silently to the elevator and rode up to the twelfth floor.

I have lived in Coconut Grove my entire life, so I knew very well from gushing newspaper accounts that Chutsky’s room was done in British Colonial. I never understood why, but the hotel had decided that British Colonial was the perfect setting to convey the ambience of Coconut Grove, although as far as I knew there had never been a British colony here. So the entire hotel was done in British Colonial. But I find it hard to believe that either the interior decorator or any Colonial British had ever pictured something like Chutsky flopped onto the king size bed of the penthouse suite Deborah led me to.

His hair had not grown back in the last hour, but he had at least changed out of the orange coverall and into a white terry-cloth robe and he was lying there in the middle of the bed shaved, shaking, and sweating heavily with a half-empty bottle of Skyy Vodka lying beside him. Deborah didn’t even slow down at the door. She charged right over to the bed and sat beside him, taking his only hand in her only hand. Love among the ruins.

“Debbie?” he said in a quavery old-man voice.

“I’m here now,” she said. “Go to sleep.”

“I guess I’m not as good as I thought I was,” he said.

“Sleep,” she said, holding his hand and settling down next to him.

I left them like that.

CHAPTER 27

I SLEPT LATE THE NEXT DAY. AFTER ALL, HADN’T I earned it? And although I arrived at work around ten o’clock, I was still there well before Vince, Camilla, or Angel-no-relation, who had apparently all called in deathly ill. One hour and forty-five minutes later Vince finally came in, looking green and very old. “Vince!” I said with great good cheer and he flinched and leaned against the wall with his eyes closed. “I want to thank you for an epic party.”

“Thank me quietly,” he croaked.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“You’re welcome,” he whispered back, and staggered softly away to his cubicle.

It was an unusually quiet day, by which I mean that, besides the lack of new cases, the forensics area was silent as a tomb, with the occasional pale-green ghost floating by suffering silently. Luckily there was also very little work to do. By five o’clock I had caught up on my paperwork and arranged all my pencils. Rita had called at lunchtime to ask me to come for dinner. I think she might have wanted to make sure I had not been kidnapped by a stripper, so I agreed to come after work. I did not hear from Debs, but I didn’t really need to. I was quite sure she was with Chutsky in his penthouse. But I was a little bit concerned, since Dr. Danco knew where to find them and might come looking for his missing project. On the other hand, he had Sergeant Doakes to play with, which should keep him busy and happy for several days.

Still, just to be safe, I called Deborah’s cell phone number. She answered on the fourth ring. “What,” she said.

“You do remember that Dr. Danco had no trouble getting in there the first time,” I said.

“

I

wasn’t here the first time,” she said. And she sounded so very fierce that I had to hope she wouldn’t shoot someone from room service.

“All right,” I said. “Just keep your eyes open.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. I heard Chutsky muttering something cranky in the background, and Deborah said, “I have to go. I’ll call you later.” She hung up.

Evening rush hour was in full swing as I headed south to Rita’s house, and I found myself humming cheerfully as a red-faced man in a pickup truck cut me off and gave me the finger. It was not just the ordinary feeling of belonging I got from being surrounded by the homicidal Miami traffic, either; I felt like a great burden had been removed from my shoulders. And, of course, it had been. I could go to Rita’s and there would be no maroon Taurus parked across the street. I could go back to my apartment, free of my clinging shadow. And even more important, I could take the Dark Passenger out for a spin and we would be alone together for some badly needed quality time. Sergeant Doakes was gone, out of my life-and soon, presumably, out of his own life, too.

I felt absolutely giddy as I wheeled down South Dixie and made the turn to Rita’s house. I was free-and free of obligation, too, since one really had to believe that Chutsky and Deborah would stay put to recuperate for a while. As for Dr. Danco-it is true that I had felt a certain twinge of interest in meeting him, and even now I would gladly take a few moments out of my busy social schedule for some real quality bonding time with him. But I was quite sure that Chutsky’s mysterious Washington agency would send someone else to deal with him, and they would certainly not want me hovering around and offering advice. With that ruled out, and with Doakes out of the picture, I was back to plan A and free to assist Reiker into early retirement. Whoever would now have to deal with the problem of Dr. Danco, it would not be Delightfully Discharged Dexter.

I was so happy that I kissed Rita when she answered the door, even though no one was watching. And after dinner, while Rita cleaned up, I went out into the backyard once again, playing kick the can with the neighborhood children. This time, though, there was a special edge to it with Cody and Astor, our own small secret adding a touch more zest. It was almost fun to watch them stalking the other children, my own little predators in training.

After half an hour of stalking and pouncing, however, it became apparent that we were severely outnumbered by even stealthier predators-mosquitoes, several billion of the disgusting little vampires, all ravenously hungry. And so, weak from loss of blood, Cody, Astor, and I staggered back into the house and reconvened around the dining table for a session of hangman.

“I’ll go first,” Astor announced. “It’s my turn anyway.”

“Mine,” said Cody, frowning.

“Nuh-uh. Anyway, I got one,” she told him. “Five letters.”

“C,” said Cody.

“No! Head! Ha!” she howled in triumph, and drew the little round head.

“You should ask the vowels first,” I said to Cody.

“What,” he said softly.

“A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y,” Astor told him. “Everybody knows that.”

“Is there an E?” I asked her, and some of the wind went out of her sails.

“Yes,” Astor said, sulkily, and she wrote the E on the middle blank line.

“Ha,” said Cody.

We played for almost an hour before their bedtime. All too soon my magical evening drew to a close and I was once again on the couch with Rita. But this time, free as I was from spying eyes, it was an easy matter for me to disengage myself from her tentacles and head for home, and my own little bed, with well-meaning excuses of having partied too hard at Vince’s and a big day of work tomorrow. And then I was off, all alone in the night, just my echo, my shadow, and me. It was two nights until the full moon, and I would make this one well worth my wait. This full moon I would spend not with Miller Lite but with Reiker Photography, Inc. In two nights I would turn loose the Passenger at last, slide into my true self, and fling the sweat-stained costume of Dearly Devoted Dexter into the garbage heap.

Of course I needed to find proof first, but somehow I was quite confident that I would. After all, I had a whole day for that, and when the Dark Passenger and I work together everything seems to fall right into place.

And filled with such cheerful thoughts of dark delights I motored back to my comfy apartment, and climbed into bed to sleep the deep and dreamless sleep of the just.

The next morning my offensively cheerful mood continued. When I stopped for doughnuts on the way to work I gave in to impulse and bought a full dozen, including several of the cream-filled ones with chocolate icing, a truly extravagant gesture that was not lost on Vince, who had finally recovered. “Oh, my,” he said with raised eyebrows. “You have done well, O mighty hunter.”

“The gods of the forest have smiled upon us,” I said. “Cream-filled or raspberry jelly?”

“Cream-filled, of course,” he said.

The day passed quickly, with only one trip out to a homicide scene, a routine dismemberment with garden equipment. It was strictly amateur work; the idiot had tried to use an electric hedge clipper and succeeded only in making a great deal of extra work for me, before finishing off his wife with the pruning shears. A truly nasty mess, and it served him right that they caught him at the airport. A well-done dismemberment is

neat

, above all, or so I always say. None of this puddled blood and caked flesh on the walls. It shows a real lack of class.

I finished up at the scene just in time to get back to my little cubbyhole off the forensics lab and leave my notes on my desk. I would type them up and finish the report on Monday, no hurry. Neither the killer nor the victim was going anywhere.

And so there I was, out the door to the parking lot and into my car, free to roam the land as I pleased. No one to follow me or feed me beer or force me to do things I would rather avoid. No one to shine the unwanted light into Dexter’s shadows. I could be me again, Dexter Unchained, and the thought was far more intoxicating than all Rita’s beer and sympathy. It had been too long since I felt this way, and I promised myself I would never again take it for granted.

A car was on fire at the corner of Douglas and Grand, and a small but enthusiastic crowd had gathered to watch. I shared their good cheer as I eased through the traffic jam caused by the emergency vehicles and headed for home.

At home I sent out for a pizza and made some careful notes on Reiker; where to look for proof, what sort of thing would be enough-a pair of red cowboy boots would certainly be a good start. I was very nearly certain that he was the one; pedophile predators tend to find ways to combine business and pleasure, and child photography was a perfect example. But “very nearly” was not certain enough. And so I organized my thoughts into a neat little file-nothing incriminating, of course, and it would all be carefully destroyed before showtime. By Monday morning there would be no hint at all of what I had done except a new glass slide in the box on my shelf. I spent a happy hour planning and eating a large pizza with anchovies and then, as the nearly full moon began to mutter through the window, I got restless. I could feel the icy fingers of moonlight stroking me, tickling at my spine, urging me into the night to stretch the predator’s muscles that had been dormant for too long.

And why not? It would do no harm to slide out into the chuckling evening and steal a look or two. To stalk, to watch unseen, to cat-foot down Reiker’s game trails and sniff the wind-it would be prudent as well as fun. Dark Scout Dexter must Be Prepared. Besides, it was Friday night. Reiker might very well leave the house for some social activity-a visit to the toy store, for instance. If he was out, I could slip into his house and look around.

And so I dressed in my best dark nightstalker clothes and took the short drive from my apartment, up Main Highway and through the Grove to Tigertail Avenue and down to the modest house where Reiker lived. It was in a neighborhood of small concrete-block houses and his seemed no different from all the others, set back from the road just far enough for a short driveway. His car was parked there, a little red Kia, which gave me a surge of hope. Red, like the boots; it was his color, a sign that I was on track.

I drove by the house twice. On my second pass the dome light in his car was on and I was just in time to catch a glimpse of his face as he climbed into the car. It was not a very impressive face: thin, nearly chinless, and partly hidden by long bangs and large-frame glasses. I could not see what he was wearing on his feet, but from what I could see of the rest of him he might well wear cowboy boots to make himself seem a little taller. He got into the car and closed the door, and I went on by and around the block.

When I came by again, his car was gone. I parked a few blocks away on a small side street and went back, slowly slipping into my night skin as I walked. The lights were all out at a neighbor’s house and I cut through the yard. There was a small guesthouse behind Reiker’s place, and the Dark Passenger whispered in my inner ear,

studio

. It was indeed a perfect place for a photographer to set up, and a studio was exactly the right kind of place to find incriminating photographs. Since the Passenger is seldom wrong about these things, I picked the lock and went in.

The windows were all boarded over on the inside, but in the dimness from the open door I could see the outline of darkroom equipment. The Passenger had been right. I closed the door and flipped up the light switch. A murky red light flooded the room, just enough to see by. There were the usual trays and bottles of chemicals over by a small sink, and to the left of that a very nice computer workstation with digital equipment. A four-drawer filing cabinet stood against the far wall and I decided to start there.

After ten minutes of flipping through pictures and negatives, I had found nothing more incriminating than a few dozen photos of naked babies posed on a white fur rug, pictures that would generally be regarded as “cute” even by people who think Pat Robertson is too liberal. There were no hidden compartments in the filing cabinet as far as I could tell, and no other obvious place to hide pictures.

Time was short; I could not take the chance that Reiker had simply gone to the store to buy a quart of milk. He might come back at any minute and decide to poke through his files and gaze fondly at the dozens of dear little pixies he had captured on film. I moved to the computer area.

Next to the monitor there was a tall CD rack and I went through the disks one at a time. After a handful of program disks and others hand-lettered GREENFIELD or LOPEZ, I found it.

“It” was a bright pink jewel case. Across the front of the case in very neat letters it said, NAMBLA 9/04.

It may well be that NAMBLA is a rare Hispanic name. But it also stands for North American Man/Boy Love Association, a warm and fuzzy support group that helps pedophiles maintain a positive self-image by assuring them that what they do is perfectly natural. Well, of course it is-so are cannibalism and rape, but really. One mustn’t.

I took the CD with me, turned out the light, and slid back into the night.

Back at my apartment it took only a few minutes to discover that the disk was a sales tool, presumably carried to a NAMBLA gathering of some kind and offered around to a select list of discriminating ogres. The pictures on it were arranged in what are called “thumbnail galleries,” miniature series of shots almost like the picture decks that Victorian dirty old men used to flip through. Each picture had been strategically blurred so you could imagine but not quite see the details.

And oh, yes: several of the shots were professionally cropped and edited versions of the ones I had discovered on MacGregor’s boat. So while I had not actually found the red cowboy boots, I had found quite enough to satisfy the Harry Code. Reiker had made the A-list. With a song in my heart and a smile on my lips, I trundled off to bed, thinking happy thoughts about what Reiker and I would be doing tomorrow night.

The next morning, Saturday, I got up a little late and went for a run through my neighborhood. After a shower and a hearty breakfast I went shopping for a few essentials-a new roll of duct tape, a razor-sharp fillet knife, just the basic necessities. And because the Dark Passenger was flexing and stretching to wakefulness, I stopped at a steak house for a late lunch. I ate a sixteen-ounce New York strip, well done of course, so there was absolutely no blood. Then I drove by Reiker’s one more time to see the place again in daylight. Reiker himself was mowing his lawn. I slowed for a casual look; alas, he was wearing old sneakers, not red boots. He was shirtless and on top of scrawny, he looked flabby and pale. No matter: I would put a little color into him soon enough.

It was a very satisfying and productive day, my Day Before. And I was sitting quietly back in my apartment wrapped in my virtuous thoughts when the telephone rang.

“Good afternoon,” I said into the receiver.

“Can you get over here?” Deborah said. “We have some work to finish up.”

“What sort of work?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” she said. “Come on over,” and she hung up. This was more than a little bit irritating. In the first place, I didn’t know of any kind of unfinished work, and in the second, I was not aware of being a jerk-a monster, yes, certainly, but on the whole a very pleasant and well-mannered monster. And to top it all off, the way she hung up like that, simply assuming I had heard and would tremble and obey. The nerve of her. Sister or not, vicious arm punch or no, I trembled for no one.

I did, however, obey. The short drive to the Mutiny took longer than usual, this being Saturday afternoon, a time when the streets in the Grove flood with aimless people. I wove slowly through the crowd, wishing for once that I could simply pin the gas pedal to the floorboard and smash into the wandering horde. Deborah had spoiled my perfect mood.

She didn’t make it any better when I knocked on the penthouse door at the Mutiny and she opened it with her on-duty-in-a-crisis face, the one that made her look like a bad-tempered fish. “Get in here,” she said.

“Yes master,” I said.

Chutsky was sitting on the sofa. He still didn’t look British Colonial-maybe it was the lack of eyebrows-but he did at least look like he had decided to live, so apparently Deborah’s rebuilding project was going well. There was a metal crutch leaning against the wall beside him, and he was sipping coffee. A platter of Danish sat on the end table next to him. “Hey, buddy,” he called out, waving his stump. “Grab a chair.”

I took a British Colonial chair and sat, after snagging a couple of Danish as well. Chutsky looked at me like he was going to object, but really, it was the very least they could do for me. After all, I had waded through flesh-eating alligators and an attack peacock to rescue him, and now here I was giving up my Saturday for who-knows-what kind of awful chore. I deserved an entire cake.

“All right,” Chutsky said. “We have to figure where Henker is hiding, and we have to do it fast.”

“Who?” I asked. “You mean Dr. Danco?”

“That’s his name, yeah. Henker,” he said. “Martin Henker.”

“And we have to

find

him?” I asked, filled with a sense of ominous foreboding. I mean, why were they looking at me and saying “we”?

Chutsky gave a small snort as if he thought I was joking and he got it. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “So where are you thinking he might be, buddy?”

“Actually, I’m not thinking about it at all,” I said.

“Dexter,” Deborah said with a warning tone in her voice.

Chutsky frowned. It was a very strange expression without eyebrows. “What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean, I don’t see why it’s my problem anymore. I don’t see why I or even

we

have to find him. He got what he wanted-won’t he just finish up and go home?”

“Is he kidding?” Chutsky asked Deborah, and if he’d only had eyebrows they would have been raised.

“He doesn’t like Doakes,” Deborah said.

“Yeah, but listen, Doakes is one of our guys,” Chutsky said to me.

“Not one of mine,” I said.

Chutsky shook his head. “All right, that’s your problem,” he said. “But we still have to find this guy. There’s a political side to this whole thing, and it’s deep doo-doo if we don’t collar him.”

“Okay,” I said. “But why is it my problem?” And it seemed like a very reasonable question to me, although to see his reaction you would have thought I wanted to fire bomb an elementary school.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, and he shook his head in mock admiration. “You really are a piece of work, buddy.”

“Dexter,” Deborah said. “Look at us.” I did look, at Deb in her cast and Chutsky with his twin stumps. To be honest, they did not look terribly fierce. “We need your help,” she said.

“But Debs, really.”

“Please, Dexter,” she said, knowing full well that I found it very hard to refuse her when she used that word.

“Debs, come on,” I said. “You need an action hero, somebody who can kick down the door and storm in with guns blazing. I’m just a mild-mannered forensics geek.”

She crossed the room and stood in front of me, inches away. “I know what you are, Dexter,” she said softly. “Remember? And I know you can do this.” She put her hand on my shoulder and lowered her voice even farther, almost whispering. “Kyle

needs

this, Dex. Needs to catch Danco. Or he’ll never feel like a man again. That’s important to me. Please, Dexter?”

And after all, what can you do when the big guns come out? Except summon your reserves of goodwill and wave the white flag gracefully.

“All right, Debs,” I said.

Freedom is such a fragile, fleeting thing, isn’t it?

CHAPTER 28

HOWEVER RELUCTANT I HAD BEEN, I HAD GIVEN MY word to help, and so poor Dutiful Dexter instantly attacked the problem with all the resourceful cunning of his powerful brain. But the sad truth was that my brain seemed to be off-line; no matter how diligently I typed in clues, nothing dropped into the out-box.

Of course it was possible that I needed more fuel to function at the highest possible level, so I wheedled Deborah into sending down for more Danish. While she was on the phone with room service Chutsky focused a sweaty, slightly glazed smile on me and said, “Let’s get to it, okay, buddy?” Since he asked so nicely-and after all, I had to do something while I waited for the Danish-I agreed.

The loss of his two limbs had removed some kind of psychic lock from Chutsky. In spite of being just a little bit shaky, he was far more open and friendly, and actually seemed eager to share information in a way that would have been unthinkable to the Chutsky with four complete limbs and a pair of expensive sunglasses. And so out of what was really no more than an urge to be tidy and know as many details as possible, I took advantage of his new good cheer by getting the names of the El Salvador team from him.

He sat with a yellow legal pad balanced precariously on his knee, holding it still with his wrist while he scrawled the names with his right, and only, hand. “Manny Borges you know about,” he said.

“The first victim,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” Chutsky said without looking up. He wrote the name and then drew a line through it. “And then there was Frank Aubrey?” He frowned and actually stuck the tip of his tongue out of the corner of his mouth as he wrote and then crossed out. “He missed Oscar Acosta. God knows where he is now.” He wrote the name anyway and put a question mark beside it. “Wendell Ingraham. Lives on North Shore Drive, out on Miami Beach.” The pad slipped to the floor as he wrote the name, and he grabbed at it as it fell, missing badly. He stared at the pad where it lay for a moment, then leaned over and retrieved it. A drop of sweat rolled off his hairless head and onto the floor. “Fucking drugs,” he said. “Got me a little woozy.”

“Wendell Ingraham,” I said.

“Right. Right.” He scribbled the rest of the name and without pausing went on with, “Andy Lyle. Sells cars now, up in Davie.” And in a furious burst of energy he went right on and triumphantly scrawled the last name. “Two other guys dead, one guy still in the field, that’s it, the whole team.”

“Don’t any of these guys know Danco is in town?”

He shook his head. Another drop of sweat flew off and narrowly missed me. “We’re keeping a pretty tight lid on this thing. Need-to-know only.”

“They don’t need to know that somebody wants to convert them to squealing pillows?”

“No, they don’t,” he said, clamping his jaw and looking like he was going to say something tough again; perhaps he would offer to flush them. But he glanced up at me and thought better of it.

“Can we at least check and see which one is missing?” I asked, without any real hope.

Chutsky started shaking his head before I even finished speaking. Two more drops of sweat flew off, left, right. “No. Uh-uh, no way. These guys always have an ear to the ground. Somebody starts asking around about them, they’ll know. And I can’t risk having them run. Like Oscar did.”

“Then how do we find Dr. Danco?”

“That’s what you’re going to figure out,” he said.

“What about the house by Mount Trashmore?” I asked hopefully. “The one you checked out with the clipboard.”

“Debbie had a patrol car drive by. Family has moved in. No,” he said, “we’re putting all our chips on you, buddy. You’ll think of something.”

Debs rejoined us before I could think of anything meaningful to say to that, but in truth, I was too surprised at Chutsky’s official attitude toward his former comrades. Wouldn’t it have been the nice thing to do, to give his old friends a running start or at least a heads-up? I certainly don’t pretend to be a paragon of civilized virtue, but if a deranged surgeon was after Vince Masuoka, for instance, I like to think I might find a way to drop a hint into casual conversation by the coffee machine. Pass that sugar, please. By the way-there’s a medical maniac after you who wants to lop off all your limbs. Would you like the creamer?

But apparently that wasn’t the way the game was played by the guys with the big manly chins, or at least not by their representative Kyle Chutsky. No matter; I had a list of names, at least, which was a place to start, although nothing else. I had no idea where to begin turning my starting point into some kind of actual helpful information, and Kyle did not seem to be doing quite as well with creativity as he had done with sharing. Deborah was little help. She was totally wrapped up in fluffing Kyle’s pillow, mopping his fevered brow, and making sure he took his pills, a matronly kind of behavior that I would have thought impossible for her, but there it was.

It became apparent that little real work would be accomplished here in the hotel penthouse. The only thing I could suggest was that I return to my computer and see what I could turn up. And so after prying two final Danish out of Kyle’s remaining hand I headed for home and my trusty computer. There were no guarantees that I would come up with anything, but I was committed to trying. I would give it my best effort, poke around at the problem for a few hours and hope that someone might wrap a secret message around a rock and throw it through my window. Perhaps if the rock hit me on the head, it would jar loose some kind of idea.

My apartment was just as I’d left it, which was comforting. The bed was even made, since Deborah was no longer in residence. I soon had my computer humming and began to search. I checked the real estate database first, but there were no new purchases that fit the pattern of the others. Still, it was obvious that Dr. Danco had to be somewhere. We had run him out of his prepared hidey-holes and yet I was quite sure that he would not wait to begin on Doakes and whoever else from Chutsky’s list might have caught his attention.

How did he decide the order of his victims anyway? By seniority? By how much they pissed him off? Or was it random? If I knew that, it was at least possible that I could find him. He had to go somewhere, and his operations were not the sort of thing one would do in a hotel room. So where would he go?

It was not a rock crashing through the window and bouncing off my head after all, but a very small idea began to trickle onto the floor of Dexter’s brain. Danco had to go somewhere to work on Doakes, obviously, and he couldn’t wait to set up another safe house. Wherever he went had to be in the Miami area, close to his victims, and he could not afford to risk all the variables of grabbing a place at random. A seemingly empty house might suddenly be overrun by prospective buyers, and if he snatched an occupied place he could not know when Cousin Enrico might drop in for a visit. So-why not simply use the home of his next victim? He had to believe that Chutsky, the only one who knew the list until now, was out of action for a while and would not pursue him. By moving in on the next name on the list he could amputate two limbs with one scalpel, as it were, by using his next victim’s house to finish Doakes and then make a leisurely start on the happy homeowner.

It made a certain amount of sense and was a more definite starting point than the list of names. But even if I was right, which of the men would be next?

The thunder rumbled outside. I looked again at the list of names and sighed. Why wasn’t I somewhere else? Even playing hangman with Cody and Astor would be a big improvement over this kind of frustrating drudgery. I had to keep after Cody to find the vowels first. Then the rest of the word would start to swim into focus. And when he mastered that, I could start to teach him other, more interesting things. Very strange to have child instruction to look forward to, but I was actually kind of eager to begin. A shame he had already taken care of the neighbor’s dog-it would have been a perfect place to start learning security as well as technique. The little scamp had so much to learn. All the old Harry lessons, passed on to a new generation.

And as I thought of helping Cody along, I realized that the price tag was accepting my engagement to Rita. Could I really go through with it? Fling away my carefree bachelor ways and settle into a life of domestic bliss? Oddly enough, I thought I might be able to pull it off. Certainly the kids were worth a little bit of sacrifice, and making Rita a permanent disguise would actually lower my profile. Happily married men are not as likely to do the kind of thing I live for.

Maybe I could go through with it. We would see. But of course, this was procrastination. It was getting me no closer to my evening out with Reiker, and no closer to finding Danco. I called my scattered senses back and looked at the list of names: Borges and Aubrey done. Acosta, Ingraham, and Lyle still to go. Still unaware that they had an appointment with Dr. Danco. Two down, three more to go, not including Doakes, who must be feeling the blade now, with Tito Puente playing his dance music in the background and the Doctor leaning over with his so-bright scalpel and leading the sergeant through his dance of dismemberment. Dance with me, Doakes. Baila conmigo, amigo, as Tito Puente would put it. A little bit harder to dance with no legs, of course, but well worth the effort.

And in the meantime, here I was dancing in circles just as surely as if the good Doctor had removed one of my legs.

All right: let’s assume Dr. Danco was at the house of his current victim, not counting Doakes. Of course, I didn’t know who that might be. So where did that leave me? When scientific inquiry was eliminated, that left lucky guess. Elementary, dear Dexter. Eeny meeny miney mo-

My finger landed on the notepad on Ingraham’s name. Well then, that was definite, wasn’t it? Sure it was. And I was King Olaf of Norway.

I got up and walked to the window where I had so many times peered out at Sergeant Doakes parked across the street in his maroon Taurus. He wasn’t there. Soon he wouldn’t actually be anywhere unless I found him. He wanted me dead or in prison, and I would be happier if he simply disappeared-one small piece at a time, or all at once, it made no difference. And yet here I was working overtime, pushing Dexter’s mighty mental machinery through its awesome paces, in order to rescue him-so he could kill or imprison me. Is it any wonder I find the whole idea of life overrated?

Perhaps stirred by the irony, the almost-perfect moon snickered through the trees. And the longer I stared out, the more I felt the weight of that wicked old moon, sputtering softly just under the horizon and already puffing hot and cold at my spine, urging me into action, until I found myself picking up my car keys and heading for the door. After all, why not just go check it out? It would take no more than an hour, and I wouldn’t have to explain my thinking to Debs and Chutsky.

I realized that the idea seemed appealing to me partly because it was quick and easy and if it paid off it would return me to my hard-won liberty in time for tomorrow night’s playdate with Reiker-and even more, I was beginning to develop a small hankering for an appetizer. Why not warm up a little on Dr. Danco? Who could fault me for doing unto him what he oh-so-readily did unto others? If I had to save Doakes in order to get Danco, well, no one ever said life was perfect.

And so there I was, headed north on Dixie Highway and then up onto I-95, taking it all the way to the 79th Street Causeway and then straight over to the Normandy Shores area of Miami Beach, where Ingraham lived. It was night by the time I turned down the street and drove slowly past. A dark green van was parked in the driveway, very similar to the white one Danco had crashed only a few days ago. It was parked next to a newish Mercedes, and looked very much out of place in this tony neighborhood. Well, then, I thought. The Dark Passenger began to mutter words of encouragement but I kept going through the bend in the road past the house and on to a vacant lot before I stopped. Just around the corner I pulled over.

The green van did not belong there, judging by the type of neighborhood this was. Of course, it could be that Ingraham was having some plastering work done and the workers had decided to stay until the job was done. But I didn’t think so, and neither did the Dark Passenger. I took out my cell phone to call Deborah.

“I may have found something,” I told her when she answered.

“What took you so long?” she said.

“I think Dr. Danco is working out of Ingraham’s house on Miami Beach,” I said.

There was a short pause in which I could almost see her frown. “Why do you think that?”

The idea of explaining to her that my guess was only a guess was not terribly appealing, so I just said, “It’s a long story, Sis. But I think I’m right.”

“You think,” she said. “But you’re not sure.”

“I will be in a few minutes,” I said. “I’m parked around the corner from the house, and there’s a van parked in front that looks a little out of place in this neighborhood.”

“Stay put,” she said. “I’ll call you back.” She hung up and left me looking at the house. It was an awkward angle to watch from and I could not really look without developing a severe knot in my neck. So I turned the car around and faced down the street toward the bend where the house sat sneering at me and as I did-there it was. Poking its bloated head through the trees, guttering bleary beams of light down onto the rancid landscape. That moon, that always laughing lighthouse of a moon. There it was.

I could feel the cold fingers of moonlight poking at me, prodding and teasing and urging me on to some foolish and wonderful something, and it had been so very long since I had listened that the sounds came twice as loud as ever, washing over my head and down my spine and in truth, what harm could it do to be absolutely sure before Deborah called back? Not to do anything stupid, of course, but just to ease out of the car and down the street past the house, just a casual stroll in the moonlight along a quiet street of houses. And if by chance the opportunity arose to play a few small games with the Doctor-

It was mildly upsetting to notice that my breath was slightly shaky as I climbed out of my car. Shame on you, Dexter. Where’s that famous icy control? Perhaps it had slipped from being under wraps too long, and perhaps it was just that the same hiatus had made me a little too eager, but this would never do. I took a long, deep breath to steady myself and headed up the street, just a casual monster out for an evening stroll past an impromptu vivisection clinic. Hello, neighbor, beautiful night to remove a leg, isn’t it?

With each step closer to the house I felt That Something growing taller and harder inside me, and at the same time the old cold fingers clamping down to hold it in place. I was fire and ice, alive with moonlight and death, and as I came even with the house the whispers inside began to well up as I heard the faint sounds from the house, a chorus of rhythm and saxophones that sounded very much like Tito Puente and I did not need the rising whispers to tell me that I was right, this was indeed the place where the Doctor had set up his clinic.

He was here, and he was at work.

And now, what did I do about that? Of course the wise thing to do would be to stroll back to my car and wait for Deborah’s call-but was this really a night for wisdom, with that lyrically sneering moon so low in the sky and ice pouring through my veins and urging me onward?

And so when I had walked on past the house, I slipped into the shadows around the house next door and slid carefully through the backyard until I could see the back of Ingraham’s house. There was a very bright light showing in the back window and I stalked into the yard in the shadow of a tree, closer and closer. A few more cat-footed steps and I could almost see in the window. I moved a little closer, just outside the line that light cast on the ground.

From where I now stood I could at last see in the window, upward at a slight angle, inside, to the ceiling of the room. And there was the mirror Danco seemed so fond of using, showing me half the table-

– and slightly more than half of Sergeant Doakes.

He was strapped securely in place, motionless, even his newly shaved head clamped tight to the table. I could not see too many details, but from what I could see, both his hands were gone at the wrist. The hands first? Very interesting, a totally different approach from the one he had used on Chutsky. How did Dr. Danco decide what was right for each individual patient?

I found myself increasingly intrigued by the man and his work; there was a quirky sense of humor in motion here and as silly as it is, I wanted to know just a little bit more about how it worked. I moved half a step closer.

The music paused and I paused with it, and then as the mambo beat picked up again I heard a metallic cough behind me and felt something flick my shoulder, stinging and tingling, and I turned around to see a small man with large, thick glasses looking at me. He was holding in his hand what looked like a paintball gun, and I just had time to feel indignant that it was aimed at me before somebody removed all the bones from my legs and I melted down into the dew-smeared moonlit grass where it was all dark and full of dreams.

CHAPTER 29

I WAS CUTTING HAPPILY AWAY AT A VERY BAD PERSON who I had taped securely and strapped to a table but somehow the knife was made of rubber and only wobbled from side to side. I reached up and grabbed a giant bone saw instead and laid it into the alligator on the table, but the real joy would not come to me and instead there was pain and I saw that I was slicing away at my own arms. My wrists burned and bucked but I could not stop cutting and then I hit an artery and the awful red spewed out everywhere and blinded me with a scarlet mist and then I was falling, falling forever through the darkness of dim empty me where the awful shapes twisted and yammered and pulled at me until I fell through and hit the dreadful red puddle there on the floor beside where two hollow moons glared down at me and demanded: Open your eyes, you are awake-

And it all came back into focus on the two hollow moons that were actually the pair of thick lenses set in large black frames and wedged onto the face of a small, wiry man with a mustache who was bending over me with a syringe in his hand.

Dr. Danco, I presume?

I didn’t think I had said it out loud, but he nodded and said, “Yes, they called me that. And who are you?” His accent was slightly strained, as if he had to think a little too hard about each word. There was a trace of Cuban to it, but not like Spanish was his native tongue. For some reason his voice made me very unhappy, as if it had an odor of Dexter Repellant to it. But deep inside my lizard brain an old dinosaur lifted its head and roared back and so I did not cringe away from him as I had at first wanted to. I tried to shake my head, but found that very hard to do for some reason.

“Don’t try to move yet,” he said. “It won’t work. But don’t worry, you’ll be able to see everything I do to your friend on the table. And soon enough it will be your turn. You can see yourself, then, in the mirror.” He blinked at me, and a light touch of whimsy came into his voice. “It’s a wonderful thing about mirrors. Did you know that if someone is standing outside the house looking into a mirror, you can see them from inside the house?”

He sounded like an elementary-school teacher explaining a joke to a student he was fond of, but who might be too dumb to get it. And I felt just dumb enough for that to make sense, because I had walked right into this with no thought deeper than,

Gee, that’s interesting

. My own moon-driven impatience and curiosity had made me careless and he had seen me peeping in. Still, he was gloating, and that was annoying, so I felt compelled to say something, however feeble.

“Why yes, I knew that,” I said. “And did you know that this house has a front door, too? And no peacocks on guard this time.”

He blinked. “Should I be alarmed?” he said.

“Well, you never know who might come barging in uninvited.”

Dr. Danco moved the left corner of his mouth upward perhaps a quarter of an inch. “Well,” he said, “if your friend on the operating table is a fair sample, I think I may be all right, don’t you?” And I had to admit that he had a point. The first-team players had not been impressive; what did he have to fear from the bench? If only I wasn’t still a little dopey from whatever drugs he had used on me, I’m quite sure I would have said something far more clever, but in truth I was still in a little bit of a chemical fog.

“I do hope I’m not supposed to believe that help is on the way?” he said.

I was wondering the same thing, but it didn’t seem entirely smart to say so. “Believe what you like,” I said instead, hoping that was ambiguous enough to give him pause, and cursing the slowness of my normally swift mental powers.

“All right then,” he said. “I believe you came here alone. Although I am curious about why.”

“I wanted to study your technique,” I said.

“Oh, good,” he said. “I’ll be happy to show you-firsthand.” He flickered his tiny little smile at me again and added, “And then feet.” He waited for a moment, probably to see if I would laugh at his hilarious pun. I felt very sorry to disappoint him, but perhaps later it might seem funnier, if I got out of this alive.

Danco patted my arm and leaned in just a bit. “We’ll have to have your name, you know. No fun without it.”

I pictured him speaking to me by name as I lay strapped to the table, and it was not a cheerful image.

“Will you tell me your name?” he asked.

“Rumplestiltskin,” I said.

He stared at me, his eyes huge behind the thick lenses. Then he reached down to my hip pocket and worked my wallet out. He flipped it open and found my driver’s license. “Oh. So YOU’RE Dexter. Congratulations on your engagement.” He dropped my wallet beside me and patted my cheek. “Watch and learn, because all too soon I will be doing the same things to you.”

“How wonderful for you,” I said.

Danco frowned at me. “You really should be more frightened,” he said. “Why aren’t you?” He pursed his lips. “Interesting. I’ll increase the dosage next time.” And he stood up and moved away.

I lay in a dark corner next to a bucket and a broom and watched him bustle about the kitchen. He made himself a cup of instant Cuban coffee and stirred in a huge amount of sugar. Then he moved back to the center of the room and stared down at the table, sipping thoughtfully.

“Nahma,” the thing on the table that had once been Sergeant Doakes pleaded. “Nahana. Nahma.” Of course his tongue had been removed-obvious symbology for the person Danco believed had squealed on him.

“Yes, I know,” Dr. Danco said. “But you haven’t guessed a single one yet.” He almost seemed to be smiling as he said that, although his face did not look like it was formed to make any expression beyond thoughtful interest. But it was enough to set Doakes off into a fit of yammering and trying to thrash his way out of his bonds. It didn’t work very well, and didn’t seem to concern Dr. Danco, who moved away sipping his coffee and humming along off-key to Tito Puente. As Doakes flopped about I could see that his right foot was gone, as well as his hands and tongue. Chutsky had said his entire lower leg had been removed all at once. The Doctor was obviously making this one last a little longer. And when it was my turn-how would he decide what to take and when?

Piece by small dim piece my brain was clearing itself of fog. I wondered how long I had been unconscious. It didn’t seem like the kind of thing I could discuss with the Doctor.

The dosage

, he had said. He had been holding a syringe as I woke up, been surprised that I was not more frightened- Of course. What a wonderful idea, to inject his patients with some kind of psychotropic drug to increase their sense of helpless terror. I wished I knew how to do that. Why hadn’t I gotten medical training? But, of course, it was a little late to worry about that. And in any case, it sounded very much like the dosage was adjusted just right for Doakes.

“Well, Albert,” said the Doctor to the sergeant, in a very pleasant and conversational voice, slurping his coffee, “what’s your guess?”

“Nahana! Nah!”

“I don’t think that’s right,” said the Doctor. “Although perhaps if you had a tongue, it might have been. Well, in any case,” he said, and he bent to the edge of the table and made a small mark on a piece of paper, almost like he was crossing something out. “It is rather a long word,” he said. “Nine letters. Still, you have to take the good with the bad, don’t you?” And he put down his pencil and picked up a saw, and as Doakes bucked wildly against his bonds the Doctor sawed off Doakes’s left foot, just above the ankle. He did it very quickly and neatly, placing the severed foot beside Doakes’s head as he reached over to his array of instruments and picked up what looked a large soldering iron. He applied this to the new wound and a wet hiss of steam billowed up as he cauterized the stump for minimal blood flow. “There now,” he said. Doakes made a strangled noise and went limp as the smell of seared flesh drifted through the room. With any luck at all he would be unconscious for a while.

And I, happily, was a little more conscious all the time. As the chemicals from the Doctor’s dart gun seeped out of my brain, a sort of muddy light began to trickle in.

Ah, memory. Isn’t it a lovely thing? Even when we are in the middle of the worst of times, we have our memories to cheer us. I, for example, lay there helpless, able only to watch as dreadful things happened to Sergeant Doakes, knowing that soon it would be my turn. But even so, I had my memories.

And what I remembered now was something Chutsky had said when I rescued him. “When he got me up there,” he had said, “he said, ‘Seven,’ and ‘What’s your guess?’” At the time I had thought it a rather strange thing to say, and wondered if Chutsky had imagined it as a side effect of the drugs.

But I had just heard the Doctor say the same things to Doakes: “What’s your guess?” followed by, “Nine letters.” And then he had made a mark on the piece of paper taped to the table.

Just as there had been a piece of paper taped near each victim we had found, each time with a single word on it, the letters crossed out one at a time. HONOR. LOYALTY. Irony, of course: Danco reminding his former comrades of the virtues they had forsaken by turning him over to the Cubans. And poor Burdett, the man from Washington whom we found in the shell of the house in Miami Shores. He had been worth no real mental effort. Just a quick five letters, POGUE. And his arms, legs, and head had been quickly cut off and separated from his body. P-O-G-U-E. Arm, leg, leg, arm, head.

Was it really possible? I knew that my Dark Passenger had a sense of humor, but it was quite a bit darker than this-this was playful, whimsical, and even silly.

Much like the Choose Life license plate had been. And like everything else I had observed about the Doctor’s behavior.

It seemed so completely unlikely, but-

Doctor Danco was playing a little game as he sliced and diced. Perhaps he had played it with others in those long years inside the Cuban prison at the Isle of Pines, and maybe it had come to seem like just the right thing to serve his whimsical revenge. Because it certainly seemed like he was playing it now-with Chutsky, and with Doakes and the others. It was quite absurd, but it was also the only thing that made sense.

Doctor Danco was playing hangman.

“Well,” he said, squatting beside me again. “How do you think your friend is doing?”

“I think you have him stumped,” I said.

He cocked his head to one side and his small, dry tongue flicked out and over his lips as he stared at me, his eyes large and unblinking through his thick glasses. “Bravo,” he said, and he patted my arm again. “I don’t think you really believe this will happen to you,” he said. “Perhaps a ten will persuade you.”

“Does it have an E in it?” I asked, and he rocked back slightly as if some offensive odor had drifted up to him from my socks.

“Well,” he said, still without blinking, and then something that may have been related to a smile twitched at the corner of his mouth. “Yes, there are two E’s. But of course, you guessed out of turn, so…” He shrugged, a tiny gesture.

“You could count it as a wrong guess-for Sergeant Doakes,” I suggested, quite helpfully, I thought.

He nodded. “You don’t like him. I see,” he said, and he frowned a little. “Even so, you really should be more afraid.”

“Afraid of what?” I said. Sheer bravado, of course, but how often does one get a chance to banter with an authentic villain? And the shot seemed to go home; Danco stared at me for a long moment before he finally gave his head a very slight shake.

“Well, Dexter,” he said, “I can see we’re going to have our work cut out for us.” And he gave me his tiny, almost invisible smile. “Among other things,” he added, and a cheerful black shadow reared up behind him as he spoke, thundering a happy challenge to my Dark Passenger, which slid forward and bellowed back. For a moment we faced off like that, and then he finally blinked, just once, and stood up. He walked back over to the table where Doakes slumbered so peacefully, and I sank back in my homey little corner and wondered what sort of miracle the Great Dexterini might come up with for this, his greatest escape.

Of course, I knew that Deborah and Chutsky were on their way, but I found that more worrisome than anything else. Chutsky would insist on restoring his damaged manhood by charging in on his crutch waving a gun in his only hand, and even if he allowed Deborah to back him up, she was wearing a large cast that made movement difficult. Hardly a rescue team to inspire confidence. No, I had to believe that my little corner of the kitchen was simply going to become crowded, and with all three of us taped and doped there would be no help coming for any of us.

And truthfully, in spite of my brief spatter of heroic dialogue, I was still somewhat woozy from whatever had been in Danco’s sleepy dart. So I was doped, tightly bound, and all alone. But there’s always some positive to every situation, if you just look hard enough, and after trying to think of one for a moment, I realized that I had to admit that so far I had not been attacked by rabid rats.

Tito Puente swung into a new tune, something a bit softer, and I grew more philosophical. We all have to go sometime. Even so, this would not make my list of top ten preferred ways to perish. Falling asleep and not waking up was number one on my list, and it got rapidly more distasteful after that.

What would I see when I died? I can’t really bring myself to believe in the soul, or Heaven and Hell, or any of that solemn nonsense. After all, if human beings have souls, wouldn’t I have one, too? And I can assure you, I don’t. Being what I am, how could I? Unthinkable. It’s hard enough just to be me. To be me with a soul and a conscience and the threat of some kind of afterlife would be impossible.

But to think of wonderful, one-of-a-kind me going away forever and never coming back-very sad. Tragic, really. Perhaps I should consider reincarnation. No control there, of course. I could come back as a dung beetle, or even worse, come back as another monster like me. There was certainly nobody who would grieve over me, especially if Debs went out at the same time. Selfishly, I hoped I would go first. Just get it over with. This whole charade had gone on long enough. Time to end it. Perhaps it was just as well.

Tito started a new song, very romantic, singing something about “Te amo,” and now that I thought of it, it might very well be that Rita would grieve over me, the idiot. And Cody and Astor, in their damaged way, would surely miss me. Somehow I had been picking up an entire train of emotional attachments lately. How could this keep happening to me? And hadn’t I been thinking much the same thoughts far too recently, as I hung upside down underwater in Deborah’s flipped car? Why was I spending so much time dying lately, and not getting it right? As I knew only too well, there really wasn’t much to it.

I heard Danco rattling around on a tray of tools and turned my head to look. It was still very difficult to move, but it seemed to be getting a little easier and I managed to get him into focus. He had a large syringe in his hand and approached Sergeant Doakes with the instrument held up as if he wanted it to be seen and admired. “Time to wake up, Albert,” he said cheerfully and jammed the needle into Doakes’s arm. For a moment, nothing happened; then Doakes twitched awake and gave out a gratifying series of groans and yammers, and Dr. Danco stood there watching him and enjoying the moment, syringe once again held aloft.

There was a thud of some kind from the front of the house and Danco spun around and grabbed for his paintball gun just as the large and bald form of Kyle Chutsky filled the door to the room. As I had feared, he was leaning on his crutch and holding a gun in what even I could tell was a sweaty and unsteady hand. “Son of a bitch,” he said, and Dr. Danco shot him with the paintball gun once, twice. Chutsky stared at him, slack-jawed, and Danco lowered his weapon as Chutsky began to slide to the floor.

And right behind Chutsky, invisible until he slumped to the floor, was my dear sister, Deborah, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen, next to the Glock pistol she held in her steady right fist. She did not pause to sweat or call Danco names. She simply tightened down her jaw muscles and fired two quick shots that took Dr. Danco in the middle of the chest and lifted him off his feet to spill backward over the frantically squealing Doakes.

Everything was very quiet and motionless for a long moment, except for the relentless Tito Puente. Then Danco slipped off the table, and Debs knelt beside Chutsky and felt for a pulse. She eased him down to a more comfy position, kissed his forehead, and finally turned to me. “Dex,” she said. “Are you all right?”

“I’ll be fine, Sis,” I said, feeling somewhat light-headed, “if you’ll just turn off that horrible music.”

She crossed to the battered boom box and yanked the plug from the wall, looking down at Sergeant Doakes in the sudden huge silence and trying not to show too much on her face. “We’ll get you out of here now, Doakes,” she said. “It’s going to be all right.” She put a hand on his shoulder as he blubbered, and then turned suddenly away and came over to me with the tears starting down her face. “Jesus,” she whispered as she cut me loose. “Doakes is a mess.”

But as she ripped the last of the tape off my wrists it was hard for me to feel any distress about Doakes, because I was free at last, all the way free, of the tape and the Doctor and doing favors and yes, it looked like I might finally be free of Sergeant Doakes, too.

I stood up, which was not as easy as it sounds. I stretched my poor cramped limbs as Debs pulled out her radio to summon our friends on the Miami Beach police force. I walked over to the operating table. It was a little thing, but my curiosity had gotten the best of me. I reached down and grabbed the piece of paper taped to the edge of the table.

In those familiar, spidery block letters, Danco had written, “TREACHERY.” Five of the letters were crossed out.

I looked at Doakes. He looked back at me, wide-eyed and broadcasting a hate that he would never be able to speak.

So you see, sometimes there really are happy endings.

EPILOGUE

IT IS A VERY BEAUTIFUL THING TO WATCH THE SUN COME up over the water in the stillness of South Florida ’s subtropical morning. It is far more beautiful when that great yellow full moon hangs so low on the opposite horizon, slowly paling to silver before it slides below the waves of the open ocean and lets the sun take over the sky. And it is even more beautiful still to watch all this out of sight of land, from the deck of a twenty-six-foot cabin cruiser as you stretch the last knots from your neck and arms, tired but fulfilled and oh-so-very happy at last, from a night of work that had waited just a bit too long.

Soon I would step into my own little boat, towing behind us now, and I would throw off the tow line and head back in the direction the moon had gone, motoring sleepily home to a brand-new life as a soon-to-be-married man. And the

Osprey

, the twenty-six-foot borrowed cabin cruiser, would motor slowly in the opposite direction, toward Bimini, out into the Gulf Stream, the great blue bottomless river that runs through the ocean so conveniently near Miami. The

Osprey

would not make it to Bimini, would not even make it across the Gulf Stream. Long before I closed my happy eyes in my little bed, its engines would stall, flooded with water, and then the boat would slowly fill with water, too, rocking sluggishly in the waves before it slid under, down into the endless crystal clear depths of the Gulf Stream.

And perhaps somewhere far below the surface it would finally settle onto the bottom among the rocks and giant fish and sunken ships, and it was whimsically wonderful to think that somewhere nearby was a neatly bound package swaying gently in the current as the crabs nibbled it down to the bones. I had used four anchors on Reiker after wrapping the pieces with rope and chain, and the neat, bloodless bundle with two awful red boots firmly chained to the bottom had sunk quickly out of sight, all of it except one tiny drop of rapidly drying blood on the glass slide in my pocket. The slide would go in the box on my shelf, right behind MacGregor’s, and Reiker would feed the crabs and life would at last go on again, with its happy rhythms of pretending and then pouncing.

And a few years from now I would bring Cody along and show him all the wonders that unfold in a Night of the Knife. He was far too young now, but he would start small, learn to plan, and move slowly upward. Harry had taught me that, and now I would teach it to Cody. And someday, perhaps he would follow in my shadowy footsteps and become a new Dark Avenger, carrying the Harry Plan forward against a new generation of monsters. Life, as I said, goes on.

I sighed, happy and content and ready for all of it. So beautiful. The moon was gone now and the sun had begun to burn away the cool of the morning. It was time to go home.

I stepped into my own boat, started the engine, and cast off the tow line. Then I turned my boat around and followed the moon home to bed.

***

Annotation

Is evil alive…? Dr Jerry Halpern is trying to find out, studying for his PhD on the subject. Dexter Morgan, meanwhile, has a few wicked things of his own to contend with – not least, planning his wedding to Rita to complete his nice-guy disguise. But when a student of Halpern's is found burnt, molested and headless – seemingly sacrificed to an ancient god – and Dex is brought in as forensic analyst to help investigate, he realises he could be dealing with someone a whole lot more sinister than he is. Soon it seems the dark passenger in Dexter's head has gone into hiding. And when something creeps out your friendly neighbourhood serial killer, you know it's serious… As Halpern and Dexter are stalked by death, it looks like it's getting personal – especially as Dex now has a family to protect. Gradually, Dexter realises his stepchildren might share his extra-curricular interest in death. Could he help them target their bloodlust, just as he steers his own? But to do that, Dex must cope with a certain mutilated sergeant from his past, and more importantly…stay alive…

Jeffry P Lindsay

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

IN THE BEGINNING

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 24

CHAPTER 25

CHAPTER 26

CHAPTER 27

CHAPTER 28

CHAPTER 29

CHAPTER 30

CHAPTER 31

CHAPTER 32

CHAPTER 33

CHAPTER 34

CHAPTER 35

CHAPTER 36

CHAPTER 37

CHAPTER 38

CHAPTER 39

CHAPTER 40

EPILOGUE

Jeffry Lindsay

Jeffry P Lindsay

Dexter in the Dark

The third book in the Dexter series, 2007

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is impossible to write in a vacuum. The air for this book was provided by Bear, Pookie, and Tink. My gratitude to Jason Kaufman and his aide de camp, Caleb, for their enormous help in shaping the manuscript.

And as ever, special thanks to Nick Ellison, who made it all happen.

FOR HILARY, AS ALWAYS

IN THE BEGINNING

I

T REMEMBERED A SENSE OF SURPRISE, AND THEN FALLING,

but that was all. Then IT just waited.

IT waited a very long time, but IT could wait easily because there was no memory and nothing had screamed yet. And so IT did not know IT was waiting. IT did not know it was anything at that point. IT just was, with no way to mark time, with no way even to have the idea of time.

So IT waited, and IT watched. There was not a great deal to see at first; fire, rocks, water, and eventually some little crawly things, which began to change and get bigger after a while. They didn’t do very much except to eat each other and reproduce. But there was nothing to compare that to, so for a while that was enough.

Time passed. IT watched as the big things and the little things killed and ate one another aimlessly. There was no real joy in watching that, since there was nothing else to do and there were plenty more of them. But IT didn’t seem able to do anything but watch. And so IT began to wonder: Why am I watching this?

IT could see no real point to anything that happened and there was nothing IT could do, and yet there IT was, watching. IT thought about this a very long time, but came to no conclusions. There was still no way to think any of this through; the whole idea of purpose wasn’t quite there yet. There was just IT and them.

There were lots of them, more all the time, busily killing and eating and copulating. But there was only one of IT, and IT did none of those things, and IT began to wonder why that was, too. Why was IT different? Why was IT so unlike everything else? What was IT, and if IT actually was something, was IT supposed to do something, too?

More time passed. The countless changing crawly things slowly got bigger and better at killing each other. Interesting at first, but only because of the subtle differences. They crawled, hopped, and slithered to kill one another-one actually flew through the air to kill. Very interesting-but so what?

IT began to feel uncomfortable with all this. What was the point? Was IT supposed to be a part of what IT watched? If not, then why was IT here watching?

IT became determined to find the reason IT was here, whatever that was. So now when IT studied the big things and the little things, IT studied the ways IT was different from them. All the other things needed to eat and drink or they died. And even if they ate and drank, they eventually died anyway. IT didn’t die. IT just went on and on. IT didn’t need to eat or drink. But gradually IT became aware that IT did need…something-but what? IT could feel that somewhere there was a need, and the need was growing, but IT could not tell what it was; there was just the sense that something was missing.

No answers came as ages of scales and egg clutches paraded by. Kill and eat, kill and eat. What is the point here? Why do I have to watch all this when I can’t do anything about it? IT began to feel just a little bit sour about the whole thing.

And then suddenly one day there was a brand-new thought: Where did I come from?

IT had figured out long ago that the eggs the others hatched from came from copulation. But IT had not come from an egg. Nothing at all had copulated to bring IT into existence. There had been nothing there to copulate when IT first became aware. IT had been there first and, seemingly, forever, except for the vague and disturbing memory of falling. But everything else had been hatched or born. IT had not. And with this thought the wall between IT and them seemed to grow vastly higher, stretching up impossibly tall, separating IT from them completely and eternally. IT was alone, completely alone forever, and that hurt. IT wanted to be a part of something. There was only one of IT-shouldn’t there be a way for IT to copulate and make more, too?

And that began to seem infinitely more important, that thought: MORE of IT. Everything else made more. IT wanted to make more, too.

It suffered, watching the mindless things in their roiling riotous living. Resentment grew, turned into anger, and finally the anger turned into rage toward the stupid, pointless things and their endless, inane, insulting existence. And the rage grew and festered until one day IT couldn’t stand it any longer. Without a pause to think what IT was doing, IT rose up and rushed at one of the lizards, wanting somehow to crush it. And a wonderful thing happened.

IT was inside the lizard.

Seeing what the lizard saw, feeling what it felt.

For a long while IT forgot rage altogether.

The lizard did not appear to notice it had a passenger. It went about its business of killing and copulating, and IT rode along. It was very interesting to be on board when the lizard killed one of the littler ones. As an experiment, IT moved into one of the little ones. Being in the one that killed was far more fun, but not enough to lead to any real purposeful ideas. Being in the one that died was very interesting and did lead to some ideas, but not very happy ones.

IT enjoyed these new experiences for a while. But although IT could feel their simple emotions, they never went beyond confusion. They still didn’t notice IT, didn’t have any idea that-well, they simply didn’t have any idea. They didn’t seem capable of having an idea. They were just so limited-and yet they were alive. They had life and didn’t know it, didn’t understand what to do with it. It didn’t seem fair. And soon IT was bored once more, and growing angry all over again.

And finally one day the monkey things started to show up. They didn’t seem like much at first. They were small and cowardly and loud. But one tiny difference finally caught IT’s attention: they had hands that let them do some amazing things. IT watched as they became aware of their hands, too, and began to use them. They used them for a great variety of brand-new things: masturbating, maiming one another, and taking food from the smaller of their own kind.

IT was fascinated and watched more closely. IT watched them hit each other and then run away and hide. IT watched them steal from one another, but only when no one was looking. IT watched them do horrible things to each other and then pretend that nothing had happened. And as IT watched, for the first time, something wonderful happened: IT laughed.

And as IT laughed, a thought was born, and grew into clarity wrapped in glee.

IT thought: I can work with this.

CHAPTER 1

W

HAT KIND OF MOON IS THIS? NOT THE BRIGHT, GLEAMING moon of slashing happiness, no indeed. Oh, it pulls and whines and shines in a cheap and guttering imitation of what it should do, but there is no edge to it. This moon has no wind in it to sail carnivores across the happy night sky and into slash-and-slice ecstasy. Instead this moon flickers shyly through a squeaky-clean window, onto a woman who perches all cheerful and perky on the edge of the couch and talks about flowers, canapés, and Paris.

Paris?

Yes, with moon-faced seriousness, Paris is what she is talking about in that far-spreading syrupy tone. She is talking about Paris. Again.

So what kind of moon can this possibly be, with its near-breathless smile and smirking lace around the edges? It batters feebly at the window, but it can’t quite get in past all the sickly-sweet warbling. And what kind of Dark Avenger could simply sit across the room, as poor Dazed Dexter does now, pretending to listen while mooning blearily on his chair?

Why, this moon must be a honeymoon-unfurling its marital banner across the living-room night, signaling for all to rally round, sound the charge, once more into the church, dear friends-because Dexter of the Deadly Dimples is getting married. Hitched to the wagon of bliss pulled by the lovely Rita, who has turned out to have a lifelong passion to see Paris.

Married, honeymoon in Paris…Do these words really belong in the same sentence as any reference at all to our Phantom Flenser?

Can we really see a suddenly sober and simpering slasher at the altar of an actual church, in Fred Astaire tie and tails, slipping the ring onto a white-wrapped finger while the congregation sniffles and beams? And then Demon Dexter in madras shorts, gawking at the Eiffel Tower and snarfing café au lait at the Arc de Triomphe? Holding hands and trundling giddily along the Seine, staring vacantly at every gaudy trinket in the Louvre?

Of course, I suppose I could make a pilgrimage to the Rue Morgue, a sacred site for serial slashers.

But let us be just a tiny bit serious for a moment: Dexter in Paris? For starters, are Americans still allowed to go to France? And for finishers, Dexter in Paris? On a

honeymoon

? How can someone of Dexter’s midnight persuasions possibly consider anything so ordinary? How can someone who considers sex as interesting as deficit accounting enter into marriage? In short, how by all that is unholy, dark, and deadly can Dexter really mean to do this?

All wonderful questions, and very reasonable. And in truth, somewhat difficult to answer, even to myself. But here I am, enduring the Chinese water torture of Rita’s expectations and wondering how Dexter can possibly go through with this.

Well then. Dexter can go through with this because he must, in part to maintain and even upgrade his necessary disguise, which prevents the world at large from seeing him for what he is, which is at best not something one would really like to have sitting across the table when the lights go out-especially if there is silverware present. And quite naturally, it takes a great deal of careful work to make sure it is not generally known that Dexter is driven by his Dark Passenger, a whispery-silk voice in the shaded backseat that from time to time climbs into the front seat to take the wheel and drive us to the Theme Park of the Unthinkable. It would never do to have the sheep see that Dexter is the wolf among them.

And so work we do, the Passenger and I, work very hard at our disguise. For the past several years we have had Dating Dexter, designed to present a cheerful and above all normal face to the world. This charming production featured Rita as the Girlfriend, and it was in many ways an ideal arrangement, since she was as uninterested in sex as I am, and yet wanted the companionship of an Understanding Gentleman. And Dexter really does understand. Not humans, romance, love, and all that gabble. No. What Dexter understands is the lethally grinning bottom line, how to find the utterly deserving among Miami ’s oh-so-many candidates for that final dark election to Dexter’s modest Hall of Fame.

This does not absolutely guarantee that Dexter is a charming companion; the charm took years of practice, and it is the pure artificial product of great laboratory skill. But alas for poor Rita-battered by a terribly unfortunate and violent first marriage-she can’t seem to tell the margarine from the butter.

All well and good. For two years Dexter and Rita cut a brilliant swathe across the Miami social scene, noticed and admired everywhere. But then, through a series of events that might well leave an enlightened observer somewhat skeptical, Dexter and Rita had become accidentally engaged. And the more I pondered on how to extricate myself from this ridiculous fate, the more I realized that it was a logical next step in the evolution of my disguise. A married Dexter-a Dexter with two ready-made children!-is surely a great deal further from seeming to be anything at all like what he really is. A quantum leap forward, onto a new level of human camouflage.

And then there are the two children.

It may seem strange that someone whose only passion is for human vivisection should actually enjoy Rita’s children, but he does. I do. Mind you, I don’t get all weepy-eyed at the thought of a lost tooth, since that would require the ability to feel emotion, and I am quite happily without any such mutation. But on the whole, I find children a great deal more interesting than their elders, and I get particularly irritable with those who cause them harm. In fact, I occasionally search them out. And when I track these predators down, and when I am very sure that they have actually done what they have been doing, I make sure they are quite unable to do it ever again-and with a very happy hand, unspoiled by conscience.

So the fact that Rita had two children from her disastrous first marriage was far from repellent, particularly when it became apparent that they needed Dexter’s special parenting touch to keep their own fledgling Dark Passengers strapped into a safe, snug Dark Car Seat until they could learn how to drive for themselves. For presumably as a result of the emotional and even physical damage inflicted on Cody and Astor by their drug-addled biological father, they too had turned to the Dark Side, just like me. And now they were to be my children, legally as well as spiritually. It was almost enough to make me feel that there was some guiding purpose to life after all.

And so there were several very good reasons for Dexter to go through with this-but Paris? I don’t know where it came from, this idea that Paris is romantic. Aside from the French, has anyone but Lawrence Welk ever thought an accordion was sexy? And wasn’t it by now clear that they don’t like us there? And they insist on speaking French, of all things?

Perhaps Rita had been brainwashed by an old movie, something with a perky-plucky blonde and a romantic dark-haired man, modernist music playing as they pursue each other around the Eiffel Tower and laugh at the quaint hostility of the dirty, Gauloise-smoking man in the beret. Or maybe she had heard a Jacques Brel record once and decided it spoke to her soul. Who can say? But somehow Rita had the notion firmly welded into her steel-trap brain that Paris was the capital of sophisticated romance, and the idea would not come out without major surgery.

So on top of the endless debates about chicken versus fish and wine versus cash bar, a series of monomaniacal rambling monologues about Paris began to emerge. Surely we could afford a whole week, that would give us time to see the Jardin des Tuileries

and

the Louvre-and maybe something by Molière at the Comédie-Française. I had to applaud the depth of her research. For my part, my interest in Paris had faded away completely long ago when I learned that it was in France.

Luckily for us, I was saved from the necessity of finding a politic way of telling her all this when Cody and Astor made their subtle entrance. They don’t barrel into a room with guns blazing as most children of seven and ten do. As I have said, they were somewhat damaged by their dear old biological dad, and one consequence is that you never see them come and go: they enter the room by osmosis. One moment they are nowhere to be seen and the next they are standing quietly beside you, waiting to be noticed.

“We want to play kick the can,” Astor said. She was the spokesperson for the pair; Cody never put more than four words together in a single day. He was not stupid, very far from it. He simply preferred not to speak most of the time. Now he just looked at me and nodded.

“Oh,” said Rita, pausing in her reflections on the land of Rousseau, Candide, and Jerry Lewis, “well then, why don’t you-”

“We want to play kick the can with

Dexter

,” Astor added, and Cody nodded very loudly.

Rita frowned. “I guess we should have talked about this before, but don’t you think Cody and Astor-I mean, shouldn’t they start to call you something more, I don’t know-but just Dexter? It seems kind of-”

“How about mon papere?” I asked. “Or Monsieur le Comte?”

“How about, I don’t think so?” muttered Astor.

“I just think-” said Rita.

“Dexter is fine,” I said. “They’re used to it.”

“It doesn’t seem respectful,” she said.

I looked down at Astor. “Show your mother you can say ‘Dexter’ respectfully,” I told her.

She rolled her eyes. “Puh-

leeeeeze

,” she said.

I smiled at Rita. “See? She’s ten years old. She can’t say

anything

respectfully.”

“Well, yes, but-” Rita said.

“It’s okay. They’re okay,” I said. “But Paris -”

“Let’s go outside,” said Cody, and I looked at him with surprise. Four entire syllables-for him it was practically an oration.

“All right,” said Rita. “If you really think-”

“I almost never think,” I said. “It gets in the way of the mental process.”

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Astor said.

“It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s true,” I said.

Cody shook his head. “Kick the can,” he said. And rather than break in on his talking jag, I simply followed him out into the yard.

CHAPTER 2

O

F COURSE, EVEN WITH RITA’S GLORIOUS PLANS UNFOLDING, life was not all jubilation and strawberries. There was real work to do, too. And because Dexter is nothing if not conscientious, I had been doing it. I had spent the past two weeks dabbing on the last few brushstrokes of a brand-new canvas. The young gentleman who served as my inspiration had inherited a great deal of money, and he had apparently been using it for the kind of dreadful homicidal escapades that made me wish I was rich, too. Alexander Macauley was his name, though he called himself “Zander,” which seemed somewhat preppy to me, but perhaps that was the point. He was a dyed-in-the-wool trust-fund hippie, after all, someone who had never done any real work, devoting himself entirely to lighthearted amusement of the kind that would have made my hollow heart go pitter-pat, if only Zander had shown slightly better taste in choosing his victims.

The Macauley family’s money came from vast hordes of cattle, endless citrus groves, and dumping phosphates into Lake Okeechobee. Zander came frequently to the poor areas of town to pour out his largesse across the city’s homeless. And the favored few he really wished to encourage he reportedly brought back to the family ranch and gave employment, as I learned from a teary-eyed and admiring newspaper article.

Of course Dexter always applauds the charitable spirit. But in general, I am so very much in favor of it because it is nearly always a warning sign that something nefarious, wicked, and playful is going on behind the Mother Teresa mask. Not that I would ever doubt that somewhere in the depths of the human heart there really and truly does live a spirit of kind and caring charity, mingled with the love of fellow man. Of course it does. I mean, I’m sure it must be in there somewhere. I’ve just never seen it. And since I lack both humanity and real heart, I am forced to rely on experience, which tells me that charity begins at home, and almost always ends there, too.

So when I see a young, wealthy, handsome, and otherwise normal-appearing young man lavishing his resources on the vile downtrodden of the earth, I find it difficult to accept the altruism at face value, no matter how beautifully presented. After all, I am fairly good at presenting a charming and innocent picture of myself, and we know how accurate that is, don’t we?

Happily for my consistent worldview, Zander was no different-just a lot richer. And his inherited money had made him a little bit sloppy. Because in the meticulous tax records I uncovered, the family ranch appeared to be unoccupied and idle, which clearly meant that wherever he was taking his dear dirty friends, it was not to a healthy and happy life of country labor.

Even better for my purposes, wherever they went with their new friend Zander, they were going barefoot. Because in a special room at his lovely Coral Gables home, guarded by some very cunning and expensive locks that took me almost five full minutes to pick, Zander had saved some souvenirs. It’s a foolish risk for a monster to take; I know this full well, since I do it myself. But if someday a hardworking investigator comes across my little box of memories, he will find no more than some glass slides, each with a single drop of blood preserved upon it, and no way ever to prove that any of them is anything sinister at all.

Zander was not quite so clever. He had saved a shoe from each of his victims, and counted on too much money and a locked door to keep his secrets safe.

Well really. No wonder monsters get such a bad reputation. It was just too naive for words-and shoes? Seriously, shoes, by all that’s unholy? I try to be tolerant and understanding of the foibles of others, but this was a bit much. What could possibly be the attraction in a sweaty, slime-encrusted, twenty-year-old sneaker? And then to leave them right out in the open like that, too. It was almost insulting.

Of course, Zander probably thought that if he was ever caught he could count on buying the best legal care in the world, who would surely get him off with only community service-a little ironic, since that was how it had all started. But one thing he had not counted on was being caught by Dexter instead of the police. And his trial would take place in the Traffic Court of the Dark Passenger, in which there are no lawyers-although I certainly hope to catch one someday soon-and the verdict is always absolutely final.

But was a shoe really enough proof? I had no doubt of Zander’s guilt. Even if the Dark Passenger hadn’t been singing arias the entire time I looked at the shoes, I knew very well what the collection meant-left to his own devices, Zander would collect more shoes. I was quite sure that he was a bad man, and I wanted very much to have a moonlight discussion with him and give him some pointed comments. But I had to be absolutely sure-that was the Harry Code.

I had always followed the careful rules laid down by Harry, my cop foster father, who taught me how to be what I am with modesty and exactness. He had shown me how to leave a crime scene clean as only a cop can, and he had taught me to use the same kind of thoroughness in selecting my partner for the dance. If there was any doubt at all, I could not call Zander out to play.

And now? No court in the world would convict Zander of anything beyond unsanitary fetishism based on his display of footwear-but no court in the world had the expert testimony of the Dark Passenger, either, that soft, urgent inner voice that demanded action and was never wrong. And with that sibilance mounting in my interior ear it was difficult to stay calm and impartial. I wanted to claim Zander for the Final Dance the way I wanted my next breath.

I wanted, I was sure-but I knew what Harry would say. It wasn’t enough. He taught me that it’s good to see bodies in order to be certain, and Zander had managed to hide all of them well enough to keep me from finding them. And without a body, no amount of wanting it would make it right.

I went back to my research to find out where he might be stashing a short row of pickled corpses. His home was out of the question. I had been in it and had not had a hint of anything other than the shoe museum, and the Dark Passenger is normally quite good at nosing out cadaver collections. Besides, there was no place to put them at the house-there are no basements in Florida, and it was a neighborhood where he could not dig in the yard or carry in bodies without being observed. And a short consultation with the Passenger convinced me that someone who mounted his souvenirs on walnut plaques would certainly dispose of the leftovers neatly.

The ranch was an excellent possibility, but a quick trip to the old place revealed no traces at all. It had clearly been abandoned for some time; even the driveway was overgrown.

I dug deeper: Zander owned a condo in Maui, but that was much too far away. He had a few acres in North Carolina -possible, but the thought of driving twelve hours with a body in the car made it seem unlikely. He owned stock in a company that was trying to develop Toro Key, a small island south of Cape Florida. But a corporate site was certainly out of the question-too many people might wander in and poke around. In any case, I remembered trying to land on Toro Key when I was younger, and it had armed guards strolling about to keep people away. It had to be somewhere else.

Among his many portfolios and assets, the only thing that made any sense at all was Zander’s boat, a forty-five-foot Cigarette. I knew from my experience with a previous monster that a boat provided wonderful opportunities for disposing of leftovers. Simply wire the body to a weight, flip it over the rail, and wave bye-bye. Neat, clean, tidy; no fuss, no muss, no evidence.

And no way for me to get my proof, either. Zander kept his boat at the most exclusive private marina in Coconut Grove, the Royal Bay Yacht Club. Their security was very good, too good for Dexter to sneak in with a lock pick and a smile. It was a full-service marina for the terminally rich, the kind of place where they cleaned and polished your bowline when you brought the boat in. You didn’t even have to fuel up your own boat; just call ahead and it would be ready for you, down to chilled champagne in the cockpit. And happily smiling armed guards infested the grounds night and day, tipping their hats at the Quality and shooting anyone who climbed the fence.

The boat was unreachable. I was as certain as I could be that Zander was using it to dispose of the bodies, and so was the Dark Passenger, which counts for even more. But there was no way to get to it.

It was annoying, even frustrating, to picture Zander with his latest trophy-probably bundled neatly into a gold-plated ice chest-calling cheerfully ahead to the dockmaster and ordering the boat fueled, and then strolling nonchalantly down the dock while two grunting Wackenhuts put the chest on board his boat and waved a respectful good-bye. But I could not get to the boat and prove it. Without this final proof, the Harry Code would not allow me to proceed.

Certain as I was, what did that leave me? I could try to catch Zander in the act the next time. But there was no way to be sure when that would be, and I couldn’t watch him all the time. I did have to show up at work now and then, and make my token appearances at home, and go through all the motions of maintaining a normal-seeming life. And so at some point in the next weeks or so if the pattern held, Zander would call the dockmaster and order his boat prepared, and-

And the dockmaster, because he was an efficient employee at a rich man’s club, would make a note of exactly what he did to the boat and when: how much fuel he put in, what kind of champagne, and how much Windex he used on the windscreen. He would put all that in the file marked “Macauley,” and store it on his computer.

And suddenly we were back in Dexter’s world again, with the Passenger hissing certainty and urging me to the keyboard.

Dexter is modest, even self-effacing, and certainly aware of the limits of his considerable talent. But if there was a limit to what I could discover on the computer, I had not found it yet. I sat back down and went to work.

It took me less than half an hour to hack into the club’s computers and find the records. Sure enough, there was a thorough service record. I checked it against the meetings of the board of Zander’s favorite charity, One World Mission of Divine Light, which was on the edge of Liberty City. On February 14, the board was delighted to announce that Wynton Allen would be moving out of the den of iniquity that is Miami and onto Zander’s ranch to be rehabilitated by honest labor. And on February 15, Zander had taken a boat trip that used thirty-five gallons of fuel.

On March 11, Tyrone Meeks had been granted similar happiness. And on March 12, Zander took a boat ride.

And so it went; each time some lucky homeless person was chosen for a life of bucolic joy, Zander placed a service order on his boat within twenty-four hours.

This was not seeing the bodies-but the Harry Code had been set up to operate in the cracks of the system, in the shadow areas of perfect justice rather than perfect law. I was sure, the Passenger was sure, and this was enough proof to satisfy all of us.

Zander would go on a different kind of moonlight cruise, and not all of his money would keep him afloat.

CHAPTER 3

S

O ON A NIGHT LIKE MANY OTHERS, WHEN THE MOON flung down chords of manic melody onto its happily bloodthirsty children, I was humming along and preparing to go out for a sharp frolic. All the work was done and it was playtime now for Dexter. It should have been a matter of mere moments to gather my simple toys and head out the door for my appointment with the trust-fund troublemaker. But of course, with marriage looming, nothing at all was simple anymore. I began to wonder, in fact, if anything would ever be simple again.

Of course, I was building a perfect and nearly impenetrable facade of gleaming antiseptic steel and glass to cement onto the front of the Gothic horror of Castle Dexter. So I was very willing to cooperate in retiring the Old Dexter, and therefore I had been in the process of “consolidating our lives,” as Rita put it. In this case that meant moving out of my comfy little nook on the edge of Coconut Grove and into Rita’s three-bedroom house farther south, as this was the “sensible” thing to do. Of course, aside from being sensible it was also a Monster Inconvenience. Under the new regime there was no way I could keep anything even slightly private if I should want to. Which of course I did. Every dedicated, responsible ogre has his secrets, and there were things that I did not wish to see the light of day in anyone’s hands but my own.

There was, for example, a certain amount of research on potential playmates; and there was also the small wooden box, very dear to me, that contained forty-one glass slides, each with a single drop of dried blood preserved in the center, each drop representing a single less-than-human life that had ended at my hands-the entire scrapbook of my inner life. Because I do not leave great heaps of decaying flesh lying about. I am not a slovenly, slipshod, madly slashing fiend. I am an extremely tidy, madly slashing fiend. I am always very careful indeed to get rid of my leftovers, and even some cruel implacable foe bent on proving me the vile ogre that I am would be hard-pressed to say what my little slides really were.

Still, explaining them might raise questions that could eventually prove awkward, even to a doting wife-and even more so to some fearsome nemesis passionately devoted to my destruction. There had been one such recently, a Miami cop named Sergeant Doakes. And although he was technically still alive, I had begun to think of him in the past tense, since his recent misadventures had cost him both his feet and hands, as well as his tongue. He was certainly in no shape to bring me to well-deserved justice. But I knew enough to know that if there had been one like him, there would sooner or later be another.

And so privacy seemed important-not that I had ever been a show-off where my personal affairs were concerned. As far as I knew, no one had ever seen into my little slide box. But I had never had a fiancée cleaning up for me, nor two very inquisitive kids sniffing around my things so they could learn to be much more like Dark Daddy Dexter.

Rita seemed to appreciate my need for a bit of personal space, if not the reasons for it, and she had sacrificed her sewing room, turning it into something she called Dexter’s study. Eventually this would house my computer and my few books and CDs and, I suppose, my little rosewood box of slides. But how could I possibly leave it in here? I could explain it to Cody and Astor easily enough-but what to tell Rita? Should I try to hide it? Build a secret passage behind a fake bookcase leading down a winding stairway to my dark lair? Put the box in the bottom of a fake can of shaving cream, perhaps? It was something of a problem.

So far I had avoided needing to find a solution by hanging on to my apartment. But I still kept a few simple things in my study, like my fillet knives and duct tape, which could readily be explained away by my love for fishing and air-conditioning. The solution could come later. Right now I felt icy fingers prodding and tickling at my spine, and I had an urgent need to keep an appointment with a spoiled young man.

And so into my study I went, in search of a navy blue nylon gym bag I had been saving for a formal occasion, to hold my knife and tape. I pulled it from the closet, a sharp taste of anticipation building on my tongue, and put in my party toys: a new roll of duct tape, a fillet knife, gloves, my silk mask, and a coil of nylon rope for emergencies. All set. I could feel my veins gleaming with steely excitement, the wild music rising in my inner ears, the roaring of the Passenger’s pulse urging me on, out, into it. I turned to go-

And ran into a matched pair of solemn children, staring up at me with expectation.

“He wants to go,” Astor said, and Cody nodded, looking at me with large unblinking eyes.

I honestly believe that those who know me would say I have a glib tongue and a ready wit, but as I mentally played back what Astor had said and tried again to find a way to make it mean something else, all I could manage was a very human sound, something like, “He muh whu hoo?”

“With you,” Astor said patiently, as if speaking to a mentally challenged chambermaid. “Cody wants to go with you tonight.”

In retrospect, it’s easy to see that this problem would come up sooner or later. And to be perfectly fair to me, which I think is very important, I had expected it-but later. Not now. Not on the edge of my Night of Need. Not when every hair on my neck was standing straight up and screeching with the pure and urgent compulsion to slither into the night in cold, stainless-steel fury-

The situation clearly called for some serious pondering, but all my nerves were clamoring for me to leap out the window and be off into the night-but there they were, and so somehow I took a deep breath and pondered the two of them.

The sharp and shiny tin soul of Dexter the Avenger was forged from a childhood trauma so violent that I had blocked it out completely. It had made me what I am, and I am sure I would sniffle and feel unhappy about that if I was able to feel at all. And these two, Cody and Astor, had been scarred the same way, beaten and savaged by a violent drug-addicted father until they, too, were turned forever away from sunlight and lollipops. As my wise foster father had known in raising me, there was no way to take that away, no way to put the serpent back in the egg.

But it could be trained. Harry had trained me, shaped me into something that hunted only the other dark predators, the other monsters and ghouls who dressed in human skin and prowled the game trails of the city. I had the indelible urge to kill, unchangeable and forever, but Harry had taught me to find and dispose of only those who, by his rigorous cop standards, truly needed it.

When I discovered that Cody was the same way, I had promised myself that I would carry on the Harry Way, pass on what I had learned to the boy, raise him up in Dark Righteousness. But this was an entire galaxy of complications, explanations, and teachings. It had taken Harry nearly ten years to cram it all into me before he allowed me to play with anything more complicated than stray animals. I had not even started with Cody-and although it made me feel like I was trying to be a Jedi Master, I could not possibly start with him now. I knew that Cody must someday come to terms with being like me, and I truly meant to help him-but not tonight. Not with the moon calling so playfully just outside the window, pulling at me like a soft yellow freight train hitched to my brain.

“I’m not, uh-” I started to say, meaning to deny everything. But they looked up at me with such an endearing expression of cold certainty that I stopped. “No,” I said at last. “He’s much too young.”

They exchanged a quick glance, no more, but there was an entire conversation in it. “I told him you would say that,” Astor said.

“You were right,” I said.

“But Dexter,” she said, “you said you would show us stuff.”

“I will,” I said, feeling the shadowy fingers crawl slowly up my spine and prodding for control, urging me out the door, “but not now.”

“When?” Astor demanded.

I looked at the two of them and felt the oddest combination of wild impatience to be off and cutting mixed with an urge to wrap them both in a soft blanket and kill anything that came near them. And nibbling at the edges, just to round out the blend, a desire to smack their thick little heads together.

Was this fatherhood at last?

The entire surface of my body was tingling with cold fire from my need to be gone, to begin, to do the mighty unmentionable, but instead I took a very deep breath and put on a neutral face. “This is a school night,” I said, “and it is almost your bedtime.”

They looked at me as if I had betrayed them, and I supposed I had by changing the rules and playing Daddy Dexter when they thought they were talking to Demon Dexter. Still, it was true enough. One really can’t take small children along on a late-night evisceration and expect them to remember their ABCs the next day. It was hard enough for me to show up at work the morning after one of my little adventures, and I had the advantage of all the Cuban coffee I wanted. Besides, they really were much too young.

“Now you’re just being a grown-up,” Astor said with a withering ten-year-old sneer.

“But I am a grown-up,” I said. “And I am trying to be the right one for you.” Even though I said it with my teeth hurting from fighting back the rising need, I meant it-which did nothing at all to soften the identical looks of bleak contempt I got from both of them.

“We thought you were different,” she said.

“I can’t imagine how I could be any more different and still look human,” I said.

“Not fair,” Cody said, and I locked eyes with him, seeing a tiny dark beast raise its head and roar at me.

“No, it’s not fair,” I said. “Nothing in life is fair. Fair is a dirty word and I’ll thank you not to use that language around me.”

Cody looked hard at me for a moment, a look of disappointed calculation I had never seen from him before, and I didn’t know if I wanted to swat him or give him a cookie.

“Not fair,” he repeated.

“Listen,” I said, “this is something I know about. And this is the first lesson. Normal children go to bed on time on school nights.”

“Not normal,” he said, sticking his lower lip out far enough to hold his schoolbooks.

“Exactly the point,” I told him. “That’s why you always have to

look

normal,

act

normal, make everyone else think you

are

normal. And the other thing you have to do is exactly what I tell you, or I won’t do this.” He didn’t look quite convinced, but he was weakening. “Cody,” I said. “You have to trust me, and you have to do it my way.”

“

Have

to,” he said.

“Yes,” I said. “Have to.”

He looked at me for a very long moment, then switched his stare to his sister, who looked back at him. It was a marvel of sub-vocal communication; I could tell that they were having a long, very intricate conversation, but they didn’t make a sound until Astor shrugged and turned back to me. “You have to promise,” she said to me.

“All right,” I said. “Promise what?”

“That you’ll start teaching us,” she said, and Cody nodded. “Soon.”

I took a deep breath. I had never really had any chance of going to what I consider a very hypothetical heaven, even before this. But to go through with this, agreeing to turn these ragged little monsters into neat, well-schooled little monsters-well, I would certainly hope I was right about the hypothetical part. “I promise,” I said. They looked at each other, looked at me, and left.

And there I was with a bag full of toys, a pressing engagement, and a somewhat shriveled sense of urgency.

Is family life like this for everyone? If so, how does anyone survive it? Why do people have more than one child, or any at all? Here I was with an important and fulfilling goal in front of me, and suddenly I get blindsided by something no soccer mom ever had to face and it was nearly impossible to remember what I was thinking only moments ago. Even with an impatient growl from the Dark Passenger-strangely muted, as if just a little confused-it took me several moments to pull myself together, from Dazed Daddy Dexter back to the Cold Avenger once again. I found it difficult to call back the icy edge of readiness and danger; it was difficult, in fact, to remember where I had left my car keys.

Somehow I found them and stumbled out of my study, and after mumbling some heartfelt nothing to Rita, I was out the door and into the night at last.

CHAPTER 4

I

HAD FOLLOWED ZANDER LONG ENOUGH TO KNOW HIS ROUTINE, and since this was Thursday night, I knew exactly where he would be. He spent every Thursday evening at One World Mission of Divine Light, presumably inspecting the livestock. After about ninety minutes of smiling at the staff and listening to a brief service he would write a check for the pastor, a huge black man who had once played in the NFL. The pastor would smile and thank him, and Zander would slip quietly out the back door to his modest SUV and drive humbly to his house, all aglow with the virtuous feeling that comes only from true good works.

But tonight, he would not drive alone.

Tonight Dexter and his Dark Passenger would go along for the ride and steer him to a brand-new kind of journey.

But first the cold and careful approach, the payoff to the weeks of stealthy stalking.

I parked my car only a few miles from Rita’s house at a large old shopping area called Dadeland and walked to the nearby Metrorail station. The train was seldom crowded, even at rush hour, but there were enough people around that no one paid any attention to me. Just a nice man in fashionably dark clothes carrying a gym bag.

I got off one stop past downtown and walked six blocks to the mission, feeling the keen edge sharpening itself within me, moving me back to the readiness I needed. We would think about Cody and Astor later. Right now, on this street, I was all hard, hidden brightness. The blinding orange-pink glare of the special crime-fighting streetlights could not wash away the darkness I wrapped tighter around me as I walked.

The mission sat on the corner of a medium-busy street, in a converted storefront. There was a small crowd gathered in front-no real surprise, since they gave out food and clothing, and all you had to do to get it was to spend a few moments of your rum-soaked time listening to the good reverend explain why you were going to hell. It seemed like a pretty good bargain, even to me, but I wasn’t hungry. I moved on past, around back to the parking lot.

Although it was slightly dimmer here, the parking lot was still far too bright for me, almost too bright even to see the moon, although I could feel it there in the sky, smirking down on our tiny squirming fragile life, festooned as it was with monsters who lived only to take that life away in large, pain-filled mouthfuls. Monsters like me, and like Zander. But tonight there would be one less.

I walked one time around the perimeter of the parking lot. It appeared to be safe. There was no one in sight, no one sitting or dozing in any of the cars. The only window with a view into the area was a small one, high up on the back wall of the mission, fitted with opaque glass-the restroom. I circled closer to Zander’s car, a blue Dodge Durango nosed in next to the back door, and tried the door handle-locked. Parked next to it was an old Chrysler, the pastor’s venerable ride. I moved to the far side of the Chrysler and began my wait.

From my gym bag I pulled a white silk mask and dropped it over my face, settling the eyeholes snugly. Then I took out a loop of fifty-pound-test fishing line and I was ready. Very soon now it would begin, the Dark Dance. Zander strolling all unknowing into a predator’s night, a night of sharp surprises, a final and savage darkness pierced with fierce fulfillment. So very soon, he would amble calmly out of his life and into mine. And then-

Had Cody remembered to brush his teeth? He had been forgetting lately, and Rita was reluctant to get him out of bed once he was settled in. But it was important to set him on the path of good habits now, and brushing was important.

I flicked my noose, letting it settle onto my knees. Tomorrow was photo day at Astor’s school. She was supposed to wear her Easter dress from last year to look nice for the picture. Had she set it out so she wouldn’t forget in the morning? Of course she wouldn’t smile for the picture, but she should at least wear the good dress.

Could I really be crouched here in the night, noose in hand and waiting to pounce, and thinking about such things? How was it possible for my anticipation to be filled with these thoughts instead of the fang-sharpening eagerness of turning the Dark Passenger loose on an oh-so-deserving playmate? Was this a foretaste of Dexter’s shiny new married life?

I breathed in carefully, feeling a great sympathy for W. C. Fields. I couldn’t work with kids, either. I closed my eyes, felt myself fill with dark night air, and let it out again, feeling the frigid readiness return. Slowly Dexter receded and the Dark Passenger took back the controls.

And not a moment too soon.

The back door clattered open and we could hear the sound of horrible animal noises blatting and bleating away inside, a truly awful rendering of “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” the sound of it enough to send anyone back to the bottle. And enough to propel Zander out the door. He paused in the doorway, turned to give the room a cheery wave and a smirk, and then the door slammed shut and he came around his car to the driver’s side and he was ours.

Zander fumbled for his keys and the lock clicked open and we were around the car and behind him. Before he knew what was happening the noose whistled through the air and slipped around his neck and we yanked hard enough to pull him off his feet, hard enough to bring him to his knees with his breath stopped and his face turning dark and it was good.

“Not a sound,” we said, cold and perfect. “Do exactly as we say, not a single word or sound, and you will live a little longer,” we told him, and we tightened the noose just a bit to let him know he belonged to us and must do as we said.

Zander responded in a most gratifying way by slipping forward onto his face and he was not smirking now. Drool leaked from the corner of his mouth and he clawed at the noose, but we held it far too tight for him to get a finger under the line. When he was very close to passing out we eased the pressure, just enough to let him crackle in a single painful breath. “On your feet now,” we said gently, pulling upward on the noose so he would do as he was told. And slowly, clawing his way up the side of his car, Zander obeyed.

“Good,” we said. “Get in the car.” We switched the noose to my left hand and opened the door of the car, then reached around the door post and took it again in my right as we climbed in the backseat behind him. “Drive,” we said in our dark and icy command voice.

“Where?” Zander said in his voice, now a hoarse whisper from our little reminders with the noose.

We pulled the line tight again to remind him not to talk out of turn. When we thought he had received the message we loosened it again. “West,” we said. “No more talk. Drive.”

He put the car in gear and, with a few small tugs on the noose, I steered him west and up onto the Dolphin Expressway. For a while Zander did exactly as we said. He would look at us in the mirror from time to time, but a very slight twitch of the noose kept him extremely cooperative until we took him onto the Palmetto Expressway and north.

“Listen,” he said suddenly, as we drove past the airport, “I am like really rich. I can give you whatever you want.”

“Yes, you can,” we said, “and you will,” and he did not understand what we wanted, because he relaxed just a little bit.

“Okay,” he said, voice still rough from the noose, “so how much do you want?”

We locked eyes with him in the mirror and slowly, very slowly so he would begin to understand, we tightened the line around his neck. When he could barely breathe, we held it like that for a moment. “Everything,” we said. “We will have everything.” We loosened the noose, just a little. “Drive,” we said.

Zander drove. He was very quiet the rest of the way, but he did not seem as frightened as he should have been. Of course, he must believe that this was not really happening to him, could not possibly happen, not to him, living forever in his impenetrable cocoon of money. Everything had a price, and he could always afford it. Soon he would negotiate. Then he would buy his way out.

And he would. Eventually he would buy his way out. But not with money. And never out of this noose.

It was not a terribly long drive and we were quiet all the way to the Hialeah exit we had chosen. But when Zander slowed for the off-ramp, he glanced at me in the mirror with fear in his eyes, the climbing terror of a monster in a trap, ready to chew off his leg to escape, and the tangible bite of his panic sparked a warm glow in the Dark Passenger and made us very glad and strong. “You don’t-there, there isn’t-where are we going?” he stammered, weak and pitiful and sounding more human all the time, which made us angry and we yanked too hard until he swerved onto the shoulder momentarily and we had to grant him some slack in the noose. Zander steered back onto the road and the bottom of the ramp.

“Turn right,” we said, and he did, the unlovely breath rasping in and out through his spit-flecked lips. But he did just as we told him to do, all the way down the street and left onto a small, dark lane of old warehouses.

He parked his car where we told him, by the rusty door of a dark unused building. A partially rotted sign with the end lopped off still said JONE PLASTI. “Park,” we said, and as he fumbled the gear lever into park we were out the door and yanking him after us and onto the ground, pulling tight and watching him thrash for a moment before we jerked him up to his feet. The spit had caked around his mouth, and there was some small bit of belief in his eyes now as he stood there ugly and disgusting in the lovely moonlight, all atremble with some terrible mistake I had made against his money, and the growing notion that perhaps he was no different from the ones he had done exactly this to washed over him and left him weak. We let him stand and breathe for just a moment, then pushed him toward the door. He put one hand out, palm against the concrete-block wall. “Listen,” he said, and there was a quaver of pure human in his voice now. “I can get you a ton of money. Whatever you want.”

We said nothing. Zander licked his lips. “All right,” he said, and his voice now was dry, shredded, and desperate. “So what do you want from me?”

“Exactly what you took from the others,” we said with an extra-sharp twitch of the noose. “Except the shoe.”

He stared and his mouth sagged and he peed in his pants. “I didn’t,” he said. “That’s not-”

“You did,” we told him. “It is.” And pulling back hard on the leash we pushed him forward and through the door, into the carefully prepared space. There were a few shattered clumps of PVC pipe swept off to the sides and, more important for Zander, two fifty-gallon drums of hydrochloric acid, left behind by Jone Plasti when they had gone out of business.

It was easy enough for us to get Zander up onto the work space we had cleared for him, and in just a few moments we had him taped and tied into place and we were very eager to begin. We cut the noose off and he gasped as the knife nicked his throat.

“Jesus!” he said. “Listen, you’re making a big mistake.”

We said nothing; there was work to do and we prepared for it, slowly cutting away his clothing and dropping it carefully into one of the drums of acid.

“Oh, fuck, please,” he said. “Seriously, it’s not what you think-you don’t know what you’re about to do.”

We were ready and we held up the knife for him to see that actually we knew very well what we were doing, and we were about to do it.

“Dude, please,” he said. The fear in him was far beyond anything he thought possible, beyond the humiliation of wetting his pants and begging, beyond anything he had ever imagined.

And then he grew surprisingly still. He looked right into my eyes with an uncalled-for clarity and in a voice I had not heard from him before he said, “He’ll find you.”

We stopped for a moment to consider what this meant. But we were quite sure that it was his last hopeful bluff, and it blunted the delicious taste of his terror and made us angry and we taped his mouth shut and went to work.

And when we were done there was nothing left except for one of his shoes. We thought about having it mounted, but of course that would be untidy, so it went into the barrel of acid with the rest of Zander.

This was not good, the Watcher thought. They had been inside the abandoned warehouse far too long, and there could be no doubt that whatever they were doing in there, it was not a social occasion.

Nor was the meeting he had been scheduled to have with Zander. Their meetings had always been strictly business, although Zander obviously thought of them in different terms. The awe on his face at their rare encounters spoke volumes on what the young fool thought and felt. He was so proud of the small contribution he made, so eager to be near the cold, massive power.

The Watcher did not regret anything that might happen to Zander-he was easy enough to replace: the real concern was why this was happening tonight, and what it might mean.

And he was glad now that he had not interfered, had simply hung back and followed. He could easily have moved in and taken the brash young man who had taken Zander, crushed him completely. Even now he felt the vast power murmuring within himself, a power that could roar out and sweep away anything that stood before it-but no.

The Watcher also had patience, and this, too, was a strength. If this other was truly a threat, it was better to wait and to watch, and when he knew enough about the danger, he would strike-swiftly, overwhelmingly, and finally.

So he watched. It was several hours before the other came out and got into Zander’s car. The Watcher stayed well back, with his headlights off at first, tailing the blue Durango easily in the late-night traffic. And when the other parked the car in the lot at a Metrorail station and got on the train, he stepped on, too, just as the doors slid closed, and sat at the far end, studying the reflection of the face for the first time.

Surprisingly young and even handsome. An air of innocent charm. Not the sort of face you might expect, but they never were.

The Watcher followed when the other got off at Dadeland and walked toward one of the many parked cars. It was late and there were no people in the lot. He knew he could make it happen now, so easily, just slip up behind the other and let the power flow through him, out into his hands, and release the other into the darkness. He could feel the slow, majestic rise of the strength inside as he closed the distance, almost taste the great and silent roar of the kill-

And then he stopped suddenly in his tracks and slowly moved away down a different aisle.

Because the other’s car had a very noticeable placard lying on the dashboard.

A police parking permit.

He was very glad he had been patient. If the other was with the police…This could be a much bigger problem than he had expected. Not good at all. This would take some careful planning. And a great deal more observation.

And so the Watcher slipped quietly back into the night to prepare, and to watch.

CHAPTER 5

S

OMEBODY ONCE SAID THAT THERE’S NO REST FOR THE wicked, and they were almost certainly talking about me, because for several days after I sent dear little Zander on to his just reward poor Dogged Dexter was very busy indeed. Even as Rita’s frenetic planning kicked into high gear, my job followed suit. We seemed to have hit one of those periodic spells Miami gets every now and then in which murder just seems like a good idea, and I was up to my eyeballs in blood spatter for three days.

But on the fourth day, things actually got a little bit worse. I had brought in doughnuts, as is my habit from time to time-especially in the days following my playdates. For some reason, not only do I feel more relaxed for several days after the Passenger and I have a night encounter, but I also feel quite hungry. I’m sure that fact is filled with deep psychological significance, but I am far more interested in making sure I get one or two of the jelly doughnuts before the savage predators in Forensics shred them all to pieces. Significance can wait when doughnuts are on the line.

But this morning I barely managed to grab one raspberry-filled doughnut-and I was lucky not to lose a finger in the process. The whole floor was buzzing with preparation for a trip to a crime scene, and the tone of the buzz let me know that it was a particularly heinous one, which did not please me. That meant longer hours, stuck somewhere far from civilization and Cuban sandwiches. Who knew what I would end up with for lunch? Considering that I had been short-changed on the doughnuts, lunch could prove to be a very important meal, and for all I knew I would be forced to work right through it.

I grabbed my handy blood-spatter kit and headed out the door with Vince Masuoka, who despite his small size had somehow grabbed two of the very valuable filled doughnuts-including the Bavarian cream with the chocolate frosting. “You have done a little too well, Mighty Hunter,” I told him with a nod at his plundered loot.

“The gods of the forest have been good,” he said, and took a large bite. “My people will not starve this season.”

“No, but I will,” I said.

He gave me his terrible phony smile, which looked like something he had learned to do by studying a government manual on facial expressions. “The ways of the jungle are hard, Grasshopper,” he said.

“Yes, I know,” I said. “First you must learn to think like a doughnut.”

“Ha,” Vince said. His laugh was even phonier than his smile, sounding like he was reading aloud from a phonetic spelling of laughter. “Ah, ha ha ha!” he said. The poor guy seemed to be faking everything about being human, just like me. But wasn’t as good at it as I was. No wonder I was comfortable with him. That and the fact that he quite often took a turn bringing the doughnuts.

“You need better camouflage,” he said, nodding at my shirt, a bright pink-and-green Hawaiian pattern complete with hula girls. “Or at least better taste.”

“It was on sale,” I said.

“Ha,” he said again. “Well, pretty soon Rita will be picking your clothes.” And then abruptly dropping his terrible artificial jollity, he said, “Listen, I think I have found the perfect caterer.”

“Does he do jelly doughnuts?” I said, truthfully hoping that the whole subject of my impending matrimonial bliss would simply go away. But I had asked Vince to be my best man, and he was taking the job seriously.

“The guy is very big,” Vince said. “He did the MTV Awards, and all those showbiz parties and stuff.”

“He sounds delightfully expensive,” I said.

“Well, he owes me a favor,” Vince said. “I think we can get him down on the price. Maybe like a hundred and fifty bucks a plate.”

“Actually, Vince, I had hoped we could afford more than one plate.”

“He was in that South Beach magazine,” he said, sounding a little hurt. “You should at least talk to him.”

“To be honest,” I said, which of course meant I was lying, “I think Rita wants something simple. Like a buffet.”

Vince was definitely sulking now. “At least talk to him,” he repeated.

“I’ll talk to Rita about it,” I said, wishing that would make the whole thing go away. And during the trip to the crime scene Vince said no more about it, so maybe it had.

The scene turned out to be a lot easier for me than I had anticipated, and I cheered up quite a bit when I got there. In the first place, it was on the University of Miami campus, which was my dear old alma mater, and in keeping with my lifelong attempt to appear human, I always tried to remember to pretend I felt a warm, fuzzy fondness for the place when I was there. Secondly, there was apparently very little raw blood to deal with, which might mean that I could be done with it in a reasonable amount of time. It also meant freedom from the nasty wet red stuff-I really don’t like blood, which may seem odd, but there it is. I do, however, find great satisfaction in organizing it at a crime scene, forcing it to fit a decent pattern and behave itself. In this case, from what I learned on the way there, that would hardly be a challenge.

And so it was with my usual cheerful good spirits that I sauntered over toward the yellow crime-scene tape, certain of a charming interlude in a hectic workday-

And came to a dead stop with one foot just inside the tape.

For a moment the world turned bright yellow and there was a sickening sensation of lurching weightless through space. I could see nothing except the knife-edged glare. There was a silent sound from the dark backseat, the feeling of subliminal nausea mixed with the blind panic of a butcher knife squealing across a chalkboard. A skittering, a nervousness, a wild certainty that something was very badly wrong, and no hint of what or where it was.

My sight came back and I looked around me. I saw nothing I didn’t expect to see at a crime scene: a small crowd gathered at the yellow tape, some uniforms guarding the perimeter, a few cheap-suited detectives, and my team, the forensic geeks, scrabbling through the bushes on their hands and knees. All perfectly normal to the naked eye. And so I turned to my infallible fully clothed interior eye for an answer.

What is it?

I asked silently, closing my eyes again and searching for some answer from the Passenger to this unprecedented display of discomfort. I was accustomed to commentary from my Dark Associate, and quite often my first sight of a crime scene would be punctuated by sly whispers of admiration or amusement, but this-it was clearly a sound of distress, and I did not know what to make of it.

What?

I asked again. But there was no answer beyond the uneasy rustle of invisible wings, so I shook it off and walked over to the site.

The two bodies had clearly been burned somewhere else, since there was no sign of any barbecue large enough to bake two medium-size females quite so thoroughly. They had been dumped beside the lake that runs through the UM campus, just off the path that ran around it, and discovered by a pair of early-morning joggers. It was my opinion from the state of the small amount of blood evidence I found that the heads had been removed after the two had burned to death.

One small detail gave me pause. The bodies were laid out neatly, almost reverently, with the charred arms folded across the chests. And in place of the severed heads, a ceramic bull’s head had been carefully placed at the top of each torso.

This is exactly the kind of loving touch that always brings some type of comment from the Dark Passenger-generally speaking, an amused whisper, a small chuckle, even a twinge of jealousy. But this time, as Dexter said to himself,

Aha, a bull’s head! What do we think about that?

, the Passenger responded immediately and forcefully with-

Nothing?

Not a whisper, not a sigh?

I sent an irritated demand for answers, and got no more than a worried scuttling, as if the Passenger were ducking down behind anything that might provide cover, and hoping to ride out the storm without being noticed.

I opened my eyes, as much from startlement as anything else. I could not remember any time when the Passenger had nothing to say on some example of our favorite subject, and yet here he was, not merely subdued but hiding.

I looked back at the two charred bodies with new respect. I had no clue as to what this might mean, but since it had never happened before, it seemed like a good idea to find out.

Angel Batista-no-relation was on his hands and knees on the far side of the path, very carefully examining things I couldn’t see and didn’t really care about. “Did you find it yet?” I asked him.

He didn’t look up. “Find what?” he said.

“I don’t have any idea,” I said. “But it must be here somewhere.”

He reached out with a pair of tweezers and plucked a single blade of grass, staring hard at it and then stuffing it into a plastic baggie as he spoke. “Why,” he said, “would somebody put a ceramic bull head?”

“Because chocolate would melt,” I said.

He nodded without looking up. “Your sister thinks it’s a Santeria thing.”

“Really,” I said. That possibility had not occurred to me, and I felt a little miffed that it hadn’t. After all, this was Miami; anytime we encountered something that looked like a ritual and involved animal heads, Santeria should have been the first thing all of us thought. An Afro-Cuban religion that combined Yoruba animism with Catholicism, Santeria was widespread in Miami. Animal sacrifice and symbolism were common for its devotees, which would explain the bull heads. And although a relatively small number of people actually practiced Santeria, most homes in the city had one or two small saint candles or cowrie-shell necklaces bought at a botanica. The prevailing attitude around town was that even if you didn’t believe in it, it didn’t hurt to pay it some respect.

As I said, it should have occurred to me at once. But my foster sister, now a full sergeant in homicide, had thought of it first, even though I was supposed to be the clever one.

I had been relieved to learn that Deborah was assigned to the case, since it meant that there would be a minimum of bone-numbing stupidity. It would also, I hoped, give her something better to do with her time than she had appeared to have lately. She had been spending all hours of the day and night hovering around her damaged boyfriend, Kyle Chutsky, who had lost one or two minor limbs in his recent encounter with a deranged freelance surgeon who specialized in turning human beings into squealing potatoes-the same villain who had artfully trimmed away so many unnecessary parts from Sergeant Doakes. He had not had the time to finish with Kyle, but Debs had taken the whole thing rather personally and, after fatally shooting the good doctor, she had devoted herself to nursing Chutsky back to vigorous manhood.

I’m sure she had racked up numberless points on the ethical scoreboard, no matter who was keeping track, but in truth all the time off had done her no good with the department, and even worse, poor lonely Dexter had felt keenly the uncalled-for neglect from his only living relative.

So it was very good news all around to have Deborah assigned to the case, and on the far side of the path she was talking to her boss, Captain Matthews, no doubt giving him a little ammunition for his ongoing war with the press, who simply refused to take his picture from his good side.

The press vans were, in fact, already rolling up and spewing out crews to tape background shots of the area. A couple of the local bloodhounds were standing there, solemnly clutching their microphones and intoning mournful sentences about the tragedy of two lives so brutally ended. As always, I felt reverently grateful to live in a free society, where the press had a sacred right to show footage of dead people on the evening news.

Captain Matthews carefully brushed his already perfect hair with the heel of his hand, clapped Deborah on the shoulder, and marched over to talk to the press. And I marched over to my sister.

She stood where Matthews had left her, watching his back as he began to speak to Rick Sangre, one of the true gurus of if-it-bleeds-it-leads reporting. “Well, Sis,” I said. “Welcome back to the real world.”

She shook her head. “Hip hooray,” she said.

“How is Kyle doing?” I asked her, since my training told me that was the right thing to ask about.

“Physically?” she said. “He’s fine. But he just feels

useless

all the time. And those assholes in Washington won’t let him go back to work.”

It was difficult for me to judge Chutsky’s ability to get back to work, since no one had ever said exactly what work he did. I knew it was vaguely connected to some part of the government and was also something clandestine, but beyond that I didn’t know. “Well,” I said, searching for the proper cliché, “I’m sure it just needs some time.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure.” She looked back at the place where the two charred bodies lay. “Anyhow, this is a great way to get my mind off it.”

“The rumor mill tells me you think it’s Santeria,” I said, and her head swiveled rapidly around to face me.

“You think it’s

not

?” she demanded.

“Oh, no, it might well be,” I said.

“But?” she said sharply.

“No buts at all,” I said.

“Damn it, Dexter,” she said. “What do you know about this?” And it was probably a fair question. I had been known on occasion to offer a pretty fair guess about some of the more gruesome murders we worked on. I had gained a small reputation for my insight into the way the twisted homicidal sickos thought and operated-natural enough, since, unknown to everyone but Deborah, I was a twisted homicidal sicko myself.

But even though Deborah had only recently become aware of my true nature, she had not been shy about taking advantage of it to help her in her work. I didn’t mind; glad to help. What else is family for? And I didn’t really care if my fellow monsters paid their debt to society in Old Sparky-unless, of course, it was somebody I was saving for my own innocent pleasure.

But in this case, I had nothing whatsoever to tell Deborah. I had, in fact, been hoping she might have some small crumb of information to give to me, something that might explain the Dark Passenger’s peculiar and uncharacteristic shrinking act. That, of course, was not the sort of thing I really felt comfortable telling Deborah about. But no matter what I said about this burned double offering, she wouldn’t believe me. She would be sure I had information and some kind of angle that made me want to keep it all to myself. The only thing more suspicious than a sibling is a sibling who happens to be a cop.

Sure enough, she was convinced I was holding out on her. “Come on, Dexter,” she said. “Out with it. Tell me what you know about this.”

“Dear Sis, I am at a total loss,” I said.

“Bullshit,” she said, apparently unaware of the irony. “You’re holding something back.”

“Never in life,” I said. “Would I lie to my only sister?”

She glared at me. “So it isn’t Santeria?”

“I have no idea,” I said, as soothingly as possible. “It seems like a really good place to start. But-”

“I knew it,” she snapped. “But what?”

“Well,” I started. And truly it had just occurred to me, and probably it meant nothing at all, but here I was in mid-sentence already, so I went on with it. “Have you ever heard of a

santero

using ceramics? And bulls-don’t they have a thing for

goat

heads?”

She looked at me very hard for a minute, then shook her head. “That’s it? That’s what you got?”

“I told you, Debs, I don’t got anything. It was only a thought, something that just now came to me.”

“Well,” she said. “If you’re telling me the truth-”

“Of course I am,” I protested.

“Then, you’ve got doodly-squat,” she said and looked away, back to where Captain Matthews was answering questions with his solemn, manly jaw jutting out. “Which is only slightly less than the horsepucky I got,” she said.

I had never before grasped that doodly-squat was less than horsepucky, but it’s always nice to learn something new. And yet even this startling revelation did very little to answer the real question here: Why had the Dark Passenger pulled a duck and cover? In the course of my job and my hobby I have seen some things that most people can’t even imagine, unless they have watched several of those movies they show at traffic school for driving drunk. And in every case I had ever encountered, no matter how grisly, my shadow companion had some kind of pithy comment on the proceedings, even if it was only a yawn.

But now, confronted by nothing more sinister than two charred bodies and some amateur pottery, the Dark Passenger chose to scuttle away like a scared spider and leave me without guidance-a brand-new feeling for me, and I discovered I did not like it at all.

Still, what was I to do? I knew of no one I could talk to about something like the Dark Passenger; at least, not if I wanted to stay at liberty, which I very much did. As far as I was aware, there were no experts on the subject, other than me. But what did I really know about my boon companion? Was I really that knowledgeable, merely because I had shared space with it for so long? The fact that it had chosen to scuttle into the cellar was making me very edgy, as if I found myself walking through my office with no pants on. When it came down to the nub of things, I had no idea what the Dark Passenger was or where it came from, and that had never seemed all that important.

For some reason, now it did.

A modest crowd had gathered by the yellow tape barrier the police had put up. Enough people so that the Watcher could stand in the middle of the group without sticking out in any way.

He watched with a cold hunger that did not show on his face-nothing showed on his face; it was merely a mask he wore for the time being, a way to hide the coiled power stored inside. Yet somehow the people around him seemed to sense it, glancing his way nervously from time to time, as if they had heard a tiger growling nearby.

The Watcher enjoyed their discomfort, enjoyed the way they stared in stupid fear at what he had done. It was all part of the joy of this power, and part of the reason he liked to watch.

But he watched with a purpose right now, carefully and deliberately, even as he watched them scrabble around like ants and felt the power surge and flex inside him.

Walking meat

, he thought.

Less than sheep, and we are the shepherd

.

As he gloated at their pathetic reaction to his display he felt another presence tickle at the edge of his predator’s senses. He turned his head slowly along the line of yellow tape-

There. That was him, the one in the bright Hawaiian shirt. He really was with the police.

The Watcher reached a careful tendril out toward the other, and as it touched he watched the other stop cold in his tracks and close his eyes, as if asking a silent question-yes. It all made sense now. The other had felt the subtle reach of senses; he was powerful, that was certain.

But what was his purpose?

He watched as the other straightened up, looked around, and then seemingly shrugged it off and crossed the police line.

We are stronger

, he thought.

Stronger than all of them. And they will discover this, to their very great sorrow

.

He could feel the hunger growing-but he needed to know more, and he would wait until the right time. Wait and watch.

For now.

CHAPTER 6

A

HOMICIDE SCENE WITH NO BLOOD SPLATTERED SHOULD have been a real holiday outing for me, but somehow I couldn’t get into the lighthearted frame of mind to enjoy it. I lurked around for a while, going in and out of the taped-off area, but there was very little for me to do. And Deborah seemed to have said all she had to say to me, which left me somewhat alone and unoccupied.

A reasonable being might very well be pardoned for sulking just a tiny bit, but I had never claimed to be reasonable, and that left me with very few options. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to get on with life and think about the many important things that demanded my attention-the kids, the caterer, Paris, lunch…Considering my laundry list of things to worry about, it was no wonder the Passenger was proving a wee bit shy.

I looked at the two overcooked bodies again. They were not doing anything sinister. They were still dead. But the Dark Passenger was still silent.

I wandered back over to where Deborah stood, talking to Angel-no-relation. They both looked at me expectantly, but I had no readily available wit to offer, which was very much out of character. Happily for my world-famous reputation for permanently cheerful stoicism, before I could really turn gloomy, Deborah looked over my shoulder and snorted. “About fucking time.”

I followed her gaze to a patrol car that had just pulled up and watched a man dressed all in white climb out.

The official City of Miami

babalao

had arrived.

Our fair city exists in a permanent blinding haze of cronyism and corruption that would make Boss Tweed jealous, and every year millions of dollars are thrown away on imaginary consulting jobs, cost overruns on projects that haven’t begun because they were awarded to someone’s mother-in-law, and other special items of great civic importance, like new luxury cars for political supporters. So it should be no surprise at all that the city pays a Santeria priest a salary and benefits.

The surprise is that he earns his money.

Every morning at sunrise, the

babalao

arrives at the courthouse, where he usually finds one or two small animal sacrifices left by people with important legal cases pending. No Miami citizen in his right mind would touch these things, but of course it would be very bad form to leave dead animals littered about Miami ’s great temple of justice. So the

babalao

removes the sacrifices, cowrie shells, feathers, beads, charms, and pictures in a way that will not offend the

orishas

, the guiding spirits of Santeria.

He is also called upon from time to time to cast spells for other important civic items, like blessing a new overpass built by a low-bid contractor or putting a curse on the New York Jets. And he had apparently been called upon this time by my sister, Deborah.

The official city

babalao

was a black man of about fifty, six feet tall with very long fingernails and a considerable paunch. He was dressed in white pants, a white guayabera, and sandals. He came plodding over from the patrol car that had brought him, with the cranky expression of a minor bureaucrat whose important filing work had been interrupted. As he walked he polished a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses on the tail of his shirt. He put them on as he approached the bodies and, when he did, what he saw stopped him dead.

For a long moment he just stared. Then, with his eyes still glued to the bodies, he backed away. At about thirty feet away, he turned around and walked back to the patrol car and climbed in.

“What the fuck,” Deborah said, and I agreed that she had summed things up nicely. The

babalao

slammed the car door and sat there in the front seat, staring straight ahead through the windshield without moving. After a moment Deborah muttered, “Shit,” and went over to the car. And because like all inquiring minds I want to know, I followed.

When I got to the car Deborah was tapping on the glass of the passenger-side window and the

babalao

was still staring straight ahead, jaw clenched, grimly pretending not to see her. Debs knocked harder; he shook his head. “Open the door,” she said in her best police-issue put-down-the-gun voice. He shook his head harder. She knocked on the window harder. “Open it!” she said.

Finally he rolled down the window. “This is nothing to do with me,” he said.

“Then what is it?” Deborah asked him.

He just shook his head. “I need to get back to work,” he said.

“Is it Palo Mayombe?” I asked him, and Debs glared at me for interrupting, but it seemed like a fair question. Palo Mayombe was a somewhat darker offshoot of Santeria, and although I knew almost nothing about it, there had been rumors of some very wicked rituals that had piqued my interest.

But the

babalao

shook his head. “Listen,” he said. “There’s stuff out there, you guys got no idea, and you don’t wanna know.”

“Is this one of those things?” I asked.

“I dunno,” he said. “Might be.”

“What can you tell us about it?” Deborah demanded.

“I can’t tell you nothing ’cause I don’t know nothing,” he said. “But I don’t like it and I don’t want anything to do with it. I got important stuff to do today-tell the cop I gotta go.” And he rolled the window up again.

“Shit,” Deborah said, and she looked at me accusingly.

“Well I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Shit,” she said again. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I am completely in the dark,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” she said, and she looked entirely unconvinced, which was a little ironic. I mean, people believe me all the time when I’m being somewhat less than perfectly truthful-and yet here was my own foster flesh and blood, refusing to believe that I was, in fact, completely in the dark. Aside from the fact that the

babalao

seemed to be having the same reaction as the Passenger-and what should I make of that?

Before I could pursue that fascinating line of thought, I realized that Deborah was still staring at me with an exceedingly unpleasant expression on her face.

“Did you find the heads?” I asked, quite helpfully I thought. “We might get a feel for the ritual if we saw what he did to the heads.”

“No, we haven’t found the heads. I haven’t found anything except a brother who’s holding out on me.”

“Deborah, really, this permanent air of nasty suspicion is not good for your face muscles. You’ll get frown lines.”

“Maybe I’ll get a killer, too,” she said, and walked back to the two charred bodies.

Since my usefulness was apparently at an end, at least as far as my sister was concerned, there was really not a great deal more for me to do on-site. I finished up with my blood kit, taking small samples of the dried black stuff caked around the two necks, and headed back to the lab in plenty of time for a late lunch.

But alas, poor Dauntless Dexter obviously had a target painted on his back, because my troubles had barely begun. Just as I was tidying up my desk and getting ready to take part in the cheerfully homicidal rush-hour traffic, Vince Masuoka came skipping into my office. “I just talked to Manny,” he said. “He can see us tomorrow morning at ten.”

“That’s wonderful news,” I said. “The only thing that could possibly make it any better would be to know who Manny is and why he wants to see us.”

Vince actually looked a little hurt, one of the few genuine expressions I had ever seen on his face. “Manny Borque,” he said. “The caterer.”

“The one from MTV?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Vince said. “The guy that’s won all the awards, and he’s been written up in

Gourmet

magazine.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, stalling for time in the hope that some brilliant flash of inspiration would hit to help me dodge this terrible fate. “The award-winning caterer.”

“Dexter, this guy is big. He could make your whole wedding.”

“Well, Vince, I think that’s terrific, but-”

“Listen,” he said, with an air of firm command that I had never heard from him before, “you said you would talk to Rita about this and let her decide.”

“I said that?”

“Yes, you did. And I am not going to let you throw away a wonderful opportunity like this, not when it’s something that I know Rita would really love to have.”

I wasn’t sure how he could be so positive about that. After all, I was actually engaged to the woman, and I had no idea what sort of caterer might fill her with shock and awe. But I didn’t think this was the time to ask him how he knew what Rita would and would not love. Then again, a man who dressed up as Carmen Miranda for Halloween might very well have a keener insight than mine into my fiancée’s innermost culinary desires.

“Well,” I said, at last deciding that procrastinating long enough to escape was the best answer, “in that case, I’ll go home and talk to Rita about it.”

“Do that,” he said. And he did not storm out, but if there had been a door to slam, he might have slammed it.

I finished tidying up and trundled on out into the evening traffic. On the way home a middle-aged man in a Toyota SUV got right behind me and started honking the horn for some reason. After five or six blocks he pulled around me and, as he flipped me off, juked his steering wheel slightly to frighten me into running up on the sidewalk. Although I admired his spirit and would have loved to oblige him, I stayed on the road. There is never any point in trying to make sense of the way Miami drivers go about getting from one place to another. You just have to relax and enjoy the violence-and of course, that part was never a problem for me. So I smiled and waved, and he stomped on his accelerator and disappeared into traffic at about sixty miles per hour over the speed limit.

Normally I find the chaotic mayhem of the evening drive home to be the perfect way to end the day. Seeing all the anger and lust to kill relaxes me, makes me feel at one with my hometown and its spritely inhabitants. But tonight I found it difficult to summon up any good cheer at all. I never for a moment thought it could ever happen, but I was worried.

Worse still, I didn’t know what I was actually worried about, only that the Dark Passenger had used the silent treatment on me at a scene of creative homicide. This had never happened, and I could only believe that something unusual and possibly Dexter-threatening had caused it now. But what? And how could I be sure, when I didn’t really know the first thing about the Passenger itself, except that it had always been there to offer happy insight and commentary. We had seen burned bodies before, and pottery aplenty, with never a twitch or a tweet. Was it the combination? Or something specific to these two bodies? Or was it entirely coincidental and had nothing whatever to do with what we had seen?

The more I thought about it, the less I knew, but the traffic swirled around me in its soothing homicidal patterns, and by the time I got to Rita’s house I had almost convinced myself that there was really nothing to worry about.

Rita, Cody, and Astor were already home when I got there. Rita worked much closer to the house than I did, and the kids were in an after-school program at a nearby park, so they had all been waiting for at least half an hour for the opportunity to torment me out of my hard-won peace of mind.

“It was on the news,” Astor whispered as I opened the door, and Cody nodded and said, “Gross,” in his soft, hoarse voice.

“What was on the news?” I said, struggling to get past them and into the house without trampling on them.

“You

burned

them!” Astor hissed at me, and Cody looked at me with a complete lack of expression that somehow conveyed disapproval.

“I what? Who did I-”

“Those two people they found at the college,” she said. “We don’t want to learn

that

,” she added emphatically, and Cody nodded again.

“At the-you mean at the university? I didn’t-”

“A university is a college,” Astor said with the underlined certainty of a ten-year-old girl. “And we think burning is just gross.”

It began to dawn on me what they had seen on the news-a report from the scene where I had spent my morning collecting dry-roasted blood samples from two charred bodies. And somehow, merely because they knew I had been out to play the other night, they had decided that this was how I had spent my time. Even without the Dark Passenger’s strange retreat, I agreed that it was completely gross, and I found it highly annoying that they thought I was capable of something like that. “Listen,” I said sternly, “that was not-”

“Dexter? Is that you?” Rita yodeled from the kitchen.

“I’m not sure,” I called back. “Let me check my wallet.”

Rita bustled in beaming and before I could protect myself she wrapped herself around me, apparently intent on squeezing hard enough to interfere with my breathing. “Hi, handsome,” she said. “How was your day?”

“Gross,” muttered Astor.

“Absolutely wonderful,” I said, fighting for breath. “Plenty of corpses for everybody today. And I got to use my cotton swabs, too.”

Rita made a face. “Ugh. That’s-I don’t know if you should talk like that around the children. What if they get bad dreams?”

If I had been a completely honest person, I would have told her that her children were far more likely to cause someone else bad dreams than to get them, but since I am not hampered by any need to tell the truth, I just patted her and said, “They hear worse than that on the cartoons every day. Isn’t that right, kids?”

“No,” said Cody softly, and I looked at him with surprise. He rarely said anything, and to have him not only speak but actually contradict me was disturbing. In fact, the whole day was turning out to be wildly askew, from the panicked flight of the Dark Passenger this morning and continuing on through Vince’s catering tirade-and now this. What in the name of all that is dark and dreadful was going on? Was my aura out of balance? Had the moons of Jupiter aligned against me in Sagittarius?

“Cody,” I said. And I do hope some hurt showed in my voice. “You’re not going to have bad dreams about this, are you?”

“He doesn’t have bad dreams,” Astor said, as if everyone who was not severely mentally challenged ought to know that. “He doesn’t have any dreams at

all

.”

“Good to know,” I said, since I almost never dream myself, either, and for some reason it seemed important to have as much as possible in common with Cody. But Rita was having none of it.

“Really, Astor, don’t be silly,” she said. “Of course Cody has dreams. Everybody has dreams.”

“I don’t,” Cody insisted. Now he was not only standing up to both of us, he was practically breaking his own record for chattiness at the same time. And even though I didn’t have a heart, except for circulatory purposes, I felt an affection for him and wanted to come down on his side.

“Good for you,” I said. “Stick with it. Dreams are very overrated. Interfere with getting a good night’s sleep.”

“Dexter, really,” Rita said. “I don’t think we should encourage this.”

“Of course we should,” I said, winking at Cody. “He’s showing fire, spunk, and imagination.”

“Am not,” he said, and I absolutely marveled at his verbal outpouring.

“Of course you’re not,” I said to him, lowering my voice. “But we have to say stuff like that to your mom, or she gets worried.”

“For Pete’s sake,” Rita said. “I give up with you two. Run outside and play, kids.”

“We wanna play with Dexter,” Astor pouted.

“I’ll be along in a few minutes,” I said.

“You better,” she said darkly. They vanished down the hall toward the back door, and as they left I took a deep breath, happy that the vicious and unwarranted attacks against me were over for now. Of course, I should have known better.

“Come in here,” Rita said, and she led me by the hand to the sofa. “Vince called a little while ago,” she said as we settled onto the cushions.

“Did he?” I said, and a sudden thrill of danger ripped through me at the idea of what he might have said to Rita. “What did he say?”

She shook her head. “He was very mysterious. He said to let him know as soon as we had talked it over. And when I asked him talked what over he wouldn’t say. He just said you would tell me.”

I barely managed to stop myself from the unthinkable conversational blunder of saying, “Did he?” again. In my defense, I have to admit that my brain was whirling, not only with the panicked notion that I had to flee to some place of safety but also with the thought that before I fled I needed to find time to visit Vince with my little bag of toys. But before I could mentally choose the correct blade, Rita went on.

“Honestly, Dexter, you’re very lucky to have a friend like Vince. He really does take his duties as best man seriously, and he has wonderful taste.”

“Wonderfully expensive, too,” I said-and perhaps I was still recovering from my near-gaffe with almost repeating “Did he?” but I knew the moment it was out of my mouth that it was absolutely the wrong thing to say. And sure enough, Rita lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Really?” she said. “Well, I suppose he would, after all. I mean, it most often goes together, doesn’t it? You really do get what you pay for, usually.”

“Yes, but it’s a question of how much you have to pay,” I said.

“How much for what?” Rita said, and there it was. I was stuck.

“Well,” I said, “Vince has this crazy idea that we should hire this South Beach caterer, a very pricey guy who does a lot of celebrity events and things.”

Rita clapped her hands under her chin and looked radiantly happy. “Not Manny Borque!” she cried. “Vince knows Manny Borque?”

Of course it was all over right there, but Dauntless Dexter does not go down without a fight, no matter how feeble. “Did I mention that he’s very expensive?” I said hopefully.

“Oh, Dexter, you can’t worry about money at a time like this,” she said.

“I can too. I am.”

“Not if there’s a chance to get Manny Borque,” she said, and there was a surprisingly strong note in her voice that I had never heard before except when she was angry with Cody and Astor.

“Yes, but Rita,” I said, “it doesn’t make sense to spend a ton of money just for the caterer.”

“Sense has nothing to do with it,” she said, and I admit that I agreed with her there. “If we can get Manny Borque to cater our wedding, we’d be crazy not to do it.”

“But,” I said, and there I stopped, because beyond the fact that it seemed idiotic to pay a king’s ransom for crackers with endives hand-painted with rhubarb juice and sculpted to look like Jennifer Lopez, I could not think of any other objection. I mean, wasn’t that enough?

Apparently not. “Dexter,” she said. “How many times will we get married?” And to my great credit I was still alert enough to clamp down on the urge to say, “At least twice, in your case,” which I think was probably very wise.

I quickly changed course, diving straight into tactics learned from pretending to be human for so many years. “Rita,” I said, “the important part of the wedding is when I slip the ring on your finger. I don’t care what we eat afterward.”

“That’s so sweet,” she said. “Then you don’t mind if we hire Manny Borque?”

Once again I found myself losing an argument before I even knew which side I was on. I became aware of a dryness in my mouth-caused, no doubt, by the fact that my mouth was hanging open as my brain struggled to make sense of what had just happened, and then to find something clever to say to get things back onto dry land.

But it was far too late. “I’ll call Vince back,” she said, and she leaned over to give me a kiss on the cheek. “Oh, this is so exciting. Thank you, Dexter.”

Well, after all, isn’t marriage about compromise?

CHAPTER 7

N

ATURALLY ENOUGH, MANNY BORQUE LIVED IN SOUTH Beach. He was on the top floor of one of the new high-rise buildings that spring up around Miami like mushrooms after a heavy rain. This one sat on what was once a deserted beach where Harry used to take Debs and me beachcombing early on Saturday mornings. We would find old life preservers, mysterious wooden chunks of some unfortunate boat, lobster-pot buoys, pieces of fishnet, and on one thrilling morning, an exceedingly dead human body rolling in the surf. It was a treasured boyhood memory, and I resented extremely that someone had built this shiny flimsy tower on the site.

The next morning at ten Vince and I left work together and drove over to the horrible new building that had replaced the scene of my youthful joy. I rode the elevator to the top in silence, watching Vince fidget and blink. Why he should be nervous about facing someone who sculpted chopped liver for a living, I don’t know, but he clearly was. A drop of sweat rolled down his cheek and he swallowed convulsively, twice.

“He’s a caterer, Vince,” I told him. “He isn’t dangerous. He can’t even revoke your library card.”

Vince looked at me and swallowed again. “He’s got a real temper,” he said. “He can be very demanding.”

“Well, then,” I said with great good cheer, “let’s go find somebody else more reasonable.”

He set his jaw like a man facing a firing squad and shook his head. “No,” he said bravely, “we’re going to go through with this.” And the elevator door slid open, right on cue. He squared his shoulders, nodded, and said, “Come on.”

We went down to the end of the hall, and Vince stopped in front of the last door. He took a deep breath, raised his fist, and, after a slight hesitation, knocked on the door. After a long moment in which nothing happened, he looked at me and blinked, his hand still raised. “Maybe,” he said.

The door opened. “Hello Vic!” the thing in the doorway warbled, and Vince responded by blushing and stammering, “I only hi.” Then he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, stammered something that sounded like, “Er wellah,” and took a half step backward.

It was a remarkable and thoroughly engaging performance, and I was not the only one who seemed to enjoy it. The manikin who had answered the door watched with a smile that suggested he might enjoy being in the audience for any kind of human suffering, and he let Vince squirm for several long moments before he finally said, “Well come

in

!”

Manny Borque, if this was really him and not some strange hologram from

Star Wars

, stood a full five foot six inches tall, from the bottom of his embroidered high-heeled silver boots to the top of his dyed orange head. His hair was cut short, except for black bangs which parted on his forehead like a swallow’s tail and draped down over a pair of enormous rhinestone-studded eyeglasses. He was dressed in a long, bright-red dashiki, and apparently nothing else, and it swirled around him as he stepped back from the door to motion us in, and then walked in rapid little steps toward a huge picture window that looked out on the water.

“Come over here and we’ll have a little talk,” he said, sidestepping a pedestal holding an enormous object that looked like a giant ball of animal vomit dipped in plastic and spray-painted with Day-Glo graffiti. He led the way to a glass table by the window, around which sat four things that were probably supposed to be chairs but could easily have been mistaken for bronze camel saddles welded onto stilts. “Sit,” he said, with an expansive wave of his hand, and I took the chair-thing nearest the window. Vince hesitated for a moment, then sat next to me, and Manny hopped up onto the seat directly across from him. “Well,” he said. “How have you been, Vic? Would you like some coffee?” and without waiting for an answer he swiveled his head to his left and called, “Eduardo!”

Beside me Vince took a ragged breath, but before he could do anything with it Manny whipped back around and faced me. “And

you

must be the blushing bridegroom!” he said.

“Dexter Morgan,” I said. “But I’m not a very good blusher.”

“Oh, well, I think Vic is doing enough for both of you,” he said. And sure enough, Vince obligingly turned just as scarlet as his complexion would allow him to do. Since I was still more than a little peeved at being subjected to this ordeal, I decided not to come to his aid by offering Manny a withering remark, or even correcting him on the subject of Vince’s actual identity as “Vince,” not “Vic.” I was sure he knew the right name quite well and was simply tormenting Vince. And that was fine with me: let Vince squirm-it served him right for going over my head to Rita and getting me into this.

Eduardo bustled in holding a vintage Fiestaware coffee service in several bright colors, balanced on a clear plastic tray. He was a stocky young man about twice the size of Manny, and he, too, seemed very anxious to please the little troll. He set a yellow cup in front of Manny, and then moved to put the blue one in front of Vince when he was stopped by Manny, who laid a finger on his arm.

“Eduardo,” he said in a silky voice, and the boy froze. “Yellow? Don’t we remember? Manny gets the blue cup.”

Eduardo practically fell over himself grinding into reverse, nearly dropping the tray in his haste to remove the offensive yellow coffee cup and replace it with the proper blue one.

“Thank you, Eduardo,” Manny said, and Eduardo paused for a moment, apparently to see if Manny really meant it or if he had done something else wrong. But Manny just patted him on the arm and said, “Serve our guests now, please,” and Eduardo nodded and moved around the table.

As it turned out, I got the yellow cup, which was fine with me, although I wondered if it meant that they didn’t like me. When he had poured the coffee, Eduardo hustled back to the kitchen and returned with a small plate holding half a dozen

pastelitos

. And although they were not, in fact, shaped like Jennifer Lopez’s derriere, they might as well have been. They looked like little cream-filled porcupines-dark brown lumps bristling with quills that were either chocolate or taken from a sea anemone. The center was open, revealing a blob of orange-colored custardy-type stuff, and each blob had a dab of green, blue, or brown on top.

Eduardo put the plate in the center of the table, and we all just looked at it for a moment. Manny seemed to be admiring them, and Vince was apparently feeling some kind of religious awe, as he swallowed a few more times and made a sound that may have been a gasp. For my part, I wasn’t sure if we were supposed to eat the things or use them for some bizarre, bloody Aztec ritual, so I simply studied the plate, hoping for a clue.

It was finally provided by Vince. “My God,” he blurted.

Manny nodded. “They’re wonderful, aren’t they?” he said. “But so-o-o-o last year.” He picked one up, the one with the blue top, and gazed at it with a kind of aloof fondness. “The color palette really got tired, and that horrible old hotel over by Indian Creek started to copy them. Still,” he said with a shrug, and he popped it into his mouth. I was glad to see that it didn’t seem to cause any major bleeding. “One does grow fond of one’s own little tricks.” He turned and winked at Eduardo. “Perhaps a little too fond sometimes.” Eduardo went pale and fled to the kitchen, and Manny turned back to us with a huge crocodile smile. “Do try one, though, won’t you?”

“I’m afraid to bite one,” Vince said. “They’re so

perfect

.”

“And I’m afraid they might bite back,” I said.

Manny showed off a few dozen teeth. “If I could teach them that,” he said, “I would never be lonely.” He nudged the plate in my direction. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Would you serve these at my wedding?” I asked, thinking perhaps somebody ought to find some kind of point in all this.

Vince elbowed me, hard, but it was apparently too late. Manny’s eyes had narrowed to little slits, although his impressive dental work was still on display. “I do not serve,” he said. “I

present

. And I

present

whatever seems best to

me

.”

“Shouldn’t I have some idea ahead of time what that might be?” I asked, “I mean, suppose the bride is allergic to wasabi-basted arugula aspic?”

Manny tightened his fists so hard I could hear the knuckles creak. For a moment I had a small thrill of hope at the thought that I might have clevered myself out of a caterer. But then Manny relaxed and laughed. “I like your friend, Vic,” he said. “He’s very brave.”

Vince favored us both with a smile and started to breathe again, and Manny began to doodle with a pad and paper, and that is how I ended up with the great Manny Borque agreeing to cater my wedding at the special discounted price of only $250 a plate.

It seemed a bit high. But after all, I had been specifically instructed not to worry about money. I was sure Rita would think of some way to make it work, perhaps by inviting only two or three people. In any case, I didn’t get a great deal of time to worry about mere finances, as my cell phone began its happy little dirge almost immediately, and when I answered I heard Deborah say, without even attempting to match my cheery hello, “I need you here right away.”

“I’m awfully busy with some very important canapés,” I told her. “Can I borrow twenty thousand dollars?”

She made a noise in her throat and said, “I don’t have time for bullshit, Dexter. The twenty-four hours starts in twenty minutes and I need you there for it.” It was the custom in Homicide to convene everybody involved in a case twenty-four hours after the work began, to make sure everything was organized and everyone was on the same page. And Debs obviously felt that I had some kind of shrewd insight to offer-very thoughtful really, but untrue. With the Dark Passenger apparently still on hiatus, I didn’t think the great light of insight would come flooding in anytime soon.

“Debs, I really don’t have any thought at all on this one,” I said.

“Just get over here,” she told me, and hung up.

CHAPTER 8

T

HE TRAFFIC ON THE 836 WAS BACKED UP FOR HALF A MILE right after the 395 from Miami Beach poured into it. We inched forward between exits until we could see the problem: a truckload of watermelons had emptied out onto the highway. There was a streak of red-and-green goo six inches thick across the road, dotted with a sprinkling of cars in various stages of destruction. An ambulance went past on the shoulder, followed by a procession of cars driven by people too important to wait in a traffic jam. Horns honked all along the line, people yelled and waved their fists, and somewhere ahead I heard a single gunshot. It was good to be back to normal life.

By the time we fought our way through the traffic and onto surface streets, we had lost fifteen minutes and it took another fifteen to get back to work. Vince and I rode the elevator to the second floor in silence, but as the doors slid open and we stepped out, he stopped me. “You’re doing the right thing,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” I said. “But if I don’t do it quickly Deborah will kill me.”

He grabbed my arm. “I mean about Manny,” he said. “You’re going to love what he does. It will really make a difference.”

I was already aware that it would really make a difference in my bank account, but beyond that I still didn’t see the point. Would everyone truly have a better time if they were served a series of apparently alien objects of uncertain use and origin instead of cold cuts? There is a great deal I don’t understand about human beings, but this really seemed to take the cake-assuming we would have a cake at all, which in my opinion was not a sure thing.

There was one thing I understood quite well, however, and that was Deborah’s attitude about punctuality. It was handed down from our father, and it said that lateness was disrespect and there were no excuses. So I pried Vince’s fingers off my arm and shook his hand. “I’m sure we’re all going to be very happy with the food,” I said.

He held on to my hand. “It’s more than that,” he said.

“Vince-”

“You’re making a statement about the rest of your life,” he said. “A really

good

statement, that your and Rita’s life together-”

“My life is in danger if I don’t go, Vince,” I said.

“I’m really happy about this,” he said, and it was so unnerving to see him display an apparently authentic emotion that there was actually a little bit of panic to my flight away from him and down the hall to the conference room.

The room was full, since this was becoming a somewhat high-profile case after the hysterical news stories of the evening before about two young women found burned and headless. Deborah glared at me as I slipped in and stood by the door, and I gave her what I hoped was a disarming smile. She cut off the speaker, one of the patrolmen who had been first on the scene.

“All right,” she said. “We know we’re not going to find the heads on the scene.”

I had thought that my late entrance and Deborah’s vicious glare at me would certainly win the award for Most Dramatic Entrance, but I was dead wrong. Because just as Debs tried to get the meeting moving again, I was upstaged as thoroughly as a candle at a firebombing.

“Come on, people,” Sergeant Sister said. “Let’s have some ideas about this.”

“We could drag the lake,” Camilla Figg said. She was a thirty-five-year-old forensics geek and usually kept quiet, and it was rather surprising to hear her speak. Apparently some people preferred it that way, because a thin, intense cop named Corrigan jumped on her right away.

“Bullshit,” said Corrigan. “Heads float.”

“They don’t float-they’re solid bone,” Camilla insisted.

“Some of ’em are,” Corrigan said, and he got his little laugh.

Deborah frowned, and was about to step in with an authoritative word or two, when a noise in the hall stopped her.

CLUMP.

Not that loud, but somehow it commanded all the attention there was in the room.

CLUMP.

Closer, a little louder, for all the world approaching us now like something from a low-budget horror movie…

CLUMP.

For some reason I couldn’t hope to explain, everyone in the room seemed to hold their breath and turn slowly toward the door. And if only because I wanted to fit in, I began to turn for a peek into the hall myself, when I was stopped by the smallest possible interior tickle, just a hint of a twitch, and so I closed my eyes and listened.

Hello?

I said mentally, and after a very short pause there was a small, slightly hesitant sound, almost a clearing of the mental throat, and then-

Somebody in the room muttered, “Holy sweet Jesus,” with the kind of reverent horror that was always guaranteed to pique my interest, and the small not-quite-sound within purred just a bit and then subsided. I opened my eyes.

I can only say that I had been so happy to feel the Passenger stirring in the dark backseat that for a moment I had tuned out everything around me. This is always a dangerous slip, especially for artificial humans like me, and the point was driven home with an absolutely stunning impact when I opened my eyes.

It was indeed low-budget horror,

Night of the Living Dead

, but in the flesh and not a movie at all, because standing in the doorway, just to my right, staring at me, was a man who was really supposed to be dead.

Sergeant Doakes.

Doakes had never liked me. He seemed to be the only cop on the entire force who suspected that I might be what, in fact, I was. I had always thought he could see through my disguise because he was somewhat the same thing himself, a cold killer. He had tried and failed to prove that I was guilty of almost anything, and that failure had also failed to endear me to him.

The last time I had seen Doakes the paramedics had been loading him into an ambulance. He had been unconscious, partly as the result of the shock and pain of having his tongue, feet, and hands removed by a very talented amateur surgeon who thought Doakes had done him wrong. Now it was true that I had gently encouraged that notion with the part-time doctor, but I had at least had the decency to persuade Doakes first to go along with the plan, in order to catch the inhuman fiend. And I had also very nearly saved Doakes at considerable risk to my own precious and irreplaceable life and limbs. I hadn’t quite pulled off the dashing and timely rescue I’m sure Doakes had hoped for, but I had tried, and it was really and truly not my fault that he had been more dead than alive when they hauled him away.

So I didn’t think it was asking too much for some small acknowledgment of the great hazard I had exposed myself to on his behalf. I didn’t need flowers, or a medal, or even a box of chocolates, but perhaps something along the lines of a hearty clap on the back and a murmured, “Thanks, old fellow.” Of course he would have some trouble murmuring coherently without a tongue, and the clap on the back with one of his new metal hands could prove painful, but he might at least try. Was that so unreasonable?

Apparently it was. Doakes stared at me as if he was the hungriest dog in the world and I was the very last steak. I had thought that he used to look at me with enough venom to lay low the entire endangered species list. But that had been the gentle laughter of a tousle-haired child on a sunny day compared to the way he was looking at me now. And I knew what had made the Dark Passenger clear its throat-it had been the scent of a familiar predator. I felt the slow flex of interior wings, coming back to full roaring life, rising to the challenge in Doakes’s eyes. And behind those dark eyes his own inner monster snarled and spat at mine. We stood like that for a long moment, on the outside simply staring but on the inside two predatory shadows screeching out a challenge.

Someone was speaking, but the world had narrowed to just me and Doakes and the two black shadows inside us calling for battle, and neither one of us heard a word, just an annoying drone in the background.

Deborah’s voice cut through the fog at last. “Sergeant Doakes,” she said, somewhat forcefully. Finally Doakes turned to face her and the spell was broken. And feeling somewhat smug in the power-joy and bliss!-of the Passenger, as well as the petty victory of having Doakes turn away first, I faded into the wallpaper, taking a small step back to survey the leftovers of my once-mighty nemesis.

Sergeant Doakes still held the department record for bench press, but he did not look like he would defend his record anytime soon. He was gaunt and, except for the fire smoldering behind his eyes, he looked almost weak. He stood stiffly on his two prosthetic feet, his arms hanging straight down by his sides, with gleaming silver things that looked like a complicated kind of vise grip protruding from each wrist.

I could hear the others in the room breathing, but aside from that there was not a sound. Everyone simply stared at the thing that had once been Doakes, and he stared at Deborah, who licked her lips, apparently trying to think of something coherent to say, and finally came up with, “Have a seat, Doakes. Um. I’ll bring you up to date?”

Doakes looked at her for a long moment. Then he turned awkwardly around, glared at me, and clumped out of the room, his strange, measured footsteps echoing down the hall until they were gone.

On the whole, cops don’t like to give the impression that they are ever impressed or intimidated, so it was several seconds before anyone risked giving away any unwanted emotion by breathing again. Naturally enough, it was Deborah who finally broke the unnatural silence. “All right,” she said, and suddenly everyone was clearing their throats and shifting in their chairs.

“All right,” she repeated, “so we won’t find the heads at the scene.”

“Heads don’t float,” Camilla Figg insisted scornfully, and we were back to where we had been before the sudden semi-appearance of Sergeant Doakes. And they droned on for another ten minutes or so, tirelessly fighting crime by arguing about who was supposed to fill out the paperwork, when we were rudely interrupted once again by the door beside me swinging open.

“Sorry to interrupt,” Captain Matthews said. “I’ve got some-ah-really great news, I think.” He looked around the room frowning, which even I could have told him was not the proper face for delivering great news. “It’s, uh, ahem. Sergeant Doakes has come back, and he’s, uh-It’s important for you people to realize that he’s been badly, uh, damaged. He has only a couple of years left before he’s eligible for full pension, so the lawyers, ah-we thought, under the circumstances, um…” He trailed off and looked around the room. “Did somebody already tell you people?”

“Sergeant Doakes was just here,” Deborah said.

“Oh,” Matthews said. “Well, then-” He shrugged. “That’s fine. All right then. I’ll let you get on with the meeting then. Anything to report?”

“No real progress yet, Captain,” Deborah said.

“Well, I’m sure you’ll get this thing wrapped up before the press-I mean, in a timely fashion.”

“Yes, sir,” she said.

“All right then,” he said again. And he looked around the room once, squared his shoulders, and left the room.

“Heads don’t float,” somebody else said, and a small snort of laughter went around the room.

“Jesus,” Deborah said. “Can we focus on this, please? We got two bodies here.”

And more to come

, I thought, and the Dark Passenger quivered slightly, as if trying very bravely not to run away, but that was all, and I thought no more about it.

CHAPTER 9

I

DON’T DREAM. I MEAN, I’M SURE THAT AT SOME POINT DURING my normal sleep, there must be images and fragments of nonsense parading through my subconscious. After all, they tell me that happens with everyone. But I never seem to remember dreams if I do have them, which they tell me happens to nobody at all. So I assume that I do not dream.

It was therefore something of a shock to discover myself late that night, cradled in Rita’s arms, shouting something I could not quite hear; just the echo of my own strangled voice coming back at me out of the cottony dark, and Rita’s cool hand on my forehead, her voice murmuring, “All right, sweetheart, I won’t leave you.”

“Thank you very much,” I said in a croaking voice. I cleared my throat and sat up.

“You had a bad dream,” she told me.

“Really? What was it?” I still didn’t remember anything but my shouting and a vague sense of danger crowding in on me, and me all alone.

“I don’t know,” Rita said. “You were shouting, ‘Come back! Don’t leave me alone.’” She cleared her throat. “Dexter-I know you’re feeling some stress about our wedding-”

“Not at all,” I said.

“But I want you to know. I will never leave you.” She reached for my hand again. “This is forever with me, big man. I am holding on to you.” She scooted over and put her head on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. I won’t ever leave you, Dexter.”

Even though I lack experience with dreams, I was fairly sure that my subconscious was not terribly worried about Rita leaving me. I mean, it hadn’t occurred to me that she would, which was not really a sign of trust on my part. I just hadn’t thought about it. Truly, I had no idea why she wanted to hang on to me in the first place, so any hypothetical leave-taking was just as mysterious.

No, this was my subconscious. If it was crying out in pain at the threat of abandonment, I knew exactly what it feared losing: the Dark Passenger. My bosom buddy, my constant companion on my journey through life’s sorrows and sharp pleasures. That was the fear behind the dream: losing the thing that had been so very much a part of me, had actually defined me, for my whole life.

When it scuttled into hiding at the university crime scene it had clearly shaken me badly, more than I had known at the time. The sudden and very scary reappearance of 65 percent of Sergeant Doakes supplied the sense of danger, and the rest was easy. My subconscious had kicked in and supplied a dream on the subject. Perfectly clear-Psych 101, a textbook case, nothing to worry about.

So why was I still worrying?

Because the Passenger had never even flinched before, and I still didn’t know why it had chosen now. Was Rita right about the stress of the approaching wedding? Or was there really something about the two headless bodies by the university lake that just plain scared the Dark out of me?

I didn’t know-and, since it seemed like Rita’s ideas about comforting me had begun to take a more active turn, it did not look like I was going to find out anytime soon.

“Come here, baby,” Rita whispered.

And after all, there really isn’t any place to run in a queen-size bed, is there?

The next morning found Deborah obsessed with finding the missing heads from the two bodies at the university. Somehow word had leaked out to the press that the department was interested in finding a couple of skulls that had wandered away. This was Miami, and I really would have thought that a missing head would get less press coverage than a traffic tie-up on I-95, but something about the fact that there were two of them, and that they apparently belonged to young women, created quite a stir. Captain Matthews was a man who knew the value of being mentioned in the press, but even he was not pleased with the note of surly hysteria that attached itself to this story.

And so pressure came down on all of us from above; from the captain to Deborah, who wasted no time passing it on down to the rest of us. Vince Masuoka became convinced that he could provide Deborah with the key to the whole matter by finding out which bizarre religious sect was responsible. This led to him sticking his head in my door that morning and, without any kind of warning, giving me his best fake smile and saying, firmly and distinctly, “Candomblé.”

“Shame on you,” I said. “This is no time for that kind of language.”

“Ha,” he said, with his terrible artificial laugh. “But it is, I’m sure of it. Candomblé is like Santeria, but it’s Brazilian.”

“Vince, I have no reason to doubt you on that. My question is, what the hell are you talking about?”

He came two steps into the room in a kind of prance, as if his body wanted to take off and he couldn’t quite fight it down. “They have a thing about animal heads in some of their rituals,” he said. “It’s on the Internet.”

“Really,” I said. “Does it say on the Internet that this Brazilian thing barbecues humans, cuts off their heads, and replaces them with ceramic bulls’ heads?”

Vince wilted just a bit. “No,” he admitted, and he raised his eyebrows hopefully. “But they use animals.”

“How do they use them, Vince?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, and he looked around my little room, possibly for another topic of conversation. “Sometimes they, you know, offer a part to the gods, and then they eat the rest.”

“Vince,” I said, “are you suggesting that somebody ate the missing heads?”

“No,” he said, turning sullen, almost like Cody and Astor might have done. “But they could have.”

“It would be very crunchy, wouldn’t it?”

“All right,” he said, exceedingly sulky now. “I’m just trying to help.” And he stalked away, without even a small fake smile.

But the chaos had only begun. As my unwanted trip to dreamland indicated, I was already under enough pressure without the added strain of a rampaging sister. But only a few minutes later, my small oasis of peace was ripped asunder once again, this time by Deborah, who came roaring into my office as if pursued by killer bees.

“Come on,” she snarled at me.

“Come on where?” I asked, quite a reasonable question, I thought, but you would have thought I had asked her to shave her head and paint her skull blue.

“Just get in gear, and come on!” she said, so I came on and followed her down to the parking lot and into her car.

“I swear to God,” she fumed as she hammered her car through the traffic, “I have never seen Matthews this pissed before. And now it’s my fault!” She banged on the horn for emphasis and swerved in front of a van that said PALMVIEW ASSISTED LIVING on the side. “All because some asshole leaked the heads to the press.”

“Well, Debs,” I said, with all the reasonable soothing I could muster, “I’m sure the heads will turn up.”

“You’re goddamned right they will,” she said, narrowly missing a fat man on a bicycle that had huge saddlebags stuffed with scrap metal. “Because I am going to find out which cult the son of a bitch belongs to, and then I’m going to nail the bastard.”

I paused in mid-soothe. Apparently my dear demented sister, just like Vince, had gotten hold of the idea that finding the appropriate alternative religion would yield a killer. “Ah, all right,” I said. “And where are we going to do that?”

She slid the car out onto Biscayne Boulevard and into a parking space at the curb without answering, and got out of the car. And so I found myself patiently following her into the Centre for Inner Enhancement, a clearinghouse for all the wonderfully useful things that have the words “holistic,” “herbal,” or “aura” in them.

The Centre was a small and shabby building in an area of Biscayne Boulevard that had apparently been designated by treaty as a kind of reservation for prostitutes and crack dealers. There were enormous bars on the storefront windows and more of them on the door, which was locked. Deborah pounded on it and after a moment it gave an annoying buzz. She pushed, and finally it clicked and swung open.

We stepped in. A suffocating cloud of sickly sweet incense rolled over me, and I could tell that my inner enhancement had begun with a complete overhaul of my lungs. Through the smoke I could dimly see a large yellow silk banner hung along one wall that stated WE ARE ALL ONE. It did not say one of what. A recording played softly, the sound of someone who seemed to be fighting off an overdose of downers by occasionally ringing a series of small bells. A waterfall murmured in the background and I am sure that my spirit would have soared, if only I had one. Since I didn’t, I found the whole thing just a bit irritating.

But of course, we weren’t here for pleasure, or even inner enhancement. And Sergeant Sister was, of course, all business all the time. She marched over to the counter, where there stood a middle-aged woman wearing a full-length tie-dyed dress that seemed to be made out of old crepe paper. Her graying hair radiated out from her head in a kind of random mess, and she was frowning. Of course, it may have been a beatific frown of enlightenment.

“Can I help you?” she said, in a gravelly voice that seemed to suggest we were beyond help.

Deborah held up her badge. Before she could say anything the woman reached over and plucked it from her hand.

“All right, Sergeant Morgan,” the woman said, tossing the badge on the counter. “It seems to be genuine.”

“Couldn’t you just read her aura and tell that?” I suggested. Neither of them seemed ready to give that remark any of the appreciation it deserved, so I shrugged and listened as Deborah began her grueling interrogation.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, please,” Deborah said, leaning forward to scoop up her badge.

“About what?” the woman demanded. She frowned even harder, and Deborah frowned back, and it began to look like we were in for a good old-fashioned country frown-off, with the winner getting free Botox treatments to freeze her face into a permanent scowl.

“There have been some murders,” Deborah said, and the woman shrugged.

“What’s that got to do with me?” she asked.

I applauded her reasoning, but after all, I did have to play for my own team now and then.

“It’s because we are all one,” I said. “That’s the basis of all police work.”

She swiveled her frown to me and blinked at me in a very aggressive way. “Who the hell are you?” she demanded. “Lemme see your badge.”

“I’m her backup,” I said. “In case she’s attacked by bad karma.”

The woman snorted, but at least she didn’t shoot me. “Cops in this town,” she said, “are

swimming

in bad karma. I was at the FTAA rally, and I know what you people are like.”

“Maybe we are,” Deborah said, “but the other side is even worse, so could you just answer a few questions?”

The woman looked back at Deborah, still frowning, and shrugged. “Okay, I guess,” she said. “But I don’t see how I can help. And I call my lawyer if you get out of line.”

“Fine,” Deborah said. “We’re looking for a lead on somebody who might be connected to a local alternative religious group that has a thing for bulls.”

For a second I thought the woman was almost going to smile, but she caught herself just in time. “Bulls? Jesus, who doesn’t have a thing for bulls. Goes all the way back to Sumer, Crete, all those old cradle-of-civilization places. Lots of people have worshipped them. I mean, aside from the huge cocks, they’re very powerful.”

If the woman thought she was going to embarrass Deborah, she didn’t know as much about Miami cops as she thought she did. My sister didn’t even blink. “Do you know of any group in particular that might be local?” Debs said.

“I dunno,” she said. “What kind of group?”

“Candomblé?” I said, briefly grateful to Vince for supplying a word. “Palo Mayombe? Or even Wicca.”

“The Spanish stuff, you gotta go over to Eleggua on Eighth Street. I wouldn’t know about that. We sell some stuff to the Wicca people, but I’m not gonna tell you about it without a warrant. Anyway, they don’t do bulls.” She snorted. “They just stand around in the Everglades naked, waiting for their power to come.”

“Is there anybody else?” Debs insisted.

The woman just shook her head. “I dunno. I mean, I know about most of the groups in town, and nothing like that I can think of.” She shrugged. “Maybe the Druids, they got a spring event coming up. They used to do human sacrifice.”

Deborah frowned even more intensely. “When was that?” she said.

This time the woman actually did smile, just a little, with one corner of her mouth. “About two thousand years ago. You’re a little late on that one, Sherlock.”

“Is there anything else you can think of that might help?” Deborah asked.

The woman shook her head. “Help with what? There might be some psycho loser out there who read Aleister Crowley and lives on a dairy farm. How would I know?”

Deborah looked at her for a moment, as if trying to decide if she had been offensive enough to arrest, and then apparently decided against it. “Thank you for your time,” she said, and she flipped her business card on the counter. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, please give me a call.”

“Yeah, sure,” the woman said, without even glancing at the card. Deborah glared at her for a moment longer and then stalked out of the door. The woman stared at me and I smiled.

“I really like vegetables,” I said. Then I gave the woman the peace sign and followed my sister out.

“That was a stupid idea,” Deborah said as we walked rapidly back to her car.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I said. And it was quite true, I wouldn’t say it. Of course, it really was a stupid idea, but to say so would have been to invite one of Debs’s vicious arm punches. “If nothing else, we eliminated a few possibilities.”

“Sure,” she said sourly. “We know it probably wasn’t a bunch of naked fruits, unless they did it two thousand years ago.”

She did have a point, but I see it as my job in life to help all those around me maintain a positive attitude. “It’s still progress,” I said. “Shall we check out the place on Eighth Street? I’ll translate for you.” In spite of being a Miami native, Debs had whimsically insisted on studying French in school, and she could barely order lunch in Spanish.

She shook her head. “Waste of time,” she said. “I’ll tell Angel to ask around, but it won’t go anywhere.”

And she was right. Angel came back late that afternoon with a very nice candle that had a prayer to St. Jude on it in Spanish, but other than that his trip to the place on Eighth Street was a waste of time, just as Debs had predicted.

We were left with nothing, except two bodies, no heads, and a very bad feeling.

That was about to change.

CHAPTER 10

T

HE NEXT DAY PASSED UNEVENTFULLY AND WE GOT NO closer to any kind of hint about the two murders at the university. And life being the kind of lopsided, grotesque affair that it is, Deborah blamed our lack of progress on me. She was still convinced that I had special magical powers and had used them to see straight into the dark heart of the killings, and that I was keeping vital information from her for petty personal reasons.

Very flattering, but totally untrue. The only insight I had into the matter was that something about it had scared the Dark Passenger, and I did not want that to happen again. I decided to stay away from the case, and since there was almost no blood work involved, that should have been easy in a logical and well-ordered universe.

But alas, we do not live in any such place. Our universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. At the moment, the chief of these was my sister. Late the following morning she cornered me in my little cubbyhole and dragged me away to lunch with her boyfriend, Kyle Chutsky. I had no real objections to Chutsky, other than his permanent attitude of knowing the real truth about everything. Aside from that, he was just as pleasant and amiable as a cold killer can be, and it would have been hypocritical for me to object to his personality on those grounds. And since he seemed to make my sister happy, I did not object on any other grounds, either.

So off I went to lunch, since in the first place she was my sister, and in the second, the mighty machine that is my body needs almost constant fuel.

The fuel it craves most often is a

medianoche

sandwich, usually with a side of fried

plátanos

and a

mamey

milk shake. I don’t know why this simple, hearty meal plays such a transcendent chord on the strings of my being, but there is nothing else like it. Prepared properly, it takes me as close to ecstasy as I can get. And no one prepares it quite as properly as Café Relampago, a storefront place not far from police HQ, where the Morgans have been eating since time out of mind. It was so good even Deborah’s perpetual grumpiness couldn’t spoil it.

“Goddamn it!” she said to me through a mouthful of sandwich. It was certainly far from a novel phrase coming from her, but she said it with a viciousness that left me lightly spattered with bread crumbs. I took a sip of my excellent

batido de mamey

and waited for her to expand on her argument, but instead she simply said it again. “Goddamn it!”

“You’re covering up your feelings again,” I said. “But because I am your brother, I can tell something is bothering you.”

Chutsky snorted as he sawed at his Cuban steak. “No shit,” he said. He was about to say more, but the fork clamped in his prosthetic left hand slipped sideways. “Goddamn it,” he said, and I realized that they had a great deal more in common than I had thought. Deborah leaned over and helped him straighten the fork. “Thanks,” he said, and shoveled in a large bite of the pounded-flat meat.

“There, you see?” I said brightly. “All you needed was something to take your mind off your own problems.”

We were sitting at a table where we had probably eaten a hundred times. But Deborah was rarely troubled by sentiment; she straightened up and slapped the battered Formica tabletop hard enough to make the sugar bowl jump.

“I want to know who talked to that asshole Rick Sangre!” she said. Sangre was a local TV reporter who believed that the gorier a story was, the more vital it was for people to have a free press that could fill them in on as many gruesome details as possible. From the tone of her voice, Deborah was apparently convinced that Rick was my new best friend.

“Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. “And I don’t think it was Doakes.”

“Ouch,” said Chutsky.

“

And

,” she said, “I want to find those fucking heads!”

“I don’t have them, either,” I said. “Did you check lost and found?”

“You know something, Dexter,” she said. “Come on, why are you holding out on me?”

Chutsky looked up and swallowed. “Why should he know something you don’t?” he asked. “Was there a lot of spatter?”

“No spatter at all,” I said. “The bodies were cooked, nice and dry.”

Chutsky nodded and managed to scoop some rice and beans onto his fork. “You’re a sick bastard, aren’t you?”

“He’s worse than sick,” Deborah said. “He’s holding out something.”

“Oh,” Chutsky said through a mouthful of food. “Is this his amateur profiling thing again?” It was a small fiction; we had told him that my hobby was actually analytical, rather than hands-on.

“It is,” Deborah said. “And he won’t tell me what he’s figured out.”

“It might be hard to believe, Sis, but I know nothing about this. Just…” I shrugged, but she was already pouncing.

“What! Come on, please?”

I hesitated again. There was no good way to tell her that the Dark Passenger had reacted to these killings in a brand-new and totally unsettling way. “I just get a feeling,” I said. “Something is a little off with this one.”

She snorted. “Two burned headless bodies, and he says something’s a little off. Didn’t you used to be smart?”

I took a bite of my sandwich as Deborah frittered away her precious eating time by frowning. “Have you identified the bodies yet?” I asked.

“Come on, Dexter. There’s no heads, so we got no dental records. The bodies were burned, so there’s no fingerprints. Shit, we don’t even know what color their hair was. What do you want me to do?”

“I could probably help, you know,” Chutsky said. He speared a chunk of fried

maduras

and popped it into his mouth. “I have a few resources I can call on.”

“I don’t need your help,” she said and he shrugged.

“You take Dexter’s help,” he said.

“That’s different.”

“How is that different?” he asked, and it seemed like a reasonable question.

“Because he gives me

help

,” she said. “You want to solve it for me.”

They locked eyes and didn’t speak for a long moment. I’d seen them do it before, and it was eerily reminiscent of the nonverbal conversations Cody and Astor had. It was nice to see them so clearly welded together as a couple, even though it reminded me that I had a wedding of my own to worry about, complete with an apparently insane high-class caterer. Happily, just before I could begin to gnash my teeth, Debs broke the eerie silence.

“I won’t be one of those women who needs help,” she said.

“But I can get you information that you can’t get,” he said, putting his good hand on her arm.

“Like what?” I asked him. I’ll admit I had been curious for some time about what Chutsky was, or had been before his accidental amputations. I knew that he had worked for some government agency which he referred to as the OGA, but I still didn’t know what that stood for.

He turned to face me obligingly. “I have friends and sources in a lot of places,” he said. “Something like this might have left some kind of trail somewhere else, and I could call around and find out.”

“You mean call your buddies at the OGA?” I said.

He smiled. “Something like that,” he said.

“For Christ’s sake, Dexter,” Deborah said. “OGA just means other government agency. There’s no such agency, it’s an in-joke.”

“Nice to be in at last,” I said. “And you can still get access to their files?”

He shrugged. “Technically I’m on convalescent leave,” he said.

“From doing what?” I asked.

He gave me a mechanical smile. “You don’t really want to know,” he said. “The point is, they haven’t decided yet whether I’m any fucking good anymore.” He looked at the fork clamped in his steel hand, turning his arm over to see it move. “Shit,” he said.

And because I could feel that one of those awkward moments was upon us, I did what I could to move things back onto a sociable footing. “Didn’t you find anything at the kiln?” I asked. “Some kind of jewelry or something?”

“What the fuck is that?” she said.

“The kiln,” I said. “Where the bodies were burned.”

“Haven’t you been paying attention? We haven’t found where the bodies were burned.”

“Oh,” I said. “I assumed it was done right there on campus, in the ceramic studio.”

By the suddenly frozen look on her face, I realized that either she was experiencing massive indigestion or she did not know about the ceramic studio. “It’s just half a mile from the lake where the bodies were found,” I said. “You know, the kiln. Where they make pottery?”

Deborah stared at me for a moment longer, and then jumped up from the table. I thought it was a wonderfully creative and dramatic way to end a conversation, and it took a moment before I could do more than blink after her.

“I guess she didn’t know about that,” Chutsky said.

“That’s my first guess,” I said. “Shall we follow?”

He shrugged and speared the last chunk of his steak. “I’m gonna have some flan, and a

cafecita

. Then I’ll get a cab, since I’m not allowed to help,” he said. He scooped up some rice and beans and nodded at me. “You go ahead, unless you want to walk back to work.”

I did not, in fact, have any desire to walk back to work. On the other hand, I still had almost half a milk shake and I did not want to leave that, either. I stood up and followed, but I softened the blow by grabbing the uneaten half of Deborah’s sandwich and taking it with me as I lurched out the door after her.

Soon we were rolling through the front gate of the university campus. Deborah spent part of the ride talking on the radio and arranging for people to meet us at the kilns, and the rest of the ride clenching her teeth and muttering.

We turned left after the gate and headed down the winding road that leads to the ceramic and pottery area. I had taken a class in pottery there my junior year in an effort to widen my horizons, and found out that I was good at making very regular-looking vases but not terribly successful at creating original works of art, at least not in that medium. In my own area, I flatter myself that I can be creative, as I had recently demonstrated with Zander.

Angel-no-relation was already there, carefully and patiently looking through the first kiln for any sign of practically anything. Deborah went over and squatted beside him, leaving me alone with the last three bites of her sandwich. I took the first bite. A crowd was beginning to gather by the yellow tape. Perhaps they were hoping to see something too terrible to look at: I never knew why they gathered like that, but they always did.

Deborah was now on the ground beside Angel, who had his head inside the first of the kilns. This would probably be a long wait.

I had barely put the last bite of sandwich into my mouth when I became aware that I was being watched. Of course I was being

looked at

, anyone on the business side of the yellow tape always was. But I was also being

watched

-the Dark Passenger clamored at me that I had been singled out by something with an unhealthy interest in special wonderful me, and I did not like the feeling. As I swallowed the last of the sandwich and turned to look, the whisper inside me hissed something that sounded like confusion…and then settled into silence.

And as it did I felt again the wave of panicked nausea and the bright yellow edge of blindness, and I stumbled for a moment, all my senses crying out that there was danger but my ability to do anything about it completely gone. It lasted only a second. I fought my way back to the surface and looked harder at my surroundings-nothing had changed. A handful of people stood looking on, the sun shone brightly, and a gentle wind riffled through the trees. Just another perfect Miami day, but somewhere in paradise the snake had reared its head. I closed my eyes and listened hard, hoping for some hint about the nature of the menace, but there was nothing but the echo of clawed feet scrabbling away.

I opened my eyes and looked around again. There was a crowd of perhaps fifteen people pretending not to be fascinated by the hope of seeing gore, but none of them stood out in any way. None of them were skulking or staring evilly or trying to hide a bazooka under their shirt. In any normal time, I might have expected my Passenger to see a dark shadow around an obvious predator, but there was no such assistance now. As far as I could see, nothing sinister loomed in the crowd. So what had set off the Passenger’s fire alarm? I knew so little about it; it was just there, a presence filled with wicked amusement and sharp suggestions. It had never showed confusion before, not until it saw the two bodies by the lake. And now it was repeating its vague uncertainty, only half a mile from the first spot.

Was it something in the water? Or was there some connection to the two burned bodies here at the kilns?

I wandered over to where Deborah and Angel-no-relation were working. They didn’t seem to be finding anything particularly alarming, and there were no jolts of panic roiling out from the kiln to the place where the Dark Passenger was hiding.

If this second retreat was not caused by something in front of me, then what caused it? What if it was some kind of weird interior erosion? Perhaps my new status of impending husband-hood and stepfather-ness was overwhelming my Passenger. Was I becoming too nice to be a proper host? This would be a fate worse than someone else’s death.

I became aware that I was standing just inside the yellow crime-scene tape, and a large form was lurking in front of me.

“Uh, hello?” he said. He was a big, well-muscled young specimen with longish, lank hair and the look of someone who believed in breathing through the mouth.

“How can I help you, citizen?” I said.

“Are you, uh, you know,” he said, “like a cop?”

“A little bit like one,” I said.

He nodded and thought about that for a moment, looking around behind him as if there might be something there he could eat. On the back of his neck was one of those unfortunate tattoos that have become so popular, an Oriental character of some kind. It probably spelled out “slow learner.” He rubbed the tattoo as if he could hear me thinking about it, then turned around to me and blurted out, “I was wondering about Jessica.”

“Of course you were,” I said. “Who wouldn’t?”

“Do they know if it’s her?” he said. “I’m like her boyfriend.”

The young gentleman had now succeeded in grabbing my professional attention. “Is Jessica missing?” I asked him.

He nodded. “She was, you know, supposed to work out with me? Like every morning, you know. Around the track, and then some abs. But yesterday she doesn’t show up. And same thing this morning. So I started thinking, uh…” He frowned, apparently at the effort of thinking, and his speech trickled to a halt.

“What’s your name?” I asked him.

“Kurt,” he said. “Kurt Wagner. What’s yours?”

“Dexter,” I said. “Wait here a moment, Kurt.” I hurried over to Deborah before the strain of trying to think again proved too much for the boy.

“Deborah,” I said, “we may have a small break here.”

“Well, it isn’t your damned pot ovens,” she snarled. “They’re too small for a body.”

“No,” I said. “But the young man over there is missing a girlfriend.”

Her head jerked up and she rose to standing almost on point like a hunting dog. She stared over at Jessica’s like-boyfriend, who looked back and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “About fucking time,” she said, and she headed for him.

I looked at Angel. He shrugged and stood up. For a moment, he looked like he was going to say something. But then he shook his head, dusted off his hands, and followed Debs over to hear what Kurt had to say, leaving me really and truly all alone with my dark thoughts.

Just to watch; sometimes it was enough. Of course there was the sure knowledge that watching would lead inevitably to the surging heat and glorious flow of blood, the overwhelming pulse of emotions throbbing from the victims, the rising music of the ordered madness as the sacrifice flew into wonderful death…All this would come. For now, it was enough for the Watcher to observe and soak in the delicious feeling of anonymous, ultimate power. He could feel the unease of the other. That unease would grow, rising through the musical range into fear, then panic, and at last full-fledged terror. It would all come in good time.

The Watcher saw the other scanning the crowd, flailing about for some clue to the source of the blossoming sense of danger that tickled at his senses. He would find nothing, of course. Not yet. Not until

he

determined that the time was right. Not until

he

had run the other into dull mindless panic. Only then would he stop watching and begin to take final action.

And until then-it was time to let the other begin to hear the music of fear.

CHAPTER 11

H

ER NAME WAS JESSICA ORTEGA. SHE WAS A JUNIOR AND lived in one of the nearby residence halls. We got the room number from Kurt, and Deborah left Angel to wait at the kilns until a squad car arrived to take over.

I never knew why they were called residence halls instead of dormitories. Perhaps it was because they looked so much like hotels nowadays. There were no ivy-covered walls bedecking the hallowed halls here, the lobby had lots of glass and potted plants, and the halls were carpeted and clean and new-looking.

We stopped at the door of Jessica’s room. It had a small, neat card taped at eye level that read ARIEL GOLDMAN & JESSICA ORTEGA. Below that in smaller print it said INTOXICANTS REQUIRED FOR ENTRY. Someone had underlined “Entry” and scrawled below it YOU THINK

?

Deborah raised an eyebrow at me. “Party girls,” she said.

“Somebody has to do it,” I said.

She snorted and knocked on the door. There was no answer, and Debs waited a full three seconds before knocking again, much harder.

I heard a door open behind me and turned to see a reed-thin girl with short blond hair and glasses looking at us. “They’re not here,” she said with clear disapproval. “For like a couple of days. First quiet I’ve had all semester.”

“Do you know where they went?” Deborah asked her.

The girl rolled her eyes. “Must be a major kegger somewhere,” she said.

“When was the last time you saw them?” Deborah said.

The girl shrugged. “With those two it’s not seeing them, it’s hearing them. Loud music and laughing all night, okay? Major pain in the butt for somebody who actually studies and goes to class.” She shook her head, and her short hair riffled around her face. “I mean, please.”

“So when was the last time you heard them?” I asked her.

She looked at me. “Are you like cops or something? What did they do now?”

“What have they done before?” Debs asked.

She sighed. “Parking tickets. I mean, lots of them. DUI once. Hey, I don’t want to sound like I’m ratting them out or something.”

“Would you say it’s unusual for them to be away like this?” I said.

“What’s unusual is if they show up to class. I don’t know how they pass anything. I mean,” she gave us half a smirk, “I can probably

guess

how they pass, but…” She shrugged. She did not share her guess with us, unless you counted her smirk.

“What classes do they have together?” Deborah asked.

The girl shrugged again and shook her head. “You’d have to check like the registrar,” she said.

It was not a terribly long walk to see like the registrar, especially at the pace Deborah set. I managed to keep up with her and still have enough breath to ask her a pointed question or two. “Why does it matter what classes they had together?”

Deborah made an impatient gesture with her hand. “If that girl is right, Jessica and her roommate-”

“Ariel Goldman,” I said.

“Right. So if they are trading sex for good grades, that makes me want to talk to their professors.”

On the surface, that made sense. Sex is one of the most common motives for murder, which does not seem to fit in with the fact that it is often rumored to be connected to love. But there was one small thing that did not make sense. “Why would a professor cook them and cut off their heads like that? Why not just strangle them and throw the bodies in a Dumpster?”

Deborah shook her head. “It’s not important how he did it. What matters is whether he did.”

“All right,” I said. “And how sure are we that these two are the victims?”

“Sure enough to talk to their teachers,” she said. “It’s a start.”

We arrived at the registrar’s office, and when Debs flashed her badge we were shown right in. But it was a good thirty minutes of Deborah pacing and muttering while I went through the computer records with the registrar’s assistant. Jessica and Ariel were, in fact, in several of the same classes, and I printed out the names, office numbers, and home addresses of the professors. Deborah glanced at the list and nodded. “These two guys, Bukovich and Halpern, have office hours now,” she said. “We can start with them.”

Once again Deborah and I stepped out into the muggy day for a stroll across campus.

“It’s nice to be back on campus, isn’t it?” I said, in my always futile effort to keep a pleasant flow of conversation going.

Deborah snorted. “What’s nice is if we can get a definite ID on the bodies and maybe move a little closer to grabbing the guy who did this.”

I did not think that identifying the bodies would really move us closer to identifying the killer, but I have been wrong before, and in any case police work is powered by routine and custom, and one of the proud traditions of our craft was that it was good to know the dead person’s name. So I willingly trundled along with Deborah to the office building where the two professors waited.

Professor Halpern’s office was on the ground floor just inside the main entrance, and before the outer door could swing shut Debs was already knocking on his door. There was no answer. Deborah tried the knob. It was locked, so she thumped on the door again with the same lack of result.

A man came strolling along the hall and stopped at the office next door, glancing at us with a raised eyebrow. “Looking for Jerry Halpern?” he said. “I don’t think he’s in today.”

“Do you know where he is?” Deborah said.

He gave us a slight smile. “I imagine he’s home, at his apartment, since he’s not here. Why do you ask?”

Debs pulled out her badge and showed it to him. He didn’t seem impressed. “I see,” he said. “Does this have anything to do with the two dead bodies across campus?”

“Do you have any reason to think it would?” Deborah said.

“N-n-n-o,” he said, “not really.”

Deborah looked at him and waited, but he didn’t say anything more. “Can I ask your name, sir?” she said at last.

“I’m Dr. Wilkins,” he said, nodding toward the door he stood in front of. “This is my office.”

“Dr. Wilkins,” Deborah said. “Could you please tell me what your remark about Professor Halpern means?”

Wilkins pursed his lips. “Well,” he said, hesitating, “Jerry’s a nice enough guy, but if this is a murder investigation…” He let it hang for a moment. So did Deborah. “Well,” he said at last, “I believe it was last Wednesday I heard a disturbance in his office.” He shook his head. “These walls are not terribly thick.”

“What kind of disturbance?” Deborah asked.

“Shouting,” he said. “Perhaps a little bit of scuffling? Anyway, I peeked out the door and saw a student, a young woman, stagger out of Halpern’s office and run away. She was, ah-her shirt was torn.”

“By any chance did you recognize the young woman?” Deborah asked.

“Yes,” Wilkins said. “I had her in a class last semester. Her name is Ariel Goldman. Lovely girl, but not much of a student.”

Deborah glanced at me and I nodded encouragingly. “Do you think Halpern tried to force himself on Ariel Goldman?” Deborah said.

Wilkins tilted his head to one side and held up one hand. “I couldn’t say for sure. That’s what it looked like, though.”

Deborah looked at Wilkins, but he didn’t have anything to add, so she nodded and said, “Thank you, Dr. Wilkins. You’ve been very helpful.”

“I hope so,” he said, and he turned away to open his door and enter his office. Debs was already looking at the printout from the registrar.

“Halpern lives just a mile or so away,” she said, and headed toward the doors. Once again I found myself hurrying to catch up to her.

“Which theory are we giving up?” I asked her. “The one that says Ariel tried to seduce Halpern? Or that he tried to rape her?”

“We’re not giving up anything,” she said. “Not until we talk to Halpern.”

CHAPTER 12

D

R. JERRY HALPERN HAD AN APARTMENT LESS THAN TWO miles from the campus, in a two-story building that had probably been very nice forty years ago. He answered the door right away when Deborah knocked, blinking at us as the sunlight hit his face. He was in his mid-thirties and thin without looking fit, and he hadn’t shaved for a few days. “Yes?” he said, in a querulous tone of voice that would have been just right for an eighty-year-old scholar. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What is it?”

Deborah held up her badge and said, “Can we come in, please?”

Halpern goggled at the badge and seemed to sag a little. “I didn’t-what, what-why come in?” he said.

“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Deborah said. “About Ariel Goldman.”

Halpern fainted.

I don’t get to see my sister look surprised very often-her control is too good. So it was quite rewarding to see her with her mouth hanging open as Halpern hit the floor. I manufactured a suitable matching expression, and bent over to feel for a pulse.

“His heart is still going,” I said.

“Let’s get him inside,” Deborah said, and I dragged him into the apartment.

The apartment was probably not as small as it looked, but the walls were lined with overflowing bookshelves, a worktable stacked high with papers and more books. In the small remaining space there was a battered, mean-looking two-seater couch and an overstuffed chair with a lamp behind it. I managed to heft Halpern up and onto the couch, which creaked and sank alarmingly under him.

I stood up and nearly bumped into Deborah, who was already hovering and glaring down at Halpern. “You better wait for him to wake up before you intimidate him,” I said.

“This son of a bitch knows something,” she said. “Why else would he flop like that?”

“Poor nutrition?” I said.

“Wake him up,” she said.

I looked at her to see if she was kidding, but of course she was dead serious. “What would you suggest?” I said. “I forgot to bring smelling salts.”

“We can’t just stand around and wait,” she said. And she leaned forward as if she was going to shake him, or maybe punch him in the nose.

Happily for Halpern, however, he chose just that moment to return to consciousness. His eyes fluttered a few times and then stayed open, and as he looked up at us his whole body tensed. “What do you want?” he said.

“Promise not to faint again?” I said. Deborah elbowed me aside.

“Ariel Goldman,” she said.

“Oh God,” Halpern whined. “I knew this would happen.”

“You were right,” I said.

“You have to believe me,” he said, struggling to sit up. “I didn’t do it.”

“All right,” Debs said. “Then who did it?”

“She did it herself,” he said.

Deborah looked at me, perhaps to see if I could tell her why Halpern was so clearly insane. Unfortunately, I could not, so she looked back at him. “She did it herself,” she said, her voice loaded with cop doubt.

“Yes,” he insisted. “She wanted to make it look like I did it, so I would have to give her a good grade.”

“She burned herself,” Deborah said, very deliberately, like she was talking to a three-year-old. “And then she cut off her own head. So you would give her a good grade.”

“I hope you gave her at least a B for all that work,” I said.

Halpern goggled at us, his jaw hanging open and jerking spasmodically, as if it was trying to close but lacked a tendon. “Wha,” he said finally. “What are you talking about?”

“Ariel Goldman,” Debs said. “And her roommate, Jessica Ortega. Burned to death. Heads cut off. What can you tell us about that, Jerry?”

Halpern twitched and didn’t say anything for a long time. “I, I-are they dead?” he finally whispered.

“Jerry,” said Deborah, “their heads were cut off. What do you think?”

I watched with great interest as Halpern’s face slid through a whole variety of expressions portraying different kinds of blankness, and finally, when the nickel dropped, it settled on the unhinged-jaw look again. “You-you think I-you can’t-”

“I’m afraid I can, Jerry,” Deborah said. “Unless you can tell me why I shouldn’t.”

“But that’s-I would never,” he said.

“Somebody did,” I said.

“Yes, but, my God,” he said.

“Jerry,” Deborah said, “what did you think we wanted to ask about?”

“The, the rape,” he said. “When I didn’t rape her.”

Somewhere there’s a world where everything makes sense, but obviously we were not in it. “When you

didn’t

rape her,” Deborah said.

“Yes, that’s-she wanted me to, ah,” he said.

“She wanted you to rape her?” I said.

“She, she,” he said, and he began to blush. “She offered me, um, sex. For a good grade,” he said, looking at the floor. “And I refused.”

“And that’s when she asked you to rape her?” I said. Deborah hit me with her elbow.

“So you told her no, Jerry?” Deborah said. “A pretty girl like that?”

“That’s when she, um,” he said, “she said she’d get an A one way or the other. And she reached up and ripped her own shirt and then started to scream.” He gulped, but he didn’t look up.

“Go on,” said Deborah.

“And she waved at me,” he said, holding up his hand and waving bye-bye. “And then she ran out into the hall.” He looked up at last. “I’m up for tenure this year,” he said. “If word about something like this got around, my career would be over.”

“I understand,” Debs said very understandingly. “So you killed her to save your career.”

“What? No!” he sputtered. “I didn’t kill her!”

“Then who did, Jerry?” Deborah asked.

“I don’t know!” he said, and he sounded almost petulant, as if we had accused him of taking the last cookie. Deborah just stared at him, and he stared back, flicking his gaze from her to me and back again. “I didn’t!” he insisted.

“I’d like to believe you, Jerry,” Deborah said. “But it’s really not up to me.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I’m going to have to ask you to come with me,” she said.

“You’re

arresting

me?” he said.

“I’m taking you down to the station to answer a few questions, that’s all,” she said reassuringly.

“Oh my God,” he said. “You’re arresting me. That’s-no. No.”

“Let’s do this the easy way, Professor,” Deborah said. “We don’t need the handcuffs, do we?”

He looked at her for a long moment and then suddenly jumped up to his feet and ran for the door. But unfortunately for him and his masterful escape plan, he had to get past me, and Dexter is widely and justly praised for his lightning reflexes. I stuck a foot in the professor’s way, and he went down onto his face and slid headfirst into the door.

“Ow,” he said.

I smiled at Deborah. “I guess you do need the cuffs,” I said.

CHAPTER 13

I

AM NOT REALLY PARANOID. I DON’T BELIEVE THAT I AM surrounded by mysterious enemies who seek to trap me, torture me, kill me. Of course, I know very well that if I allow my disguise to slip and reveal me for what I am, then this entire society will join together in calling for my slow and painful death, but this is not paranoia-this is a calm, clearheaded view of consensus reality, and I am not frightened by it. I simply try to be careful so it doesn’t happen.

But a very large piece of my carefulness had always been listening to the subtle whisperings of the Dark Passenger, and it was still being strangely shy about sharing its thoughts. And so I faced a new and unsettling inner silence, and that made me very edgy, sending out a little ripple of uneasiness. It had started with that feeling of being watched, even stalked, at the kilns. And then, as we drove back to headquarters, I could not shake the idea that a car seemed to be following us. Was it really? Did it have sinister intent? And if so, was it toward me or Deborah, or was it just random Miami driver spookiness?

I watched the car, a white Toyota Avalon, in the side mirror. It stayed with us all the way until Deborah turned into the parking lot, and then it simply drove by without slowing or the driver appearing to stare, but I could not lose my ridiculous notion that it had indeed been following us. Still, I could not be sure unless the Passenger told me, which it did not-it merely gave a sort of sibilant throat-clearing, and so it seemed beyond stupid for me to say anything to Deborah about it.

And then later, when I came out of the building to my own car to go home for the night, I had the same feeling once again, that someone or something was watching-but it was a

feeling

. Not a warning, not an interior whisper from the shadows, not a get-ready flutter of invisible black wings-a

feeling

. And that made me nervous. When the Passenger speaks, I listen. I act. But it was not speaking now, merely squirming, and I had no idea what to do given that message. So in the absence of any more definite idea, I kept my eyes on my rearview mirror as I headed south for home.

Was this what it was like to be human? To walk through life with the perpetual feeling that you were meat on the hoof, stumbling down the game trail with tigers sniffing at your heels? If so, it would certainly go a long way toward explaining human behavior. As a predator myself, I knew very well the powerful feeling of strolling in disguise through the herds of potential prey, knowing that I could at any moment cut one of them from the herd. But without any word from the Passenger I did not merely blend in; I was actually part of the herd, vulnerable. I was prey, and I did not like it. It made me a great deal more watchful.

And when I came down off the expressway, my watching revealed a white Toyota Avalon following me.

Of course there are lots of white Toyota Avalons in the world. After all, the Japanese lost the war and that gives them the right to dominate our car market. And certainly many of these Avalons could reasonably be heading for home along the same crowded route I took. Logically speaking, there are only so many directions in which to go, and it made perfect sense for a white Avalon to go in any one of them. And it was not logical to assume that anyone would want to follow me. What had I done? I mean, that anybody could prove?

And so it was perfectly illogical of me to feel that I was being followed, which does not explain why I made a sudden right turn off U.S. 1 and down a side street.

It also does not explain why the white Avalon followed.

The car kept well back, as any predator would do to avoid spooking its chosen prey-or as any normal person might do if they just happened to take the same turn by coincidence. And so with the same uncharacteristic lack of logic, I zigged again, this time to the left, down a small residential street.

A moment later the other car followed.

As mentioned, Dashing Dexter does not know the meaning of fear. That would have to mean that the roaring thump of my heart, the parching of my mouth, and the sweat pouring out of my hands was no more than massive uneasiness.

I did not enjoy the feeling. I was no longer the Knight of the Knife. My blade and my armor were in some subbasement of the castle, and I was on the field of battle without them, a suddenly soft and tasty victim, and for no reason I could name I was sure that something had my scent in its ravening nostrils.

I turned right again-and noticed only as I went by it the sign that said NO OUTLET.

I had turned down a cul-de-sac. I was trapped.

For some reason, I slowed and waited for the other car to follow me. I suppose I just wanted to be sure that the white Avalon was really there. It was. I continued to the end of the street, where the road widened into a small circle for turning around. There were no cars in the driveway of the house at the top of the circle. I pulled in and stopped my engine, waiting, amazed by the crashing of my heart and my inability to do anything more than sit and wait for the inevitable teeth and claws of whatever was chasing me.

The white car came closer. It slowed as it reached the circle, slowed as it approached me…

And it went past me, around the circle, back up the street, and into the Miami sunset.

I watched it go, and as its taillights disappeared around the corner I suddenly remembered how to breathe. I took advantage of this rediscovered knowledge, and it felt very good. Once I had restored my oxygen content and settled back into being me, I began to feel like a very stupid me. What, after all, had really happened? A car had appeared to follow me. Then it had gone away. There were a million reasons why it might have taken the same route as I had, most of them summed up by the one word: coincidence. And then, as poor Dithering Dexter sat sweating in his seat, what had the big bad car done? It had gone past. It had not paused to stare, snarl, or throw a hand grenade. It had just gone by and left me in a puddle of my own absurd fear.

There was a knock on my window and I bumped my head on the ceiling of the car.

I turned to look. A middle-aged man with a mustache and bad acne scars was bent over, looking in at me. I had not noticed him until now, further proof that I was alone and unprotected.

I rolled down the window. “Can I help you with something?” the man said.

“No, thank you,” I told him, somewhat puzzled as to what help he thought he could offer. But he did not keep me guessing.

“You’re in my driveway,” he said.

“Oh,” I said, and it occurred to me that I probably was and some explanation was called for. “I was looking for Vinny,” I said. Not brilliant, but serviceable under the circumstances.

“You got the wrong place,” the man said with a certain mean triumph that almost cheered me up again.

“Sorry,” I said. I rolled up the window and backed out of the driveway, and the man stood and watched me go, presumably to be sure that I did not suddenly leap out and attack him with a machete. In just a few moments I was back in the bloodthirsty chaos of U.S. 1. And as the routine violence of the traffic closed around me like a warm blanket, I felt myself slowly sinking back into myself. Home again, behind the crumbling walls of Castle Dexter, vacant basement and all.

I had never felt so stupid-which is to say, I felt as close to being a real human being as it was possible for me to feel. What on earth had I been thinking? I had not, in truth, been thinking at all, merely reacting to a bizarre twitch of panic. It was all too ridiculous, too patently human and laughable, if only I had been a real human who could really laugh. Ah, well. At least I was really ridiculous.

I drove the last few miles thinking of insulting things to call myself for such a timid overreaction, and by the time I pulled into the driveway at Rita’s house I was thoroughly soaked in my own abuse, which made me feel much better. I got out of my car with something very close to a real smile on my face, generated by my joy in the true depth of Dexter Dunderhead. And as I took one step away from the car, half turning to head for the front door, a car drove slowly by.

A white Avalon, of course.

If there is such a thing in the world as justice, then this was surely one of the moments it had arranged just for me. Because many times I had enjoyed the sight of a person standing with their mouth hanging open, completely incapacitated by surprise and fear, and now here was Dexter in the same stupid pose. Frozen in place, unable to move even to wipe away my own drool, I watched the car drive slowly past, and the only thought I could muster was that I must look very, very stupid.

Naturally, I would have looked a great deal stupider if whoever was in the white car did anything other than drive past slowly, but happily for the many people who know and love me-at least two, including myself-the car went by without pausing. For a moment I thought I could see a face looking at me from the driver’s seat. And then he accelerated, turning slightly away into the middle of the street so that the light gleamed for an instant off the silver bull’s head Toyota emblem, and the car was gone.

And I could think of nothing at all to do but eventually close my mouth, scratch my head, and stumble into the house.

There was a soft but very deep and powerful drumbeat, and gladness surged up, born from relief and anticipation of what was to come. And then the horns sounded, and it was very close now, only a matter of moments before it came and then everything would begin and happen again at last, and as the gladness rose into a melody that climbed until it seemed to come from everywhere, I felt my feet taking me to where the voices promised bliss, filling everything with that joy that was on the way, that overwhelming fulfillment that would lift us into ecstasy-

And I woke up with my heart pounding and a sense of relief that was certainly not justified and that I did not understand at all. Because it was not merely the relief of a sip of water when you are thirsty or resting when you are tired, although it was those things, too.

But-far beyond puzzling, deep into disturbing-it was also the relief that comes after one of my playdates with the wicked; the relief that says you have fulfilled the deep longings of your innermost self and now you may relax and be content for a while.

And this could not be. It was impossible for me to feel that most private and personal of feelings while lying in bed asleep.

I looked at the clock beside the bed: five minutes past midnight, not a time for Dexter to be up and about, not on a night when he had planned only to sleep.

On the other side of the bed Rita snored softly, twitching slightly like a dog who dreamed of chasing a rabbit.

And on my side of the bed, one terribly confused Dexter. Something had come into my dreamless night and made waves across the tranquil sea of my soulless sleep. I did not know what that something was, but it had made me very glad for no reason I could name, and I did not like that at all. My moonlight hobby made me glad in my own emotionless way and that was all. Nothing else had ever been allowed into that corner of the dark subbasement of Dexter. That was the way I preferred it to be. I had my own small, well-guarded space inside, marked off and locked down, where I felt my own particular joy-on those nights only and at no other time. Nothing else made sense for me.

So what had invaded, knocked down the door, and flooded the cellar with this uncalled-for and unwanted feeling? What in all the world possibly

could

climb in with such overwhelming ease?

I lay down, determined to go back to sleep and prove to myself that I was still in charge here, that nothing had happened, and certainly wouldn’t happen again. This was Dexterland, and I was king. Nothing else was permitted inside. And I closed my eyes and turned for confirmation to the voice of authority on the inside, the inarguable master of the shadowy corners of all that is me, the Dark Passenger, and I waited for it to agree, to hiss a soothing phrase to put the jangling music and its geyser of feeling into its place, out of the dark and into the outside. And I waited for it to say something, anything, and it did not.

And I poked at it with a very hard and irritated thought, thinking,

Wake up! Show some teeth in there!

And it said nothing.

I hurried myself into all the corners of me, hollering with increasing concern, calling for the Passenger, but the place it had been was empty, swept clean, room to rent. It was gone as if it had never been there at all.

In the place where it used to be I could still hear an echo of the music, bouncing off the hard walls of an unfurnished apartment and rolling through a sudden, very painful emptiness.

The Dark Passenger was gone.

CHAPTER 14

I

SPENT THE NEXT DAY IN A LATHER OF UNCERTAINTY, HOPING that the Passenger would return and somehow sure it would not. And as the day wore on, this dreary certainty got bigger and bleaker.

There was a large, brittle empty spot inside me and I had no real way to think about it or cope with the gaping hollowness that I had never felt before. I would certainly not claim to feel anguish, which has always struck me as a very self-indulgent thing to experience, but I was acutely uneasy and I lived the whole day in a thick syrup of anxious dread.

Where had my Passenger gone, and why? Would it come back? And these questions pulled me inevitably down into even more alarming speculation: What was the Passenger and why had it come to me in the first place?

It was somewhat sobering to realize just how deeply I had defined myself by something that was not actually me-or was it? Perhaps the entire persona of the Dark Passenger was no more than the sick construct of a damaged mind, a web spun to catch tiny glimmers of filtered reality and protect me from the awful truth of what I really am. It was possible. I am well aware of basic psychology, and I have assumed for quite some time that I am somewhere off the charts. That’s fine with me; I get along very well without any shred of normal humanity to my name.

Or I had until now. But suddenly I was all alone in there, and things did not seem quite so hard-edged and certain. And for the first time, I truly needed to know.

Of course, few jobs provide paid time off for introspection, even on a topic as important as missing Dark Passengers. No, Dexter must still lift that bale. Especially with Deborah cracking the whip.

Happily, it was mostly routine. I spent the morning with my fellow geeks combing through Halpern’s apartment for some concrete residue of his guilt. Even more happily, the evidence was so abundant that very little real work was necessary.

In the back of his closet we found a sock with several drops of blood on it. Under the couch was a white canvas shoe with a matching blotch on top. In a plastic bag in the bathroom was a pair of pants with a singed cuff and even more blood, small dots of spray that had been heat-hardened.

It was probably a good thing that there was so much of it out in the open, because Dexter was truly not his usual bright and eager self today. I found myself drifting in an anxious gray mist and wondering if the Passenger was coming home, only to jerk back to the present, standing there in the closet holding a dirty, blood-spattered sock. If any real investigation had been necessary, I am not sure I could have performed up to my own very high standards.

Luckily, it wasn’t needed. I had never before seen such an outpouring of clear and obvious evidence from somebody who had, after all, had several days to clean up. When I indulge in my own little hobby I am neat and tidy and forensically innocent within minutes; Halpern had let several days go by without taking even the most elementary precautions. It was almost too easy, and when we checked his car I dropped the “almost.” Clearly displayed on the central armrest of the front seat was a thumbprint of dried blood.

Of course, it was still possible that our lab work would show that it was chicken blood, and Halpern had simply been indulging in an innocent pastime, perhaps as an amateur poultry butcher. Somehow, I doubted it. It seemed overwhelmingly clear that Halpern had done something truly unkind to someone.

And yet, the small nagging thought tugged at me that it was, just as overwhelmingly so, too easy. Something was not quite right here. But since I had no Passenger to point me in the right direction, I kept it to myself. It would have been cruel, in any case, to burst Deborah’s happy balloon. She was very nearly glowing with satisfaction as the results came in and Halpern looked more and more like our demented catch of the day.

Deborah was actually humming when she dragged me along to interview Halpern, which took my unease to a new level. I watched her as we went into the room where Halpern was waiting. I could not remember the last time she had seemed so happy. She even forgot to wear her expression of perpetual disapproval. It was very unsettling, a complete violation of natural law, as if everyone on I-95 suddenly decided to drive slowly and carefully.

“Well, Jerry,” she said cheerfully as we settled into chairs facing Halpern. “Would you like to talk about those two girls?”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. He was very pale, almost greenish, but he looked a lot more determined than he had when we brought him in. “You’ve made a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t do anything.”

Deborah looked at me with a smile and shook her head. “He didn’t do anything,” she said happily.

“It’s possible,” I said. “Somebody else might have put the bloody clothes in his apartment while he was watching Letterman.”

“Is that what happened, Jerry?” she said. “Did somebody else put those bloody clothes in your place?”

If possible, he looked even greener. “What-bloody-what are you talking about?”

She smiled at him. “Jerry. We found a pair of your pants with blood on ’em. It matches the victims’ blood. We found a shoe and a sock, same story. And we found a bloody fingerprint in your car. Your fingerprint, their blood.” Deborah leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “Does that jog your memory at all, Jerry?”

Halpern had started shaking his head while Deborah was talking, and he continued to do so, as if it was some kind of weird reflex and he didn’t know he was doing it. “No,” he said. “No. That isn’t even-No.”

“No, Jerry?” Deborah said. “What does that mean, no?”

He was still shaking his head. A drop of sweat flew off and plopped on the table and I could hear him trying very hard to breathe. “Please,” he said. “This is crazy. I didn’t do anything. Why are you-This is pure Kafka, I didn’t do anything.”

Deborah turned to me and raised an eyebrow. “Kafka?” she said.

“He thinks he’s a cockroach,” I told her.

“I’m just a dumb cop, Jerry,” she said. “I don’t know about Kafka. But I know solid evidence when I see it. And you know what, Jerry? I’m seeing it all over your apartment.”

“But I didn’t

do

anything,” he pleaded.

“Okay,” said Deborah with a shrug. “Then help me out here. How did all that stuff get into your place?”

“Wilkins did it,” he said, and he looked surprised, as if someone else had said it.

“Wilkins?” Deborah said, looking at me.

“The professor in the office next door?” I said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Halpern said, suddenly gathering steam and leaning forward. “It was Wilkins-it had to be.”

“Wilkins did it,” Deborah said. “He put on your clothes, killed the girls, and then put the clothes back in your apartment.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Why would he do that?”

“We’re both up for tenure,” he said. “Only one of us will get it.”

Deborah stared at him as if he had suggested dancing naked. “Tenure,” she said at last, and there was wonder in her voice.

“That’s right,” he said defensively. “It’s the most important moment in any academic career.”

“Important enough to kill somebody?” I asked.

He just stared at a spot on the table. “It was Wilkins,” he said.

Deborah stared at him for a full minute, with the expression of a fond aunt watching her favorite nephew. He looked at her for a few seconds, and then blinked, glanced down at the table, over to me, and back down to the table again. When the silence continued, he finally looked back up at Deborah. “All right, Jerry,” she said. “If that’s the best you can do, I think it might be time for you to call your lawyer.”

He goggled at her, but seemed unable to think of anything to say, so Deborah stood up and headed for the door, and I followed.

“Got him,” she said in the hallway. “That son of a bitch is

cooked

. Game, set, point.”

And she was so positively sunny that I couldn’t help saying, “If it was him.”

She absolutely beamed at me. “Of course it was him, Dex. Jesus, don’t knock yourself. You did some great work here, and for once we got the right guy first time out.”

“I guess so,” I said.

She cocked her head to one side and stared at me, still smirking in a completely self-satisfied way. “Whatsa matter, Dex,” she said. “Got your shorts in a knot about the wedding?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Life on earth has never before been so completely harmonious and satisfying. I just-” And here I hesitated, because I didn’t really know what I just. There was only this unshakable and unreasonable feeling that something was not right.

“I know, Dex,” she said in a kindly voice that somehow made it feel even worse. “It seems way too easy, right? But think of all the shit we go through every day, with every other case. It stands to reason that now and then we get an easy one, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This just doesn’t

feel

right.”

She snorted. “With the amount of hard evidence we got on this guy, nobody’s going to give a shit how it

feels

, Dex,” she said. “Why don’t you lighten up and enjoy a good day’s work?”

I’m sure it was excellent advice, but I could not take it. Even though I had no familiar whisper to feed me my cues, I had to say something. “He doesn’t act like he’s lying,” I said, rather feebly.

Deborah shrugged. “He’s a nut job. Not my problem. He did it.”

“But if he’s psychotic in some way, why would it just burst out all of a sudden? I mean, he’s thirty-something years old, and this is the first time he’s done anything? That doesn’t fit.”

She actually patted my shoulder and smiled again. “Good point, Dex. Why don’t you get on your computer and check his background? I bet we find something.” She glanced at her watch. “You can do that right after the press conference, okay? Come on, can’t be late.”

And I followed along dutifully, wondering how I always seemed to volunteer for extra work.

Deborah had, in fact, been granted the priceless boon of a press conference, something Captain Matthews did not give out lightly. It was her first as lead detective on a major case with its own media frenzy, and she had clearly studied up on how to look and speak for the evening news. She lost her smile and any other visible trace of emotion and spoke flat sentences of perfect cop-ese. Only someone who knew her as well as I did could tell that great and uncharacteristic happiness was burbling behind her wooden face.

So I stood at the back of the room and watched as my sister made a series of radiantly mechanical statements adding up to her belief that she had arrested a suspect in the heinous murders at the university, and as soon as she knew if he was guilty her dear friends in the media would be among the first to know it. She was clearly proud and happy and it had been pure meanness on my part even to hint that something was not quite righteous with Halpern’s guilt, especially since I did not know what that might be-or even if.

She was almost certainly right-Halpern was guilty and I was being stupid and grumpy, thrown off the trolley of pure reason by my missing Passenger. It was the echo of its absence that made me uneasy, and not any kind of doubt about the suspect in a case that really meant absolutely nothing to me anyway. Almost certainly-

And there was that almost again. I had lived my life until now in absolutes-I had no experience with “almost,” and it was unsettling, deeply disturbing not to have that voice of certainty to tell me what was what with no dithering and no doubt. I began to realize just how helpless I was without the Dark Passenger. Even in my day job, nothing was simple anymore.

Back in my cubicle I sat in my chair and leaned back with my eyes closed.

Anybody there?

I asked hopefully. Nobody was. Just an empty spot that was beginning to hurt as the numb wonder wore off. With the distraction of work over, there was nothing to keep me from self-absorbed self-pity. I was alone in a dark, mean world full of terrible things like me. Or at least, the me I used to be.

Where had the Passenger gone, and why had it gone there? If something had truly scared it away, what could that something be? What could frighten a thing that lived for darkness, that really came to life only when the knives were out?

And this brought a brand-new thought that was most unwelcome: If this hypothetical something had scared away the Passenger, had it followed it into exile? Or was it still sniffing at my trail? Was I in danger with no way left to protect myself-with no way of knowing whether some lethal threat was right behind me until its drool actually fell on my neck?

I have always heard that new experiences are a good thing, but this one was pure torture. The more I thought about it, the less I understood what was happening to me, and the more it hurt.

Well, there was one sure remedy for misery, and that was good hard work on something completely pointless. I swiveled around to face my computer and got busy.

In only a few minutes I had opened up the entire life and history of Dr. Gerald Halpern, Ph.D. Of course, it was a little trickier than simply searching Halpern’s name on Google. There was, for example, the matter of the sealed court records, which took me almost five full minutes to open. But when I did, it was certainly worth the effort, and I found myself thinking,

Well, well, well…

And because at the moment I was tragically alone on the inside, with no one to hear my pensive remarks, I said it aloud, too. “Well, well, well,” I said.

The foster-care records would have been interesting enough-not because I felt any bond with Halpern from my own parentless past. I had been more than adequately provided with a home and family by Harry, Doris, and Deborah, unlike Halpern, who had flitted from foster home to foster home until finally landing at Syracuse University.

Far more interesting, however, was the file that no one was supposed to open without a warrant, a court order, and a stone tablet direct from the hand of God. And when I had read through it a second time, my reaction was even more profound. “Well, well, well,

well

,” I said, mildly unsettled at the way the words bounced off the walls of my empty little office. And since profound revelations are always more dramatic with an audience, I reached for the phone and called my sister.

In just a few minutes she pushed into my cubicle and sat on the folding chair. “What did you find?” she said.

“Dr. Gerald Halpern has A Past,” I said, carefully pronouncing the capital letters so she wouldn’t leap across the desk and hug me.

“I knew it,” she said. “What did he do?”

“It’s not so much what he did,” I said. “At this point, it’s more like what was done to him.”

“Quit screwing around,” she said. “What is it?”

“To begin with, he’s apparently an orphan.”

“Come on, Dex, cut to the chase.”

I held up a hand to try to calm her down, but it clearly didn’t work very well, because she started tapping her knuckles on the desktop. “I am trying to paint a subtle canvas here, Sis,” I said.

“Paint faster,” she said.

“All right. Halpern went into the foster-care system in upstate New York when they found him living in a box under the freeway. They found his parents, who were unfortunately dead of recent and unpleasant violence. It seems to have been very well-deserved violence.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“His parents were pimping him out to pedophiles,” I said.

“Jesus,” Deborah said, and she was clearly a little shocked. Even by Miami standards, this was a bit much.

“And Halpern doesn’t remember any of that part. He gets blackouts under stress, the file says. It makes sense. The blackouts were probably a conditioned response to the repeated trauma,” I said. “That can happen.”

“Well, fuck,” Deborah said, and I inwardly applauded her elegance. “So he forgets shit. You have to admit that fits. The girl tries to frame him for rape, and he’s already worried about tenure-so he gets stressed and kills her without knowing it.”

“A couple of other things,” I said, and I admit that I enjoyed the drama of the moment perhaps a little more than was necessary. “To begin with, the death of his parents.”

“What about it?” she said, quite clearly lacking any theatrical pleasure at all.

“Their heads were cut off,” I said. “And then the house was torched.”

Deborah straightened up. “Shit,” she said.

“I thought so, too.”

“Goddamn, that’s

great

, Dex,” she said. “We have his ass.”

“Well,” I said, “it certainly fits the pattern.”

“It sure as hell does,” she said. “So did he kill his parents?”

I shrugged. “They couldn’t prove anything. If they could, Halpern would have been committed. It was so violent that nobody could believe a kid had done it. But they’re pretty sure that he was there, and at least saw what happened.”

She looked at me hard. “So what’s wrong with that? You still think he didn’t do it? I mean, you’re having one of your hunches here?”

It stung a lot more than it should have, and I closed my eyes for a moment. There was still nothing there except dark and empty. My famous hunches were, of course, based on things whispered to me by the Dark Passenger, and in its absence I had nothing to go on. “I’m not having hunches lately,” I admitted. “There’s just something that bothers me about this. It just-”

I opened my eyes and Deborah was staring at me. For the first time today there was something in her expression beyond bubbly happiness, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask me what that meant and was I all right. I had no idea what I would say if she did, since the Dark Passenger was not something I had ever talked about, and the idea of sharing something that intimate was very unsettling.

“I don’t know,” I said weakly. “It doesn’t seem right.”

Deborah smiled gently. I would have felt more at ease if she had snarled and told me to fuck off, but she smiled and reached a hand across the desk to pat mine. “Dex,” she said softly, “the hard evidence is more than enough. The background fits. The motive is good. You admit you’re not having one of your…hunches.” She cocked her head to the side, still smiling, which made me even more uneasy. “This one is righteous, Bro. Whatever is bothering you, don’t pin it on this. He did it, we got him, that’s it.” She let go of my hand before either one of us could burst into tears. “But I’m a little worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” I said, and it sounded false even to me.

Deborah looked at me for a long moment, and then stood up. “All right,” she said. “But I’m here for you if you need me.” And she turned and walked away.

Somehow I slogged through the gray soup of the rest of the day and made it all the way home to Rita’s at the end of the day, where the soup gelled into an aspic of sensory deprivation. I don’t know what we had for dinner, or what anyone might have said. The only thing I could bring myself to listen for was the sound of the Passenger rushing back in, and this sound did not come. And so I swam through the evening on automatic pilot and finally went to bed, still completely wrapped up in Dull Empty Dexter.

It surprised me a great deal to learn it, but sleep is not automatic for humans, not even for the semi-human I was becoming. The old me, Dexter of the Darkness, had slept perfectly, with great ease, simply lying down, closing his eyes, and thinking, “One two three GO.” Presto, sleep-o.

But the New Model Dexter had no such luck.

I tossed, I turned, I commanded my pitiful self to go immediately to sleep with no further dithering, and all to no avail. I could not sleep. I could only lie there wide-eyed and wonder why.

And as the night dragged on, so did the terrible, dreary introspection. Had I been misleading myself my entire life? What if I was not Dashing Slashing Dexter and his Canny Sidekick the Passenger? What if I was, in fact, actually only a Dark Chauffeur, allowed to live in a small room at the big house in exchange for driving the master on his appointed rounds? And if my services were no longer required, what could I possibly be now that the boss had moved away? Who was I if I was no longer me?

It was not a happy thought, and it did not make me happy. It also did not help me sleep. Since I had already tossed and turned exhaustively, without getting exhausted, I now concentrated on rolling and pitching, with much the same result. But finally, at around 3:30 A.M., I must have hit on the right combination of pointless movement and I dropped off at last into a shallow uncomfortable sleep.

The sound and smell of bacon cooking woke me up. I glanced at the clock-it was 8:32, later than I ever sleep. But of course it was Saturday morning. Rita had allowed me to doze on in my miserable unconsciousness. And now she would reward my return to the land of the waking with a bountiful breakfast. Yahoo.

Breakfast did, in fact, take some of the sourness out of me. It is very hard to maintain a really good feeling of utter depression and total personal worthlessness when you are full of food, and I gave up trying halfway through an excellent omelet.

Cody and Astor had naturally been awake for hours-Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD. They did not even notice me when I staggered past them on my way to the kitchen, and they stayed glued to the image of a talking kitchen utensil while I finished my breakfast, had a final cup of coffee, and decided to give life one more day to get its act together.

“All better?” Rita asked as I put down my coffee mug.

“It was a very nice omelet,” I said. “Thank you.”

She smiled and lunged up out of her chair to give me a peck on the cheek before flinging all the dishes in the sink and starting to wash them. “Remember you said you’d take Cody and Astor somewhere this morning,” she said over the sound of running water.

“I said that?”

“Dexter, you know I have a fitting this morning. For my wedding gown. I told you that weeks ago, and you said fine, you would take care of the kids while I went over to Susan’s for the fitting, and then I really need to go to the florist’s and see about some arrangements, even Vince offered to help me with that, he says he has a friend?”

“I doubt that,” I said, thinking of Manny Borque. “Not Vince.”

“But I said no thanks. I hope that was all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “We have only one house to sell to pay for things.”

“I don’t want to hurt Vince’s feelings and I’m sure his friend is wonderful, but I have been going to Hans for flowers since forever, and he would be brokenhearted if I went somewhere else for the wedding.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll take the kids.”

I had been hoping for a chance to devote some serious time to my own personal misery and find a way to start on the problem of the absent Passenger. Failing that, it would have been nice just to relax a little bit, perhaps even catch up on some of the precious sleep I had lost the night before, as was my sacred right.

It was, after all, a Saturday. Many well-regarded religions and labor unions have been known to recommend that Saturdays are for relaxation and personal growth; for spending time away from the hectic hurly-burly, in well-earned rest and recreation. But Dexter was more or less a family man nowadays, which changes everything, as I was learning. And with Rita spinning around making wedding preparations like a tornado with blond bangs, it was a clear imperative for me to scoop up Cody and Astor and take them away from the pandemonium to the shelter of some activity sanctioned by society as appropriate for adult-child bonding time.

After a careful study of my options, I chose the Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium. After all, it would be crowded with other family groups, which would maintain my disguise-and start them on theirs as well. Since they were planning to embark on the Dark Trail, they needed to begin right away to understand the notion that the more abnormal one is, the more important it is to appear normal.

And going to the museum with Doting Daddy Dexter was supremely normal-appearing for all three of us. It had the added cachet of being something that was officially Good for Them, a very big advantage, no matter how much that notion made them squirm.

So I loaded the three of us into my car and headed north on U.S. 1, promising the whirling Rita that we would return safely for dinner. I drove us through Coconut Grove and just before the Ricken-backer Causeway turned into the parking lot of the museum in question. We did not go gentle into that good museum, however. In the parking lot, Cody got out of the car and simply stood there. Astor looked at him for a moment, and then turned to me. “Why do we have to go in there?” she said.

“It’s educational,” I told her.

“Ick,” she said, and Cody nodded.

“It’s important for us to spend time together,” I said.

“At a

museum

?” Astor demanded. “That’s

pathetic

.”

“That’s a lovely word,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

“We’re

not

going in there,” she said. “We want to

do

something.”

“Have you ever been to this museum?”

“No,” she said, drawing the word out into three contemptuous syllables as only a ten-year-old girl can.

“Well, it might surprise you,” I said. “You might actually learn something.”

“That’s not what we want to learn,” she said. “Not at a

museum

.”

“What is it you think you want to learn?” I said, and even I was impressed by how very much like a patient adult I sounded.

Astor made a face. “You know,” she said. “You said you’d show us stuff.”

“How do you know I’m not?” I said.

She looked at me uncertainly for a moment, then turned to Cody. Whatever it was they said to each other, it didn’t require words. When she turned back to me a moment later, she was all business, totally self-assured. “No way,” she said.

“What do you know about the stuff I’m going to show you?”

“

Dex

ter,” she said. “Why else did we ask you to show us?”

“Because you don’t know anything about it and I do.”

“Duh-uh.”

“Your education begins in that building,” I said with my most serious face. “Follow me and learn.” I looked at them for a moment, watched their uncertainty grow, then I turned and headed for the museum. Maybe I was just cranky from a night of lost sleep, and I was not sure they would follow, but I had to set down the ground rules right away. They had to do it my way, just as I had come to understand so long ago that I had to listen to Harry and do it his way.

CHAPTER 15

B

EING FOURTEEN YEARS OLD IS NEVER EASY, EVEN FOR artificial humans. It’s the age where biology takes over, and even when the fourteen-year-old in question is more interested in clinical biology than the sort more popular with his classmates at Ponce de Leon Junior High, it still rules with an iron hand.

One of the categorical imperatives of puberty that applies even to young monsters is that nobody over the age of twenty knows anything. And since Harry was well over twenty at this point, I had gone into a brief period of rebellion against his unreasonable restraints on my perfectly natural and wholesome desires to hack my school chums into little bits.

Harry had laid out a wonderfully logical plan to get me squared away, which was his term for making things-or people-neat and orderly. But there is nothing logical about a fledgling Dark Passenger flexing its wings for the first time and beating them against the bars of the cage, yearning to fling itself into the free air and fall on its prey like a sharp steel thunderbolt.

Harry knew so many things I needed to learn to become safely and quietly me, to turn me from a wild, blossoming monster into the Dark Avenger: how to act human, how to be certain and careful, how to clean up afterward. He knew all these things as only an old cop could know them. I understood this, even then-but it all seemed so dull and unnecessary.

And Harry couldn’t really know everything, after all. He could not know, for example, about Steve Gonzalez, a particularly charming example of pubescent humanity who had earned my attention.

Steve was larger than me, and at a year or two older; he already had something on his upper lip that he referred to as a mustache. He was in my PE class and felt it his God-given duty to make my life miserable whenever possible. If he was right, God must have been very pleased with the effort he put into it.

This was long before Dexter became the Living Ice Cube, and a certain amount of heated and very hard feeling built up inside. This seemed to please Steve and urge him on to greater heights of creativity in his persecution of the simmering young Dexter. We both knew this could end only one way, but alas for him, it was not the way Steve had in mind.

And so one afternoon an unfortunately industrious janitor stumbled into the biology lab at Ponce de Leon to find Dexter and Steve sorting out their personality conflict. It was not quite the classical middle-school face-off of filthy words and swinging fists, although I believe that might have been what Steve had in mind. But he had not reckoned with confronting the young Dark Passenger, and so the janitor found Steve securely taped to the table with a swatch of gray duct tape over his mouth, and Dexter standing above him with a scalpel, trying to remember what he had learned in biology class the day they dissected the frog.

Harry came to get me in his police cruiser, in uniform. He listened to the outraged assistant principal, who described the scene, quoted the student handbook, and demanded to know what Harry was going to do about it. Harry just looked at the assistant principal until the man’s words dribbled away into silence. He looked at him a moment longer, for effect, and then he turned his cold blue eyes on me.

“Did you do what he says you did, Dexter?” he asked me.

There was no possibility of evasion or falsehood in the grip of that stare. “Yes,” I said, and Harry nodded.

“You see?” the assistant principal said. He thought he was going to say more, but Harry turned the look back on him and he fell silent again.

Harry looked back at me. “Why?” he said.

“He was picking on me.” That sounded somewhat feeble, even to me, so I added, “A lot. All the time.”

“And so you taped him to a table,” he said, with very little inflection.

“Uh-huh.”

“And you picked up a scalpel.”

“I wanted him to stop,” I said.

“Why didn’t you tell somebody?” Harry asked me.

I shrugged, which was a large portion of my working vocabulary in those days.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked.

“I can take care of it,” I said.

“Looks like you didn’t take care of it so well,” he said.

There seemed to be very little I could do, so naturally enough I chose to look at my feet. They apparently had very little to add to the discussion, however, so I looked up again. Harry still watched me, and somehow he no longer needed to blink. He did not seem angry, and I was not really afraid of him, and that somehow made it even more uncomfortable.

“I’m sorry,” I said at last. I wasn’t sure if I meant it-for that matter, I’m still not sure I can really be sorry for anything I do. But it seemed like a very politic remark, and nothing else burbled up in my teenaged brain, simmering as it was with an oatmeal-thick sludge of hormones and uncertainty. And although I am sure Harry didn’t believe that I was sorry, he nodded again.

“Let’s go,” he said.

“Just a minute,” the assistant principal said. “We still have things to discuss.”

“You mean the fact that you let a known bully push my boy to this kind of confrontation because of poor supervision? How many times has the other boy been disciplined?”

“That’s not the point-” the assistant principal tried to say.

“Or are we talking about the fact that you left scalpels and other dangerous equipment unsecured and easily available to students in an unlocked and unsupervised classroom?”

“Really, Officer-”

“I tell you what,” Harry said. “I promise to overlook your extremely poor performance in this matter, if you agree to make a real effort to improve.”

“But this boy-” he tried to say.

“I will deal with this boy,” Harry said. “You deal with fixing things so I don’t have to call in the school board.”

And that, of course, was that. There was never any question of contradicting Harry, whether you were a murder suspect, the president of the Rotary Club, or a young errant monster. The assistant principal opened and closed his mouth a few more times, but no actual words came out, just a sort of sputtering sound combined with throat-clearing. Harry watched him for a moment, and then turned to me. “Let’s go,” he said again.

Harry was silent all the way out to the car, and it was not a chummy silence. He did not speak as we drove away from the school and turned north on Dixie Highway -instead of heading around the school in the other direction, Granada to Hardee and over to our little house in the Grove. I looked at him as he made his turn, but he still had nothing to say, and the expression on his face did not seem to encourage conversation. He looked straight ahead at the road, and drove-fast, but not so fast he had to turn on the siren.

Harry turned left on 17th Avenue, and for a few moments I had the irrational thought that he was taking me to the Orange Bowl. But we passed the turnoff for the stadium and kept going, over the Miami River and then right on North River Drive, and now I knew where we were going but I didn’t know why. Harry still hadn’t said a word or looked in my direction, and I was beginning to feel a certain oppression creeping into the afternoon that had nothing to do with the storm clouds that were beginning to gather on the horizon.

Harry parked the cruiser and at last he spoke. “Come on,” he said. “Inside.” I looked at him, but he was already climbing out of the car, so I got out, too, and followed him meekly into the detention center.

Harry was well known here, as he was everywhere a good cop might be known. He was followed by calls of “Harry!” and “Hey, Sarge!” all the way through the receiving area and down the hall to the cell block. I simply trudged behind him as my sense of grim foreboding grew. Why had Harry brought me to the jail? Why wasn’t he scolding me, telling me how disappointed he was, devising harsh but fair punishment for me?

Nothing he did or refused to say offered me any clues. So I trailed along behind. We were stopped at last by one of the guards. Harry took him to one side and spoke quietly; the guard looked over at me, nodded, and led us to the end of the cell block. “Here he is,” the guard said. “Enjoy yourself.” He nodded at the figure in the cell, glanced at me briefly, and walked away, leaving Harry and me to resume our uncomfortable silence.

Harry did nothing to break the silence at first. He turned and stared into the cell, and the pale shape inside moved, stood up, and came to the bars. “Why it’s Sergeant Harry!” the figure said happily. “How are you, Harry? So

nice

of you to drop by.”

“Hello, Carl,” Harry said. At last he turned to me and spoke. “This is Carl, Dexter.”

“What a handsome lad you are, Dexter,” Carl said. “Very pleased to meet you.”

The eyes Carl turned on me were bright and empty, but behind them I could almost see a huge dark shadow, and something inside me twitched and tried to slink away from the larger and fiercer thing that lived there beyond the bars. He was not in himself particularly large or fierce-looking-he was even pleasant in a very superficial way, with his neat blond hair and regular features-but there was something about him that made me very uneasy.

“They brought Carl in yesterday,” Harry said. “He’s killed eleven people.”

“Oh, well,” Carl said modestly, “more or less.”

Outside the jail, the thunder crashed and the rain began. I looked at Carl with real interest; now I knew what had unsettled my Dark Passenger. We were just starting out, and here was somebody who had already been there and back, on eleven occasions, more or less. For the first time I understood how my classmates at Ponce might feel when they came face-to-face with an NFL quarterback.

“Carl enjoys killing people,” Harry said matter-of-factly. “Don’t you, Carl?”

“It keeps me busy,” Carl said happily.

“Until we caught you,” Harry said bluntly.

“Well, yes, there is that of course. Still…” he shrugged and gave Harry a very phony-looking smile, “it was fun while it lasted.”

“You got careless,” Harry said.

“Yes,” Carl said. “How could I know the police would be so very thorough?”

“How do you do it?” I blurted out.

“It’s not so hard,” Carl said.

“No, I mean-Um, like

how

?”

Carl looked at me searchingly, and I could almost hear a purring coming from the shadow just past his eyes. For a moment our eyes locked and the world was filled with the black sound of two predators meeting over one small, helpless prey. “Well, well,” Carl said at last. “Can it really be?” He turned to Harry just as I was beginning to squirm. “So I’m supposed to be an object lesson, is that it, Sergeant? Frighten your boy onto the straight and narrow path to godliness?”

Harry stared back, showing nothing, saying nothing.

“Well, I’m afraid I have to tell you that there is no way off this particular path, poor dear Harry. When you are on it, you are on it for life, and possibly beyond, and there is nothing you or I or the dear child here can do about it.”

“There’s one thing,” Harry said.

“Really,” Carl said, and now a slow black cloud seemed to be rising up around him, coalescing on the teeth of his smile, spreading its wings out toward Harry, and toward me. “And what might that be, pray tell?”

“Don’t get caught,” Harry said.

For a moment the black cloud froze, and then it drew back and vanished. “Oh my God,” Carl said. “How I wish I knew how to laugh.” He shook his head slowly, from side to side. “You’re serious, aren’t you? Oh my God. What a wonderful dad you are, Sergeant Harry.” And he gave us such a huge smile that it almost looked real.

Harry turned his full ice-blue gaze on me now.

“He got caught,” Harry said to me, “because he didn’t know what he was doing. And now he will go to the electric chair. Because he didn’t know what the

police

were doing. Because,” Harry said without raising his voice at all and without blinking, “he had no training.”

I looked at Carl, watching us through the thick bars with his too-bright dead empty eyes. Caught. I looked back at Harry. “I understand,” I said.

And I did.

That was the end of my youthful rebellion.

And now, so many years later-wonderful years, filled with slicing and dicing and not getting caught-I truly knew what a remarkable gamble Harry had taken by introducing me to Carl. I could never hope to measure up to his performance-after all, Harry did things because he had

feelings

and I never would-but I could follow his example and make Cody and Astor toe the line. I would gamble, just as Harry had.

They would follow or not.

CHAPTER 16

T HEY FOLLOWED.

The museum was crowded with groups of curious citizens in search of knowledge-or a bathroom, apparently. Most of them were between the ages of two and ten, and there seemed to be about one adult for every seven children. They moved like a great colorful flock of parrots, swooping back and forth through the exhibits with a loud cawing sound that, in spite of the fact that it was in at least three languages, all sounded the same. The international language of children.

Cody and Astor seemed slightly intimidated by the crowd and stayed close to me. It was a pleasant contrast to the spirit of Dexterless adventure that seemed to rule them the rest of the time, and I tried to take advantage of it by steering them immediately to the piranha exhibit.

“What do they look like?” I asked them.

“Very bad,” Cody said softly, staring unblinking at the many teeth the fish displayed.

“Those are piranha,” Astor said. “They can eat a whole cow.”

“If you were swimming and you saw piranha, what would you do?” I asked them.

“Kill them,” said Cody.

“There’s too many,” Astor said. “You should run away from them, and not go anywhere near.”

“So anytime you see these wicked-looking fish you will either try to kill them or run away from them?” I said. They both nodded. “If the fish were really smart, like people, what would they do?”

“Wear a disguise,” Astor giggled.

“That’s right,” I said, and even Cody smiled. “What kind of disguise would you recommend? A wig and a beard?”

“Dex-ter,” Astor said. “They’re fish. Fish don’t wear beards.”

“Oh,” I said. “So they would still want to look like fish?”

“Of course,” she said, as if I was too stupid to understand big words.

“What kind of fish?” I said. “Great big ones? Like sharks?”

“ Normal,” Cody said. His sister looked at him for a moment, and then nodded.

“Whatever there’s lots of in the area,” she said. “Something that won’t scare away what they want to eat.”

“Uh-huh,” I said.

They both looked at the fish in silence for a moment. It was Cody who first got it. He frowned and looked at me. I smiled encouragingly. He whispered something to Astor, who looked startled. She opened her mouth to say something, and then stopped.

“Oh,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “Oh.”

She looked at Cody, who looked up again from the piranha. Again, they didn’t say anything aloud, but there was an entire conversation. I let it run its course, until they looked up at me. “What can we learn from piranha?” I said.

“Don’t look ferocious,” Cody said.

“Look like something normal,” Astor said grudgingly. “But Dexter, fish aren’t people.”

“That’s exactly right,” I said. “Because people survive by recognizing things that look dangerous. And fish get caught. We don’t want to.” They looked at me solemnly, then back at the fish. “So what else have we learned today?” I asked after a moment.

“Don’t get caught,” Astor said.

I sighed. At least it was a start, but there was much work yet to do. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s see some of the other exhibits.”

I was not really very familiar with the museum, perhaps because until recently I’d had no children to drag in there. So I was definitely improvising, looking for things that might get them started toward thinking and learning the right things. The piranha had been a stroke of luck, I admit-they had simply popped into view and my giant brain had supplied the correct lesson. Finding the next piece of happy coincidence was not as easy, and it was half an hour of trudging grimly through the murderous crowd of kids and their vicious parents before we came to the lion exhibit.

Once again, the ferocious appearance and reputation proved irresistible to Cody and Astor, and they came to a halt in front of the exhibit. It was a stuffed lion, of course, what I think they call a diorama, but it held their attention. The male lion stood proudly over the body of a gazelle, mouth wide and fangs gleaming. Beside him were two females and a cub. There was a two-page explanation that went with the exhibit, and about halfway down the second page I found what I needed.

“Well now,” I said brightly. “Aren’t we glad we’re not lions?”

“No,” said Cody.

“It says here,” I said, “that when a male lion takes over a lion family-”

“It’s called a

pride

, Dexter,” Astor said. “It was in

Lion King

.”

“All right,” I said. “When a new daddy lion takes over a pride, he kills all the cubs.”

“That’s horrible,” Astor said.

I smiled to show her my sharp teeth. “No, it’s perfectly natural,” I said. “To protect his own and make sure that it’s

his

cubs that rule the roost. Lots of predators do that.”

“What does that have to do with us?” Astor said. “You’re not going to kill us when you marry Mom, are you?”

“Of course not,” I said. “You are my cubs now.”

“Then so what?” she said.

I opened my mouth to explain to her and then felt all the air rush out of me. My mouth hung open but I couldn’t speak, because my brain was whirling with a thought so far-fetched that I didn’t even bother to deny it.

Lots of predators do that

, I heard myself say.

To protect his own

, I had said.

Whatever made me a predator, its home was in the Dark Passenger. And now something had scared away the Passenger. Was it possible that, that-

That what? A new daddy Passenger was threatening

my

Passenger? I had run into many people in my life who had the shadow of something similar to mine hung over them, and nothing had ever happened with them except mutual recognition and a bit of inaudible snarling. This was too stupid even to think about-Passengers didn’t have daddies.

Did they?

“Dexter,” Astor said. “You’re scaring us.”

I admit that I was scaring me, too. The thought that the Passenger could have a parent stalking it with lethal intentions was appallingly stupid-but then, after all, where had the Passenger really come from? I was reasonably sure that it was more than a psychotic figment of my disordered brain. I was not schizophrenic-both of us were sure of that. The fact that it was now gone proved that it had an independent existence.

And this meant that the Passenger had come from somewhere. It had existed before me. It had a source, whether you called it a parent or anything else.

“Earth to Dexter,” Astor said, and I realized that I still stood in front of them frozen in my unlikely, foolish openmouthed pose like a pedantic zombie.

“Yes,” I said stupidly, “I was just thinking.”

“Did it hurt a lot?” she said.

I closed my mouth and looked at her. She was facing me with her look of ten-year-old disgust at how dumb grown-ups can be, and this time I agreed with her. I had always taken the Passenger for granted, so much so that I had never really wondered where it had come from, or how it had come to be. I had been smug, fatuously content to share space with it, simply glad to be me and not some other, emptier mortal, and now, when a little self-knowledge might have saved the day, I was struck dumb. Why had I never thought of any of these things before? And why did I have to choose now as the first time, in the presence of a sarcastic child? I had to devote some time and thought to this-but of course, this was neither the time nor the place.

“Sorry,” I said. “Let’s go see the planetarium.”

“But you were going to tell us why lions are important,” she said.

In truth, I could no longer remember why lions were important. But happily for my image, my cell phone began to chatter before I could admit it. “Just a minute,” I said, and I pulled the phone from its holster. I glanced at it and saw that it was Deborah. And after all, family is family, so I answered.

“They found the heads,” she said.

It took me a moment to figure out what she meant, but Deborah was hissing in my ear and I realized some sort of response was called for. “The heads? From the two bodies over at the university?” I said.

Deborah made an exasperated hissing noise and said, “Jesus, Dex, there aren’t that many missing heads in town.”

“Well, there’s city hall,” I said.

“Get your ass over here, Dexter. I need you.”

“But Deborah, it’s Saturday, and I’m in the middle of-”

“Now,” she said, and hung up.

I looked at Cody and Astor and pondered my quandary. If I took them home it would be at least an hour before I got back to Debs, and in addition we would lose our precious Saturday quality time together. On the other hand, even I knew that taking children to a homicide scene might be considered a little bit eccentric.

But it would also be educational. They needed to be impressed with just how thorough the police are when dead bodies turn up, and this was as good an opportunity as any. On balance, even taking into consideration that my dear sister might have a semi-ballistic reaction, I decided it would be best simply to pile into the car and take them to their first investigation.

“All right,” I said to them as I reholstered my phone. “We have to go now.”

“Where?” Cody said.

“To help my sister,” I said. “Will you remember what we learned today?”

“Yes, but this is just a

museum

,” Astor said. “It’s not what we want to learn.”

“Yes, it is,” I said. “And you have to trust me, and do it my way, or I’m not going to teach you.” I leaned down to where I could look them both in the eyes. “Not doodly-squat,” I said.

Astor frowned. “Dex-terrrr,” she said.

“I mean it. It has to be my way.”

Once again she and Cody locked glances. After a moment he nodded, and she turned back to me. “All right,” she said. “We promise.”

“We’ll wait,” Cody said.

“We understand,” Astor said. “When can we start the cool stuff?”

“When I say,” I said. “Anyway, right now we have to go.”

She switched immediately back to snippy ten-year-old. “Now where do we have to go?”

“I have to go to work,” I said. “So I’m taking you with me.”

“To see a

body

?” she asked hopefully.

I shook my head. “Just the head,” I said.

She looked at Cody and shook her head. “Mom won’t like it.”

“You can wait in the car if you want to,” I said.

“Let’s go,” said Cody, his longest speech all day.

We went.

CHAPTER 17

D

EBORAH WAS WAITING AT A MODEST $2 MILLION HOUSE on a private cul-de-sac in Coconut Grove. The street was sealed off from just inside the guard booth to the house itself, about halfway down on the left, and a crowd of indignant residents stood around on their carefully manicured lawns and walkways, fuming at the swarm of low-rent social undesirables from the police department who had invaded their little paradise. Deborah was in the street instructing a videographer in what to shoot and from what angles. I hurried over to join her, with Cody and Astor trailing along right behind.

“What the hell is that?” Deborah demanded, glaring from the kids to me.

“They are known as children,” I told her. “They are often a byproduct of marriage, which may be why you are unfamiliar with them.”

“Are you off your fucking nut bringing them here?” she snapped.

“You’re not supposed to say that word,” Astor told Deborah with a glare. “You owe me fifty cents for saying it.”

Deborah opened her mouth, turned bright red, and closed it again. “You gotta get them outta here,” she finally said. “They shouldn’t see this.”

“We

want

to see it,” Astor said.

“Hush,” I told them. “Both of you.”

“Jesus Christ, Dexter,” Deborah said.

“You told me to come right away,” I said. “I came.”

“I can’t play nursemaid to a couple of kids,” Deborah said.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “They’ll be fine.”

Deborah stared at the two of them; they stared back. Nobody blinked, and for a moment I thought my dear sister would chew off her lower lip. Then she shook herself. “Screw it,” she said. “I don’t have time for a hassle. You two wait over there.” She pointed to her car, which was parked across the street, and grabbed me by the arm. She dragged me toward the house where all the activity was humming. “Lookit,” she said, and pointed at the front of the house.

On the phone, Deborah had told me they found the heads, but in truth it would have taken a major effort to miss them. In front of the house, the short driveway curled through a pair of coral-rock gateposts before puddling into a small courtyard with a fountain in the middle. On top of each gatepost was an ornate lamp. Chalked on the driveway between the posts was something that looked like the letters MLK, except that it was in a strange script that I did not recognize. And to make sure that no one spent too long puzzling out the message, on top of each gatepost-

Well. Although I had to admit the display had a certain primitive vigor and an undeniable dramatic impact, it was really far too crude for my taste. Even though the heads apparently had been carefully cleaned, the eyelids were gone and the mouths had been forced into a strange smile by the heat, and it was not pleasant. Certainly no one on-site asked my opinion, but I have always felt that there should be no leftovers. It’s untidy, and it shows a lack of a real workmanlike spirit. And for these heads to be left so conspicuously-this was mere showing off, and demonstrated an unrefined approach to the problem. Still, there’s no accounting for taste. I’m always willing to admit that my technique is not the only way. And as always in aesthetic matters, I waited for some small sibilant whisper of agreement from the Dark Passenger-but of course, there was nothing.

Not a murmur, not a twitch of the wing, not a peep. My compass was gone, leaving me in the very unsettling position of needing to hold my own hand.

Of course, I was not completely alone. There was Deborah beside me, and I became aware that as I was pondering the matter of my shadow companion’s disappearance, she was speaking to me.

“They were at the funeral this morning,” she said. “Came back and this was waiting for them.”

“Who are they?” I asked, nodding at the house.

Deborah jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow. It hurt. “The family, asshole. The Ortega family. What did I just say?”

“So this happened in daylight?” For some reason, that made it seem a little more disturbing.

“Most of the neighbors were at the funeral, too,” she said. “But we’re still looking for somebody who might have seen something.” She shrugged. “We might get lucky. Who knows.”

I did not know, but for some reason I did not think that anything connected to this would bring us luck. “I guess this creates a little doubt about Halpern’s guilt,” I said.

“It damned well does not,” she said. “That asshole is guilty.”

“Ah,” I said. “So you think that somebody else found the heads, and, uh…”

“Fucking hell, I don’t know,” she said. “Somebody must be working with him.”

I just shook my head. That didn’t make any sense at all, and we both knew it. Somebody capable of conceiving and performing the elaborate ritual of the two murders would almost have to do it alone. Such acts were so highly personal, each small step the acting out of some unique inner need, that the idea of two people sharing the same vision was almost pure nonsense. In a weird way, the ceremonial display of the heads fit in with the way the bodies had been left-two pieces of the same ritual.

“That doesn’t seem right,” I said.

“Well then, what does?”

I looked at the heads, perched so carefully atop the lamps. They had of course been burned in the fire that had toasted the bodies, and there were no traces of blood visible. The necks appeared to have been cut very neatly. Other than that, I had no keen insight into anything at all-and yet there was Deborah, staring at me expectantly. It’s difficult to have a reputation for being able to see into the still heart of the mystery when all that notoriety rests on the shadowy guidance of an interior voice that was, at the moment, somewhere else altogether. I felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy, suddenly called upon to perform the whole act alone.

“Both the heads are here,” I said, since I clearly had to say something. “Why not at the other girl’s house? The one with the boyfriend?”

“Her family lives in Massachusetts,” Deborah said. “This was easier.”

“And you checked him out, right?”

“Who?”

“The dead girl’s boyfriend,” I said slowly and carefully. “The guy with the tattoo on his neck.”

“Jesus Christ, Dexter, of course we’re checking him out. We’re checking out everybody who came within half a mile of these girls in their whole fucking sad little lives, and you-” She took a deep breath, but it didn’t seem to calm her down very much. “Listen, I don’t really need any help with the basic police work, okay? What I need help with is the weird creepy shit you’re supposed to know about.”

It was nice to confirm my identity as the Weird Creepy Shit King, but I did have to wonder how long it would last without my Dark Crown. Still, with my reputation on the line I had to venture some kind of insightful opinion, so I took a small bloodless stab at it.

“All right,” I said. “Then from a weird creepy point of view, it doesn’t make sense to have two different killers with the same ritual. So either Halpern killed ’em and somebody found the heads and thought, what the hell, I’ll hang ’em up-or else the wrong guy is in jail.”

“Fuck that,” she said.

“Which part?”

“All of it, goddamn it!” she said. “Neither one of those choices is any better.”

“Well, shit,” I said, surprising us both. And since I felt cranky beyond endurance with Deborah, and with myself, and with this whole burned-and-headless thing, I took the only logical, reasonable course. I kicked a coconut.

Much better. Now my foot hurt, too.

“I’m checking Goldman’s background,” she said abruptly, nodding at the house. “So far, he’s just a dentist. Owns an office building in Davie. But this-it smells like the cocaine cowboys. And that doesn’t make sense, either. Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said. “Give me something.”

I looked at Deborah with surprise. Somehow she had brought it around so it was back in my lap again, and I had absolutely nothing beyond a very strong hope that Goldman would turn out to be a drug lord who was only disguised as a dentist. “I have come up empty,” I said, which was sad but far too true.

“Aw, crap,” she said, looking past me to the edge of the gathering crowd. The first of the news vans had arrived, and even before the vehicle had come to a full stop the reporter leaped out and began poking at his cameraman, prodding him into position for a long shot. “Goddamn it,” Deborah said, and hurried over to deal with them.

“That guy is scary, Dexter,” said a small voice behind me, and I turned quickly around. Once again, Cody and Astor had snuck up on me unobserved. They stood together, and Cody inclined his head toward the small crowd that had gathered on the far side of the crime-scene tape.

“Which guy is scary?” I said, and Astor said, “There. In the orange shirt. Don’t make me point, he’s

looking

.”

I looked for an orange shirt in the crowd and saw only a flash of color at the far end of the cul-de-sac as someone ducked into a car. It was a small blue car, not a white Avalon-but I did notice a familiar dab of additional color dangling from the rearview mirror as the car moved out onto the main road. And although it was difficult to be sure, I was relatively confident that it was a University of Miami faculty parking pass.

I turned back to Astor. “Well, he’s gone now,” I said. “Why did you say he was scary?”

“

He

says so,” Astor said, pointing to Cody, and Cody nodded.

“He was,” Cody said, barely above a whisper. “He had a big shadow.”

“I’m sorry he scared you,” I said. “But he’s gone now.”

Cody nodded. “Can we look at the heads?”

Children are so interesting, aren’t they? Here Cody had been frightened by something as insubstantial as somebody’s shadow, and yet he was as eager as I’d ever seen him to get a closer look at a concrete example of murder, terror, and human mortality. Of course I didn’t blame him for wanting a peek, but I didn’t think I could openly allow it. On the other hand, I had no idea how to explain all of this to them, either. I am told that the Turkish language, for example, has subtleties far beyond what I can imagine, but English was definitely not adequate for a proper response.

Happily for me, Deborah came back just then, muttering, “I will never complain about the captain again.” That seemed highly unlikely, but it did not seem politic to say so. “He can

have

those bloodsucking bastards from the press.”

“Maybe you’re just not a people person,” I said.

“Those assholes aren’t people,” she said. “All they want is to get some goddamned pictures of their perfect fucking haircuts standing in front of the heads, so they can send their tape to the network. What kind of animal wants to see this?”

Actually, I knew the answer to that one, since I was shepherding two of them at the moment and, truth be told, might be considered one myself. But it did seem like I should avoid this question and try to keep our focus on the problem at hand. So I pondered whatever it was that had made Cody’s scary guy seem scary, and the fact that he’d had what looked very much like a university parking permit.

“I’ve had a thought,” I said to Deborah, and the way her head snapped around you might have thought I’d told her she was standing on a python. “It doesn’t really fit with your dentist-as-drug-lord theory,” I warned her.

“Out with it,” she said through her teeth.

“Somebody was here, and he scared the kids. He took off in a car with a faculty parking tag.”

Deborah stared at me, her eyes hard and opaque. “Shit,” she said softly. “The guy Halpern said, what’s his name?”

“Wilkins,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Can’t be. All because the kids say somebody scared them? No.”

“He has a motive,” I said.

“To get tenure, for Christ’s sake? Come on, Dex.”

“We don’t have to think it’s important,” I said. “

They

do.”

“So to get tenure,” she said, shaking her head, “he breaks into Halpern’s apartment, steals his clothes, kills two girls-”

“And then steers us to Halpern,” I said, remembering how he had stood there in the hall and suggested it.

Deborah’s head jerked around to face me. “Shit,” she said. “He did do that, didn’t he? Told us to go see Halpern.”

“And however feeble tenure might seem as a motive,” I said, “it makes more sense than Danny Rollins and Ted Bundy getting together on a little project, doesn’t it?”

Deborah smoothed down the back of her hair, a surprisingly feminine gesture for someone I had come to think of as Sergeant Rock. “It might,” she said finally. “I don’t know enough about Wilkins to say for sure.”

“Shall we go talk to him?”

She shook her head. “First I want to see Halpern again,” she said.

“Let me get the kids,” I said.

Naturally enough, they were not anywhere near where they should have been. But I found them easily enough; they had wandered over to get a better look at the two heads, and it may have been my imagination, but I thought I could see a small gleam of professional appreciation in Cody’s eyes.

“Come on,” I told them, “we have to get going.” They turned away and followed me reluctantly, but I did hear Astor muttering under her breath, “Better than a stupid museum anyway.”

From the far edge of the group that had gathered to see the spectacle he had watched, careful to be just one of the staring crowd, no different from all the rest of them, and unobserved in any specific way. It was a risk for the Watcher to be there at all-he could well be recognized, but he was willing to take the chance. And of course, it was gratifying to see the reaction to his work; a small vanity but one he allowed himself.

Besides, he was curious to see what they would make of the one simple clue he had left. The other was clever-but so far he had ignored it, walking right past and allowing his coworkers to photograph it and examine it. Perhaps he should have been a little more blatant-but there was time to do this right. No hurry at all, and the importance of getting the other ready, taking him when it was all just right-that outweighed everything else.

The Watcher moved a little closer, to study the other, perhaps see some sign as to how he was reacting so far. Interesting to bring those children with him. They didn’t seem particularly disturbed by the sight of the two heads. Perhaps they were used to such things, or-

No. It was not possible.

Moving with the greatest possible care, he edged closer, still trying to work his way near with the natural ebb and flow of the onlookers, until he got to the yellow tape at a point as close to the children as he could get.

And when the boy looked up and their eyes met, there was no longer any possibility of mistake.

For a moment their gaze locked and all sense of time was lost in the whir of shadowy wings. The boy simply stood there and stared at him with recognition-not of who he was but of what, and his small dark wings fluttered in panicked fury. The Watcher could not help himself; he moved closer, allowing the boy to see him and the nimbus of dark power he carried. The boy showed no fear-simply looked back at him and showed his own power. Then the boy turned away and took his sister’s hand, and the two of them trotted over to the other.

Time to leave. The children would certainly point him out, and he did not want his face seen, not yet. He hurried back to the car and drove away, but not with anything like worry. Not at all. If anything, he was more pleased than he had a right to be.

It was the children, of course. Not just that they would tell the other, and move him a few small steps further into the necessary fear. But also because he really liked children. They were wonderful to work with, they broadcast emotions that were so very powerful, and raised the whole energy of the event to a higher plane.

Children-wonderful.

This was actually starting to be enjoyable.

For a while, it was enough to ride in the monkey-things and help them kill. But even this grew dull with the simple repetition, and every now and then IT felt again that there had to be something more. There was that tantalizing twitch of something indefinable at the moment of the kill, the sense that something stirred toward waking and then settled back down again, and IT wanted to know what that was.

But no matter how many times, no matter how many different monkey-things, IT could never get any closer to that feeling, never push in far enough to find out what it was. And that made IT want to know all the more.

A great deal of time went by, and IT began to turn sour again. The monkey-things were just too simple, and whatever IT did with them was not enough. IT began to resent their stupid, pointless, endlessly repeating existence. IT lashed out at them once or twice, wanting to punish them for their dumb, unimaginative suffering, and IT drove IT’s host to kill entire families, whole tribes of the things. And as they all died, that wonderful hint of something else would hang there just out of reach and then settle back down again into slumber.

It was furiously frustrating; there had to be a way to break through, find out what that elusive something was and pull it into existence.

And then at last, the monkey-things began to change. It was very slow at first, so slow that IT didn’t even realize what was happening until the process was well under way. And one wonderful day, when IT went into a new host, the thing stood up on its back legs and, as IT still wondered what was happening, the thing said, “Who are you?”

The extreme shock of this moment was followed by an even more extreme pleasure.

IT was no longer alone.

CHAPTER 18

T

HE RIDE TO THE DETENTION CENTER WENT SMOOTHLY, but with Deborah driving that merely meant that no one was severely injured. She was in a hurry, and she was first and foremost a Miami cop who had learned to drive from Miami cops. And that meant she believed that traffic was fluid in nature and she sliced through it like a hot iron in butter, sliding into gaps that weren’t really there, and making it clear to the other drivers that it was either move or die.

Cody and Astor were very pleased, of course, from their securely seat-belted position in the backseat. They sat as straight as possible, craning upward to see out. And rarest of all, Cody actually smiled briefly when we narrowly missed smashing into a 350-pound man on a small motorcycle.

“Put on the siren,” Astor demanded.

“This isn’t a goddamned game,” Deborah snarled.

“Does it have to be a goddamned game for the siren?” Astor said, and Deborah turned bright red and yanked the wheel hard to bring us off U.S. 1, just barely missing a battered Honda riding on four doughnut tires.

“Astor,” I said, “don’t say that word.”

“She says it all the time,” Astor said.

“When you are her age, you can say it, too, if you want to,” I said. “But not when you’re ten years old.”

“That’s stupid,” she said. “If it’s a bad word it doesn’t matter how old you are.”

“That’s very true,” I said. “But I can’t tell Sergeant Deborah what to say.”

“That’s stupid,” Astor repeated, and then switched directions by adding, “Is she really a sergeant? Is that better than a policeman?”

“It means she’s the boss policeman,” I said.

“She can tell the ones in the blue suits what to do?”

“Yes,” I said.

“And she gets to have a gun, too?”

“Yes.”

Astor leaned forward as far as the seat belt would let her, and stared at Deborah with something approaching respect, which was not an expression I saw on her face very often. “I didn’t know girls could have a gun and be the boss policeman,” she said.

“Girls can do any god-anything boys can do,” Deborah snapped. “Usually better.”

Astor looked at Cody, and then at me. “Anything?” she said.

“Almost anything,” I said. “Professional football is probably out.”

“Do you shoot people?” Astor asked Deborah.

“For Christ’s sake, Dexter,” Deborah said.

“She shoots people sometimes,” I told Astor, “but she doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“Why not?”

“Shooting somebody is a very private thing,” I said, “and I think she feels that it isn’t anybody else’s business.”

“Stop talking about me like I’m a lamp, for Christ’s sake,” Deborah snapped. “I’m sitting right here.”

“I know that,” Astor said. “Will you tell us about who you shot?”

For an answer, Deborah squealed the car through a sharp turn, into the parking lot, and rocked to a stop in front of the center. “We’re here,” she said, and jumped out as if she was escaping a nest of fire ants. She hurried into the building and as soon as I got Cody and Astor unbuckled, we followed at a more leisurely pace.

Deborah was still speaking with the sergeant on duty at the desk, and I steered Cody and Astor to a pair of battered chairs. “Wait here,” I said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

“Just

wait

?” Astor said, with outrage quivering in her voice.

“Yes,” I said. “I have to go talk to a bad guy.”

“Why can’t we go?” she demanded.

“It’s against the law,” I said. “Now wait here like I said. Please.”

They didn’t look terribly enthusiastic, but at least they didn’t leap off the chairs and charge down the hallway screaming. I took advantage of their cooperation and joined Deborah.

“Come on,” she said, and we headed to one of the interview rooms down the hall. In a few minutes a guard brought Halpern in. He was handcuffed, and he looked even worse than he had when we brought him in. He hadn’t shaved and his hair was a rat’s nest, and there was a look in his eyes that I can only describe as haunted, no matter how clichéd that sounds. He sat in the chair where the guard nudged him, perching on the edge of the seat and staring at his hands as they lay before him on the table.

Deborah nodded to the guard, who left the room and stood in the hall outside. She waited for the door to swing closed and then turned her attention to Halpern. “Well, Jerry,” she said, “I hope you had a good night’s rest.”

His head jerked as if it had been yanked upward by a rope, and he goggled at her. “What-what do you mean?” he said.

Debs raised her eyebrows. “I don’t mean anything, Jerry,” she said mildly. “Just being polite.”

He stared at her for a moment and then dropped his head again. “I want to go home,” he said in a small, shaky voice.

“I’m sure you do, Jerry,” Deborah said. “But I can’t let you go right now.”

He just shook his head, and muttered something inaudible.

“What’s that, Jerry?” she asked in the same kind, patient voice.

“I said, I don’t think I did anything,” he said, still without looking up.

“You don’t

think

so?” she asked him. “Shouldn’t we be kind of sure about that before we let you go?”

He raised his head to look at her, very slowly this time. “Last night…” he said. “Something about being in this place…” He shook his head. “I don’t know. I don’t know,” he said.

“You’ve been in a place like this before, haven’t you, Jerry? When you were young,” Deborah said, and he nodded. “And this place made you remember something?”

He jerked as if she’d spit in his face. “I don’t-it isn’t a memory,” he said. “It was a dream. It had to be a dream.”

Deborah nodded very understandingly. “What was the dream about, Jerry?”

He shook his head and stared at her with his jaw hanging open.

“It might help you to talk about it,” she said. “If it’s just a dream, what can it hurt?” He kept shaking his head. “What was the dream about, Jerry?” she said again, a little more insistently, but still very gently.

“There’s a big statue,” he said, and he stopped shaking his head and looked surprised that words had come out.

“All right,” Deborah said.

“It-it’s really big,” he said. “And there’s a…a…it has a fire burning in its belly.”

“It has a belly?” Deborah said. “What kind of statue is it?”

“It’s so big,” he said. “Bronze body, with two arms held out, and the arms are moving down, to…” He trailed off, and then mumbled something.

“What did you say, Jerry?”

“He said it has a bull’s head,” I said, and I could feel all the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight out.

“The arms come down,” he said. “And I feel…really happy. I don’t know why. Singing. And I put the two girls into the arms. I cut them with a knife, and they go up to the mouth, and the arms dump them in. Into the fire…”

“Jerry,” Debs said, even more gently, “your clothes had blood on them, and they’d been singed.” He didn’t say anything, and she went on. “We know you have blackouts when you’re feeling too much stress,” she said. He stayed quiet. “Isn’t it just possible, Jerry, that you had one of these blackouts, killed the girls, and came home? Without knowing it?”

He began shaking his head again, slowly and mechanically.

“Can you give me a better suggestion?” she said.

“Where would I find a statue like that?” he said. “That’s-how could I, what, find the statue, and build the fire inside it, and get the girls there, and-how could that be possible? How could I do all that and not know it?”

Deborah looked at me, and I shrugged. It was a fair point. After all, there must surely be some practical limit to what you can do while sleepwalking, and this did seem to go a little beyond that.

“Then where did the dream come from, Jerry?” she said.

“Everybody has dreams,” he said.

“And how did the blood get on your clothes?”

“Wilkins did it,” he said. “He had to, there’s no other answer.”

There was a knock on the door and the sergeant came in. He bent over and spoke softly into Deborah’s ear, and I leaned closer to hear. “This guy’s lawyer is making trouble,” he said. “He says now that the heads turned up while his client is in here, he has to be innocent.” The sergeant shrugged. “I can’t keep him outta here,” he said.

“All right,” Debs said. “Thanks, Dave.” He shrugged again, straightened, and left the room.

Deborah looked at me. “Well,” I said, “at least it doesn’t seem too easy anymore.”

She turned back to Halpern. “All right, Jerry,” she said. “We’ll talk some more later.” She stood up and walked out of the room and I followed.

“What do we think about that?” I asked her.

She shook her head. “Jesus, Dex, I don’t know. I need a major break here.” She stopped walking and turned to face me. “Either the guy really did this in one of his blackouts, which means he set the whole thing up without really knowing, which is impossible.”

“Probably,” I said.

“Or else somebody else went to a shitload of trouble to set it up and frame him, and timed it just right to match one of his blackouts.”

“Which is also impossible,” I said helpfully.

“Yeah,” she said. “I know.”

“And the statue with the bull’s head and the fire in its belly?”

“Fuck,” she said. “It’s just a dream. Has to be.”

“So where were the girls burned?”

“You want to show me a giant statue with a bull’s head and a built-in barbecue? Where do you hide that? You find it and I’ll believe it’s real,” she said.

“Do we have to release Halpern now?” I asked.

“No, goddamn it,” she snarled. “I still got him on resisting arrest.” And she turned away and walked back toward the receiving area.

Cody and Astor were sitting with the sergeant when we got back out to the entryway, and even though they had not remained where I told them to, I was so grateful that they had not set anything on fire that I let it go. Deborah watched impatiently while I collected them, and we all headed out the door together. “Now what?” I said.

“We have to talk to Wilkins, of course,” Deborah said.

“And do we ask him if he has a statue with a bull’s head in his backyard?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “That’s bullshit.”

“That’s a bad word,” said Astor. “You owe me fifty cents.”

“It’s getting late,” I said. “I have to get the kids home before their mother barbecues me.”

Deborah looked at Cody and Astor for a long moment, then up at me. “All right,” she said.

CHAPTER 19

I

DID MANAGE TO GET THE KIDS HOME BEFORE RITA WENT over the edge, but it was a very close call that was not made any easier when she found out that they had been to see severed heads. Still, they were obviously unbothered and even excited about their day, and Astor’s new determination to be a Mini-Me to my sister Deborah seemed to distract Rita from anything approaching actual wrath. After all, an early career choice could save a lot of time and bother later.

It was clear that Rita had a full head of steam and we were in for Babblefest. Normally I would simply smile and nod and let her run on. But I was in no mood for anything that smacked of normal. For the last two days I had wanted nothing but a quiet place and time to try to figure out where my Passenger had gone, and I had instead been pulled in every other direction possible by Deborah, Rita, the kids, even my job, of all things. My disguise had taken over from the thing it was supposed to be hiding, and I did not like it. But if I could make it past Rita and out the door, I would finally have some time to myself.

And so, pleading important case work that could not wait for Monday morning, I slid out the door and drove in to the office, enjoying the relative peace and calm of Miami traffic on a Saturday night.

For the first fifteen minutes of the drive I could not lose the feeling that I was being followed. Ridiculous, I know, but I had no experience with being alone in the night and it made me feel very vulnerable. Without the Passenger I was a tiger with a dull nose and no fangs. I felt slow and stupid, and the skin on my back would not stop crawling. It was an overall feeling of impending creepiness, the sense that I needed to circle around and sniff the back trail, because something was lurking there hungrily. And tickling at the edges of all that was an echo of that strange dream music, making my feet twitch in an involuntary way, as if they had someplace to go without me.

It was a terrible feeling, and if only I had been capable of empathy, I’m sure I might have had a moment of awful revelation, wherein I flung a hand to my forehead and sank to the ground, murmuring anguished regrets over all the times I had done the stalking and caused this dreadful feeling in others. But I am not built for anguish-at least, not my own-and so all I could think about was my very large problem. My Passenger was gone, and I was empty and defenseless if somebody really was tailing me.

It had to be mere imagination. Who would stalk Dutiful Dexter, plodding through his completely normal artificial existence with a happy smile, two children, and a new mortgage to a caterer? Just to be sure, I glanced into the rearview mirror.

No one of course; no one lurking with an ax and a piece of pottery with Dexter’s name on it. I was turning stupid in my lonely dotage.

A car was on fire on the shoulder of the Palmetto Expressway, and most of the traffic was dealing with the congestion by either roaring around it on the left shoulder or leaning on the horn and shouting. I got off and drove past the warehouses near the airport. At a storage place just off 69th Avenue a burglar alarm was clattering endlessly, and three men were loading boxes into a truck without any appearance of haste. I smiled and waved; they ignored me.

It was a feeling I was getting used to-everyone was ignoring poor empty Dexter lately, except, of course, whoever it was that had either been following me or not really following me at all.

But speaking of empty, the way I had weaseled out of a confrontation with Rita, smooth as it had been, had left me without dinner, and this is not something I willingly tolerate. Right now I wanted to eat almost as much as I wanted to breathe.

I stopped at a Pollo Tropical and picked up half a chicken to take with me. The smell instantly filled the car, and the last couple of miles it was all I could do to keep the car on the road instead of screeching to a halt and ripping at the chicken with my teeth.

It finally overwhelmed me in the parking lot, and as I walked in the door I had to fumble out my credentials with greasy fingers, nearly dropping the beans in the process. But by the time I settled in at my computer, I was a much happier boy and the chicken was no more than a bag of bones and a pleasant memory.

As always, with a full stomach and a clean conscience I found it much easier to shift my powerful brain into high gear and think about the problem. The Dark Passenger was missing; that seemed to imply that it had some kind of independent existence without me. That meant it must have come from somewhere and, quite possibly, gone back there. So my first problem was to learn what I could about where it came from.

I knew very well that mine was not the only Passenger in the world. Over the course of my long and rewarding career I had encountered several other predators wrapped in the invisible black cloud that indicated a hitchhiker like mine. And it stood to reason that they had originated somewhere and sometime, and not just with me and in my own time. Shamefully enough, I had never wondered why, or where these inner voices came from. Now, with the whole night stretching ahead of me in the peace and quiet of the forensics lab, I could rectify this tragic oversight.

And so without any thought of my own personal safety, I dashed fearlessly onto the Internet. Of course, there was nothing helpful when I searched “Dark Passenger.” That was, after all, my private term. I tried it anyway, just to be safe, and found nothing more than a few online games and a couple of blogs that someone really should report to the proper authorities, whoever was in charge of policing teenage angst.

I searched for “interior companion,” “inside friend,” and even “spirit guide.” Once again there were some very interesting results that made one wonder what this tired old world was coming to, but nothing that illuminated my problem. But as far as I know there has never been only one of anything, and the odds were that I was simply failing to come up with the correct search terms to find what I needed.

Very well: “Inner guide.” “Internal adviser.” “Hidden helper.” I went through as many combinations of these as I could think of, switching around the adjectives, running through lists of synonyms, and always marveling at how New Age pseudo-philosophy had taken over the Internet. And still I came up with nothing more sinister than a way to tap my powerful subconscious to make a killing in real estate.

There was, however, one very interesting reference to Solomon, of biblical fame, which claimed that the old wise guy had made secret references to some kind of inner king. I searched for a few tidbits of information on Solomon. Who would have guessed that this Bible stuff was interesting and relevant? But apparently when we think of him as being a wise, jolly old guy with a beard who offered to cut a baby in half just for laughs, we are missing out on all the good parts.

For example, Solomon built a temple to something called Moloch, apparently one of the naughty elder gods, and he killed his brother because “wickedness” was found inside him. I could certainly see that, from a biblical perspective, interior wickedness might be a fine description of a Dark Passenger. But if there was a connection here, did it really make sense that someone with an “inner king” would kill somebody inhabited by wickedness?

It was making my head spin. Was I to believe that King Solomon himself actually had a Dark Passenger of his own? Or because he was supposedly one of the Bible’s good guys, should I interpret it to mean that he found one in his brother and killed him because of it? And contrary to what we had all been led to believe, did he really mean it when he offered to cut the baby in half?

Most important of all, did it really matter what had happened several thousand years ago on the far side of the world? Even supposing that King Solomon had one of the original Dark Passengers, how did that help me get back to being lovable deadly me? What did I actually

do

with all this fascinating historical lore? None of it told me where the Passenger came from, what it was, or how to get it back.

I was at a loss. All right, then, it was clearly time to give up, accept my fate, throw myself on the mercy of the court, assume the role of Dexter, quiet family man and former Dark Avenger. Resign myself to the idea that I would never again feel the hard cool touch of the moonlight on my electrified nerve endings as I slid through the night like the avatar of cold, sharp steel.

I tried to think of something to inspire me to even greater heights of mental effort in my investigation, but all I came up with was a piece of a Rudyard Kipling poem: “If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs,” or words to that effect. It didn’t seem like it was enough. Perhaps Ariel Goldman and Jessica Ortega should have memorized Kipling. In any case, my search had taken me no place helpful.

Fine. What else could someone call the Passenger? “Sardonic commentator,” “warning system,” “inside cheerleader.” I checked them all. Some of the results for inside cheerleader were really quite startling, but had nothing to do with my search.

I tried “watcher,” “interior watcher,” “dark watcher,” “hidden watcher.”

One last long shot, possibly having to do with the fact that my thoughts were once again turning toward food, but quite justified nevertheless: “hungry watcher.”

Again, the results were mostly New Age blather. But one blog caught my eye, and I clicked on it. I read the opening paragraph and, although I did not actually say “Bingo,” that was certainly the gist of what I thought.

“Once again into the night with the Hungry Watcher,” it began. “Stalking the dark streets that teem with prey, riding slowly through the waiting feast and feeling the pull of the tide of blood that will soon rise to cover us with joy…”

Well. The prose was somewhat purple, perhaps. And the part about the blood was a little bit icky. But that aside, it was a pretty good description of how I felt when I went off on one of my adventures. It seemed likely that I had found a kindred spirit.

I read on. It was all consistent with the experience as I knew of it, cruising through the night with hungry anticipation as a sibilant inner voice whispered guidance. But then, when the narrative came to the point where I would have pounced and slashed, this narrator instead made a reference to “the others,” followed by three figures from some alphabet I didn’t recognize.

Or did I?

Feverishly, I scrabbled across my desk for the folder holding the file for the two headless girls. I yanked out the stack of photographs, flipped through them-and there it was.

Chalked on the driveway at Dr. Goldman’s house, the same three letters, looking like a misshapen MLK.

I glanced up at my computer screen: it was a match, no question about it.

This was way too much to be a coincidence. It clearly meant something very important; perhaps it was even the key to understanding the entire mess. Yes, highly significant, with just one small footnote: Significant of what? What did it mean?

On top of everything else, why was this particular clue afflicting me? I had come here to work on my own personal problem of a missing Passenger-had come late at night so I would not be harried by my sister or other demands of work. And now, apparently, if I wanted to solve my problem I would have to do it by working on Deborah’s case. How come nothing was fair anymore?

Well, if there was any real reward for complaining I hadn’t seen it so far, in a life filled with suffering and verbal skill. So I might as well take what was offered and see where it led.

First, what language was the script? I was reasonably certain it wasn’t Chinese or Japanese-but what about some other Asian alphabet I knew nothing about? I pulled up an online atlas and began checking off countries: Korea, Cambodia, Thailand. None of them had an alphabet that was even close. What did that leave? Cyrillic? Easy enough to check. I pulled up a page containing the whole alphabet. I had to stare at it for a long time; some of the letters seemed close, but in the end I concluded that it was not a match.

What then? What did that leave? What would somebody really smart do next, somebody like who I had once been, or even somebody like that all-time champion of bright guys, King Solomon?

A small beeping sound began to chirp in the back of my brain, and I listened to it for a moment before I answered it. Yes, that’s right, I said King Solomon. The guy from the Bible with an inner king. What? Oh, really? A connection, you say? You think so?

A long shot, but easy enough to check, and I did. Solomon would have spoken ancient Hebrew, of course, which was simple to find on the Web. And it looked very little like the characters I had found. So that was that, and there was no connection: ipso facto, or some other equally compelling Latin saying.

But hold on: Didn’t I remember that the original language of the Bible was not Hebrew but something else? I beat my gray cells brutally, and they finally came out with it. Yes, it had been something I remembered from that unimpeachable scholarly source,

Raiders of the Lost Ark.

And the language I was looking for was Aramaic.

Once again, it was easy to find a Web site eager to teach us all to write Aramaic. And as I looked at it, I became eager to learn, because there was no doubt about it-the three letters were an exact match. And they were, in fact, the Aramaic counterparts of MLK, just the way they looked.

I read on. Aramaic, like Hebrew, did not use vowels. Instead, you had to supply them yourself. Very tricky, really, because you had to know what the word was before you could read it. Therefore, MLK could be milk or milik or malik or any other combination, and none of them made sense. At least not to me, which seemed like the important thing. But I doodled anyway, trying to make sense of the letters. Milok. Molak. Molek-

Once again something flickered in the back of my brain and I grabbed at it, pulled it forward into the light, and looked it over. It was King Solomon again. Just before the part where he killed his brother for having wickedness inside, he had built a temple to Moloch. And of course, the preferred alternative spelling for Moloch was Molek, known as the detestable god of the Ammonites.

This time I searched “Moloch worship,” scanning through a dozen irrelevant Web sites before hitting a few that told me the same things: the worship was characterized by an ecstatic loss of control and ended with a human sacrifice. Apparently the people were whipped into a frenzy until they didn’t realize that little Jimmy had somehow been killed and cooked, not necessarily in that order.

Well, I don’t really understand ecstatic loss of control, even though I have been to football games at the Orange Bowl. So I admit I was curious: How did they work that trick? I read a little closer, and found that apparently there was music involved, music so compelling that the frenzy was almost automatic. How this happened was a little ambiguous-the clearest reading I found, from an Aramaic text translated with lots of footnotes, was that “Moloch sent music unto them.” I supposed that meant a band of his priests would march through the streets with drums and trumpets…

Why drums and trumpets, Dexter?

Because that was what I was hearing in my sleep. Drums and trumpets rising into a glad chorus of singing and the feeling that pure eternal joy was right outside the door.

Which seemed like a pretty good working definition of ecstatic loss of control, didn’t it?

All right, I reasoned: just for the sake of argument, let’s say Moloch has returned. Or maybe he never went away. So a three-thousand-year-old detestable god from the Bible was sending music in order to, um-what, exactly? Steal my Dark Passenger? Kill young women in Miami, the modern Gomorrah? I even dragged in my earlier insight from the museum and tried to fit it into the puzzle: so Solomon had the original Dark Passenger, which had now come to Miami, and, like a male lion taking over a pride, was therefore trying to kill the Passengers already here, because, um…Why exactly?

Or was I really supposed to believe that an Old Testament bad guy was coming out of time to get me? Wouldn’t it make more sense simply to reserve myself a rubber room right now?

I pushed at it from every side and still came up with nothing. Possibly my brain was starting to fall apart, too, along with the rest of my life. Maybe I was just tired. Whatever the case, none of it made sense. I needed to know more about Moloch. And because I was sitting in front of the computer, I wondered if Moloch had his own Web site.

It took only a moment to find out, so I typed it in, went down the list of self-important self-pitying blogs, online fantasy games, and arcane paranoid fantasies until I found one that looked likely. When I clicked on the link, a picture began to form very slowly, and as it did-

The deep, powerful beat of the drum, insistent horns rising behind the pulsing rhythm to a point that swells until it can no longer hold back the voices which break out in anticipation of a gladness beyond knowing-it was the music I had heard in my sleep.

Then the slow blossom of a smoldering bull’s head, there in the middle of the page, with two upraised hands beside it and the same three Aramaic letters above.

And I sat and stared and blinked with the cursor, still feeling the music crash through me and lift me toward the hot glorious heights of an unknown ecstasy that promised me all the blinding delight ever possible in a world of hidden joy. For the first time in my memory, as these passionate strange sensations washed over and through me and finally out and away-for the first time ever I felt something new, different, and unwelcome.

I was afraid.

I could not say why, or of what, which made it much worse, a lonely unknown fear that roiled through me and echoed off the empty places and drove away everything but the picture of that bull’s head and the fear.

This is nothing, Dexter

, I told myself.

An animal picture and some random notes of not terribly good music

. And I agreed with myself completely-but I could not make my hands listen to reason and move off my lap. Something about this crossover between the supposedly unconnected worlds of sleep and waking made telling them apart impossible, as if anything that could show up in my sleep and then appear on my screen at work was too powerful to resist and I had no chance of fighting it, had simply to watch as it dragged me down and under into the flames.

There was no black, mighty voice inside me to turn me into steel and fling me like a spear at whatever this was. I was alone, afraid, helpless, and clueless; Dexter in the dark, with the bogeyman and all his unknown minions hiding under the bed and getting ready to pull me out of this world and into the burning land of shrieking, terror-filled pain.

With a motion that was far from graceful I lunged across my desk and yanked the computer’s power cord from the wall and, breathing rapidly and looking like someone had attached electrodes to my muscles, I jerked backward into my chair again, so quick and clumsy that the plug on the end of the cord whipped back and snapped me on the forehead just above the left eyebrow.

For several minutes I did nothing but breathe and watch as the sweat rolled off my face and plopped onto my desk. I had no idea why I had leaped off my chair like a gaffed barracuda and yanked the cord out of the wall, beyond the fact that for some reason it had felt like I had to do it or die, and I couldn’t understand where that notion came from, either, but come it had, barreling out of the new darkness between my ears and crushing me with its urgency.

And so I sat in my quiet office and gaped at a dead screen, wondering who I was and what had just happened.

I was never afraid. Fear was an emotion and Dexter did not have them. To be afraid of a Web site was so far beyond stupid and pointless that there were no adjectives for it. And I did not act irrationally, except when imitating human beings.

So why had I pulled the plug, and why were my hands trembling, all from a cheerful little tune and a cartoon cow?

There were no answers, and I was no longer sure I wanted to find them.

I drove home, convinced that I was being followed, even though the rearview mirror stayed empty the whole way.

The other really was quite special, resilient in a way that the Watcher had not seen in quite some time. This was proving to be far more interesting than some of the ones in the past. He began to feel something that might even be called kinship with the other. Sad, really. If only things had worked out differently. But there was a kind of beauty to the inevitable fate of the other, and that was good, too.

Even this far behind the other’s car, he could see the signs of nerves starting to fray: speeding up and slowing down, fiddling with the mirrors. Good. Uneasy was just the beginning. He needed to move the other far beyond uneasy, and he would. But first it was essential to make sure the other knew what was coming. And so far, in spite of the clues, he did not seem to have figured it out.

Very well, then. The Watcher would simply repeat the pattern until the other recognized just what sort of power was after him. After that, the other would have no choice. He would come like a happy lamb to the slaughter.

Until then, even the watching had purpose. Let him know he was watched. It would do him no good, even if he saw the face watching him.

Faces can change. But the watching would not.

CHAPTER 20

O

F COURSE THERE WAS NO SLEEP FOR ME THAT NIGHT. THE next day, Sunday, passed in a haze of fatigue and anxiety. I took Cody and Astor to a nearby park and sat on a bench while I tried to make sense of the pile of uncooperative information and conjecture I had come up with so far. The pieces refused to come together into any kind of picture that made sense. Even if I hammered them into a semi-coherent theory, it told me nothing that would help me understand how to find my Passenger.

The best I could come up with was a sort of half-formed notion that the Dark Passenger and others like it had been hanging around for at least three thousand years. But why mine should flee from any other was impossible to say-especially since I had encountered others before with no more reaction than raised hackles. My notion of the new daddy lion seemed particularly far-fetched in the pleasant sunlight of the park, against the background of the children twittering threats at one another. Statistically speaking, about half of them had new daddies, based on the divorce rate, and they seemed to be thriving.

I let despair wash over me, a feeling that seemed slightly absurd in the lovely Miami afternoon. The Passenger was gone, I was alone, and the only solution I could come up with was to take lessons in Aramaic. I could only hope that a chunk of frozen wastewater from a passing airplane would fall on my head and put me out of my misery. I looked up hopefully, but there, too, I was out of luck.

Another semi-sleepless night, broken only by a recurrence of the strange music that came into my sleep and woke me as I sat up in bed to go to it. I had no idea why it seemed like such a good idea to follow the music, and even less idea where it wanted to take me, but apparently I was going anyway. Clearly I was falling apart, sliding rapidly downhill into gray, empty madness.

Monday morning a dazed and battered Dexter staggered into the kitchen, where I was immediately and violently assaulted by Hurricane Rita, who charged at me waving a huge stack of papers and CDs. “I need to know what you think,” she said, and it struck me that this was something she definitely did

not

need to know, considering the deep bleakness of my thoughts. But before I could summon even a mild objection she had hurled me into a kitchen chair and began flinging the documents around.

“These are the flower arrangements that Hans wants to use,” she started, showing me a series of pictures that were, in fact, floral in nature. “This is for the altar. And it’s maybe a little too, oh, I don’t know,” she said desperately. “Is anybody going to make jokes about too much white?”

Although I am known for a finely tuned sense of humor, very few jokes based on the color white sprang to mind, but before I could reassure her on the subject, Rita was already flipping the pages.

“Anyway,” she said, “this is the individual table setting. Which hopefully goes with what Manny Borque is doing. Maybe we should get Vince to check it with him?”

“Well,” I said.

“Oh good lord, look at the time,” she said, and before I could speak even one more syllable she had dropped a pile of CDs in my lap. “I’ve narrowed it down to six bands,” she said. “Can you listen to these today and let me know what you think? Thanks, Dex,” she went on relentlessly, leaning to plant a kiss on my cheek and then heading for the door, already moving on to the next item on her checklist. “Cody?” she called. “It’s time to go, sweetie. Come on.”

There was another three minutes of commotion, the highlights of which were Cody and Astor sticking their heads in the kitchen door to say good-bye, and then the front door slammed and all was silent.

And in the silence I thought I could almost hear, as I had heard in the night, the faint echo of the music. I knew I should leap from my chair and charge out the door with my saber clamped firmly between my teeth-charge into the bright light of day and find this thing, whatever it was, beard it in its den and slay it-but I could not.

The Moloch Web site had stuck its fear into me, and even though I knew it was foolish, wrong, counterproductive, totally non-Dexter in every way, I could not fight it. Moloch. Just a silly ancient name. An old myth that had disappeared thousands of years ago, torn down with Solomon’s temple. It was nothing, a figment from prehistoric imaginations, less than nothing-except that I was afraid of it.

There seemed nothing else to do except to stumble through the day with my head down and hope that it didn’t get me, whatever it was. I was bone tired, and maybe that was adding to my sense of helplessness. But I didn’t think so. I had the feeling that a very bad thing was circling closer with its nose full of my scent, and I could already feel its sharp teeth in my neck. All I could hope for was to make its sport last a little longer, but sooner or later I would feel its claws on me and then I, too, would bleat, beat my heels in the dust, and die. There was no fight left in me; there was, in fact, almost nothing at all left in me, except a kind of reflex humanity that said it was time to go to work.

I picked up Rita’s stack of CDs and slogged out the door. And as I stood in the doorway of the house, turning the key to lock the front door, a white Avalon very slowly pulled away from the curb and drove off with a lazy insolence that cut through all my fatigue and despair and sliced right into me with a jolt of sheer terror that rocked me back against the door as the CDs slipped from my fingers and crashed onto the walk.

The car motored slowly up the street to the stop sign. I watched, nerveless and numb. And as its brake lights flicked off and it started up and through the intersection, a small piece of Dexter woke up, and it was very angry.

It might have been the absolute bold uncaring disrespect of the Avalon’s behavior, and it might have been that all I really needed was the jolt of adrenaline to supplement my morning coffee. Whatever it was, it filled me with a sense of righteous indignation, and before I could even decide what to do I was already doing it, running down the driveway to my car and leaping into the driver’s seat. I jammed the key into the ignition, fired up the engine, and raced after the Avalon.

I ignored the stop sign, accelerated through the intersection, and caught sight of the car as it turned right a few blocks ahead. I went much faster than I should have and saw him turn left toward U.S. 1. I closed the gap and sped up, frantic to catch him before he got lost in the rush-hour traffic.

I was only a block or so back when he turned north on U.S. 1 and I followed, ignoring the squealing brakes and the deafening chord of horn music from the other motorists. The Avalon was about ten cars ahead of me now, and I used all my Miami driving skills to get closer, concentrating only on the road and ignoring the lines that separated the lanes, even failing to enjoy the wonderful creativity of the language that followed me from the surrounding cars. The worm had turned, and although it might not have all its teeth, it was ready for battle, however it was that worms fought. I was angry-another novelty for me. I had been drained of all my darkness and pushed into a bright drab corner where all the walls were closing in, but enough was enough. It was time for Dexter to fight back. And although I did not really know what I planned to do when I caught up with the other car, I was absolutely going to do it.

I was half a block back when the Avalon’s driver became aware of me and sped up immediately, slipping into the far left lane into a space so tight that the car behind him slammed on its brakes and spun sideways. The two cars behind it smashed into its exposed side and a great roar of horns and brakes hammered at my ears. I found just enough room to my right to squeak through around the crash and then over to the left again in the now-open far lane. The Avalon was a block ahead and picking up speed, but I put the pedal down and followed.

For several blocks the gap between us stayed about the same. Then the Avalon caught up with the traffic that was ahead of the accident and I got a bit closer, until I was only two cars behind, close enough to see a pair of large sunglasses looking back at me in the side mirror. And as I surged up to within one car length of his bumper, he suddenly yanked his steering wheel hard to the left, bouncing his car up onto the median strip and sliding sideways down into traffic on the other side. I was past him before I could even react. I could almost hear mocking laughter drifting back at me as he trundled off toward Homestead.

But I refused to let him go. It was not that catching the other car might give me some answers, although that was probably true. And I was not thinking of justice or any other abstract concept. No, this was pure indignant anger, rising from some unused interior corner and flowing straight out of my lizard brain and down to my knuckles. What I really wanted to do was pull this guy out of his rotten little car and smack him in the face. It was an entirely new sensation, this idea of inflicting bodily harm in the heat of anger, and it was intoxicating, strong enough to shut down any logical impulses that might be left in me and it sent me across the median in pursuit.

My car made a terrible crunching noise as it bounced up onto the median and then down on the other side, and a large cement truck missed flattening me by only about four inches, but I was off again, heading after the Avalon in the lighter southbound traffic.

Far ahead of me there were several spots of moving white color, any one of which might have been my target. I stomped down on the gas and followed.

The gods of traffic were kind to me, and I zipped through the steadily moving cars for almost half a mile before I hit my first red light. There were several cars in each lane halted obediently at the intersection and no way around them-except to repeat my car-crunching trick of banging up onto the median strip. I did. I came down off the narrow end of the median and into the intersection just in time to cause severe inconvenience to a bright yellow Hummer that was foolishly trying to use the roads in a rational way. It gave a manic lurch to avoid me, and very nearly succeeded; there was only the lightest of thuds as I bounced neatly off its front bumper, through the intersection, and onward, followed by yet another blast of horn music and yelling.

The Avalon would be a quarter of a mile ahead if it was still on U.S. 1, and I did not wait for the distance to grow. I chugged on in my trusty, banged-up little car, and after only half a minute I was in sight of two white cars directly ahead of me-one of them a Chevy SUV and the other a minivan. My Avalon was nowhere to be seen.

I slowed just for a moment-and out of the corner of my eye I saw it again, edging around behind a grocery store in a strip mall parking lot off to the right. I slammed my foot down onto the gas pedal and slewed across two lanes of traffic and into the parking lot. The driver of the other car saw me coming; he sped up and pulled out onto the street running perpendicular to U.S. 1, racing away to the east as fast as he could go. I hurried through the parking lot and followed.

He led me through a residential area for a mile or so, then around another corner and past a park where a day-care program was in full swing. I got a little closer-just in time to see a woman holding a baby and leading two other children step into the road in front of us.

The Avalon accelerated up and onto the sidewalk and the woman continued to move slowly across the road looking at me as if I was a billboard she couldn’t read. I swerved to go behind her, but one of her children suddenly darted backward right in front of me and I stood on the brake. My car went into a skid, and for a moment it looked as if I would slide right into the whole slow, stupid cluster of them as they stood there in the road, watching me with no sign of interest. But my tires bit at last, and I managed to spin the wheel, give it a little bit of gas, and skid through a quick circle on the lawn of a house across the street from the park. Then I was back onto the road in a cloud of crabgrass, and after the Avalon, now farther ahead.

The distance stayed about the same for several more blocks before I got my lucky break. Ahead of me the Avalon roared through another stop sign, but this time a police cruiser pulled out after it, turned on the siren, and gave chase. I wasn’t sure if I should be glad of the company or jealous of the competition, but in any case it was much easier to follow the flashing lights and siren, so I continued to slog along in the rear.

The two other cars went through a quick series of turns, and I thought I might be getting a little closer, when suddenly the Avalon disappeared and the cop car slid to a halt. In just a few seconds I was up beside the cruiser and getting out of my car.

In front of me the cop was running across a close-cropped lawn marked with tire tracks that led around behind a house and into a canal. The Avalon was settling down into the water by the far side and, as I watched, a man climbed out of the car through the window and swam the few yards to the opposite bank of the canal. The cop hesitated on our side and then jumped in and swam to the half-sunk car. As he did, I heard the sound of heavy tires braking fast behind me. I turned to look.

A yellow Hummer rocked to a stop behind my car and a red-faced man with sandy hair jumped out and started to yell at me. “You cocksucker son of a bitch!” he hollered. “You dinged up my car! What the hell you think you’re doing?”

Before I could answer, my cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” I said, and oddly enough the sandy-haired man stood there quietly as I answered the phone.

“Where the hell are you?” Deborah demanded.

“ Cutler Ridge, looking at a canal,” I said.

It gave her pause for a full second before she said, “Well, dry off and get your ass over to the campus. We got another body.”

CHAPTER 21

I

T TOOK ME A FEW MINUTES TO DISENGAGE MYSELF FROM the driver of the yellow Hummer, and I might have been there still if not for the cop who had jumped into the canal. He finally climbed out of the water and came over to where I stood listening to a nonstop stream of threats and obscenities, none very original. I tried to be polite about it-the man obviously had a great deal to get off his chest, and I certainly didn’t want him to sustain psychological damage by repressing it-but I did have some urgent police business to attend to, after all. I tried to point that out, but apparently he was one of those individuals who could not yell and listen to reason at the same time.

So the appearance of an unhappy and extremely wet cop was a welcome interruption to a conversation that was verging on tedious and one-sided. “I would really like to know what you find out about the driver of that car,” I said to the cop.

“I bet you would,” he said. “Can I see some ID, please?”

“I have to get to a crime scene,” I said.

“You’re at one,” he told me. So I showed him my credentials and he looked at them very carefully, dripping canal water onto the laminated picture. Finally he nodded and said, “Okay, Morgan, you’re out of here.”

From the Hummer driver’s reaction you might have thought the cop had suggested setting the Pope on fire. “You can’t let that son of a bitch just go like that!” he screeched. “That goddamn asshole dinged up my car!”

And the cop, bless him, simply stared at the man, dripped a little more water, and said, “May I see your license and registration, sir?” It seemed like a wonderful exit line, and I took advantage of it.

My poor battered car was making very unhappy noises, but I put it on the road to the university anyway-there really was no other choice. No matter how badly damaged it was, it would have to get me there. And it made me feel a certain kinship with my car. Here we were, two splendidly built pieces of machinery, hammered out of our original beautiful condition by circumstances beyond our control. It was a wonderful theme for self-pity, and I indulged it for several minutes. The anger I had felt only a few minutes ago had leeched away, dripped onto the lawn like canal water off the cop. Watching the Avalon’s driver swim to the far side, climb out, and walk away had been in the same spirit as everything else lately; get a little bit close and then have the rug pulled out from under your feet.

And now there was a new body, and we hadn’t even figured out what to do about the others yet. It was making us look like the greyhounds at a dog track, chasing after a fake rabbit that is always just a little bit too far ahead, jerked tantalizingly away every time the poor dog thinks he’s about to get it in his teeth.

There were two squad cars at the university ahead of me, and the four officers had already cordoned off the area around the Lowe Art Museum and pushed back the growing crowd. A squat, powerful-looking cop with a shaved head came over to meet me, and pointed toward the back of the building.

The body was in a clump of vegetation behind the gallery. Deborah was talking to someone who looked like a student, and Vince Masuoka was squatting beside the left leg of the body and poking carefully with a ballpoint pen at something on the ankle. The body could not be seen from the road, but even so you could not really say it had been hidden. It had obviously been roasted like the others, and it was laid out just like the first two, in a stiff formal position, with the head replaced by a ceramic bull’s head. And once again, as I looked at it I waited by reflex for some reaction from within. But I heard nothing except the gentle tropical wind blowing through my brain. I was still alone.

As I stood in huffish thought, Deborah came roaring over to me at full volume. “Took you long enough,” she snarled. “Where have you been?”

“Macramé class,” I said. “It’s just like the others?”

“Looks like it,” she said. “What about it, Masuoka?”

“I think we got a break this time,” Vince said.

“About fucking time,” Deborah said.

“There’s an ankle bracelet,” Vince said. “It’s made of platinum, so it didn’t melt off.” He looked up at Deborah and gave her his terribly phony smile. “It says Tammy on it.”

Deborah frowned and looked over to the side door of the gallery. A tall man in a seersucker jacket and bow tie stood there with one of the cops, looking anxiously at Deborah. “Who’s that guy?” she asked Vince.

“Professor Keller,” he told her. “Art history teacher. He found the body.”

Still frowning, Deborah stood up and beckoned the uniformed cop to bring the professor over.

“Professor…?” Deborah said.

“Keller. Gus Keller,” the professor said. He was a good-looking man in his sixties with what looked like a dueling scar on his left cheek. He didn’t appear to be about to faint at the sight of the body.

“So you found the body here,” Deb said.

“That’s right,” he said. “I was coming over to check on a new exhibit-Mesopotamian art, actually, which is interesting-and I saw it here in the shrubbery.” He frowned. “About an hour ago, I guess.”

Deborah nodded as if she already knew all that, even the Mesopotamian part, which was a standard cop trick designed to make people eager to add new details, especially if they might be a little bit guilty. It didn’t appear to work on Keller. He simply stood and waited for another question, and Deborah stood and tried to think of one. I am justly proud of my hard-earned artificial social skills, and I didn’t want the silence to turn awkward, so I cleared my throat, and Keller looked at me.

“What can you tell us about the ceramic head?” I asked him. “From the artistic point of view.” Deborah glared at me, but she may have been jealous that I thought of the question instead of her.

“From the artistic point of view? Not much,” Keller said, looking down at the bull’s head by the body. “It looks like it was done in a mold, and then baked in a fairly primitive kiln. Maybe even just a big oven. But historically, it’s much more interesting.”

“What do you mean interesting?” Deborah snapped at him, and he shrugged.

“Well, it’s not perfect,” Keller said. “But somebody tried to recreate a very old stylized design.”

“How old?” Deborah said. Keller raised an eyebrow and shrugged, as if to say she had asked the wrong question, but he answered.

“Three or four thousand years old,” he said.

“That’s very old,” I offered helpfully, and they both looked at me, which made me think I ought to add something halfway clever, so I said, “And what part of the world would it be from?”

Keller nodded. I was clever again. “ Middle East,” he said. “We see a similar motif in Babylonia, and even earlier around Jerusalem. The bull head appears to be attached to the worship of one of the elder gods. A particularly nasty one, really.”

“Moloch,” I said, and it hurt my throat to say that name.

Deborah glared at me, absolutely certain now that I had been holding out on her, but she looked back at Keller as he continued to talk.

“Yes, that’s right,” he said. “Moloch liked human sacrifice. Especially children. It was the standard deal: sacrifice your child and he would guarantee a good harvest, or victory over your enemies.”

“Well, then, I think we can look forward to a very good harvest this year,” I said, but neither one of them appeared to think that was worth even a tiny smile. Ah well, you do what you can to bring a little cheer into this dreary world, and if people refuse to respond to your efforts it’s their loss.

“What’s the point of burning the bodies?” Deborah demanded.

Keller smiled briefly, kind of a professorial thanks-for-asking smile. “That’s the whole key to the ritual,” he said. “There was a huge bull-headed statue of Moloch that was actually a furnace.”

I thought of Halpern and his “dream.” Had he known about Moloch beforehand, or had it come to him the way the music came to me? Or was Deborah right all along and he had actually been to the statue and killed the girls-as unlikely as that seemed now?

“A furnace,” said Deborah, and Keller nodded. “And they toss the bodies in there?” she said, with an expression that indicated she was having trouble believing it, and it was all his fault.

“Oh, it gets much better than that,” Keller said. “They delivered the miracle in the ritual. Very sophisticated flummery, in fact. But that’s why Moloch had such lasting popularity-it was convincing, and it was exciting. The statue had arms that stretched out to the congregation. When you placed the sacrifice in his arms, Moloch would appear to come to life and eat the sacrifice-the arms would slowly raise up the victim and place it in his mouth.”

“And into the furnace,” I said, not wanting to be left out any longer, “while the music played.”

Deborah looked at me strangely, and I realized that no one else had mentioned music, but Keller shrugged it off and answered.

“Yes, that’s right. Trumpets and drums, singing, all very hypnotic. Climaxing as the god lifted the body up to its mouth and dropped it. Into the mouth and you fall down into the furnace. Alive. It can’t have been much fun for the victim.”

I believed what Keller said-I heard the soft throb of the drums in the distance, and it wasn’t much fun for me, either.

“Does anybody still worship this guy?” Deborah asked.

Keller shook his head. “Not for two thousand years, as far as I know,” he said.

“Well then, what the hell,” Deborah said. “Who’s doing this?”

“It isn’t any kind of secret,” Keller said. “It’s a pretty well-documented part of history. Anybody could have done a little research and found out enough to do something like this.”

“But why would they?” Deborah said.

Keller smiled politely. “I’m sure I don’t know,” he said.

“So what the hell good does any of that do me?” she said, with a tone that suggested it was Keller’s job to come up with an answer.

He gave her a kindly professor smile. “It never hurts to know things,” he said.

“For instance,” I said, “we know that somewhere there must be a big statue of a bull with a furnace inside.”

Deborah snapped her head around so that she faced me.

I leaned close to her and said softly, “Halpern.” She blinked at me and I could see she hadn’t thought of that yet.

“You think it wasn’t a dream?” she demanded.

“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “But if somebody is doing this Moloch thing for real, why wouldn’t he do it with all the proper equipment?”

“Goddamn it,” Deborah said. “But where could you hide something like that?”

Keller coughed with a certain delicacy. “I’m afraid there’s more to it than that,” he said.

“Like what?” Deborah demanded.

“Well, you’d have to hide the smell, too,” he said. “The smell of cooking human bodies. It lingers, and it’s rather unforgettable.” He sounded a little bit embarrassed and he shrugged.

“So we’re looking for a gigantic

smelly

statue with a furnace inside,” I said cheerfully. “That shouldn’t be too hard to find.”

Deborah glared at me, and once again I had to feel a little disappointed at her heavy-handed approach to life-especially since I would almost certainly join her as a permanent resident in the Land of Gloom if the Dark Passenger refused to behave and come out of hiding.

“Professor Keller,” she said, turning away from me and completing the abandonment of her poor brother, “is there anything else about this bull shit that might help us?”

It was certainly a clever enough remark to be encouraging, and I almost wished I had said it, but it appeared to have no effect on Keller, nor even on Deborah herself, who looked as though she was unaware that she had said something notable. Keller merely shook his head.

“It’s not really my area, I’m afraid,” he said. “I know just a little background stuff that affects the art history. You might check with somebody in philosophy or comparative religion.”

“Like Professor Halpern,” I whispered again, and Deborah nodded, still glaring.

She turned to go and luckily remembered her manners just in time; she turned back to Keller and said, “You’ve been very helpful, Dr. Keller. Please let me know if you think of anything else.”

“Of course,” he said, and Debs grabbed my arm and propelled me onward.

“Are we going back to the registrar’s office?” I asked politely as my arm went numb.

“Yeah,” she said. “But if there’s a Tammy enrolled in one of Halpern’s classes, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”

I pulled the tattered remnants of my arm from her grip. “And if there isn’t?”

She just shook her head. “Come on,” she said.

But as I passed by the body once more, something clutched at the leg of my pants, and I looked down.

“Ahk,” Vince said to me. He cleared his throat. “Dexter,” he said, and I raised an eyebrow. He flushed and let go of my pants. “I have to talk to you,” he said.

“By all means,” I said. “Can it wait?”

He shook his head. “It’s pretty important,” he said.

“Well, all right then.” I took the three steps back to where he was still squatting beside the body. “What is it?”

He looked away, and as unlikely as it was that he would show real emotion, his face flushed even more. “I talked to Manny,” he said.

“Wonderful. And yet you still have all your limbs,” I said.

“He, ahm,” Vince said. “He wants to make a few changes. Ahm. In the menu. Your menu. For the wedding.”

“Aha,” I said, in spite of how corny it sounds to say “Aha” when you are standing beside a dead body. I just couldn’t help myself. “By any chance, are these expensive changes?”

Vince refused to look up at me. He nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “He said he’s had an inspiration. Something really new and different.”

“I think that’s terrific,” I said, “but I don’t think I can afford inspiration. We’ll have to tell him no.”

Vince shook his head again. “You don’t understand. He only called because he

likes

you. He says the contract allows him to do whatever he wants.”

“And he wants to raise the price a wee bit?”

Vince was definitely blushing now. He mumbled a few syllables and tried to look away even further. “What?” I asked him. “What did you say?”

“About double,” he said, very quietly, but at least audible.

“Double,” I said.

“Yes.”

“That’s $500 a plate,” I said.

“I’m sure it will be very nice,” said bright-red Vince.

“For $500 a plate it had better be more than nice. It had better park the cars, mop the floor, and give all the guests a back rub.”

“This is cutting-edge stuff, Dexter. You’ll probably get your wedding in a magazine.”

“Yes, and it will probably be

Bankruptcy Today

. We have to talk to him, Vince.”

He shook his head and continued to look at the grass. “I can’t,” he said.

Humans are wonderful combinations of silly, ignorant, and dumb, aren’t they? Even the ones who are pretending most of the time, like Vince. Here he was, a fearless forensic tech, actually within inches of a gruesomely murdered body that had no more effect on him than a tree stump, and yet he was paralyzed with terror at the thought of facing a tiny man who sculpted chocolate for a living.

“All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to him myself.”

He looked up at me at last. “Be careful, Dexter,” he said.

CHAPTER 22

I

CAUGHT UP WITH DEBORAH AS SHE WAS TURNING HER CAR around, and happily, she paused long enough for me to climb in for a ride to the registrar’s office. She had nothing to say on the short drive over, and I was too preoccupied with my own problems to care.

A quick search of the records with my new friend at the registrar’s office turned up no Tammy in any of Halpern’s classes. But Deborah, who had been pacing back and forth while she waited, was ready for that. “Try last semester,” she said. I did; again nothing.

“All right,” she said with a frown. “Then try Wilkins’s classes.”

It was a lovely idea, and to prove it, I got an immediate hit: Ms. Connor was in Wilkins’s seminar on situational ethics.

“Right,” Deborah said. “Get her address.”

Tammy Connor lived in a residential hall that was only moments away, and Deborah wasted no time in getting us over there and parking illegally in front of it. She was out of the car and marching toward the front door before I could even get my door open, but I followed along as quickly as I could.

The room was on the third floor. Deborah chose to vault up the stairs two at a time rather than waste time pushing the button for an elevator, and since this left me with not enough breath to complain about it, I didn’t. I got there just in time to see the door to Tammy’s room swing open to reveal a stocky girl with dark hair and glasses. “Yes?” she said, frowning at Deborah.

Debs showed her badge and said, “Tammy Connor?”

The girl gasped and put a hand to her throat. “Oh, God, I knew it,” she said.

Deborah nodded. “Are you Tammy Connor, miss?”

“No. No, of course not,” the girl said. “Allison, her roommate.”

“Do you know where Tammy is, Allison?”

The girl inhaled her lower lip and chewed it while shaking her head vigorously. “No,” she said.

“How long has she been gone?” Deborah asked.

“Two days.”

“Two days?” Deborah said, raising her eyebrows. “Is that unusual?”

Allison looked like she was going to chew her lip off, but she kept gnawing on it, pausing only long enough to blurt out, “I’m not supposed to say anything.”

Deborah stared at her for a long moment before finally saying, “I think you’re going to have to say something, Allison. We think Tammy may be in a lot of trouble.”

That seemed to me a very understated way of saying that we thought she was dead, but I let it go by, since it was obviously having a profound effect on Allison.

“Oh,” she said, and started jiggling up and down. “Oh, oh, I just

knew

this would happen.”

“What is it that you think happened?” I asked her.

“They got caught,” she said. “I told her.”

“I’m sure you did,” I said. “So why not tell us, too?”

She hopped a little faster for a moment. “Oh,” she said again and then warbled, “she’s having an affair with a professor. Oh, God, she’ll

kill

me for this!”

Personally, I didn’t think Tammy would be killing anybody, but just to be sure I said, “Did Tammy wear any jewelry?”

She looked at me like I was crazy. “Jewelry?” she said, as if the word was in some foreign language-Aramaic, perhaps.

“Yes, that’s right,” I said encouragingly. “Rings, bracelets-anything like that?”

“You mean like her platinum anklet?” Allison said, very obligingly, I thought.

“Yes, exactly like that,” I said. “Did it have any markings on it?”

“Uh-huh, her name,” she said. “Oh, God, she’ll be so

pissed

at me.”

“Do you know which professor she was having an affair with, Allison?” Deborah said.

Allison went back to shaking her head. “I really shouldn’t tell,” she said.

“Was it Professor Wilkins?” I said, and even though Deborah glared at me, Allison’s reaction was much more gratifying.

“Oh God,” she said. “I swear I never said.”

One call on the cell phone got us the address in Coconut Grove where Dr. Wilkins made his humble home. It was in a section called The Moorings, which meant that either my alma mater was paying professors a great deal more than they used to, or else Professor Wilkins had independent means. As we turned onto the street, the afternoon rain started, blowing across the road in slanted sheets, then slowing to a trickle, then picking up again.

We found the house easily. The number was on the yellow seven-foot wall that surrounded the house. A wrought-iron gate blocked off the driveway. Deborah pulled up in front and parked in the street, and we climbed out and looked through the gate. It was a rather modest home, no more than 4,000 square feet, and situated at least seventy-five yards from the water, so perhaps Wilkins wasn’t really all that wealthy.

As we peeked in, looking for some way to signal the house that we had arrived and wished to enter, the front door swung open and a man came out, wearing a bright yellow rain suit. He headed for the car parked in the drive, a blue Lexus.

Deborah raised her voice and called out, “Professor? Professor Wilkins?”

The man looked up at us from under the hood of his rain suit. “Yes?”

“Can we speak to you for a moment, please?” Deborah said.

He walked toward us slowly, head cocked at Deborah on a slight angle. “That depends. Who is us?”

Deborah reached into her pocket for her badge and Professor Wilkins paused cautiously, no doubt worried that she might pull out a hand grenade.

“Us is the police,” I reassured him.

“Is we?” he said, and he turned toward me with a half smile that froze when he saw me, flickered, and then resumed as a very poor fake smile. Since I am an expert on faking emotions and expressions I was in absolutely no doubt about it-the sight of little old me had startled him somehow, and he was covering it by pretending to smile. But why? If he was guilty, surely the thought of police at the gate would be worse than Dexter at the door. But instead he looked at Deborah and said, “Oh, yes, we met once before, outside my office.”

“That’s right,” said Deborah as she finally fished out her badge.

“I’m sorry, will this take long? I’m kind of in a hurry,” he said.

“We have just a couple of questions, Professor,” Deborah said. “It will take only a minute.”

“Well,” he said, looking from the badge to my face and then quickly away again. “All right.” He opened the gate and held it wide. “Would you like to come in?”

Even though we were already soaked to the skin, it seemed like a pretty good idea to get out of the rain, and we followed Wilkins through the gate, up the driveway, and into his house.

The interior of the house was done in a style I recognized as classic Coconut Grove Rich Person Casual. I had not seen an example like this since I was a boy, when Miami Vice Modern took over as the area’s dominant decorative pattern. But this was old school, bringing back the memory of when the area was called Nut Grove because of its loose, Bohemian flavor.

The floors were reddish-brown tile and shiny enough to shave in, and there was a conversation area consisting of a leather couch and two matching chairs off to the right beside a large picture window. Next to the window was a wet bar with a large, glassed-in, temperature-controlled wine cabinet and an abstract painting of a nude on the wall next to it.

Wilkins led us past a pair of potted plants and over to the couch, and hesitated a couple of steps in front of it. “Ah,” he said, pushing back the hood from his rain jacket, “we’re kind of wet for the leather furniture. Can I offer you a barstool?” He gestured toward the bar.

I looked at Deborah, who shrugged. “We can stand,” she said. “This will only take a minute.”

“All right,” Wilkins said. He folded his arms and smiled at Deborah. “What’s so important that they send someone like you, in this weather?” he said.

Deborah flushed slightly, whether from irritation or something else I couldn’t tell. “How long have you been sleeping with Tammy Connor?” Deborah said.

Wilkins lost his happy expression and for a moment there was a very cold, unpleasant look on his face. “Where did you hear that?” he said.

I could see that Deborah was trying to push him off-balance just a bit, and since that is one of my specialties I chimed in. “Will you have to sell this place if you don’t get tenure?” I said.

His eyes snapped to mine, and there was nothing at all pleasant about the look he gave me. He kept his tongue in his mouth, too. “I should have known,” he said. “So this was Halpern’s jailhouse confession, was it? Wilkins did it.”

“So you didn’t have an affair with Tammy Connor?” Deborah said.

Wilkins looked back to her again and, with a visible effort, regained his relaxed smile. He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I can’t get used to you as the tough one. I guess that’s a pretty successful technique for you two, hmm?”

“Not so far,” I said. “You haven’t answered any of the questions.”

He nodded. “All right,” he said. “And did Halpern tell you he broke into my office? I found him hiding under my desk. God knows what he was doing there.”

“Why do you think he broke into your office?” Deborah asked.

Wilkins shrugged. “He said I sabotaged his paper.”

“Did you?”

He looked at her, and then over to me for an unpleasant moment, then back to Deborah. “Officer,” he said, “I am trying very hard to cooperate here. But you’ve accused me of so many different things I’m not sure which one I’m supposed to answer.”

“Is that why you haven’t answered any of them?” I asked.

Wilkins ignored me. “If you can tell me how Halpern’s paper and Tammy Connor fit together, I’ll be happy to help any way I can. But otherwise, I’ve got to get going.”

Deborah looked at me, whether for advice or because she was tired of looking at Wilkins, I couldn’t tell, so I gave her my very best shrug, and she looked back at Wilkins. “Tammy Connor is dead,” she said.

“Oh, my,” Wilkins said. “How did it happen?”

“The same way as Ariel Goldman,” Debs said.

“And you knew them both,” I added helpfully.

“I imagine that dozens of people knew them both. Including Jerry Halpern,” he said.

“Did Professor Halpern kill Tammy Connor, Professor Wilkins?” Deborah asked him. “From the detention center?”

He shrugged. “I’m only saying that he knew them, too.”

“And did he have an affair with her, too?” I asked.

Wilkins smirked. “Probably not. Not with Tammy, anyway.”

“What does that mean, Professor?” Deborah asked.

Wilkins shrugged. “Just rumors, you know. The kids talk. Some of them think Halpern is gay.”

“Less competition for you,” I said. “Like with Tammy Connor.”

Wilkins scowled at me and I’m sure I would have been intimidated if I was a university sophomore. “You need to make up your mind whether I killed my students or screwed them,” he said.

“Why not both?”

“Did you go to college?” he demanded.

“Why yes, I did,” I said.

“Then you ought to know that a certain type of girl sexually pursues her professors. Tammy was over eighteen, and I’m not married.”

“Isn’t it a little bit unethical to have sex with a student?” I said.

“Ex-student,” he snapped. “I dated her after the class last semester. There’s no law against dating an ex-student. Especially if she throws herself at you.”

“Nice catch,” I said.

“Did you sabotage Professor Halpern’s paper?” Deborah said.

Wilkins looked back at Deborah and smiled again. It was wonderful to watch somebody almost as good as I am at switching emotions so quickly. “Detective, do you see a pattern here?” he said. “Listen, Jerry Halpern is a brilliant guy, but…not exactly stable? And with all the pressure on him right now, he’s just decided that I am a whole conspiracy to get him, all by myself.” He shrugged. “I don’t think I’m quite that good,” he said with a little smile. “At least, not at conspiracy.”

“So you think Halpern killed Tammy Connor and the others?” Deborah said.

“I didn’t say that,” he said. “But hey, he’s the psycho. Not me.” He made a step toward the door and raised an eyebrow at Deborah. “And now, if you don’t mind, I really have to get going.”

Deborah handed him a business card. “Thank you for your time, Professor,” she said. “If you think of anything that might help, please give me a call.”

“I certainly will,” he said, giving her the kind of smile that killed disco and placing a hand on her shoulder. She managed not to flinch. “I really hate to throw you back out into the rain, but…”

Deborah moved, very willingly I thought, out from under his hand and toward the door. I followed. Wilkins herded us out the door and through the gate, and then climbed into his car, backed out of the driveway, and drove away. Debs stood in the rain and watched him go, which I am sure she intended to make Wilkins nervous enough to leap from the car and confess, but considering the weather it struck me as excessive zeal. I got into the car and waited for her.

When the blue Lexus had vanished Deborah finally got in beside me. “Guy gives me the fucking creeps,” she said.

“Do you think he’s the killer?” I asked. It was a strange feeling for me, not knowing, and wondering if somebody else had seen behind the predator’s mask.

She shook her head with irritation. Water flew off her hair and hit me. “I think he’s a fucking creep,” she said. “What do you think?”

“I’m pretty sure you’re right,” I said.

“He didn’t mind admitting his affair with Tammy Connor,” she said. “So why lie and say she was in his class

last

semester?”

“Reflex?” I said. “Because he’s up for tenure?”

She drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, and then leaned forward decisively and started the car. “I’m putting a tail on him,” she said.

CHAPTER 23

A

COPY OF AN INCIDENT REPORT LAY ON MY DESK WHEN I finally got to work, and I realized that someone expected me to be a productive drone today, in spite of it all. So much had happened in the last few hours that it was hard to adjust to the idea that most of the workday was still looming over me with its long sharp teeth, so I went for a cup of coffee before submitting to servitude. I had half hoped that someone might have brought in some doughnuts or cookies, but of course it was a foolish thought. There was nothing but a cup and a half of burned, very dark coffee. I poured some into a cup-leaving the rest for someone truly desperate-and slogged back to my desk.

I picked up the report and began to read. Apparently someone had driven a vehicle belonging to a Mr. Darius Starzak into a canal and then fled the scene. Mr. Starzak himself was thus far unavailable for questioning. It took me several long moments of blinking and sipping the vile coffee to realize that this was the report of my incident this morning, and several minutes longer to decide what to do about it.

To have the name of the car’s owner was little enough to go on-almost nothing, since the odds were good that the car was stolen. But to assume that and do nothing was worse than trying it and coming up empty, so I went to work once again on my computer.

First, the standard stuff: the car’s registration, which showed an address off Old Cutler Road in a somewhat pricey neighborhood. Next, the police records: traffic stops, outstanding warrants, child support payments. There was nothing. Mr. Starzak was apparently a model citizen who’d had no contact at all with the long arm of the law.

All right then; the name itself, “Darius Starzak.” Darius was not a common name-at least, not in the United States. I checked immigration records. And surprisingly, I got a hit right away.

First of all, it was Dr. Starzak, not Mister. He held a Ph.D. in religious philosophy from Heidelberg University, and until a few years ago had been a tenured professor at the University of Kraków. A little more digging revealed that he had been fired for some kind of uncertain scandal. Polish is not really one of my stronger languages, although I can say kielbasa when ordering lunch at a deli. But unless the translation was completely off, Starzak had been fired for membership in an illegal society.

The file did not mention why a European scholar who had lost his job for such an obscure reason would want to follow me and then drive his car into a canal. It seemed like a significant omission. Nevertheless, I printed the picture of Starzak from the immigration file. I squinted at the photo, trying to imagine it half hidden by the large sunglasses I had seen in the Avalon’s side mirror. It could have been him. It could also have been Elvis. And as far as I knew, Elvis had just as much reason to follow me as Starzak.

I went a little deeper. It isn’t easy for a forensics wonk to access Interpol without an official reason, even when he is charming and clever. But after playing my online version of dodgeball for a few minutes, I got into the central records, and here things became more interesting.

Dr. Darius Starzak was on a special watch list in four countries, not including the States, which explained why he was here. Although there was no proof that he had done anything, there were suspicions that he knew more than he would say about the traffic in war orphans from Bosnia. And the file casually mentioned that, of course, it is impossible to account for the whereabouts of such children. In the language of official police documents, that meant that somebody thought he might be killing them.

I should have filled up with a great thrill of cold glee as I read this, a wicked gleam of sharp anticipation-but there was nothing, not the dullest echo of the smallest spark. Instead, I felt a very small return of the human-style anger I had felt this morning when Starzak was following me. It was not an adequate replacement for the surge of dark, savage certainty from the Passenger that I had been used to, but at least it was something.

Starzak had been doing bad things to children, and he-or someone using his car, at least-had tried to do them to me. All right then. So far I had been battered back and forth like a Ping-Pong ball, and I had been content to take it, passively and without complaint, sucked into a vacuum of miserable submission because I had been deserted by the Dark Passenger. But here was something I could understand and, better, act upon.

The Interpol file told me that Starzak was a bad man, exactly the kind of person I normally tried to find in pursuit of my hobby. Someone had followed me in his car, and then gone to the extreme measure of driving his car into a canal to escape. It was possible that someone had stolen the car and Starzak was completely innocent. I didn’t think so, and the Interpol report argued against it. But just to be sure I checked the stolen vehicle reports. There was no listing for Starzak or his car.

All right: I was sure it had been him, and this confirmed his guilt. I knew what to do about this: Just because I was alone inside, did that have to mean I couldn’t do it?

The warm glow of certainty flickered under the anger and brought it to a slow, confident simmer. It was not the same as the gold-standard sureness I had always received from the Passenger, but it was certainly more than a hunch. This was right, I was sure. If I did not have the kind of solid proof I usually had, too bad. Starzak had escalated the situation to a point where I had no doubt, and he had moved himself to the top of my list. I would find him and turn him into a bad memory and a drop of dried blood in my little rosewood box.

And since I was running on emotion for the first time anyway, I allowed a small feeble flicker of hope to bloom. It might well be that dealing with Starzak and doing all the things I had never before done alone might bring back the Dark Passenger. I knew nothing about how these things worked, but it made a certain kind of sense, didn’t it? The Passenger had always been there urging me on-wouldn’t it just possibly show up if I created the kind of situation it needed? And wasn’t Starzak right in front of me and practically begging to be dealt with?

And if the Passenger didn’t come back, why shouldn’t I begin to be me by myself? I was the one who did the heavy lifting-couldn’t I carry on with my vocation, even in my empty state?

All the answers clicked up an angry red “yes.” And for a moment I paused and waited automatically for the accustomed answering hiss of pleasure from the shadowy inside corner-but of course, it did not come.

Never mind. I could do this alone.

I had been working at night a good deal lately, so there was no surprise at all on Rita’s face when I told her after dinner that I had to go back to the office. Of course, I was not off the hook with Cody and Astor, who wanted to come with me and do something interesting, or at least stay home and play kick the can. But after some minor wheedling and a few vague threats I plucked them off me and slid out the door into the night. My night, my last remaining friend, with its feeble half-moon flickering in a dull soggy sky.

Starzak lived in an area with a gate, but a minimum-wage guard in a little hut is really much better at raising property values than it is at keeping out someone with Dexter’s experience and hunger. And even though it meant a little bit of a hike after I left my car up the road from the guardhouse, the exercise was welcome. I’d had too many late nights, too many sour mornings lately, and it felt good to be up on my legs and moving toward a worthwhile goal.

I circled slowly through the neighborhood, finding Starzak’s address and moving on past as if I was no more than a neighbor out for an evening constitutional. There was a light on in the front room and a single car in the driveway; it had a Florida plate that said Manatee County on the bottom. There are only 300,000 people living in Manatee County, and at least twice that many cars on the road that claim to be from there. It’s a rental-car trick, designed to disguise the fact that the driver has rented a car and is therefore a tourist and a legitimate target for any predator with a yen for easy prey.

I felt a small surge of hot anticipation. Starzak was home, and the fact that he had a rental car made it more likely that he was the one who had driven his car into the canal. I moved past the house, alert for any sign that I had been seen. I saw nothing, and heard only the faint sound of a TV somewhere nearby.

I circled the block and found a house with no lights on and hurricane shutters up, a very good sign that no one was home. I moved through the darkened yard and up to the tall hedge that separated it from Starzak’s house. I slipped into a gap in the shrubbery, slid the clean mask over my face, pulled on gloves, and waited as my eyes and ears adjusted. And as I did it occurred to me just how ridiculous I would look if someone saw me. I had never worried about that before; the Passenger’s radar is excellent and always gave me warning of unwanted eyes. But now, without any interior help, I felt naked. And as that feeling washed over me, it left another in its wake: sheer, helpless stupidity.

What was I doing? I was violating nearly every rule I had lived by, coming here spontaneously, without my usual careful preparation, without any real proof, and without the Passenger. It was madness. I was just asking to be discovered, locked up, or hacked to bits by Starzak.

I closed my eyes and listened to the novel emotions gurgling through me. Feeling-what authentic human fun. Next I could join a bowling league. Find a chat room online and talk about New Age self-help and alternative herbal medicine for hemorrhoids. Welcome to the human race, Dexter, the endlessly futile and pointless human race. We hope you will enjoy your short and painful stay.

I opened my eyes. I could give up, accept the fact that Dexter’s day was done. Or-I could go through with this, whatever the risks, and reassert the thing that had always been me. Take action that would either bring back the Passenger or start me on the path to living without it. If Starzak was not an absolute certainly, he was close, I was here, and this was an emergency.

At least it was a clear choice, something I hadn’t had in quite some time. I took a deep breath and moved as silently as I could through the hedge and into Starzak’s yard.

I kept to the shadows and got to the side of the house where a door opened into the garage. It was locked-but Dexter laughs at locks, and I did not need any help from the Passenger to open this one and step into the dark garage, quietly closing the door behind me. There was a bicycle along the far wall, and a workbench with a very neat set of hanging tools. I made a mental note and crossed the garage to the door that led into the house and paused there for a long moment with my ear against the door.

Above the faint hum of air-conditioning, I heard a TV and nothing else. I listened a little longer to be sure, and then very carefully eased open the door. It was unlocked and opened smoothly and without sound, and I was into Starzak’s house as silent and dark as one of the shadows.

I slipped down a hallway toward the purple glow of the TV, keeping myself pressed against the wall, painfully aware that if he was behind me for some reason I was brilliantly backlit. But as I came in sight of the TV, I saw a head rising above the back of a sofa and I knew I had him.

I held my noose of fifty-pound-test fishing line ready in my hand and stepped closer. A commercial came on and the head moved slightly. I froze, but he moved his head back to center again and I was across the room and on him, my noose whistling around his neck and sliding tight just above his Adam’s apple.

For a moment he thrashed in a very gratifying way, which only pulled the noose tighter. I watched him flop and grab at his throat, and while it was enjoyable I did not feel the same cold, savage glee that I was used to at such moments. Still, it was better than watching the commercial, and I let him go on until his face started to turn purple and the thrashing subsided into a helpless wobble.

“Be still and be quiet,” I said, “and I will let you breathe.”

It was very much to his credit that he understood at once and stopped his feeble floundering. I eased off on the noose just a bit and listened while he forced in a breath. Just one-and then I tightened up again and pulled him to his feet. “Come,” I said, and he came.

I stood behind him, keeping the pressure on the line just tight enough so that he could breathe a little if he tried really hard, and I led him down the hall to the back of the house and into the garage. As I pushed him to the workbench he went down to one knee, either a stumble or a foolish attempt to escape. Either way, I was in no mood for it, and I pulled hard enough to make his eyes bulge out and watched as his face got dark and he slumped over on the floor, unconscious.

Much easier for me. I got his dead weight up onto the workbench and duct-taped securely into place while he still wallowed in gape-mouthed unconsciousness. A thin stream of drool ran from one corner of his mouth and his breath came very rough, even after I loosened the noose. I looked down at Starzak, taped to the table with his unlovely face hanging open, and I thought, as I never had before, this is what we all are. This is what it comes to. A bag of meat that breathes, and when that stops, nothing but rotting garbage.

Starzak began to cough, and more phlegm dribbled from his mouth. He pushed against the duct tape, found he could not move, and fluttered open his eyes. He said something incomprehensible, composed of far too many consonants, and then rolled his eyes back and saw me. Of course he could not see my face through my mask, but I got the very unsettling feeling that he recognized me anyway. He moved his mouth a few times, but said nothing until he finally rolled his eyes back down to point at his feet and said in a dry and raspy voice with a Central European accent, but very little of the expected emotion in it, “You are making a very large mistake.”

I searched for an automatic sinister reply, and found nothing.

“You will see,” he said in his terrible flat and raw voice. “He will get you anyway, even without me. It is too late for you.”

And there it was. As close to a confession as I needed that he had been following me with sinister intent. But all I could think to say was, “Who is he?”

He forgot he was taped to the bench and tried to shake his head. It didn’t work, but it didn’t seem to bother him much, either. “They will find you,” he repeated. “Soon enough.” He twitched a little, as if he was trying to wave a hand, and said, “Go ahead. Kill me now. They will find you.”

I looked down at him, so passively taped and ready for my special attentions, and I should have been filled with icy delight at the job ahead of me-and I was not. I was not filled with anything except emptiness, the same feeling of hopeless futility that had come over me while I waited outside the house.

I shook myself out of the funk and taped Starzak’s mouth shut. He flinched a little, but other than that he continued to look straight away, with no show of any kind of emotion.

I raised my knife and looked down at my unmoving and unmoved prey. I could still hear his awful wet breath rattling in and out through his nostrils and I wanted to stop it, turn out his lights, shut down this noxious thing, cut it into pieces and seal them into neat dry garbage bags, unmoving chunks of compost that would no longer threaten, no longer eat and excrete and flail around in the patternless maze of human life-

And I could not.

I called silently for the familiar rush of dark wings to sweep out of me and light up my knife with the wicked gleam of savage purpose, and nothing came. Nothing moved within me at the thought of doing this sharp and necessary thing I had done so happily so many times. The only thing that welled up inside me was emptiness.

I lowered the knife, turned away, and walked out into the night.

CHAPTER 24

S

OMEHOW I PULLED MYSELF OUT OF BED AND WENT IN TO work the next day, in spite of the gnawing sense of dull despair that bloomed in me like a brittle garden of thorns. I felt wrapped in a fog of dull pain that hurt only enough to remind me that it, too, was without purpose, and there seemed no point to going through the empty motions of breakfast, the long slow drive to work, no reason at all beyond the slavery of habit. But I did it, allowing muscle memory to push me all the way into the chair at my desk, where I sat, turned on the computer, and let the day drag me off into gray drudgery.

I had failed with Starzak. I was no longer me, and had no idea who or what I was.

Rita was waiting for me at the door when I got home with a look of anxious annoyance on her face.

“We need to decide about the band,” she said. “They may already be booked.”

“All right,” I said. Why not decide about bands? It was as meaningful as anything else.

“I picked up all the CDs from where you dropped them yesterday,” she said, “and sorted them by price.”

“I’ll listen to them tonight,” I said, and although Rita still seemed peeved, eventually the evening routine took over and calmed her down, and she settled into cooking and cleaning while I listened to a series of rock bands playing “Chicken Dance” and “Electric Slide.” I’m sure that ordinarily it would have been as much fun as a toothache, but since I couldn’t think of anything else in the world worth doing, I labored through the whole stack of CDs and soon it was time for bed again.

At 1 A.M. the music came back to me, and I don’t mean “Chicken Dance.” It was the drums and trumpets, and a chorus of voices came with them and rolled through my sleep, lifting me up into the heavens, and I woke up on the floor with the memory of it still echoing in my head.

I lay on the floor for a long time, unable to form any truly coherent thought about what it meant, but afraid to go to sleep in case it should come back again. Eventually I did get into bed, and I suppose I even slept, since I opened my eyes to sunlight and sound coming from the kitchen.

It was a Saturday morning, and Rita made blueberry pancakes, a very welcome nudge back to everyday life. Cody and Astor piled into the flapjacks with enthusiasm, and on any normal morning I would not have held back either. But today was not a normal morning.

It is difficult to understate how large the shock must be to put Dexter off his feed. I have a very fast metabolism, and require constant fuel in order to maintain the wonderful device that is me, and Rita’s pancakes fully qualify as high-test unleaded. And yet, time and again I found myself staring at the fork as it wavered halfway between the plate and my mouth, and I was unable to muster the necessary enthusiasm for completing the motion and putting in food.

Soon enough, everyone else was finished with the meal, and I was still staring at half a plate of food. Even Rita noticed that all was not well in Dexter’s Domain.

“You’ve hardly touched your food,” she said. “Is something wrong?”

“It’s this case I’m working on,” I said, at least half truthfully. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

“Oh,” she said. “You’re sure that…I mean, is it very violent?”

“It’s not that,” I said, wondering what she wanted to hear. “It’s just…very puzzling.”

Rita nodded. “Sometimes if you stop thinking about something for a while, the answer comes to you,” she said.

“Maybe you’re right,” I said, which was probably stretching the truth.

“Are you going to finish your breakfast?” she said.

I stared down at my plate with its pile of half-eaten pancakes and congealed syrup. Scientifically speaking, I knew they were still delicious, but at the moment they seemed about as appealing as old wet newspaper. “No,” I said.

Rita looked at me with alarm. When Dexter does not finish his breakfast, we are in uncharted territory. “Why don’t you take your boat out?” she said. “That always helps you relax.” She came over and put a hand on me with aggressive concern, and Cody and Astor looked up with the hope of a boat ride written on their faces, and it was suddenly like being in quicksand.

I stood up. It was all too much. I could not even meet my own expectations, and to be asked to deal with all theirs too was suffocating. Whether it was my failure with Starzak, the pursuing music, or being sucked down into family life, I could not say. Maybe it was the combination of all of them, pulling me apart with wildly opposite gravities and sucking the pieces into a whirlpool of clinging normaley that made me want to scream, and at the same time left me unable even to whimper. Whatever it was, I had to get out of here.

“I have an errand I have to run,” I said, and they all looked at me with wounded surprise.

“Oh,” Rita said. “What kind of errand?”

“Wedding business,” I blurted out, without any idea what I was going to say next, but trusting the impulse blindly. And happily for me, at least one thing went right, because I remembered my conversation with the blushing, groveling Vince Masuoka. “I have to talk to the caterer.”

Rita lit up. “You’re going to see Manny Borque? Oh,” she said. “That’s really-”

“Yes, it is,” I assured her. “I’ll be back later.” And so at the reasonable Saturday-morning time of fifteen minutes before ten o’clock, I bid a fond farewell to dirty dishes and domesticity, and climbed into my car. It was an unusually calm morning on the roads, and I saw no violence or crime of any kind as I drove to South Beach, which was almost like seeing snow at the Fontainebleau. Things being what they were for me lately, I kept an eye on the rearview mirror. For just a minute I thought that a little red Jeep-style car was following me, but when I slowed down it went right past me. The traffic stayed light, and it was still only ten fifteen when I had parked my car, rode up in the elevator, and knocked on Manny Borque’s door.

There was a very long spell of utter silence, and I knocked again, a little more enthusiastically this time. I was about to try a truly rousing salute on the door when it swung open and an exceedingly bleary and mostly naked Manny Borque blinked up at me. “Jesus’ tits,” he croaked. “What time is it?”

“Ten fifteen,” I said brightly. “Practically time for lunch.”

Perhaps he wasn’t really awake, or perhaps he thought it was so funny it was worth saying again, but in any case he repeated himself: “Jesus’ tits.”

“May I come in?” I asked him politely, and he blinked a few more times and then pushed the door open all the way.

“This better be good,” he said, and I followed him in, past the hideous art-thing in his foyer and on to his perch by the window. He hopped up onto his stool, and I sat on the one opposite.

“I need to talk to you about my wedding,” I said, and he shook his head very grumpily and squealed out, “Franky!” There was no answer and he leaned on one tiny hand and tapped the other on the table. “That little bitch had better-Goddamn it,

Franky

!” he called out in something like a very high-pitched bellow.

A moment later there was a scurrying sound from the back of the apartment, and then a young man came out, pulling a robe closed as he hurried in and brushing back his lank brown hair as he came to a halt in front of Manny. “Hi,” he said. “I mean, you know. Good morning.”

“Get coffee very quickly,” Manny said without looking up at him.

“Um,” Franky said. “Sure. Okay.” He hesitated for half a second, just long enough to give Manny time to fling out his minuscule fist and shriek, “Now, goddamn it!” Franky gulped and lurched away toward the kitchen, and Manny went back to leaning his full eighty-five pounds of towering grumpiness on his fist and closing his eyes with a sigh, as though he were tormented by numberless hordes of truly idiotic demons.

Since it seemed obvious that there could be no possibility of conversation without coffee, I looked out the window and enjoyed the view. There were three large freighters on the horizon, sending up plumes of smoke, and closer in to shore a good scattering of pleasure boats, ranging from the multimillion-dollar playtoys headed for the Bahamas all the way down to a cluster of Windsurfers in close to the beach. A bright yellow kayak was offshore, apparently heading out to meet the freighters. The sun shone, the gulls flew by searching for garbage, and I waited for Manny to receive his transfusion.

There was a shattering crash from the kitchen, and Franky’s muted wail of “Oh,

shit

.” Manny tried to close his eyes tighter, as if he could seal out all the agony of being surrounded by terrible stupidity. And only a few minutes later, Franky arrived with the coffee service, a silver semi-shapeless pot and three squat stoneware cups, perched on a transparent platter shaped like an artist’s palette.

With trembling hands Franky placed a cup in front of Manny and poured it full. Manny took a tiny sip, sighed heavily without any sense of relief, and opened his eyes at last. “All right,” he said. And turning to Franky, he added, “Go clean up your hideous mess, and if I step on broken glass later, I swear to

God

I will disembowel you.” Franky stumbled away, and Manny took another microscopic sip before turning his bleary glare on me. “You want to talk about your wedding,” he said as if he couldn’t really believe it.

“That’s right,” I said, and he shook his head.

“A nice-looking man like you,” he said. “Why on

earth

would you want to get married?”

“I need the tax break,” I said. “Can we talk about the menu?”

“At the crack of dawn, on a Saturday? No,” he said. “It’s a horrible, pointless, primitive ritual,” and I assumed he was talking about the wedding rather than the menu, although with Manny one really couldn’t be sure. “I am truly appalled that anyone would

willingly

go through with it. But,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “at least it gives me a chance to experiment.”

“I wonder if it might be possible to experiment a little cheaper.”

“It might be,” he said and for the first time he showed his teeth, but it could only be called a smile if you agree that torturing animals is funny, “but it just won’t happen.”

“Why not?”

“Because I’ve already decided what I want to do, and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

To be perfectly truthful there were several things I could think of to stop him, but none of them-enjoyable as they might be-would pass the strict guidelines of the Harry Code, and so I could not do them. “I don’t suppose sweet reason would have any effect?” I asked hopefully.

He leered at me. “How sweet did you have in mind?” he said.

“Well, I was going to say please and smile a lot,” I said.

“Not good enough,” he said. “Not by a great deal.”

“Vince said you were guessing five hundred dollars a plate?”

“I don’t

guess

,” he snarled. “And I don’t give a

shit

about counting your fucking pennies.”

“Of course not,” I said, trying to soothe him a bit. “After all, they’re not your pennies.”

“Your girlfriend signed the fucking contract,” he said. “I can charge you anything I fucking feel like.”

“But there must be something I can do to get the price down a little?” I said hopefully.

His snarl loosened into his patented leer again. “Not in a chair,” he said.

“Then what can I do?”

“If you mean what can you do to get me to change my mind, nothing. Not a thing in the world. I have people lined up around the block trying to hire me-I am booked two years in advance, and I am doing you a very large favor.” His leer widened into something almost supernatural. “So prepare yourself for a miracle. And a very hefty bill.”

I stood up. The little gnome was obviously not going to bend in the least, and there was nothing I could do about it. I really wanted to say something like “You haven’t heard the last of me,” but there didn’t seem much point to that either. So I just smiled back, said, “Well then,” and walked out of the apartment. As the door closed behind me, I could hear him, already squealing at Franky, “For Christ’s sake move your big ass and get all that shit off my fucking

floor

.”

As I walked toward the elevator I felt an icy steel finger brush the back of my neck and for just a moment I felt a faint stirring, as if the Dark Passenger had put one toe in the water and run away after seeing that it was too cold. I stopped dead and slowly looked around me in the hallway.

Nothing. Down at the far end a man was fumbling with the newspaper in front of his door. Otherwise, the hall was empty. I closed my eyes for just a moment.

What?

I asked. But there was no answer. I was still alone. And unless somebody was glaring at me through a peephole in one of the doors, it had been a false alarm. Or, more likely, wishful thinking.

I got in the elevator and went down.

As the elevator door slid shut the Watcher straightened up, still holding the newspaper from where he had taken it off the mat. It was a good piece of camouflage, and it might work again. He stared down the hall and wondered what was so interesting in that other apartment, but it didn’t really matter. He would find out. Whatever the other had been doing, he would find out.

He counted slowly to ten and then sauntered down the hallway to the apartment the other had visited. It would only take a moment to find out why he had gone in there. And then-

The Watcher had no real idea what was really going through the other’s mind right now, but it was not happening fast enough. It was time for a real push, something to break the other out of his passivity. He felt a rare pulse of playfulness welling up through the dark cloud of power, and he heard the flutter of dark wings inside.

CHAPTER 25

I

N MY LIFELONG STUDY OF HUMAN BEINGS, I HAVE FOUND that no matter how hard they might try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workaday lives of meaningless toil and suffering.

That thought always cheers me up, and because I like to spread happiness wherever I go, I did my small part to cushion the blow of unavoidable Monday morning by arriving at work with a box of doughnuts, all of which vanished in what can only be called an extremely grumpy frenzy before I reached my desk. I doubted very seriously that anyone had a better reason than I did for feeling surly, but you would not have known it to watch them all snatching at my doughnuts and grunting at me.

Vince Masuoka seemed to be sharing in the general feeling of low-key anguish. He stumbled into my cubbyhole with a look of horror and wonderment on his face, an expression that must have indicated something very moving because it looked almost real. “Jesus, Dexter,” he said. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“I tried to save you one,” I said, thinking that with that much anguish he could only be referring to the calamity of facing an empty doughnut box. But he shook his head.

“Oh, Jesus, I can’t believe it. He’s dead!”

“I’m sure it had nothing to do with the doughnuts,” I said.

“My God, and you were going to see him. Did you?”

There comes a point in every conversation where at least one of the people involved has to know what is being talked about, and I decided that point had arrived.

“Vince,” I said, “I want you to take a deep breath, start all over from the top, and pretend you and I speak the same language.”

He stared at me as if he was a frog and I was a heron. “Shit,” he said. “You don’t know yet, do you? Holy shit.”

“Your language skills are deteriorating,” I said. “Have you been talking to Deborah?”

“He’s

dead

, Dexter. They found the body late last night.”

“Well, then, I’m sure he’ll stay dead long enough for you to tell me what in the hell you’re talking about.”

Vince blinked at me, his eyes suddenly huge and moist. “Manny Borque,” he breathed. “He was murdered.”

I will admit to having mixed reactions. On the one hand, I was certainly not sorry to have somebody else take the little troll out of the picture in a way I was unable to do for ethical reasons. But on the other hand, now I needed to find another caterer-and oh, yes, I would probably have to give a statement of some kind to the detective in charge. Annoyance fought it out with relief, but then I remembered that the doughnuts were gone, too.

And so the reaction that won out was irritation at all the bother this was going to cause. Still, Harry had schooled me well enough to know that this is not really an acceptable reaction to display when one hears of the death of an acquaintance. So I did my best to push my face into something resembling shock, concern, and distress. “Wow,” I said. “I had no idea. Do they know who did it?”

Vince shook his head. “The guy had no enemies,” he said, and he didn’t seem aware of how unlikely his statement sounded to anyone who had ever met Manny. “I mean, everybody was just in

awe

of him.”

“I know,” I said. “He was in magazines and everything.”

“I can’t believe anybody would do that to him,” he said.

In truth, I couldn’t believe it had taken so long for somebody to do that to him, but it didn’t seem like the politic thing to say. “Well, I’m sure they’ll figure it out. Who’s assigned to the case?”

Vince looked at me like I had asked him if he thought the sun might come up in the morning. “Dexter,” he said wonderingly, “his head was cut off. It’s just like the three over at the university.”

When I was young and trying hard to fit in, I played football for a while, and one time I had been hit hard in the stomach and couldn’t breathe for a few minutes. I felt a little bit like that now.

“Oh,” I said.

“So naturally they’ve given it to your sister,” he said.

“Naturally.” A sudden thought hit me, and because I am a lifelong devotee of irony, I asked him, “He wasn’t cooked, too, was he?”

Vince shook his head. “No,” he said.

I stood up. “I better go talk to Deborah,” I said.

Deborah was not in any mood to talk when I arrived at Manny’s apartment. She was bending over Camilla Figg, who was dusting for prints around the legs of the table by the window. She didn’t look up, so I peeked into the kitchen, where Angel-no-relation was bent over the body.

“Angel,” I said, and I found some difficulty believing my eyes, so I asked him, “Is that really a girl’s head there?”

He nodded and poked at the head with a pen. “Your sister says, prolly the girl from the Lowe Museum,” he said. “They put it here because this guy is such a

bugero

.”

I looked down at the two cuts, one just above the shoulders, the other just below the chin. The one on the head matched what we had seen before, done with neatness and care. But the one on the body that was presumably Manny was much rougher, as if it had been hurried. The edges of the two cuts were pushed together carefully, but of course they did not quite mesh. Even on my own, with no dark interior muttering, I could tell that this was different somehow, and one small cold finger crawling across the back of my neck suggested that the difference might be very important-maybe even to my current troubles-but beyond that vague and unsatisfying ghost of a hint, there was nothing for me here but uneasiness.

“Is there another body?” I asked him, remembering poor bullied Franky.

Angel shrugged without looking up. “In the bedroom,” he said. “Just with a butcher knife stuck in him. They left his head.” He sounded a little offended that someone would go to all that trouble and leave the head, but other than that he seemed to have nothing to tell me, so I walked away, over to where my sister was now squatting beside Camilla.

“Good morning, Debs,” I said, with a cheerfulness I did not feel at all, and I was not the only one, because she didn’t even look up at me.

“Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said. “Unless you have something really good for me, stay the fuck away.”

“It isn’t all that good,” I said. “But the guy in the bedroom is named Franky. This one here is Manny Borque, who has been in a number of magazines.”

“How the fuck would you know that?” she said.

“Well, it’s a little awkward,” I said, “but I may have been one of the last people to see this guy alive.”

She straightened up. “When,” she said.

“Saturday morning. Around ten thirty. Right here.” And I pointed to the coffee cup that was still on top of the table. “Those are my prints.”

Deborah was looking at me with disbelief and shaking her head. “You

knew

this guy,” she said. “He was a friend of yours?”

“I hired him to cater my wedding,” I said. “He was supposed to be very good at it.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “So what were you doing here on a Saturday morning?”

“He raised the price on me,” I said. “I wanted to talk him down.”

She looked around the apartment and glanced out the window at the million-dollar view. “What was he charging?” she said.

“Five hundred dollars a plate,” I said.

Her head snapped around to face me again. “Jesus fuck,” she said. “For what?”

I shrugged. “He wouldn’t tell me, and he wouldn’t lower the price.”

“Five hundred dollars a

plate

?” she said.

“It is a little high, isn’t it? Or should I say, it

was

.”

Deborah chewed on her lip for a long moment without blinking, and then she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from Camilla. I could still see one small foot sticking out of the kitchen door where the dear departed had met his untimely end, but Deborah led me away from it and over to the far end of the room.

“Dexter,” she said, “promise me you didn’t kill this guy.”

As I have mentioned before, I do not have real emotions. I have practiced long and hard to react the way human beings would react in almost every possible situation-but this one caught me by surprise. What is the correct facial expression for being accused of murder by your sister? Shock? Anger? Disbelief? As far as I knew, this wasn’t covered in any of the textbooks.

“Deborah,” I said. Not tremendously clever, but it was all I could think of.

“Because you don’t get a free pass with me,” she said. “Not for something like this.”

“I would never,” I said. “This is not…” I shook my head, and it really seemed so unfair. First the Dark Passenger left me, and now my sister and my wits had apparently fled, too. All the rats were swimming away as the good ship Dexter slid slowly under the waves.

I took a deep breath and tried to organize the crew to bail out a little. Deborah was the only person on earth who knew what I really was, and even though she was still getting used to the idea, I had thought she understood the very careful boundaries set up by Harry, and understood, too, that I would never cross them. Apparently I was wrong. “Deborah,” I said. “Why would I-”

“Cut the crap,” she snapped. “We both know you could have done it. You were here at the right time. And you have a pretty good motive, to get out of paying him like fifty grand. It’s either that or I believe some guy in jail did it.”

Because I am an artificial human, I am also extremely clearheaded most of the time, uncluttered by emotions. But I felt as if I was trying to see through quicksand. On the one hand, I was surprised and a little disappointed that she thought I might have done something this sloppy. On the other hand, I wanted to reassure her that I hadn’t. And I wanted to say that if I had done this, she would never have found out about it, but that didn’t seem quite diplomatic. So I took another deep breath and settled for, “I promise.”

My sister looked at me long and hard. “Really,” I said.

She finally nodded. “All right,” she said. “You better be telling me the truth.”

“I am,” I said. “I didn’t do this.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Then who did?”

It really isn’t fair, is it? I mean, this whole life thing. Here I was, still defending myself from an accusation of murder-from my own foster flesh and blood!-and at the same time being asked to solve the crime. I had to admire the mental agility that allowed Deborah to perform that kind of cerebral tumbling act, but I also had to wish she would direct her creative thinking at somebody else.

“I don’t know who did this,” I said. “And I don’t-I’m not getting any, um, ideas about it.”

She stared at me very hard indeed. “Why should I believe that, either?” she said.

“Deborah,” I said, and I hesitated. Was this the time to tell her about the Dark Passenger and its present absence? There was a very uncomfortable series of sensations sloshing through me, somewhat like the onset of the flu. Could these be emotions, pounding at the defenseless coastline of Dexter, like huge tidal waves of toxic sludge? If so, it was no wonder humans were such miserable creatures. This was an awful experience.

“Listen, Deborah,” I said again, trying to think of a way to start.

“I am listening, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “But you’re not saying anything.”

“It’s hard to say,” I said. “I’ve never said it before.”

“This would be a great time to start.”

“I, uh-I have this thing inside me,” I said, aware that I sounded like a complete idiot and feeling a strange heat rising into my cheeks.

“What do you mean,” she demanded. “You’ve got cancer?”

“No, no, it’s-I hear, um-It tells me things,” I said. For some reason I had to look away from Deborah. There was a photograph of a naked man’s torso on the wall; I looked back to Deborah.

“Jesus,” she said. “You mean you hear voices? Jesus Christ, Dex.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not like hearing voices. Not exactly.”

“Well then what the fuck?” she said.

I had to look at the naked torso again, and then blow out a large breath before I could look back at Deborah. “When I get one of my hunches about, you know. At a crime scene,” I said. “It’s because this…thing is telling me.” Deborah’s face was frozen over, completely immobile, as if she was listening to a confession of terrible deeds; which she was, of course.

“So it

tells

you, what?” she said. “Hey, somebody who thinks he’s Batman did this.”

“Kind of,” I said. “Just, you know. The little hints I used to get.”

“Used to get,” she said.

I really had to look away again. “It’s gone, Deborah,” I said. “Something about all this Moloch stuff scared it away. That’s never happened before.”

She didn’t say anything for a long time, and I saw no reason to say it for her.

“Did you ever tell Dad about this voice?” she said at last.

“I didn’t have to,” I said. “He already knew.”

“And now your voices are gone,” she said.

“Just one voice.”

“And that’s why you’re not telling me anything about all this.”

“Yes.”

Deborah ground her teeth together loud enough for me to hear them. Then she released a large breath without unlocking her jaw. “Either you’re lying to me because you did this,” she hissed at me, “or you’re telling the truth and you’re a fucking psycho.”

“Debs-”

“Which one do you think I want to believe, Dexter? Huh? Which one?”

I don’t believe I have felt real anger since I was an adolescent, and it may be that even then I was not able to feel the real thing. But with the Dark Passenger gone and me slipping down the slope into genuine humanity, all the old barriers between me and normal life were fading, and I felt something now that must have been very close to the real thing. “Deborah,” I said, “if you don’t trust me and you want to think I did this, then I don’t give a rat’s ass which one you believe.”

She glared at me, and for the very first time, I glared back.

Finally she spoke. “I still have to report this,” she said. “Officially, you can’t come anywhere near this for now.”

“Nothing would make me happier,” I said. She stared at me for a moment longer, then made her mouth very small and returned to Camilla Figg. I watched her back for a moment, and then headed for the door.

There was really no point in hanging around, especially since I had been told, officially and unofficially, that I was not welcome. It would be nice to say that my feelings were hurt, but surprisingly, I was still too angry to feel miffed. And in truth, I have always been so shocked that anyone could really like me that it was almost a relief to see Deborah taking a sensible attitude for once.

It was all good all the time for Dexter, but for some reason, it didn’t really feel like a very large victory as I headed for the door and exile.

I was waiting for the elevator to arrive when I was blindsided by a hoarse shout of “Hey!”

I turned and saw a grim, very angry old man racing at me wearing sandals and black socks that came up almost to his knobby old knees. He also wore baggy shorts and a silk shirt and an expression of completely righteous wrath. “Are you the police?” he demanded.

“Not all of them,” I said.

“What about my goddamn paper?” he said.

Elevators are so slow, aren’t they? But I do try to be polite when it is unavoidable, so I smiled reassuringly at the old lunatic. “You didn’t like your paper?” I asked.

“I didn’t

get

my goddamn paper!” he shouted at me, turning a light purple from the effort. “I called and I told you people and the colored girl on the phone said to call the newspaper! I watch the kid

steal

it, and she hangs up on me!”

“A kid stole your newspaper,” I said.

“What the hell did I just say?” he said, and he was getting a little bit shrill now, which did nothing to make waiting for the elevator any more enjoyable. “Why the hell do I pay my taxes, to hear her say that? And she

laughs

at me, goddamn it!”

“You could get another paper,” I said soothingly.

It didn’t seem to soothe him. “What the hell is that, get another paper? Saturday morning, in my pajamas, and I should get another paper? Why can’t you people just catch the criminals?”

The elevator made a muted

ding

sound to announce its arrival at last, but I was no longer interested, because I had a thought. Every now and then I do have thoughts. Most of them never make it all the way to the surface, probably because of a lifetime of trying to seem human. But this one came slowly up and, like a gas bubble bursting through mud, popped brightly in my brain. “Saturday morning?” I said. “Do you remember what time?”

“Of course I remember what time! I told them when I called, ten thirty, on a Saturday morning, and the kid is stealing my paper!”

“How do you know it was a kid?”

“I watched through the peephole, that’s how!” he yelled at me. “I should go out in the hall without looking, the job you people do? Forget it!”

“When you say ‘kid,’” I said, “how old do you mean?”

“Listen, mister,” he said, “to me, everybody under seventy is a kid. But this kid was maybe twenty, and he had a backpack on like they all wear.”

“Can you describe this kid?” I asked.

“I’m not blind,” he said. “He stands up with my paper, he’s got one of those goddamn tattoos they all have now, right on the back of his neck!”

I felt little metal fingers flutter across the back of my neck and I knew the answer, but I asked anyway. “What kind of tattoo?”

“Stupid thing, one of those Jap symbols. We beat the crap out of the Japs so we could buy their cars and tattoo their goddamn scribbles on our kids?”

He seemed to be only warming up, and while I really admired the fact that he had such terrific stamina at his age, I felt it was time to turn him over to the proper authorities as constituted by my sister, which lit up in me a small glow of satisfaction, since it not only gave her a suspect better than poor Disenfranchised Dexter but also inflicted this beguiling old poop on her as a small measure of punishment for suspecting me in the first place. “Come with me,” I said to the old man.

“I’m not going anywhere,” he said.

“Wouldn’t you like to talk to a real detective?” I said, and the hours of practice I had spent on my smile must have paid off, because he frowned, looked around him, and then said, “Well, all right,” and followed me all the way back to where Sergeant Sister was snarling at Camilla Figg.

“I told you to stay away,” she said, with all the warmth and charm I had come to expect from her.

“Okay,” I said. “Shall I take the witness away with me?”

Deborah opened her mouth, then closed and opened it a few more times, as if she was trying to figure out how to breathe like a fish.

“You can’t-it isn’t-Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said at last.

“I can, it is, and I’m sure he will,” I said. “But in the meantime, this nice old gentleman has something interesting to tell you.”

“Who the hell are you to call me old?” he said.

“This is Detective Morgan,” I told him. “She’s in charge here.”

“A girl?” he snorted. “No wonder they can’t catch anybody. A girl detective.”

“Be sure to tell her about the backpack,” I told him. “And the tattoo.”

“What tattoo?” she demanded. “What the hell are you talking about?”

“The mouth on you,” the old man said. “Shame!”

I smiled at my sister. “Have a nice chat,” I said.

CHAPTER 26

I

COULD NOT BE SURE THAT I WAS OFFICIALLY INVITED BACK to the party, but I didn’t want to go so far away that I missed the chance to graciously accept my sister’s apology. So I went to loiter just inside the front door of the former Manny Borque’s apartment, where I could be noticed at the appropriate time. Unfortunately, the killer had not stolen the giant artistic ball of animal vomit on the pedestal by the door. It was still there, right in the middle of my loitering grounds, and I was forced to look at it while I waited.

I was wondering how long it would take Deborah to ask the old man about the tattoo and then make the connection. Even as I wondered, I heard her raise her voice in official ritual words of dismissal, thanking the old man for his help and instructing him to call if he thought of anything else. And then the two of them came toward the door, Deborah holding the old man firmly by the elbow and steering him out of the apartment.

“But what about my paper, miss?” he protested as she opened the door.

“It’s Sergeant Miss,” I told him, and Deborah glared at me.

“Call the paper,” she told him. “They’ll give you a refund.” And she practically hurled him out the door, where he stood for a moment trembling with anger.

“The bad guys are winning!” he shouted, and then, happily for us, Deborah closed the door.

“He’s right, you know,” I said to her.

“Well, you don’t have to look so goddamned happy about it,” she said.

“And you, on the other hand, might try looking a lot happier,” I said. “It’s him, the boyfriend, what’s his name.”

“Kurt Wagner,” she said.

“Very good,” I said. “Due diligence. Kurt Wagner it is, and you know it.”

“I don’t know shit,” she said. “It could still be a coincidence.”

“Sure, it could be,” I said. “And there’s even a mathematical chance that the sun will come up in the west, but it’s not very likely. And who else do you have?”

“That fucking creep, Wilkins,” she said.

“Somebody’s been watching him, right?”

She snorted. “Yeah, but you know what these guys are like. They take a nap, or take a dump, and swear the guy was never out of their sight. Meantime, the guy they’re supposed to watch is out chopping up cheerleaders.”

“So you really still think he could be the killer? Even when this kid was here at exactly the same time Manny was killed?”

“You were here at the same time,” she said. “And this one’s not like the others. More like a cheap copy.”

“Then how did Tammy Connor’s head get here?” I said. “Kurt Wagner is doing this, Debs, he has to be.”

“All right,” she said. “He probably is.”

“Probably?” I said, and I really was surprised. Everything pointed to the kid with the neck tattoo, and Deborah was dithering.

She looked at me for a long moment, and it was not a look of warm, loving filial affection. “It still might be you,” she said.

“By all means, arrest me,” I said. “That would be the smart thing to do, wouldn’t it? Captain Matthews will be happy because you made an arrest, and the media will love you for busting your brother. Terrific solution, Deborah. It will even make the real killer happy.”

Deborah said nothing, just turned and walked away. After thinking about it for a moment, I realized what a good idea that was. So I did it, too, and walked away in the opposite direction, out of the apartment and back to work.

The rest of my day was far more fulfilling. Two bodies, male, Caucasian, had been found in a BMW parked on the shoulder of the Palmetto Expressway. When somebody tried to steal the car, they found the bodies and phoned it in-after removing the sound system and the airbags. The apparent cause of death was multiple gunshot wounds. The newspapers are fond of using the phrase “gangland style” for killings that show a certain neatness and economy. We would not be searching for any gangs this time. The two bodies and the inside of the car had been quite literally hosed with lead and spurting blood, as though the killer had trouble figuring out which end of the gun to hold on to. Judging from the bullet holes in the windows, it was a miracle that no passing motorists had been shot as well.

A busy Dexter should be a happy Dexter, and there was enough awful dried blood in the car and on the surrounding pavement to keep me occupied for hours, but not surprisingly I was still not happy. I had such a large number of hideous things happening to me, and now there was this disagreement with Debs. It was not really accurate to say that I loved Deborah, since I am incapable of love, but I was used to her, and I would rather have her around and reasonably content with me.

Other than a few ordinary sibling squabbles when we were younger, Deborah and I had rarely had any serious disagreements, and I was a bit surprised to find out that this one bothered me a great deal. In spite of the fact that I am a soulless monster who enjoys killing, it stung to have her think of me that way, especially since I had given my word of honor as an ogre that I was entirely innocent, at least in this case.

I wanted to get along with my sister, but I was also miffed that she seemed a little too enthusiastic about her role as a representative of the Full Majesty of the Law, and not quite willing enough as my sidekick and confidante.

Of course it made sense for me to be wasting my perfectly good indignation on this, since there was nothing else at all to occupy my attention at the time-things like weddings, mysterious music, and missing Passengers always sort themselves out, right? And blood spatter is a simple craft that requires minimal concentration. To prove it, I let my thoughts wander as I mentally wallowed in my sad state, and because of it I slipped in the congealed blood and went down to one knee on the roadside by the BMW.

The shock of contact with the road was immediately echoed by an interior shock, a jolt of fear and cold air going through me, rising up from the awful sticky mess and straight into my empty self, and it was a long moment before I could breathe again. Steady, Dexter, I thought. This is just a small, painful reminder of who you are and where you came from, brought on by stress. It has nothing to do with operatic cattle.

I managed to stand up without whimpering, but my pants were torn, my knee hurt, and one leg of the pants was covered with the vile half-dry blood.

I really don’t like blood. And to look down and see it actually on my clothes, actually

touching

me, and on top of the complete turmoil my life had become and the great empty Passenger-less pit I had fallen into-the blood completed the circuit. These were definitely emotions I was feeling now, and they were not pleasant. I felt myself shudder and I nearly shouted, but I managed, just barely, to contain myself, clean up, and soldier on.

I did not feel much better, but I made it through the day by changing into the extra set of clothing that wise blood-spatter techs keep handy, and it was finally time to head home.

As I drove south to Rita’s on Old Cutler a little red Geo got on my bumper and would not back off. I watched in the mirror, but I could not see the driver’s face, and I wondered if I had done something I wasn’t aware of to make him or her angry. I was very tempted to step on the brakes and let the chips fall where they might, but I was not yet so completely frazzled as to believe that wrecking my car would make anything better. I tried to ignore the other car, just one more semi-insane Miami driver with a mysterious hidden agenda.

But it stayed with me, inches away, and I began to wonder what that agenda might be. I sped up. The Geo sped up and stayed right on my bumper.

I slowed down; so did the Geo.

I moved across two lanes of traffic, leaving a chorus of angry horns and upraised fingers in my wake. The Geo followed.

Who was it? What did they want with me? Was it possible that Starzak knew that it was me who had taped him up, and now he was coming after me in a different car, determined to revenge himself on me? Or was it someone else this time-and if so, who? Why? I could not bring myself to believe that Moloch was driving the car behind me. How could an ancient god even get a learner’s permit? But somebody was back there, clearly planning to stay with me for a while, and I had no idea who. I found myself flailing for an answer, reaching for something that was no longer there, and the sense of loss and emptiness amplified my uncertainty and anger and uneasiness, and I realized my breath was hissing in and out between clenched teeth and my hands were clenched on the wheel and covered with a chilly sheen of sweat, and I thought, that’s enough.

And as I mentally prepared myself to slam on the brakes and leap out of the car to smash this other driver’s face into a red pulp, the red Geo suddenly slid off my bumper and turned right, vanishing down a side street into the Miami night.

It had been nothing after all, just a perfectly normal rush-hour psychosis. Another average crazed Miami driver, killing the boredom of the long drive home by playing tag with the car in front.

And I was nothing more than a dazed, battered, paranoid former monster with his hands clenched and his teeth grinding together.

I went home.

The Watcher dropped away and then circled back. He moved through the traffic invisible to the other now, and turned down the street to the house well behind the other. He had enjoyed tailing him so closely, forcing a display of mild panic. He had provoked the other in order to gauge his readiness, and what he found was very satisfying. It was a finely balanced process, to push the other precisely into the right frame of mind. He had done it many times before, and he knew the signs. Jumpy, but not quite on the ragged edge where he needed to be, not yet.

It was clearly time to accelerate things.

Tonight would be very special.

CHAPTER 27

D

INNER WAS READY WHEN I GOT TO RITA’S HOUSE. CONSIDERING what I had gone through and what I was thinking about it, you might have thought that I would never eat again. But as I walked in the front door I was assaulted by the aroma; Rita had made roast pork, broccoli, and rice and beans, and there are very few things in this world that compare to Rita’s roast pork. And so it was a somewhat mollified Dexter who finally pushed the plate away and rose from the table. And in truth, the rest of the evening was mildly soothing as well. I played kick the can with Cody and Astor and the other neighborhood children until it was bedtime, and then Rita and I sat on the couch and watched a show about a grumpy doctor before turning in for the night.

Normality wasn’t all bad, not with Rita’s roast pork in it, and Cody and Astor to keep me interested. Perhaps I could live vicariously through them, like an old baseball player who becomes a coach when his playing days are over. They had so much to learn, and in teaching them I could relive my fading days of glory. Sad, yes, but it was at least a small compensation.

And as I drifted off to sleep, in spite of the fact that I really do know better, I caught myself thinking that maybe things weren’t that bad after all.

That foolish notion lasted until midnight, when I woke up to see Cody standing at the foot of the bed. “Somebody’s outside,” he said.

“All right,” I said, feeling half asleep and not at all curious about why he needed to tell me that.

“They want in,” he said.

I sat up. “Where?” I said.

Cody turned and headed into the hallway and I followed. I was half convinced that he had simply had a bad dream, but after all, this was Miami and these things have been known to happen, although certainly seldom more than five or six hundred times on any given night.

Cody led me to the door to the backyard. About ten feet from the door he stopped dead, and I stopped with him.

“There,” Cody said softly.

There indeed. It was not a bad dream, or at least not the kind you need to be asleep to have.

The doorknob was moving, wiggling as someone on the outside tried to turn it.

“Wake up your mom,” I whispered to Cody. “Tell her to call 9-1- 1.” He looked up at me as if he was disappointed that I wasn’t going to charge out the door with a hand grenade and take care of things myself, but then he turned and walked back down the hall toward the bedroom.

I approached the door, quietly and cautiously. On the wall beside it was a switch that turned on a floodlight which illuminated the backyard. As I reached for the switch, the doorknob stopped turning. I turned the light on anyway.

Immediately, as if the switch had caused it to happen, something began to thump on the front door.

I turned and ran for the front of the house-and halfway there Rita stepped into the hall and crashed into me. “Dexter,” she said. “What-Cody said-”

“Call the cops,” I told her. “Someone is trying to break in.” I looked behind her at Cody. “Get your sister and all of you get into the bathroom. Lock the door.”

“But who would-we’re not-” Rita said.

“Go,” I told her, and pushed past her to the front door.

Once again I flipped on the outside light, and once again the sound stopped immediately.

Only to start up again down the hall, apparently on the kitchen window.

And naturally enough when I ran into the kitchen the sound had already stopped, even before I turned on the overhead light.

I slowly approached the window over the sink and carefully peeked out.

Nothing. Just the night and the hedge and the neighbor’s house and nothing else whatsoever.

I straightened up and stood there for a moment, waiting for the noise to start up again at some other corner of the house. It didn’t. I realized I was holding my breath, and I let it out. Whatever it was, it had stopped. It was gone. I unclenched my fists and took a deep breath.

And then Rita screamed.

I turned around fast enough to twist my ankle, but still hobbled for the bathroom as quickly as I could. The door was locked, but from inside I could hear something scrabbling at the window. Rita shouted, “Go away!”

“Open the door,” I said, and a moment later Astor opened it wide.

“It’s at the window,” she said, rather calmly I thought.

Rita was standing in the middle of the bathroom with her clenched fists raised to her mouth. Cody stood in front of her protectively holding the toilet plunger, and they were both staring at the window.

“Rita,” I said.

She turned to me with her eyes wide and filled with fear. “But what do they want?” she demanded, as if she thought I could tell her. And perhaps I could have, in the ordinary course of things-“ordinary” being defined as the entire previous portion of my life, when I had my Passenger to keep me company and whisper terrible secrets. But as it was, I only knew they wanted in and I did not know why.

I also did not know what they wanted, but it didn’t seem quite as important at the moment as the fact that they obviously wanted something and thought we had it. “Come on,” I said. “Everybody out of here.” Rita turned to look at me, but Cody stood his ground. “Move,” I said, and Astor took Rita by the hand and hurried through the door. I put a hand on Cody’s shoulder and pushed him after his mother, gently prying the plunger from his hands, and then I turned to face the window.

The noise continued, a hard scratching that sounded like someone was trying to claw through the glass. Without any real conscious thought I stepped forward and whacked the window with the rubber head of the toilet plunger.

The sound stopped.

For a long moment there was no sound except for my breathing, which I realized was somewhat fast and ragged. And then, not too far away, I heard a police siren cutting through the silence. I backed out of the bathroom, watching the window.

Rita sat on the bed with Cody on one side of her and Astor on the other. The children seemed quite calm, but Rita was clearly on the edge of hysteria. “It’s all right,” I said. “The cops are almost here.”

“Will it be Sergeant Debbie?” Astor asked me, and she added hopefully, “Do you think she’ll shoot somebody?”

“Sergeant Debbie is in bed, asleep,” I said. The siren was near now, and with a squeal of tires it came to a stop in front of our house and wound its way down through the scale to a grumbling halt. “They’re here,” I told them, and Rita lunged up off the bed and grabbed the children by the hand.

The three of them followed me out of the bedroom, and by the time we got to the front door there was already a knock sounding on the wood, polite but firm. Still, life teaches us caution, so I called out, “Who is it?”

“This is the police,” a stern masculine voice said. “We have a report of a possible break-in.” It sounded authentic, but just to be sure, I left the chain on as I opened the door and looked out. Sure enough, there were two uniformed cops standing there, one looking at the door and one turned away, looking out into the yard and the street.

I closed the door, took the chain off, and reopened it. “Come in, Officer,” I said. His name tag said Ramirez, and I realized I knew him slightly. But he made no move to enter the house; he simply stared down at my hand.

“What kind of emergency is this, chief?” he said, nodding at my hand. I looked and realized I was still holding the toilet plunger.

“Oh,” I said. I put the plunger behind the door in the umbrella stand. “Sorry. That was for self-defense.”

“Uh-huh,” Ramirez said. “Guess it would depend what the other guy had.” He stepped forward into the house, calling over his shoulder to his partner, “Take a look around the yard, Williams.”

“Yo,” said Williams, a wiry black man of about forty. He walked down into the yard and disappeared around the corner of the house.

Ramirez stood in the center of the room, looking at Rita and the kids. “So, what’s the story here?” he asked, and before I could answer he squinted at me. “I know you from somewhere?” he said.

“Dexter Morgan,” I said. “I work in forensics.”

“Right,” he said. “So what happened here, Dexter?”

I told him.

CHAPTER 28

T

HE COPS STAYED WITH US FOR ABOUT FORTY MINUTES. They looked around the yard and the surrounding neighborhood and found nothing, which did not seem to surprise them, and which truthfully was not a great shock to me, either. When they were done looking Rita made them coffee and fed them some oatmeal cookies she had made.

Ramirez was certain it had been a couple of kids trying to get some kind of reaction from us, and if so they had certainly succeeded. Williams tried very hard to be reassuring, telling us it was just a prank and now it was over, and as they were leaving Ramirez added that they would drive by a few times the rest of the night. But even with these soothing words still fresh, Rita sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee for the rest of the night, unable to get back to sleep. For my part, I tossed and turned for more than three minutes before I drifted back to slumberland.

And as I flew down the long black mountain into sleep, the music started up again. And there was a great feeling of gladness and then heat on my face…

And somehow I was in the hallway, with Rita shaking me and calling my name. “Dexter, wake up,” she said. “Dexter.”

“What happened?” I said.

“You were sleepwalking,” she said. “And singing. Singing in your sleep.”

And so rosy-fingered dawn found both of us sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. When the alarm finally went off in the bedroom, she got up to turn it off and came back and looked at me. I looked back, but there didn’t seem to be anything to say, and then Cody and Astor came into the kitchen, and there was nothing more we could do except stumble through the morning routine and head for work, automatically pretending that everything was exactly the way it should be.

But of course it wasn’t. Someone was trying to get into my head, and they were succeeding far too well. And now they were trying to get into my house, and I didn’t even know who it was, or what they wanted. I had to assume that somehow it was all connected to Moloch, and the absence of my Presence.

The bottom line was that somebody was trying to do something to me, and they were getting closer and closer to doing it.

I found myself unwilling to consider the idea that a real live ancient god was trying to kill me. To begin with, they don’t exist. And even if they did, why would one bother with me? Clearly some human being was using the whole Moloch thing as a costume in order to feel more powerful and important, and to make his victims believe he had special magical powers.

Like the ability to invade my sleep and make me hear music, for instance? A human predator couldn’t do that. And it couldn’t scare away the Dark Passenger, either.

The only possible answers were impossible. Maybe it was just the crippling fatigue, but I couldn’t think of any others that weren’t.

When I arrived at work that morning, I had no chance to think of anything better, because there was an immediate call to a double homicide in a quiet marijuana house in the Grove. Two teenagers had been tied up, cut up, and then shot several times each, just for good measure. And although I am certain that I should have considered this a terrible thing, I was actually very grateful for the opportunity to view dead bodies that were not cooked and beheaded. It made things seem normal, even peaceful, for just a little while. I sprayed my luminol hither and yon, almost happy to perform a task that made the hideous music recede for a little while.

But it also gave me time to ponder, and this I did. I saw scenes like this every day, and nine times out of ten the killers said things like “I just snapped” or “By the time I knew what I was doing it was too late.” All grand excuses, and it had seemed a bit amusing to me, since I always knew what I was doing, which was why I did it.

And at last a thought wandered in-I had found myself unable to do anything at all to Starzak without my Dark Passenger. This meant that my talent was in the Passenger, not in me by myself. Which could mean that all these others who “snapped” were temporarily playing host to something similar, couldn’t it?

Until now, mine had never left me; it was permanently at home with me, not wandering around in the streets hitchhiking with the first bad-tempered wretch that wandered by.

All right, put that aside for the time being. Let’s just assume that some Passengers wander and some of them nest. Could this account for what Halpern had described as a dream? Could something go into him, make him kill two girls, and then take him home and tuck him into bed before leaving?

I didn’t know. But I did know that if that idea held water, I was in a lot deeper than I had imagined.

By the time I got back to my office it was past time for lunch, and there was a call waiting from Rita to remind me that I had a 2:30 appointment with her minister. And by “minister” I don’t mean the kind with a position in the cabinet of a foreign government. As unlikely as it seems, I mean the kind of minister you will find in a church, if you are ever compelled to visit one for some reason. For my part, I have always assumed that if there is any kind of God at all He would never let something like me flourish. And if I am wrong, the altar might crack and fall if I went inside a church.

But my sensible avoidance of religious buildings was at an end now, since Rita wanted her very own minister to perform our wedding ceremony, and apparently he needed to check my human credentials before agreeing to the assignment. Of course, he hadn’t done a very good job of it the first time, since Rita’s first husband had been a crack addict who regularly beat her, and the reverend had somehow failed to detect that. And if the minister had missed something that obvious before, the odds of him doing better with me were not very good at all.

Still, Rita set great store by the man, so away we went to an ancient coral-rock church on an overgrown lot in the Grove, only half a mile from the homicide scene I had worked that morning. Rita had been confirmed there, she told me, and had known the minister for a very long time. Apparently that was important, and I supposed it should be, considering what I knew about several men of God who had come to my attention through my hobby. My former hobby, that is.

Reverend Gilles was waiting for us in his office-or is it called a cloister, or a retreat, or something like that? Rectory always sounded to me like a place where you would find a proctologist. Perhaps it was a sacristy-I admit that I am not up on my terminology here. My foster mother, Doris, did try to get me to church when I was young, but after a couple of regrettable incidents it became apparent that it wasn’t going to stick, and Harry intervened.

The reverend’s study was lined with books that had improbable titles offering no doubt very sound advice on dealing with things God would really prefer you to avoid. There were also a few that offered insight into a woman’s soul, although it did not specify which woman, and information on how to make Christ work for you, which I hoped did not mean at minimum wage. There was even one on Christian chemistry, which seemed to me to be stretching the point, unless it gave a recipe for the old water-into-wine trick.

Much more interesting was a book with Gothic script on the binding. I turned my head to read the title; mere curiosity, but when I read it I felt a jolt go through me as if my esophagus had suddenly filled with ice.

Demonic Possession: Fact or Fancy?

it said, and as I read the title I distinctly heard the far-off sound of a nickel dropping.

It would be very easy for an outside observer to shake his head and say, Yes, obviously, Dexter is a dull boy if he has never thought of that. But the truth is, I had not. Demon has so many negative connotations, doesn’t it? And as long as the Presence was present, there seemed no need to define it in those arcane terms. It was only now that it was gone that I required some explanation. And why not this one? It was a bit old-fashioned, but its very hoariness seemed to argue that there might be something to it, some connection that went back to the nonsense with Solomon and Moloch and all the way up to what was happening to me today.

Was the Dark Passenger really a demon? And did the Passenger’s absence mean it had been cast out? If so, by what? Something overwhelmingly good? I could not recall encountering anything like that in the last, oh, lifetime or so. Just the opposite, in fact.

But could something very very bad cast out a demon? I mean, what could be worse than a demon? Perhaps Moloch? Or could a demon cast itself out for some reason?

I tried to comfort myself with the thought that at least I had some good questions now, but I didn’t feel terribly comforted, and my thoughts were interrupted when the door opened and the Right Reverend Gilles breezed in, beaming and muttering, “Well, well.”

The reverend was about fifty and seemed well fed, so I suppose the tithing business was working. He came right to us and gave Rita a hug and a peck on the cheek, before turning to offer me a hearty masculine handshake.

“Well,” he said, smiling cautiously at me. “So you’re Dexter.”

“I suppose I am,” I said. “I just couldn’t help it.”

He nodded, almost as if I had made sense. “Sit down, please, relax,” he said, and he moved around behind the desk and sat in a large swivel chair.

I took him at his word and leaned back in the red leather chair opposite his desk, but Rita perched nervously on the edge of her identical seat.

“Rita,” he said, and he smiled again. “Well, well. So you’re ready to try again, are you?”

“Yes, I-that’s just-I mean, I think so,” Rita said, blushing furiously. “I mean, yes.” She looked at me with a bright red smile and said, “Yes, I’m ready.”

“Good, good,” he said, and he switched his expression of fond concern over to me. “And you, Dexter. I would really like to know a little bit about you.”

“Well, to begin with, I’m a murder suspect,” I said modestly.

“Dexter,” Rita said, and impossibly turned even redder.

“The police think you killed somebody?” Reverend Gilles asked.

“Oh, they don’t all think that,” I said. “Just my sister.”

“Dexter works in forensics,” Rita blurted out. “His sister is a detective. He just-he was only kidding about the other part.”

Once again he nodded at me. “A sense of humor is a big help in any relationship,” he said.

He paused for a moment, looked very thoughtful and even more sincere, and then said, “How do you feel about Rita’s children?”

“Oh, Cody and Astor

adore

Dexter,” Rita said, and she looked very happy that we were no longer talking about my status as a wanted man.

“But how does Dexter feel about

them

?” he insisted gently.

“I like them,” I said.

Reverend Gilles nodded and said, “Good. Very good. Sometimes children can be a burden. Especially when they’re not yours.”

“Cody and Astor are very good at being a burden,” I said. “But I don’t really mind.”

“They’re going to need a lot of mentoring,” he said, “after all they went through.”

“Oh, I mentor them,” I said, although I thought it was probably a good idea not to be too specific, so I just added, “They’re very eager to be mentored.”

“All right,” he said. “So we’ll see those kids here at Sunday school, right?” It seemed to me to be a bald-faced attempt to blackmail us into providing future recruits to fill his collection basket, but Rita nodded eagerly, so I went along with it. Besides, I was reasonably sure that whatever anyone might say, Cody and Astor would find their spiritual comfort somewhere else.

“Now, the two of you,” he said, leaning back in his chair and rubbing the back of one hand with the palm of the other. “A relationship in today’s world needs a strong foundation in faith,” he said, looking at me expectantly. “Dexter? How about it?”

Well, there it was. You have to believe that sooner or later a minister will find a way to twist things around so they fall into his area. I don’t know if it’s worse to lie to a minister than to anyone else, but I did want to get this interview over quickly and painlessly, and could that possibly happen if I told the truth? Suppose I did and said something like, Yes, I have a great deal of faith, Reverend-in human greed and stupidity, and in the sweetness of sharp steel on a moonlit night. I have faith in the dark unseen, the cold chuckle from the shadows inside, the absolute clarity of the knife. Oh, yes, I have faith, Reverend, and beyond faith-I have certainty, because I have seen the bleak bottom line and I know it is real; it’s where I live.

But really, that was hardly calculated to reassure the man, and I surely didn’t need to worry about going to hell for telling a lie to a minister. If there actually is a hell, I already have a front-row seat. So I merely said, “Faith is very important,” and he seemed to be happy with that.

“Great, okay,” he said, and he glanced covertly at his watch. “Dexter, do you have any questions about our church?”

A fair question, perhaps, but it took me by surprise, since I had been thinking of this interview as my time for answering questions, not asking them. I was perfectly ready to be evasive for at least another hour-but really, what was there to ask about? Did they use grape juice or wine? Was the collection basket metal or wood? Was dancing a sin? I was just not prepared. And yet he seemed like he was truly interested in knowing. So I smiled reassuringly back at Reverend Gilles and said, “Actually, I’d love to know what you think about demonic possession.”

“Dexter!” Rita gulped with a nervous smile. “That’s not-You can’t really-”

Reverend Gilles raised a hand. “It’s all right, Rita,” he said. “I think I know where Dexter’s coming from.” He leaned back in the chair and nodded, favoring me with a pleasant and knowing smile. “Been quite a while since you’ve been to church, Dexter?”

“Well, actually, it has,” I said.

“I think you’ll find that the new church is quite a good fit for the modern world. The central truth of God’s love doesn’t change,” he said. “But sometimes our understanding of it can.” And then he actually winked at me. “I think we can agree that demons are for Halloween, not for Sunday service.”

Well, it was nice to have an answer, even if it wasn’t the one I was looking for. I hadn’t really expected Reverend Gilles to pull out a grimoire and cast a spell, but I admit it was a little disappointing. “All right, then,” I said.

“Any other questions?” he asked me with a very satisfied smile. “About our church, or anything about the ceremony?”

“Why, no,” I said. “It seems very straightforward.”

“We like to think so,” he said. “As long as we put Christ first, everything else falls into place.”

“Amen,” I said brightly. Rita gave me a bit of a look, but the reverend seemed to accept it.

“All right, then,” he said, and he stood up and held out his hand, “June twenty-fourth it is.” I stood up, too, and shook his hand. “But I expect to see you here before then,” he said. “We have a great contemporary service at ten o’clock every Sunday.” He winked and gave my hand an extra-manly squeeze. “Gets you home in time for the football game.”

“That’s terrific,” I said, thinking how nice it is when a business anticipates the needs of its customers.

He dropped my hand and grabbed Rita, wrapping her up in a full embrace. “Rita,” he said. “I’m so happy for you.”

“Thank you,” Rita sobbed into his shoulder. She leaned against him for a moment longer and snuffled, and then stood upright again, rubbing her nose and looking at me. “Thank you, Dexter,” she said. For what I don’t know, but it’s always nice to be included.

CHAPTER 29

F

OR THE FIRST TIME IN QUITE A WHILE I WAS ACTUALLY anxious to get back to my cubicle. Not because I was pining for blood spatter-but because of the idea that had descended on me in Reverend Gilles’s study. Demonic possession. It had a certain ring to it. I had never really felt possessed, although Rita was certainly staking her claim. But it was at least some kind of explanation with a degree of history attached, and I was very eager to pursue it.

First I checked my answering machine and e-mail: no messages except a routine departmental memo on cleaning up the coffee area. No abject apology from Debs, either. I made a few careful calls and found that she was out trying to round up Kurt Wagner, which was a relief, since it meant she wasn’t following me.

Problem solved and conscience clear, I began looking into the question of demonic possession. Once again, good old King Solomon figured prominently. He had apparently been quite cozy with a number of demons, most of whom had improbable names with several

z

’s in them. And he had ordered them about like indentured servants, forcing them to fetch and tote and build his great temple, which was a bit of a shock, since I had always heard that the temple was a good thing, and surely there must have been some kind of law in place about demon labor. I mean, if we get so upset about illegal immigrants picking the oranges, shouldn’t all those God-fearing patriarchs have had some kind of ordinance against demons?

But there it was in black and white. King Solomon had consorted with them quite comfortably, as their boss. They didn’t like being ordered around, of course, but they put up with it from him. And that raised the interesting thought that perhaps someone else was able to control them, and was trying to do so with the Dark Passenger, who had therefore fled from involuntary servitude. I paused and thought about that.

The biggest problem with that theory was that it did not fit in with the overwhelming sense of mortal danger that had flooded through me from the very first, even when the Passenger had still been on board. I can understand reluctance to do unwanted work as easily as the next guy, but that had nothing to do with the lethal dread that this had raised in me.

Did that mean the Passenger was not a demon? Did it mean that what was happening to me was mere psychosis? A totally imagined paranoid fantasy of pursuing bloodlust and approaching horror?

And yet, every culture in the world throughout history seemed to believe that there was something to the whole idea of possession. I just couldn’t get it to connect in any way to my problem. I felt like I was onto something, but no great thought emerged.

Suddenly it was five thirty, and I was more than usually anxious to flee from the office and head for the dubious sanctuary of home.

The next afternoon I was in my cubicle, typing up a report on a very dull multiple killing. Even Miami gets ordinary murders, and this was one of them-or three and a half of them, to be precise, since there were three bodies in the morgue and one more in intensive care at Jackson Memorial. It was a simple drive-by shooting in one of the few areas of the city with low property values. There was really no point in spending a great deal of my time on it, since there were plenty of witnesses and they all agreed that someone named “Motherfucker” had done the deed.

Still, forms must be observed, and I had spent half a day on the scene making sure that no one had jumped out of a doorway and hacked the victims with a hedge clipper while they were being shot from a passing car. I was trying to think of an interesting way to say that the blood spatter was consistent with gunfire from a moving source, but the boredom of it all was making my eyes cross, and as I stared vacantly at the screen, I felt a ringing rise in my ears and change to the clang of gongs and the night music came again, and the plain white of the word-processing page seemed suddenly to wash over with awful wet blood and spill out across me, flood the office, and fill the entire visible world. I jumped out of my chair and blinked a few times until it went away, but it left me shaking and wondering what had just happened.

It was starting to come at me in the full light of day, even sitting at my desk at police headquarters, and I did not like that at all. Either it was getting stronger and closer, or I was going right off the deep end and into complete madness. Schizophrenics heard voices-did they ever hear music, too? And did the Dark Passenger qualify as a voice? Had I been completely insane all this time and was just now coming to some kind of crazy final episode in the artificial sanity of Dubious Dexter?

I didn’t think that was possible. Harry had gotten me squared away, made sure that I fit in just right-Harry would have known if I was crazy, and he had told me I was not. Harry was never wrong. So it was settled and I was fine, just fine, thank you.

So why did I hear that music? Why was my hand shaking? And why did I need to cling to a ghost to keep from sitting on the floor and flipping my lips with an index finger?

Clearly no one else in the building heard anything-it was just me. Otherwise the halls would be filled with people either dancing or screaming. No, fear had crawled into my life, slinking after me faster than I could run, filling the huge empty space inside me where the Passenger had once snuggled down.

I had nothing to go on; I needed some outside information if I hoped to understand this. Plenty of sources believed that demons were real- Miami was filled with people who worked hard to keep them away every day of their lives. And even though the

babalao

had said he wanted nothing to do with this whole thing, and had walked away from it as rapidly as he could, he had seemed to know what it was. I was fairly sure that Santeria allowed for possession. But never mind: Miami is a wonderful and diverse city, and I would certainly find some other place to ask the question and get an entirely different answer-perhaps even the one I was looking for. I left my cubicle and headed for the parking lot.

The Tree of Life was on the edge of Liberty City, an area of Miami that is not a good place for tourists from Iowa to visit late at night. This particular corner had been taken over by Haitian immigrants, and many of the buildings had been painted in several bright colors, as if there was not enough of one color to go around. On some of the buildings there were murals depicting Haitian country life. Roosters seemed to be prominent, and goats.

Painted on the outside wall of the Tree of Life there was a large tree, appropriately enough, and under it was an elongated image of two men pounding on some tall drums. I parked right in front of the shop and went in through a screen door that rang a small bell and then banged behind me. In the back, behind a curtain of hanging beads, a woman’s voice called out something in Creole, and I stood by the glass counter and waited. The store was lined with shelves that contained numerous jars filled with mysterious things, liquid, solid, and uncertain. One or two of them seemed to be holding things that might once have been alive.

After a moment, a woman pushed through the beads and came into the front of the store. She appeared to be about forty and reed thin, with high cheekbones and a complexion like sun-bleached mahogany. She wore a flowing red-and-yellow dress, and her head was wrapped in a matching turban. “Ah,” she said with a thick Creole accent. She looked me over with a very doubtful expression and shook her head slightly. “How I can help you, sir?”

“Ah, well,” I said, and I more or less stumbled to a halt. How, after all, did one begin? I couldn’t really say that I thought I used to be possessed and wanted to get the demon back-the poor woman might throw chicken blood at me.

“Sir?” she prompted impatiently.

“I was wondering,” I said, which was true enough, “do you have any books on possession by demons? Er-in English?”

She pursed her lips with great disapproval and shook her head vigorously. “It is not the demons,” she said. “Why do you ask this-are you a reporter?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just, um, interested. Curious.”

“Curious about the

voudoun

?” she said.

“Just the possession part,” I said.

“Huh,” she said, and if possible her disapproval grew even more. “Why?”

Someone very clever must already have said that when all else fails, try the truth. It sounded so good that I was sure I was not the first to think of it, and it seemed like the only thing I had left. I gave it a shot.

“I think,” I said, “I mean, I’m not sure. I think I may have been possessed. A while ago.”

“Ha,” she said. She looked at me long and hard, and then shrugged. “May be,” she said at last. “Why do you say so?”

“I just, um…I had the feeling, you know. That something else was, ah. Inside me? Watching?”

She spat on the floor, a very strange gesture from such an elegant woman, and shook her head. “All you blancs,” she said. “You steal us and bring us here, take everythin’ from us. And then when we make somethin’ from the nothin’ you give us, now you want to be part of that, too. Ha.” She shook her finger at me, for all the world like a second-grade teacher with a bad student. “You listen, blanc. If the spirit enters you, you would know. This is not somethin’ like in a movie. It is a very great blessing, and,” she said with a mean smirk, “it does not happen to the blancs.”

“Well, actually,” I said.

“Non,” she said. “Unless you are willing, unless you ask for the blessing, it does not come.”

“But I

am

willing,” I said.

“Ha,” she said. “It never come to you. You waste my time.” And she turned around and walked through the bead curtains to the back of the store.

I saw no point in waiting around for her to have a change of heart. It didn’t seem likely to happen-and it didn’t seem likely that voodoo had any answers about the Dark Passenger. She had said it only comes when called, and it was a blessing. At least that was a different answer, although I did not remember ever calling the Dark Passenger to come in-it was just always there. But to be absolutely sure, I paused at the curb outside the store and closed my eyes.

Please come back in,

I said.

Nothing happened. I got in my car and went back to work.

What an interesting choice

, the Watcher thought. Voodoo. There was a certain logic to the idea, of course, he could not deny that. But what was really interesting was what it showed about the other.

He was moving in the right direction-and he was very close

.

And when his next little clue turned up, the other would be that much closer. The boy had been so panicky, he had almost wriggled away. But he had not; he had been very helpful and he was now on his way to his dark reward.

Just like the other was.

CHAPTER 30

I

HAD BARELY SETTLED BACK INTO MY CHAIR WHEN DEBORAH came into my little cubicle and sat in the folding chair across from my desk.

“Kurt Wagner is missing,” she said.

I waited for more, but nothing came, so I just nodded. “I accept your apology,” I said.

“Nobody’s seen him since Saturday afternoon,” she said. “His roommate says he came in acting all freaked out, but wouldn’t say anything. He just changed his shoes, and left, and that’s it.” She hesitated, and then added, “He left his backpack.”

I admit I perked up a little at that. “What was in it?” I asked.

“Traces of blood,” she said, as if she was admitting she had taken the last cookie. “It matches Tammy Connor’s.”

“Well then,” I said. It didn’t seem right to say anything about the fact that she’d had somebody else do the blood work. “That’s a pretty good clue.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s him. It has to be him. So he did Tammy, took the head in his backpack and did Manny Borque.”

“It does look like that,” I said. “That’s a shame-I was just getting used to the idea that I was guilty.”

“It makes no fucking sense,” Deborah complained. “The kid’s a good student, on the swimming team, good family-all of that.”

“He was such a nice guy,” I said. “I can’t believe he did all those horrible things.”

“All right,” Deborah said. “I know it, goddamn it. Total cliché. But what the hell-the guy kills his own girlfriend, sure. Maybe even her roommate, because she saw it. But why everybody else? And all that crap with burning them, and the bulls’ heads, what is it, Mollusk?”

“Moloch,” I said. “Mollusk is a clam.”

“Whatever,” she said. “But it makes no sense, Dex. I mean…” She looked away, and for a moment I thought she was going to apologize after all. But I was wrong. “If it does make sense,” she said, “it’s

your

kind of sense. The kind of thing you know about.” She looked back at me, but she still seemed to be embarrassed. “That’s, you know-I mean, is it, um-did it come back? Your, uh…”

“No,” I said. “It didn’t come back.”

“Well,” she said, “shit.”

“Did you put out a BOLO on Kurt Wagner?” I asked.

“I know how to do my job, Dex,” she said. “If he’s in the Miami-Dade area, we’ll get him, and FDLE has it, too. If he’s in Florida, somebody’ll find him.”

“And if he’s not in Florida?”

She looked hard at me, and I saw the beginnings of the way Harry had looked before he got sick, after so many years as a cop: tired, and getting used to the idea of routine defeat. “Then he’ll probably get away with it,” she said. “And I’ll have to arrest you to save my job.”

“Well, then,” I said, trying hard for cheerfulness in the face of overwhelming grim grayness, “let’s hope he drives a very recognizable car.”

She snorted. “It’s a red Geo, one of those mini-Jeep things.”

I closed my eyes. It was a very odd sensation, but I felt all the blood in my body suddenly relocating to my feet. “Did you say red?” I heard myself ask in a remarkably calm voice.

There was no answer, and I opened my eyes. Deborah was staring at me with a look of suspicion so strong I could almost touch it.

“What the hell is that,” she said. “One of your voices?”

“A red Geo followed me home the other night,” I said. “And then somebody tried to break into my house.”

“Goddamn it,” she snarled at me, “when the fuck were you going to tell me all this?”

“Just as soon as you decided you were speaking to me again,” I said.

Deborah turned a very gratifying shade of crimson and looked down at her shoes. “I was busy,” she said, not very convincingly.

“So was Kurt Wagner,” I said.

“All right, Jesus,” she said, and I knew that was all the apology I would ever get. “Yeah, it’s red. But shit,” she said, still looking down, “I think that old man was right. The bad guys are winning.”

I didn’t like seeing my sister this depressed. I felt that some cheery remark was called for, something that would lift the gloom and bring a song back to her heart, but alas, I came up empty. “Well,” I said at last, “if the bad guys really are winning, at least there’s plenty of work for you.”

She looked up at last, but not with anything resembling a smile. “Yeah,” she said. “Some guy in Kendall shot his wife and two kids last night. I get to go work on that.” She stood up, straightening slowly into something that at least resembled her normal posture. “Hooray for our side,” she said, and walked out of my office.

From the very beginning it was an ideal partnership. The new things had self-awareness, and that made manipulating them much easier-and much more rewarding for IT. They killed one another much more readily, too, and IT did not have to wait long at all for a new host-nor to try again to reproduce. IT eagerly drove IT’s host to a killing, and IT waited, longing to feel the strange and wonderful swelling.

But when the feeling came, it simply stirred slowly, tickled IT with a tendril of sensation, and then vanished without blossoming and producing offspring.

IT was puzzled. Why didn’t reproduction work this time? There had to be a reason, and IT was orderly and efficient in IT’s search for the answer. Over many years, as the new things changed and grew, IT experimented. And gradually IT found the conditions that made reproduction work. It took quite a few kills before IT was satisfied that IT had found the answer, but each time IT duplicated the final formula, a new awareness came into being and fled into the world in pain and terror, and IT was satisfied.

The thing worked best when the hosts were off-balance a bit, either from the drinks they had begun to brew or from some kind of trance state. The victim had to know what was coming, and if there was an audience of some kind, their emotions fed into the experience and made it even more powerful.

Then there was fire-fire was a very good way to kill the victims. It seemed to release their essence all at once in a great shrieking jolt of spectacular energy.

And finally, the whole thing worked better with the young ones. The emotions all around were so much stronger, especially in the parents. It was wonderful beyond anything else IT could imagine.

Fire, trance, young victims. A simple formula.

IT began to push the new hosts to create a way to establish these conditions permanently. And the hosts were surprisingly willing to go along with IT.

CHAPTER 31

W

HEN I WAS VERY YOUNG I ONCE SAW A VARIETY ACT on TV. A man put a bunch of plates on the end of a series of supple rods, and kept them up in the air by whipping the rods around to spin the plates. And if he slowed down or turned his back, even for a moment, one of the plates would wobble and then crash to the ground, followed by all the others in series.

That’s a terrific metaphor for life, isn’t it? We’re all trying to keep our plates spinning in the air, and once you get them up there you can’t take your eyes off them and you have to keep chugging along without rest. Except that in life, somebody keeps adding more plates, hiding the rods, and changing the law of gravity when you’re not looking. And so every time you think you have all your plates spinning nicely, suddenly you hear a hideous clattering crash behind you and a whole row of plates you didn’t even know you had begins to hit the ground.

Here I had stupidly assumed that the tragic death of Manny Borque had given me one less plate to worry about, since I could now proceed to cater the wedding as it should be done, with $65 worth of cold cuts and a cooler full of soda. I could concentrate on the very real and important problem of putting me back together again. And so thinking all was quiet on the home front, I turned my back for just a moment and was rewarded with a spectacular crash behind me.

The metaphorical plate in question shattered when I came into Rita’s house after work. It was so quiet that I assumed no one was home, but a quick glance inside showed something far more disturbing. Cody and Astor sat motionless on the couch, and Rita was standing behind them with a look on her face that could easily turn fresh milk into yogurt.

“Dexter,” she said, and the tromp of doom was in her voice, “we need to talk.”

“Of course,” I said, and as I reeled from her expression, even the mere thought of a lighthearted response shriveled into dust and blew away in the icy air.

“These children,” Rita said. Apparently that was the entire thought, because she just glared and said no more.

But of course, I knew which children she meant, so I nodded encouragingly. “Yes,” I said.

“Ooh,” she said.

Well, if it was taking Rita this long to form a complete sentence, it was easy to see why the house had been so quiet when I walked in. Clearly the lost art of conversation was going to need a little boost from Diplomatic Dexter if we were ever going to get more than seven words out in time for dinner. So I plunged straight in with my well-known courage. “Rita,” I said, “is there some kind of problem?”

“Ooh,” she said again, which was not encouraging.

Well really, there’s only so much you can do with monosyllables, even if you are a gifted conversationalist like me. Since there was clearly no help coming from Rita, I looked at Cody and Astor, who had not moved since I came in. “All right,” I said. “Can you two tell me what’s wrong with your mother?”

They exchanged one of their famous looks, and then turned back to me. “We didn’t mean to,” Astor said. “It was an accident.”

It wasn’t much, but at least it was a complete sentence. “I’m very glad to hear it,” I said. “

What

was an accident?”

“We got caught,” Cody said, and Astor poked him with an elbow.

“We didn’t

mean to

,” she repeated with emphasis, and Cody turned to look at her before he remembered what they had agreed on; she glared at him and he blinked once before slowly nodding his head at me.

“Accident,” he said.

It was nice to see that the party line was firmly in place behind a united front, but I was still no closer to knowing what we were talking about, and we had been talking about it, more or less, for several minutes-time being a large factor, since the dinner hour was approaching and Dexter does require regular feeding.

“That’s all they’ll say about it,” Rita said. “And it is nowhere

near

enough. I don’t see

how

you could possibly tie up the Villegas’ cat by accident.”

“It didn’t die,” Astor said in the tiniest voice I had ever heard her use.

“And what were the hedge clippers for?” Rita demanded.

“We didn’t use them,” Astor said.

“But you were going to, weren’t you?” Rita said.

Two small heads swiveled to face me, and a moment later, Rita’s did, too.

I am sure it was completely unintentional, but a picture was beginning to emerge of what had happened, and it was not a peaceful still life. Clearly the youngsters had been attempting an independent study without me. And even worse, I could tell that somehow it had become my problem; the children expected me to bail them out, and Rita was clearly prepared to lock and load and open fire on me. Of course it was unfair; all I had done so far was come home from work. But as I have noticed on more than one occasion, life itself is unfair, and there is no complaint department, so we might as well accept things the way they happen, clean up the mess, and move on.

Which is what I attempted to do, however futile I suspected it would be. “I’m sure there’s a very good explanation,” I said, and Astor brightened immediately and began to nod vigorously.

“It was an accident,” she insisted happily.

“Nobody ties up a cat, tapes it to a workbench, and stands over it with hedge clippers by

accident

!” Rita said.

To be honest, things were getting a little complicated. On the one hand, I was very pleased to get such a clear picture at last of what the problem was. But on the other hand, we seemed to have strayed into an area that could be somewhat awkward to explain, and I could not help feeling that Rita might be a little bit better off if she remained ignorant of these matters.

I thought I had been clear with Astor and Cody that they were not to fly solo until I had explained their wings to them. But they had obviously chosen not to understand and, even though they were suffering some very gratifying consequences for their action, it was still up to me to get them out of it. Unless they could be made to understand that they absolutely must not repeat this-and must not stray from the Harry Path as I put their feet upon it-I was happy to let them twist in the wind indefinitely.

“Do you know that what you did is wrong?” I asked them. They nodded in unison.

“Do you know

why

it is wrong?” I said.

Astor looked very uncertain, glanced at Cody, and then blurted out, “Because we got caught!”

“There now, you see?” said Rita, and a hysterical edge was creeping into her voice.

“Astor,” I said, looking at her very carefully and not really winking, “this is not the time to be funny.”

“I’m glad somebody thinks this is funny,” Rita said. “But I don’t happen to think so.”

“Rita,” I said, with all the soothing calm I could muster, and then, using the smooth cunning I had developed in my years as an apparently human adult, I added, “I think this might be one of those times that Reverend Gilles was talking about, where I need to mentor.”

“Dexter, these two have just-I don’t have any idea-and you-!” she said, and even though she was close to tears, I was happy to see that at least her old speech patterns were returning. Just as happily, a scene from an old movie popped into my head in the nick of time, and I knew exactly what a real human being was supposed to do.

I walked over to Rita and, with my very best serious face, I put a hand on her shoulder.

“Rita,” I said, and I was very proud of how grave and manly my voice sounded, “you are too close to this, and you’re letting your emotions cloud your judgment. These two need some firm perspective, and I can give it to them. After all,” I said as the line came to me, and I was pleased to see that I hadn’t lost a step, “I have to be their father now.”

I should have guessed that this would be the remark that pushed Rita off the dock and into the lake of tears; and it was, because immediately after I said it, her lips began to tremble, her face lost all its anger, and a rivulet began to stream down each cheek.

“All right,” she sobbed, “please, I-just talk to them.” She snuffled loudly and hurried from the room.

I let Rita have her dramatic exit and gave it a moment to sink in before I walked back around to the front of the couch and stared down at my two miscreants. “Well,” I said. “What happened to We understand, We promise, We’ll wait?”

“You’re taking too long,” said Astor. “We haven’t done anything except the once, and besides, you’re not always right and we think we shouldn’t have to wait anymore.”

“I’m ready,” Cody said.

“Really,” I said. “Then I guess your mother is the greatest detective in the world, because you’re ready and she caught you anyway.”

“Dex-terrrr,” Astor whined.

“No, Astor, you quit talking and just listen to me for a minute.” I stared at her with my most serious face, and for a moment I thought she was going to say something else but then a miracle took place right there in our living room. Astor changed her mind and closed her mouth.

“All right,” I said. “I have said from the very beginning that you have to do it my way. You don’t have to believe I’m always right,” and Astor made a sound, but didn’t say anything. “But you have to do what I say. Or I will not help you, and you will end up in jail. There is no other way. Okay?”

It is quite possible that they didn’t know what to do with this new tone of voice and new role. I was no longer Playtime Dexter, but something very different, Dexter of Dark Discipline, which they had never seen before. They looked at each other uncertainly so I pushed a little more.

“You got caught,” I said. “What happens when you get caught?”

“Time out?” Cody said uncertainly.

“Uh-huh,” I said. “And if you’re thirty years old?”

For possibly the first time in her life, Astor had no answer, and Cody had already used up his two-word quota for the time being. They looked at each other, and then they looked at their feet.

“My sister, Sergeant Deborah, and I spend all day catching people who do this kind of stuff,” I said. “And when we catch them, they go to prison.” I smiled at Astor. “Time out for grown-ups. But a lot worse. You sit in a little room the size of your bathroom, locked in, all day and all night. You pee in a hole in the floor. You eat moldy garbage, and there are rats and lots of cockroaches.”

“We know what prison is, Dexter,” she said.

“Really? Then why are you in such a hurry to get there?” I said. “And do you know what Old Sparky is?”

Astor looked at her feet again; Cody hadn’t looked up yet.

“Old Sparky is the electric chair. If they catch you, they strap you into Old Sparky, put some wires on your head, and fry you up like bacon. Does that sound like fun?”

They shook their heads, no.

“So the very first lesson is not to get caught,” I said. “Remember the piranhas?” They nodded. “They look ferocious, so people know they’re dangerous.”

“But Dexter, we don’t look ferocious,” Astor said.

“No, you don’t,” I said. “And you don’t want to. We are supposed to be people, not piranhas. But the idea is the same, to look like something you are not. Because when something bad happens, that’s who everyone will look for first-the ferocious people. You need to look like sweet, lovable, normal children.”

“Can I wear makeup?” Astor asked.

“When you’re older,” I said.

“You say that about

everything

!” she said.

“And I mean it about everything,” I said. “You got caught this time because you went off on your own and didn’t know what you were doing. You didn’t know what you were doing because you didn’t listen to me.”

I decided the torture had gone on long enough and I sat down on the couch in between them. “No more doing anything without me, okay? And when you promise this time, you better mean it.”

They both looked slowly up at me and then nodded. “We promise,” Astor said softly, and Cody, even softer, echoed, “Promise.”

“Well then,” I said. I took their hands and we shook solemnly.

“Good,” I said. “Now let’s go apologize to your mom.” They both jumped up, radiating relief that the hideous ordeal was over, and I followed them out of the room, closer to feeling self-satisfied than I could remember feeling before.

Maybe there was something to this whole fatherhood thing after all.

CHAPTER 32

S

UN TZU, A VERY SMART MAN, IN SPITE OF THE FACT THAT he has been dead for so long, wrote a book called

The Art of War

, and one of the many clever observations he made in the book was that every time something awful happens, there’s a way to turn it to your advantage, if you just look at things properly. This is not New Age California Pollyanna thinking, insisting that if life gives you lemons you can always make Key Lime pie. It is, rather, very practical advice that comes in handy a lot more than you might think.

At the moment, for instance, my problem was how to continue training Cody and Astor in the Harry Way now that they had been busted by their mother. And in looking for a solution I remembered good old Sun Tzu and tried to imagine what he might have done. Of course, he had been a general, so he probably would have attacked the left flank with cavalry or something, but surely the principles were the same.

So as I led Cody and Astor to their weeping mother I was beating the bushes in the dark forest of Dexter ’s brain for some small partridge of an idea that the old Chinese general might approve of. And just as the three of us trickled to a halt in front of sniffling Rita, the idea popped out, and I grabbed it.

“Rita,” I said quietly, “I think I can stop this before it gets out of hand.”

“You heard what-This is already out of hand,” she said, and she paused for a large snuffle.

“I have an idea,” I said. “I want you to bring them down to me at work tomorrow, right after school.”

“But that isn’t-I mean, didn’t it all start because-”

“Did you ever see a TV show called

Scared Straight

?” I said.

She stared at me for a moment, snuffled again, and looked at the two kids.

And that is why, at three thirty the next afternoon, Cody and Astor were taking turns peering into a microscope in the forensics lab. “That’s a

hair

?” Astor demanded.

“That’s right,” I said.

“It looks

gross

!”

“Most of the human body is gross, especially if you look at it under a microscope,” I told her. “Look at the one next to it.”

There was a studious pause, broken only once when Cody yanked on her arm, and she pushed him away and said, “Stop it, Cody.”

“What do you notice?” I asked.

“They don’t look the same,” she said.

“They’re not,” I said. “The first one is yours. The other one is mine.”

She continued to look for a moment, then straightened up from the eyepiece. “You can tell,” she said. “They’re different.”

“It gets better,” I told her. “Cody, give me your shoe.”

Cody very obligingly sat on the floor and pried off his left sneaker. I took it from him and held out a hand. “Come with me,” I said. I helped him to his feet and he followed me, hopping one-footed to the closest countertop. I lifted him onto a stool and held up the shoe so he could see the bottom. “Your shoe,” I said. “Clean or dirty?”

He peered at it carefully. “Clean,” he said.

“So you would think,” I said. “Watch this.” I took a small wire brush to the tread of his shoe, carefully scraping out the nearly invisible gunk from between the ridges of the tread into a petri dish. I lifted a small sample of it onto a glass slide and took it back over to the microscope. Astor immediately crowded in to look, but Cody hopped over quickly. “My turn,” he said. “My shoe.” She looked at me and I nodded.

“It’s his shoe,” I said. “You can see right after.” She apparently accepted the justice of that, as she stepped back and let Cody climb onto the stool. I looked into the eyepiece to focus it, and saw that the slide was everything I could hope for. “Aha,” I said, and stepped back. “Tell me what you see, young Jedi.”

Cody frowned into the microscope for several minutes, until Astor’s jiggling dance of impatience became so distracting that we both looked at her. “That’s long enough,” she said. “It’s my turn.”

“In a minute,” I said, and I turned back to Cody. “Tell me what you saw.”

He shook his head. “Junk,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Now I’ll tell you.” I looked into the eyepiece again and said, “First off, animal hair, probably feline.”

“That means cat,” Astor said.

“Then there’s some soil with a high nitrogen content-probably potting soil, like you’d use for houseplants.” I spoke to him without looking up. “Where did you take the cat? The garage? Where your mom works on her plants?”

“Yes,” he said.

“Uh-huh. I thought so.” I looked back into the microscope. “Oh-look there. That’s a synthetic fiber, from somebody’s carpet. It’s blue.” I looked at Cody and raised an eyebrow. “What color is the carpet in your room, Cody?”

His eyes were wide-open round as he said, “Blue.”

“Yup. If I wanted to get fancy I’d compare this to a piece I took from your room. Then you would be cooked. I could prove that it was you with the cat.” I looked back into the eyepiece again. “My goodness, somebody had pizza recently-oh, and there’s a small chunk of popcorn, too. Remember the movie last week?”

“Dexter, I wanna see,” Astor whined. “It’s my turn.”

“All right,” I said, and I set her on a stool next to Cody’s so she could peer into the microscope.

“I don’t see popcorn,” she said immediately.

“That round, brownish thing up in the corner,” I said. She was quiet for a minute, and then looked up at me.

“You can’t really tell all that,” she said. “Not just looking in the microscope.”

I am happy to admit that I was showing off, but after all, that’s what this whole episode was about, so I was prepared. I grabbed a three-ring notebook I had prepared and laid it open on the counter. “I can, too,” I said. “And a whole lot more. Look.” I turned to a page that had photos of several different animal hairs, carefully selected to show the greatest variety. “Here’s the cat hair,” I said. “Completely different from goat, see?” I flipped the page. “And carpet fibers. Nothing like these from a shirt and this one from a washcloth.”

The two of them crowded together and stared at the book, flipping through the ten or so pages I had put together to show them that, yes indeed, I really can tell all that. It was carefully arranged to make forensics look just a tiny bit more all-seeing and all-powerful than the Wizard of Oz, of course. And to be fair, we really can do most of what I showed them. It never actually seems to do much good in catching any bad guys, but why should I tell them that and spoil a magical afternoon?

“Look back in the microscope,” I told them after a few minutes. “See what else you can find.” They did so, very eagerly, and seemed quite happy at it for a while.

When they finally looked up at me I gave them a cheerful smile and said, “All this from a clean shoe.” I closed the book and watched the two of them think about this. “And that’s just using the microscope,” I said, nodding around the room at the many gleaming machines. “Think what we can figure out if we use all the fancy stuff.”

“Yeah, but we could go barefoot,” Astor said.

I nodded as if what she had said made sense. “Yes, you could,” I said. “And then I could do something like this-give me your hand.”

Astor eyed me for a few seconds as if she was afraid I would cut her arm off, but then she held it out slowly. I held it and, using a fingernail clipper from my pocket, I scraped under her fingernails. “Wait until you see what you have here,” I said.

“But I washed my hands,” Astor said.

“Doesn’t matter,” I told her. I put the small specks of stuff onto another glass slide and fixed it to the microscope. “Now then,” I said.

CLUMP.

It really is a bit melodramatic to say that we all froze, but there it is-we did. They both looked up at me and I looked back at them and we all forgot to breathe.

CLUMP.

The sound was getting closer and it was very hard to remember that we were in police headquarters and perfectly safe.

“Dexter,” Astor said in a slightly quavery voice.

“We are in police headquarters,” I said. “We’re perfectly safe.”

CLUMP.

It stopped, very close. The hair went up on the back of my neck and I turned toward the door as it swung slowly open.

Sergeant Doakes. He stood there in the doorway, glaring, which seemed to have become his permanent expression. “You,” he said, and the sound was nearly as unsettling as his appearance as it rolled out of his tongue-less mouth.

“Why yes, it is me,” I said. “Good of you to remember.”

He clumped one more step into the room and Astor scrambled off her stool and scurried to the windows, as far away from the door as she could get. Doakes paused and looked at her. Then his eyes swung back to Cody, who slid off his stool and stood there unblinking, facing Doakes.

Doakes stared at Cody, Cody stared back, and Doakes made what I can only call a Darth Vader intake of breath. Then he swung his head back to me and clumped one rapid step closer, nearly losing his balance. “You,” he said again, hissing it this time. “Kigs!”

“Kigs?” I said, and I really was puzzled and not trying to provoke him. I mean, if he insisted on stomping around and frightening children, the least he could do is carry a notepad and pencil to communicate with.

Apparently that thoughtful gesture was beyond him, though. Instead he gave another Darth Vader breath and slowly pointed his steel claw at Cody. “Kigs,” he said agian, his lips drawn back in a snarl.

“He means me,” Cody said. I turned to him, surprised to hear him speak with Doakes right there, like a nightmare come to life. But of course, Cody didn’t have nightmares. He simply looked at Doakes.

“What about you, Cody?” I said.

“He saw my shadow,” Cody said.

Sergeant Doakes took another wobbly step toward me. His right claw snapped, as if it had decided on its own to attack me. “You. Goo. Gik.”

It was becoming apparent that he had something on his mind, but it was even clearer that he ought to stick with the silent glaring, since it was nearly impossible to understand the gooey syllables that came from his damaged mouth.

“Wuk. You. Goo,” he hissed, and it was such a clear condemnation of all that was Dexter, I at last understood that he was accusing me of something.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Goy,” he said, pointing again at Cody.

“Why, yes,” I said. “Methodist, actually.” I admit that I deliberately misunderstood him: he was saying “boy” and it came out “goy” because he had no tongue, but really, one can only take so much. It should have been painfully clear to Doakes that his attempts at vocal communication were having very limited success, and yet he insisted on trying. Didn’t the man have any sense of decorum at all?

Happily for all of us, we were interrupted by a clatter in the hallway and Deborah rushed into the room. “Dexter,” she said. She paused as she took in the wild tableau of Doakes with claw upraised against me, Astor cringing against the window, and Cody lifting a scalpel off the bench to use against Doakes. “What the hell,” Deborah said. “Doakes?”

He very slowly let his arm drop, but he did not take his eyes off me.

“I’ve been looking for you, Dexter. Where were you?”

I was grateful enough for her timely entry that I did not point out how foolish her question was. “Why, I was right here, educating the children,” I said. “Where were you?”

“On my way to the Dinner Key,” she said. “They found Kurt Wagner’s body.”

CHAPTER 33

D

EBORAH HURLED US THROUGH TRAFFIC AT EVEL Knievel-over-the-canyon speeds. I tried to think of a polite way to point out that we were going to see a dead body that would probably not escape, so could she please slow down, but I could not come up with any phrase that would not cause her to take her hands off the wheel and put them around my neck.

Cody and Astor were too young to realize that they were in mortal danger, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly in the backseat, even getting into the spirit of things by happily returning the greetings of the other motorists by raising their own middle fingers in unison each time we cut off somebody.

There was a three-car pileup on U.S. 1 at LeJeune which slowed traffic for a few moments and we were forced to cut our pace to a crawl. Since I no longer had to spend all my breath suppressing screams of terror, I tried to find out from Deborah exactly what we were racing to see.

“How was he killed?” I asked her.

“Just like the others,” she said. “Burned. And there’s no head on the body.”

“You’re sure this is Kurt Wagner?” I asked her.

“Can I prove it? Not yet,” she said. “Am I sure? Shit yes.”

“Why?”

“They found his car nearby,” she said.

I was quite sure that normally I would understand exactly why somebody seemed to have a fetish for the heads, and know where to find them and why. But of course, now that I was all alone on the inside there was no more normal.

“This doesn’t make any sense, you know,” I said.

Deborah snarled and hammered the heel of her hand on the steering wheel. “Tell me about it,” she said.

“Kurt must have done the other victims,” I said.

“So who killed him? His scoutmaster?” she said, leaning on the horn and pulling around the traffic snarl into the oncoming lane. She swerved toward a bus, stomped on the gas, and wove through traffic for fifty yards until we were past the pileup. I concentrated on remembering to breathe and reflecting that we were all certain to die someday anyway, so in the big picture what did it really matter if Deborah killed us? It was not terribly comforting, but it did keep me from screaming and diving out the car window until Deborah pulled back into the correct lane on the far side of U.S. 1.

“That was fun,” said Astor. “Can we do that again?”

Cody nodded enthusiastically.

“And we could put on the siren next time,” Astor said. “How come you don’t use the siren, Sergeant Debbie?”

“Don’t call me Debbie,” Deborah snapped. “I just don’t like the siren.”

“Why not?” Astor insisted.

Deborah blew out a huge breath and glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “It’s a fair question,” I said.

“It makes too much noise,” Deborah said. “Now let me drive, okay?”

“All right,” Astor said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

We drove in silence all the way to Grand Avenue, and I tried to think about it by myself-clearly enough to come up with anything that might help. I didn’t, but I did think of one thing worth mentioning.

“What if Kurt’s murder is just a coincidence?” I said.

“Even you can’t really believe that,” she said.

“But if he was on the run,” I said, “maybe he tried to get a fake ID from the wrong people, or get smuggled out of the country. There are plenty of bad guys he could run into under the circumstances.”

It didn’t really sound likely, even to me, but Deborah thought about it for a few seconds anyway, chewing on her lower lip and absentmindedly blasting the horn as she pulled around a courtesy van from one of the hotels.

“No,” she said at last. “He was cooked, Dexter. Like the first two. No way they could copy that.”

Once again I was aware of a small stirring in the bleak emptiness inside, the area once inhabited by the Dark Passenger. I closed my eyes and tried to find some shred of my once-constant companion, but there was nothing. I opened my eyes in time to see Deborah accelerate around a bright red Ferrari.

“People read the newspapers,” I said. “There are always copycat killings.”

She thought some more, and then shook her head. “No,” she said at last. “I don’t believe in coincidence. Not with something like this. Cooked and headless both, and it’s a coincidence? No way.”

Hope always dies hard, but even so I had to admit that she was probably right. Beheading and burning were not really standard procedures for the normal, blue-collar killer, and most people would be far more likely simply to clonk you on the head, tie an anchor to your feet, and fling you into the bay.

So in all likelihood, we were on our way to see the body of somebody we were sure was a killer, and he had been killed the same way as his own victims. If I had been my cheerful old self, I would certainly have enjoyed the delicious irony, but in my present condition it seemed like just another annoying affront to an orderly existence.

But Deborah gave me very little time to reflect and become grumpy; she whipped through the traffic in the center of Coconut Grove and pulled into the parking area beside Bayfront Park, where the familiar circus was already under way. Three police cruisers were pulled up, and Camilla Figg was dusting for fingerprints on a battered red Geo parked at one of the meters-presumably Kurt Wagner’s car.

I got out and looked around, and even without an inner voice whispering clues, I noticed right away that there was something wrong with this picture. “Where’s the body?” I asked Deborah.

She was already walking toward the gate of the yacht club. “Out on the island,” she said.

I blinked and got out of the car. For no reason I could name, the thought of the body on the island raised the hair on the back of my neck, but as I looked out over the water for the answer, all I got was the afternoon breeze that blew across the pines on the barrier islands of Dinner Key and straight through the emptiness inside me.

Deborah jogged me with her elbow. “Come on,” she said.

I looked in the backseat at Cody and Astor, who had just now mastered the intricacies of the seat-belt release and were trickling out of the car. “Stay here,” I said to them. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

“Where are you going?” Astor said.

“I have to go out to that island,” I said.

“Is there a dead person there?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

She glanced at Cody, then back at me. “We want to go,” she said.

“No, absolutely not,” I said. “I got in enough trouble the last time. If I let you see another dead body your mother would turn me into one, too.”

Cody thought that was very funny and he made a small noise and shook his head.

I heard a shout and looked through the gate into the marina. Deborah was already at the dock, about to step into the police boat tied up there. She waved an arm at me and yelled, “Dexter!”

Astor stomped her foot to get my attention, and I looked back at her. “You have to stay here,” I said, “and I have to go now.”

“But Dexter, we want to ride on the boat,” she said.

“Well, you can’t,” I said. “But if you behave I’ll take you on my boat this weekend.”

“To see a dead person?” Astor said.

“No,” I said. “We’re not going to see any more dead bodies for a while.”

“But you promised!” she said.

“Dexter!” Deborah yelled again. I waved at her, which did not seem to be the response she was looking for, because she beckoned furiously at me.

“Astor, I have to go,” I said. “Stay here. We’ll talk about this later.”

“It’s always later,” she muttered.

On the way through the gate I paused and spoke to the uniformed cop there, a large heavy man with black hair and a very low forehead. “Could you keep one eye on my kids there?” I asked him.

He stared at me. “What am I, day-care patrol?”

“Just for a few minutes,” I said. “They’re very well behaved.”

“Lookit, sport,” he said, but before he could finish his sentence there was a rustle of movement and Deborah was beside us.

“God

damn

it, Dexter!” she said. “Get your ass on the boat!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to find somebody to watch the kids.”

Deborah ground her teeth together. Then she glanced at the big cop and read his name tag. “Suchinsky,” she said. “Watch the fucking kids.”

“Aw, come on, Sarge,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

“Stick with the kids, goddamn it,” she said. “You might learn something. Dexter-get on the goddamn boat, now!”

I turned meekly and hurried for the goddamn boat. Deborah strode past me and was already seated when I jumped on, and the cop driving the boat headed for one of the smaller islands, weaving between the anchored sailboats.

There are several small islands on the outside of Dinner Key Marina that provide protection from wind and wave, one of the things that makes it such a good anchorage. Of course, it’s only good under ordinary circumstances, as the islands themselves proved. They were littered with broken boats and other maritime junk deposited by the many recent hurricanes, and every now and then a squatter would set up housekeeping, building a shack from shattered boat parts.

The island we headed for was one of the smaller ones. Half of a forty-foot sports fisherman lay on the beach at a crazy angle, and the pine trees inland of the beach were hung with chunks of Styrofoam, tattered cloth, and wispy shreds of plastic sheeting and garbage bags. Other than that, it was just the way the Native Americans had left it, a peaceful little chunk of land covered with Australian pines, condoms, and beer cans.

Except, of course, for Kurt Wagner’s body, which had most likely been left by someone other than Native Americans. It was lying in the center of the island in a small clearing, and like the others, it had been arranged in a formal pose, with the arms folded across the chest and the legs pressed together. The body was headless and unclothed, charred from being burned, very much like the others-except that this time there had been a small addition. Around the neck was a leather string holding a pewter medallion about the size of an egg. I leaned closer to look; it was a bull’s head.

Once again I felt a strange twinge in the emptiness, as if some part of me were recognizing that this was significant, but didn’t know why or how to express it-not alone, not without the Passenger.

Vince Masuoka was squatting next to the body examining a cigarette butt and Deborah knelt down beside him. I circled them one time, looking at it from all angles: Still Life with Cops. I was hoping, I suppose, that I would find a small but significant clue. Perhaps the killer’s driver’s license, or a signed confession. But there was nothing of the kind, nothing but sand, pockmarked from countless feet and the wind.

I went down on one knee beside Deborah. “You looked for the tattoo, right?” I asked her.

“First thing,” Vince said. He extended a rubber-gloved hand and lifted the body slightly. There it was, half covered with sand but still visible, only the upper edge of it cut off and left, presumably, with the missing head.

“It’s him,” Deborah said. “The tattoo, his car is at the marina-it’s him, Dexter. And I wish I knew what the hell that tattoo meant.”

“It’s Aramaic,” I said.

“How the fuck would you know that?” Deborah said.

“My research,” I said, and I squatted down next to the body. “Look.” I picked a small pine twig out of the sand and pointed with it. Part of the first letter was missing, cut off along with the head, but the rest was plainly visible and matched my language lesson. “There’s the

M

, what’s left of it. And the

L

, and the

K

.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Deborah demanded.

“Moloch,” I said, feeling a small irrational chill just saying the word here in the bright sunshine. I tried to shake it off, but a feeling of uneasiness stayed behind. “Aramaic has no vowels. So

MLK

spells Moloch.”

“Or milk,” Deborah said.

“Really, Debs, if you think our killer would tattoo

milk

on his neck, you need a nap.”

“But if Wagner is Moloch, who killed him?”

“Wagner kills the others,” I said, trying very hard to sound thoughtful and confident at the same time, a difficult task. “And then, um…”

“Yeah,” she said. “I already figured out ‘um.’”

“And you’re watching Wilkins.”

“We’re watching Wilkins, for Christ’s sake.”

I looked at the body again, but there was nothing else on it to tell me more than I knew, which was almost nothing. I could not stop my brain from going in a circle; if Wagner had been Moloch, and now Wagner was dead, and killed by Moloch…

I stood up. For a moment I felt dizzy, as if bright lights were crashing in on me, and in the distance I heard that awful music beginning to swell up into the afternoon and for just that moment I could not doubt that somewhere nearby the god was calling me-the real god himself and not some psychotic prankster.

I shook my head to silence it and nearly fell over. I felt a hand grabbing my arm to steady me, but whether it was Debs, Vince, or Moloch himself, I couldn’t tell. From far away a voice was calling my name, but it was singing it, the cadence rising up to the far-too-familiar rhythm of that music. I closed my eyes and felt heat on my face and the music got louder. Something shook me and I opened my eyes.

The music stopped. The heat was just the Miami sun, with the wind whipping in the clouds of an afternoon squall. Deborah held both my elbows and shook me, saying my name over and over patiently.

“Dexter,” she said. “Hey Dex, come on. Dexter. Dexter.”

“Here I am,” I said, although I was not entirely sure of that.

“You okay, Dex?” she said.

“I think I stood up too fast,” I said.

She looked dubious. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“Really, Debs, I’m fine now,” I said. “I mean, I think so.”

“You think so,” she said.

“Yes. I mean, I just stood up too fast.”

She looked at me a moment longer, then let go and stepped back. “Okay,” she said. “Then if you can make it to the boat, let’s get back.”

It may be that I was still dizzy, but there seemed to be no sense in her words, almost as if they were just made-up syllables. “Get back?” I said.

“Dexter,” she said. “We got six bodies, and our only suspect is on the ground here with no head.”

“Right,” I said, and I heard a faint drumbeat under my voice. “So where are we going?”

Deborah balled up her fists and clenched her teeth. She looked down at the body, and for a moment I thought she was actually going to spit. “What about the guy you chased into the canal?” she said at last.

“Starzak? No, he said…” I stopped myself from finishing, but not quite soon enough, because Deborah pounced.

“He

said

? When did you talk to him, goddamn it?”

To be fair to me, I really was still a little bit dizzy, and I had not thought before I spoke, and now I was in a somewhat awkward spot. I could not very well tell my sister that I had spoken to him just the other night when I had taped him to his workbench and tried to cut him up into small neat pieces. But the blood must have been flowing back into my brain, because I very quickly said, “I mean, he

seemed

,” I said. “He seemed to be just a…I don’t know,” I said. “I think it was personal, like I cut him off in traffic.”

Deborah looked at me angrily for a moment, but then she seemed to accept what I had said, and she turned away and kicked at the sand. “Well, we got nothing else,” she said. “It won’t hurt to check him out.”

It didn’t seem like a really good idea to tell her that I already had checked him out quite thoroughly, far beyond the boundaries of normal police routine, so I just nodded in agreement.

CHAPTER 34

T

HERE WAS NOT A GREAT DEAL MORE WORTH SEEING ON the little island. Vince and the other forensic nerds would spot anything else worth the trouble, and our presence would only hamper them. Deborah was impatient and wanted to rush back to the mainland to intimidate suspects. So we walked to the beach and boarded the police launch for the short trip back across the harbor to the dock. I felt a little better when I climbed onto the dock and walked back to the parking lot.

I didn’t see Cody and Astor, so I went over to Officer Low Forehead. “The kids are in the car,” he told me before I could speak. “They wanted to play cops and robbers with me, and I didn’t sign up for day care.”

Apparently he was convinced that his line about day care was so sidesplittingly funny that it was worth repeating, so rather than risk having him say it again, I simply nodded, thanked him, and went over to Deborah’s car. Cody and Astor were not visible until I was practically on top of the car, and for a moment I wondered which car they were in. But then I saw them, crouching down in the backseat, looking at me with very wide eyes. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. “Can I come in?” I called through the glass.

Cody fumbled with the lock, and then swung the door open.

“What’s up?” I asked them.

“We saw the scary guy,” Astor said.

At first I had no idea what she meant by that, and so I really couldn’t say why I felt the sweat start rolling down my back. “What do you mean, the scary guy?” I said. “You mean that policeman over there?”

“Dex-terrr,” Astor said. “Not dumb,

scary

. Like when we saw the heads.”

“The

same

scary guy?”

They exchanged another look, and Cody shrugged. “Kind of,” Astor said.

“He saw my shadow,” Cody said in his soft, husky voice.

It was good to hear the boy open up like this, and even better, now I knew why the sweat was running down my back. He had said something about his shadow before, and I had ignored it. Now it was time to listen. I climbed into the backseat with them.

“How do you know he saw your shadow, Cody?”

“He

said

so,” Astor said. “And Cody could see

his

.”

Cody nodded, without taking his eyes off my face, looking at me with his usual guarded expression that showed nothing. And yet I could tell that he trusted me to take care of whatever this was. I wished I could share his optimism.

“When you say your shadow,” I asked him carefully, “do you mean the one on the ground that the sun makes?”

Cody shook his head.

“You have another shadow besides that,” I said.

Cody looked at me like I had asked him if was wearing pants, but he nodded. “Inside,” he said. “Like you used to have.”

I sat back against the seat and pretended to breathe. “Inside shadow.” It was a perfect description-elegant, economical, and accurate. And to add that I used to have one gave it a poignancy which I found quite moving.

Of course, being moved really serves no useful purpose, and I usually manage to avoid it. In this case, I mentally shook myself and wondered what had happened to the proud towers of Castle Dexter, once so lofty and festooned with silk banners of pure reason. I remembered very well that I used to be smart, and yet here I was ignoring something important, ignoring it for far too long. Because the question was not what was Cody talking about. The real puzzle was why I had failed to understand him before.

Cody had seen another predator and recognized him when the dark thing inside him heard the roar of a fellow monster, just as I had known others when my Passenger was at home. And this other had recognized Cody for what he was in exactly the same way. But why that should frighten Cody and Astor into hiding in the car-

“Did the man say anything to you?” I asked them.

“He gave me this,” Cody said. He held out a buff-colored business card and I took it from him.

On the card was a stylized picture of a bull’s head, exactly like the one I had just seen around the neck of Kurt’s body out on the island. And underneath it was a perfect copy of Kurt’s tattoo: MLK.

The front door of the car opened and Deborah hurled herself behind the wheel. “Let’s go,” she said. “Get in your seat.” She slammed the key into the ignition and had the car started before I could even inhale to speak.

“Wait a minute,” I said after I managed to find a little air to work with.

“I don’t

have

a goddamned minute,” she said. “Come on.”

“He was here, Debs,” I said.

“For Christ’s sake, Dex,

who

was here?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Then how the fuck do you know he was here?”

I leaned forward and handed her the card. “He left this,” I said.

Deborah took the card, glanced at it, and then dropped it on the seat as if it was made out of cobra venom. “Shit,” she said. She turned off the car’s engine. “Where did he leave it?”

“With Cody,” I said.

She swiveled her head around and looked at the three of us, one after the other. “Why would he leave it with a kid?” she asked.

“Because-” Astor said, and I put a hand on her mouth.

“Don’t interrupt, Astor,” I said, before she could say anything about seeing shadows.

She took a breath, but then she thought better of it and just sat there, unhappy at being muzzled but going along with it for the time being. We sat there for a moment, the four of us, one big unhappy extended family.

“Why not stick it on the windshield, or send it in the mail?” Deborah said. “For that matter, why the hell give us the damn thing at all? Why even have it printed, for Christ’s sake?”

“He gave it to Cody to intimidate us,” I said. “He’s saying, ‘See? I can get to you where you’re vulnerable.’”

“Showing off,” Deborah said.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“Well goddamn it, that’s the first thing he’s done that made any sense at all.” She slapped the heels of her hands on the steering wheel. “He wants to play catch-me-if-you-can like all the other psychos, then by God I can play that game, too. And I’ll catch the son of a bitch.” She looked back at me. “Put that card in an evidence bag,” she said, “and try to get a description from the kids.” She opened the car door, vaulted out, and went over to talk to the big cop, Suchinsky.

“Well,” I said to Cody and Astor, “can you remember what this man looked like?”

“Yes,” said Astor. “Are we really going to play with him like your sister said?”

“She didn’t mean ‘play’ like you play kick the can,” I said. “It’s more like he’s daring us to try to catch him.”

“Then how is that different from kick the can?” she said.

“Nobody gets killed playing kick the can,” I told her. “What did this man look like?”

She shrugged. “He was old.”

“You mean, really old? White hair and wrinkles?”

“No, you know. Old like you,” she said.

“Ah, you mean

old

,” I said, feeling the icy hand of mortality brush its fingers across my forehead and leave feebleness and shaky hands in its wake. It was not a promising start toward getting a real description, but after all, she was ten years old and all grown-ups are equally uninteresting. It was clear that Deborah had made the smart move by choosing to speak to Officer Dim instead. This was hopeless. Still, I had to try.

A sudden inspiration hit me-or at any rate, considering my current lack of brain power, something that would have to stand in for inspiration. It would at least make sense if the scary guy had been Starzak, coming back after me. “Anything else about him you remember? Did he have an accent when he spoke?”

She shook her head. “You mean like French or something? No, he just talked regular. Who’s Kurt?”

It would be an exaggeration to say that my little heart went flip-flop at her words, but I certainly felt some kind of internal quiver. “Kurt is the dead guy I just looked at. Why do you want to know?”

“The man said,” Astor said. “He said someday Cody would be a much better helper than Kurt.”

A sudden, very cold chill rolled through Dexter’s interior climate. “Really,” I said. “What a nice man.”

“He wasn’t nice at all, Dexter, we told you. He was scary.”

“But what did he look like, Astor?” I said without any real hope. “How can we find him if we don’t know what he looks like?”

“You don’t have to catch him, Dexter,” she said, with the same mildly irritated tone of voice. “He said you’ll find him when the time is right.”

The world stopped for a moment, just long enough for me to feel drops of ice water shoot out of all my pores as if they were spring-loaded. “What exactly did he say?” I asked her when things started up again.

“He said to tell you you’ll find him when the time is right,” she said. “I just said.”

“How did he say it?” I said. “‘Tell Daddy?’ ‘Tell that man?’ What?”

She sighed again. “Tell

Dexter

,” she said, slowly so I would understand. “That’s you. He said, ‘Tell Dexter he’ll find me when the time is right.’”

I suppose I should have been even more scared. But strangely enough, I wasn’t. Instead, I felt better. Now I knew for sure-someone really was stalking me. Whether a god or a mortal, it didn’t matter anymore, and he would come get me when the time was right, whatever that meant.

Unless I got him first.

It was a silly thought, straight out of a high-school locker room. I had so far shown absolutely no ability to stay even half a step ahead of whoever this was, let alone find him. I’d done nothing but watch as he stalked me, scared me, chased me, and drove me into a state of dark dithering unlike anything I had ever experienced before.

He knew who, what, and where I was. I didn’t even know what he looked like. “Please, Astor, this is important,” I said. “Was he real tall? Did he have a beard? Was he Cuban? Black?”

She shrugged. “Just, you know,” she said, “a white man. He had glasses. Just a regular man. You know.”

I didn’t know, but I was saved from admitting it when Deborah yanked open the driver’s door and slid back into the car. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “How can a man be that dumb and still tie his own shoes?”

“Does that mean Officer Suchinsky didn’t have a lot to say?” I asked her.

“He had plenty to say,” Deborah said. “But it was all brain-dead bullshit. He thought the guy might have been driving a green car, and that’s about it.”

“Blue,” Cody said, and we all looked at him. “It was blue.”

“Are you sure?” I asked him, and he nodded.

“So do I believe a little kid?” Deborah asked. “Or a cop with fifteen years on the force and nothing in his head but shit?”

“You shouldn’t keep saying those bad words,” Astor said. “That’s five and a half dollars you owe me. And anyway, Cody’s right, it was a blue car. I saw it, too, and it was blue.”

I looked at Astor, but I could feel the pressure of Deborah’s stare on me and I turned back to her.

“Well?” she said.

“Well,” I said. “Without the bad words, these are two very sharp kids, and Officer Suchinsky will never be invited to join Mensa.”

“So I’m supposed to believe them,” she said.

“I do.”

Deborah chewed on that for a moment, literally moving her mouth around as if she was grinding some very tough food. “Okay,” she said at last. “So now I know he’s driving a blue car, just like one out of every three people in Miami. Tell me how that helps me.”

“Wilkins drives a blue car,” I said.

“Wilkins is under surveillance, goddamn it,” she said.

“Call them.”

She looked at me, chewed on her lip, and then picked up her radio and stepped out of the car. She talked for a moment, and I heard her voice rising. Then she said another of her very bad words, and Astor looked at me and shook her head. And then Deborah slammed herself back into the car.

“Son of a bitch,” she said.

“They lost him?”

“No, he’s right there, at his house,” she said. “He just pulled in and went in the house.”

“Where did he go?”

“They don’t know,” she said. “They lost him on the shift change.”

“What?”

“DeMarco was coming in as Balfour was punching out,” she said. “He slipped away while they were changing. They swear he wasn’t gone more than ten minutes.”

“His house is a five-minute drive from here.”

“I know that,” she said bitterly. “So what do we do?”

“Keep them watching Wilkins,” I said. “And in the meantime, you go talk to Starzak.”

“You’re coming with me, right?” she said.

“No,” I said, thinking that I certainly didn’t want to see Starzak, and that for once I had a perfect excuse in place. “I have to get the kids home.”

She gave me a sour look. “And what if it isn’t Starzak?” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know either.” She started the engine. “Get in your seat.”

CHAPTER 35

I

T WAS WELL PAST FIVE O’CLOCK BY THE TIME WE GOT BACK to headquarters and so, in spite of some very sour looks from Deborah, I loaded Cody and Astor into my own humble vehicle and headed for home. They remained subdued for most of the ride, apparently still a little bit shaken by their encounter with the scary guy. But they were resilient children, which was amply demonstrated by the fact that they could still talk at all, considering what their biological father had done to them. So when we were only about ten minutes from the house Astor began to return to normal.

“I wish you would drive like Sergeant Debbie,” she said.

“I would rather live a little longer,” I told her.

“Why don’t you have a siren?” she demanded. “Didn’t you want one?”

“You don’t get a siren in forensics,” I said. “And no, I never wanted one. I would rather keep a low profile.”

In the rearview mirror I could see her frown. “What does that mean?” she asked.

“It means I don’t want to draw attention to myself,” I said. “I don’t want people to notice me. That’s something you two have to learn about,” I added.

“Everybody else wants to be noticed,” she said. “It’s like all they ever do, is do stuff so everybody will look at them.”

“You two are different,” I said. “You will always be different, and you will never be like everybody else.” She didn’t say anything for a long time and I glanced at her in the mirror. She was looking at her feet. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” I said. “What’s another word for normal?”

“I don’t know,” she said dully.

“Ordinary,” I said. “Do you really want to be ordinary?”

“No,” she said, and she didn’t sound quite so unhappy. “But then if we’re not ordinary, people will notice us.”

“That’s why you have to learn to keep a low profile,” I said, secretly pleased at the way the conversation had worked around to prove my point. “You have to pretend to be

really

normal.”

“So we shouldn’t ever let anybody know we’re different,” she said. “Not anybody.”

“That’s right,” I said.

She looked at her brother, and they had another of those long silent conversations. I enjoyed the quiet, just driving through the evening congestion and feeling sorry for myself.

After a few minutes Astor spoke up again. “That means we shouldn’t tell Mom what we did today,” she said.

“You can tell her about the microscope,” I said.

“But not the other stuff?” Astor said. “The scary guy and riding with Sergeant Debbie?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“But we’re never supposed to tell a lie,” she said. “Especially to our own mother.”

“That’s why you don’t tell her anything,” I said. “She doesn’t need to know things that will make her worry too much.”

“But she loves us,” Astor said. “She wants us to be happy.”

“Yes,” I said. “But she has to think you are happy in a way she can understand. Otherwise

she

can’t be happy.”

There was another long silence before Astor finally said, just before we turned onto their street, “Does the scary guy have a mother?”

“Almost certainly,” I said.

Rita must have been waiting right inside the front door, because as we pulled up and parked the door swung open and she came out to meet us. “Well, hello,” she said cheerfully. “And what did you two learn today?”

“We saw dirt,” Cody said. “From my shoe.”

Rita blinked. “Really,” she said.

“And there was a piece of popcorn, too,” Astor said. “And we looked in the microphone and we could tell where we had been.”

“Micro

scope

,” Cody said.

“Whatever,” Astor shrugged. “But you could tell whose hair it was, too. And if it was a goat or a rug.”

“Wow,” Rita said, looking somewhat overwhelmed and uncertain, “I guess you had quite a time then.”

“Yes,” Cody said.

“Well then,” Rita said. “Why don’t you two get started on homework, and I’ll get you a snack.”

“Okay,” Astor said, and she and Cody scurried up the walk and into the house. Rita watched them until they went inside, and then she turned to me and held onto my elbow as we strolled after them.

“So it went well?” she asked me. “I mean, with the-they seemed very, um…”

“They are,” I said. “I think they’re beginning to understand that there are consequences for fooling around like that.”

“You didn’t show them anything too grim, did you?” she said.

“Not at all. Not even any blood.”

“Good,” she said, and she leaned her head on my shoulder, which I suppose is part of the price you have to pay when you are going to marry someone. Perhaps it was simply a public way to mark her territory, in which case I guess I should be very happy that she chose not to do so with the traditional animal method. Anyway, displaying affection through physical contact is not something I really understand, and I felt a bit awkward, but I put an arm around her, since I knew that was the correct human response, and we followed the kids into the house.

I’m quite sure it isn’t right to call it a dream. But in the night the sound came into my poor battered head once again, the music and chanting and the clash of metal I had heard before, and there was the feeling of heat on my face and a swell of savage joy rising from the special place inside that had been empty for so long now. I woke up standing by the front door with my hand on the doorknob, covered with sweat, content, fulfilled, and not at all uneasy as I should have been.

I knew the term “sleepwalking,” of course. But I also knew from my freshman psychology class that the reasons someone sleepwalks are usually not related to hearing music. And I also knew in the deepest level of my being that I should be anxious, worried, crawling with distress at the things that had been happening in my unconscious brain. They did not belong there, it was not possible that they could be there-and yet, there they were. And I was glad to have them. That was the most frightening thing of all.

The music was not welcome in the Dexter Auditorium. I did not want it. I wanted it to go away. But it came, and it played, and it made me supernaturally happy against my will and then dumped me by the front door, apparently trying to get me outside and-

And what? It was a jolt of monster-under-the-bed thought straight from the lizard brain, but…

Was it a random impulse, uncharted movement by my unconscious mind, that got me out of bed and down the hall to the door? Or was something trying to get me to open the door and go outside? He had told the kids I would find him when the time was right-was this the right time?

Did someone want Dexter alone and unconscious in the night?

It was a wonderful thought, and I was terribly proud to have it, because it meant that I had clearly suffered brain damage and could no longer be held responsible. Once again I was blazing new trails in the territory of stupid. It was impossible, idiotic, stress-induced hysteria. No one on earth could possibly have so much time to throw away; Dexter was not important enough to anyone but Dexter. And to prove it, I turned on the floodlight over the front porch and opened the door.

Across the street and about fifty feet to the west a car started up and drove away.

I closed the door and double-locked it.

And now it was my turn once more to sit up at the kitchen table, sipping coffee and pondering life’s great mystery.

The clock said 3:32 when I sat down, and 6:00 when Rita finally came into the room.

“Dexter,” she said with an expression of soporific surprise on her face.

“In the flesh,” I said, and it was exceedingly difficult for me to maintain my artificially cheerful facade.

She frowned. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing at all,” I said. “I just couldn’t sleep.”

Rita bent her face down toward the floor and shuffled over to the coffeemaker and poured herself a cup. Then she sat across the table from me and took a sip. “Dexter,” she said, “it’s perfectly normal to have reservations.”

“Of course,” I said, with absolutely no idea what she meant, “otherwise you don’t get a table.”

She shook her head slightly with a tired smile. “You know what I mean,” she said, which was not true. “About the wedding.”

A small bleary light went on in the back of my head, and I very nearly said

Aha

. Of course the wedding. Human females were obsessive on the subject of weddings, even it if wasn’t their own. When it was, in fact, their own, the idea of it took over every moment of waking and sleeping thought. Rita was seeing everything that happened through a pair of wedding-colored glasses. If I could not sleep, that was because of bad dreams brought on by our upcoming wedding.

I, on the other hand, was not similarly afflicted. I had a great deal of important stuff to worry about, and the wedding was something that was on automatic pilot. At some point I would show up, it would happen, and that would be that. Clearly this was not a viewpoint I could invite Rita to share, no matter how sensible it seemed to me. No, I had to come up with a plausible reason for my sleeplessness, and in addition I needed to reassure her of my enthusiasm for the wonderful looming event.

I looked around the room for a clue, and finally saw something in the two lunch boxes stacked beside the sink. A great place to start: I reached deep into the dregs of my soggy brain and pulled out the only thing I could find there that was less than half wet. “What if I’m not good enough for Cody and Astor?” I said. “How can I be their father when I’m really not? What if I just can’t do it?”

“Oh, Dexter,” she said. “You’re a wonderful father. They absolutely love you.”

“But,” I said, struggling for both authenticity and the next line, “but they’re little now. When they get older. When they want to know about their

real

father-”

“They know all they’ll ever need to know about that sonofabitch,” Rita snapped. It surprised me: I had never heard her use rough language before. Possibly she never had, either, because she began to blush. “You are their real father,” she said. “You are the man they look up to, listen to, and love. You are exactly the father they need.”

I suppose that was at least partly true, since I was the only one who could teach them the Harry Way and other things they needed to know, though I suspected this was not exactly what Rita had in mind. But it didn’t seem politic to bring that up, so I simply said, “I really want to be good at this. I can’t fail, even for a minute.”

“Oh, Dex,” she said, “people fail all the time.” That was very true. I had noticed many times before that failure seemed to be one of the identifying characteristics of the species. “But we keep trying, and it comes out all right in the end. Really. You’re going to be great at this, you’ll see.”

“Do you really think so?” I said, only mildly ashamed of the disgraceful way I was hamming it up.

“I

know

so,” she said, with her patented Rita smile. She reached across the table and clutched at my hand. “I won’t let you fail,” she said. “You’re mine now.”

It was a bold claim, flinging the Emancipation Proclamation aside like that and saying she owned me. Still, it seemed to close off an awkward moment comfortably, so I let it slide. “All right,” I said. “Let’s have breakfast.”

She cocked her head to one side and looked at me for a moment, and I was aware that I must have hit a false note, but she just blinked a few times before she said, “All right,” and got up and began to cook breakfast.

The other had come to the door in the night, and then slammed it in fear-there was no mistaking that part. He had felt fear. He heard the call and came, and he was afraid. And so the Watcher had no doubt about it.

It was time.

Now.

CHAPTER 36

I

WAS BONE WEARY, CONFUSED, AND, WORST OF ALL, STILL frightened. Every lighthearted blast of the horn had me leaping against the seat belt and searching for a weapon to defend myself, and every time an innocent car pulled up to within inches of my bumper I found myself glaring into the mirror, waiting for an unusually hostile movement or a burst of the hateful dream music flung at my head.

Something was after me. I still didn’t know why or what, beyond a vague connection to an ancient god, but I knew it was after me, and even if it could not catch me right away, it was wearing me down to the point where surrender would seem like a relief.

What a frail thing a human being is-and without the Passenger, that is all I was, a poor imitation of a human being. Weak, soft, slow and stupid, unseeing, unhearing and unaware, helpless, hopeless, and harried. Yes, I was almost ready to lie down and let it run over me, whatever it was. Give in, let the music wash over me and take me away into the joyful fire and the blank bliss of death. There would be no struggle, no negotiation, nothing but an end to all that is Dexter. And after a few more nights like the one just past, that would be fine with me.

Even at work there was no relief. Deborah was lurking in wait, and pounced after I had barely stepped out of the elevator.

“Starzak is missing,” she said. “Couple of days of mail in the box, newspapers in the drive-He’s gone.”

“But that’s good news, Debs,” I said. “If he ran, doesn’t that prove he’s guilty?”

“It doesn’t prove shit,” she said. “The same thing happened to Kurt Wagner, and he showed up dead. How do I know that won’t happen to Starzak?”

“We can put out a BOLO,” I said. “We might get to him first.”

Deborah kicked the wall. “Goddamn it, we haven’t gotten to anything first, or even on time. Help me out here, Dex,” she said. “This thing is driving me nuts.”

I could have said that it was doing far more than that to me, but it didn’t seem charitable. “I’ll try,” I said instead, and Deborah slouched away down the hall.

I was not even into my cubicle when Vince Masuoka met me with a massive fake frown “Where are the doughnuts?” he said accusingly.

“What doughnuts?” I said.

“It was your turn,” he said. “You were supposed to bring doughnuts today.”

“I had a rough night,” I said.

“So now we’re all going to have a rough morning?” he demanded. “Where’s the justice in that?”

“I don’t do justice, Vince,” I said. “Just blood spatter.”

“Hmmph,” he said. “Apparently you don’t do doughnuts, either.” And he stalked away with a nearly convincing imitation of righteous indignation, leaving me to reflect that I could not remember another occasion when Vince had gotten the best of me in any kind of verbal interchange. One more sign that the train had left the station. Could this really be the end of the line for poor Decaying Dexter?

The rest of the workday was long and awful, as we have always heard that workdays are supposed to be. This had never been the case for Dexter; I have always kept busy and artificially cheerful in my job, and never watched the clock or complained. Perhaps I had enjoyed work because I was conscious of the fact that it was part of the game, a piece of the Great Joke of Dexter putting one over and passing for human. But a really good joke needs at least one other in on it, and since I was alone now, bereft of my inner audience, the punch line seemed to elude me.

I plodded manfully through the morning, visited a corpse downtown, and then came back for a pointless round of lab work. I finished out the day by ordering some supplies and finishing a report. As I was tidying up my desk to go home, my telephone rang.

“I need your help,” my sister said brusquely.

“Of course you do,” I said. “Very good of you to admit it.”

“I’m on duty until midnight,” she said, ignoring my witty and piquant sally, “and Kyle can’t get the shutters up by himself.”

So often in this life I find myself halfway through a conversation and realizing I don’t know what I’m talking about. Very unsettling, although if everybody else would realize the same thing, particularly those in Washington, it would be a much better world.

“Why does Kyle need to get the shutters up at all?” I asked.

Deborah snorted. “Jesus Christ, Dexter, what do you do all day? We’ve got a hurricane coming in.”

I might well have said that whatever else I do all day, I don’t have the leisure to sit around and listen to the Weather Channel. Instead, I just said, “A hurricane, really. How exciting. When did this happen?”

“Try to get there around six. Kyle will be waiting,” she said.

“All right,” I said. But she had already hung up.

Since I speak fluent Deborah, I suppose I should have accepted her telephone call as a kind of formal apology for her recent pointless hostility. Quite possibly she had come to accept the Dark Passenger, especially since it was gone. This should have made me happy. But considering the day I had been having, it was just one more splinter under the fingernail for poor Downtrodden Dexter. On top of that, it seemed like sheer effrontery for a hurricane to pick this moment for its pointless harassment. Was there no end to the pain and suffering I would be forced to endure?

Ah well, to exist is to wallow in misery. I headed out the door for my date with Deborah’s paramour.

Before I started my car, however, I placed a call to Rita, who would be very nearly home now by my calculations.

“Dexter,” she answered breathlessly, “I can’t remember how much bottled water we have and the lines at Publix are all the way out into the parking lot.”

“Well then we’ll just have to drink beer,” I said.

“I think we’re okay on the canned food, except that beef stew has been there for two years,” she said, apparently unaware that anyone else might have said something. So I let her rattle on, hoping she would slow down eventually. “I checked the flashlights two weeks ago,” she said. “Remember, when the power went out for forty minutes? And the extra batteries are in the refrigerator, on the bottom shelf at the back. I have Cody and Astor with me now, there’s no after-school program tomorrow, but somebody at school told them about Hurricane Andrew and I think Astor is a little frightened, so maybe when you get home you could talk to them? And explain that it’s like a big thunderstorm and we’ll be all right, there’s just going to be a lot of wind and noise and the lights will go out for a little while. But if you see a store on the way home that isn’t too crowded be sure to stop and get some bottled water, as much as you can get. And some ice, I think the cooler is still on the shelf above the washing machine, we can fill it with ice and put in the perishables. Oh-what about your boat? Will it be all right where it is, or do you need to do something with it? I think we can get the things out of the yard before dark, I’m sure we’ll be fine, and it probably won’t hit here anyway.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll be a little late getting home.”

“All right. Oh-look at that, the Winn-Dixie store doesn’t look too bad. I guess we’ll try to get in, there’s a parking spot. Bye!”

I would never have thought it possible, but Rita had apparently learned to get by without breathing. Or perhaps she only had to come up for air every hour or so, like a whale. Still, it was an inspiring performance, and after witnessing it, I felt far better prepared to put up shutters with my sister’s one-handed boyfriend. I started the car and slid out into traffic.

If rush-hour traffic is utter mayhem, then rush-hour traffic with a hurricane coming is end-of-the-world, we’re-all-going-to-die-but-you-go-first insanity. People were driving as if they positively had to kill everyone else who might come between them and getting their plywood and batteries. It was not a terribly long drive to Deborah’s little house in Coral Gables, but when I finally pulled into her driveway I felt as if I had survived an Apache manhood ordeal.

As I climbed out of the car, the front door of the house swung open and Chutsky came out. “Hey, buddy,” he called. He gave me a cheerful wave with the steel hook where his left hand used to be and came down the walkway to meet me. “I really appreciate the help. This goddamned hook makes it kind of tough to put the wing nuts on.”

“And even harder to pick your nose,” I said, just a little irritated by his cheerful suffering.

But instead of taking offense, he laughed. “Yeah. And a whole lot harder to wipe my ass. Come on. I got all the stuff out in back.”

I followed him around to the back of the house, where Deborah had a small overgrown patio. But to my great surprise, it was no longer overgrown. The trees that had hung over the area were trimmed back, and the weeds growing up between the flagstones were all gone. There were three neatly pruned rosebushes and a bank of ornamental flowers of some kind, and a neatly polished barbecue grill stood in one corner.

I looked at Chutsky and raised an eyebrow.

“Yeah, I know,” he said. “It’s maybe a little bit gay, right?” He shrugged. “I get real bored sitting around here healing, and anyway I like to keep things neatened up a little more than your sister.”

“It looks very nice,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” he said, as if I really had accused him of being gay. “Well, let’s get this done.” He nodded toward a stack of corrugated steel leaning against the side of the house-Deborah’s hurricane shutters. The Morgans were second-generation Floridians, and Harry had raised us to use good shutters. Save a little money on the shutters, spend a lot more replacing the house when they failed.

The downside to the high quality of Deborah’s shutters, though, was that they were very heavy and had sharp edges. Thick gloves were necessary-or in Chutsky’s case, one glove. I’m not sure he appreciated the cash he was saving on gloves, though. He seemed to work a little harder than he had to, in order to let me know that he was not really handicapped and didn’t actually need my help.

At any rate, it was only about forty minutes before we had all the shutters in their tracks and locked on. Chutsky took a last look at the ones that covered the French doors of the patio and, apparently satisfied with our outstanding craftsmanship, he raised his left arm to wipe the sweat from his brow, catching himself at the very last moment before he rammed the hook through his cheek. He laughed a little bitterly, staring at the hook.

“I’m still not used to this thing,” he said, shaking his head. “I wake up in the night and the missing knuckle itches.”

It was difficult to think of anything clever or even socially acceptable to say to that. I had never read anywhere what to say to someone speaking of having feeling in his amputated hand. Chutsky seemed to feel the awkwardness, because he gave me a small dry snort of non-humorous amusement.

“Hey, well,” he said, “there’s still a couple of kicks left in the old mule.” It seemed to me an unfortunate choice of words, since he was also missing his left foot, and any kicking at all seemed out of the question. Still, I was pleased to see him coming out of his depression, so it seemed like a good thing to agree with him.

“No one ever doubted it,” I said. “I’m sure you’re going to be fine.”

“Uh-huh, thanks,” he said, not very convincingly. “Anyway, it’s not you I have to convince. It’s a couple of old desk jockies inside the Beltway. They’ve offered me a desk job, but…” He shrugged.

“Come on now,” I said. “You can’t really want to go back to the cloak-and-dagger work, can you?”

“It’s what I’m good at,” he said. “For a while there, I was the very best.”

“Maybe you just miss the adrenaline,” I said.

“Maybe,” he said. “How about a beer?”

“Thank you,” I said, “but I have orders from on high to get bottled water and ice before it’s all gone.”

“Right,” he said. “Everybody’s terrified they might have to drink a mojito without ice.”

“It’s one of the great dangers of a hurricane,” I said.

“Thanks for the help,” he said.

If anything, traffic was even worse as I headed for home. Some of the people were hurrying away with their precious sheets of plywood tied to their car roofs as if they had just robbed a bank. They were angry from the tension of standing in line for an hour wondering if someone would cut in front of them and whether there would be anything left when it was their turn.

The rest of the people on the road were on their way to take their places in these same lines and hated everyone who had gotten there first and maybe bought the last C battery in Florida.

Altogether, it was a delightful mixture of hostility, rage, and paranoia, and it should have cheered me up immensely. But any hope of good cheer vanished when I found myself humming something, a familiar tune that I couldn’t quite place, and couldn’t stop humming. And when I finally did place it, all the joy of the festive evening was shattered.

It was the music from my sleep.

The music that had played in my head with the feeling of heat and the smell of something burning. It was plain and repetitive and not a terribly catchy bit of music, but here I was humming it to myself on South Dixie Highway, humming and feeling comfort from the repeating notes as if it was a lullaby my mother used to sing.

And I still didn’t know what it meant.

I am sure that whatever was happening in my subconscious was caused by something simple, logical, and easy to understand. On the other hand, I just couldn’t think of a simple, logical, and easy-to-understand reason for hearing music and feeling heat on my face in my sleep.

My cell phone started to buzz, and since traffic was crawling along anyway, I answered it.

“Dexter,” Rita said, but I barely recognized her voice. She sounded small, lost, and completely defeated. “It’s Cody and Astor,” she said. “They’re gone.”

Things were really working out quite well. The new hosts were wonderfully cooperative. They began to gather, and with a little bit of persuasion, they easily came to follow IT’s suggestions about behavior. And they built great stone buildings to hold IT’s offspring, dreamed up elaborate ceremonies with music to put them in a trance state, and they became so enthusiastically helpful that for a while there were just too many of them to keep up with. If things went well for the hosts, they killed a few of their number out of gratitude. If things went badly, they killed in the hope that IT would make things better. And all IT had to do was let it happen.

And with this new leisure, IT began to consider the result of IT’s reproductions. For the first time, when the swelling and bursting came, IT reached out to the newborn, calming it down, easing its fear, and sharing consciousness. And the newborn responded with gratifying eagerness, quickly and happily learning all that IT had to teach and gladly joining in. And then there were four of them, then eight, sixty-four-and suddenly it was too much. With that many, there was simply not enough to go around. Even the new hosts began to balk at the number of victims they needed.

IT was practical, if nothing else. IT quickly realized the problem, and solved it-by killing almost all of the others IT had spawned. A few escaped, out into the world, in search of new hosts. IT kept just a few with IT, and things were under control at last.

Sometime later, the ones who fled began to strike back. They set up their rival temples and rituals and sent their armies at IT, and there were so many. The upheaval was enormous and lasted a very long time. But because IT was the oldest and most experienced, IT eventually vanquished all the others, except for a few who went into hiding.

The others hid in scattered hosts, keeping a low profile, and many survived. But IT had learned over the millennia that it was important to wait. IT had all the time there was, and IT could afford to be patient, slowly hunt out and kill the ones who fled, and then slowly, carefully, build back up the grand and wonderful worship of ITself.

IT kept IT’s worship alive; hidden, but alive.

And IT waited for the others.

CHAPTER 37

A

S I KNOW VERY WELL, THE WORLD IS NOT A NICE PLACE. There are numberless awful things that can happen, especially to children: they can be taken by a stranger or a family friend or a divorced dad; they can wander away and vanish, fall in a sinkhole, drown in a neighbor’s pool-and with a hurricane coming there were even more possibilities. The list is limited only by their imaginations, and Cody and Astor were quite well supplied with imagination.

But when Rita told me they were gone, I did not even consider sinkholes or traffic accidents or motorcycle gangs. I knew what had happened to Cody and Astor, knew it with a cold, hard certainty that was more clear and positive than anything the Passenger had ever whispered to me. One thought burst in my head, and I never questioned it.

In the half a second it took to register Rita’s words my brain flooded with small pictures: the cars following me, the night visitors knocking on the doors and windows, the scary guy leaving his calling card with the kids, and, most convincingly, the searing statement uttered by Professor Keller: “Moloch liked human sacrifice. Especially children.”

I did not know why Moloch wanted my children in particular, but I knew without the slightest doubt that he, she, or it had them. And I knew that this was not a good thing for Cody and Astor.

I lost no time getting home, swerving through the traffic like the Miami native I am, and in just a few minutes I was out of the car. Rita stood in the rain at the end of the driveway, looking like a small, desolate mouse.

“Dexter,” Rita said, with a world of emptiness in her voice. “Please, oh God, Dexter, find them.”

“Lock the house,” I said, “and come with me.”

She looked at me for a moment as if I had said to leave the kids and go bowling. “Now,” I said. “I know where they are, but we need help.”

Rita turned and ran to the house and I pulled out my cell phone and dialed.

“What,” Deborah answered.

“I need your help,” I said.

There was a short silence and then a hard bark of not-amused laughter. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “There’s a hurricane coming in, the bad guys are lined up five deep all over town waiting for the power to go out, and you need my help.”

“Cody and Astor are gone,” I said. “Moloch has them.”

“Dexter,” she said.

“I have to find them fast, and I need your help.”

“Get over here,” she said.

As I put my phone away Rita came splattering down the sidewalk through the puddles that were already forming. “I locked up,” she said. “But Dexter, what if they come back and we’re gone?”

“They won’t come back,” I said. “Not unless we bring them back.” Apparently that was not the reassuring remark she was hoping for. She stuffed a fist into her mouth and looked like she was trying very hard not to scream. “Get in the car, Rita,” I said. I opened the door for her and she looked at me over her half-digested knuckles. “Come on,” I said, and she finally climbed in. I got behind the wheel, started up, and nosed the car out of the driveway.

“You said,” Rita stammered, and I was relieved to notice that she had removed the fist from her mouth, “you said you know where they are.”

“That’s right,” I said, turning onto U.S. 1 without looking and accelerating through the thinning traffic.

“Where are they?” she asked.

“I know who has them,” I said. “Deborah will help us find out where they went.”

“Oh God, Dexter,” Rita said, and she began to weep silently. Even if I wasn’t driving I wouldn’t know what to do or say about that, so I simply concentrated on getting us to headquarters alive.

A telephone rang in a very comfortable room. It did not give out an undignified chirping, or a salsa tune, or even a fragment of Beethoven, as modern cell phones do. Instead, it purred with a simple old-fashioned sound, the way telephones are supposed to ring.

And this conservative sound went well with the room, which was elegant in a very reassuring way. It contained a leather couch and two matching chairs, all worn just enough to give the feeling of a favorite pair of shoes. The telephone sat on a dark mahogany end table on the far side of the room, next to a bar made of matching wood.

Altogether the room had the relaxed and timeless feel of a very old and well-established gentlemen’s club, except for one detail: the wall space between the bar and the couch was taken up by a large wooden case with a glass front, looking something like a cross between a trophy case and a shelf for rare books. But instead of flat shelves, the case was fitted with hundreds of felt-lined niches. Just over half of them cradled a skull-sized ceramic of a bull’s head.

An old man entered the room, without haste, but also without the careful hesitance of frail old age. There was a confidence in his walk that is usually found only in much younger men. His hair was white and full and his face was smooth, as if it had been polished by the desert wind. He walked to the telephone like he was quite sure that whoever was calling would not hang up until he answered, and apparently he was right, since it was still ringing when he lifted the receiver.

“Yes,” he said, and his voice, too, was much younger and stronger than it should have been. As he listened he picked up a knife that lay on the table beside the telephone. It was of ancient bronze. The pommel was curved into a bull’s head, the eyes set with two large rubies, and the blade was traced with gold letters that looked very much like

MLK

. Like the old man, the knife was much older than it looked, and far stronger. He idly ran a thumb along the blade as he listened, and a line of blood rose up on his thumb. It didn’t seem to affect him. He put the knife down.

“Good,” he said. “Bring them here.” He listened again for a moment, idly licking the blood from his thumb. “No,” he said, running his tongue along his lower lip. “The others are already gathering. The storm won’t affect Moloch, or his people. In three thousand years, we’ve seen far worse, and we’re still here.”

He listened again for a moment before interrupting with just a trace of impatience. “No,” he said. “No delays. Have the Watcher bring him to me. It’s time.”

The old man hung up the telephone and stood for a moment. Then he picked up the knife again, and an expression grew on his smooth old face.

It was almost a smile.

The wind and the rain were gusting fiercely but only occasionally, and most of Miami was already off the roads and filling out insurance claim forms for the damage they planned to have, so the traffic was not bad. One very intense blast of wind nearly pushed us off the expressway, but other than that it was a quick trip.

Deborah was waiting for us at the front desk. “Come to my office,” she said, “and tell me what you know.” We followed her to the elevator and went up.

“Office” was a bit of an exaggeration for the place where Deborah worked. It was a cubicle in a room with several others just like it. Crammed into the space was a desk and chair and two folding chairs for guests, and we settled in. “All right,” she said. “What happened?”

“They…I sent them out into the yard,” Rita said. “To get all their toys and things. For the hurricane.”

Deborah nodded. “And then?” she prompted.

“I went in to put away the hurricane supplies,” she said. “And when I came out they were gone. I didn’t-it was only a couple of minutes, and they…” Rita put her face in her hands and sobbed.

“Did you see anyone approach them?” Deborah asked. “Any strange cars in the neighborhood? Anything at all?”

Rita shook her head. “No, nothing, they were just gone.”

Deborah looked at me. “What the hell, Dexter,” she said. “That’s it? The whole story? How do you know they’re not playing Nintendo next door?”

“Come on, Deborah,” I said. “If you’re too tired to work, tell us now. Otherwise, stop the crap. You know as well as I do-”

“I don’t know anything like it, and neither do you,” she snapped.

“Then you haven’t been paying attention,” I said, and I found that my tone was sharpening to match hers, which was a bit of a surprise. Emotion? Me? “That business card he left with Cody tells us everything we need to know.”

“Except where, why, and who,” she snarled. “And I’m still waiting to hear some hints about that.”

Even though I was perfectly prepared to snarl right back at her, there was really nothing to snarl. She was right. Just because Cody and Astor were missing, that didn’t mean we suddenly had new information that would lead us to our killer. It only meant that the stakes were considerably higher, and that we were out of time.

“What about Wilkins?” I demanded.

She waved a hand. “They’re watching him,” she said.

“Like last time?”

“Please,” Rita interrupted, with a rough edge of hysteria creeping into her voice, “what are you talking about? Isn’t there some way to just-I mean, anything…?” Her voice trailed off into a new round of sobs, and Deborah looked from her to me. “Please,” Rita wailed.

As her voice rose it echoed into me and seemed to drop one final piece of pain into the empty dizziness inside me that blended in with the faraway music.

I stood up.

I felt myself sway slightly and heard Deborah say my name, and then the music was there, soft but insistent, as if it had always been there, just waiting for a moment when I could hear it without distraction, and as I turned my focus on the thrum of the drums it called me, called as I knew it had been calling all along, but more urgently now, rising closer to the ultimate ecstasy and telling me to come, follow, go this way, come to the music.

And I remember being very glad about that, that the time was here at last, and even though I could hear Deborah and Rita speaking to me it didn’t seem that anything they had to say could be terribly important, not when the music was calling and the promise of perfect happiness was here at last. So I smiled at them and I think I even said, “Excuse me,” and I walked out of the room, not caring about their puzzled faces. I went out of the building, and to the far side of the parking lot where the music was coming from.

A car was waiting for me there, which made me even happier, and I hurried over to it, moving my feet to the beautiful flow of the music, and when I got there the back door of the car swung open and then I don’t remember anything at all.

CHAPTER 38

I

HAD NEVER BEEN SO HAPPY.

The joy came at me like a comet, blazing huge and ponderous through a dark sky and whirling toward me at inconceivable speed, swirling in to consume me and carry me away into a boundless universe of rapture and all-knowing unity, love, and understanding-bliss without end, in me and of me and all around me forever.

And it whirled me across the trackless night sky in a warm, blinding blanket of jubilant love and rocked me in a cradle of endless joy, joy, joy. As I spun higher and faster and even more replete with every possible happiness, a great slamming sound rolled across me and I opened my eyes in a small dark room with no windows and a very hard concrete floor and walls and no idea of where it was or how I got there. A single small light burned above the door, and I was lying on the floor in the dim glow it cast.

The happiness was gone, all of it, and nothing welled up to replace it other than a sense that wherever I might be, nobody had in mind restoring either my joy or my freedom. And although there were no bulls’ heads anywhere in the room, ceramic or otherwise, and there were no old Aramaic magazines stacked on the floor, it was not hard to add it all up. I had followed the music, felt ecstasy, and lost conscious control. And that meant that the odds were very good that Moloch had me, whether he was real or mythical.

Still, better not to take things for granted. Perhaps I had sleepwalked my way into a storage room somewhere, and getting out was simply a matter of turning the knob on the door. I got to my feet with a little difficulty-I felt groggy and a bit wobbly, and I guessed that whatever had brought me here, some kind of drug had been part of the process. I stood for a moment and concentrated on getting the room to hold still, and after a few deep breaths I succeeded. I took one step to the side and touched a wall: very solid concrete blocks. The door felt almost as thick and was solidly locked; it didn’t even rattle when I punched my shoulder against it. I walked one time around the small room-really, it was no more than a large closet. There was a drain in the center of the room, and that was the only feature or furnishing that I could see. This did not seem particularly encouraging, since it meant that either I was supposed to use the drain for personal tasks or else I was not expected to be here long enough to need a toilet. If that was the case, I had trouble believing that an early exit would be a good thing for me.

Not that there was anything I could do about it, whatever plans were being made for me. I had read

The Count of Monte Cristo

and

The Prisoner of Zenda

, and I knew that if I could get hold of something like a spoon or a belt buckle it would be easy enough to dig my way out in the next fifteen years or so. But they had thoughtlessly failed to provide me with a spoon, whoever they were, and my belt buckle had apparently been appropriated, too. This told me a great deal about them, at least. They were very careful, which probably meant experienced, and they lacked even the most basic sense of modesty, since they were clearly not concerned in the least that my pants might fall down without a belt. However, I still had no idea who they might be or what they might want with me.

None of this was good news.

And none of it offered any clue at all as to what I could do about it, except sit on the cold concrete floor and wait.

So I did.

Reflection is supposed to be good for the soul. Throughout history, people have tried to find peace and quiet, time all to themselves with no distractions, just so they can reflect. And here I was with exactly that-peace and quiet with no distractions, but I nevertheless found it very difficult to lean back in my comfy cement room and let the reflections come and do good for my soul.

To begin with, I wasn’t sure I had a soul. If I did, what was it thinking to allow me to do such terrible things for so many years? Did the Dark Passenger take the place of the hypothetical soul that humans were supposed to have? And now that I was without it, would a real one grow and make me human after all?

I realized that I was reflecting anyway, but somehow that failed to create any real sense of fulfillment. I could reflect until my teeth fell out and it was not going to explain where my Passenger had gone-or where Cody and Astor were. It was also not going to get me out of this little room.

I got up again and circled the room, slower this time, looking for any small weakness. There was an air-conditioning vent in one corner-a perfect way to escape, if only I had been the size of a ferret. There was an electric outlet on the wall beside the door. That was it.

I paused at the door and felt it. It was very heavy and thick, and offered me not the tiniest bit of hope that I could break it, pick the lock, or otherwise open it without the assistance of either explosives or a road grader. I looked around the room again, but didn’t see either one lying in a corner.

Trapped. Locked in, captured, sequestered, in durance vile-even synonyms didn’t make me feel any better. I leaned my cheek against the door. What was the point in hoping, really? Hoping for what? Release back into the world where I no longer had any purpose? Wasn’t it better for all concerned that Dexter Defeated simply vanish into oblivion?

Through the thickness of the door I heard something, some high-pitched noise approaching outside. And as the sound got closer I recognized it: a man’s voice, arguing with another, higher, insistent voice that was very familiar.

Astor.

“Stupid!” she said, as they came even with my door. “I don’t have to…” And then they were gone.

“Astor!” I shouted as loud as I could, even though I knew she would never hear me. And just to prove that stupidity is ubiquitous and consistent, I slammed on the door with both hands and yelled it again. “Astor!”

There was no response at all, of course, except for a faint stinging sensation on the palms of my hands. Since I could not think of anything else to do, I slid down to the floor, leaned against the door, and waited to die.

I don’t know how long I sat there with my back against the door. I admit that sitting slumped against the door was not terribly heroic. I know I should have jumped to my feet, pulled out my secret decoder ring, and chewed through the wall with my secret radioactive powers. But I was drained. To hear Astor’s defiant small voice on the other side of the door had hammered in what felt like the last nail. There was no more Dark Knight. There was nothing left of me but the envelope, and it was coming unglued.

So I sat, slumped, sagged against the door, and nothing happened. I was in the middle of planning how to hang myself from the light switch on the wall when I felt a kind of scuffling on the other side of the door. Then someone pushed on it.

Of course I was in the way and so naturally enough it hurt, a severe pinch right in the very back end of my human dignity. I was slow to react, and they pushed again. It hurt again. And blossoming up from the pain, shooting out of the emptiness like the first flower of spring, came something truly wonderful.

I got mad.

Not merely irritated, narked by someone’s thoughtless use of my backside as a doorstop. I got truly angry, enraged, furious at the lack of any consideration for

me

, the assumption that I was a negligible commodity, a thing to be locked in a room and shoved around by anyone with an arm and a short temper. Never mind that only moments ago I had held the same low opinion of me. That didn’t matter at all-I was mad, in the classic sense of being half crazed, and without thinking anything other than that, I shoved back against the door as hard as I could.

There was a little bit of resistance, and then the latch clicked shut. I stood up, thinking,

There!

-without really knowing what that meant. And as I glared at the door it began to open again, and once more I heaved against it, forcing it closed. It was wonderfully fulfilling, and I felt better than I had in quite some time, but as some of the pure blind anger leached out of me it occurred to me that as relaxing as door thumping was, it was slightly pointless, after all, and sooner or later it would have to end in my defeat, since I had no weapons or tools of any kind, and whoever it was on the other side of the door was theoretically unlimited in what they could bring to the task.

As I thought this, the door banged partially open again, stopping when it hit my foot, and as I banged back automatically I had an idea. It was stupid, pure James Bond escapism, but it just might possibly work, and I had absolutely nothing to lose. With me, to think is to explode into furious action, and so even as I thumped the door shut with my shoulder, I stepped to the side of the doorframe and waited.

Sure enough, only a moment later the door thumped open, this time with no resistance from me, and as it swung wide to slam against the wall an off-balance man in some kind of uniform stumbled in after it. I grabbed at his arm and managed to get a shoulder instead, but it was enough, and with all my strength I pivoted and shoved him headfirst into the wall. There was a gratifying thump, as if I had dropped a large melon off the kitchen table, and he bounced off the wall and fell face-first onto the concrete floor.

And lo, there was Dexter reborn and triumphant, standing proudly on both feet, with the body of his enemy stretched supine at his feet, and an open door leading to freedom, redemption, and then perhaps a light supper.

I searched the guard quickly, removing a ring of keys, a large pocketknife, and an automatic pistol that he would probably not need anytime soon, and then I stepped cautiously into the hall, closing the door behind me. Somewhere out here, Cody and Astor waited, and I would find them. What I would do then I didn’t know, but it didn’t matter. I would find them.

CHAPTER 39

T

HE BUILDING WAS ABOUT THE SIZE OF A LARGE MIAMI Beach house. I prowled cautiously through a long hallway that ended at a door similar to the one I had just played bull-in-the-ring with. I tiptoed up and put my ear against it. I didn’t hear anything at all, but the door was so thick that this meant almost nothing.

I put my hand on the knob and turned it very slowly. It wasn’t locked, and I pushed the door open.

I peeked carefully around the edge of the door and saw nothing that ought to cause alarm other than some furniture that looked like real leather-I made a mental note to report it to PETA. It was quite an elegant room, and as I opened the door farther I saw a very nice mahogany bar in the far corner.

But much more interesting was the trophy case beside the bar. It stretched along the wall for twenty feet, and behind the glass, just visible, I could see row after row of what seemed to be assorted ceramic bulls’ heads. Each piece shone under its own mini-spotlight. I did not count, but there had to be more than a hundred of them. And before I could move into the room I heard a voice, as cold and dry as it could be and still be human.

“Trophies,” and I jumped, turning the gun toward the sound. “A memorial wall dedicated to the god. Each represents a soul we have sent to him.” An old man sat there, simply looking at me, but seeing him was almost a physical blow. “We create a new one for each sacrifice,” he said. “Come in, Dexter.”

The old man didn’t seem very menacing. In fact, he was nearly invisible, sitting back as he was in one of the large leather chairs. He got up slowly, with an old man’s care, and turned a face on me that was as cold and smooth as river rock.

“We have been waiting for you,” he said, although as far as I could tell he was alone in the room, except for the furniture. “Come in.”

I really don’t know if it was what he said, or the way he said it-or something else entirely. In any case, when he looked directly at me I suddenly felt like there was not enough air in the room. All the mad dash of my escape seemed to bleed out of me and puddle around my ankles, and a great clattering emptiness tore through me, as though there was nothing in the world but pointless pain, and he was its master.

“You’ve caused us a great deal of trouble,” he said quietly.

“That’s some consolation,” I said. It was very hard to say, and sounded feeble even to me, but at least it made the old man look a little bit annoyed. He took a step toward me, and I found myself trying to shrink away. “By the way,” I said, hoping to appear nonchalant about the fact that I felt like I was melting, “who are us?”

He cocked his head to one side. “I think you know,” he said. “You’ve certainly been looking at us long enough.” He took another step forward and my knees wobbled slightly. “But for the sake of a pleasant conversation,” he said, “we are the followers of Moloch. The heirs of King Solomon. For three thousand years, we have kept the god’s worship alive and guarded his traditions, and his power.”

“You keep saying ‘we,’” I said.

He nodded, and the movement hurt me. “There are others here,” he said. “But the we is, as I am sure you are aware, Moloch. He exists inside me.”

“So

you

killed those girls? And followed me around?” I said, and I admit I was surprised to think of this elderly man doing all that.

He actually smiled, but it was humorless and didn’t make me feel any better. “I did not go in person, no. It was the Watchers.”

“So-you mean, it can leave you?”

“Of course,” he said. “Moloch can move between us as he wishes. He’s not one person, and he’s not

in

one person. He’s a god. He goes out of me and into some of the others for special errands. To watch.”

“Well, it’s wonderful to have a hobby,” I said. I wasn’t really sure where our conversation was going, or if my precious life was about to skid to a halt, so I asked the first question that sprung to mind. “Then why did you leave the bodies at the university?”

“We wanted to find you, naturally.” The old man’s words froze me to the spot.

“You had come to our attention, Dexter,” he continued, “but we had to be sure. We needed to observe you to see if you would recognize our ritual or respond to our Watcher. And, of course, it was convenient to lead the police to concentrate on Halpern,” he said.

I didn’t know where to begin. “He’s not one of you?” I said.

“Oh, no,” the old man said pleasantly. “As soon as he’s released from police custody he’ll be over there, with the others.” He nodded toward the trophy case, filled with ceramic bulls’ heads.

“Then he really didn’t kill the girls.”

“Yes, he did,” he said. “While he was being persuaded from the inside by one of the Children of Moloch.” He cocked his head to one side. “I’m sure you of all people can understand that, can’t you?”

I could, of course. But it didn’t answer any of the main questions. “Can we please go back to where you said I had ‘come to your attention’?” I asked politely, thinking of all the hard work I put into keeping a low profile.

The man looked at me as though I had an exceptionally thick head. “You killed Alexander Macauley,” he said.

Now the tumblers fell into the weakened steel lock that was Dexter’s brain. “Zander was one of you?”

He shook his head slightly. “A minor helper. He supplied material for our rites.”

“He brought you the winos, and you killed them,” I said.

He shrugged. “We practice sacrifice, Dexter, not killing. In any case, when you took Zander, we followed you and discovered what you are.”

“What am I?” I blurted, finding it slightly exhilarating to think that I stood face-to-face with someone who could answer the question I had pondered for most of my slash-happy life. But then my mouth went dry, and as I awaited his answer a sensation bloomed inside me that felt an awful lot like real fear.

The old man’s glare turned sharp. “You’re an aberration,” he said. “Something that shouldn’t exist.”

I will admit that there have been times when I would agree with that thought, but right now was not one of them. “I don’t want to seem rude,” I said, “but I like existing.”

“That is no longer your choice,” he said. “You have something inside you that represents a threat to us. We plan to get rid of it, and you.”

“Actually,” I said, sure he was talking about my Dark Passenger, “that thing is not there anymore.”

“I know that,” he said, a little irritably, “but it originally came to you because of great traumatic suffering. It is attuned to you. But it is also a bastard child of Moloch, and that attunes

you

to

us

.” He waved a finger at me. “That’s how you were able to hear the music. Through the connection made by your Watcher. And when we cause you sufficient agony in a very short time, it will come back to you, like a moth to a flame.”

I really didn’t like the sound of that, and I could see that our conversation was sliding rapidly out of my control, but just in time I remembered that I did, after all, have a gun. I pointed it at the old man and drew myself up to my full quivering height.

“I want my children,” I said.

He didn’t seem terribly concerned about the pistol aimed at his navel, which to me seemed like pushing the envelope of self-confidence. He even had a large wicked-looking knife on one hip, but he made no move to touch it.

“The children are no longer your concern,” he said. “They belong to Moloch now. Moloch likes the taste of children.”

“Where are they?” I said.

He waved his hand dismissively. “They’re right here on Toro Key, but you’re too late to stop the ritual.”

Toro Key was far from the mainland and completely private. But in spite of the fact that it’s generally a great pleasure to learn where you are, this time it raised a number of very sticky questions-like, where were Cody and Astor, and how would I prevent life as I knew it from ending momentarily?

“If you don’t mind,” I said, and I wiggled the pistol, just so he would get the point, “I think I’ll collect them and go home.”

He didn’t move. He just looked at me, and from his eyes I could very nearly see enormous black wings beating out and into the room, and before I could squeeze the trigger, breathe, or blink, the drums began to swell, insisting on the beat that was embedded in me already, and the horns rose with the rhythm, leading the chorus of voices up and into happiness, and I stopped dead in my tracks.

My vision seemed normal, and my other senses were unimpaired, but I could not hear anything but the music, and I could not do anything except what the music told me to do. And it told me that just outside this room true happiness was waiting. It told me to come and scoop it up, fill my hands and heart with bliss everlasting, joy to the end of all things, and I saw myself turning toward the door, my feet leading me to my happy destiny.

The door swung open as I approached it, and Professor Wilkins came in. He was carrying a gun, too, and he barely glanced at me. Instead, he nodded at the old man and said, “We’re ready.” I could barely hear him through the wild flush of feeling and sound welling up, and I moved eagerly toward the door.

Somewhere deep beneath all this was the tiny shrill voice of Dexter, screaming that things were not as they should be and demanding a change in direction. But it was such a small voice, and the music was so large, bigger than everything else in this endlessly wonderful world, and there was never any real question about what I was going to do.

I stepped toward the door in rhythm to the ubiquitous music, dimly aware that the old man was moving with me, but not really interested in that fact or any other. I still had the gun in my hand-they didn’t bother to take it from me, and it didn’t occur to me to use it. Nothing mattered but following the music.

The old man stepped around me and opened the door, and the wind blew hot in my face as I stepped out and saw the god, the thing itself, the source of the music, the source of everything, the great and wonderful bull-horned fountain of ecstasy there ahead of me. It towered above everything else, its great bronze head twenty-five feet high, its powerful arms held out to me, a wonderful hot glow burning in its open belly. My heart swelled and I moved toward it, not really seeing the handful of people standing there watching, even though one of those people was Astor. Her eyes got big when she saw me, and her mouth moved, but I could not hear what she said.

And tiny Dexter deep inside me screamed louder, but only just loud enough to be heard, and not even close to loud enough to be obeyed. I walked on toward the god, seeing the glow from the fire inside it, watching the flames in its belly flicker and jump with the wind that whipped around us. And when I was as close as I could get, standing right beside the open furnace of its belly, I stopped and waited. I did not know what I was waiting for, but I knew that it was coming and it would take me away to wonderful forever, so I waited.

Starzak came into view, and he was holding Cody by the hand, dragging him along to stand near us, and Astor was struggling to get away from the guard beside her. It didn’t matter, though, because the god was there and its arms were moving down now, outspread and reaching to embrace me and clasp me in its warm, beautiful grip. I quivered with the joy of it, no longer hearing the shrill, pointless voice of protest from Dexter, hearing nothing at all but the voice of the god calling from the music.

The wind whipped the fire into life, and Astor thumped against me, bumping me into the side of the statue and the great heat coming from the god’s belly. I straightened up with only a moment of annoyance and once more watched the miracle of the god’s arms coming down, the guard moving Astor forward to share the bronze embrace, and then there was the smell of something burning and a blaze of pain along my legs and I looked down to see that my pants were on fire.

The pain of the fire on my legs jolted through me with the shriek of a hundred thousand outraged neurons, and the cobwebs were instantly cleared away. Suddenly the music was just noise from a loudspeaker, and this was Cody and Astor here beside me in very great danger. It was as if a hole had opened up in a dam and Dexter came pouring back in through it. I turned to the guard and yanked him away from Astor. He gave me a look of blank surprise and pitched over, grabbing my arm as he fell and pulling me down onto the ground with him. But at least he fell away from Astor, and the ground jarred the knife out of his hand. It bounced along to me and I picked it up and holstered it snugly in the guard’s solar plexus.

Then the pain in my legs went up a notch and I quickly concentrated on extinguishing my smoldering pants, rolling and slapping at them until they were no longer burning. And while it was a very good thing not to be on fire anymore, it was also several seconds of time that allowed Starzak and Wilkins to come charging toward me. I grabbed the pistol from the ground and lurched to my feet to face them.

A long time ago, Harry had taught me to shoot. I could almost hear his voice now as I moved into my firing stance, breathed out, and calmly squeezed the trigger. Aim for the center and shoot twice. Starzak goes down. Move your aim to Wilkins, repeat. And then there were bodies on the ground, and a terrible scramble of the remaining onlookers running for safety, and I was standing beside the god, alone in a place that was suddenly very quiet except for the wind. I turned to see why.

The old man had grabbed Astor and was holding her by the neck, with a grip much more powerful than seemed possible with his frail body. He pushed her close to the open furnace. “Drop the gun,” he said, “or she burns.”

I saw no reason to doubt that he would do as he said, and I saw no sign of any way to stop him, either. Everyone living had scattered, except for us.

“If I drop the gun,” I said, and I hoped I sounded reasonable, “how do I know you won’t put her in the fire anyway.”

He snarled at me, and it still caused a twinge of agony. “I’m not a murderer,” he said. “It has to be done right or it’s just killing.”

“I’m not sure I can see a difference,” I said.

“You wouldn’t. You’re an aberration,” he said.

“How do I know you won’t kill us all anyway?” I said.

“You’re the one I need to feed to the fire,” he said. “Drop the gun and you can save this girl.”

“Not terribly convincing,” I said, stalling for time, hoping for that time to bring something.

“I don’t need to be,” he said. “This isn’t a stalemate-there are other people on this island, and they’ll be back out here soon. You can’t shoot them all. And the god is still here. But since you obviously need convincing, how about if I slice your girl a few times and let the blood flow persuade you?” He reached down to his hip, found nothing, and frowned. “My knife,” he said, and then his expression of puzzlement blossomed into one of great astonishment. He gaped at me without saying a thing, simply holding his mouth wide open as if he was about to sing an aria.

And then he dropped to his knees, frowned, and pitched forward onto his face, revealing a knife blade protruding from his back-and also revealing Cody, standing behind him, smiling slightly as he watched the old man fall, and then looking up at me.

“Told you I was ready,” he said.

CHAPTER 40

T

HE HURRICANE TURNED NORTH AT THE LAST MINUTE and ended up hitting us with nothing but a lot of rain and a little wind. The worst of the storm passed far to the north of Toro Key, and Cody, Astor, and I spent the remainder of the night locked in the elegant room with the couch in front of one door and a large overstuffed chair in front of the other. I called Deborah on the phone I found in the room, and then made a small bed out of cushions behind the bar, thinking that the thick mahogany would provide additional protection if it was needed.

It wasn’t. I sat with my borrowed pistol all night, watching the doors, and watching the kids sleep. And since nobody disturbed us, that was really not enough to keep a full-grown brain alive, so I thought, too.

I thought about what I would say to Cody when he woke up. When he put the knife into the old man he had changed everything. No matter what he thought, he was not ready merely because of what he had done. He had actually made things harder for himself. The road was going to be a long tough one for him, and I didn’t know if I was good enough to keep his feet on it. I was not Harry, could never be anything like Harry. Harry had run on love, and I had a completely different operating system.

And what was that now? What was Dexter without Darkness?

How could I hope to live at all, let alone teach the children how to live, with a gaping gray vacuum inside me? The old man had said the Passenger would come back if I was in enough pain. Did I have to physically torture myself to call it home? How could I do that? I had just stood in burning pants watching Astor nearly thrown into a fire, and that hadn’t been enough to bring back the Passenger.

I still didn’t have any answers when Deborah arrived at dawn with the SWAT team and Chutsky. They found no one left on the island, and no clues as to where they might have gone. The bodies of the old man, Wilkins, and Starzak were tagged and bagged, and we all clambered onto the big Coast Guard helicopter to ride back to the mainland. Cody and Astor were thrilled of course, although they did an excellent job of pretending not to be impressed. And after all the hugs and weeping showered on them by Rita, and the general happy air of a job well done among the rest of them, life went on.

Just that: life went on. Nothing new happened, nothing within me was resolved, and no new direction revealed itself. It was simply a resumption of an aggressively plain ordinary existence that did more to grind me down further than all the physical pain in the world could have done. Perhaps the old man had been right-perhaps I had been an aberration. But I was not even that any longer.

I felt deflated. Not merely empty but

finished

somehow, as if whatever I came into the world to do was done now, and the hollow shell of me was left behind to live on the memories.

I still craved an answer to the personal absence that plagued me, and I had not received it. It now seemed likely that I never would. In my numbness I could never feel a pain deep enough to bring home the Dark Passenger. We were all safe and the bad guys were dead or gone, but somehow that didn’t seem to be about

me

. If that sounds selfish, I can only say that I have never pretended to be anything else but completely self-centered-at least not unless someone was watching. Now, of course, I would have to learn to truly

live

the part, and the notion filled me with a distant, weary loathing that I couldn’t shake off.

The feeling stayed with me over the next few days, and finally faded into the background just enough that I began to accept it as my new permanent lot. Dexter Downtrodden. I would learn to walk stooped over, and dress all in gray, and children everywhere would play mean little tricks on me because I was so sad and dreary. And finally, at some pathetic old age, I would simply fall over unnoticed and let the wind blow my dust into the street.

Life went on. Days blended into weeks. Vince Masuoka went into a furious frenzy of activity, finding a new more reasonable caterer, fitting me for my tuxedo, and, eventually, when the wedding day itself came, getting me to the overgrown church in Coconut Grove on time.

So I stood there at the altar, listening to the organ music and waiting with my new numb patience for Rita to sashay down the aisle and into permanent bondage with me. It was a very pretty scene, if only I had been able to appreciate it. The church was full of nicely dressed people-I never knew Rita had so many friends! Perhaps now I should try to collect some, too, to stand beside me in my new gray, pointless life. The altar was overflowing with flowers, and Vince stood at my side, sweating nervously and spasmodically wiping his hands on his pants legs every few seconds.

Then there was a louder blare from the organ, and everyone in the church stood up and faced backward. And here they came: Astor in the lead, in her beautiful white dress, her hair done in sausage curls and an enormous basket of flowers in her hands. Next came Cody in his tiny tuxedo, his hair plastered to his head, holding the small velvet cushion with the rings on it.

Last of all came Rita. As I saw her and the children, I seemed to see the whole drab agony of my new life parading toward me, a life of PTA meetings and bicycles, mortgages and Neighborhood Watch meetings, and Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, soccer and new shoes and braces. It was an entire lifeless, colorless secondhand existence, and the torment of it was blindingly sharp, almost more than I could bear. It washed over me with exquisite agony, a torture worse than anything I had ever felt, a pain so bitter that I closed my eyes-

And then I felt a strange stirring inside, a kind of surging fulfillment, a feeling that things were just the way they should be, now and evermore, world without end; that what was brought together here must never be rent asunder.

And marveling at this sensation of rightness, I opened my eyes and turned to look at Cody and Astor as they climbed the steps to stand beside me. Astor looked so radiantly happy, an expression beyond any I had ever seen from her, and it filled me with a sense of comfort and rightness. And Cody, so dignified with his small careful steps, very solemn in his quiet way. I saw that his lips were moving in some secret message for me, and I gave him a questioning glance. His lips moved again and I bent just a little to hear him.

“Your shadow,” he said. “It’s back.”

I straightened slowly and closed my eyes for the merest moment. Just long enough to hear the hushed sibilance of a welcome-home chuckle.

The Passenger had returned.

I opened my eyes, back again to the world as it should be. No matter that I stood surrounded by flowers and light and music and happiness, nor that Rita was now climbing the steps intent on clamping herself to me forevermore. The world was whole once again, just as it should be. A place where the moon sung hymns and the darkness below it murmured perfect harmony broken only by the counterpoint of sharp steel and the joy of the hunt.

No more gray. Life had returned to a place of bright blades and dark shadows, a place where Dexter hid behind the daylight so that he could leap out of the night and be what he was meant to be: Dexter the Avenger, Dark Driver for the thing once more inside.

And I felt a very real smile spread across my face as Rita stepped up to stand beside me, a smile that stayed with me through all the pretty words and hand-holding, because once more, forever and always, I could say it again.

I do. And yes, I will, I really will.

And soon.

EPILOGUE

F

AR ABOVE THE AIMLESS SCURRYING OF THE CITY IT

watched, and IT waited. There was plenty to see, as always, and IT was in no hurry. IT had done this many times before, and would do so again, endlessly and forever. That was what IT was for. Right now there were so many different choices to consider, and no reason to do anything but consider them until the right one was clear. And then IT would start again, gather the faithful, give them their bright miracle, and IT would feel once more the wonder and joy and swelling rightness of their pain.

All that would come again. It was just a matter of waiting for the right moment.

And IT had all the time in the world.

Jeffry Lindsay

***

Annotation

Being a blood spatter analyst who hates the sight of blood has always made Dexter's work for the Miami PD tough. But it means he's very neat when it comes to his out-of-hours hobby: murder. Of course, the fact Dexter only kills bad people helps too.

Now Dex is facing a disturbing situation. He's used to blood at work, and blood when he's out with the dark passenger (the voice that guides him on his deadly outings). But he's not sure what to make of the man who says blood is art. Using bodies as his canvas, someone is out there expressing themselves in the most lethal and painful of ways. If Dexter's to escape the scalpel and avoid becoming the latest exhibit, he needs somewhere to run...and he might just have found the perfect place. With his wedding looming, completing his nice-guy disguise, Dexter's honeymoon might just save his skin.

From the most original voice in crime fiction, DEXTER BY DESIGN is an enthralling, macabre and gruesomely entertaining thriller.

DEXTER BY DESIGN

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

EPILOGUE

DEXTER BY DESIGN
JEFF LINDSAY

For Hilary, as always

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

It is impossible to write in a vacuum. The air for this book was provided by Bear, Pookie, and Tink.

My gratitude to Jason Kaufman and his aide de camp, Caleb, for their enormous help in shaping the manuscript.

And as ever, special thanks to Nick Ellison, who made it all happen.

ONE

PARDONEZ MOI, MONSIEUR. Ou EST LA LUNE? Alors, mon ancien, la lune est id, ouvre la Seine, enorme, rouge et hutnide.

Merci, mon ami, I see it now Et actualment, name of a dog, it is a night for the moon, a night made just for the sharp pleasures of the moonlight, the dance macabre between Dexter of the Dark and some special friend.

But merde alors! The moon is over la Seine? Dexter is in Paris! Quelle horreur! The Dance is not possible, not in Paris! Here there is no way to find the special friend, no sheltering Miami night, no gentle welcoming ocean waters for the leftovers. Here there are only the taxis, the tourists, and that huge, lonely moon.

And Rita, of course. Rita everywhere, fumbling with her phrase book and folding and unfolding dozens of maps and guidebooks and pamphlets, all promising perfect happiness and, miraculously, delivering it —to her.

Only to her.

Because her newly wedded Parisian bliss is strictly a solo act, and her newly acquired husband, former high priest of lunar levity —Dexter the Drastically Deferred —can only marvel at the moon and hold tightly to the impatiently twitching Dark Passenger and hope that all this happy insanity will end soon and send us back to the well-ordered normal life of catching and carving the other monsters.

For Dexter is used to carving freely, with a neat and joyful hand that now must merely clutch at Rita's and marvel at the moon, savoring the irony of being on a honeymoon, wherein all that is sweet and lunar is forbidden.

And so, Paris. Dexter trudges meekly along in the wake of the Good Ship Rita, staring and nodding where these things are required and occasionally offering a sharp and witty comment, like, “Wow,” and, “Uh-huh,” as Rita trammels through the pent-up lust for Paris that has surged in her all these many years and which now, at last, has found consummation.

But surely even Dexter is not immune to the legendary charms of the City of Light? Surely even he must behold the glory and feel some small synthetic twitch stirring in response, somewhere in the dark and empty pit where a soul should be? Can Dexter truly come to Paris and feel absolutely nothing?

Of course not. Dexter feels plenty; Dexter feels tired, and bored. Dexter feels slightly anxious to find someone to play with sometime soon. The sooner the better, to be perfectly honest, since for some reason Being Married seems to sharpen the appetites somewhat.

But this is all part of the bargain, all part of what Dexter must do in order to do what Dexter does. In Paris, just like at home, Dexter must maintenir le deguisement. Even the worldly wise French might pause and frown at the thought of a monster in their midst, an inhuman fiend who lives only to tumble the other monsters off the edge into well-earned death. And Rita, in her new incarnation as blushing bride, is the perfect deguisement for all I truly am. No one could possibly imagine that a cold and empty killer would stumble meekly along behind such a perfect avatar of American tourism.

Surely, not mon frere. C'est impossible.

For the moment, alas, tres impossible. There is no hope of slipping quietly away for a few hours of much deserved recreation.

Not here, where Dexter is not known and does not know the ways of the police. Never in a strange and foreign place, where the strict rules of the Harry Code do not apply. Harry was a Miami cop, and in Miami all that he spake was just as he ordained it to be. But Harry spake no French, and French cops are so very unknown to me; the risk is far too high here, no matter how strongly the pulse of darkness may throb in the shadowy back seat.

A shame, really, because the streets of Paris are made for lurking with sinister intent. They are narrow, dark, and possess no logical order that a reasonable person can detect. It's far too easy to imagine Dexter, wrapped in a cape and clutching a gleaming blade, sliding through these gloomy alleys with an urgent appointment somewhere nearby in one of these same old buildings that seem to lean down at you and demand that you misbehave.

And the streets themselves are so perfect for mayhem, made as they are out of large blocks of stone that, in Miami, would have been pried out long ago and flung through the windshields of passing cars, or sold to a building contractor to make new roads.

But this is not Miami, alas. This is Paris. And so I bide my time, solidifying this vital new phase of Dexter's disguise, hoping to live through only one week more of Rita's dream honeymoon.

I drink the French coffee —weak by Miami standards— and the vin de table —disturbingly, reminiscently, red as blood— and marvel at my new wife's capacity for soaking up all that is French.

She has learned to blush very nicely as she says, “table pour deux, s'il vous plait,” and the French waiters instantly understand that this is a brand new two and, almost as if they got together ahead of time and agreed to feed Rita's romantic fantasies, they smile fondly, bow us to a table, and all but break into a chorus of “La vie en rose.” Ah, Paris. Ah, I'amour.

We spend the days trudging through the streets and stopping at terribly important map references. We spend the nights in small and quaint eating spots, many of them having the added bonus of some form of French music playing. We even attend a performance of The Imaginary Invalid at the Comedie Francaise. It is performed entirely in French for some reason, but Rita seems to enjoy it.

Two nights later she seems to enjoy the show at Moulin Rouge just as much. She seems, in fact, to enjoy nearly everything about Paris, even riding a boat up and down the river. I do not point out to her that much nicer boat rides are available at home in Miami, boat rides that she has never shown any interest in, but I do begin to wonder what, if anything, she might be thinking.

She assaults every landmark in the city, with Dexter as her unwilling shock troop, and nothing can stand before her. The Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, Versailles, the cathedral of Notre Dame; they all fall to her fierce blonde focus and savage guidebook.

It begins to seem like a somewhat high price to pay for deguisement, but Dexter is the perfect soldier. He plods on under his heavy burden of duty and water bottles. He does not complain about the heat, his sore feet, the large and unlovely crowds in their too tight shorts, souvenir T-shirts and flip-flops.

He does, however, make one small attempt to stay interested.

During the Hop-On-Hop-Off Bus Tour of Paris, as the recorded voice drones out, in eight languages, the names of the different fascinating locations with massive historical significance a thought comes unasked-for into Dexter's slowly suffocating brain. It seems only fair that here in the City of Eternal Accordion Music there is some small cultural pilgrimage available to a long suffering monster, and I know now what it is. At the next stop, I pause at the door of the bus and ask the driver a simple and innocent question.

“Excuse me,” I say “Do we go anywhere near the Rue Morgue?” The driver is listening to an iPod. He pulls one ear bud out with an annoyed flourish, looks me over from head to toe, and raises an eyebrow.

“The Rue Morgue,” I say again. “Do we go by the Rue Morgue?” I find myself speaking in the too-loud tones of the American non-linguist, and I stumble to a stop. The driver stares at me. I can hear tinny hip-hop music coming from the dangling ear bud. Then he shrugs. He launches into a brief and passionate explanation of my complete ignorance in very rapid French, pops the ear bud back in, and opens the door to the bus.

I follow Rita off the bus, meek, humble, and mildly disappointed.

It had seemed like such a simple thing to make a solemn stop at the Rue Morgue, to pay my respects to an important cultural landmark in the world of Monsters, but it is not to be. I repeat the question later, to a taxi driver, and receive the same answer, and Rita interprets with a somewhat embarrassed smile.

“Dexter,” she says. “Your pronunciation is terrible.”

“I might do better in Spanish,” I say.

“It wouldn't matter,” she says. “There is no Rue Morgue.”

“What?”

“It's imaginary,” she says. “Edgar Allen Poe made it up. There is no real Rue Morgue.”

I feel like she has just announced there is no Santa Claus. No Rue Morgue? No happy historical pile of Parisian corpses? How can this be? But it is certain to be true. There is no questioning Rita's knowledge of Paris. She has spent too many years with too many guidebooks for any possibility of a mistake.

And so I slide back into my shell of dumb compliance, the tiny flicker of interest killed as dead as Dexter's conscience.

With only three days left before we fly back home to the blessed malice and mayhem of Miami, we come to our Full Day At The Louvre. This is something that has raised mild interest even in me; just because I have no soul does not mean I don't appreciate art. Quite the opposite, in fact. Art is, after all, all about making patterns in order to create a meaningful impact on the senses. And isn't this just exactly what Dexter does? Of course, in my case “impact” is a little more literal, but still —I can appreciate other media.

So it was with at least a small interest that I followed Rita across the huge courtyard of the Louvre and down the stairs into the glass pyramid. She had chosen to go this alone and forsake the tour groups —not out of any distaste for the grungy mobs of gaping, drooling, woefully ignorant sheep who seemed to coalesce around each tour guide, but because Rita was determined to prove that she was a match for any museum, even a French one.

She marched us right up to the ticket line, where we waited for several minutes before she finally bought our tickets, and then we were off into the wonders of the Louvre.

The first wonder was immediately obvious as we climbed out of the admissions area and into the actual museum. In one of the first galleries we came to, a huge crowd of perhaps five large tour groups was clustered around a perimeter marked by a red velvet rope. Rita made a noise that sounded something like “Mrmph,” and reached for my hand to drag me past. As we walked rapidly past the crowd I turned for a look; it was the Mona Lisa.

“It's so tiny,” I blurted out.

“And very overrated,” Rita said primly.

I know that a honeymoon is meant to be a time for getting to know your new lifepartner, but this was a Rita I had never encountered before. The one I thought I knew did not, as far as I could tell, ever have strong opinions, especially opinions that were contrary to conventional wisdom. And yet, here she was calling the most famous painting in the world overrated. The mind boggled; at least, mine did.

“It's the Mona Lisa,” I said. “How can it be overrated?” She made another noise that was all consonants and pulled on my hand a little harder. “Come look at the Titians,” she said. “They're much nicer.”

The Titians were very nice. So were the Reubens, although I did not see anything in them to explain why they should have a sandwich named for them. But that thought did make me realize I was hungry, and I managed to steer Rita through three more long rooms filled with very nice paintings and into a cafe on one of the upper levels.

After a snack that was more expensive than airport food and only a little tastier, we spent the rest of the day wandering through the museum looking at room after room of paintings and sculptures. There really were an awful lot of them, and by the time we finally stepped out into the twilit courtyard again my formerly magnificent brain had been pounded into submission.

“Well,” I said, as we sauntered across the flagstones, “that was certainly a full day”

“Oohhh” she said, and her eyes were still large and bright, as they had been for most of the day. “That was absolutely incredible!” And she put an arm around me and nestled close as if I had been personally responsible for creating the entire museum. It made walking a bit more difficult, but it was, after all, the sort of thing one did on a honeymoon in Paris, so I let her cling on and we staggered across the courtyard and through the gate into the street.

As we turned the corner a young woman with more facial piercings than I would have thought possible stepped in front of us and thrust a piece of paper into Rita's hands. “Now to see the real art,” she said. “Tomorrow night, eh?”

“Merci,” Rita said blankly, and the woman moved past, thrusting her papers at the rest of the evening crowd.

I think she probably could have gotten a few more earrings on the left side,” I said as Rita frowned at the paper. “And she missed a spot on her forehead.”

“Oh,” said Rita. “It's a performance piece.” Now it was my turn to stare blankly, and I did. “What is?”

“Oh, that's so exciting,” she said. “And we don't have anything to do tomorrow night. We're going!”

“Going where?”

“This is just perfect,” she said.

And maybe Paris really is a magical place after all. Because Rita was right.

TWO

PERFECTION WAS IN A SMALL AND SHADOWED STREET NOT too far from the Seine, in what Rita breathlessly informed me was the Rive Gauche, and it took the form of a storefront performance space called Realite. We had hurried through dinner —even skipping dessert! —in order to get there at 7.30, as the flyer had urged.

There were about two dozen people inside when we got there, clustered together in small groups in front of a series of flat-screen TV monitors mounted on the walls. It all seemed very gallery-like, until I picked up one of the brochures. It was printed in French, English and German. I skipped ahead to the English and began to read.

After only a few sentences I felt my eyebrows climbing up my forehead. It was a manifesto of sorts, written with a clunky passion that did not translate well, except possibly into German. It spoke of expanding the frontiers of art into new areas of perception, and destroying the arbitrary line between art and life drawn by the archaic and emasculated Academy.

Even though some pioneering work had been done by Chris Burden, Rudolf Schwarzkogler, David Nebreda and others, it was time to smash the wall and move forward into the twenty-first century. And tonight, with a new piece called Jennifer's Leg, we were going to do just that.

It was all extremely passionate and idealistic, which I have always found to be a very dangerous combination, and I would have found it a little funny —except that Someone Else was finding it so, more than a little; somewhere deep in the dungeons of Castle Dexter I heard a soft and sibilant chuckle from the Dark Passenger, and that amusement, as always, heightened my senses and brought me up on point. I mean, really; the Passenger was enjoying an art exhibit?

I looked around the gallery with a different sort of awareness. The muted whispering of the people clustered by the monitors no longer seemed to be the hush of respect toward art. Now I could see an edge of disbelief and even shock in their near-silence.

I looked at Rita. She was frowning as she read, and shaking her head. “I've heard of Chris Burden, he was American,” she said. “But this other one, Schwarzkogler?” She stumbled over the name —after all, she had been studying French all this time, not German. “Oh,” she said, and began to blush. “It says he, he cut off his own—” She looked up at the people around the room, staring silently at something or other on the screens. “Oh my God,” she said.

“Maybe we should go,” I suggested, as my inner friend's amusement climbed steadily up the scale.

But Rita had already moved to stand in front of the first screen, and as she saw what it showed her mouth dropped open and began to twitch slightly, as if she was trying and failing to pronounce a very long and difficult word. “That's, that's, that's—” she said.

And a quick look at the screen showed that Rita was right again: it really was.

On the monitor a video clip showed a young woman dressed in an archaic stripper's costume of bangles and feathers. But instead of the kind of sexually provocative pose the outfit might have called for, she stood with one leg up on the table and, in a short and soundless loop of about fifteen seconds, she brought a whirring table saw down on her leg and threw her head back, mouth wide open in anguish. Then the clip jumped back to the start and she did the whole thing again.

“Dear God,” Rita said, shaking her head. “That's, that's some kind of trick photography. It has to be.” I was not so sure. In the first place, I had already been tipped off by the Passenger that something very interesting was going on here.

And in the second place, the expression on the woman's face was quite familiar to me from my own artistic endeavors. It was genuine pain, I was quite sure, real and extreme agony —and yet, in all my extensive research I had never before encountered someone willing to inflict this much of it on themselves. No wonder the Passenger was having a fit of the giggles. Not that I found it funny; if this sort of thing took hold I would have to find a new hobby.

Still, it was an interesting twist, and I might have been more than willing to look at the other video clips under ordinary circumstances.

But it did seem to me that I had some kind of responsibility toward Rita, and this was clearly not the sort of thing she could see and still maintain a sunny outlook. “Come on,” I said. “Let's go get some dessert.”

But she just shook her head and repeated, “It has to be a trick,” and she moved on to the next screen.

I moved with her and was rewarded with another fifteen second loop of the young woman in the same costume. In this one she actually appeared to be removing a chunk of flesh from her leg. Her expression here moved into dumb and endless agony, as if the pain had gone on long enough that she was used to it, but it still hurt.

Strangely enough, this expression reminded me of the face of the woman at the end of a movie Vince Masuoka had shown at my bachelor party -1 believe it was called Frat House Gang Bang. There was a gleam of I showed you” satisfaction showing through the fatigue and the pain as she looked down at the six-inch patch between her knee and her shin where all the flesh was peeled off to reveal the bone.

“Oh my God,” Rita murmured. And for some reason she continued to the next monitor.

I do not pretend to understand human beings. For the most part I try to maintain a logical outlook on life, which is usually a real disadvantage in trying to figure out what people really think they're doing. I mean, as far as I could tell, Rita truly was as sweet and pleasant and optimistic as Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. The sight of a dead cat beside the road could move her to tears.

And yet here she was, methodically moving through an exhibit that was clearly far worse than anything she had ever imagined. She knew that the next clip would be more of the same, graphic and appalling beyond belief. And yet, instead of sprinting for the exit she was calmly wanting more.

More people drifted in, and I watched them go through the same process of recognition and shock. The Passenger was clearly enjoying things, but to be perfectly truthful I was beginning to think that the whole affair was wearing a little thin. I couldn't really get into the spirit of the event and gain any sense of fun from the audience's suffering. After all, where was the point? Okay, Jennifer cut off pieces of her leg. So what? Why bother inflicting enormous pain on yourself when sooner or later Life would certainly get around to doing it for you? What did it prove? What happened next?

Still, Rita seemed determined to make herself as uncomfortable as possible, moving relentlessly from one video loop to the next.

I could think of nothing else to do but follow along in her wake, nobly enduring as she repeated, “Oh, God. Oh my God,” at each new horror.

At the far end of the room, the largest clump of people stood looking at something on the wall that was angled so that we could only see the metal edge of the frame. It was clear from their faces that this was a real doozy, the climax of the show, and I was a little impatient to get to it and get things over with, but Rita insisted on seeing every clip along the way first.

Each one showed the woman doing ever more dreadful things to her leg, until finally, in the last one, a slightly longer clip which showed her sitting still and staring down at her leg, there was nothing left but smooth white bone between her knee and her ankle. The flesh on the foot was left intact, and looked very odd at the end of the pale length of bone.

Even odder was the expression on Jennifer's face, a look of exhausted and triumphant pain that said she had clearly proved something. I glanced again at the program, but I found nothing to say what that something was.

Rita had no apparent insight either. She had fallen into a numb silence, and simply stared at the final clip, watching it three times before shaking her head a last time and moving on as if hypnotized to where the larger group of people stood clustered around the Something in the metal frame at the far end of the room.

It proved to be by far the most interesting piece in the exhibit, the real clincher as far as I was concerned, and I could hear the Passenger chuckling agreement. Rita, for the first time, was unable even to muster another repeat of “Oh my God'.

Mounted on a square of raw plywood and set in a steel frame was Jennifer's leg bone. The whole thing this time, including everything from the knee down.

“Well,” I said. “At least we know for sure it isn't trick photography”

“It's a fake,” Rita asserted, but I don't think she believed it.

Somewhere outside in the bright lights of the world's most glamorous city the church bells were striking the hour. But inside the little gallery there was very little glamour at that moment, and the bells sounded unusually loud —almost loud enough to cover another sound, the sibilance of a small familiar voice letting me know that things were about to get even more interesting, and because I have learned that this voice is almost always right, I turned around to look.

Sure enough, the plot was thickening even as I glanced at the front of the room. As I watched, the door swung open and with a rustle of spangles, Jennifer herself came in.

I had thought the room was quiet before, but it had been Mardi Gras compared to the silence that followed her as she clumped down the length of the room on crutches. She was pale and gaunt. Her stripper's costume hung loosely from her body, and she walked slowly and carefully, as if she was not yet used to the crutches. A clean white bandage covered the stump of her newly missing leg.

As Jennifer approached us where we stood in front of the mounted leg bone, I could feel Rita shrink back, away from any possible contact with the one-legged woman. I glanced at her; she was nearly as pale as Jennifer, and she had apparently given up breathing.

I looked back up. Just like Rita had done, the rest of the crowd, with their unblinking eyes fixed on Jennifer, edged away from her path, and she finally came to a halt only a foot in front of her leg.

She stared at it for a long moment, apparently unaware that she was depriving an entire roomful of people of oxygen. Then she raised one hand off the crutches, leaned forward, and touched the leg bone.

“Sexy,” she said.

Rita fainted.

THREE

WE ARRIVED HOME IN MIAMI ON A FRIDAY EVENING, two days later, and the mean-spirited surge of the crowd in the airport as they cursed and shoved each other around the baggage carousel nearly brought a tear to my eye.

Someone tried to walk off with Rita's suitcase, and then snarled at me when I took it away, and this was all the welcome I needed. It was good to be home.

If any further sentimental greeting was necessary, I got it bright and early on Monday morning, my first day back at work. I stepped off the elevator and bumped into Vince Masuoka. “Dexter,” he said, in what I am sure was a very emotional tone of voice, “did you bring doughnuts?” It was truly heart-warming to realize that I had been missed, and if only I had a heart I am sure it would have been warmed.

“I no longer eat doughnuts,” I told him. I only eat croissants.” Vince blinked. “How come?” he said.

“Je suis Parisien,” I replied.

He shook his head. “Well, you should have brought doughnuts,” he said. “We got a really weird one out on South Beach this morning, and there's no place out there to get doughnuts.”

“Comme c'est tragique!” I said.

“Are you gonna stay like this all day?” he said. “Cause this could be a really long one.”

It was, in fact, a long one, made longer by the mad crush of reporters and other gawkers who already stood three deep at the yellow crime-scene tape strung up around a chunk of beach not too far from the southernmost tip of South Beach. I was already sweating when I worked my way through the crowd and onto the sand, over to where I saw Angel Batista-No-Relation already down on his hands and knees examining something that no one else could see.

“What's weird?” I asked him.

He didn't even look up. “Tits on a frog,” he said.

“I'm sure you're right. But Vince said there's something weird about these bodies.”

He frowned at something and bent closer to the sand.

“Don't you worry about sand mites?” I asked him.

Angel just nodded. “They were killed somewhere else,” he said.

“But one of them dripped a little.” He frowned. “But it's not blood.”

“How lucky for me.”

“Also,” he said, using tweezers to put something invisible into a plastic bag, “they got ...” He paused here, not for any reason connected with unseen objects, but as if to find a word that wouldn't frighten me, and in the silence I heard a rising whirr of stretching wings from the dark back seat of the Dexter-mobile.

“What?” I said, when I could stand it no longer.

Angel shook his head slightly. “They got —arranged,” he said, and as if a spell had been broken he jerked into motion, sealing his plastic bag, placing it carefully to one side, and then going back down on one knee.

If that was all he had to say on the subject, I would clearly have to go see for myself what all the silence was about. So I walked another twenty feet to the bodies.

Two of them, one male and one female, apparently in their thirties, and they had not been chosen for their beauty. Both were pale, overweight and hairy. They had been carefully arranged on gaudy beach towels, the kind so popular with tourists from the Midwest. Casually spread open on the woman's lap was a bright pink paperback novel with the kind of trashy cover that people from Michigan love to carry around on vacation: Tourist Season. A perfectly ordinary married couple enjoying a day at the beach.

To underline the happiness they were supposed to be experiencing, each of them had a semi-transparent plastic mask stuck onto their face and apparently held in place with glue, the kind of mask that gave the wearer's face a large and artificial smile while still allowing the real features to show through. Miami, the home of permanent smiles.

Except that these two had somewhat unusual reasons to smile, reasons that had my Dark Passenger burbling with what sounded like laughter. These two bodies had been split open from the bottom of the ribcage down to the waist line, and then the flesh had been peeled back to show what was inside. I did not need the surge of hissing hilarity that rose up from my shadowy friend to appreciate that what was inside was just a little bit out of the ordinary.

All of the standard-issue messiness had been removed, which I thought was a very nice start. There was no awful gooey heap of intestines or glistening horrible guts. All the dreadful bloody gunk had been scooped out. The woman's body cavity had then been neatly and tastefully converted into a tropical fruit basket, the kind that might welcome special guests to a good hotel. I could see a couple of mangoes, papayas, oranges and grapefruits, a pineapple, and of course some bananas. There was even a bright red ribbon attached to the ribcage, and poking up out of the middle of the fruit was a bottle of cheap champagne.

The man had been arranged with a somewhat more casual diversity. Instead of the bright and attractive fruit medley, his emptied gut had been filled with a huge pair of sunglasses, a dive mask and snorkel, a squeeze bottle of sunscreen, a can of insect repellent, and a small plate of pasteles, Cuban pastries. It seemed like a terrible waste in this sandy wilderness without doughnuts.

Propped up on one side of the cavity was some kind of large pamphlet or brochure. I couldn't see the cover, so I bent over and looked closer; it was “The South Beach Swimsuit Calendar'. A grouper's head peeked out from behind the calendar, its gaping fishy face frozen into a smile eerily similar to the one on the plastic mask glued to the man's face.

I heard the crunch of feet through the sand behind me and turned around.

“Friend of yours?” my sister Deborah asked as she walked over and nodded at the bodies. Perhaps I should say Sergeant Deborah, since my job requires me to be polite to someone who has reached her exalted rank in the police force. And polite I generally am, even to the point of ignoring her snarky remarks. But the sight of what she held in her hand wiped away all my political obligations.

Somehow, she had managed to come up with a doughnut —a Bavarian Creme, my favorite —and she took a large bite. It seemed horribly unfair. “What do you think, bro?” she said through a mouthful.

I think you should have brought me a doughnut,” I said.

She bared her teeth in a large smile, which did not help anything, since her gums were lined with chocolate frosting from the doughnut in question. I did,” she said. “But I got hungry and ate it.” It was nice to see my sister smile, since it was not something she had been doing much of for the last few years; it just didn't seem to fit in with her cop self-image.

But I was not filled with the warm glow of brotherly affection at seeing her —mostly because I was not filled with doughnut, either, and I wanted to be. Still, I knew from my research that the happiness of one's family was the next best thing, so I put the best possible face on it. “I'm very happy for you,” I said.

“No you're not, you're pouting,” she said. “What do you think?” And she crammed the last chunk of Bavarian Creme into her mouth and nodded down at the bodies again.

Of all people in the world, Deborah had the right to ask for the benefit of my special insight into the sick and twisted animals who killed like this, since she was my only relative and I was sick and twisted myself. But aside from the slowly fading amusement of the Dark Passenger, I had no particular clue as to why these two bodies had been arranged like a welcome message from a very troubled civic booster.

I listened intently for a long moment, pretending to study the bodies, but I neither heard nor saw anything, except a faint and impatient clearing of the throat from the shadows inside Chateau Dexter. But Deborah was expecting some sort of pronouncement.

“It seems awfully contrived,” I managed to say.

“Nice word,” she said. “What the fuck does that mean?” I hesitated. I was drawing a blank. Even a true expert like myself has limits, and whatever trauma created the need to turn a pudgy woman into a fruit basket was beyond me and my interior helper.

Deborah looked at me expectantly. I didn't want to give her any casual chatter that she might take for genuine intuition and charge off in the wrong direction. On the other hand, my reputation required that I offer some kind of learned opinion.

“It's nothing definite,” I said. “It's just that...” And I paused for a moment, because I realized that what I was about to say actually was bona ride perception, and the small encouraging chuckle from the Passenger confirmed it.

“What, goddamn it?” Deborah said, and it was something of a relief to see her return to her own cranky normality.

“This was done with a kind of cold control you don't see normally,” I offered.

Debs snorted. “Normally?” she said. “Like, what —normal like you?”

I was surprised at the personal turn her remarks were taking, but I let it go. “Normal for somebody who could do this,” I said.

“There needs to be some passion, some sign that whoever did this was really, uh -feeling the need to do it. Not this. Not just like, what can I do after that's fun.”

“This is fun for you?” she said.

I shook my head, irritated that she was deliberately missing the point. “No, it's not, that's what I'm trying to say. The killing part is supposed to be fun, and the bodies should reveal that. Instead, the killing wasn't the point at all, it was just a means to an end. Instead of the end itself ... Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Is that what it's like for you?” she said.

I found myself somewhat taken aback, an unusual situation for Dashing Dexter, always ready with a quip. Deborah was still coming to terms with what I was, and what her father had done with me, and I could appreciate that it was difficult for her to deal with on a daily basis, especially at work —which for her, after all, involved finding people like me and sending them to Old Sparky.

On the other hand, it was truly not something I could talk about with anything approaching comfort. Even with Deborah, it felt like discussing oral sex with your mother. So I decided to side-step ever so slightly. “My point is,” I said, “that this doesn't seem to be about the killing. It's about what to do with the bodies afterwards.” She stared at me for a moment, and then shook her head. I would love to know what the fuck you think that means,” she said. “But even more, I think I would love to know what the fuck goes on in your head.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It sounded like a soothing sound the Passenger might make. “Look, Debs,” I said.

“What I'm saying is, we're not dealing with a killer —we're dealing with somebody who likes to play with dead bodies, not live ones.”

“And that makes a difference?”

“Yes.”

“Does he still kill people?” she asked.

“It sure looks like it.”

“And he'll probably do it again?”

“Probably,” I said over a cold chuckle of interior certainty that only I could hear.

“So what's the difference?” she said.

“The difference is that there won't be the same kind of pattern.

You can't know when he'll do it again, or who he'll do it to, or any of the things you can usually count on to help you catch him. All you can do is wait and hope you get lucky”

“Shit,” she said. I never was good at waiting.” There was a little bit of a commotion over where the cars were parked, and an overweight detective named Coulter come scuffling rapidly over the sand to us.

“Morgan,” he said.

“Yeah?” we both said.

“Not you,” he told me. “You. Debbie.” Deborah made a face —she hated being called Debbie. “What?”

“We're supposed to partner on this,” he said. “Captain said.”

“I'm already here,” she said. I don't need a partner.”

“Now you do,” Coulter said. He took a swig from a large soda bottle. “There's another one of these,” he said, gasping for breath.

“Over at Fairchild Gardens.”

“Lucky you,” I said to Deborah. She glared at me and I shrugged.

“Now you don't have to wait.”

FOUR

ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT MIAMI HAS ALWAYS been the total willingness of its residents to pave everything.

Our fair city began as a sub-tropical garden teeming with wildlife, both animal and vegetable, and after only a very few years of hard work all the plants were gone and the animals were dead.

Of course, their memory lingers on in the condo clusters that replace them. It is an unwritten law that each new development is named after whatever was killed to build it. Destroy eagles? Eagle's Nest Gated Community. Kill off the panthers? Panther Run Planned Living. Simple and elegant, and generally very lucrative.

I don't mean to suggest by this that Fairchild Gardens was a parking lot where all the Fairchilds and their tulips had been killed.

Far from it. If anything, it represented the revenge of the plants. You had to drive past a certain number of Orchid Bays and Cypress Hollows to get there, but when you arrived, you were greeted by a vast natural-looking wilderness of trees and orchids nearly devoid of hedge-clipping humanity. Except for the busloads of tourists, of course. Still, there were actually one or two places where you could look at a genuine palm tree without seeing neon lights in the background, and on the whole I usually found it a relief to walk among the trees and vegetate far from the hurly-burly.

But this morning, the parking area was overflowing when we arrived, since the gardens had been closed with the discovery of Something Awful, and the crowds of people who had scheduled a visit had backed up at the entrance, hoping to get inside so they could mark it off on their itinerary, and maybe even see something horrible so they could pretend to be shocked. A perfect vacation visit to Miami; orchids and corpses.

There were even two elfin young men with video cameras circulating through the crowd and filming, of all things, the people standing around and waiting. As they moved they called out, “Murder in the gardens!” and other encouraging remarks. Perhaps they had a good parking spot and didn't want to leave it, since there was absolutely no place left to park anything larger than a unicycle.

Deborah, of course, was a Miami native, and a Miami cop; she pushed her motor-pool Ford through the crowd and parked it right in front of the main entrance to the park, where several other official cars were already parked, and jumped right out. By the time I got out of the car she was already talking to the uniformed officer standing there, a short beefy guy named Meltzer, whom I knew slightly. He was pointing down one of the paths on the far side of the entrance, and Deborah was already headed past him along the trail he had indicated.

I followed as quickly as I could. I was used to tagging along behind Deborah and playing catch-up, since she always rushed onto a crime scene. It never seemed quite politic to point out to her that there was really no need to hurry. After all, the victim wasn't going anywhere. Still, Deborah hurried, and she expected me to be there to decipher the scene. And so, before she could get lost in the carefully tended jungle, I hurried after her.

I finally caught up to her just as she skidded to a halt in a small clearing off the main trail, an area called Rain Forest. There was a bench where the weary nature lover could pause and recuperate amid the blooms. Alas for poor panting Dexter, breathing hard now as a result of racing pell-mell after Debs, the bench was already occupied by someone who clearly needed to sit down far more than I did.

He sat beside running water in the shade of a palm tree, dressed in baggy cotton shorts, the flimsy kind that have somehow become acceptable to wear in public recently, and he wore the rubber flip flops that invariably go with the shorts. He also had on a T-shirt that said, “I'm with Butthead” and he was draped with a camera and pensively clutching a bouquet. Although I say pensively, it was a very different kind of pensiveness, because his head had been neatly removed and replaced with a colorful spray of tropical flowers.

Instead of flowers the bouquet consisted of a bright and festive heap of intestines, topped by what was almost certainly a heart and surrounded by an appreciative cloud of flies.

“Son of a bitch,” Deborah said and it was hard to argue with her logic. “Son of a god damn bitch. Three of “em in one day”

“We don't know for sure that they're connected,” I said carefully, and she glared at me.

“You want to tell me we got two of these assholes running around at the same time?” she demanded.

“It doesn't seem very likely,” I admitted.

“You're goddamned right it doesn't. And I'm about to have Captain Matthews and every reporter on the Eastern Seaboard on my ass.”

“Sounds like quite a party,” I said.

“So what am I supposed to tell them?”

“We are pursuing a number of leads and hope to have something more definite to tell you shortly,” I said.

Deborah stared at me with the look of a large and very angry fish, all teeth and wide eyes. I can remember that shit without your help,” she said. “Even the reporters can remember that shit. And Captain Matthews invented that shit.”

“What kind of shit would you prefer?” I asked.

“The kind of shit that tells me what this is about, asshole.” I ignored my sister's term of endearment and looked again at our nature-loving friend. There was an air of studied ease to the position of the body that created a very large contrast to the fact that it was actually a very dead and headless former human being. It had apparently been posed with extreme care, and once again I got the distinct impression that this final diorama was more important than the actual killing had been.

It was a little bit disturbing, in spite of the mocking chuckle from the Dark Passenger. It was as if someone admitted they went through all the bother and mess of sex only to smoke a cigarette afterwards.

Equally disturbing was the fact that, as at the earlier scene, I was getting no hints at all from the Passenger, beyond a kind of disconnected and appreciative amusement.

“What this seems to be about,” I said hesitatingly, “is making some kind of statement.”

“Statement?” Deborah said. “What kind of statement?”

“I don't know.”

Deborah stared at me for a moment longer, then shook her head.

“Thank God you're here to help,” she said and before I could think of some suitable stinging remark in my defense, the forensic team bustled into our peaceful little glen and began to photograph, measure, dust, and peer into all the tiny places that might hold answers. Deborah immediately turned away to talk to Camilla Figg, one of the lab geeks, and I was left alone to suffer in the knowledge that I had failed my sister.

I am sure the suffering would have been terrible if I was capable of feeling remorse, or any other crippling human emotion, but I am not built for it, and so I didn't feel it —or anything else except hunger.

I went back out to the parking area and talked to Officer Meltzer until someone came along who could give me a ride back to the South Beach site. I had left my kit there, and had not even made a start on looking for any blood evidence.

I spent the rest of the morning shuttling back and forth between the two crime scenes. There was very little actual spatter work for me to do, no more than the few small, nearly dry spots in the sand that suggested the couple on the beach had been killed elsewhere and brought out onto the beach later. I was pretty sure we had all assumed this already, since it was very unlikely that somebody would do all that chopping and re-arranging quite so publicly, so I didn't bother to mention this to Deborah, who was already in a pointless frenzy, and I didn't want any more of it aimed at me.

The only real break I got all day was at almost one o'clock, when Angel-no-relation offered to drive me back to my cubicle, and stop along the way at Calle Ocho for lunch at his favorite Cuban restaurant, Habanita. I had a very nice Cuban steak with all the trimmings, and two cafecitas with my flan dessert, and I felt a whole lot better about myself as I headed into the building, flashed my credentials, and stepped into the elevator.

As the elevator doors slid shut I felt a small flutter of uncertainty from the Passenger, and I listened hard, wondering if this was a reaction to the morning's carnival of carnage, or perhaps the result of too many onions with my steak. But I could get nothing more from it beyond a certain tensing of invisible black wings, very often a sign that things were not what they should be.

How this could happen in an elevator I did not know, and I considered the idea that the Passenger's recent sabbatical in the face of Moloch might have left it in a mildly dithering and unsettled state. It would not do, of course, to have a less than effective Passenger, and I was pondering what to do about that when the elevator doors opened and all questions were answered.

As if he had known we would be aboard, Sergeant Doakes stood glaring and unblinking at the exact spot where we stood, and the shock was considerable. He had never liked me; had always had the unreasonable suspicion that I was some kind of monster, which of course I was, and he had been determined to prove it somehow. But an amateur surgeon had captured Doakes and removed his hands, feet, and tongue, and although I had endured considerable inconvenience in trying to save him —and really, I did help save most of him —he had decided his new, trimmed-down form was my fault, and he liked me even less.

Even the fact that without his tongue he was now incapable of saying anything that was minimally coherent was no help; he said it anyway, and the rest of us were forced to endure what sounded like a strange new language made up of all “G” and “N” sounds, and spoken with an urgent and threatening delivery that made you look for an emergency exit even while you strained to understand.

So I braced myself for some angry gibberish and he stood there looking at me with an expression that is usually reserved for grandmother-rapers, and I began to wonder if I could possibly just push past him, but then the elevator doors began to close automatically.

Before I could escape back downstairs, Doakes shot out his right hand —actually a gleaming steel claw —and stopped the doors from closing.

“Thank you,” I said, and took a tentative step forward. But he did not budge and he did not blink and without knocking him down, I did not see how I could get by.

Doakes kept his unblinking loathing stare on me and brought up a small silver thing about the size of a hardcover book. He flipped it open to reveal that it was a small hand-held computer or PDA and, still without looking away from me, he jabbed at it with his claw.

“Put it on my desk,” said a disjointed male voice from the PDA, and Doakes snarled a little more and jabbed again. “Black with two sugars,” the voice said, and he poked again. “Have a nice day,” it said in a very pleasant baritone that should have come from a happy, pudgy white American man, instead of this glowering dark cyborg so bent on revenge.

But at least he finally had to look away, down to the keyboard of the thing he held in his claw, and after staring for a moment at what was clearly a cluster of pre-recorded sentences, he found the right button.

“I am still watching you,” said the happy voice. Its cheerful, positive tone should have made me feel very good about myself, but the fact that it was Doakes saying it by proxy somehow spoiled the effect.

“That's very reassuring,” I said. “Would you mind watching me get off the elevator?”

For a moment I thought he did mind, and he moved his claw to the keyboard again. But then he remembered that it hadn't worked out too well before to poke it without looking, so he glanced down, punched a button, and looked up at me as the cheerful voice said, “Motherfucker,” in a tone that made it sound like, “Jelly doughnut.” But at least he moved aside slightly so I could get by.

“Thank you,” I said, and because I am sometimes not a very kind person, I added, “And I will put it on your desk. Black with two sugars. Have a nice day.” I stepped past him and headed down the hall, but I could feel his eyes on me all the way down to my cubicle.

FIVE

THE ORDEAL OF THE WORKING DAY HAD BEEN nightmarish enough, from being stranded without doughnuts in the morning all the way through to the terrifying encounter with what was left of Sergeant Doakes, the vocally enhanced version. Even so, none of this prepared me for the shock of arriving home.

I'd been hoping for the warm and fuzzy glow of a good meal and some down time with Cody and Astor my adopted children perhaps a game of Kick the Can out in the yard before dinner. But as I pulled up and parked at Rita's house —now my house, too, which took some getting used to —I was surprised to see the two small tousled heads sitting in the front yard, apparently waiting for me. Since I knew full well that SpongeBob was on TV right now, I could not imagine what would make them do this. So it was with a growing sense of alarm that I climbed out of my car and approached them.

“Greetings, citizens,” I said. They stared at me with a matched set of mournful looks, but said nothing. That was to be expected from Cody, who never spoke more than four words at a time. But for Astor, it was alarming, since she had inherited her mother's talent for circular breathing, which allowed them both to talk without pausing for air. To see her sit there without speaking was almost unprecedented. So I switched languages and tried again.

“What up, yo?” I asked them.

“Poop van,” said Cody. Or at any rate, that's what I thought I heard. But since none of my training had prepared me to respond to anything remotely like that, I looked over at Astor, hoping for some hint about how I should react.

“Mom said we get to have pizza but it's the poop van for you, and we didn't want you to go away, so we came out here to warn you. You're not going away, are you, Dexter?” It was a small relief to know that I had heard Cody right, even though that now meant that I had to make sense of “poop van'. Had Rita really said that? Did it mean that I had done something very bad that I didn't know about? That didn't seem fair —I liked to remember and enjoy it when I do something bad. And one day after the honeymoon —wasn't that just a little abrupt?

“As far as I know, I'm not going anywhere,” I said. “Are you sure that's what your mom said?” They nodded in unison and Astor said, “Uh-huh. She said you'd be surprised.”

“She was right,” I said, and it really didn't seem fair. I was totally at a loss. “Come on,” I said. “We'll go tell her I'm not going.” They each took one of my hands and we went inside.

The air inside the house was filled with a tantalizing aroma, strangely familiar and yet exotic, as if you sniffed a rose and instead smelled pumpkin pie. It was coming from the kitchen, so I led my small troop in that direction.

“Rita?” I called out, and the clatter of a pan answered me.

“It's not ready,” she said. “It's a surprise.” As we all know, surprise is usually ominous, unless it is your birthday —and even then, there are no guarantees. But I pushed bravely into the kitchen anyway, and found Rita wearing an apron and fussing over the stove, a lock of blonde hair falling unnoticed down across her forehead.

“Am I in trouble?” I asked.

“What? No, of course not. Why would— damn it!” she said, sticking a singed finger into her mouth, and then stirring the contents of the pan furiously.

“Cody and Astor say you're sending me away,” I said.

Rita dropped her stirring spoon and looked at me with an expression of alarm. “Away? That's silly, I— why would I ...” She bent to pick up the spoon and jumped to the skillet to stir again.

“So you didn't call the poop van?” I said.

“Dexter,” she said, with a certain amount of stress in her voice, “I am trying to make you a special meal, and I'm working very hard not to ruin it. Can this please wait until later?” And she jumped to the counter and grabbed a measuring cup, and then rushed back to the skillet.

“What are you making?” I said.

“You liked the food so much in Paris,” she said, frowning and slowly stirring in whatever was in the measuring cup.

I almost always like the food,” I said.

“So I wanted to make you a nice French meal,” she said. “Coq au vin.” She said it with her best Bad French accent, caca van, and a very small light bulb came on in my head.

“Caca van?” I said, and I looked at Astor.

She nodded. “Poop van,” she said.

“Damn it!” said Rita again, this time trying vainly to stick a burned elbow into her mouth.

“Come along, children,” I said in a Mary Poppins voice. “I'll explain it outside.” And I led them through the house, down the hall, and out into the backyard. We sat together on the step and they both looked at me expectantly.

“All right,” I said. “Caca van is just a misunderstanding.” Astor shook her head. Since she knew absolutely everything, a misunderstanding was not possible. “Anthony said that caca means poop in Spanish,” she said with certainty. “And everybody knows what a van is.”

“But coq au vin is French,” I said. “It's something your mother and I learned about in France.” Astor shook her head, a little doubt showing on her face.

“Nobody speaks French,” she said.

“Several people speak it in France,” I said. “And even over here, some people like your mother think they speak it.”

“So what is it?” she asked.

“It's chicken,” I said.

They looked at each other, then back at me. Oddly enough, it was Cody who broke the silence. “Do we still get pizza?” he asked.

“I'm pretty sure you do,” I said. “So how about rounding up a team for Kick the Can?”

Cody whispered something to Astor, and she nodded. “Can you teach us stuff? You know, the other stuff?” she said.

The “other stuff she referred to was, of course, the Dark Lore that went with training to be Dexter's Disciples. I had discovered recently that the two of them, because of the repeated trauma of life with their biological father, who regularly beat them with furniture and small appliances, had both turned into what can only be described as My Children. Dexter's Descendants.

They were as permanently scarred as I was, forever twisted away from fuzzy puppy reality and into the sunless land of wicked pleasure. They were far too eager to begin playing fiendish games, and the only safe way out for them was through me and onto the Harry Path.

Truthfully, it would be a very real delight to conduct a small lesson tonight, as a baby step back in the direction of resuming my “normal life', if one could apply such an expression to my existence. The honeymoon had strained my imitations of polite behavior beyond all their previous limits, and I was ready to slither back into the shadows and polish my fangs. Why not bring the children along?

All right,” I said. “Go get some kids for Kick the Can, and I'll show you something you can use.”

“By playing Kick the Can?” Astor said with a pout. “We don't want to know that.”

“Why do I always win when we play Kick the Can?” I asked them.

“You don't,” Cody said.

“Sometimes I let one of you win,” I said loftily.

“Ha,” Cody said.

“The point is,” I said, I know how to move quietly. Why could that be important?”

“Sneak up on people,” Cody said, which were a lot of words in a row for him. It was wonderful to see him coming out of his shell with this new hobby.

“Yes,” I said. “And Kick the Can is a good game to practice that.” They looked at each other, and then Astor said, “Show us first, and then we'll go get everybody”

“All right,” I said, and I stood up and led them to the hedge between our yard and the neighbors'.

It was not dark yet, but the shadows were getting longer and we stood there in the shaded grass beside the hedge. I closed my eyes for just a moment; something stirred in the dark back seat and I let the rustling of black wings rattle softly through me, feeling myself blend in with the shadows and become a part of the darkness ...

“What are you doing?” Astor said.

I opened my eyes and looked at her. She and her brother were staring at me as if I had suddenly started to eat dirt, and it occurred to me that trying to explain an idea like becoming one with the darkness might be a tough sell. But it had been my idea to do this, so there was really no way around it.

“First,” I said, trying to sound casually logical, “you have to make yourself relax, and feel like you're a part of the night around you.”

“It's not night,” Astor pointed out.

“Then just be a part of the late afternoon, okay?” I said. She looked dubious, but she didn't say anything else, so I went on.

“Now,” I said. “There's something inside you that you need to wake up, and you need to listen to it. Does that make sense to you?”

“Shadow Guy,” said Cody, and Astor nodded.

I looked at the two of them and felt something close to religious wonder. They knew about the Shadow Guy —their name for the Dark Passenger. They had it inside them as certainly as I did, and were familiar enough with its existence to have named it. There could be no doubt about it —they were already in the same dark world I lived in. It was a profound moment of connection, and I knew now that I was doing the right thing —these were my children and the Passenger's and the thought that we were together in this stronger-than-blood bond was almost overwhelming.

I was not alone. I had a large and wonderful responsibility in taking charge of these two and keeping them safely on the Harry Path to becoming what they already were, but with safety and order.

It was a lovely moment, and I am quite sure that somewhere music was playing.

And that really should have been how this day of turmoil and hardship ended. Really and truly, if there were any justice at all in this wide wicked world, we would have frolicked happily in the evening's heat, bonding and learning wonderful secrets, and then ambling in to a delicious meal of French food and American pizza.

But of course, there is no such thing as justice, and most of the time I find myself pausing to reflect that it must be true that life does not really like us very much, after all. And I should not have been surprised when, just as I reached out a hand to each of them, my cell phone began to warble.

“Get your ass down here,” Deborah barked, without even a hello.

“Of course,” I said. “As long as the rest of me can stay here for dinner.”

“That's funny,” she said, although she didn't sound very amused.

“But I don't need another laugh right now, because I am looking at another one of those hilarious dead bodies.” I felt a small inquisitive purr from the Passenger, and several hairs on the back of my neck stood up for a closer look. “Another?” I said. “You mean like the three posed bodies this morning?”

“That's exactly what I mean,” she said, and hung up.

“Har-de-har-har,” I said, and put my phone away.

Cody and Astor were looking at me with identical expressions of disappointment. “That was Sergeant Debbie, wasn't it?” Astor said. “She wants you to go to work.”

“That's right,” I admitted.

“Mom is going to be really mad,” she said, and it hit me that she was probably right —I could still hear Rita making furious cooking noises in the kitchen, punctuated with the occasional “damn it'. I was hardly an expert on the subject of human expectations, but I was pretty sure she would be upset that I was going to leave without tasting this special and painfully prepared meal.

“Now I really am on the poop van,” I said, and I went inside, wondering what I could possibly say and hoping some inspiration might hit me before Rita did.

SIX

I WAS NOT AT ALL CERTAIN I WAS GOING TO THE RIGHT PLACE until I got there and pulled up in front —it had seemed like such an unlikely destination before I got to where I could see the yellow crime-scene tape, the lights of the patrol cars flashing in the dusk, and the growing crowd of gawkers hoping to see something unforgettable. It was almost always crowded at Joe's Stone Crab, but not in July. The restaurant would not open again until October, which seemed like a long wait even for Joe's.

But this was a different crowd tonight, and they weren't here for stone crabs. They were hungry for something else tonight, something Joe would most likely prefer to take off his menu.

I parked and followed the trail of uniformed officers around to the back, where tonight's entree sat, leaning back against the wall beside the service door. I heard the sibilant interior chuckling before I actually saw any details, but as I got close enough, the lights strung up by the forensic team showed me plenty worth an appreciative smile.

His feet were crammed into a pair of those black, glove leather shoes that are usually Italian and most often worn for the sole purpose of dancing. He also wore a pair of very nice resort-style shorts in a tasteful cranberry color, and a blue silk shirt with a silver embossed palm tree pattern on it. But the shirt was unbuttoned and pulled back to reveal that the man's chest had been removed and the cavity emptied out of all the natural and awful stuff that should go in there. It was now filled instead with ice, bottles of beer, and what appeared to be a shrimp cocktail ring from the grocery store.

His right hand was clutching a fistful of Monopoly money, and his face was covered with another of those glued-on plastic masks.

Vince Masuoka crouched on the far side of the doorway spreading dust in slow, even strokes across the wall, and I stepped over beside him.

“Are we going to get lucky tonight?” I asked him.

He snorted. “If they let us take a couple of those free beers,” he said. “They're really cold.”

“How can you tell?” I asked.

He jerked his head toward the body. “It's that new kind, the label turns blue when it's cold,” he said. He wiped his arm across his forehead. “It's gotta be over ninety out here, and that beer would taste great right now.”

“Sure,” I said, looking at the improbable shoes on the body. “And then we could go dancing.”

“Hey,” he said. “You want to? When we're done?”

“No,” I answered. “Where's Deborah?” He nodded to his left. “Over there,” he said. “Talking to the woman who found it.”

I walked over to where Debs was interviewing an hysterical Hispanic woman who was crying into her hands and shaking her head at the same time, which struck me as a very difficult thing to do, like rubbing your belly and patting your head. But she was doing it quite well, and for some reason Deborah was not impressed with the woman's wonderful coordination.

“Arabelle,” Debs was saying, “Arabelle, please listen to me.” Arabelle was not listening, and I didn't think my sister's vocal tone of combined anger and authority was well calculated to win over anyone —especially not someone who looked like she had been sent over from a casting office to play the part of a cleaning woman with no green card. Deborah glared at me as I approached, as if it was my fault that she was intimidating Arabelle, so I decided to help.

It is not that I think Debs is incompetent —she is very good at her job; it's in her blood, after all. And the idea that to know me is to love me is one that has never crossed the shadowed threshold of my mind. Just the opposite, in fact. But Arabelle was so upset, it was clear that she was not filled with the thrill of discovery. Instead she was several steps over the edge into hysteria, and talking to hysterical people, like so much of ordinary human interaction, isn't most people's favorite thing to do, happily for Dark and Dismal Dexter.

It was all technique, a craft and not an art, and that put it squarely inside the expertise of anyone who has studied and copied human behavior. Smile in the right places, nod your head, pretend to listen -1 had mastered it ages ago.

“Arabelle,” I said in a soothing voice and with the proper Central American accent. She stopped shaking her head for a moment.

“Arabelle, necesitamos descubrir este monstruo.” I looked over at Debs and said, “It is a monster that did this, right?” and she snapped her chin up and down in a nod of agreement.

“Digame, por favor,” I said soothingly, and Arabelle very gratifyingly lowered one hand from her face.

“Si?” she said shyly, and I marveled once again at the power of my totally smarmy synthetic charm. And in two languages, too.

“En Ingles?” I said with a really good fake smile. “Porque mi hermana no habla Espanol.” I said nodding at Deborah. I was sure that referring to Debs as “my sister', rather than “the authority figure with a gun who wants to send you back to El Salvador after she has seen you beaten and raped', would help to open her up a little bit.

“Do you speak English?”

“Lee-tell beet,” she said.

“Good,” I said. “Tell my sister what you saw.” And I took a step back, only to find that Arabelle had shot out a hand and clamped it onto my arm.

“You no go?” she said shyly.

I stay here,” I said. She looked at me searchingly for a moment.

I don't have any idea what she was looking for, but she apparently thought she saw it. She let go of my arm, dropped both hands to clasp them in front of her, and faced Deborah, standing almost at attention.

I looked at Deborah, too, and found her staring at me with a look of disbelief on her face. “Jesus,” she said. “She trusts you and not me?”

“She can tell that my heart is pure,” I said.

“Pure what?” Debs said, and she shook her head. “Jesus. If only she knew.”

I had to admit there was some truth in my sister's ironic observation.

Still, what I was had all been sanctioned and set up by her father, Saint Harry, and even in death his was not an authority that Debs would question —nor would I, for that matter. But her tone of voice was a little sharp for someone who was counting on me for help, and it stung just a little. “If you like,” I said, I can leave and let you do this alone.”

“No!” said Arabelle, and once again her hand flew over and attached itself to my arm. “You say that you stay,” she said, accusation and near-panic in her voice.

I raised an eyebrow at Deborah.

She shrugged. “Yeah,” she said. “You stay.” I patted Arabelle's hand and pried it off me. “I'll be right here,” I said, adding, “Espero aqui,” with another completely artificial smile that for some reason seemed to reassure her. She looked into my eyes, smiled back, took a deep breath and faced Debs.

“Tell me,” she said to Arabelle.

I get here same hour, like every time,” she said.

“What hour is that?” Deborah asked.

Arabelle shrugged. “Five o'clock,” she said. “Threes time a week now, because is close en Julio, but they wan keep it clean. No coke-roachess.” She looked at me and I nodded; coke-roachess bad.

“And you went to the back door?” Deborah asked.

“Esway, es ...” She looked at me and made an awkward face. “Siempre?”

“Always,” I translated.

Arabelle nodded. “Always back door,” she said. “Frawnt ees close hasta octuobre!

Deborah cocked her head for a moment, but then got it: front closed until October. “Okay,” she said. “So you get here, you go around to the back door, and you see the body?” Arabelle covered her face again, just for a moment. She looked at me and I nodded, so she dropped her hands. “Yes.”

“Did you notice anything else, anything unusual?” Debs asked, and Arabelle looked at her blankly. “Did you see something that shouldn't be there?”

“El cuerpo,” Arabelle said indignantly, pointing at the corpse. “He no shood be there.”

“And did you see anybody else at all?” Arabelle shook her head. “Nobody. Me only”

“How about nearby?” Arabelle looked blank, and Deborah pointed. “Over there? On the sidewalk? Anybody at all over there?” Arabelle shrugged. “Turistas. Weeth cameras.” She frowned and lowered her voice, speaking confidentially to me. “Creo que muy probablemente eran maricones,” she said, shrugging.

I nodded. “Gay tourists,” I said to Deborah.

Deborah glared at her, then turned it on me, as if she could scare one of us into thinking up another really good question. But even my legendary wit had run dry, and I shrugged. “I don't know,” I said.

“She probably can't tell you any more than that.”

“Ask her where she lives,” Deborah said, and an expression of alarm flitted across Arabelle's face.

I don't think she'll tell you,” I said.

“Why the fuck not?” Deborah demanded.

“She's afraid you'll tell la Migra,” I said, and Arabelle visibly jumped when I said it. “Immigration.” I know what the fuck la Migra means,” Deborah snapped. “I live here, too, remember?”

“Yes,” I said. “But you refused to learn Spanish.”

“Then ask her to tell you,” Deborah said.

I shrugged and turned to Arabelle. “Necesito su direccion,” I said.

“Por que?” she said rather shyly.

“Vamos a bailor,” I said. We'll go dancing.

She giggled. “Estoy casada,” she said. I'm married.

“Por favor?” I said, with my very best one hundred watt smile, and I added, “Nunca para la Migra, de verdad.” Arabelle smiled, leaned forward, and whispered an address in my ear. I nodded; it was in an area flooded with Central American immigrants, several of them here legally. It made perfect sense for her to live there, and I was certain she was telling me the truth. “Gracias,” I said, and as I started to pull away, she grabbed my arm again.

“Nunca para la Migra?” she asked.

“Never,” I agreed. “Solamente para pillar este asesino.” Only to catch this killer.

She nodded as if that made sense, that I needed her address to find the killer, and gave me her shy smile again. “Gracias,” she said. “Te creo.” I believe you. Her faith in me was really quite touching, especially considering there was no reason for it, beyond the fact that I had given her a completely phony smile. It made me wonder if a career change was in order —perhaps I should sell cars, or even run for president.

“All right,” Deborah said. “She can go home.” I nodded at Arabelle. “Vaya a casa,” I said.

“Gracias,” she said again. And she smiled hugely and then turned and almost ran for the street.

“Shit,” Deborah said. “Shit shit shit.” I looked at her with raised eyebrows, and she shook her head.

She seemed deflated, the anger and tension drained out of her. I know it's stupid,” she said. I just hoped she might have seen something. I mean ...” She shrugged and turned away, looking in the direction of the body in the doorway. “We'll never find the gay tourists, either. Not in South Beach,” she said.

“They can't have seen anything anyway,” I said.

“In broad daylight. And nobody saw anything?”

“People see what they expect to see,” I said. “He probably used a delivery van, and that would make him invisible.”

“Well, shit,” she said again, and it didn't seem like a good time to criticize her for such a limited vocabulary. She faced me again. I don't suppose you got anything helpful from looking at this one?”

“Let me take some pictures and think about it,” I said.

“That's a no, right?”

“It's not a stated no,” I said. “It's an implied no.” Deborah held up a middle finger. “Imply this,” she said, and turned away to look at the body again.

SEVEN

IT IS SURPRISING, BUT TRUE: COLD COQ AU VIN REALLY doesn't taste as good as it should. Somehow the wine gives off an odor of stale beer, and the chicken feels slightly slimy, and the whole experience becomes an ordeal of grim perseverance in the face of bitterly disappointed expectations. Still, Dexter is nothing if not persistent, and when I got home around midnight I worked through a large portion of the stuff with truly stoic fortitude.

Rita did not wake up when I slipped into bed, and I did not dawdle over long on the shores of sleep. I closed my eyes, and it seemed like almost immediately the clock radio beside the bed began to scream at me about the rising tide of dreadful violence threatening to overwhelm our poor battered city.

I pried open an eye and saw that it really was six o'clock and time to get up. It didn't seem fair, but I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower, and by the time I reached the kitchen Rita had breakfast on the table. I see you had some of the chicken,” she said, a little grimly, I thought, and I realized a little blarney was called for.

“It was wonderful,” I said. “Better than what we had in Paris.” She brightened a little, but shook her head. “Liar,” she said. “It never tastes right when it's cold.”

“You have the magic touch,” I said. “It tasted warm.”

She frowned and brushed a lock of hair off her face. “I know you have to, you know...” she trailed off. I mean, your job is... But I wish you could have tasted it when -1 mean, I really do understand,” she said, and I was not sure I could say the same thing. Rita put a plate of fried eggs and sausage in front of me and nodded at the small TV set over by the coffee maker. “It was all over the news this morning, about... That's what it was, wasn't it? And they had your sister on, saying that, you know. She didn't look very happy”

“She's not happy at all,” I said. “Which doesn't seem right, since she has a really challenging job, and her picture is on TV. Who could ask for more?”

Rita did not smile at my light-hearted jest. Instead she pulled a chair over next to mine and, sitting down and clasping her hands in her lap, she frowned even deeper. “Dexter,” she said, “we really need to talk.”

I know from my research into human life that these are the words that strike terror into men's souls. Conveniently enough, I have no soul, but I still felt a surge of discomfort at what those ominous syllables might mean. “So soon after the honeymoon?” I said, hoping to deflect at least some small bit of seriousness.

Rita shook her head. “It's not -1 mean ...” She fluttered one hand, and then let it drop back into her lap. She sighed deeply. “It's Cody,” she said at last.

“Oh,” I said, without even a clue of what sort of “it” Cody might be. He seemed perfectly all right to me —but then, I knew better than Rita that Cody was not at all the small, quiet human child he seemed to be, but instead a Dexter-in-training.

“He still seems, so ...” She shook her head again and looked down, her voice dropping. I know his ... father ... did some things that... hurt him. Probably changed him forever. But...” She looked up at me, her eyes bright with tears. “It isn't right; he shouldn't still be like this. Should he? So quiet all the time, and ...” She looked down again. “I'm just afraid for what, you know ...” A tear fell onto her lap and she sniffled. “He might be ... you know ... permanently ...”

Several more tears joined the first one, and even though I am generally helpless in the face of emotion, I knew that some kind of reassuring gesture was called for here.

“Cody will be fine,” I said, blessing my ability to lie convincingly.

“He just needs to come out of his shell a little bit.” Rita sniffled again. “Do you really think so?”

“Absolutely,” I said, putting a hand over hers, as I had seen in a movie not too long ago. “Cody is a great kid. He's just maturing a little slower than others. Because of what happened to him.” She shook her head and a tear hit me in the face. “You can't know that,” she said.

I can,” I told her, and oddly enough, now I was actually telling the truth. “I know perfectly well what he's going through, because I went through it myself.” She looked at me with very bright, wet eyes. “You —you never talked about what happened to you,” she said.

“No,” I said. “And I never will. But it was close enough to what happened to Cody, so I do know. Trust me on this, Rita.” And I patted her hand again, thinking, Yes, trust me. Trust me to turn Cody into a well-adjusted, smoothly functioning monster, just like me.

“Oh, Dexter” she said. I do trust you. But he's so ...” She shook her head again, sending a spray of tears around the room.

“He'll be fine,” I said. “Really. He just needs to learn to be with other kids his own age.” And learn to pretend to be like them, I thought, but it didn't seem terribly comforting to say aloud, so I didn't.

“If you're sure,” Rita said with a truly enormous snuffle.

“I'm sure,” I said.

“All right,” she said, reaching for a napkin off the table and blotting at her nose and eyes. “Then let's just ...” Sniffle. Honk. I guess we just think of ways to get him to mix with other kids.”

“That's the ticket,” I said. “We'll have him cheating at cards in no time.”

Rita blew her nose a last, long time.

“Sometimes I couldn't tell that you're being funny,” she said. She stood up and kissed me on the top of the head. “If I didn't know you so well.”

Of course, if she really knew me as well as she thought, she would stab me with a fork and run for her life, but maintaining our illusions is an important part of life's work, so I said nothing, and breakfast went on in its wonderfully soothing monotony. There is a real pleasure in being waited upon, especially by someone who really knows what she's doing in the kitchen, and it was worth listening to all the chatter that went with it.

Cody and Astor joined us as I started my second cup of coffee, and the two of them sat side by side with identical expressions of heavily sedated incomprehension on their faces. They didn't have the benefit of coffee, and it took them several minutes to realize that they were, in fact, awake. It was Astor, naturally enough, who broke the silence.

“Sergeant Debbie was on TV” she said. Astor had developed a strange case of hero-worship for Deborah, ever since she found out that Debs carried a gun and got to boss around big beefy uniformed cops.

“That's part of her job” I said, even though I realized it would probably feed the hero-worship.

“How come you're never on TV, Dexter?” she said accusingly.

I don't want to be on TV” I said, and she looked at me like I had suggested outlawing ice cream. “It's true” I said. “Imagine if everybody knew what I look like. I couldn't walk down the street without people pointing at me and talking behind my back.”

“Nobody points at Sergeant Debbie” she said.

I nodded. “Of course not”1 said. “Who would dare?” Astor looked like she was ready to argue, so I put my coffee cup down with a bang and stood up. “I'm off to another day of mighty work defending the good people of our city” I said.

“You can't defend people with a microscope” Astor said.

“That's enough, Astor” Rita said, and she hustled over to plant another kiss on me, on the face this time. I hope you catch this one, Dexter” she said. “It sounds awful.” I rather hoped we would catch this one, too. Four victims in one day seemed a little bit overzealous, even to me, and it would certainly create a city-wide atmosphere of paranoid watchfulness that would make it almost impossible for me to have any quiet fun of my own.

So it was with a real determination to see justice done that I went in to work. Of course, any real attempt at justice would have to start with the traffic, since Miami drivers have long ago taken the simple chore of going from one place to another and turned it into a kind of high-speed, heavily armed game of high stakes bumper cars. It's even more interesting because the rules change from one driver to the next. For example, as I drove along in the tight bundle of cars on the expressway, a man in the next lane suddenly started honking his horn. When I turned to look, he flipped me off, yelled, “Maricon!” and forced his way in front of me, and then over on to the shoulder, where he accelerated away.

I had no idea what had caused the display, so I simply waved at his car as it vanished in a distant concerto of honking and shouting.

The Miami Rush Hour Symphony.

I arrived at work a little bit early, but the building was already buzzing with frantic activity. The press room was overflowing with more people than I had ever seen before —at least, I assumed they were people, although with reporters you can never be sure. And the true seriousness of the situation hit me when I realized that there were dozens of cameras and microphones and no sign of Captain Matthews.

More unprecedented shocks awaited: a uniformed cop stood at the elevator and demanded to see my credentials before he let me past, even though he was a guy I knew slightly. And even worse when I finally got to the lab area, I found that Vince had actually brought in a bag of croissants.

“Good lord” I said, gazing at the flakes of crust that covered Vince's shirt front. I was just kidding, Vince.” I know” he said. “But it sounded kind of classy, so ...” He shrugged, which caused a trickle of croissant flakes to fall off him and onto the floor. “They make “em with chocolate filling” he said.

“And ham and cheese, too.”

“I don't think they'll approve of that in Paris” I said.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Deborah snarled from behind me as she snatched up a ham and cheese croissant.

“Some of us like to sleep from time to time” I said.

“Some of us don't get to sleep” she said. “Because some of us have been trying to work, surrounded by camera crews from fucking Brazil and who knows where.” She took a savage bite of croissant and, with a full mouth, looked at the rest of it in her hand and said, “Jesus Christ, what is this thing?”

“It's a French doughnut” I said.

Debs threw the rest of it at a nearby trash can and missed by about four feet. “Tastes like shit” she said.

“Would you rather try some of my jelly roll?” Vince asked her.

Debs didn't even blink. “Sorry, I'd need at least a mouthful, which you ain't got” she said, and she grabbed my arm. “Come on.” My sister led me down the hall to her cubicle and flung herself into the chair at her desk. I sat in the folding chair and waited for whatever onslaught of emotion she might have prepared for me.

It came in the form of a stack of newspapers that she started to throw at me, saying, “LA Times; Chicago Sun-Times; New York fucking Times; Der Spiegel; Toronto Star.” Just before I vanished completely under a pile of papers, battered insensible, I reached across and grabbed her arm, stopping her from flinging the Karachi Observer at me. “Debs” I said. I can see them better if they're not wedged into my eye sockets.”

“This is a shit-storm” she said, “like no shit-storm you have ever seen before.”

Truthfully, I had not seen many actual shit-storms, although one time in middle school Randy Schwartz flushed a cherry bomb down a full toilet in the boys rest room, forcing Mr O'Brien to go home early to change clothes. But clearly Debs was in no mood for fond reminiscence, even though neither of us had liked Mr O'Brien.

“I gathered that” I said, “from the fact that Matthews is suddenly invisible.”

She snorted. “Like he never existed.” I never thought we'd see a case so hot the captain didn't want to be on TV” I said.

“Four fucking bodies in one fucking day” she spat out. “Like nothing anybody has ever seen, and it lands in my lap.”

“Rita says you looked very nice on television” I said encouragingly, but for some reason that caused her to swipe at the pile of newspapers and knock several more onto the floor.

I don't wanna be on fucking television” she said. “Fucking Matthews has thrown me to the lions, because this is absolutely the biggest, most bad-ass godawful goddamn story in the whole fucking world right now, and we haven't even released any pictures of the bodies but somehow everybody knows there's something weird going on, and the mayor is having a shit-fit, and the fucking governor is having a shit-fit, and if I personally do not solve this thing by lunchtime the whole fucking state of Florida is going to fall into the ocean and I am going to be underneath it when it happens.” She slapped at the pile of newspapers again and this time at least half of them fell to the floor. That seemed to take all the fury out of her, because she slumped over and suddenly looked drained and exhausted. “I really need some help here, bro. I hate it like hell that I have to ask you, but —if you could ever really figure one of these out, this is the time.”

I wasn't really sure what to make of the fact that suddenly she “hated like hell” to ask me —after all, she had asked before, several times, apparently without hate. She seemed to be getting a little odd and even snarky lately on the subject of my special talents. But what the hell. While it is true that I am without emotion, I am not immune to being manipulated by it, and the sight of my sister so obviously at the end of her rope was more than I could comfortably side-step.

“Of course I'll help, Debs” I said. “I just don't know how much I can really do.”

“Well, fuck, you have to do something” she said. “We're going under here.”

It was nice that she said “we” and included me, although I had not been aware until right now that I, too, was going under. But the added sense of belonging did very little to jar my giant brain into action. In fact, the huge cranial complex that is Dexter's Cerebral Faculty was being abnormally quiet, just as it had been at the crime scenes. Nevertheless, it was clear that a display of good old team spirit was called for, so I closed my eyes and tried to look like I was thinking very hard.

All right then: if there were any real, physical clues, the tireless and dogged heroes of forensics would find them. So what I needed was some kind of hint from a source that my coworkers could not tap —the Dark Passenger. The Passenger, however, was being uncharacteristically silent, except for its mildly savage chuckling, and I wasn't sure what that meant. Normally, any display of predatory skill would evoke some kind of appreciation that quite often provided a small stab of insight into the killing. But this time, any such comment was absent. Why?

Perhaps the Passenger was not yet settled back in comfortably after its recent flight. Or perhaps it was still recovering from the trauma —although this didn't seem likely, judging by the growing power of my Need.

So why the sudden shyness? If something wicked transpired under our nose, I had come to expect a response beyond amusement.

It had not come. Therefore —nothing wicked had happened? That made even less sense, since we quite clearly had four very dead bodies.

It also meant that I was, apparently, on my own —and there was Deborah staring at me with a very hard and expectant glare. So back up a step, oh great and grim genius. Something was different about these killings, beyond the rather garish presentation of the bodies.

And presentation was exactly the right word —they were displayed in a way calculated to make maximum impact.

But on whom? Conventional wisdom in the psychopathic killer community would say that the more trouble you go to show off, the more you want an adoring audience. But it is also common knowledge that the police keep such sights under tight wraps —and even if they didn't, none of the news media would run pictures of such terrible things; believe me, I have looked.

So, who could the presentations be aimed at? The police? The forensics wonks? Me? None of those were likely, and beyond those and the three or four people who had discovered the bodies, nobody had seen anything, and there had been only the tremendous outcry from the entire state of Florida, desperate to save the tourist industry.

A thought snapped my eyes open, and there was Deborah staring at me like an Irish setter on point.

“What, goddamn it?” she said.

“What if this is what they want?” I said.

She stared at me for a moment, looking quite a bit like Cody and Astor when they've just woken up. “What's that mean?” she finally said.

“The first thing I thought about the bodies was that it wasn't about killing them. It was about playing with them afterwards. Displaying them.”

Debs snorted. “I remember. It still doesn't make any sense.”

“But it does” I said. “If somebody is trying to create an effect. To have an impact in some way. So look at it backwards —what impact has this already had?”

“Aside from getting media attention all over the world—”

“No, not aside from that. That is exactly what I mean.” She shook her head. “What?”

“What's wrong with media attention, sis? The whole world is looking at the Sunshine State —at Miami, tourist beacon to the world.”

“They're looking, and they're saying no fucking way am I going anywhere near that slaughter house” Deb said. “Come on, Dex, what's the fucking point? I told you —oh.” She frowned. “You're saying somebody did this to attack the tourist industry? The whole fucking state? That's fucking nuts.”

“You think somebody did this who isn't nuts, sis?”

“But who the hell would do that?” I don't know” I said. “California?”

“Come on, Dexter” she snarled. “It has to make sense. If somebody does this, they have to have some kind of motive.”

“Somebody with a grudge” I said, sounding a lot more certain than I felt.

“A grudge against the whole fucking state?” she said. “Is that supposed to make sense?”

“Well, not really” I said.

“Then how about if you come up with something that does make sense? And, like, right now? Because I don't see how this could get much worse.”

If life teaches us anything, it is to flinch away and roll under the furniture whenever anyone is foolish enough to utter those fell words. And sure enough, the dreadful syllables were barely out of Deborah's mouth when the phone on her desk buzzed for her attention, and some small and rather nasty voice whispered in my ear that this would be a great time to wedge myself under the desk in the foetal position.

Deborah snatched up the phone, still glaring at me, and then suddenly turned away and hunched over. She muttered a few shocked syllables that sounded like, “When? Jesus. Right” and then she hung up and turned a look on me that made her previous glare seem like the first kiss of springtime. “You motherfucker” she said.

“What did I do?” I said, rather surprised by the cold fury in her voice.

“That's what I want to know” she said.

Even a monster reaches a point where irritation begins to trickle in, and I believe I was very close to that point. “Deborah, either you start speaking complete sentences that actually make sense, or I'm going back to the lab to polish the spectrometer.”

“There's a break in the case” she said.

“Then why aren't we happy?”

“It's at the Tourist Board” she said.

I opened my mouth to say something witty and cutting, and then I closed it again.

“Yeah” Deborah said. “Almost like somebody had a grudge against the whole state.”

“And you think it's me?” I said, beyond irritation now and all the way to open-mouthed astonishment. She just stared at me. “Debs, I think somebody put lead in your coffee. Florida is my home —you want me to sing “Swanee River?” It might not have been the offer to sing that animated her, but whatever it was she looked at me for another long moment and then jumped up. “Come on, let's get over there” she said.

The? What about Coulter, your partner?”

“He's getting coffee, fuck him,” she said. “Besides, I'd rather partner with a warthog. Come on.” For some reason I did not actually swell with pride at being slightly better than a warthog, but when duty calls, Dexter answers, and I followed her out the door.

EIGHT

The Greater Miami Convention and Visitor's Bureau was in a high-rise building on Brickell Avenue, as befitted its status as a very important organization.

The full majesty of its purpose was reflected in the view from its windows, which showed a lovely slice of downtown and Government Cut, a swathe of Biscayne Bay, and even the nearby Arena where the basketball team shows up from time to time for some really dramatic losses.

It was a wonderful view, almost a postcard, as if to say, “Look —this is Miami: we weren't kidding.” Very few of the Bureau's employees seemed to be enjoying the view today, however. The office resembled a giant oak-lined bee's nest that somebody had poked with a stick. There could not have been more than a handful of employees, but they were flitting in and out of doors and up and down the hallway so rapidly it looked like there were hundreds of them in constant motion, like crazed particles in a whirring jar of oil.

Deborah stood at the receptionist's desk for two full minutes —a lifetime as far as her sense of patience was concerned —before a large woman paused and stared at her.

“What do you want?” the woman demanded.

Debs immediately flashed her badge. “I'm Sergeant Morgan. From the police?”

“Oh my God” the woman said. “I'll get Jo Anne” and disappeared through a door on the right. Deborah looked at me as if it was my fault and said, “Jesus” and then the door slammed open again and a small woman with a long nose and a short haircut came barreling out.

“Police?” she said with real outrage in her voice. She looked beyond us and then back to Deborah. “You're the police? What, the pin-up police?”

Of course, Deborah was used to having people challenge her, but usually not quite so brutally. She actually blushed a little before she held up her badge again and said, “Sergeant Morgan. Do you have some information for us?”

“This is no time for being politically correct” the woman said. I need Dirty Harry, and they send Legally Blonde.” Deborah's eyes narrowed and the pretty red flush left her cheeks.

“If you'd like, I can come back with a subpoena” she said. “And possibly a warrant for obstructing an investigation.” The woman just stared. Then there was a yell from the back room and something large fell over and broke. She jumped a little, then said, “My God. All right, come on” and she vanished through the door again. Deborah breathed out hard, showing a few teeth, and then we followed.

The small woman was already disappearing through a door at the end of the hall, and by the time we caught up with her she was settling into a swivel chair at a conference table. “Sit down” she said, waving at the other chairs with a large black remote control. Without waiting to see if we sat, she pointed the remote at a big flat-screen TV and said, “This came yesterday, but we didn't get around to looking at it until this morning.”

She glanced up at us. “We called right away” she said, perhaps still trembling with fear from Deborah's threat of a warrant. If so, she was controlling her trembles remarkably well.

“What is it?” Deborah said, sliding into a chair. I sat in one next to her as the woman said, “The DVD. Watch.” The TV blinked into life, went through a few wonderfully informative screens asking us to wait or select, and then blurted into life with a high-pitched scream. Beside me, Deborah jumped involuntarily.

The screen lit up and an image jumped into focus: from an unmoving position above, we saw a body lying against a white porcelain background. The eyes were wide and staring and, to someone of my modest experience, obviously dead. Then a figure moved into view and partially blocked the body. We saw only the back, and then the upraised arm holding a power saw. The arm went down and we heard the whine of the blade biting into flesh.

“Jesus Christ” Deborah said.

“It gets worse” said the short woman.

The blade whirred and growled, and we could see the figure in the foreground working hard. Then the saw stopped, the figure dropped it onto the porcelain, reached forward, and pulled a huge heap of terrible gleaming guts out and dropped them where the camera could see them best. And then large white letters appeared on the screen, superimposed on the heap of intestines: THE NEW MIAMI: IT WILL RIP YOUR GUTS OUT.

The picture held for a moment, and then the screen went blank.

“Wait” the woman said, and the screen blinked again, and then new letters glowed to life on the screen: THE NEW MIAMI SPOT #2 Then we were looking at sunrise on a beach. Mellow Latin music played. A wave rolled in on the sand. An early morning jogger trotted into frame, stumbled, and then came to a shocked halt. The camera moved in on the jogger's face as it went from shock to terror.

Then the jogger lurched into a sprint, up away from the water and across the sand toward the street in the distance. The camera moved back to show my old friends, the happy couple we had found disemboweled on the sand at South Beach.

Then a jump cut took us to the first officer on the scene as his face crumpled and he turned away to vomit. Another jump to faces in the crowd of onlookers craning their necks and freezing, and several more faces, coming faster and faster, each expression different, each showing horror in its own way.

Then the screen whirled, and began to show a frozen shot of each face we had seen, lined up in little boxes until the screen was filled with them and looked like a page from a high school yearbook, with a dozen shocked mug shots in three neat rows.

Again the letters glowed into life: THE NEW MIAMI: IT WILL GET TO YOU.

And then the screen went dark.

I could think of almost nothing to say, and a glance at my companions showed that I was not the only one. I thought of criticizing the camera technique just to break the awkward silence —after all, today's audience likes a little more movement in the shot. But the mood in the room didn't really seem conducive to a discussion of film technique, so I stayed quiet. Deborah sat clenching her teeth.

The short woman said nothing, just looked out the window at the beautiful view. Then, finally, she said, “We're assuming there's more.

I mean, the news said there were four bodies, so ...” She shrugged.

I tried to see around her and out the window at whatever was so interesting to her, but saw nothing more than a speed boat coming up Government Cut.

“This got here yesterday?” Deborah said. “In the regular mail?”

“It came in a plain envelope with a Miami postmark” the woman said. “It's on a plain disk just like the ones we have here in the office.

You can get them anywhere —Office Depot, Wal-Mart, whatever.” She said it with such disdain, and with such a lovely expression of true humanity on her face —something between contempt and indifference —that I had to wonder how she could make anyone like anything, let alone make millions of people want to come to a city partially inhabited by someone like her.

And as that thought clattered onto the floor of my brain and echoed across the marble, a small train chugged out of the Dexter Station and onto the tracks. For a moment I just watched the exhaust billow up out of the smoke stack, and then I closed my eyes and climbed on board.

“What?” Deborah demanded. “What have you got?” I shook my head and thought it through one more time. I could hear Deborah's fingers tapping on the table, and then the clatter of the remote as the short woman put it down, and the train finally came up to cruising speed and I opened my eyes. “What if” I said, “somebody wants negative publicity for Miami?”

“You said that already” Deborah snarled, “and it's still stupid.

Who could have a grudge against the whole fucking state?”

“But if it's not against the state?” I said. “What if it's only against the people who promote the state?” I looked pointedly at the short woman.

The?” the short woman said. “Somebody did this to get to me?” I was touched by her modesty and gave her one of my warmest fake smiles. “You, or your agency” I said.

She frowned, as if the idea of someone attacking her agency instead of herself was ridiculous. “Well” she said dubiously.

But Deborah slapped the table and nodded. “That's it” she said. “Now it makes sense. If you fired somebody, and they're pissed off.”

“Especially if they were a little bit off to begin with” I said.

“Which most of these artsy types are anyway” Deborah said. “So somebody loses their job, stews about it for a while, and hits back like this.” She turned to the short woman. “I'll need to see your personnel files.”

The woman opened and closed her mouth a few times and then started shaking her head. I can't let you see our files” she said.

Deborah glared at her for a moment and then, just when I was expecting her to argue, she stood up. I understand” she said. “Come on, Dex.” She headed for the door and I stood to follow.

“What —where are you going?” the woman called out.

“To get a court order. And a warrant” she said, and turned away without waiting for a reply.

I watched as the woman thought she might bluff it out, for a good two and half seconds, and then she jumped up and ran after Debs, calling, “Wait a sec!” And that is how, only a few minutes later, I happened to be sitting in the back room in front of a computer terminal. Beside me at the keyboard was Noel, a preposterously skinny Haitian American man with thick glasses and severe facial scars.

For some reason, whenever there is computer work to do Deborah calls on her brother, Digitally Dominant Dexter. It is true that I am quite accomplished in certain areas of the arcane lore of finding things with a computer, since it has proved very necessary for my small and harmless hobby of tracking down the bad guys who slip through the cracks in the justice system and turning them into a few nice and tidy garbage bags full of spare parts.

But it is also true that our mighty Police Department has several computer experts who could have done the work just as easily without raising the question of why a blood spatter expert was such a good hacker. These questions can eventually turn awkward and make suspicious people ponder, which I do like to avoid at work, since cops are notoriously suspicious people.

Still, complaining is no good. It draws just as much attention, and in any case the entire police force was used to seeing the two of us together and, after all, how could I say no to my poor little sister without receiving a few of her famous powerful arm punches?

Besides, she had been somewhat cranky and distant lately, and beefing up my HLQ, or Helpful-Loyal Quotient, could not possibly hurt.

So I played Dutiful Dexter and sat with Noel, who was wearing far too much cologne, and we talked about what to look for.

“Look” Noel said with a thick Creole accent, I give you a list of all who are fired for what, two years?”

“Two years is good” I said. “If there aren't too many.” He shrugged, a task that somehow looked painful with his bony shoulders. “Less than a dozen” he said. He smiled and added, “With Jo Anne, many more just quit.”

“Print the list” I said. “Then we check their files for any unusual complaints or threats.”

“But also” he said. “We have a number of independent contractors to design projects, no? And sometimes they do not get the bid, and who can say how unhappy they are?”

“But a contractor could always try again on the next project, right?”

Noel shrugged again, and the motion looked like he was endangering his ears with his too-sharp shoulders. “Per'aps” he said.

“So, unless it was some sort of final blow-up, where the Bureau said they would never ever use them under any circumstances, it's not as likely”

“Then we stick to the fired ones,” he said, and in just a few moments he had printed out a list with, as he had said, less than a dozen names and last known addresses on it —nine, to be exact.

Deborah had been staring out the window, but when she heard the printer whirring into action she stalked over and leaned on the back of my chair. “What've you got?” she demanded.

I took the sheet of paper from the printer and held it up. “Maybe nothing,” I said. “Nine people who were fired.” She snatched the list from my hand and glared at it as if it was withholding evidence.

“We're going to cross-check it against their files” I said, “to see if they made any threats.”

Deborah gritted her teeth, and I could tell she wanted to run out the door and down the avenue to the first address, but it would certainly save time to prioritize them and put any real zingers at the head of the list. “Fine,” she said at last. “But hurry it up, huh?” We did hurry it up; I was able to eliminate two workers who had been “fired” when Immigration had forced them out of the country. But only one name moved right to the top of the list: Hernando Meza, who had become obstreperous —that's the word the file used —and had to be removed from the premises forcibly.

And the beauty part? Hernando had designed displays at airports and cruise terminals.

Displays, like what we had seen at South Beach and Fairchild Gardens.

“Goddamn” Deborah said when I told her. “We got a hot one, right off the bat.”

I agreed that it looked worthwhile to stop and have a chat with Meza, but a small and nagging voice was telling me that things are never this easy, that when you get a hot one right off the bat, you usually end up right back on the bat again —or dodging as the bat comes straight at your face.

And as we should all know by now, any time you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.

NINE

Hernando Meza lived in a section of Coral Gables that was nice, but not too nice, and so, protected by its own mediocrity, it hadn't changed much over the last twenty years, unlike most of the rest of Miami. In fact, his little house was only a little more than a mile from where Deborah lived, which practically made them neighbors. Unfortunately, that didn't seem to influence either one of them into acting in a neighborly way.

It started right after Debs knocked on his door. I could tell by the way she was jiggling one foot that she was excited and really thought she might be on to something. And then when the door made a kind of mechanical whirring sound and opened inward to reveal Meza, Deborah's foot stopped jiggling and she said, “Shit.” Under her breath, of course, but hardly inaudibly.

Meza heard her and responded with, “Well, fuck you,” and just stared at her with a really impressive amount of hostility, considering he was in a motorized wheelchair and without the apparent use of any of his limbs, except possibly for a few fingers on each hand.

He used one of the fingers to twitch at a joystick on the bright metal tray attached to the front of his chair, and it lurched a few inches forward at us. “The fuck you want?” he said. “You don't look smart enough to be Witnesses, so you selling something? Hey, I could use some new skis.”

Deborah glanced at me, but I had no actual advice or insight for her, so I simply smiled. For some reason, that made her angry; her eyebrows crashed together and her lips got very thin. She turned to Meza and, in a perfect Cold Cop tone of voice, she said, “Are you Hernando Meza?”

“What's left of him” Meza said. “Hey, you sound like a cop. Is this about me running laps naked at the Orange Bowl?”

“We'd like to ask you a couple of questions” Debs said. “May we come in?”

“No” he said.

Deborah already had one foot lifted, her weight leaning forward, anticipating that Meza, like everyone else in the world, would automatically let her come in. Now she lurched to a pause and then stepped back half a step. “Excuse me?” she said.

“Noooooo” Meza said, drawing out the word as if he was talking to an idiot who didn't understand the concept. “Noooo, you may not come in.” And he twitched a finger on the chair's controls and the chair jerked toward us very aggressively.

Deborah jumped wildly to one side, then recovered her professional dignity and stepped back in front of Meza, although at a safe distance. “All right” she said. “We'll do it here.”

“Oh, yeah” Meza said, “let's do it here.” And flipping his finger on the joystick he made the chair pump a few inches forward and backward several times. “Yeah baby, yeah baby, yeah baby” he said.

Deborah had clearly lost control of the interview with her suspect, which the cop handbook frowns upon. She jumped off to the side again, completely flustered by Meza's fake chair sex, and he followed her around in his chair. “Come on, mama, give it up!” he called in a voice somewhere between a chortle and a wheeze.

I'm sorry if it sounds like I am feeling something, but I sometimes get just a little twinge of sympathy for Deborah, who really does try very hard. And so, as Meza whirled his chair in a stuttering arch of mini-lurches at Debs, I stepped behind him, leaned down to the back of his chair, and pulled the power cable off the batteries. The whine of the engine stopped, the chair thumped to a halt, and the only remaining sound was a siren in the distance and the small clatter of Meza's finger rattling against the joy stick.

At its best, Miami is a city of two cultures and two languages, and those of us who immerse ourselves in both have learned that a different culture can teach us many new and wonderful things.

I have always embraced this concept, and it paid off now, as Meza proved to be wonderfully creative in both Spanish and English. He ran through an impressive list of standards, and then his artistic side took full flower and he called me things that had never before existed, except possibly in a parallel universe designed by Hieronymus Bosch. The performance took on an added air of supernatural improbability because Meza's voice was so weak and husky, but he never allowed that to slow him. I was frankly awed, and Deborah seemed to be too, because we both simply stood and listened until Meza finally wore down and tapered off with, “Cocksucker.”

I stepped around in front and stood beside Debs. “Don't say that” I said, and he just glared at me. “It's so pedestrian, and you're much better than that. What was that part, “turd-sucking bag of possum vomit?” Wonderful.” And I gave him his due with some light applause.

“Plug me in, perro de puta,” he said. “We see how funny you are then.”

“And have you run us over with that sporty SUV of yours?” I said. “No thanks.”

Deborah lurched up out of her stunned appreciation of the performance and back into her alpha role. She pushed me to one side and resumed her stone-faced staring at Meza. “Mr Meza, we need you to answer a couple of questions, and if you refuse to cooperate I will take you down to the station and ask them there.”

“Do it, cunt” he said. “My lawyer would love that.”

“We could just leave him like this” I suggested. “Until someone comes along and steals him to sell for scrap metal.”

“Plug me in, you sack of lizard pus.”

“He's repeating himself”1 said to Deborah. I think we're wearing him down.”

“Did you threaten to kill the director of the Tourist Board?” Deborah asked.

Meza started to cry. It was not a pretty sight; his head flopped nervelessly to one side and mucus drooled from his mouth and nose, joined the tears, and began to march across his face. “Bastards” he said. “They shoulda killed me.” He snuffled so weakly that it had no effect at all except for the thin wet noise it made. “Looka me, looka what they done” he said in his hoarse, husky voice, a croak with no edge to it.

“What did they do to you, Mr Meza?” Debs said.

“Looka me” he snuffled. “They did this. Looka me. I live in this chingado chair, can't even pee without some maricon nurse to hold my dick.” He looked up, a little defiance once again showing through the mucus. “Wou'nt you wanna kill those puercos, too?” he said.

“You say they did this to you?” Debs said.

He sniffled again. It still didn't do anything. “Happened on the job” he said a little defensively. I was on the clock, but they said no, car accident, they don't pay for it. And then they fire me.” Deborah opened her mouth, and then closed it again with an audible click. I think she had been about to say something like, “Where were you last night between the hours of 3.30 and 5.00” and it occurred to her that he had most likely been right here in his powered chair. But Meza was sharp if nothing else, and he had noticed, too.

“What?” he said, snuffling mightily and actually moving a small stream of mucus, ever so slightly. “Somebody finally killed one of those chingado maricones? And you don't think it could be me “cause I'm in this chair? Bitch, you plug me in I show you how easy I kill somebody piss me off.”

“Which maricon did you kill?” I asked him, and Deborah elbowed me, even though she still had nothing to say.

“Whichever one is dead, motherfucker” he wheezed at me. I hope it that cocksucker Jo Anne, but fuck, I kill them all before I finish.”

“Mr Meza” Deborah said, and there was a slight hesitation in her voice that might have been sympathy in somebody else; in Debs it was disappointment at realizing that this poor blob of stuff was not her suspect. Once again, Meza picked up on it and went on the attack.

“Yeah, I did it” he said. “Cuff me, cunt. Chain me to the floor in the back seat with the dogs. Whatsa matter, you afraid I'll die on you? Do it, bitch. Or I kill you like I kilt those asshole-suckers at the Board.”

“Nobody killed anyone at the Board” I said.

He glared at me. “No?” he said. His head swivelled back to Deborah, mucus flashing in the sunlight. “Then what the fuck you harassing me for, shit-pig?” Deborah hesitated, then tried one last time. “Mr Meza” she said.

“Fuck you, get the fuck off my porch” Meza said.

“It seems like a good idea, Debs,” I said.

Deborah shook her head with frustration, then blew out a short, explosive breath. “Fuck” she said. “Let's go. Plug him in.” And she turned and walked off the porch, leaving me the dangerous and thankless job of plugging Meza's power cord back into the battery.

It just goes to show what selfish and thoughtless creatures humans are, even when they're family. After all, she was the one with the gun —shouldn't she be the one to plug him in?

Meza seemed to agree. He began running though a new list of graphically vulgar surrealism, all directed at Deborah's back. All I got was a quick, muttered, “Hurry up, faggot” as he paused to catch his breath.

I hurried. Not out of any desire to please Meza, but because I did not want to be standing around when he got power back to his chair.

It was far too dangerous —and in any case, I felt that I had spent enough of my precious and irreplaceable daylight listening to him complain. It was time to get back out into the world, where there were monsters to catch, even a monster to be, and with luck, there was also at some point a lunch to eat. None of this could happen if I remained trapped on this porch dodging a motorized chair with mouth to match.

So I pushed the power connection back into the battery and vaulted off the porch before Meza realized he was plugged in again.

I hurried to the car and climbed in. Deborah slammed the car into gear and accelerated away even before I got the door closed, apparently worried that Meza might disable the car by ramming it with his chair, and we were very quickly back in the warm and fuzzy cocoon of Miami's homicidal traffic.

“Fuck” she said at last, and the word seemed like a soft summer breeze after listening to Meza, I was sure he was going to be it.”

“Look at the bright side” I said. “At least you learned some wonderful new words.”

“Go shit up a rope” Debs said. After all, she wasn't exactly new to this herself.

TEN

There was time to check two more names on the list before we broke for lunch. The address for the first one was over in Coconut Grove, and it took us only about ten minutes to get there from Meza's house. Deborah drove just slightly faster than she should have, which in Miami is slow, and therefore a lot like wearing a “Kick Me” sign on your back. So, even though the traffic was light, we had our own soundtrack along the way, of horns and hollering and gracefully extended middle fingers, as the other drivers swooped past us like a school of ravenous piranha darting around a rock in the river.

Debs didn't seem to notice. She was thinking hard, which meant that her brow was furrowed into such a deep frown that I felt like warning her that the lines would become permanent if she didn't unclench. But past experience had taught me that interrupting her thought process with that kind of caring remark would invariably result in one of her blistering arm-punches, so I sat silently. I did not really see what there was to think about so thoroughly: we had four very decorative bodies and no clue who had arranged them. But of course, Debs was the trained investigator, not me. Perhaps there was something from one of her courses at the Academy that applied here and called for massive forehead wrinkling.

In any case, we were soon at the address on our list. It was a modest old cottage off Tigertail Avenue, with a small, overgrown yard and a “For Sale” sign stuck in front of a large mango tree. There were half a dozen old newspapers scattered across the yard, still in their wrappers, and only half visible through the tall and untended grass of the lawn.

“Shit” said Deborah as she parked in front of the place. It seemed like a very sharp and succinct summary. The house looked like it had not been lived in for months.

“What did this guy do?” I asked her, watching a brightly colored sheet of newsprint blow across the yard.

Debs glanced at the list. “Alice Bronson” she said. “She was stealing money from an office account. When they called her on it, she threatened them with battery and murder.”

“One at a time, or together?” I asked, but Debs just glared at me and shook her head.

“This won't be anything” she said, and I tended to agree. But of course, police work is composed mostly of doing the obvious and hoping you get lucky, so we unbuckled our seat belts and kicked through the leaves and other lawn trash to the front door. Debs pounded on the door mechanically and we could hear it echo through the house. It was clearly as empty as my conscience.

Deborah looked down at the list in her hand and found the name of the suspect who was supposed to live here. “Ms Bronson?” she called out, but there was even less response, since her voice did not boom through the house like her knocking did.

“Shit” Debs said again. She pounded one more time with the same result —nothing.

Just to be absolutely sure we walked around the house one time and peered in the windows, but there was nothing to see except some very ugly green and maroon curtains left hanging in the otherwise bare living room. When we circled back around to the front again, there was a boy beside our car, sitting on a bicycle and staring at us. He was about eleven or twelve years old and had long hair plaited into dreadlocks and then pulled back into a ponytail.

“They been gone since April” he said. “Did they owe you guys money, too?”

“Did you know the Bronsons?” Deborah asked the boy.

He cocked his head to one side and stared at us, looking a lot like a parrot trying to decide whether to take the cracker or bite the finger. “You guys cops?” he said.

Deborah held up her badge and the boy rolled forward on his bike to take a closer look. “Did you know these people?” Debs said again.

The boy nodded. I just wanted to be sure” he said. “Lots of people have fake badges.”

“We really are cops” I said. “Do you know where the Bronsons went?”

“Naw” he said. “My dad says they owed everybody money and they prolly changed their name or went to South America or something.”

“And when was that?” Deborah asked him.

“Back in April” he said. I already said.” Deborah looked at him with restrained irritation and then glanced at me. “He did” I told her. “He said April.”

“What did they do?” the boy asked, a little too eagerly, I thought.

“Probably nothing” I told him. “We just wanted to ask them a few questions.”

“Wow” the kid said. “Murder? Really?” Deborah made a strange little shake of her head, as if she was clearing away a cloud of small flies. “Why do you think it was murder?” she asked him.

The boy shrugged. “On TV” he said simply. “If it's murder they always say it's nothing. If it's nothing they say it's a serious violation of the penal code or something like that.” He snickered. “Peenal code” he said, grabbing at his crotch.

Deborah looked at the kid and just shook her head. “He's right again” I said to her. I saw it on CSL”

“Jesus” said Debs, still shaking her head.

“Give him your card” I said. “He'll like that.”

“Yeah” the boy said, smirking happily, “and tell me to call if I think of anything.”

Deborah stopped shaking her head and snorted. “Okay, kid, you win” she said. She flipped him her business card, and he caught it neatly. “Call me if you think of anything” she said.

“Thanks” he said, and he was still smiling as we climbed into the car and drove away, although whether because he really did like the card, or he was just pleased to have gotten the best of Deborah, I couldn't say.

I glanced at the list beside her on the seat. “Brandon Weiss is next” I said. Urn, a writer. He wrote some ads they didn't like, and he was fired.”

Deborah rolled her eyes. “A writer” she said. “What did he do, threaten them with a comma?”

“Well, they had to call in security and have him removed.” Deborah turned and looked at me. “A writer” she said. “Come on, Dex.”

“Some of them can be quite fierce” I said, although it seemed like a bit of a stretch to me, too.

Deborah looked back at the traffic, nodded and chewed on her lip. “Address?” she said.

I looked down at the paper again. “This sounds more like it” I said, reading off an address just off North Miami Avenue. “It's right in the Miami Design District. Where else would a homicidal designer go?”

“I guess you would know” she said, rather churlishly I thought, but not much more than normal, so I let it go.

“It can't possibly be worse than the first two” I said.

“Yeah, sure, third time's the charm” Deborah said sourly.

“Come on, Debs” I said. “You need to show a little enthusiasm.” Deborah pulled the car off the highway and into the parking lot of a fast food spot, which surprised me a great deal because, in the first place, it wasn't quite lunchtime and, in the second place, the things this place served were not quite food, no matter how fast.

But she made no move to go into the restaurant. Instead, she slammed the gear lever into Park and turned to face me. “Fuck it” she said and I could tell that something was bothering her.

“Is it that kid?” I asked. “Or are you still pissed off about Meza?”

“Neither” she said. “It's you.” If I had been surprised by her choice of restaurants, I was absolutely astonished at her subject matter. Me? I replayed the morning in my head and found nothing objectionable. I had been the good soldier to her crabby general; I had even made fewer than normal insightful and clever remarks, for which she should really be grateful, since she was usually the target of them.

“I'm sorry” I said. I don't know what you mean.” I mean you,” she said, very unhelpfully. “All of you.” I still don't know what you mean,” I said. “There isn't that much of me.”

Deborah slammed the palm of her hand on the steering wheel.

“Goddamn it, Dexter, the clever-ass shit doesn't work for me any more.”

Have you ever noticed that every now and then you'll overhear an amazingly clear declarative sentence when you're out in public, spoken with such force and purpose that you absolutely yearn to know what it means, because it is just so forceful and crystalline? And you want to follow along behind whoever just spoke, even though you don't know them, just to find out what that sentence means and how it would affect the lives of the people involved?

I felt like that now: I had no idea at all what she was talking about, but I really wanted to know.

Happily for me, she didn't keep me waiting.

“I don't know if I can do this any more,” she said.

“Do what?”

I am riding around in a car with a guy who has killed what, ten, fifteen, people?”

It's never pleasant to be so grossly underestimated, but it didn't seem like the right time to correct her. “All right” I said.

“And I am supposed to catch people like you, and put them away for good, except you're my brotherY she said, hitting the wheel with her hand to emphasize each syllable —which she didn't really need to do, since I heard her very clearly. I finally understood what all her recent churlishness had been about, although I still had no idea why it had taken until now for her to blow up on the subject.

There was a great deal to what she said, of course, and if I had really been as smart as I think I am I would have known that at some point we were going to have this conversation, and I would have been ready for it. But I had foolishly assumed that there is nothing in the world as powerful as the status quo, and she had caught me by surprise. Besides, as far as I could see, there had been nothing in the recent past that would trigger this kind of confrontation; where do these things come from?

“I'm sorry, Debs” I said. “But, uh, what do you want me to do?”

“I want you to stop it” she said. I want you to be somebody else.” She looked at me, and her lips twitched, and then she looked away again, out the side window and away beyond US 1 and over the elevated People Mover rails. I want you ... to be the guy I always thought you were.”

I like to think I am more resourceful than most. But at the moment, I might as well have been bound and gagged and tied to the railroad tracks. “Debs” I said. Not much, but apparently the only shot I had in the chamber.

“Goddamn it, Dex,” she said, slapping the steering wheel so hard the whole car trembled. I can't even talk about it, not even to Kyle.

And you ...” She slapped the steering wheel again. “How do I even know you're telling the truth, that Daddy set you up like this?” It's probably not accurate to say my feelings were hurt, since I'm pretty sure I don't have any. But the injustice of the remark did seem painful. “I wouldn't lie to you” I said.

“You lied to me every day of your life that you didn't tell me what you really are” she said.

I am as familiar with New Age philosophy and Dr Phil as the next guy, but there comes a point where reality absolutely has to intrude, and it seemed to me that we had reached it. “All right, Debs” I said. “And what would you have done if you knew who I really was?”

I don't know” she said. I still don't know.”

“Well then” I said.

“But I ought to do something.”

“Why?”

“Because you killed people, goddamn it!” she said.

I shrugged. I can't help it. And they all really deserved it.”

“It isn't right!”

“It's what Dad wanted” I said.

A group of college-aged kids walked past the car and stared at us. One of them said something and they all laughed. Ha ha.

See the funny couple fighting. He will sleep on the couch tonight, ha ha.

Except that if I couldn't persuade Deborah that all was exactly as it should be, world without end, I might very well sleep in a cell tonight.

“Debs” I said. “Dad set it up this way. He knew what he was doing.”

“Did he?” she said. “Or are you making that up? And even if he did set it up, was he right to do it that way? Or was he just another bitter, burned-out cop?”

“He was Harry” I said. “He was your father. Of course he was right.”

I need more than that” she said.

“What if there isn't any more?” She turned away at last, and didn't beat on the steering wheel, which was a relief. But she was silent for long enough that I began to wish she would. I don't know,” she said at last. I just don't know.”

And there it was. I mean, I could see that it was a problem for her —what to do with the homicidal adopted brother? After all, he was pleasant, remembered birthdays, and gave really good presents; a productive member of society, a hard-working and sober guy —if he slipped away and killed bad people now and then, was it really such a big deal?

On the other hand, she was in a profession that generally frowned on that kind of thing. And technically, it was supposed to be her job to find people like me and escort them to a reserved seat in Old Sparky. I could see that it might pose something of a professional dilemma, especially when it was her brother who was forcing the issue.

Or was it?

“Debs” I said. I know this is a problem for you.”

“Problem” she said. A tear rolled down one cheek, although she did not sob or otherwise seem to be crying.

“I don't think he ever wanted you to know” I said. I was never supposed to tell you. But ...” I thought about finding her taped to the table with my real genetic brother standing over her, holding a knife for each of us, and realizing I could not kill her no matter how much I needed to, no matter how close it would have brought me to him, my brother, the only person in the world who really understood me and accepted me for what I am. And somehow, I couldn't do it. Somehow, the voice of Harry had come back to me and kept me on the Path.

“Fuck” Deborah said. “What the fuck was Daddy thinking?” I wondered that sometimes, too. But I also wondered how people could possibly believe any of the things they said they did, and why I couldn't fly, and this seemed to be in the same category. “We can't know what he was thinking” I said. “Just what he did.”

“Fuck” she said again.

“Maybe so” I said. “What are you going to do about it?” She still didn't look at me. I don't know” she said. “But I think I have to do something.” We both sat there for a very long moment with nothing left to say. Then she put the car in gear and we rolled back out onto the highway.

ELEVEN

There are really very few better conversation stoppers than telling your brother you're considering arresting him for murder, and even my legendary wit was not equal to the task of thinking of something to say that was worth the breath spent on it. So we rode in silence, down US 1 to 95 North and then off the freeway and into the Design District, just past the turnoff for the Julia Tuttle Causeway.

The silence made the trip seem a lot longer than it really was.

I glanced once or twice at Deborah, but she was apparently absorbed in thought —perhaps considering whether to use her good cuffs on me or just the cheap extra pair in the glove compartment. Whatever the case, she stared straight ahead, turning the wheel mechanically and moving in and out of traffic without any real thought, and without any attention wasted on me.

We found the address quickly enough, which was a relief, since the strain of not looking at each other and not talking was getting to be a bit much. Deborah pulled up in front of a sort of warehouse looking thing on NE 40th Street, and pushed the gear lever into Park. She turned off the engine and still did not look at me, but paused for a moment. Then she shook her head and climbed out of the car.

I guess I was supposed to just follow along like always, Little Deb's hulking shadow. But I do have some small smidgen of pride, and really: if she was going to turn on me for a paltry few recreational killings, should I be expected to help her solve these? I mean, I don't need to think that things are fair —they never are —but this seemed to be straining at the bounds of decency.

So I sat in the car and didn't really watch as Debs stalked up to the door of the place and rang the buzzer. It was only out of the uninterested corner of my eye that I saw the door open, and I barely noticed the boring detail of Deborah showing her badge. And so I couldn't really tell from where I sat unwatching in the car if the man hit her and she fell over, or whether he simply pushed her to the ground and then disappeared inside.

But I became mildly interested again when she struggled to one knee, then fell over and did not get up again.

I heard a distinct buzzing in Alarm Central: something was very wrong and all my huffishness with Deborah evaporated like gasoline on hot pavement. I was out of the car and running up the sidewalk as fast as I could manage it.

From ten feet away I could see the handle of a knife sticking out of her side and I slowed for a moment as a shock wave rolled through me. A pool of awful wet blood was already spreading across the sidewalk and I was back in the cold box with Biney, my brother, and seeing the terrible sticky red lying thick and nasty on the floor and I could not move or even breathe. But the door fluttered open and the man who had knifed Deborah stepped out, saw me, and went to his knees reaching for the knife handle, and the rising sound of wind that whooshed in my ears turned into the roar of the Dark Passenger spreading its wings and I stepped forward quickly and kicked him hard in the side of the head.

He sprawled beside her, face in the blood, and he did not move.

I knelt beside Deborah and took her hand. Her pulse was strong, and her eyes flickered open. “Dex” she whispered.

“Hang on, sis” I said, and she closed her eyes again. I pulled her radio from its holster on her belt and called for help.

A small crowd had gathered in the few minutes it took for the ambulance to get there, but they parted willingly as the emergency medical techs jumped out and hurried to Deborah.

“Whoof” the first one said. “Let's stop the bleeding fast.” He was a stocky young guy with a Marine Corps haircut, and he knelt beside Debs and went to work. His partner, an even stockier woman of about forty, quickly got an IV bag into Deborah's arm, sliding the needle in just as I felt a hand pulling my arm from behind.

I turned. A uniformed cop was there, a middle-aged black guy with a shaved head, and he nodded at me. “You her partner?” he asked.

I pulled out my ID. “Her brother” I said. “Forensics.”

“Huh” he said, taking my credentials and looking them over.

“You guys don't usually get to the scene this fast.” He handed back my ID. “What can you tell me about that guy?” He nodded to the man who had stabbed Deborah, who was sitting up now and holding his head as another cop squatted beside him.

“He opened the door and saw her” I said. “And then he stuck a knife in her.”

“Uh-huh” the cop said. He turned away to his partner. “Cuff him, Frankie.”

I did not watch and gloat as the two cops pulled the knife wielder's arms behind him and slapped on cuffs, because they were loading Deborah into the ambulance. I stepped over to speak to the EMS guy with the short hair. “Will she be all right?” I asked.

He gave me a mechanical and unconvincing smile. “We'll see what the doctors say, okay?” he said, which did not sound as encouraging as he might have intended.

“Are you taking her to Jackson?” I asked.

He nodded. “She'll be in the ICU Trauma when you get there,” he said.

“Can I ride with you?” I asked.

“No” he said. He slammed the door shut, ran to the front seat of the ambulance, and got in. I watched as they nosed out into traffic, turned on the siren, and drove away.

I suddenly felt very lonely. It seemed far too melodramatic to bear. The last words we had spoken were not pleasant, and now they might very well prove to be our Last Words. It was a sequence of events that belonged on television, preferably on an afternoon soap opera. It did not belong in the prime time drama of Dexter's Dim Days. But there it was. Deborah was on her way to intensive care and I did not know if she would come out of it. I did not even know if she would get there alive.

I looked back at the sidewalk. It seemed like an awful lot of blood. Deborah's blood.

Happily for me, I did not have to brood too long. Detective Coulter had arrived, and he looked unhappy even for him. I watched him stand on the sidewalk for a minute and look around, before he trudged over to where I stood. He looked even more unhappy as he looked me over from head to toe with the same expression he had used on the crime scene.

“Dexter” he said, shaking his head. “The fuck you do?” For a very brief moment I actually started to deny that I'd stabbed my sister. Then I realized he couldn't possibly be accusing me, and indeed, he was merely breaking the ice before taking my statement.

“She shoulda waited for me” he said. “I'm her partner.”

“You were getting coffee” I said. “She thought it shouldn't wait.” Coulter looked down at the blood on the pavement and shook his head. “Coulda waited twenty minutes” he said. “For her partner.” He looked up at me. “It's a sacred bond.” I have no experience with the sacred, since I spend most of my time playing for the other team, so I simply said, I guess you're right” and that seemed to satisfy him enough that he settled down and just took my statement with no more than a few sour glances at the blood stain left by his sacred partner. It took a very long ten minutes before I could finally excuse myself to drive to the hospital.

the walls are painted, and on the whole they are not truly happy places. Of course, I was quite pleased that there was one close by, but I was not filled with a sense of pleasant expectation when I walked into the trauma unit. There was an air of animal resignation about the people waiting, and a sense of perpetual, bone-numbing crisis on the faces of all the doctors and nurses as they bustled back and forth, and this was only countered by the unhurried, bureaucratic, clipboard-wielding officiality of the woman who stopped me when I tried to push through and find Deborah.

“Sergeant Morgan, knife wound” I said. “They just brought her in.”

“Who are you?” she said.

Stupidly thinking it might get me past her quickly, I said, “Next of kin” and the woman actually smiled. “Good” she said. “Just the man I need to talk to.”

“Can I see her?” I said.

“No” she said. She grabbed me by the elbow and began to steer me firmly toward an office cubicle.

“Can you tell me how she's doing?” I asked.

“Have a seat right here, please” she said, propelling me toward a molded plastic chair that faced a small desk.

“But how is she?” I said, refusing to be bullied.

“We'll find out in just a minute” she said. “Just as soon as we get some of this paperwork done. Sit down, please, Mr —is it Mr Morton?”

“Morgan” I said.

She frowned. I have Morton here.”

“It's Morgan” I said. “M-o-r-g-a-n.”

“Are you sure?” she asked me, and the surreal nature of the whole hospital experience swept over me and shoved me down into the chair, as if I had been smacked by a huge wet pillow.

“Quite sure” I said faintly, slumping back as much as the wobbly little chair allowed.

“Now I'll have to change it in the computer” she said, frowning.

“Doggone it.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, like a stranded fish, as the woman pecked at her keyboard. It was just too much; even her laconic “Doggone it” was an offense to reason. It was Deborah's life on the line —shouldn't there be great fiery gouts of urgent profanity spewing from every single person physically able to stand and speak? Perhaps I could arrange for Hernando Meza to come in and teach a workshop on the correct linguistic approach to impending doom.

It took far longer than seemed either possible or human, but eventually I did manage to get all the proper forms filled out and persuade the woman that, as next of kin and a police employee I had every right in the world to see my sister. But of course, things being what they are in this vale of tears, I did not really get to see her.

I simply stood in a hallway and peeked through a porthole-shaped window and watched as what seemed like a very large crowd of people in lime green scrubs gathered around the table and did terrible, unimaginable things —to Deborah.

For several centuries I simply stood and stared and occasionally flinched as a bloody hand or instrument appeared in the air above my sister. The smell of chemicals, blood, sweat and fear was almost overwhelming. But finally, when I could feel the earth turning dead and airless and the sun growing old and cold, they all stepped back from the table and several of them began to push her toward the door. I stepped back and watched them roll her through the doors and down the hall, and then I grabbed at the arm of one of the senior-looking men who filed out after. It might have been a mistake: my hand touched something cold, wet and sticky, and I pulled it away to see it splotched with blood. For a moment I felt light-headed and unclean and even a little panicky, but as the surgeon turned to look at me I recovered just enough.

“How is she?” I asked him.

He looked down the hall toward where they were taking my sister, then back at me. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Her brother” I said. “Is she going to be all right?” He gave me half a not-funny smile. “It's much too soon to tell” he said. “She lost an awful lot of blood. She could be fine, or there could be complications. We just don't know yet.”

“What kind of complications?” I asked. It seemed like a very reasonable question to me, but he blew out an irritated breath and shook his head.

“Everything from infection to brain damage” he said. “We're not going to know anything for a day or two, so you're just going to have to wait until we do know something, okay?” He gave me the other half of the smile and walked away in the opposite direction from where they had taken Deborah.

I watched him go, thinking about brain damage. Then I turned and followed the gurney that had carried Deborah down the hall.

TWELVE

There were so many pieces of machinery around Deborah that it took me a moment before I saw her in the middle of the whirring, chirping clutter. She lay there in the bed without moving, tubes going in and out of her, her face half covered by a respirator mask and nearly as pale as the sheets. I stood and looked for a minute, not sure what I was supposed to do. I had bent all my concentration on getting in to see her, and now here I was, and I could not remember ever reading anywhere what the proper procedure was for visiting nearest and dearest in the ICU.

Was I supposed to hold her hand? It seemed likely, but I wasn't sure, and there was an IV attached to the hand nearest me; it didn't seem like a good idea to risk dislodging it.

So instead I found a chair, tucked away under one of the life support machines. I moved it as close to the bed as seemed proper, and I settled down to wait.

After only a couple of minutes there was a sound at the door and I looked up to see a thin black cop I knew slightly, Wilkins. He stuck his head in the door and said, “Hey, Dexter, right?” I nodded and held up my credentials. Wilkins nodded his head at Deborah.

“How is she?”

“Too soon to tell” I said.

“Sorry, man” he said, and shrugged. “Captain wants somebody watching, so I'll be out here.”

“Thank you” I said, and he turned away to take up his post at the door.

I tried to imagine what life would be like without Deborah. The very idea was disturbing, although I could not say why. I could not think of any huge and obvious differences, and that made me feel slightly embarrassed, so I worked at it a little harder. I would probably get to eat the coq au vin warm next time. I would not have as many bruises on my arms without her world-famous vicious arm punches. And I would not have to worry about her arresting me, either. It was all good —why was I worried?

Still, the logic was not terribly convincing. And what if she lived but suffered brain damage? That could very well affect her career in law enforcement. She might need full-time care, spoonfeeding, adult diapers —none of these things would go over well on the job. And who would do all the endless tedious drudgery of looking after her? I didn't know a great deal about medical insurance, but I knew enough to know that full-time care was not something they offered cheerfully. What if I had to take care of her? It would certainly put a large dent in my free time. But who else was there? In all the world, she had no other family. There was only Dear Dutiful Dexter; no one else to push her wheelchair and cook her pablum and tenderly wipe the corners of her mouth as she drooled. I would have to tend to her for the rest of her life, far into the sunset years, the two of us sitting and watching game shows while the rest of the world went on its merry way, killing and brutalizing each other without me.

Just before I sank under a huge wave of wet self-pity I remembered Kyle Chutsky. To call him Deborah's boyfriend was not quite accurate, since they had been living together for over a year, and that made it seem like a bit more. Besides, he was hardly a boy. He was at least ten years older than Debs, very large and beat-up, and missing his left hand and foot as the result of an encounter with the same amateur surgeon who had modified Sergeant Doakes.

To be perfectly fair to me, which I think is very important, I did not think of him merely because I wanted someone else to take care of a hypothetically brain-damaged Deborah. Rather, it occurred to me that the fact she was in the ICU was something he might want to know.

So I took my cell phone from its holster and called him. He answered almost immediately.

“Hello?”

“Kyle, this is Dexter” I said.

“Hey, buddy” he said in his artificially cheerful voice. “What's up?”

“I'm with Deborah” I said. “In the ICU at Jackson.”

“What happened?” he asked after a slight pause.

“She's been stabbed” I replied. “She lost a lot of blood.”

“I'm on my way” he announced, and hung up.

It was nice that Chutsky cared enough to come right away.

Maybe he would help me with Deborah's pablum, take turns pushing the wheelchair. It's good to have someone.

That reminded me that I had someone —or perhaps I was had.

In any case, Rita would want to know I would be late, before she cooked a pheasant souffle for me. I called her at work, told her quickly what was up, and hung up again as she was just getting started on a chorus of Oh-My-Gods.

Chutsky came into the room about fifteen minutes later, trailed by a nurse who was apparently trying to make sure he was perfectly happy with everything from the location of the room to the arrangement of IVs. “This is her,” the nurse said.

“Thanks, Gloria” Chutsky said without looking at anything but Deborah. The nurse hovered anxiously for a few more moments, and then vanished uncertainly.

Meanwhile, Chutsky moved over to the bed and took Deborah's hand —good to know I had been right about that; holding her hand was, indeed, the correct thing to do.

“What happened, buddy?” he said, staring down at Deborah.

I gave him a brief rundown, and he listened without looking at me, pausing in his hand-holding briefly to wipe a lock of hair away from Deborah's forehead. When I had finished talking he nodded absently and said, “What did the doctors say?”

“It's too soon to tell” I said.

He waved that away impatiently, using the gleaming silver hook that had replaced his left hand. “They always say that” he said. “What else?”

“There's a chance of permanent damage” I said. “Even brain damage.”

He nodded. “She lost a lot of blood” he said, not a question, but I answered anyway. “That's right,” I said.

I have a guy coming down from Bethesda” Chutsky said. “He'll be here in a couple of hours.” I couldn't think of very much to say to that. A guy? From Bethesda? Was this good news of some kind, and if so, why?

I could not come up with a single thing to distinguish Bethesda from Cleveland, except that it was in Maryland instead of Ohio.

What kind of guy would come down from there? And to what end? But I also couldn't think of any way to frame a question on the subject. For some reason, my brain was not running with its usual icy efficiency. So I just watched as Chutsky pulled another chair around to the far side of the bed, where he could sit and hold Deborah's hand. And after he got settled, he finally looked directly at me. “Dexter” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Think you could scare up some coffee? And maybe a doughnut or something?”

The question took me completely by surprise —not because it was such a bizarre notion, but because it seemed like one to me, and it really should have been as natural as breathing. It was well past my lunchtime, and I had not eaten, and I had not thought of eating.

But now, when Chutsky suggested it, the idea seemed wrong, like singing the real words to “Barnacle Bill” in church.

Still, to object would seem even stranger. So I stood up and said, “I'll see what I can do” and headed out and down the hall.

When I came back a few minutes later I had two cups of coffee and four doughnuts. I paused in the hallway, I don't know why, and looked in. Chutsky was leaning forward, eyes closed, with Deborah's hand pressed to his forehead. His lips were moving, although I could hear no sound over the clatter of the life support machinery. Was he praying? It seemed like the oddest thing yet. I suppose I really didn't know him very well, but what I did know about him did not fit with the image of a man who prayed. And in any case, it was embarrassing, something you didn't really want to see, like watching somebody clean their nostrils with a fingertip. I cleared my throat as I came over to my chair, but he didn't look up.

Aside from saying something loud and cheerful, and possibly interrupting his fit of religious fervor, there was nothing really constructive for me to do. So I sat down and started on the doughnuts. I had almost finished the first one when Chutsky finally looked up.

“Hey” he said. “What'd you get?” I passed him a coffee and two of the doughnuts. He grabbed the coffee with his right hand and passed his hook through the holes in the doughnuts. “Thanks,” he said. He held the coffee between his knees and flipped the lid off with a finger, dangling the doughnuts from his hook and taking a bite out of one of them. “Mmp” he said.

“Didn't get any lunch. I was waiting to hear from Deborah, and I was going to maybe come eat with you guys. But...” he said, and trailed off, taking another bite of the doughnut.

He ate his doughnuts in silence, except for the occasional slurp of coffee, and I took advantage of the time to finish mine. When we were both done we simply sat and stared at Deborah as if she was our favorite TV show. Now and again one of the machines would make some sort of odd noise and we would both glance up at it. But nothing actually changed. Deborah continued to lay with her eyes closed, breathing slowly and raggedly and with the Darth Vader sound of the respirator as an accompaniment.

I sat for at least an hour, and my thoughts didn't suddenly turn bright and sunny. As far as I could tell, neither did Chutsky's.

He did not burst into tears, but he looked tired and a little grey, worse than I had ever seen him except for when I rescued him from the man who cut off his hand and foot. And I suppose I did not look a great deal better, although it was not the thing I worried about the most, now or at any other time. In truth, I did not spend a great deal of my time worrying about anything —planning, yes, making sure that things went just right on my Special Nights Out. But worrying truly seemed to be an emotional activity rather than a rational one, and until now it had never furrowed my forehead.

But now? Dexter worried; it was a surprisingly easy pastime to pick up. I got the hang of it right away, and it was all I could do to keep from chewing my fingernails.

Of course she would be all right. Wouldn't she? “Too soon to tell” began to seem more ominous. Could I even trust that statement?

Wasn't there a protocol, a standard medical procedure for informing next of kin that their loved ones were either dying or about to become vegetables? Start out by warning them that all may not be right “too soon to tell” —and then gradually break it to them that all is forever unwell.

But wasn't there some law somewhere that required doctors to tell the truth about these things? Or was that just auto mechanics?

Was there such a thing as truth, medically speaking? I had no idea this was a new world for me, and I didn't like it, but whatever else might be true, it really was too soon to tell, and I would just have to wait, and shockingly, I was not nearly as good at that as I had expected.

When my stomach began to growl again I decided it must be evening, but a glance at my watch told me that it was still only a few minutes short of four o'clock.

Twenty minutes later Chutsky's Guy From Bethesda arrived.

I hadn't really known what to expect, but it was nothing like what I got. The guy was about five foot six, bald and pot-bellied, with thick gold-framed glasses, and he came in with two of the doctors who had worked on Deborah. They followed him like high school freshmen trailing the prom queen, eager to point out things that would make him happy. Chutsky leapt to his feet when the guy came in.

“Doctor Teidel!” he said.

Teidel nodded at Chutsky and said, “Out” with a head motion that included me.

Chustky nodded and grabbed my arm, and as he pulled me out of the room Teidel and his two satellites were already pulling back the sheet to examine Deborah.

“The guy is the best” Chutsky said, and although he still didn't say the best what, I was now assuming it was something medical.

“What is he going to do?” I asked, and Chutsky shrugged.

“Whatever it takes” he said. “Come on, let's get something to eat. We don't want to see this.” That did not sound terribly reassuring, but Chutsky obviously felt better about things with Teidel in charge, so I followed along to a small and crowded cafe on the ground floor of the parking garage. We wedged ourselves in at a small table in the corner and ate indifferent sandwiches and, although I didn't think to ask him, Chutsky told me a little about the doctor from Bethesda.

“Guy's amazing” he said. “Ten years ago? He put me back together. I was in a lot worse shape than Deborah, believe me, and he got all the pieces back in the right place and in working order.”

“Which is almost as important” I said, and Chutsky nodded as if he was listening to me.

“Honest to God” he said, “Teidel is the best there is. You saw how those other doctors were treating him?”

“Like they wanted to wash his feet and peel him grapes” I said.

Chutsky gave one syllable of polite laugh, “Huh” and an equally brief smile. “She's gonna be okay now” he said. “Just fine.” But whether he was trying to convince me or himself, I couldn't say.

THIRTEEN

DR. TEIDEL WAS IN THE STAFF BREAK ROOM WHEN WE GOT back from eating. He sat at a table sipping a cup of coffee, which somehow seemed strange and improper, like a dog sitting at a table and holding a paw full of playing cards. If Teidel was going to be a miraculous savior, how could he do ordinary human things, too? And when he looked up as we came in, his eyes were human, tired, not at all brimming with the spark of divine inspiration, and his first words did not fill me with awe, either.

“It's too soon to be certain,” he said to Chutsky, and I was grateful for the slight variation in the standard medical mantra. “We're not at the real crisis point yet, and that could change everything.” He slurped from his coffee cup. “She's young, strong. The doctors here are very good. You're in good hands. But a lot can still go wrong.”

“Is there anything you can do?” Chutsky asked, sounding very uncertain and humble, like he was asking God for a new bicycle.

“You mean a magic operation or a fantastic new procedure?” Teidel said. He sipped coffee. “No. Not a thing. You just have to wait.” He glanced at his watch and stood up. I have a plane to catch.” Chutsky lurched forward and shook Teidel's hand. “Thank you, Doctor. I really appreciate this. Thanks.” Teidel pried his hand away from Chutsky's. “You're welcome,” he said, and headed for the door.

Chutsky and I watched him go. I feel a lot better” Chutsky said.

“Just having him here was major.” He glanced at me as if I had said something scornful, and said, “Seriously. She's going to be okay” I wished that I felt as confident as Chutsky. I did not know that Deborah was going to be okay. I really wanted to believe it, but I am not as good at kidding myself as most humans are, and I have always found that if things have a choice of directions, they are most likely to go downhill.

Still, it was not the sort of thing I could say in the ICU without causing a certain amount of negative feeling to be directed toward me, so I mumbled something appropriate and we went back to sit at Deborah's bedside. Wilkins was still at the door, and there had been no change in Deborah that I could see, and no matter how long we sat or how hard we looked at her nothing happened, except for the hum, click, ping of the machinery.

Chutsky stared at her, as if he could make her sit up and speak by the power of his gaze. It didn't work. After a time he switched his stare to me. “The guy who did this” he said. “They got him, right?”

“He's locked up” I said. “At the detention center.” Chutsky nodded and looked like he was going to say something else. He looked toward the window, sighed, and then went back to staring at Deborah.

Dexter is known far and wide for the depth and sharpness of his intellect, but it was nearly midnight before it occurred to me that there was no point in sitting and staring at Deborah's unmoving form. She had not leapt to her feet from the Uri Geller intensity of Chutsky's gaze, and if the doctors were to be believed she was not going to do anything at all for some time. In which case, instead of sitting here and slowly sagging into the floor and morphing into a hunched, red-eyed lump, it made more sense for Dexter to totter off to bed for a few squalid hours of slumber.

Chutsky offered no objection; he just waved his hand and muttered something about holding down the fort, and I staggered out of the ICU into the warm and wet Miami night. It was a pleasant change after the mechanical chill of the hospital, and I paused to breathe in the flavor of vegetation and exhaust fumes. There was a large chunk of evil yellow moon floating in the sky and chuckling to itself, but I did not really feel its pull. I could not concentrate at all on the joyous matching gleam a knife blade would give off or the wild night-time dance of shadowy delight I should be longing for.

Not with Deborah lying unmoving inside. Not that it would be wrong -1 just didn't feel it. I didn't feel anything at all except tired, dull and empty.

Well, I couldn't cure the dull and empty, and I couldn't cure Deborah, but at least I could do something about the tired part.

I went home.

I woke up early, with a bad taste in my mouth. Rita was already in the kitchen and she had a cup of coffee in front of me before I could even settle into a chair. “How is she?” she said.

“It's too soon to tell” I said, and she nodded.

“They always say that” she said.

I took a large slug of the coffee and stood back up. “I'd better check and see how she is this morning” I said. I grabbed my cell phone from the table by the front door and called Chutsky.

“No change” he said, in a voice that was rough with fatigue. “I'll call you if anything happens.” I went back to the kitchen table and sat, feeling like I might fall into a coma myself at any minute. “What did they say?” Rita asked.

“No change” I told her, and I slouched forward into the coffee cup.

Several cups of coffee and six blueberry pancakes later I was somewhat restored and ready to go to work. So I pushed back from the table, said goodbye to Rita and the kids, and headed out the door. I would go through the motions like always, and let the ordinary rhythm of my artificial life lull me into synthetic serenity.

But work was not the sanctuary I had expected. I was greeted everywhere with sympathetic frowns and hushed voices asking, “How is she?” The entire building seemed to be throbbing with concern and echoing with the battle cry of, “It's too soon to tell.” Even Vince Masuoka had gotten into the spirit. He had brought in doughnuts —the second time this week! —and in a spirit of pure sympathetic kindness he had saved me the Bavarian Creme.

“How is she?” he asked, handing me the doughnut.

“She lost a lot of blood” I told him, mostly for the sake of some variety before I wore out my tongue from saying the same thing so many times. “She's still in ICU.”

“They're pretty good at this stuff at Jackson” he said. “Lots of practice.”

“I'd rather have them practice on someone else” I said, and ate the doughnut.

I had been in my chair for less than ten minutes when I got a call from Captain Matthews” executive assistant, Gwen. “The captain wants to see you right away” she said.

“Such a beautiful voice —it can only be that radiant angel Gwen,” I said.

“He means right now” she said, and hung up. And so did I.

I was in the captain's outer office in just under four minutes, looking at Gwen in person. She had been Matthews” assistant forever, all the way back to when she was called a secretary, and for two reasons. The first was that she was incredibly efficient. The second was that she was incredibly plain, and none of the captain's three wives had ever been able to find the slightest objection to her.

The combination of these two things made her irresistible to me, as well, and I was unable to see her without letting some lighthearted jest fly out from my frothy wit. “Ah Gwendolyn,” I said.

“Sweet siren of South Miami.”

“He's waiting for you” she said.

“Never mind him” I said. “Fly away with me to a life of beautiful debauchery.”

“Go on in” she said, nodding at the door. “In the conference room.”

I had assumed that the captain would want to express official sympathy, and the conference room seemed like a strange place to do that. But he was the captain and Dexter a mere underling, so I went on in.

Captain Matthews was, indeed, waiting for me. So were a few other people, most of whom I recognized, and none of whom were particularly good news. There was Israel Salguero, who was head of Internal Affairs; he was bad news all by himself. But he was also joined by Irene Cappuccio whom I knew only by sight and reputation. She was the senior lawyer for the department, and rarely called in unless somebody had filed a credible and substantial law suit against us. Sitting beside her was another department lawyer, Ed Beasley.

Across the table was Lieutenant Stein, Information Officer, who specialized in spinning things to keep the whole force from looking like a rampaging gang of visigoths. Altogether, this was not a group calculated to make Dexter sink into a chair wrapped in a soft cloud of tranquility.

There was a stranger sitting in one of the chairs by Matthews, and it was clear from the cut of his apparently expensive suit that he was not a cop. He was black, with a look of important condescension on his face and a shaved head that gleamed so brightly I was sure he used furniture polish, and as I watched he twitched his arm so that the sleeve rolled up to reveal a large diamond cufflink and a beautiful Rolex watch.

“Morgan” Matthews said, as I hovered in the doorway fighting down a sense of panic. “How is she?”

“Too soon to tell,” I said.

He nodded. “Well, I'm sure we all, ah, hope for the best here” he said. “She's a fine officer, and her dad was, uh —your dad, too, of course.” He cleared his throat and went on. “The, uh, doctors at Jackson are the best, and I want you to know that if there's anything the department can do, um ...” The man beside him glanced up at Matthews, and then at me, and Matthews nodded. “Sit down” he said.

I hooked a chair back away from the table and sat, with no idea what was going on, but an absolute certainty that I wouldn't like it.

Captain Matthews confirmed my opinion right away. “This is an informal conversation” he said. “Just to, ah, ahem.” The stranger turned his large and brittle eyes on the captain with a somewhat withering expression, and then looked back at me. I represent Alex Doncevic” he said.

The name meant absolutely nothing to me, but he said it with such smooth conviction I was sure it ought to, so I just nodded and said, “Oh, all right.”

“In the first place” he said, I am demanding his immediate release. And in the second ...” He paused here, apparently for dramatic effect and to let his righteous anger build up and spill out into the room. “In the second place” he said, as if he was addressing a crowd in a large hall, “we are considering a lawsuit for punitive damages.”

I blinked. They were all looking at me, and I was clearly an important part of something a little bit dire, but I really had no idea what it might be. “I'm sorry to hear that” I said.

“Look” Matthews said. “We're just having an informal, preliminary conversation here. Because Mr Simeon here, ah —has a very respectable position in the community. Our community” he said.

“And because his client is under arrest for several major felonies” Irene Cappuccio said.

“Illegally under arrest” Simeon said.

“That remains to be seen” Cappuccio told him. She nodded at me. “Mr Morgan can possibly shed some light on that.”

“All right” said Matthews. “Let's not, uh.” He put both hands on the conference table, face down. “The important thing is, just —uh, Irene?”

Cappuccio nodded and looked at me. “Can you tell us exactly what happened yesterday, leading up to the assault on Detective Morgan?”

“You know you would never get away with that in court, Irene” Simeon said. “Assault? Come on.” Cappuccio looked at him with a cold, unblinking stare for what seemed like a very long time, but was probably only about ten seconds. “All right” she said, turning back to me. “Leading up to the time his client stuck a knife in Deborah Morgan? You're not denying he stabbed her, are you?” she said to Simeon.

“Let's hear what happened,” Simeon said with a tight smile.

Cappuccio nodded to me. “Go on” she said. “Start at the beginning.”

“Well” I said, and that was all I could really say for the moment.

I could feel the eyes on me and the clock ticking, but I couldn't think of anything more cogent to say. It was nice finally to know who Alex Doncevic was; it's always good to know the names of people who stab your family members.

But whoever else he might be, Alex Doncevic was not the name on the list Deborah and I had been investigating. She had knocked on that door to find someone named Brandon Weiss, and been stabbed by someone else altogether, who had panicked into flight and attempted murder at the mere sight of her badge?

Dexter does not demand that life must always unfold in a reasonable manner. After all, I live here, and I know that logic does not.

But this made no sense at all, unless I accepted the idea that if you knock on doors at random in Miami, one out of three people who answer are prepared to kill you. While this idea had its own very great charm, it did not really seem terribly likely.

On top of that, at the moment, why he did it was not as important as the fact that Doncevic had stabbed Deborah. But why that should cause a gathering of this magnitude, I had no idea. Matthews, Cappuccio, Salguero —these people did not get together for coffee every day.

So, I knew that something unpleasant was happening, and that whatever I said was going to affect it, but since I didn't know what “it” was I didn't know what to say to make things better.

There was just too much information that did not add up to anything, and even my giant brain could not quite cope. I cleared my throat, hoping it would give me a little time, but it was over in just a few seconds and they were all still looking at me.

“Well” I said again. “Um, the beginning? You mean, um ...”

“You went to interview Mr Doncevic” Cappuccio said.

“No, um —not really”

“Not really” said Simeon, as if to clarify what the words meant.

“What does that mean, not really?”

“We went to interview someone named Brandon Weiss” I said.

“Doncevic answered the door.” Cappuccio nodded. “What did he say when Sergeant Morgan identified herself?”

I don't know” I said.

Simeon glanced at Cappuccio and said, “Stonewalling” in a very loud whisper. She waved it off.

“Mr Morgan” she said, and glanced down at the file in front of her. “Dexter.” She gave me a very small facial twitch that she probably thought was a warm smile. “You're not under oath here, and you're not in any kind of trouble. We just need to know what happened, leading up to the stabbing.” I understand” I said. “But I was in the car.” Simeon sat up almost at attention. “In the car,” he said. “Not at the door with Sergeant Morgan.”

“That's right.”

“So you didn't hear what was said —or not said” he said, raising one eyebrow high enough that it might almost pass for a tiny toupee on that shiny bald head.

“That's right.”

Cappuccio leaned in and said, “But you said in your statement that Sergeant Morgan showed her badge.”

“Yes” I said. I saw her.”

“And he was sitting in the car, how far away?” Simeon said. “Do you know what I could do with that in court?” Matthews cleared his throat. “Let's not, um —court is not, uh, we don't have to assume this will end in court” he said.

I was a lot closer when he tried to stab me” I said, hoping to be a little helpful.

But Simeon waved that off. “Self-defense,” he said. “If she failed to properly identify herself as an officer of the law, he had every right to defend himself!”

“She showed her badge, I'm sure of it” I said.

“You can't be sure —not from fifty feet away!” Simeon asserted.

I saw it” I protested, and hoped I didn't sound petulant.

“Besides, Deborah would never forget that —she's known the correct procedure since she could walk.” Simeon waved a very large index finger at me. “And that's another thing I really don't like here —exactly what is your relationship to Sergeant Morgan?”

“She's my sister,” I said.

“Your sister,” he said, making it sound somehow like he was saying, “Your evil henchman.” He shook his head theatrically, and looked around the room. He definitely had everyone's attention, and he was clearly enjoying it. “This just gets better and better,” he said, with a much nicer smile than Cappuccio's.

Salguero spoke up for the first time. “Deborah Morgan has a clean record. She comes from a police family, and she is clean in every way, and always has been.”

“A police family does not mean clean” Simeon said. “What it means is the Blue Wall, and you know it. This is a clear case of self defense, abuse of authority, and cover-up.” He threw his hands up and went on, “Obviously, we are never going to find out what really happened, not with all these Byzantine family and police department connections. I think we will just have to let the courts figure this out.”

Ed Beasley spoke up for the first time, in a gruff and non hysterical way that made me want to give him a hearty handshake.

“We have an officer in intensive care” he said. “Because your client stuck a knife in her. And we don't need a court to figure that out, Kwami.”

Simeon turned a row of bright teeth on Beasley. “Maybe not, Ed” he said. “But until you guys succeed in throwing out the Bill of Rights, my client has that option.” He stood up. “In any case” he said, I think I have enough to get my client out on bail.” He nodded at Cappuccio and left the room.

There was a moment of silence, and then Matthews cleared his throat. “Does he have enough, Irene?” Cappuccio snapped the pencil she was holding. “With the right judge? Yeah” she said. “Probably.”

“The political climate is not good right now” Beasley said.

“Simeon can stir things up and make this stink. And we can't afford another stink right now.”

“All right then, people” Matthews said. “Let's batten down the hatches for the coming shit-storm. Lieutenant Stein, you've got your work cut out for you. Get something on my desk for the press ASAP —before noon.”

Stein nodded. “Right” he said.

Israel Salguero stood up and said, I have my work, too, Captain.

Internal Affairs will have to start a review of Sergeant Morgan's behavior right away.”

“All right, good” Matthews said, and then he looked at me.

“Morgan” he said, shaking his head. I wish you could have been a little more helpful.”

FOURTEEN

So Alex Doncevic was out on the street long before Deborah was even awake. In fact, Doncevic was out of the detention center at 5.17 that afternoon, which was only an hour and twenty-four minutes after Deborah opened her eyes for the first time.

I knew about Deborah because Chutsky called me right away, as excited as if she had just swum the English Channel towing a piano. “She's gonna be okay, Dex” he said. “She opened her eyes and looked right at me.”

“Did she say anything?” I asked.

“No” he said. “But she squeezed my hand. She's gonna make it.” I was still not convinced that a wink and a squeeze were accurate signs that a complete recovery was at hand, but it was nice to know that she had made some progress. Especially since she would need to be fully conscious to face Israel Salguero and Internal Affairs.

I knew when Doncevic was released from the Detention center because in the time between the meeting in the conference room and Chutsky's call I had made a decision.

I have said before that I do not actually feel emotions. That's fine with me, since I have noticed that they are never particularly helpful to those who do feel them. But throughout that long and weary day I had noticed a strange sensation in the pit of my stomach that blossomed right after Matthews had called me unhelpful. The feeling grew throughout the rest of the morning, until it felt something like severe indigestion, although I am sure it had nothing to do with the Bavarian Creme doughnut I'd eaten, which had been quite good.

No, at the center of this new and unpleasant sensation was the thought that, for the first time ever, it bothered me that life was not fair.

Dexter is not delusional; he knows better than most that “fair” is a relatively new and stupid idea. Life is not fair, can never be fair, shouldn't even pretend to be fair, and so humans invented the idea to try to level the playing field and make things a little more challenging for the predators. And that's fine. Personally, I welcome the challenge.

But although Life is not fair, Law and Order was supposed to be. And the idea that Doncevic might go free while Deborah wasted away in a hospital just seemed so very, kind of —all right, I will say it: it wasn't fair. I mean, I am sure there are other available words here, but Dexter will not dodge merely because this truth, like most others, was a relatively ugly one. I felt a sharp sense of not-fairness to the whole thing, and it made me ponder what I might do to set things back in their proper order.

I pondered through several hours of routine paperwork and three cups of somewhat horrible coffee. And I pondered through a below average lunch at a small place claiming to be Mediterranean, which was only true if we accept that stale bread, clotted mayonnaise and greasy cold cuts are Mediterranean. Then I pondered through another few minutes of pushing things around on the desk in my little cubby.

It occurred to me after all this pondering that my once-powerful brain was not functioning at its former dizzying heights. In fact, it was barely functioning at all. Perhaps the interlude in Paris had softened it. More likely, though, it had grown feeble from the long forced absence from its favorite pastime, my own personal form of sudoku, finding and flensing the wicked unpunished. It had been far too long since I'd had a Dexter's Night Out, and I was quite sure the resulting tension was causing my current feeble-mindedness. If I had been firing on all my dark cylinders I like to believe I would have seen the obvious a great deal sooner.

But finally, somewhere in the distant fog of Dexter's diminished brainscape a small and faint gong sounded a tiny tinny note. “Bong” it said softly, and murky light slowly flooded into Dexter's Dim Noggin.

It may seem difficult to believe that it took so long for the wicked nickel to drop, but I can only say that it had been too long and I was tired, and out of sorts from the very bad lunch. Once the nickel did, in fact, drop, it dropped very smoothly and well and with a delightful sound of solid and pleasing chimes.

I had been scolded for being not very helpful, and I believe that I had been feeling the truth of that accusation. Dexter had not, in fact, been helpful; he had been sulking in the car when Debs was hurt, and he had failed to protect her once again from the attack of the shiny-headed lawyer.

But there was a way I could be very very helpful, and it was something that I was particularly good at. I could make a whole handful of problems go away: Deborah's, the department's, and my own very special ones, all at the same time with one smooth stroke or several choppy ones, if I was feeling particularly playful. All I had to do was relax and be wonderful special Me, while helping poor deserving Doncevic to see the error of his ways.

I knew Doncevic was guilty -1 had seen him stab Deborah with my own eyes. And so it followed that there was also a very good chance he had killed and arranged the bodies that were causing such an uproar and harming our vital tourist economy. Disposing of Doncevic was practically my civic duty. Since he was out on bail, if he turned up missing, everyone would assume he had run. The bounty hunters would make a stab at finding him, but no one would care when they failed.

I felt a very strong satisfaction with this solution: it's nice when things can work out so nicely, and the neatness of it appealed to my inner monster, the tidy one that likes to see problems properly bagged up and thrown away. Besides, it was only fair.

Wonderful: I would spend some quality time with Alex Doncevic.

I began by checking online to see his status, and re-checking every fifteen minutes when it became clear that he was about to be released. At 4.32 his paperwork was in its final stages, and I moseyed down to the parking lot and drove over to the front door of the detention center.

I got there just in time, and there were plenty of people there ahead of me. Simeon really knew how to throw a party, especially if the press were involved, and they were all there waiting in a huge, unruly mob, the vans and satellite dishes and beautiful haircuts all competing for space. When Doncevic came out on Simeon's arm there was a clatter of cameras and the multiple thud of many elbows trying to clear a way, and the crowd surged forward like a pack of dogs pouncing on raw meat.

I watched from my car as Simeon made a long and heartwarming statement, answered a few questions, and then pushed through the crowd towing Doncevic with him. They got into a black Lexus SUV and drove away. After a moment, I followed.

Following another car is relatively simple, particularly in Miami, where there is always traffic, and it always acts irrationally.

Since it was rush hour, it was even worse. I just had to stay back a bit, leaving a couple of cars between me and the Lexus. Simeon did nothing to show that he thought he was being followed. Of course, even if he spotted me he would assume I was a reporter hoping for a candid shot of Doncevic weeping with gratitude, and Simeon would do nothing more than make sure his good side was to the camera.

I followed them across town to North Miami Avenue, and dropped back a little as they turned onto NE 40th Street. I was fairly confident I knew where they were going now, and sure enough, Simeon pulled over in front of the building where Deborah had first met my new friend Doncevic. I drove past, circled the block once, and came back in time to see Doncevic get out of the Lexus and head into the building.

Happily for me, there was a parking spot where I could see the door. I pulled into it, turned off the engine, and waited for darkness, which would come as it always did, to find Dexter ready for it. And tonight, at last, after such a long and dreary stay in the daytime world, I was ready to join with it, revel in its sweet and savage music, and play a few chords of Dexter's own minuet. I found myself impatient with the ponderous, slowly sinking sun, and eager for the night. I could feel it stretching out for me, leaning in to spread through me, flexing its wings, easing the knots out of the too-long unused muscles and preparing to spring My phone rang.

“It's me” said Rita.

“I'm sure it is” I said.

I think I have a really good —what did you say?”

“Nothing” I said. “What's your really good?”

“What?” she said. “Oh —I've been thinking about what we said.

About Cody?”

I pulled my mind back from the pulsing darkness I had been feeding and tried to remember what we had said about Cody. It had been something about helping him come out of his shell, but I did not remember that we had actually decided anything beyond a few vague platitudes designed to make Rita feel better while I carefully placed Cody's feet on the Harry Path. So I just said, “Oh, right. Yes?” in the hope of drawing her out just a bit.

I was talking to Susan? You know, over on 137th? With the big dog” she said.

“Yes” I said. I remember the dog.” As indeed I did —it hated me, like all domestic animals do. They all recognize me for what I am, even if their masters do not.

“And her son, Albert? He's been having a really positive experience with the Cub Scouts. And I thought that might be just right for Cody”

At first the idea didn't make any sense at all. Cody? A cub scout?

It seemed like serving cucumber sandwiches and tea to Godzilla.

But as I stammered for a reply, trying to think of something that was neither outraged denial nor hysterical laughter, I actually caught myself thinking that it was not a bad idea. It was, in fact, a very good idea that would mesh perfectly with the plan to make Cody fit in with human children. And so, caught halfway between irritated denial and enthusiastic acceptance, I quite distinctly said, “Hi didda yuh-kay”

“Dexter, are you all right?” Rita said.

I, uh, you caught me by surprise” I said. “I'm in the middle of something. But I think it's a great idea.”

“Really? You really do?” she said.

“Absolutely” I said. “It's the perfect thing for him.” I was hoping you'd say so,” she said. “But then I thought, I don't know. What if -1 mean, you really do think so?” I really did, and eventually I made her believe me. But it took several minutes, since Rita is able to speak without breathing and, quite often, without finishing a sentence, so that she got out fifteen or twenty disconnected words for every one of mine.

By the time I finally persuaded her and hung up, it was slightly darker outside, but unfortunately much lighter inside me. The opening notes of “Dexter's Dance Suite” were muted now, some of the rising urgency blurred by the soundtrack of Rita's call. Still, it would come back, I was quite sure.

In the meantime, just to look busy, I called Chutsky.

“Hey, buddy” he said. “She opened her eyes again a few minutes ago. The doctors think she's starting to come around a little bit.”

“That's wonderful” I said. “I'm coming by a little later. I just have some loose ends to take care of.”

“Some of your people have been coming by to say hi” he said.

“Do you know a guy named Israel Salguero?” A bicycle went by me in the street. The rider thumped my side mirror and went on past. I know him” I said. “Was he there?”

“Yeah” said Chutsky. “He was here.” Chutsky was silent, as if waiting for me to say something. I couldn't think of much, so finally he said, “Something about the guy”

“He knew our father” I said.

“Uh-huh” he said. “Something else.”

“Um” I said. “He's from Internal Affairs. He's investigating Deborah's behavior in this whole thing.” Chutsky was silent for a moment. “Her behavior?” he said at last.

“Yes” I said.

“She got stabbed.”

“The lawyer said it was self-defense” I said.

“Son of a bitch” he said.

“I'm sure there's nothing to worry about” I said. “It's just regulations, he has to investigate.”

“Son of a goddamn bitch,” Chustky said. “And he comes around here? With her in a fucking coma?”

“He's known Deborah a long time” I said. “He probably just wanted to see if she was okay.” There was a very long pause, and then Chutsky said, “Okay, buddy. If you say so. But I don't think I'm going to let him in here next time.”

I was not really sure how well Chutsky's hook would match up with Salguero's smooth and total confidence, but I had a feeling it would be an interesting contest. Chutsky, for all his bluff and phony cheerfulness, was a cold killer. But Salguero had been in Internal Affairs for years, which made him practically bullet proof. If it came to a fight, I thought it might do quite well on pay per view. I also thought I should probably keep that idea to myself, so I just said, “All right. I'll see you later” and hung up.

And so, with all the petty human details taken care of, I went back to waiting. Cars went by. People walked past on the sidewalk.

I got thirsty, and found half a bottle of water on the floor in the back seat. And finally, it got completely dark.

I waited a little longer to let the darkness settle over the city, and over me. It felt very good to shrug into the cold and comfy night jacket, and the anticipation grew strong inside with whispered encouragement from the Dark Passenger, urging me to step aside and give it the wheel.

And finally, I did.

I put the careful noose of nylon fishing leader and a roll of duct tape in my pocket, the only tools I had in my car at the moment, and got out of the car.

And hesitated. Too long since the last time, far too long since Dexter had done the deed. I had not done my research and that was not good. I had no plan and that was worse. I did not really know what was behind that door or what I would do when I got inside.

I was uncertain for a moment and I stood beside the car and wondered if I could improvise my way through the dance. The uncertainty ate away my armor and left me standing on one foot in the dangerous dark without a way to move forward with the first knowing step.

But this was silly, weak and wrong —and very much Not Dexter.

The Real Dexter lived in the dark, came alive in the sharp night, took joy in slashing out from the shadows. Who was this standing here hesitating? Dexter did not dither.

I looked up into the night sky and breathed it in. Better. There was only a piece of rotten yellow moon but I opened up to it and it howled at me, and the night pounded through my veins and throbbed into my fingertips and sang across the skin stretched tight on my neck and I felt it all change, all grow back into what We must be to do what We would do, and then We were ready to do it.

This was now, this was the night, this was Dark Dexter's Dance, and the steps would come, flowing from our feet as they had always known they must.

The black wings reached out from deep inside and spread across the night sky and carried us forward.

We slid through the night and around the block, checking the entire area carefully. Down at the far end of the street there was an alley and we went down it into deeper darkness, cutting back toward the rear of Doncevic's building. There was a battered van parked at a covered and well-masked loading dock at the back of it —a quick and dry whisper from the Passenger saying, look; this is how he moved the bodies out and took them to their display points. And soon he would leave the same way.

We circled back around and found nothing alarming in the area.

An Ethiopian restaurant around the corner. Loud music three doors down. And then we were back at the front door and we rang the bell. He opened the door and had one small moment of surprise before we were on him, putting him quickly face down on the floor with the noose on his neck as we taped his mouth, hands and feet.

When he was secure and quiet we moved quickly through the rest of the place and found no one . We did find a few items of interest: some very nice tools in the bathroom, right next to a large bathtub.

Saws and snips and all, lovely Dexter Playtime Toys, and it was quite clearly the white porcelain background from the home movie we had seen at the Tourist Board and it was proof, all the proof we needed now, in this night of need. Doncevic was guilty. He had stood here on the tile by the tub holding these tools, and done unthinkable things —exactly the unthinkable acts that we were thinking of doing to him now.

We dragged him into the bathroom and put him in the tub and then we stopped again, just for a moment. A very small and insistent whisper was hinting that all was not right, and it went up our spine and into our teeth. We rolled Doncevic into the tub, face down, and went quickly through the place again. There was nothing and no one, and all was well, and the very loud voice of the Dark Driver was drowning out the feeble whisper and once again demanding that we steer back to the dance with Doncevic.

So we went back to the tub and went to work. And we hurried a little because we were in a strange place without any real planning, and also because Doncevic said one strange thing before we took the gift of speech away from him forever. “Smile” he said, and that made us angry and he was quickly unable to say anything very definite again. But we were thorough, oh yes, and when we were done, we were quite pleased with a job well done. Everything had gone very well indeed, and we had taken a very large step toward getting things back to the way things must be.

They were that way until it ended, with nothing left but a few bags of garbage and one small drop of Doncevic's blood on a glass slide for my rosewood box.

And as always, I felt a whole lot better afterwards.

FIFTEEN

IT WAS THE NEXT MORNING THAT THINGS BEGAN TO unravel.

I went in to work tired but content from my happy chores and the late night they had put me through. I had just settled down with a cup of coffee to attack a heap of paperwork when Vince Masuoka poked his head in the door. “Dexter” he said.

“The one and only” I said with proper modesty.

“Did you hear?” he said with an irritating bet-you-didn't-hear smirk.

I hear so many things, Vince” I said. “Which one do you mean?”

“The autopsy report” he said. And because it was apparently important to him to stay as annoying as possible, he said nothing else, just looked at me expectantly.

“All right, Vince” I said at last. “Which autopsy report did I not hear about that will change the way I think about everything?” He frowned. “What?” he said.

I said, no, I didn't hear. Please tell me.” He shook his head. I don't think that's what you said” he said.

“But anyway, you know those wacky designer bodies, with all the fruit and stuff in them?”

“At South Beach, and Fairchild Gardens?” I said.

“Right” he said. “So they get them to the morgue for the autopsy, and the ME is like, whoa, great, they're back.” I don't know if you have noticed this, but it is quite possible for two human beings to have a conversation in which one or both parties involved has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

I seemed to be in one of those brain-puzzling chats right now, since so far the only thing I'd gotten from talking to Vince was a profound sense of irritation.

“Vince” I said. “Please use small and simple words and tell me what you're trying to say before you force me to break a chair over your head.”

“I'm just saying” he said, which at least was true and easy to understand, as far as it went. “The ME gets those four bodies and says, these were stolen from here. And now they're back.” The world seemed to tilt to one side ever so slightly and a heavy grey fog settled over everything, which made it hard to breathe. “The bodies were stolen from the morgue?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Meaning, they were already dead, and somebody took them away and then did all the weird stuff to them?” He nodded. “It's just like the craziest thing I ever heard” he said. I mean, you steal dead bodies from the morgue? And you play with “em like that?”

“But whoever did it didn't actually kill them” I said.

“No, they were all accidental deaths, just lying there on their slabs.”

Accidental is such a terrible word. It stands for all the things I have fought against my whole life: it is random, messy, unplanned and therefore dangerous. It is the word that will get me caught some day, because in spite of all the care in the world, something accidental can still happen and, in this world of ragged chaotic chance, it always does.

And it just had. I had just last night filled half a dozen garbage bags with someone who was more or less accidentally innocent.

“So it isn't murder after all” I said.

He shrugged. “It's still a felony” he said. “Stealing a corpse, desecrating the dead, something like that. Endangering public health? I mean, it's gotta be illegal.”

“So is jaywalking” I said.

“Not in New York. They do it all the time.” Learning more about the jaywalking statutes in New York did nothing at all to fill me with good cheer. The more I thought about it, the more I would have to say that I was skating perilously close to having real human emotions about this, and as the day went on I thought about it more and more. I felt a strange kind of choking sensation just below my throat, and a vague and aimless anxiety that I could not shake, and I had to wonder; is this what guilt feels like? I mean, supposing I had a conscience, would mine be troubled now? It was very unsettling, and I didn't like it at all.

And it was all so pointless —Doncevic had, after all, stuck a knife in Deborah, and if she wasn't dead, it was not from lack of trying on his part. He was guilty of something rather naughty, even if it was not the more final version of the deed.

So why should I “feel” anything? It is all very well for a human being to say, I did something that made me feel bad.” But how could cold and empty Dexter possibly say anything of the sort? To begin with, I don't feel. More importantly —even if I did feel something, the odds are very good that it would be something that most of us would agree is, after all, kind of bad.

This society does not look with fondness and approval on emotions like Need to Kill, or Enjoying Cutting, and realistically those are the most likely things to pop up in my case.

Was this one small accidental and impulsive little dismemberment really the thing to push me over the edge into the turmoil soup that is human feeling? There was nothing to regret here —applying the smooth and icy logic of Dexter's great intellect resulted in the same bottom line no matter how many times I ran through it: Doncevic was no great loss to anybody, and he had at least tried to kill Deborah. Did I have to hope she would die, simply so I could feel good about myself?

But it was bothering me, and it continued to rankle throughout the morning and on into the afternoon when I stopped at the hospital on my lunch break.

“Hey buddy” Chutsky said wearily as I came into the room. “Not much change. She's opened her eyes a couple of times. I think she's getting a little stronger.” I sat in the chair on the opposite side of the bed from Chutsky.

Deborah didn't look stronger. She looked about the same —pale, barely breathing, closer to death than life. I had seen this expression before, many times, but it did not belong on Deborah. It belonged on people I had carefully chosen to wear that look as I pushed them down the dark slope and away into emptiness as the reward for the wicked things they had done.

I had seen it just last night on Doncevic —and even though I had not carefully chosen him, I realized the look truly belonged there, on him. He had put this same look on my sister, and that was enough.

There was nothing here to stir unease in Dexter's non-existent soul.

I had done my job, taken a bad person out of the crawling frenzy of life and hurried him into a cluster of garbage bags where he belonged. If it was untidy and unplanned it was still righteous, as my law enforcement associates would say. Associates like Israel Salguero, who would now have no need to harass Deborah and damage her career just because the man with the shiny head was making noise in the press.

When I ended Doncevic, I had ended that mess, too. A small weight lifted. I had done what Dexter does, and done it well, and my little corner of the world was just a tiny bit better. I sat in the chair and chewed on a really terrible sandwich, chatting with Chutsky and actually getting to see Deborah open her eyes one time, for a full three seconds. I could not say for sure that she knew I was there, but the sight of her eyeballs was very encouraging and I began to understand Chutsky's wild optimism a little more.

I went back to work feeling a great deal better about myself and things in general. Had I been hasty? Too bad. Doncevic deserved it, and I had given it to him. And with Deborah getting better unhassled by Internal Affairs and the press, life was really going right back on track to where it belonged, so nanny-poo-poo to worrying about it.

It was a lovely and gratifying way to roll back from lunch, and the feeling lasted all the way into the building and up to my cubicle, where I found Detective Coulter waiting for me.

“Morgan” he said. “Siddown.” I thought it was very nice of him to invite me to sit in my own chair, so I sat down. He looked at me for a long moment, chewing on a toothpick that stuck out of one corner of his mouth. He was a pear-shaped guy, never terribly attractive, and at the moment even less so. He had crammed his sizeable buttocks into the extra chair by my desk and, aside from the toothpick, he was working on a giant bottle of Mountain Dew, some of which had already stained his dingy white shirt. His appearance, together with his attitude of staring silently at me as if hoping I would burst into tears and confess to something, was extremely annoying, to say the least. So, fighting off the temptation to collapse into a weeping heap, I picked up a lab report from my in-basket and began to read.

After a moment Coulter cleared his throat. “All right” he said, and I looked up and raised a polite eyebrow at him. “We gotta talk about your statement” he said.

“Which one?” I said.

“When your sister got stabbed” he said. “Couple of things don't add up.”

“All right” I said.

Coulter cleared his throat again. “So, uh —tell me again what you saw.”

“I was sitting in the car” I said.

“How far away?”

“Oh, maybe fifty feet” I said.

“Uh-huh. How come you didn't go with her?”

“Well” I said, thinking it was really none of his business, I really didn't see the point.”

He stared some more and then shook his head. “You coulda helped her” he said. “Maybe stopped the guy from stabbing her.”

“Maybe” I said.

“You coulda acted like a partner” he said. It was clear that the sacred bond of partnership was still pulling strongly at Coulter, so I bit back my impulse to say something, and after a moment he nodded and went on.

“So the door opens and boom, he sticks a knife in?”

“The door opens and Deborah showed her badge” I said.

“You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“But you're fifty feet away?” I have really good eyesight” I said, wondering if everyone who came in to see me today was going to be profoundly annoying.

“Okay” he said. “And then what?”

“Then” I said, reliving that moment with terrible slow-motion clarity, “Deborah fell over. She tried to get up and couldn't and I ran to help her.”

“And this guy Dankawitz, whatever, he was there the whole time?”

“No” I said. “He was gone, and then he came back out as I got close to Deborah.”

“Uh-huh” Coulter said. “How long was he gone?”

“Maybe ten seconds tops” I said. “Why does that matter?” Coulter took the toothpick out of his mouth and stared at it.

Apparently it even looked awful to him, because after a moment of thinking about it, he threw it at my waste basket. He missed, of course. “Here's the problem” he said. “The fingerprints on the knife aren't his.”

About a year ago I'd had an impacted tooth removed, and the dentist had given me nitrous oxide. For just a moment I felt the same sense of dizzy silliness whipping through me. “The —urm fingerprints ...?” I finally managed to stutter.

“Yeah” he said, swigging briefly from the huge soda bottle. “We took his prints when we booked him. Naturally” He wiped the corner of his mouth with his wrist. “And we compared them to the ones on the handle of that knife? And hey. They don't match. So I'm thinking, what the fuck, right?”

“Naturally” I said.

“So I thought, what if there was two of “em, cuz what else could it be, right?” He shrugged and, sadly for all of us, fumbled another toothpick out of his shirt pocket and began to munch on it. “Which is why I had to ask you again what you think you saw.” He looked at me with an expression of totally focused stupidity and I had to close my eyes to think at all. I replayed the scene in my memory one more time: Deborah waiting by the door, the door opening. Deborah showing her badge and then suddenly falling but all I could see in my mind was the man's profile with no details.

The door opens, Deborah shows the badge, the profile —no, that was it. There was no more detail. Dark hair and a light shirt, but that was true of half the world, including the Doncevic I had kicked in the head a moment later.

I opened my eyes. I think it was the same guy” I said, and although for some reason I was reluctant to give him any more, I did. He was, after all, the representative of Truth, Justice and the American Way, no matter how unattractive. “But to be honest, I can't really be sure. It was too quick.” Coulter bit down on the toothpick. I watched it bobble around in the corner of his mouth for a moment while he tried to remember how to speak. “So it coulda been two of “em” he said at last.

I suppose so” I said.

“One of “em stabs her, runs inside like, shit, what'd I do” he said.

“And the other one goes, shit, and runs out to look, and you pop him one.”

“It's possible” I said.

“Two of “em” he repeated.

I did not see the point of answering the same question twice, so I just sat and watched the toothpick wiggle. If I had thought I was filled with unpleasant rumblings before, it was nothing to the whirlpool of unease that was forming in me now. If Doncevic's fingerprints were not on the knife, he had not stabbed Deborah; that was elementary, Dear Dexter. And if he had not stabbed Deborah, he was innocent and I had made a very large mistake.

This really should not have bothered me. Dexter does what he must and the only reason he does it to the well deserving is because of Harry's training. For all the Dark Passenger cares, it could just as easily be random. The relief would be just as sweet for us. The way I choose is merely the Harry-imposed icy logic of the knife.

But it was possible that Harry's voice was in me deeper than I had ever thought, because the idea that Doncevic might be innocent was sending me into a tailspin. And even before I could get a grip on this nasty uncomfortable sensation, I realized Coulter was staring at me.

“Yes” I said, not at all sure what that meant.

Coulter once again threw a mangled toothpick at the trash can.

He missed again. “So where's the other guy?” he said.

“I don't know” I told him. And I didn't.

But I really wanted to find out.

SIXTEEN

I HAVE HEARD CO-WORKERS SPEAK OF HAVING 'THE BLAHS', and always thought myself blessed that I lacked the ability to provide a host for anything with such an unattractive name. But the last few hours of my work day could be described in no other way. Dexter of the Bright Knife, Dexter the Duke of Darkness, Dexter the Hard and Sharp and Totally Empty, had the blahs. It was uncomfortable, of course, but due to the very nature of the thing I did not have the energy to do anything about it. I sat at my desk and pushed paperclips around, wishing I could just as easily push the pictures out of my head: Deborah falling; my foot connecting to Doncevic's head; the knife going up; the saw coming down ...

Blah. It was as stupid as it was embarrassing and enervating.

Okay, technically speaking, Doncevic had been sort of innocent.

I had made one lousy little mistake. Big deal. Nobody's perfect. Why should I even pretend to be? Was I really going to imagine that I felt bad about ending an innocent life? Preposterous. And anyway, what is innocent, after all? Doncevic had been playing around with dead bodies, and he had caused millions of dollars in damage to the city budget and the tourist industry. There were plenty of people in Miami who would gladly have killed him just to stop the bleeding.

The only problem was that one of those people was not me.

I was not much, I knew that. I never pretended to have any real humanity, and I certainly didn't tell myself that what I did was all right just because my playmates were cut from the same cloth. In fact, I was fairly certain that the world would be a much better place without me. Mind you, I have never been in a very big hurry to make the world a better place in that regard, either. I wanted to stick around as long as possible, because when you die either everything stops forever, or else Dexter was in for a very warm surprise. Neither option seemed like much of a choice.

So, I had no illusions about my worth to the rest of the world.

I did what I did and didn't ask for any thanks. But always, every time since the very first, I had done it by the rules laid down by Saint Harry, my near-perfect adoptive father. This time I had broken the rules, and for reasons that were not clear to me, that made me feel like I deserved to be caught and punished. And I could not convince myself that this was a healthy feeling.

So I battled the blahs until quitting time and then, without any real increase in energy, I drove over to the hospital again. The rush hour traffic did nothing to cheer me up. Everybody seemed to be just going through the motions without any real, genuine homicidal rage. A woman cut me off and threw half an orange at my windshield, and a man in a van tried to run me off the road, but they seemed to be doing it mechanically, not really putting their hearts into it.

When I got to Deborah's room, Chutsky was asleep in his chair, snoring loud enough to rattle the windows. So I sat for a little while, watching Deborah's eyelids quiver. I thought that was probably a good thing, indicating she was getting her REM sleep and therefore getting better. I wondered what she would think of my little mistake when she woke up. Considering what her attitude had been just before she got stabbed, it didn't seem likely that she would be terribly understanding about even such a minor slip-up. After all, she was as much in the grip of Harry's Shadow as I was, and if she could barely tolerate what I did when it was Harry Approved, she would never go along with something outside his careful limits.

Debs could never know what I had done. Not a big deal, considering I had always hidden everything from her until recently. But it didn't make me feel any better this time, for some reason. After all, I had done this one for her, as much as anything else —the first time I had ever acted out of noble impulses, and it had turned out very badly. My sister made a really poor Dark Passenger.

Debs moved her hand, just a twitch, and her eyes blinked open.

Her lips parted slightly and I was certain she actually focused on me for a moment. I leaned toward her and she watched me, and then her eyelids drifted closed again.

She was slowly getting better, and she was going to make it, I was sure. It might be weeks rather than days, but sooner or later she was going to get up out of that awful steel bed and get to work at being her old self again. And when she did ... what would she do about me?

I didn't know. But I had a very bad feeling that it wouldn't be much fun for either of us; because as I had realized, we were both still living in Harry's shadow, and I was pretty sure I knew what Harry would say.

Harry would say it was wrong, because this was not the way he had designed Dexter's life, as I remembered oh so well.

Harry usually looked very happy when he came in the front door from work. I don't think he ever was truly happy, of course, but he always looked like it, and this was one of my first very important lessons from him: make your face fit the occasion. It may seem like a small and obvious point, but to a fledgling monster still figuring out that he was very different, it was a vital lesson.

I remember sitting in the great banyan tree in our front yard one afternoon because, frankly, that is what the other kids in the neighborhood did, even long after what one might call optimum tree-climbing age. Those trees were a great place to sit, with their wide horizontal branches, and they served as a clubhouse for everyone under the age of eighteen.

So I sat in mine that afternoon, hoping the rest of the neighborhood would mistake me as normal. I was at an age where everything was starting to change, and I had begun to notice that I was changing in a very different way. For one thing, I was not totally consumed with trying to see under Bobbie Gelber's skirt when she climbed up into the tree, and all the other boys were. And for another ...

When the Dark Passenger started whispering wicked thoughts, I realized that it was a presence that had always been there; it just had not spoken until now. But now, when my contemporaries were starting to pass around copies of Hustler, it was sending me dreams of a different kind of illustration, perhaps from Vivisection Monthly. Although the images that came to me were disturbing at first, they started to seem more and more natural, inevitable, desirable, and finally, necessary. But another voice, equally strong, told me this was wrong, crazy, very dangerous. And for the most part the two voices fought to a tie and I did nothing but dream, just like all the human boys my age.

One wonderful night the two whispering armies came together when I realized that the Gelbers” dog, Buddy, was keeping Mom awake with its non-stop barking. This was not a good thing. Mom was dying of some untreatable mysterious thing called a lymphoma, and she needed her sleep. It occurred to me that if I could help Mom sleep, this would be a very good thing, and both voices agreed that this was so —one somewhat reluctantly, of course, but the other, darker one, with an eagerness that made me dizzy.

And so it was that Buddy, the loud-mouthed little dog, launched Dexter on his way. It was clumsy of course, and much messier than I had planned, but it was also oh so good and right and necessary.

In the following months there were a few more minor experiments; carefully spaced, playmates more cautiously chosen, since even in my hot-blooded phase of self-discovery I understood that if all the pets in the neighborhood disappeared, someone was bound to ask questions. But there was a stray, and a bicycle trip to a different area, and somehow young Luke Darkwalker got by, slowly learning to be happily me. And because I felt so attached to my small experiments, I buried them close at hand, behind a row of bushes in our backyard.

I certainly know better than that now. But at the time, everything seemed so innocent and wonderful, and I wanted to look out at the bushes and bask in the warm glow of the memories from time to time. But I had made my first mistake.

That lazy afternoon I sat in my banyan tree and watched as Harry parked the car, got out, and paused. He had on his work face, the one that said I have seen it all and don't like most of it. He stood beside the car for a long moment with his eyes closed, doing nothing more complicated than breathing.

When he opened his eyes again he had an expression on his face that said, I am home and feel very good about that. He took a step toward the front door and I jumped down out of the tree and went to him.

“Dexter” he said. “How was your day at school?” In truth it had been just about like all the others, but even then I knew that wasn't the appropriate response. “Good” I said. “We're studying communism.” Harry nodded. “That's important to know about” he said.

“What's the capital of Russia?”

“Moscow” I said. “It used to be St Petersburg.”

“Really” said Harry. “Why did they change it?” I shrugged. “They're atheists now” I said. “They can't have a Saint anything, because they don't believe in them.” He put a hand on my shoulder and we started walking to the house. “That can't be much fun” he said.

“Didn't you, um, fight communists?” I asked him, wanting to say kill but not quite daring. “In the Marines?” Harry nodded. “That's right” he said. “Communism threatens our way of life. So it's important to fight it.” We were at the front door, and he gently pushed me in ahead of him, into the smell of the fresh coffee that Doris, my adoptive mom, always had ready for Harry when he came home from work. She was not yet too sick to move, and she was waiting for him in the kitchen.

They went through their ritual of drinking coffee and talking quietly, as they did every day, and it was such a perfect Norman Rockwell picture that I would certainly have forgotten it almost instantly if not for what happened later that evening.

Doris was already in bed. She had taken to going to sleep earlier and earlier as her cancer got worse and she needed more pain medicine. Harry, Deborah and I had gathered in front of the TV set as we usually did. We were watching a sitcom, I don't remember which. There were many of them at the time that all could have been lumped together under the title of Funny Minority and the White Guy. The whole purpose of these shows seemed to be letting us all know that in spite of our small differences we were really all the same.

I kept waiting for some clue that this might include me, but neither Freddy Prinze nor Redd Foxx ever chopped up a neighbor. Still, everyone else seemed to enjoy the show. Deborah laughed out loud now and then, and Harry kept a contented smile on his face, and I did my best just to keep a low profile and fit in amid the hilarity.

But in the middle of the climactic scene, right when we were about to learn that we are all the same and then hug, the doorbell rang. Harry frowned a little bit, but he got up and went to the door with one eye still on the TV. Since I had guessed how the show would end and I was not particularly moved by artificial hugs of compassion, I watched Harry. He turned on the outside light, peeked through the eyehole, and then unlocked and opened the door.

“Gus” he said, with surprise. “Come on in.” Gus Rigby was Harry's oldest friend on the force. They had been best man at each other's weddings, and Harry was godfather to Gus's daughter, Betsy. Since his divorce, Gus was always at our house for holidays and special occasions, although not as often now that Doris was sick, and he always brought a key lime pie.

But he didn't look terribly social now, and he was not carrying a pie. He looked angry and frazzled, and he said, “We gotta talk” and pushed past Harry into the house.

“About what?” Harry said, still holding the door open.

Gus turned and snarled at him. “Otto Valdez is out on the street.” Harry stared at him. “How did he get out?”

“That lawyer he's got” Gus said. “He said it was excessive force.” Harry nodded. “You were rough on him, Gus.”

“He's a baby-raper” Gus said. “You want me to kiss him?”

“All right” Harry said. He closed and locked the door. “What is there to talk about?” he said.

“He's after me now” Gus said. “The phone rings and nobody's there, just breathing. But I know it's him. And I got a note under my front door. At my home, Harry.”

“What did the lieutenant say?” Gus shook his head. I want to do this myself” he said. “On the side. And I want your help.” With the wonderful timing that only happens in real life, the TV show came to an end and the laughter track blasted out right on the toes of Gus's words. Deborah laughed, too, and finally looked up.

“Hi Uncle Gus” she said.

“Hello, Debbie” Gus said. “You're more beautiful every day” Debs scowled. Even then she was embarrassed by her good looks, and she didn't like being reminded of it. “Thank you” she said grumpily.

“Come on into the kitchen” Harry said, taking Gus by the elbow and leading him away.

I knew perfectly well that Harry was taking Gus into the kitchen to keep me and Deborah from hearing what would be said, and naturally enough that made me want to hear it all the more. And since Harry had not specifically said, “Stay here and do not listen ...” Why, it would hardly be eavesdropping at all!

So, I got up from in front of the TV set very casually and went down the hall toward the bathroom. I paused in the hallway and looked back: Deborah was already engrossed in the next program, and so I slid into a small patch of shadow and listened.

“... courts will handle it” Harry was saying.

“Like they handled it so far?” Gus said, sounding angrier than I had ever heard him. “Come on, Harry, you know better than that.”

“We're not vigilantes, Gus.”

“Well maybe we should be, goddamn it.” There was a pause. I heard the refrigerator door open and then the sound of a beer can opening. A moment went by and nothing was said.

“Listen, Harry” Gus said at last. “We've been cops for a long time now.”

“Coming up on twenty years” Harry said.

“And from the first day on the job, didn't it hit you that the system just doesn't work? That the biggest assholes always find a way to fall out of jail and back onto the streets? Huh?”

“That doesn't mean we have the right to—”

“Then who does have the right, Harry? If not us, who does?” There was another longish pause. Finally Harry spoke, very softly, and I had to strain to make out the words.

“You weren't in Vietnam” Harry said. Gus didn't respond.

“Something I learned there is that some people can kill in cold blood, and others can't. And most of us can't” Harry said. “It does bad things to you.”

“So what are you saying: you agree with me, but you can't do it?

If ever anybody deserved it, Harry, Otto Valdez ...”

“What are you doing?” came Deborah's voice, approximately eight inches from my ear. I jumped so hard I bumped my head on the wall.

“Nothing,” I replied.

“Funny place to do it” she said, and since she showed no inclination to move on, I decided I was done listening and I went back to zombie-land in front of the TV. I had certainly heard enough to understand what was going on, and I was fascinated. Dear sweet kindly Uncle Gus wanted to kill somebody, and wanted Harry to help him. My brain whirled with the excitement of it, frantically searching for a way to persuade them to let me help —or at least watch. Where was the harm in that? It was almost a civic duty!

But Harry refused to help Gus, and a little while later Gus left the house looking like someone had let all the air out of him. Harry came back to the TV with me and Debs, and spent the next half hour trying to get his happy face back on.

Two days later they found Uncle Gus's body. It had been mutilated and beheaded and apparently tortured first.

Three days after that, unknown to me, Harry found my little pet memorial under the bushes in the backyard. Over the next week or two I caught him staring at me more than once with his work face on. I did not know why at the time, and it was somewhat intimidating, but I was far too much of the young gawp to be able to phrase a statement like, “Dad, why are you staring at me with that particular expression?”

In any case, the why of it very soon became apparent. Three weeks after Uncle Gus met his untimely end, Harry and I went on a camping trip to Elliot Key, and with a few simple sentences —starting with, “You're different, son” —Harry changed everything forever.

His plan. His design for Dexter. His perfectly crafted, sane and sensible road map for me to be eternally and wonderfully me.

And now I had stepped off the Path, taken a small and dangerous back road detour. I could almost see him shake his head and turn those ice-cold blue eyes on me.

“We've got to get you squared away” Harry would have said.

SEVENTEEN

A PARTICULARLY LOUD SNORE FROM CHUTSKY BROUGHT me back to the present. It was loud enough that one of the nurses stuck her head in the door, and then checked all the dials and gauges and whirling machinery before going away again, with a suspicious backward glance at the two of us, as if we had deliberately made terrible noises in order to upset her machines.

Deborah moved one leg slightly, just enough to prove she was still alive, and I pulled myself all the way back from meandering down memory lane. Somewhere, there was somebody who actually was guilty of putting the knife into my sister. That was all that mattered. Someone had actually done this thing. It was a large and untidy loose end wandering around and I needed to grab hold and snip it back into neatness. Because the thought of such a large piece of unfinished and unpunished business gave me the urge to clean the kitchen and make the bed. It was messy, plain and simple, and Dexter doesn't like disorder.

Another thought poked its nose into the room. I tried to shoo it away, but it kept coming back, wagging its tail and demanding that I pet it. And when I did, it seemed to me to be a good thought.

I closed my eyes and tried to picture the scene one more time. The door swings open —and it stays open as Deborah shows her badge and then falls. And it is still open when I get to her side ... which means that someone else could very well have been inside and looking out. And that meant that somewhere, there just might be somebody who knew what I looked like. A second person, just like Detective Coulter had suggested. It was a little insulting to admit that a drooling dolt like Coulter might be right about something, but after all, Isaac Newton didn't reject gravity just because the apple had a low IQ.

Happily for my self-esteem, however, I was one step ahead of Coulter, because I might know this hypothetical second person's name. We had been going to ask someone named Brandon Weiss about his threats to the Tourist Board, and somehow ended up with Doncevic instead. So there might well have been two of them, living together. Another small train chugged into the station: Arabelle, the cleaning woman at Joe's, had seen two gay tourists, with cameras.

And I had seen two men who fit that description at Fairchild Gardens, also with cameras, filming the crowd. A film of the crime scene arriving at the Tourist Board had started all this. It was not conclusive, but it was certainly a nice start, and I was pleased, since it proved that a certain amount of mental function might well be returning to Cyber-Dex.

As if to prove it, I had one more thought. Taking it a step further, if this hypothetical Weiss had followed the story in the media, which seemed very likely, he would know who I was, and quite possibly consider me a person worth talking to, in the strictly Dexter-ian sense of the word. Dexter-ose? Probably not —this was not a sweet thought, and it did not fill me with sociable good cheer. It meant that either I would have to defend myself successfully when he came, or let him do unto me. Either way there would be a mess, and a body, and a great deal of publicity, and all of them attached to my secret identity, Daytime Dexter, which was something I very much wanted to avoid if possible.

All that meant one simple thing: I had to find him first.

This was not a daunting task. I have spent my adult life getting very good at finding things, and people, on the computer. In fact, it was this particular talent that had gotten Debs and me into our current mess, so there was a certain symmetry to the idea that this same skill would get me out of it now.

All right then: to work. Time to heed the clarion call and strap myself into my trusty computer.

And as always seems to happen when I have reached the point where I am ready to take decisive action, everything began to happen at once.

As I took a breath in preparation for standing up, Chutsky suddenly opened his eyes and said, “Oh, hey, buddy, the doctor said—” and was interrupted by the sound of my cell phone ringing.

As I reached to answer it, a doctor stepped into the room and said, “All right” to two interns following close behind him.

And then in rapid-fire confusion I heard, from the doctor, the phone and Chutsky, “Hey, buddy, it's the doc —Cub Scouts, and Astor's friend has the mumps —the higher nerve center seems to be responding to ...”

Once again I was very pleased not to be a normal human being, since if I was I would certainly have flung my chair at the doctor and run screaming from the room. Instead, I waved at Chutsky, turned away from the doctors, and concentrated on the phone.

“I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you” I said. “Can you say it again?” I said, it would be a big help if you could come home” Rita said.

“If you're not too busy? Because Cody has his first Cub Scouts meeting tonight, and Astor's friend Lucy has the mumps? Which means she can't go over there, so one of us should stay with her at home? And I thought, you know. Unless you're stuck at work again?”

“I'm at the hospital” I said.

“Oh,” Rita said. “Well then, that's ... Is she any better?” I looked over at the small clot of doctors. They were examining a small heap of documents apparently relating to Deborah. I think we're about to find out,” I said. “The doctors are here now.”

“Well, if it's -1 guess I could just -1 mean, Astor could go along to Cub Scouts if ...”

“I'll take Cody to Scouts” I said. “Let me just talk to the doctor first.”

“If you're sure” she said. “Because if it's, you know ...”

“I know” I said, although I actually didn't. “I'll be right home.”

“All right” she said. “Love you.” I hung up and turned back to the doctors. One of the interns had peeled back Deborah's eyelid and was glaring at her eyeball with the aid of a small flashlight. The real doctor was watching him, holding the clipboard.

“Excuse me” I said, and he glanced up at me.

“Yes?” he said, with what I recognized as a fake smile. It was not nearly as good as mine.

“She's my sister” I said.

The doctor nodded. “Next of kin, all right” he said.

“Is there any sign of improvement?”

“Well,” he said. “The higher nerve functions seem to be coming back on-line, and the autonomic responses are good. And there's no fever or infection, so the prognosis seems favorable for a slight upgrade in condition within the next twenty-four hours.”

“That's good,” I said hopefully.

“However, I do have to warn you” he said, with an equally phony frown of importance and seriousness. “She lost an awful lot of blood, which can sometimes lead to permanent impairment of brain functions.”

“But it's too soon to tell?” I said.

“Yes” he said, nodding vigorously. “Exactly”

“Thank you, Doctor” I said, and stepped around him to where Chutsky was now standing, wedged into a corner, so the doctors could have full access to Debs.

“She'll be fine” he told me. “Don't let these guys scare you, she's gonna be absolutely fine. Remember, I had Doc Teidel here.” He lowered his voice to just above a whisper. “No offense to these guys, but Teidel's a hell of a lot better. He put me back together, and I was a whole lot worse than this” he said, nodding at Deborah. “And I didn't have any brain damage, either.” Considering the Pollyanna optimism he was showing, I wasn't sure about that, but it didn't seem worth arguing about. “All right” I said. “Then I'll check back with you later. I have a crisis at home.”

“Oh” he said, with a frown. “Everybody okay?”

“All fine” I said. “It's the Cub Scouts I'm worried about.” And although I meant that as a light-hearted exit line, isn't it funny how often these little jokes come true?

EIGHTEEN

The Cub Scout den that Rita had found for Cody met at Golden Lakes Elementary School, a few miles from our house. We got there a little early and sat in the car for a minute, and Cody watched without expression as a handful of boys his approximate age ran into the school wearing their blue uniforms.

I let him sit and watch, thinking that a little preparation time might do us both some good.

A few cars pulled up. More boys in blue uniforms ran into the building, apparently eager to get inside. Anyone equipped with a heart would certainly have found it warming at the sight —one parent was so enamored of the scene that he stood beside his van and video-taped the stream of boys running past and inside. But Cody and I simply sat and watched.

“They're all the same” Cody said softly.

“Just on the outside” I said. “It's something you can learn to do.” He looked at me blankly.

“It's just like putting on one of those uniforms” I said. “When you look the same, people think you are. You can do this.”

“Why?” he said.

“Cody” I said, “we have talked about how important it is to look normal.” He nodded. “This will help you figure out how to act like other kids. It's part of your training.”

“Other part?” he said, with the first eagerness he had shown, and I knew he was longing for the simple clarity of the knife.

“If you do this part well, we will do the other part” I said.

“An animal?”

I looked at him, saw the cold gleam in his small blue eyes, and knew there was no going back from where he already was; the only thing I could hope for was the long and difficult shaping that had been done to me. “All right” I said. “We'll do an animal.”

He watched me for another long moment, and then he nodded back, and we climbed out of the car and followed the pack into the cafeteria.

Inside, the other boys —and one girl —ran around making lots of loud noise for the first few minutes. Cody and I sat quietly in our tiny, molded plastic chairs, at a table just barely tall enough to smack you in the kneecaps if you tried to walk around it. He watched the others at their noisy play without expression and without any attempt to join in, and that was a starting point, something I could do with him. He was far too young to be known as a brooding loner we needed to get his disguise in gear.

“Cody” I said, and he looked at me with the same lack of expression.

“Look at the other kids.” He blinked, and then swivelled his head to take in the rest of the room. He watched without comment for a minute, and then turned back to me. “Okay” he said softly.

“It's just that they're all running around and having fun, and you're not” I said.

“No” he said.

“So you will stand out”1 said. “You have to pretend you're having fun here.”

I don't know how” he said, a major speech for him.

“But you have to learn,” I said. “You have to look like all the others, or—”

“Well, well, what's wrong with you, little guy?” a voice boomed out. A large and offensively cheerful man came over and put his hands on his bare knees so he could shove his face closer to Cody's.

He was bursting out of a Cub Scout leader's uniform, and the sight of his hairy legs and large belly seemed very wrong. “You're not feeling shy, are you?” he said with a huge and terrible grin.

Cody stared back at him without blinking for a long moment, and the man's grin began to fade a little. “No” Cody said at last.

“Well, good” the man said, straightening up and moving back a step.

“He's not really shy” I said. “He's just a little tired today.” The man turned his grin on me, looked me over for a moment, then stuck out his hand. “Roger Deutsch” he said, holding out his hand. “I'm the den master. I just like to get to know everybody a little before we start.”

“Dexter Morgan” I said, shaking his hand. “This is Cody” Deutsch held his hand out to Cody. “Hi, Cody, glad to meet you.” Cody looked at the hand, then at me; I nodded at him, and he put his small hand into the meaty paw held out in front of him. “Hi” he said.

“So” Deutsch said relentlessly, “what brings you to Scouting, Cody?”

Cody glanced at me. I smiled, and he turned back to Deutsch.

“Have fun” he said, his small, deadpan face looking like he was at a funeral.

“Great” said Deutsch. “Scouting should be fun. But there's a serious part, too. You can learn about all kinds of cool things. Is there anything special you really want to learn about, Cody?”

“Animal carving” Cody said, and I had to fight not to fall out of my tiny chair.

“Cody” I said.

“No, that's okay, Mr Morgan” Deutsch said. “We do lots of crafts.

We can start with soap carving and move on to wood.” He winked at Cody. “If you're worried about him working with knives, we won't let him hurt himself.”

It didn't seem polite to say that I wasn't worried about Cody hurting himself with a blade in his hand. He already knew very well which end to hold, and he had shown a precocious talent for finding the right way to put in the point. But I was fairly certain Cody could not learn the kind of animal carving he wanted in Scouting —at least not until the Eagle Scout level. So I simply said, “We'll talk it over with Mom, and see what she says” and Deutsch nodded his head.

“Great” he said. “In the meantime, don't be shy. You just jump in here with both feet, buddy.” Cody looked at me, and then nodded at Deutsch.

“All right” Deutsch said, finally straightening up. “Well, let's get this thing started then.” He nodded at me and turned back to begin rallying the troops.

Cody shook his head and whispered something. I leaned a little closer to him. “What?” I said.

“Both feet” he said.

“It's just an expression” I told him.

He looked at me. “Stupid expression” he said.

Deutsch had moved across the room, calling for quiet, getting all the kids together, and they were now assembling in the front of the room. It was time for Cody to jump in, even if it was only with one foot at first. So I stood up and held out a hand to him. “Come on” I said. “This will work out fine.” Cody didn't look convinced, but he stood up and looked at the group of normal boys converging on Deutsch. He pulled himself as straight and tall as possible, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay” and marched over to join the group.

I watched him push carefully through the crowd to find his spot and then stand there, all alone and being as brave as he could be.

This was not going to be easy —not for him, and not for me. It would be very awkward for him to try to fit into a group that he had nothing in common with. He was a tiny wolf trying to grow lamb's wool and learn to say, “Baaa!” If he howled at the moon even once the game was over.

And for me? I could only watch, and possibly give him a few pointers in between rounds. I had gone through a similar phase myself, and I still remembered the terrible pain of it; realizing that this was all and forever something for the others and never for me that laughter, friendship, the sense of belonging, were things I would never really feel. Even worse, once I realized that I was outside all of it, I had to pretend to feel it, learn to show the mask of happiness in order to hide the deadly emptiness inside.

I remembered the dreadful clumsiness of those first years of trying; the first horrible attempts at laughter, always at the wrong time and always sounding so very inhuman. Even speaking to the others naturally, easily, about the right things and with the right manufactured feelings. Slowly, painfully, awkwardly learning, watching how the others did these things so effortlessly and feeling the added pain of being outside that graceful ease of expression. A small thing, knowing how to laugh. So very inconsequential, unless you don't know how and have to learn it from watching others, as I did.

As Cody would have to do now. He would have to go through the whole vile process of understanding that he was different and always would be, and then learning to pretend he was not. And that was just the starting point, the first easy leg of the Harry Path. After that things got even more complicated, more difficult and painful, until an entire artificial life was built and hammered into place. All fake, all the time, with only the short and far-too-rare intervals of razor-edged reality to look forward to —and I was passing all this on to Cody, that small and damaged creature who stood up there now so stiffly, watching with such intense focus for a hint of belonging that would never come.

Did I really have the right to force him into this agonizing mold?

Merely because ” had gone through this, did that truly mean he had to? Because if I was honest with myself, it had not been working terribly well for me lately. The Harry Path, a thing that had seemed so clear, clean and clever, had taken a turn into the underbrush.

Deborah, the one person in the world who should understand, doubted that it was right, that it was even real, and now she lay in the ICU while I floundered around the city slaughtering the innocent.

Was this really what I wanted for Cody?

I watched him follow along through the Pledge of Allegiance, and found no answers there. And so it was a very thoughtful Dexter who eventually tottered home after the meeting, with a wounded and uncertain Cody in tow.

Rita met us at the door, a look of worry on her face. “How did it go?” she asked Cody.

“Okay” he said, with a look on his face that said it was not okay.

“It was fine” I said, sounding a little more convincing. “And it will get much better.”

“Has to” Cody said softly.

Rita looked from Cody to me and then back again. I don't I mean, did you, did you ... Cody. Are you going to keep going?” Cody looked at me and I could almost see a small and sharp blade flashing in his eyes. “I'll go” he said to his mother.

Rita looked relieved. “That's wonderful” she said. “Because it really is -1 know that you'll, you know.”

“I'm sure he will” I said.

My cell phone began to chirp and I answered it. “Yes” I said.

“She woke up” Chutsky said. “And she spoke.”

“I'll be right there” I said.

NINETEEN

I don't really know what I WAS expecting when I GOT to the hospital, but I didn't get it. Nothing seemed to have changed. Deborah was not sitting up in bed and doing the crossword puzzle while listening to her iPod. She still lay motionless, surrounded by the clutter of machinery and Chutsky. And he sat in the same position of supplication in the same chair, although he had managed to shave and change his shirt somewhere along the way.

“Hey, man!” he called out cheerfully as I pushed in to Deborah's bedside. “We're on the mend,” he said. “She looked right at me, and she said my name. She's gonna be totally fine.”

“Great” I said, although it didn't seem clear to me that saying a one syllable name meant that my sister was rocketing back to full, unimpaired normality. “What did the doctors say?” Chutsky shrugged. “Same old shit. Not to get my hopes up too high, too soon to be sure, autonomic nervous blah blah blah.” He held up his hand in a what-the-hell gesture. “But they didn't see it when she woke up, and I did. She looked into my eyes, and I could tell. She's still in there, buddy. She's gonna be fine.” There seemed to be very little to say to that, so I muttered a few well-meaning and empty syllables, and sat down. And although I waited very patiently for two and a half hours, Debs did not leap out of bed and begin to do calisthenics; she did not even repeat her parlor trick of opening her eyes and saying Chutsky's name, and so I finally tottered home to bed without feeling any of Chutsky's magical certainty.

The next morning when I arrived at my job I was determined to get to work right away and find out all I could about Doncevic and his mysterious associate. But I barely had time to put my coffee cup down on my desk when I received a visitation from the Ghost of Christmas Gone Terribly Wrong, in the person of Israel Salguero from Internal Affairs. He came wafting silently in and sat in the folding chair across from me without a sound. There was a sense of velvet menace to his movement that I would have admired, if it had not been aimed at me. I watched him, and he watched me for a moment, before he finally nodded and said, I knew your father.” I nodded and took the very great risk of sipping my coffee —but without taking my eyes off Salguero.

“He was a good cop, and a good man” Salguero said. He spoke softly, fitting his way of moving so silently, and he had the slight trace of an accent that many Cuban-Americans of his generation had. He had, in fact, known Harry very well, and Harry had thought highly of him. But that was in the past, and Salguero was now a very respected and very feared IA Lieutenant, and no good could come of having him investigating either me or Deborah.

And so, thinking that it was probably best just to wait him out and let him get to the point, if there was one, I took another sip of my coffee. It did not taste nearly as good as it had before Salguero had come in.

I would like to be able to get this thing cleared up as quickly as possible” he said. “I'm sure that neither you or your sister have anything to worry about.”

“No, of course not” I said, wondering why I didn't feel reassured —unless of course it was because my entire life was built around the idea of escaping notice, and having a trained investigator peering in under the edges was not a terribly comforting concept.

“If there is anything you care to tell me at any time” he said, “my office door is always open to you.”

“Thank you very much” I said, and since there didn't seem to be anything else to say, I didn't say it. Salguero watched me for a moment, then nodded and slid up from his chair and out the door, leaving me wondering just how much trouble the Morgans were in.

It took me several minutes and a full cup of coffee to clear his visit from my head and concentrate on the computer.

When I did, what a wonderful surprise I got.

Just as a matter of reflex, I glanced at my email inbox as I went to work. There were two departmental memos that demanded my immediate inattention, an ad promising me several inches of unspecified additional length, and a note with no title that I almost deleted, until I saw who it was from: bweiss@aol.com It really shouldn't have, but it took a moment for the name to register, and my finger was literally poised on the mouse to delete the message when something clicked and I paused.

Bweiss. The name seemed familiar somehow. Perhaps it was “Weiss, first initial B', like most email addresses. That would make sense. And if the B stood for Brandon, that would make even more sense. Because it was the name of the person I had just sat down to investigate.

How thoughtful of him to get in touch.

I opened Weiss's email with more than usual interest, very eager to find out what he might have to say to me. But to my great disappointment, he apparently had nothing at all to say. There was merely a link to YouTube stuck in the middle of the page with no comment at all. http:””www.youtube.com”watch?v=991rj?42n How very interesting. Brandon wanted to share his videos with me. But what kind of video could it possibly be? Perhaps his favorite rock band? Or an edited montage of clips from his favorite TV show? Or even more of the kind of footage he had sent to the Tourist Board? That would be very thoughtful.

So, with a warm and fuzzy glow growing in the spot where my heart should have been, I clicked on the link and waited impatiently for the screen to open. Finally, the small box appeared and I clicked on the play button.

For a moment there was just darkness. Then a grainy picture blossomed and I was looking down at white porcelain from a fixed camera perched somewhere near the ceiling —the same shot featured in the video sent to the Tourist Board. I felt mildly disappointed he had just sent me a link to a copy of something I had already seen.

But then there was a sound of soft slithering, and movement started in the corner of the screen. A dark figure lurched into frame and dumped something onto the white porcelain.

Doncevic.

And the dark figure? Dexter, of course.

My face was not visible, but there was no doubt. That was Dexter's back, his $17 hair cut, the collar of Dexter's lovely dark shirt curled around Dexter's wonderful precious neck.

My sense of disappointment was completely gone. This was a brand new video after all, something I had never seen, and I was immediately very anxious to see it for the first time.

I watched as Dexter Past straightened up, looked around —still, happily, without showing his face to the camera. Clever boy. Dexter walked out of frame and was gone. The lump in the tub moved slightly, and then Dexter came back and picked up the saw. The blade whirred, the arm went up ...

And darkness. End of video.

I sat in a quiet and stunned stupor for several minutes. There was a clatter of some kind in the hall. Someone came into the lab and opened a drawer, closed it again, and left. The phone rang; I didn't answer it.

That was me. Right there on YouTube. In full glorious living and slightly grainy color. Dexter of the Deadly Dimples, now starring in a minor motion picture classic. Smile at the camera, Dexter. Wave to the nice audience. I had never been very fond of home movies, and this one left me even colder than ever. But there I was —not merely captured on film but posted on a website for all the world to see and admire. It was more than I could wrap my mind around; my thoughts just moved in a circle, like a film clip in a loop. That was me; it couldn't be me but it was. I had to do something, but what could I do? Don't know, but something because that was me ...

Things were certainly getting interesting, weren't they?

All right; that was me. Obviously there was a camera hidden somewhere above the tub. Weiss and Doncevic had used it for their decorative projects, and it was still there when I showed up. Which meant that Weiss was still somewhere in the area.

But no, it didn't mean that at all. It was ridiculously easy to connect a camera to the Internet and monitor from a computer. Weiss could be anywhere, collecting the video and sending it on to me. To precious anonymous me. Dexter the mostly modest, who toiled in the shadows and never ever looked for publicity of any kind for his good works. But of course, in the hideous clamor of media attention that had surrounded this whole thing, including the attack on Deborah, my name had almost certainly been mentioned somewhere.

Dexter Morgan, unassuming forensic whiz, brother of the nearly slain. One picture, one frame of evening news footage, and he would have me.

A cold and awful lump began to grow in my stomach. It was just that easy. So simple for a deranged decorator to figure out who and what I was. I had been too clever for too long and grown accustomed to being the only tiger in the forest. And I had forgotten that when there is only one tiger it's awfully easy for the hunter to follow the tracks.

And he had. He had followed me to my den and taken pictures of Dexter at play, and there it was.

My finger twitched almost unwillingly on the mouse and I watched the video again.

It was still me. Right there on the video. It was me.

Happily for all concerned —by which I mean me —I did eventually begin to listen to the cool small voice in the back of my once-useful brain that had spent the last few minutes repeating, Steady, Dexter. All right then; steady. I took a deep breath and let the oxygen work its magic on my thought process, or what was left of it.

This was a problem, to be sure, but it had a solution like every other problem, and it was in the area of two things that Dexter is very good at: finding people and things with a computer and then making them go away. So it was all to the good. The video was on the Internet? Wonderful —less work for me. It couldn't be better.

I was almost feeling something, either fake happiness or something like it.

Time to apply logic, turn the full power of Dexter's icy biocomputer on the problem. First: what did he want? Why had he done this? Obviously he wanted some reaction from me —but which one? The most obvious would be that he was looking for revenge. I had killed his friend —partner? Lover? It didn't matter.

He wanted me to know that he knew what I had done, and, and ...

And he had sent the clip to me, not to someone who would presumably do something about it, like Detective Coulter. Which meant that this was a personal challenge, something that he was not going to make public, at least not yet.

Except that it was public —it was on YouTube, and it was only a matter of time before someone else stumbled upon it. And that meant that there was a time element. So what was he saying? Find me before they find you?

Okay so far. But then what? An Old West showdown —power saws at ten paces? Or was the idea just to torture me, keep me chasing until I made a mistake, or until he grew bored and sent the whole thing on to the evening news?

It was enough to create at least the idea of panic in a lesser being.

But Dexter is made of far sterner stuff. He wanted me to try to find him —but he could not know that I had my varsity letter in finding.

If I was even half as good as modesty let me admit I was, I would find him a great deal quicker than he thought I could. Fine. If Weiss wanted to play, I would play.

But we were going to play by Dexter's rules, not his.

TWENTY

FIRST THINGS FIRST” HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY MOTTO, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense —after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn't be first things, would they? Still, cliches exist to comfort the feeble-minded, not to provide any actual meaning. Since I was feeling somewhat weak between the ears at the moment, I took a little bit of consolation from the thought as I pulled up the police records on Brandon Weiss.

It wasn't much; there was a parking ticket that he had paid, and the complaint filed against him by the Tourist Board. He had no outstanding warrants, no special permits beyond a driver's license, no permit to carry a concealed firearm —or a concealed power saw, for that matter. His address was the one I knew, where Deborah had been stabbed. With a little digging, I found one previous address, in Syracuse, New York. Before that he had lived in Montreal, Canada.

A quick check showed that he was still a Canadian citizen.

No real leads there; nothing that qualified as a clue of any kind.

I hadn't really expected anything, but my job and my adoptive father had taught me well that due diligence paid off from time to time.

This was just the beginning.

The next step, Weiss's email address, was a little harder. With a certain amount of slightly illegal maneuvering, I got into AOL's subscriber list and found out just a little more. The same address in the Design District was given as his home address, but there was also a cell phone number. I wrote it down to pursue later, in case I needed it. Other than that, there was nothing helpful here. Surprising, really, that an organization like AOL fails to ask simple and vital questions, like, “Where would you hide if Dexter was after you?”

Still, nothing worth doing is ever easy —another fascinatingly stupid cliche. After all, breathing is fairly easy for the most part, and I think many scholars would agree it pays handsome dividends. The cell phone company's records would tell me much the same thing as AOL's, but there was a chance I could track down the location of the phone itself, a trick I had done once before when I very nearly saved Sergeant Doakes from being surgically modified.

For no particular reason I went back to YouTube. Perhaps I just wanted to see myself one more time, relaxing and being myself. It was, after all, something I had never seen before, and never expected to see. Dexter in action, as only he can do it. I watched the video one more time, marveling at how graceful and natural I looked. What a wonderful sense of style I showed as I swung the saw up toward the camera. Beautiful. A true artist. I should do more film work.

And with that, another thought popped into my slowly awakening brain. Beside the screen, the email address was highlighted.

I really didn't know much about YouTube, but I knew that if an email address was highlighted, it led somewhere. So I clicked on it and almost immediately an orange background came up on screen and I was on a YouTube personal page. In large fiery letters across the top of the page, it said: THE NEW MIAMI. I scrolled part-way down to a box that said, VIDEOS (5), with a row of thumbnail stills of each video. The one showing my back was number four.

In an effort to be methodical and not simply watch my riveting performance again, I clicked on the first one, which showed a man's face twisted into a grimace of disgust. The video began, and again the title appeared on the screen in fiery letters: THE NEW MIAMI #1.

Then there was a very nice sunset shot of lush tropical vegetation; a row of lovely orchids, a line of birds landing on a small lake, and then the camera pulled back to show the body we had found at Fairchild Gardens. There was a terrible groan off camera and a somewhat strangled voice said, “Oh, Jesus” and then the camera followed his back as a piercing scream ripped out of the speaker. It sounded strangely familiar, and for a moment that puzzled me, and I paused the video, rewound, and played the scream again. Then I had it; it was the same scream that had been on the first video, the one we had seen at the Tourist Board. For whatever strange reason, Weiss had used the same scream here.

Possibly it was just brand continuity, like McDonald's using the same clown.

I started up the video again; the camera was moving through the crowd in the Fairchild parking lot picking out faces that looked shocked, disgusted, or merely curious. Again the screen whirled and lined up the expressive faces in a row of boxes against a background of the sunset vegetation shot, and the letters supered in on top: THE NEW MIAMI: PERFECTLY NATURAL.

If nothing else, it removed any lingering doubt I might have had about Weiss's guilt. I was quite sure the other videos would show the other victims, complete with reaction shots of the crowd. But just to be thorough, I decided to watch them all in order, all five of them.

But wait a second: there should only be three spots, one for each of the sites we had found. One more for Dexter's great performance and that would be four —what was the other one?

There was a loud clatter in the lab, and Vince Masuoka called out, “Yo, Dexter!” and I quickly clicked the browser off. It wasn't just false modesty that made me reluctant to share my wonderful acting work with Vince. Explaining the performance would be far too difficult. And just as my monitor went blank, Vince pushed into my little cubby, carrying his forensic kit.

“You don't answer your phone any more?” he said.

I must have been in the restroom” I said.

“No rest for the wicked” he said. “Come on, we gotta go to work.”

“Oh” I said. “What's up?” I don't know, but it's got the uniforms on site almost hysterical” Vince said. “Something down in Kendall.” Of course, awful things happen in Kendall all the time, but very few of them require my professional attention. In retrospect I suppose I should have been more curious, but I was still distracted by the discovery of my unwilling stardom on YouTube, and I really wanted to see the other videos. What would the last one show? Since there was no new body on display that I knew of, I had a small and nibbling thought that it might be something revealing, some small something that might get me closer to Weiss —and I very much needed to get as close as possible, knife-blade close, before anyone else saw my movie and recognized me.

So my mind was not truly focused on my job, and I rode along with Vince exchanging half-conscious pleasantries and wondering what Weiss might have revealed in that last, unseen video. Therefore, it was with a very real sense of shock that I recognized our destination when Vince pulled into the parking lot, turned off the engine, and said, “Let's go.” We were parked at a large public building I had seen before. In fact, I had seen it only a day ago, when I had taken Cody to his Cub Scout meeting.

We had just parked at Golden Lakes Elementary School.

Of course, it had to be mere happenstance. People get killed all the time, even at elementary schools, and to assume this was any more than one of those funny coincidences that make life so interesting was to believe that the entire world revolved around Dexter which was true in a rather limited way, of course, but I was not deranged enough to believe it in a literal way.

So a bemused and slightly unsettled Dexter trudged after Vince, under the yellow crime scene tape, and over to the side door of the building, where the body had been discovered. As I approached the carefully guarded spot where it lay in all its glory, I heard a strange and near-idiot whistling sound, and realized it was me. Because in spite of the see-through plastic mask glued to the face, in spite of the yawning body cavity which was filled with what appeared to be Cub Scout uniform items and paraphernalia, and in spite of the fact that it was completely impossible that I was right, I recognized the body from ten feet away.

It was Roger Deutsch, Cody's Scout master.

TWENTY-ONE

THE BODY HAD BEEN PROPPED IN THE RECESS AROUND THE side door of the building, the one that served as an emergency exit for the combination cafeteria and auditorium of the school. One of the servers had stepped outside for a smoke and seen it, and had to be sedated, which was easy for me to understand after I took a quick look. And after a second, more careful examination, I very nearly needed a sedative myself.

Roger Deutsch had a lanyard around his neck, with a whistle hanging from it. As before, the body cavity had been scooped out and then filled with interesting things —in this case, a Cub Scout uniform, a colorful book that said Big Bear Cub Scout Handbook on the cover, and some other gear. I could see the handle of a hand axe sticking up, and a pocket knife with the Cub Scout logo on it.

As I bent closer to look, I also saw a grainy picture, printed on regular white paper, with BE PREPARED printed on it in large black letters. The picture showed a blurry shot, taken from some distance away, of several boys and one adult going into this same building. And although it was impossible to prove it, I knew quite well who the adult and one of the children were.

Me and Cody.

There was no mistaking the familiar curve of Cody's back. And there was no mistaking the message, either.

It was a very odd moment, kneeling there on the pavement and looking at a blurry, indistinct picture of myself and Cody, and wondering if anybody would see me if I took it. I had never tampered with evidence before, but then again, I had never been part of it, either. And it was quite clear that this was meant for me. BE PREPARED, and the photo. It was a warning, a challenge: ” know who you are and I know how to hurt you And here I come.

BE PREPARED.

I was not prepared. I did not yet know where Weiss might be, and I did not know what or when his next move would be, but I did know that he had moved everything several notches ahead of me, and he had raised the stakes considerably at the same time. This was not a stolen dead body, and it was not anonymous. Weiss had killed Roger Deutsch, not just modified his body. And he had chosen this victim carefully, deliberately, in order to get at me.

It was a complex threat, too. Because the picture added another dimension —it said: I may get you, and I may get Cody, or I may simply expose you for what we both know you are. On top of that was the sure knowledge that if I was exposed and slapped in jail, Cody would have no protection at all against whatever Weiss might do.

I looked hard at the picture, trying to decide if anyone else could tell it was me, and whether taking it was worth the risk of removing and destroying it. But before I could make any decision, the feather stroke of an invisible black wing brushed across my face and raised the hair along my neck.

The Dark Passenger had been very quiet through this whole thing so far, contenting himself with a disinterested smirk from time to time, and offering no really cogent observations. But now the message was clear, and it echoed the one on the photograph: Be prepared. You are not alone. And I knew just as certainly as I possibly could that somewhere nearby something was looking at me and harboring wicked thoughts, watching me as the tiger watches its prey.

Slowly, carefully, as if I had simply forgotten something in the car, I stood up and walked back toward where we had parked. As I walked I casually scanned the parking area; not looking for anything in particular, just Dopey Dexter ambling along in a perfectly normal way, and under the nonchalant and distracted smile the black smoke boiled and I looked for something that I knew was looking at me.

And found it.

Over there, in the nearest row of the parking lot, maybe a hundred feet away from me, right where it would provide the best view, a small bronze-colored sedan was parked. And through the windshield, something winked at me; sunlight off the lens of a camera.

Still so very careful and casual, even though the darkness was roaring through me with a knife edge blossoming, I took a step toward the car. Across the distance I saw the bright flash of the camera coming down, and the small pale face of a man, and the black wings rattled and crashed between us for one very long second ...

Then the car started up, backed out of the parking spot with a small squeal of rubber, and disappeared out of the lot and away into traffic. Although I sprinted forward, the most I could see of the license plate was the first half: OGA and three numbers that might have been anything, although I thought the middle one was either a 3 or an 8.

But with the description of the car, it was enough. I would at least find the registration of the car. It would not be registered to Weiss, couldn't be. Nobody is that stupid, not in this day of nonstop police drama in all the media. But a small hope flickered. He had left quickly, not wanting me to see him or his car, and just this once I might have some small bit of luck.

I stood there for nearly a minute, letting the wild wind inside me settle back down into a neatly coiled and steadily purring thing.

My heart was pumping as it seldom did in the light of day, and I realized that it was a very good thing that Weiss had been just a little bit shy, and had taken off so readily. After all, what would I have done otherwise? Pulled him out of the car and killed him? Or had him arrested and flung into a squad car, so he could begin to tell everyone who would listen all about Dexter?

No, it was just as well that he had escaped. I would find him, and we would meet on my terms, in the suitable dark of a night that could not come soon enough for me.

I took a deep breath, plastered my best phony working smile back onto my face, and walked back to the pile of decorative meat that had been Cody's scout master.

Vince Masuoka was squatting by the body when I got there, but instead of doing something useful, he was simply staring at the stuff shoved into the cavity and frowning. He looked up as I approached, and said, “What do you think it means?”

“I'm sure I have no idea,” I said. I just do blood spatter. They pay detectives to figure out what it means.” Vince cocked his head and looked at me as if I had told him we were supposed to eat the body. “Did you know that Detective Coulter is in charge of the investigation?” he said.

“Maybe they pay him for something else” I said, and I felt a small surge of hope. I had forgotten this detail, but it was worth remembering. With Coulter in charge, I could confess to the murder, hand him videos of me performing it, and he would still find a way not to prove it.

So it was with something approaching good cheer that I went back to work —tempered with very real impatience to get it finished and get back to my computer to track down Weiss. Happily, there was very little blood spatter on site —Weiss appeared to be the kind of neatnik I admired —and therefore there was almost nothing for me to do. I finished up shortly and begged a ride back to headquarters with one of the squad cars. The driver, a large white-haired guy named Stewart, talked about the Dolphins all the way back, apparently not really caring if I spoke back.

By the time we got back to headquarters I had learned some wonderful things about the approaching football season and what we should have done during the off-season but had somehow, inexplicably, managed to bungle once again, which would certainly lead to another season of ineptitude and shameful losses. I thanked him for the ride and the vital information and fled for my computer.

The database for automobile registration is one of the most basic tools of police work, both in reality and in fiction, and it was with a slight sense of shame that I went to it now. It really just seemed too easy, straight out of a rather simple-minded television drama. Of course, if it led to finding Weiss I would somehow overcome the feeling that this was almost like cheating, but for the time being I really kind of wished for a clue that would call for something a little more clever. Still, we work with the tools we are given, and hope that someone asks us later for constructive criticism.

After only fifteen minutes I had combed the entire Florida state database, and found three small bronze-colored vehicles with the letters OGA on their license tag. One of them was registered in Kissimmee, which seemed like a bit of a commute. Another was a 3 Rambler, and I was reasonably sure that I would have noticed something that distinctive.

That left number three, a 1995 Honda, registered to a Kenneth A Wimble on NW 98th Street in Miami Shores. The address was in an area of modest homes, and it was relatively close to the place in the Design District where Deborah had been stabbed. It really wouldn't even be a terribly long walk —so that, for example, if the police came to your little nest on NE 40th you could easily hop out the back door and amble a few blocks over until you found an unattended car.

But then what? If you are Weiss, where do you take this car? It seemed to me that you would take it far away from wherever you stole it. So probably the very last place on earth that he would be was the house on N W 98th Street. Unless there was some connection between Weiss and Wimble. It would be perfectly natural to borrow a friend's car: Just some casual butchery, buddy —back in a couple of hours.

Of course, for some bizarre reason, we don't have a National Registry of Who Your Friends Are. One would assume that this administration would have thought of that, and rammed it through Congress. It would certainly make my work easier now. But no such luck; if they were indeed chums, I would have to find out the hard way, by a personal visit. It was merely due diligence in any case. But first I would see if I could uncover anything at all about Kenneth A Wimble.

A quick check of the database showed that he had no criminal record, at least not under that name. His utilities were paid, although payment on his propane bill had been late several times. Digging a little deeper, going into the tax records, I discovered that Wimble was self-employed, and his occupation was listed as video editor.

Coincidence is always possible. Strange and improbable things happen every day, and we accept them and simply scratch our heads like rubes in the big city, and say, “Gollee, ain't that somethin'.” But this seemed to be stretching coincidence past the breaking point.

I had been following a writer who had left a video trail, and now the trail had led me to a video professional. And since there comes a time and place when the seasoned investigator must accept the fact that he has stumbled on something that is probably not coincidence, I murmured, “Aha” very quietly to myself. I thought I sounded quite professional saying it, too.

Wimble was in on this in some way, tied up with Weiss in making and sending the videos, and therefore, presumably in arranging the bodies and finally in killing Roger Deutsch. So when Deborah had come knocking at the door, Weiss fled to his other partner, Wimble.

A place to hide, a small bronze-colored car to borrow, and on with the show.

All right then, Dexter. Mount up and move out. We know where he is, and now is the time to go get him; before he decides to put my name and picture on the front page of the Miami Herald. Up and away. Let's go.

Dexter? Are you there, buddy?

I was there. But I suddenly found, oddly enough, that I really missed Deborah. This was exactly the kind of thing I should be doing with her —after all, it was bright daylight out there, and that was not truly Dexter's Dominion. Dexter needs darkness to blossom into the real life of the party that he is deep inside. Sunlight and hunting do not mix. With Deborah's badge I could have stayed hidden in plain sight, but without it... I was not actually nervous, of course, but I was a little bit uneasy.

However, there was no choice at all. Deborah was lying in a hospital bed, Weiss and his dear friend Wimble were giggling at me in a house on 98th Street, and Dexter was dithering about daylight.

And that would not do, not at all.

So stand, breathe, stretch. Once more into the breach, dear Dexter. Get up and be gone. And I did, and I headed out the door to my car, but I could not shake the strange feeling of unease.

The feeling lasted all the way over to NW 98th Street, even through the soothing homicidal rhythm of the traffic. Something was wrong somewhere and Dexter was headed into it somehow.

But since there was nothing more definite than that, I kept going, and wondering what was really chewing at the bottom corner of my brain. Was it really just fear of daylight? Or was my subconscious telling me that I had missed something important, something that was getting ready to rear up and bite me? I went over it all in my head, again and again, and it all added up the same way. The only thing that really stuck out was the thought that it was all very simple, perfectly connected, coherent and logical and right, and I had no choice but to act as quickly as I could, and why should that be bothersome? When did Dexter ever have any choice anyway? When does anyone really have a choice of any kind, beyond occasionally being able to say —on those very few good days we get —I choose ice cream instead of pie?

Nevertheless, I still felt invisible fingers tickling at my neck when I parked the car across the street and halfway down the block from Wimble's house. For several long minutes I did nothing more than sit in the car and look up the street at the house.

The bronze-colored car was parked in the street right in front of the house. There was no sign of life, and no large heap of body parts dragged to the curb to await pick-up. Nothing at all but a quiet house in an ordinary Miami neighborhood, baking in the midday sun.

The longer I sat there in the car with the motor off, the more I realized that I was baking, too, and if I stayed in the car a few more minutes I would be watching a crisp dark crust form on my skin.

Whatever faint tremors of doubt I felt, I had to do something while there was still breathable air in the car.

I got out and stood blinking in the heat and light for several seconds, and then moved off down the street, away from Wimble's house. Moving slowly and casually, I walked around the block one time, looking at the house from the rear. There was not much to see; a row of hedges growing up through a chain-link fence blocked any view of the house from the next block over. I continued around the block, crossed the street, and walked on back to my car.

I stood there again, blinking in the brightness, feeling the sweat roll down my spine, across my forehead, into my eyes. I knew that I could not stand there a great deal longer without drawing attention.

I had to do something —either approach the house, or get back into my car, drive home, and wait to see myself on the evening news.

But with that nasty, annoying little voice still squeaking in my brain that something was just not right, I stood there a little longer, until some small and brittle thing inside snapped, and I finally thought, Fine. Let it come, whatever it might be. Anything is better than standing here counting the droplets of sweat as they fall.

I remembered something helpful for a change, and opened the trunk of my car. I had thrown a clipboard in there; it had been very useful for several past investigations into the lifestyles of the wicked and infamous, and there was a clip-on tie as well. It has been my experience that you can go anywhere, day or night, and no one will question you if you wear a clip-on tie and carry a clipboard. Luckily today I was wearing a shirt that actually buttoned at the neck, and I hung the tie on my collar, picked up the clipboard and a ballpoint pen, and walked up the street to Wimple's house. Just another semi important official or other, here to check on something.

I glanced up the street; it was lined with trees, and several of the houses had fruit trees in the yard. Fine: today I was Inspector Dexter from the State Board of Tree Inspection. This would allow me to move close to the house with a semi-logical activity to cloak me.

And then what? Could I really get inside and take Weiss by surprise, in broad daylight? The hot glare of the sun made it seem vastly unlikely somehow. There was no comforting darkness, no shadows to hold me and hide my approach. I was as completely visible and obvious as could be and if Weiss glanced out the window and recognized me, the game was up before it properly began.

But what choice did I have? It was him or me, and if I did nothing at all, he would most likely do a great deal of something, starting with exposing me and moving down the list to hurting Cody or Astor, or who knows what. He was quite clearly deranged, even more than I was, and I had no way to know how far he would go, or what he would do when he got there. Without question, I had to head him off and stop him now, before he did any more damage.

As I straightened up to do so, a most unwelcome thought shoved its way in: was this the way Deborah thought of me? Did she see me as a sort of wild obscenity, slashing its way across the landscape with random ferocity? Was that why she had been so unhappy with me? Because she had formed an image of me as a ravening monster?

It was such a painful notion that for a moment I could do nothing but blink away the drops of sweat rolling down my forehead. It was unfair, totally unjustified; of course, I was a monster —but not that kind. I was neat, focused, polite, and very careful not to cause the tourists any inconvenience with random body parts scattered about.

How could she fail to see that? How could I make her see the well ordered beauty of the way Harry had set me up?

The first answer was, I could not —not if Weiss stayed alive and at liberty Because once my face was on the news, my life was over and Deborah would have no more choice than I would; no more choice than I had right now. Sunlight or not, I had to do this, and I had to do it quickly and well.

I took a deep breath and moved up the street to the house next to Wimble's, looking intently at the trees along the drive and scribbling on the clipboard. I moved slowly up the driveway. No one leapt out at me with a machete in their teeth, so I walked back down the driveway, paused in front of the house, and then went on to Wimble's.

There were suspicious trees to examine there, too, and I looked up at them, made notes, and moved a bit further up the driveway.

There was no sight nor sound of life from the house. Even though I did not know what I hoped to see, I moved closer, looking for it, and not just in the trees. I looked carefully at the house, noting that all the windows seemed to have shades drawn down. Nothing could see in or out. I got far enough up the driveway to notice that there was a back door, located at the top of two concrete steps. I moved toward it very casually, listening for any small rustling or whispering or shouts of, “Look out! He's here!” Still nothing. I pretended to notice a tree in the backyard, close to a propane tank and only about twenty feet from the door, and I went over to it.

Still nothing. I scribbled. There was a window in the top half of the door, with no shade pulled down. I walked over to it, mounted the two steps, and peeked inside. I was looking into a darkened hallway, lined with a washing machine and dryer, and a few brooms and mops held in clamps on the wall. I put a hand on the door knob and turned very slowly and quietly. It was unlocked. I took a deep breath ... and very nearly fell out of my skin as a horrible, shattering scream came from inside. It was the sound of anguish and horror and such a clear call for help that even Disinterested Dexter moved reflexively forward, and I had one foot actually inside the house when a tiny little question mark scuttled across the floor of my brain and I thought, I've heard that scream before. As my second foot moved forward, further into the house, I thought, Really? Where? The answer came quite quickly, which was comforting: it was the same scream that was on the “New Miami” videos that Weiss had made.

Which meant that it was a recorded scream.

Which meant it was intended to lure me inside.

Which meant that Weiss was ready and waiting for me.

It is not terribly flattering to my own special self, but the truth is that I actually paused for a split second to admire the speed and clarity of my mental process. And then, happily for me, I obeyed the shrill interior voice that was screaming, “Run, Dexter, run!” and bolted out of the house and down the driveway, just in time to see the bronze-colored car screech away down the street.

And then a huge hand rose up behind me and slammed me to the ground, a hot wind blew past, and Wimble's house was gone in a cloud of flame and showering rubble.

TWENTY-TWO

“IT WAS THE PROPANE,” DETECTIVE COULTER TOLD ME. I leaned against the side of the EMS truck holding an ice pack to my head. My wounds were very minor, considering, but because they were on me they seemed more important, and I was not enjoying them, nor the attention I was getting. Across the street the rubble of Wimble's house smouldered and the fire-fighters still poked and squirted at steaming piles of junk. The house was not totally destroyed, but a large chunk of the middle of it from roof to foundation was gone and it had certainly lost a great deal of market value, dropping instantly into the category of Very Airy Fixer-Upper.

“So” Coulter said. “He lets the gas out from the wall heater in that soundproof room, tosses in something to set it off, we don't know what yet, and he's out the door and away before it all goes boom.” Coulter paused and took a long swig from the large plastic bottle of Mountain Dew he carried. I watched his Adam's apple bob under two thick rolls of grimy flab. He finished drinking, poked his index finger into the mouth of the bottle, and wiped his mouth on his forearm, staring at me as if I was keeping him from using a napkin. “Why would he have a soundproof room, you think?” he said.

I shook my head very briefly and stopped because it hurt. “He was a video editor” I said. “He probably needed it for recording.”

“Recording” said Coulter. “Not chopping people up.”

“That's right,” I said.

Coulter shook his head. Apparently it didn't hurt him at all, because he did it for several seconds, looking over at the smoking house.

“So, and you were here, because why?” he said. “I'm not real clear on that part, Dex.”

Of course he was not real clear on that part. I had done everything I could to avoid answering any questions about that part, clutching my head and blinking and gasping as if in terrible pain every time someone approached the subject. Of course, I knew that sooner or later I would have to provide a satisfactory answer, and the sticky part was that “satisfactory” thing. Certainly, I could claim I'd been visiting my ailing granny, but the problem with giving such answers to cops is that they tend to check them, and alas, Dexter had no ailing granny, nor any other plausible reason to be there when the house exploded, and I had a very strong feeling that claiming coincidence would not really get me terribly far, either.

And in all the time since I had picked myself up off the pavement and staggered over to lean on a tree and admire the way I could still move all my body parts —the whole time I was getting patched up and then waiting for Coulter to arrive —all these long minutes-into hours, I had not managed to come up with anything that sounded even faintly believable. And with Coulter now turning to stare at me very hard indeed, I realized my time was up.

“So, what then?” he said. “You were here because why? Picking up your laundry? Part-time job delivering pizza? What?” It was one of the biggest shocks of a very unsettling day to hear Coulter revealing a faint patina of wit. I had thought of him as an exceedingly dull and dim lump of dough, incapable of anything beyond filling out an accident report, and yet here he was making amusing remarks with a very professional deadpan delivery, and if he could do that, I had to assume he might have an outside chance of putting two and two together and coming up with me. I was truly on the spot. And so, throwing my cunning into high gear, I decided to go with the time-honored tactic of telling a big lie wrapped in a small truth.

“Look, detective” I said, with a painful and somewhat hesitant delivery that I was quite proud of. Then I closed my eyes and took a deep breath —all real Academy Award stuff. “I'm sorry, I'm still a little fuzzy. They say I sustained a minor concussion.”

“Was that before you got here, Dex?” Coulter said. “Or can you remember that far back, about why you were here?” I can remember” I said reluctantly. “I just...”

“You don't feel so good” he said.

“Yeah, that's right.”

I can understand that” he said, and for one wild, irrational moment I thought he might let me go. But no: “What I can't understand” he went on relentlessly, “is what the fuck you were doing here when the fucking house blew the fuck up.”

“It's not easy to say” I said.

I guess not” said Coulter. “Cause you haven't said it yet. You gonna tell me, Dex?” He popped his finger out of the bottle, took a sip, pushed the finger back in again. The bottle was more than half empty now, and it hung there like some kind of strange and embarrassing biological appendage. Coulter wiped his mouth again.

“See, I kind of need to know this” he said. “Cuz they tell me there's a body in there.”

A minor seismic event worked its way down my spine, from the top of my skull all the way down to my heels. “Body?” I said with my usual incisive wit.

“Yeah” he said. “A body”

“That's, you mean —dead?” Coulter nodded, watching me with distant amusement, and I realized with a terrible shock that we had switched roles, and now I was the stupid one. “Yeah, that's right” he said. “Cuz it was inside the house when it went ka-boom, so you would have to figure it would be dead. Also” he said, “it couldn't run away, being tied up like that. Who would tie a guy up when the house was gonna blow like that, do you figure?”

“It, uh ... must have been the killer” I stammered.

“Uh-huh” said Coulter. “So you figure the killer killed him, that it?”

“Uh, yes” I said, and even through the growing pounding in my head I could tell how stupid and unconvincing that sounded.

“Uh-huh. But not you, right? I mean, you didn't tie the guy up and toss in a Cohiba or something, right?”

“Look, I saw the guy drive away as the house went up” I said.

“And who was that guy, Dex? I mean, you got a name or anything?

Cuz that would really help a lot here.” It might have been that the concussion was spreading, but a terrible numbness seemed to be taking me over. Coulter suspected something, and even though I was relatively innocent in this case, any kind of investigation was bound to have uncomfortable results for Dexter. His eyes had not left my face, and he had not blinked, and I had to tell him something, but even with a minor concussion I knew that I could not give him Weiss's name. I, it —the car was registered to Kenneth Wimble” I said tentatively.

Coulter nodded. “Same guy owns the house” he said.

“Yes, that's right.”

He kept nodding mechanically as if that made sense and said, “Sure. So you figure Wimble ties up this guy —in his own house and then blows up his own house and drives away in his car, like to the summer place in North Carolina, maybe?” Again it occurred to me that there was more to this man than I had thought there was, and it was not a pleasant realization.

I thought I was dealing with SpongeBob, and he had turned out to be Columbo instead, hiding a much sharper mind than the shabby appearance seemed to allow for. I, who wore a disguise my entire life, had been fooled by a better costume, and looking at the gleam of previously hidden intelligence in Coulter's eyes, I realized that Dexter was in danger. This was going to call for a great deal of skill and cleverness, and even then I was no longer sure it would be enough.

I don't know where he went” I said, which was not a great start, but it was all I could come up with.

“Course not. And you don't know who he is, either, right? Cuz you'd tell me if you did.”

“Yes, I would.”

“But you don't have any idea.”

“No.”

“So great, then whyn't you tell me what you were doing here instead?” he said.

And there it was, full circle, back to the real question —and if I answered it right all was forgiven, and if I did not respond in a way that would make my suddenly smart friend happy, there was a very real possibility that he would follow through and derail the Dexter Express. I was waist-deep in the outhouse without a rope, and my brain was throbbing, trying to push through the fog to top form, and failing.

“It's, it's...” I looked down and then far away to my left, searching for the right words for a terrible and embarrassing admission. “She's my sister,” I said at last.

“Who is?” said Coulter.

“Deborah” I said. “Your partner. Deborah Morgan. She's in the ICU because of this guy, and I ...” I trailed off very convincingly and waited to see if he could fill in the blanks, or if the cute remarks had been a coincidence.

I knew that” he admitted. He took another sip of soda and then jammed his finger tip back into the mouth of the bottle and let it dangle again. “So you find this guy how?”

“At the elementary school this morning,” I said. “He was shooting video from his car, and I got the tag. I traced it to here.” Coulter nodded. “Uh-huh” he said. “And instead of telling me, or the lieutenant, or even a school crossing guard, you figure to take him on by yourself.”

“Yes” I said.

“Because she's your sister.”

“I wanted to, you know ...” I said.

“Kill him?” he said, and the words hit me with an icy shock.

“No,” I said. “Just, just...”

“Read him his rights?” said Coulter. “Handcuff him? Ask him some tough questions? Blow up his house?”

“I guess, um” I said, as if reluctantly letting out the ugly truth.

“I wanted to, you know. Rough him up a little.”

“Uh-huh” said Coulter. “And then what?” I shrugged, feeling somewhat like a teenage boy caught with a condom. “Then bring him in” I said.

“Not kill him?” Coulter said, raising one badly trimmed eyebrow.

“No” I said. “How could I, um ...?”

“Not stick a knife in him and say, “This is for what you did to my sister“?”

“Come on, Detective. Me?” And I didn't quite bat my eyes at him, but I did my best to look like the charter member of the Geek Patrol that I was in my secret identity.

Coulter simply stared at me for a long and very uncomfortable minute. Then he shook his head again. I dunno, Dex” he said.

“Doesn't really add up.” I gave him a look of pained confusion, which wasn't entirely acting. “What do you mean?” I said.

He took another swig of soda. “You always play by the rules” he said. “Your sister's a cop. Your dad was a cop. You never get in any kind of trouble, ever. Mister Boy Scout. And now you decide you're Rambo?” He made a face as if somebody had put garlic in his Mountain Dew. “Am I missing something? You know, something that makes sense?”

“She's my sister” I said, and it sounded incredibly feeble, even to me.

“Yeah, I got that already” he said. “You got nothing else?” I felt trapped in slow motion while large and ponderous things whizzed past me. My head throbbed and my tongue was too thick,

and all my legendary cleverness had deserted me. Coulter watched me as I numbly and painfully shook my head, and I thought, This is a very dangerous man. But out loud, all I could manage was, “I'm sorry.” He looked at me for just a moment longer, then turned away. I think maybe Doakes was right about you” he said, and then he walked across the street to talk to the fire-fighters.

Well. The mention of Doakes was the perfect end to an absolutely enchanting conversation. I barely stopped myself from shaking my head again, but the temptation was strong, because it seemed to me that what had been a sane and well-ordered universe just a few days ago was suddenly beginning to spin wildly out of control. First I walk into a trap and nearly turn into the Inhuman Torch, and then a man I had regarded as a foot soldier in the war against intelligence turned out to be far deeper than I had known —and to top it off, he was apparently in league with the last few living pieces of my nemesis, Sergeant Doakes, and he seemed very likely to take up where Doakes had left off, in the pursuit of poor persecuted Dexter.

Where would this end?

If this was not bad enough —which, frankly, I thought it was I was still in terrible danger from Weiss and whatever his plan of attack might be.

All in all, it occurred to me that this would be a very good time to be somebody else. Unfortunately, that was a trick I had so far failed to master. With nothing else to do except ponder the almost certain doom headed toward me at such terrible speed from so many different directions, I walked down the block to my car. And of course, because apparently I had not suffered nearly enough, a slim and ghostly figure came off the curb and glided into step beside me.

“You were here when this happened” said Israel Salguero.

“Yes” I said, wondering if next a satellite would fall from orbit and onto my head.

He was silent for a moment and then he stopped walking, and I turned to face him. “You know I am not investigating you” he said.

I thought that was very nice to hear, but considering how things had gone the last few hours I thought it would be best just to nod, so I did.

“But apparently what happened here is connected to the incident involving your sister, and that I am investigating” he said, and I was glad I hadn't said anything. So glad, in fact, that I decided that silence would be a good policy to continue.

“You know that one of the most important things I am charged to uncover is any kind of vigilante activity on the part of any of our officers” he said.

“Yes” I said. Only one word, after all.

He nodded. He still had not taken his eyes off my face.

“Your sister has a very promising career ahead of her” he said.

“It would be a very great shame if something like this hurt her.”

“She's still unconscious” I said. “She hasn't done anything.”

“No, she hasn't done anything” he said. “What about you?” I just tried to find the guy who stabbed her” I said. I didn't do anything wrong.”

“Of course” he said. He waited for me to say something else, but I didn't and so after what seemed like several weeks, he smiled and patted my arm and walked away across the street to where Coulter was standing and swigging from his Mountain Dew bottle.

I watched as the two of them spoke, turned to face me, and then turned away again to look at the smouldering house.

Thinking that this afternoon couldn't possibly get any better, I turned and trudged to my car. The windshield was cracked from a flying piece of house.

I managed not to burst into tears. I got in and drove home, peering through the cracked glass and listening to my head throb.

TWENTY-THREE

RITA WAS NOT HOME YET WHEN I ARRIVED, SINCE I'D gotten there a bit early as a result of my explosive misfortune.

The house seemed very empty, and I stood inside the front door for a minute just listening to the unnatural silence. A pipe ticked in the back of the house, and then the air conditioner came on, but these were not living sounds and I still felt as if I had stumbled into a movie where everyone else had been whisked away in a spaceship. The lump on my head was still throbbing, and I was very tired and very alone. I went to the couch and fell onto it as if I suddenly had no bones left to hold me up.

I lay there for some time —a kind of strange interval in the urgency. I knew I still had to explode into action, track down Weiss, head him off at the pass and beard him in his den, but for some reason I was completely unable to move, and the mean little voice that had been urging me on did not sound terribly convincing at the moment, as if it, too, needed a coffee break. So I just lay there, face down, trying to feel the sense of emergency that had deserted me, and failing to feel anything except, as mentioned, fatigue and pain.

If somebody had shouted at me, “Look out behind you! He's got a gun!” I would have replied with no more than a weary mumble, “Tell him to take a number and wait.” I woke up, I don't know how much later, to an overwhelming sense of blue, which made no sense at all until I was able to focus my eyes. There stood Cody, no more than six inches away from my head, in his apparently brand new Cub Scout uniform. I sat up, which caused my head to clang like a gong, and looked at him.

“Well” I said. “You certainly look official.”

“Look stupid” he said. “Shorts.” I looked at him in his dark blue shirt and shorts, the little hat perched on top of his head and the neckerchief in its slide around his neck, and it didn't seem fair to pick on the shorts. “What's wrong with shorts?” I said. “You wear shorts all the time.”

“Uniform shorts” he said, as if it was some kind of impossible assault on the last frontier of human dignity.

“Lots of people wear uniform shorts” I said, desperately flinging my battered brain through its paces in search of an example.

Cody looked very doubtful. “Who?” he said.

“Well, ah, the mail man wears shorts—” I broke off quickly; the look he was giving me was louder and more pointed than anything he could have said. “And, um, the British soldiers wore shorts in India” I said, with incredibly feeble hope.

He stared at me for a moment longer without saying anything, as if I had let him down badly when all the chips were on the table.

And before I could think of another brilliant example, Rita came charging into the room.

“Oh, Cody, you didn't wake him up, did you? Hello, Dexter, we've been shopping, we got all the things Cody needs for the Cub Scouts, he doesn't like the shorts, I think because Astor said something, my God what happened to your head?” she said, running through two octaves and eight emotions without breathing.

“It's nothing” I said. “Just a flesh wound” which was something I'd always wanted to say, even though I didn't really know what that meant. Weren't all wounds flesh wounds, unless they bypassed the flesh somehow and went right to the bone?

Nevertheless, Rita responded with a gratifying circus of concern, shooing away Cody and Astor and getting me an ice pack, a comforter, and a cup of tea before flinging herself down beside me on the couch and demanding to know what had happened to my poor dear head. I filled her in on all the dreadful details —leaving out one or two things with no real relevance, like what I had been doing at a house that blew up in an attempt to kill me —and as I spoke, I watched with dismay as her eyes got big and moist, until they began to overflow and tears ran down her cheeks and across her face. It was really quite flattering to think that minor damage to my skull could cause such a display of hydrotechnics, but at the same time it left me slightly uneasy about what my response ought to be.

Luckily for my reputation as a method actor, Rita left me in no doubt at all about how I should behave. “You stay right here and rest” she said. “Quiet and rest when you get a bump on the head like that. I'm going to make you some soup.” I had not known that soup was good for concussions, but Rita seemed very sure about it, and with a few gentle strokes on my face and a light kiss near the bump she was off the couch and into the kitchen, where she immediately began a muted clatter that very soon smelled like garlic, onion, and then chicken, and I drifted into a state of half-sleep where even the faint throbbing of my head seemed distant, cozy and almost pleasant. I wondered if Rita would bring me soup if I was arrested. I wondered if Weiss had anyone to bring him soup. I hoped not —I was starting to dislike him, and he certainly didn't deserve soup.

Astor suddenly appeared beside the couch, interrupting my reverie. “Mom says you got hit on the head” she said.

“Yes, that's right” I said.

“Can I see it?” she asked, and I was so deeply touched by her concern that I bowed my head to reveal the lump and the matted hair around it where it had bled. “It doesn't look so bad” she said, sounding a little disappointed.

“It isn't” I told her.

“So you're not going to die, are you?” she asked politely.

“Not yet” I said. “Not until after you do your homework.” She nodded, glanced toward the kitchen, and said, I hate math.” Then she wandered away down the hall, presumably to hate her math at closer range.

I drifted a while longer. The soup finally came, and while I would not absolutely insist that it was good for my head injury, it certainly did me no harm. As I may have mentioned before, Rita in the kitchen can do things that are far beyond mortal ken, and after a big portion of her chicken soup I began to think that the world at large might deserve one last chance. She fussed over me the whole time, which was not really my favorite thing, but at the moment it seemed kind of soothing and I let her fluff the pillows, mop my brow with a cool cloth, and rub my neck when the soup was all gone.

Before too long, the entire evening had passed, and Cody and Astor came in to say muted goodnights. Rita herded them away to bed and tucked them in and I staggered down the hall to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Just as I got the toothbrush going in a really good rhythm, I caught sight of myself in the mirror over the sink.

My hair stuck up in all directions, there was a bruise on one cheek, and the normal sprightly emptiness of my eyes seemed hollow.

I looked like a very unflattering mug shot, the kind where the recently arrested is still sobering up and trying to figure out what he did and how he got caught. I hoped it was not an omen of what was to come.

In spite of an evening of nothing more strenuous than lounging on the couch and dozing, I was nearly overwhelmed with sleepiness, and the teeth-brushing had taken the last of my energy. Still, I made it all the way to the bed under my own power, and I flopped down onto the pillows thinking that I would just drift off into slumberland and worry about everything else in the morning. But alas, Rita had other plans.

After the hushed murmur of bedtime prayers had died away down the hall in the children's room, I heard her come into the bathroom and run water for a while, and I had almost fallen asleep when the sheets rustled and something that smelled like very aggressive orchids slid into bed beside me.

“How do you feel?” Rita said.

“Much better,” I said, and giving credit where it was due I added, “The soup seemed to help.”

“Good,” she whispered, and she put her head down on my chest.

For a while she just lay there, and I could feel her breath blowing across my chest and I wondered if I could really get to sleep with the weight of her head pressed onto my ribs like that. But then the pattern of her breathing changed, got slightly percussive, and I realized she was crying.

There are few things in the world that make me feel more clueless than a woman's tears. I know that I am supposed to do something comforting and then go slay whatever dragon caused the crying fit, but it has been my experience, in my limited dealings with women, that the tears never come when they should, and they are never about what you might think, and consequently you are reduced to truly stupid options like patting her head and saying, “There there” in the hopes that at some point she will let you in on what the display is actually about.

But Dexter is nothing if not a team player, and so I slid my arm up across her back, put the palm of my hand on her head and patted.

“It's okay” I said, and no matter how stupid that sounded I thought it was a tremendous improvement over “there there'.

True to form, Rita's reply came out of absolutely nowhere that I could hope to predict. I can't lose you” she said.

I certainly had no plans to be lost, and I would gladly have told her so, but she was just hitting her stride now, and the silent sobs were jerking her body and sending a small rivulet of salt water rolling down my chest.

“Oh, Dexter” she sobbed, “what would I do if I lost you, too?” And now, with that word “too', I had somehow joined a completely unexpected and unknown company, presumably of people Rita had carelessly left lying around where they had been easily lost, and she had given me no clue how I had managed to get a seat with that group, or even who they were. Did she mean her first husband, the addict who had beaten and tormented her, Cody and Astor, until they were traumatized into becoming my ideal family? He was in prison now, and I certainly agreed that being lost that way was a bad idea. Or was there some other string of misplaced persons who had slipped through the cracks of Rita's life and been washed away by the rains of mischance?

Then, as if I needed further proof that her thoughts were being beamed to her from a mother ship in orbit beyond Pluto, Rita began to slide her face down my chest, across my stomach —still sobbing, you understand, and leaving a trail of tears that quickly turned cool.

“Just lie still” she sniffled. “You shouldn't exert yourself with a concussion.”

As I said, you never really know what the program is going to be when a woman switches on the tears.

TWENTY-FOUR

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT I WOKE UP AND THOUGHT, BUT what does he want? I don't know why I hadn't asked that question before, and I don't know why it came to me now, lying in my comfy bed next to a gently snoring Rita. But there it was —it was bobbling around on the surface of Lake Dexter now, and I had to do something with it. The inside of my head still felt stiff, as if it was packed with wet sand, and for several minutes I lay there unable to do anything with my thought except to repeat it: what does he want?

What did Weiss want? He was not simply feeding a Passenger of his own, I was reasonably sure of that. I had felt no sympathy twinges from my own anywhere near either Weiss or his handiwork, which ordinarily I would, in the presence of another Presence.

And the way he went about it, starting with already dead bodies instead of creating his own —until he had killed Deutsch —argued that he was after something altogether different.

But what? He made videos of the bodies. He made videos of people looking at the bodies. And he had made a video of me at play —unique footage, yes, but it all added up to nothing that made any sense to me. Where was the fun in all that? I saw none and that made it impossible for me to get inside Weiss's head and figure him out. With normal, well-adjusted psychopaths who killed because they must and took a simple, honest pleasure from their work, I never had that problem. I understood them all too well, since I was one. But with Weiss, there was no point of contact, no place to feel empathy, and because of that I had no idea of where he would go or what he would do next. I had a very bad feeling that whatever it was, I would not like it —but I had no feeling at all of what it would be, and I didn't like that at all.

I lay there in bed for a while thinking about it —or trying to think about it, since the good ship Dexter was clearly not yet ready to raise full steam. Nothing came to me. I didn't know what he wanted.

I didn't know what he would do next. Coulter was out to get me. So was Salguero, and of course, Doakes had never given up. Debs was still in a coma.

On the plus side, Rita had made me some very good soup. She was really very good to me —she deserved better, even though she clearly didn't know that. She thought she had everything, apparently, between me, the children, and our recent trip to Paris. And although she did, in fact, have these things, none of them remotely resembled what she thought they were. She was like a mother lamb in a wolf pack, and she only saw white fluffy wool all around her when in fact the pack was licking its lips and waiting for her to turn her back. Dexter, Cody and Astor were monsters. And Paris —well, they did actually speak French there, just as she had hoped. But Paris had proved to have its own unique kind of monster, too, as our wonderful interval at the art gallery had proved. What was it called? “Jennifer's Leg.” Very interesting; after all my years of toiling in the fields it was still possible for me to see something that surprised me, and for that reason I felt a certain warmth for Paris nowadays.

Between Jennifer and her leg, and Rita's eccentric performance, and whatever it was that Weiss was doing, life was just full of surprises lately, and they all boiled down to one thing: people really deserve whatever happens to them, don't they?

It may not do me very much credit, but I found this thought very comforting, and I drifted back to sleep soon after.

The next morning my head had cleared a great deal; whether it was from Rita's attentions or just my naturally chipper metabolism, I couldn't say. In any case, I jumped out of bed with a fully functioning and powerfully effective brain at my service once again, which was all to the good.

The down side to that, however, was that any effective brain, realizing it was in the situation in which I found myself, would also find itself fighting down a very strong urge to panic, pack a bag, and run for the border. But even with my mental powers in high gear, I could not think of a border that would protect me from the mess I was in.

Still, life gives us very few real choices, and most of them are awful, so I headed for work, determined to track down Weiss, and not to rest until I had him. I still did not understand him, or what he was doing, but that did not mean I couldn't find him. No, indeed; Dexter was part bloodhound and part bulldog, and when he is on your trail you might as well give up and save us all time and bother.

I wondered if there was a way to get that message to Weiss.

I got to work a little bit early and so managed to grab a cup of coffee that almost tasted like coffee. I took it to my desk, sat at the computer, and got down to work. Or to be perfectly accurate, I got down to staring at my computer screen and trying to think of the right way to go to work. I had used up most of my clues already and felt like I was at something of a dead end —and not the kind I usually enjoy, either. Weiss had stayed one step ahead of me, and I had to admit that he could be anywhere now; holed up somewhere nearby or even back in Canada, there was no way to know. And although I had thought my brain was fully functional once again, it was offering me no way to find out.

I tried to organize what I knew, and found that I did not know enough to organize. Where could he be? I don't know, anywhere, I guess. What would he do next? I don't know, almost anything.

What did he want? We'd already beaten our head against that one in the night, and sitting in my cubicle offered me no new insight.

I had exhausted all the obvious lines to explore on the Internet, and I had watched myself on YouTube more often than modesty would really permit.

Far away, on top of an ice-covered peak in the distant skyline of Dexter's mind, a signal flag rose up the pole and fluttered in the wind. I stared across the distance, trying to read the signal, and finally I got it: “Five!” it said. I blinked against the glare and read it again. “Five.”

A lovely number, five. I tried to remember if it was a prime number, and discovered I could not recall what that meant. But it was a very welcome number right now, because I had remembered why it was important, prime or not.

There were five videos on Weiss's YouTube page. One each for the sites where Weiss had left his modified bodies, one of Dexter at play ... and one more that I had been about to watch when Vince clattered in and called me away to work. It could not be another “New Miami” commercial featuring Deutsch's body, because Weiss had still been filming that when I arrived at the crime scene. So it showed something else. And although I did not really expect it to tell me how to get to Weiss, it would almost certainly tell me something I did not know.

I grabbed my mouse and eagerly drove to YouTube, then clicked through to the New Miami page. It was unchanged, the orange background still lighting up the screen behind the blazing letters.

And on the right side were the five videos, neatly lined up in a thumbnail gallery, just as I remembered them.

Number five, the last one down, showed no picture in its box, just an area of blurry darkness. I moved the cursor over it and clicked. For a moment nothing happened; then a thick white line pulsed across the screen from left to right, and there was a blare of trumpets that was oddly familiar. And then a face appeared on the screen —Doncevic, smiling, his hair puffed out, and a voice began to sing, “Here's the story ...” and I realized why it sounded familiar.

It was the opening to The Brady Bunch.

The horribly cheerful music bumped out at me and I watched as the voice warbled, “Here's the story, of a guy named Alex, who was lonely, bored, and looking —for a change.” Then the first three arranged corpses appeared to the left of Doncevic's happy face. He looked up at them and smiled as the song went on. They even smiled back, thanks to the plastic masks glued on to their faces.

The white line slid across the screen again, and the voice went on. “It's the story, of a guy named Brandon, who had time of his own on his hands.” A picture of a man's face appeared in the middle Weiss?

He was thirty or so, about the same age as Doncevic, but he was not smiling as the song continued. “They were two guys living all together, until suddenly Brandon was alone.” Three boxes appeared on the right side of the screen, and in each one a dark and blurry frame appeared that was just as familiar as the song, but in a very slightly different way: these were three action shots lifted from the film of Dexter at play.

The first showed Doncevic's body dumped in the tub. The second showed Dexter's arm raising the saw up, and the third was the saw slashing down on Doncevic. All three were short, two second loops that repeated, over and over, as the song lurched on.

From the middle box Weiss looked on as the voice sang, “Until one day Brandon Weiss will get this fellow, and I promise he will not be saved by luck. There is nothing you can do to escape me.

Because you have made me a crazy fuck.” The cheerful tune crashed on as Weiss sang, “A crazy fuck. A crazy fuck. When you killed Alex —I became —a crazy fuck.” But then, instead of a happy smile and dissolve to the first commercial, Weiss's face swelled up to fill the whole screen and he said, I loved Alex, and you took him away from me, just when we were getting started. In a way it's very funny, because he was the one who said we shouldn't kill anybody. I thought it would have been ... truer.” He made a face and said, “Is that a word?” He gave a short and bitter laugh and went on. “Alex came up with the idea of taking bodies from the morgue, so we didn't have to kill anybody.

And when you took him, you took away the only thing that stopped me from killing.”

For a moment he just stared at the camera. Then, very softly, he said, “Thank you. You're right. It's fun. I'm going to do it some more.” He gave a kind of twisted smile, as if he found something funny but didn't feel like laughing. “You know, I kind of admire you.” Then the screen went black.

When I was much younger I used to feel cheated by my lack of human feelings. I could see the huge barrier between me and humanity, a wall built of feelings I would never feel, and I resented it very much. But one of those feelings was guilt —one of the most common and powerful, in fact —and as I realized that Weiss was telling me I had turned him loose as a killer, I also realized that I really ought to feel a little guilt, and I was very grateful that I did not.

Instead of guilt, what I felt was relief. Chilled waves of it, pulsing through me and snapping the tension that had been winding itself tighter and tighter inside me. I was well and truly relieved —because now I knew what he wanted. He wanted me. It had not been said out loud, but it was there: the next time it will be you and yours. And following the relief came a sense of cold urgency, a slow spreading and flexing of dark interior talons as the Dark Passenger caught the challenge in Weiss's voice and responded in kind.

This was a great relief, too. Up until now the Passenger had been silent, having nothing at all to say about borrowed bodies, even when they were converted into patio furniture or gift baskets. But now there was menace, another predator sniffing down our back trail and threatening a territory we had already marked. And this was a challenge we could not allow, not for a moment. Weiss had served notice that he was coming —and finally, at last, the Passenger was rising from its nap and polishing its teeth. We would be ready.

But ready for what? I did not believe for a moment that Weiss would run away, that was not even a question. So what would he do?

The Passenger hissed an answer, an obvious one, but I felt its Tightness because it was what we would have done. And Weiss had as much as told me himself: I loved Alex and you took him away ...” So he would go after someone close to me. And by leaving the photo on Deutsch's body he had even told me who. It would be Cody and Astor, because that would hit me the same way I had hit him —and it would also bring me to him, and on his terms.

But how would he do it? That was the big question —and it seemed to me that the answer was fairly obvious. So far Weiss had been very straightforward —there is nothing terribly subtle about blowing up a house. I had to believe that he would move quickly, when he felt the odds favored him most. And since I knew he had been watching me, I had to assume he knew my daily routine —and the routine the children followed. They would be most vulnerable when Rita picked them up from school, coming out of a secure environment and into anything goes Miami. I would be far away at work, and he could certainly overcome one relatively frail and unsuspecting woman to grab at least one of the kids.

So what I had to do was get into position first, before Weiss, and watch for him to arrive. It was a simple plan, and not without risk I might well be wrong. But the Passenger was hissing agreement, and it is rarely wrong, so I resolved to leave work early, right after lunch, and get into position at the elementary school to intercept Weiss.

And once again, as I gathered myself for a great leap at the jugular vein of the impending foe —my telephone rang.

“Hey, buddy,” Kyle Chutsky said. “She's awake, and she's asking for you.”

TWENTY-FIVE

THEY HAD MOVED DEBORAH OUT OF THE INTENSIVE CARE unit. I had one moment of disjointed confusion when I stared into the empty ICU. I had seen this in half a dozen movies, where the hero looks at the empty hospital bed and knows that it means whoever had been there is now dead, but I was quite sure Chutsky would have mentioned it if Debs had died, so I just went back down the hall to the reception area.

The woman at the desk made me wait while she did mysterious and very slow things with a computer, answered the phone, and talked with two of the nurses who were leaning nearby. The air of barely controlled panic that everyone had shown in the ICU was completely gone now, replaced by an apparently obsessive interest in phone calls and fingernails. But finally the woman admitted that there was a slim possibility of finding Deborah in room 235, which was on the second floor. That made so much sense I actually thanked her, and trudged off to find the room.

It was indeed on the second floor, and right next to room 233, so with a feeling that all was right with the world I stepped in to see Deborah propped up in bed, with Chutsky on the far side of the bed in virtually the same position he had held in the ICU. There was still an impressive array of machinery surrounding Deborah, and the tubes still went in and out, but as I entered the room she opened one eye and looked at me, managing a modest half-smile for my benefit.

“Alive alive oh” I said, thinking that quaint good cheer was called for. I pulled a chair up beside the bed and sat.

“Dex” she said in a soft and hoarse voice. She tried to smile again, but it was even worse than the first attempt, and she gave up and closed her eyes, seeming somehow to be receding into the snowy distance of the pillows.

“She's not too strong here yet” Chutsky said.

I guessed that” I said.

“So, uh, don't get her tired, or anything” he said. “The doctor said.”

I don't know if Chutsky thought I was going to suggest a game of volleyball, but I nodded and just patted Deborah's hand. “It's nice to have you back, sis” I said. “You had us worried.” I feel” she said in a feeble husky voice. But she did not tell us what she felt; instead, she closed her eyes again and parted her lips for a ragged breath, and Chutsky leaned forward and put a small chip of ice between her lips.

“Here” he said. “Don't try to talk yet.” Debs swallowed the ice, but frowned at Chutsky anyway. “I'm okay” she said, which was certainly a bit of an exaggeration. The ice seemed to help a little and when she spoke again her voice did not sound quite so much like a rat tail file on an old door knob. “Dexter” she said, and the sound of it was unnaturally loud, as if she was shouting in church. She shook her head slightly and, to my great amazement, I saw a tear roll out of the corner of her eye —something I had not seen from her since she was twelve. It slid across her cheek and down onto the pillow where it disappeared.

“Shit” she said. I feel so totally ...” Her hand fluttered feebly, the one that Chutsky was not holding.

“You should” I said. “You were practically dead.” She lay there for a long moment, unspeaking, eyes closed, and then finally said, very softly, I don't want to do this any more.” I looked at Chutsky across Deborah; he shrugged. “Do what, Debs?” I said.

“Cops” she said, and when I finally understood what she was saying, that she didn't want to be a cop any more, I was as shocked as if the moon had tried to resign.

“Deborah” I said.

“Doesn't make sense” she said. “End up here ... for what?” She opened her eyes and looked at me and shook her head very slightly.

“For what?” she said.

“It's your job” I said, and I admit it wasn't terribly moving, but it was all I could think of under the circumstances, and I didn't really think she wanted to hear about Truth, Justice and the American Way.

She apparently didn't want to hear that it was her job, either, because she just looked at me and then turned her head and closed her eyes again. “Shit” she said.

“All right now” said a loud and cheerful voice from the door, in a thick Bahamian accent, “Gentlemen must go.” I looked; a large and very happy nurse had come into the room and was advancing on us rapidly. “The lady must rest, which she cannot do when you are bothering her” the nurse said. She said “boddering” and for a second I found it so charming that I did not realize she was shooing me out.

I just got here” I said.

She planted herself right in front of me and crossed her arms.

“Then you will save big money on parking, because you got to go now” she said. “Come on, gentlemen” she said, turning to face Chutsky. “Boat of you.”

The?” he said with a look of great surprise.

“You” she said, leveling a massive finger at him. “You been here too long already.”

“But I have to stay here,” he said.

“No, you have to go” the nurse said. “Doctor wants her to rest a while. Alone.”

“Go ahead” Debs said softly, and he looked at her with an expression of hurt. “I'll be fine” she said. “Go on.” Chutsky looked from her to the nurse, and then back at Deborah again. “All right” he said at last. He leaned forward and kissed her cheek, and she did not object. He stood up and raised an eyebrow at me. “Okay, buddy” he said. “Guess we're evicted.” As we left the nurse was battering at the pillows as if they had misbehaved.

Chutsky led me down the hall to the elevator and as we waited for it he said, “I'm a little bit worried.” He frowned and poked at the DOWN button several more times.

“What?” I said. “You mean about, um, brain damage?” Deborah's statement that she wanted to quit was still ringing in my ears, and it was so completely unlike her that I was a little worried, too. The image of vegetable Debbie drooling in a chair while Dexter spoonfed her oatmeal still seemed hauntingly awful to me.

Chutsky shook his head. “Not exactly” he said. “More like psychological damage.”

“How do you mean?”

He made a face. I dunno” he said. “Maybe it's just the trauma.

But she seems ... very weepy. Anxious. Not like, you know. Herself.” I have never been stabbed and then lost most of my blood, and in any case I could not remember reading anything that explained how you are supposed to feel under the circumstances. But it seemed to me that being weepy and anxious when these things happened to you was a relatively reasonable reaction. And before I could think of a tactful way to say so, the elevator doors slid open and Chutsky charged in. I followed.

As the doors slid shut, he went on. “She didn't really know me at first,” he said. “Right when she opened her eyes.”

“I'm sure that's normal” I said, although I was not really sure at all. I mean, she's been in a coma.”

“She looked right at me,” he said, as if I hadn't spoken at all, “and she was like, I dunno. Scared of me. Like, who am I and what am I doing there.”

To be perfectly honest, I had wondered the same thing over the last year or so, but it hardly seemed proper to say so. Instead, I just said, “I'm sure it takes time to—”

“Who am I?” he said, again apparently without noticing that I had spoken. “I sat there the whole time, never left her side for longer than five minutes at a time.” He stared at the elevator's control panel as it chimed to let us know we had arrived. “And she doesn't know who I am.”

The doors slid open, but Chutsky did not notice at first.

“Well” I said, hoping to break him out of his freeze.

He looked up at me. “Let's get a cup of coffee” he said, and headed out the elevator door, pushing past three people in light green scrubs, and I trudged along behind.

Chutsky led me out the door and over to the small restaurant in the ground floor of the parking garage, where somehow he managed to get two cups of coffee rather quickly, without anyone shoving in front of him or elbowing him in the ribs. It made me feel slightly superior: obviously, he was not a Miami native. Still, there was something to be said for results, and I took the coffee and sat at a small table wedged into the corner.

Chutsky didn't look at me, or anything else for that matter.

He didn't blink, and the expression on his face didn't change.

I couldn't think of anything to say that was worth the air it would take, so we sat in chummy awkwardness for several minutes, until he finally blurted out, “What if she doesn't love me any more?”

I have always tried to maintain a modest outlook, particularly when it comes to my own talents, and I know very well that I am really only good at one or two things, and advice to the lovelorn is very definitely not one of them. And since I do not actually understand love, it seemed a little unfair to expect me to comment on its possible loss.

Still, it was quite clear that some kind of comment was called for, and so, dropping the temptation to say, don't really know why she loved you in the first place” I fumbled in my bag of cliches and came up with, “Of course she does. She's just had a terrible strain it takes time to recover.”

Chutsky watched me for a few seconds to see if there was any more, but there wasn't. He turned away and sipped at his coffee.

“Maybe you're right” he said.

“Of course I am” I said. “Give her time to get well. Everything will be fine.” No lightning struck me when I said it, so I suppose it was possible that I was right.

We finished our coffee in relative silence, Chutsky brooding on the possibility that he was no longer beloved, and Dexter anxiously gazing at the clock as it approached noon, the time for me to leave and get in place to ambush Weiss, and so it was something less than chummy when I finally drained my cup and stood up to go. “I'll come back later” I said, but Chutsky just nodded and took another forlorn sip of his coffee.

“Okay, buddy” he said. “See you.”

TWENTY-SIX

The Golden Lakes area went boldly against the unwritten law of Miami real estate; in spite of the fact that the word “lakes” was in its name, there were actually several lakes in the area, and one of them butted up against the far side of the school's playground. In truth, it did not look terribly golden to me, more of a milky green, but there was no denying that it was actually a lake, or at least a large pond. Still, I could appreciate the difficulty of trying to sell an area called, “Milky Green Pond', so perhaps the developers had known what they were doing after all, which would be yet another violation of custom.

I got to Golden Lakes well before school was over for the day, and I drove around the perimeter a couple of times, looking for a likely place for Weiss. There was none. The road on the east side ended where the lake came up almost to one side of the fence. And the fence was the tall chain-link variety and it went all around the school without a break, even on the lake side —just in case a hostile frog tried to get on the grounds, I'm sure. Almost to the spot where the side road ended at the lake, there was a gate in the fence at the far side of the playing field, but it was securely closed with a chain and a large padlock.

Other than that, the only way through the fence was in front of the school, and it was blocked by a guard booth, with a police car parked beside it. Try to get through during school hours and the guard or the cop would stop you. Try to get through during dropoff or pick-up and hundreds of teachers, moms, and crossing guards would stop you, or at least make things too difficult and chancy for comfort.

So the obvious answer for Weiss was to get in position early.

And I had to figure out where. I put my Dark Thoughts Thinking Cap on and went slowly around the perimeter one more time. If I wanted to grab somebody from the school, how would I do it?

First, it would have to be going in or coming out, since it would too hard to breach school security in the middle of class. And that meant at the front gate —which is, naturally enough, why all the security was there, everything from the cop on duty to the very mean shop teacher.

Of course, if you could somehow get inside the fence first, and strike while all the security was focused at the front gate, that would make things much easier. But to do that, you would have to come through the fence, or over it, at a spot where you were not likely to be noticed —or at a spot where you could be inside the school quickly enough that it wouldn't matter if you were seen.

As far as I could tell, there was no such spot. I drove around the perimeter one more time; nothing. The fence was set well back from the buildings on all sides except the front. The one apparent weak spot was at the pond. There was a clump of pine trees and scrub brush between the pond and the fence, but the whole thing was too far from the school's buildings. You could never get over the fence and across the field without being extremely visible.

And I could not drive around again without raising suspicion.

I nosed the car onto a street off to the south side of the school, parked, and thought about it. All my keen reasoning led me to believe that Weiss would try to get the kids here, this afternoon, and this icy impeccable logic was seconded by a hot and inarguable blast of certainty from the Passenger. But how? From where I sat I looked out at the school, and I had a very strong sense that somewhere nearby Weiss was doing the same thing. But he would not simply bust through the fence and hope he got lucky. He had been watching, making note of the details, and he would have a plan. And I had about half an hour now to figure out what that plan was and come up with a way to stop it.

I looked diagonally at the clump of trees by the lake. It was the only place where there was any kind of cover. But so what, if that cover vanished at the fence? Then something caught my eye just to the left, and I turned to look.

A white van pulled up and parked by the padlocked gate and a figure got out, wearing a lime green shirt with matching cap and carrying a tool box, very visible even from far away. The figure walked to the gate, set down the tool box, and knelt down at the chain.

Of course. The best way to be invisible is to be completely, obviously visible. I am scenery; I belong here. I am just here to fix the fence, and there is no need to look at me at all, ha ha.

I started the car. Moving slowly back around the perimeter, keeping my eye on that bright green blob, I felt the cold wings unfold in me. I had him —right where he was supposed to be. But of course, I couldn't just park and jump out; I would have to approach cautiously, assuming he knew what my car looked like, taking for granted that he would have both eyes wide open and watching for the possibility of Dexter.

So slow down, think this through; don't simply count on the dark wings to carry you over all obstacles. Look carefully, and notice things: like, Weiss had his back to the van —and the van was parked sideways, nose in to the fence, blocking off the view of the pond.

Because obviously nothing could come at him from that side.

Which naturally meant that Dexter would.

Driving slowly and taking great care not to attract any attention, I turned the car around and headed back to the south side of the school grounds. I followed the fence to the end, where the road ended and the pond began. I parked at the very end of the road in front of the metal barricade, invisible to Weiss at the padlocked gate, and got out. I moved quickly to the narrow path between the lake and the fence and hurried forward.

From the distant school building the bell rang. School was over for the day and Weiss would have to make his move now. I could see him, still kneeling at the padlock. I didn't see the large handles of a bolt cutter sticking up, and it would take him a few minutes either to pick the lock or cut it. But once inside he could simply move along the fence leisurely, pretending to inspect the chain link.

I reached the edge of the clump of trees and hurried through.

I stepped carefully over small heaps of garbage —beer cans, plastic soda bottles, chicken bones and other less pleasant objects —and came to the far end, pausing only for a moment at the last tree to make sure that Weiss was still there, fiddling with the lock. The van was in the way and I could not see him, but as far as I could tell the gate was still closed. I took a deep breath, drawing in the darkness and letting it flow through me, and then I stepped out into the bright sun.

I moved to the right, almost at a run, to come at him from the rear, around the back end of the van. Silently, carefully, feeling the stretch of dark wings all around me, I crossed the space to the van, came around the back end and paused as I saw the figure kneeling by the gate.

He looked back over his shoulder and saw me. “Whus hapnin'” the man said. He was about fifty, black, and very definitely not Weiss.

“Oh” I said, with my usual wit. “Hello.”

“Damn kids put superglue in the lock” he said, turning back around to face the lock.

“What were they thinking?” I said politely. But I never got to find out what they were thinking, because far away across the field, in the street in front of the main gate, I heard the sound of car horns, followed by the crunch of metal. And much closer at hand, actually inside my head, in fact, I heard a voice hissing, Stupid! And without pausing to wonder how I knew that the accident had been Weiss ramming Rita, I jumped up onto the fence, hooked myself over to the other side, and took off at a run across the playing field.

“Hey!” the man at the lock called, but for once I did not mind my manners and wait to hear what he had to say.

Of course Weiss would not cut the lock —he didn't need to. Of course he didn't have to get into the school and try to outwit or overcome hundreds of wary teachers and savage children. All he had to do was wait outside in the traffic, like a shark swimming the edge of the reef and waiting for Nemo to swim out. Of course.

I ran hard. The field seemed a little uneven, but it was all short and well-kept grass and I was able to hit a very good pace. I was just congratulating myself on being in good enough shape to stay at top speed when I raised my eyes for a moment to see what was going on. It was not a good idea; my foot caught on something almost instantly and I pitched face forward at a really wonderful velocity. I tucked into a ball and rolled through a somersault and a half before I flopped out flat on my back on top of something lumpy.

I jumped up and took off running again, with a slight limp from a twisted ankle, and a vague picture of a fire ant mound, now flattened by my human cannonball act.

Closer now; voices raised in alarm and panic from the street and then a scream of pain. I could see nothing but a jumble of cars and a clot of people straining forward to look at something in the middle of the road. I went through the small gate in the fence, onto the sidewalk and around to the front of the school. I had to slow down to work my way through the crowd of kids, teachers and parents, clustered at the pick-up spot at the front door, but I pushed through as quickly as I could and on out into the street. I moved back up to a run to cover the last 150 feet or so, to where traffic had stopped and coalesced around two cars that had come together in an untidy clump. One of them was Weiss's bronze-colored Honda.

The other car was Rita's.

There was no sign of Weiss. But Rita herself leaned against the front bumper of her car with a look of numb shock on her face, holding Cody by one hand and Astor by the other. Seeing them all together, safe and sound, I slowed to a walk for the last few paces.

She looked at me with no change in expression. “Dexter” she said.

“What are you doing here?” I was just in the neighborhood” I said. “Ouch.” And the ouch was not mere random cleverness: all across my back a hundred fire ants I had apparently picked up when I fell bit me at the same time as if by some telepathic signal. “Is everyone all right?” I said, pulling frantically to get my shirt off.

I pulled the shirt over my head to see the three of them staring at me with a look of mildly annoyed concern. “Are you okay?” Astor said. “Because you just took your shirt off in the middle of the street.”

“Fire ants” I said. “All over my back.” I slapped at my back with the shirt, which did no good at all.

“A man rammed us with his car” Rita said. “And he tried to grab the children.”

“Yes, I know” I said, twisting myself into shapes a pretzel would envy as I tried to get at the fire ants.

“What do you mean, you know?” Rita said.

“He got away” a voice said behind us. “Moved pretty fast, considering.” I turned in mid-ant slap to see a uniformed cop, panting from his apparent chase of Weiss. He was a youngish guy, rather fit looking, and his name tag said Lear. He had stopped and was staring at me. “This isn't clothing optional here, pal” he said.

“Fire ants,” I said. “Rita, could you give me a hand, please?”

“You know this guy?” the cop asked Rita.

“My husband” she said, and she let go of the children's hands, somewhat reluctantly, and began to slap at my back.

“Well” Lear said, “anyway, the guy got away. He ran clear over to US 1 and headed for the strip malls. I called it in, they'll do a BOLO, but ...” He shrugged. “Gotta say he ran pretty good for having a pencil stuck in his leg.”

“My pencil” Cody said with his strange and very rare smile.

“and I punched him really hard in the crotch” Astor said.

I looked down at the two of them through my red cloud of ant bite pain. They looked so smug and pleased with themselves; and to be honest, I was very pleased with them, too. Weiss had done his worst —and theirs was just a bit worse. My little predators. It was almost enough to stop the ant bites from hurting. But only almost especially since Rita was smacking the bites as well as the ants, causing added pain.

“Got yourself a couple of real scouts here” Officer Lear said, looking at Cody and Astor with an expression of slightly worried approval.

“Just Cody” Astor said. “And he's only been to one meeting.” Officer Lear opened his mouth, realized he had nothing to say, and closed it again. He turned to me instead and said, “The tow truck will be here in a couple of minutes. And EMS will want to take a look, just to make sure everybody's okay”

“We're okay,” said Astor.

“So,” Lear went on, “if you wanna stay with your family, I can maybe get this traffic going?” I think that will be all right” I said. Lear looked at Rita and raised an eyebrow, and she nodded.

“Yes” she said. “Of course.”

“All right” he said. “The Feds will probably want to talk to you.

I mean, about the attempted kidnapping.”

“Oh my God” Rita said, as if hearing that word made it all real.

I think the guy was just a random crazy” I said hopefully. After all, I already had enough trouble without the FBI looking into my family life.

Lear was not impressed. He looked at me very sternly. “It's kidnapping,” he said. “With your kids.” He stared at me for a moment to make sure I knew that word, then turned and waggled his finger at Rita. “Make sure you all see the EMS people.” He looked back at me with no expression. “And maybe you better get dressed, all right?” And then he turned and stepped out into the street and began to wave at the cars in an attempt to get traffic moving again.

I think I got them all” Rita said with a last slap at my back. “Give me your shirt.” She took it, shook it out vigorously, and handed it back to me. “Here, you better put this back on” she said, and although I could not imagine why all of Miami was suddenly so obsessed with fighting partial nudity, I put the shirt back on, after looking suspiciously inside for any lingering fire ants.

When I poked my head out of the shirt and into the daylight again, Rita had already grabbed Cody and Astor by the hand again.

“Dexter,” she said. Tou said —how could you, I mean ... Why are you here?”

I was not sure how little I could tell her and still answer satisfactorily, and unfortunately, I didn't think I could just clutch at my head and moan again -1 was pretty sure I'd worn that out yesterday.

And to say that the Passenger and I had agreed that Weiss would come here and take the children because that's what we would have done in his place probably would not go down well, either. So I decided to try a rather diluted version of the truth. “It, ah —it's this guy who blew up the house yesterday,” I said. I just had a hunch that he might try again.” Rita just looked at me. I mean, to grab the kids as a way to get at me.”

“But you're not even a real policeman” Rita said with a certain amount of outrage in her voice, as if somebody had broken a basic rule. “Why would he try to get at you?” It was a good point, particularly since in her world —and generally speaking, in my world, too —blood spatter experts don't end up in blood feuds. I think it's about Deborah” I said. After all, she was a real policeman, and she wasn't here to contradict me. “It's somebody she was after when she got stabbed and I was there.”

“And so now he tries to hurt my children?” she said. “Because Deborah tried to arrest him?”

“That's the criminal mind” I said. “It doesn't work like yours.” Of course, it actually did work like mine, and right now the criminal mind was working on a thought about what Weiss might have left behind in his car. He had not expected to flee on foot —it was quite possible that there was some kind of hint in the car about where he would go and what his next move would be. And more —there might be some kind of horrible clue that pointed a blood-soaked finger in my direction. With that thought, I realized I needed to go through his car now, while Lear was busy and before any other cops arrived on the scene.

Seeing that Rita was still looking at me expectantly, I said, “He's crazy. We may never really understand what he's thinking.” She looked nearly convinced, so in the belief that a quick exit was often the most convincing argument, I nodded at Weiss's car. I should probably see if he left anything important. Before the tow truck gets here.” And I stepped around the hood of Rita's car and up to the front door of Weiss's, which was hanging open.

The front seat held the usual assortment of car garbage. Gum wrappers littered the floor, a water bottle lay on the seat, an ash tray held a handful of quarters for tolls. No butcher knives, bone saws, or bombs; nothing interesting at all. I was just about to slide into the car and open the glove compartment when I noticed a large notebook on the back seat. It was an artist's sketch book, with the edges of several loose pages sticking out, all held together with a large rubber band, and as I saw it the voice in the back of Dexter's Dark Room called out, Bingo!

I stepped out of the car and tried to open the back door. It was jammed shut, dented in from impact with Rita's car. So I knelt on the front seat and leaned over, grabbing the notebook and pulling it out. A siren wailed nearby, and I stepped away from Weiss's car and moved over next to Rita, clutching the book to my chest.

“What is it?” she said.

I don't know” I said. “Let's have a look.” And thinking only innocent thoughts I removed the rubber band.

A loose page fluttered to the ground and Astor pounced on it.

“Dexter” she said. “This looks just like you.”

“That's not possible” I said, taking the page from her hand.

But it was possible. It was a nice drawing, very well done, showing a man from the waist up, in a kind of mock-heroic Rambo-esque pose, holding a large knife that dripped blood, and there was no doubt about it.

It was me.

TWENTY-SEVEN

I ONLY HAD A FEW SECONDS TO ADMIRE THE SPLENDID likeness of myself before, in rapid succession, Cody said, “Cool” Rita said, “Let me see” and —happiest of all —the ambulance arrived. In the confusion that followed I managed to slip the portrait back into the notebook and usher my little family over to talk to the Medical Techs for a brief but thorough examination. Although they were reluctant to admit it, they could find no severed limbs, missing skulls, or mangled internal organs at all and so, eventually, they were forced to allow Rita and the kids to go, with dire warnings about what to watch out for just in case.

The damage to Rita's car was mostly cosmetic —one headlight was broken and the fender was pushed in —so I bundled the three of them into the car. Normally Rita would drop them at an after school program and go back to work, but there is an unwritten law granting you the rest of the day off when you and your children are attacked by a maniac, so she decided to take them all home to recover from the trauma. And since Weiss was still out there somewhere, we decided that I had better do the same, and come home to protect them. So I waved them away into traffic and started the long and weary walk back to where I had parked my car.

My ankle was throbbing and the sweat that ran down my back irritated the ant bites, so in order to take my mind off the pain I flipped open Weiss's notebook and paged through it as I walked.

The shock of that picture of me was past, and I needed to find out what it meant —and where it might be leading Weiss. I was reasonably sure it was not a mere doodle, something he had absentmindedly scratched out while talking on the telephone. After all, who did he have left to talk to? His lover Doncevic was dead, and he had killed his dear pal Wimble himself. Besides, everything he had done so far had been pointed at a very specific purpose, and without exception it had been a purpose that I could do without quite happily.

So I studied the drawing of me again. It was idealized, I suppose —I could not remember noticing that I had such clearly defined washboard abs when last I looked. And the overall impression of a vast and happy menace was, while perhaps accurate, something I tried very hard not to show. But I had to admit he had captured something here, possibly even suitable for framing.

I went through the other pages. It was quite interesting stuff, and the drawings were good, especially the ones that featured me.

I was sure I didn't look that noble, happy, and savage, but perhaps that was what artistic license is all about. As I looked at the other drawings and began to get an idea what it was all leading up to, I was also quite sure that I didn't like this, no matter how flattering.

Not at all.

Many of the drawings showed ideas for ways to decorate anonymous bodies in the spirit of what Weiss had already done.

There was one that featured a woman with six breasts; where the extras would come from was not mentioned. She was wearing a flamboyant feathered hat and a thong, the kind of costume we had seen at Moulin Rouge in Paris. It hid almost nothing, but made everything seem so glamorous, and the effect of the sequined bras that barely covered all six breasts was absolutely riveting.

The next page had a letter-sized piece of paper wedged into the binding. I took it out and unfolded it. It was an airline schedule from Cubana Aviacion, printed from a computer and listing their flights from Havana to Mexico. It was tucked in with a drawing that depicted a man wearing a straw hat and holding an oar. A line had been drawn through it and next to it in bold and neat block letters was written, “REFUGEE!” I shoved the Aviacion printout back in and flipped the page. The next page showed a man with an opened body cavity stuffed with what appeared to be cigars and rum bottles.

He was propped up in a vintage convertible car with the top down.

But by far the more interesting drawings —at least to me —were the series featuring one strong central image of Dauntless Dimpled Dexter. It may not say a great deal about me that I found these pictures of myself so much more compelling than the ones that featured butchered strangers, but there is something endlessly fascinating about looking at drawings of yourself you've discovered in a homicidal psychopath's notebook. In any case, it was this final series that took my breath away. And if Weiss actually created his depictions, it would take my breath away literally and forever.

Because these, done in much more detail, were taken from the film loop that showed me working on Doncevic. They were accurately copied, showing almost exactly what I remembered from seeing that video so many times; almost. In several of the frames, Weiss had sketched in a slight change of angle so that the face showed.

My face.

Attached to the body doing all the chopping.

And just to underscore the threat, Weiss had written “PHOTOSHOP” underneath these pictures, and underlined it. I am not really current on video technology, but I can put two and two together as well as anyone else. Photoshop is a program for manipulating film images, and you could use it to alter the images, put in things that don't belong. I had to assume it could be done just as easily with video. And I knew Weiss had enough video to last for several wicked lifetimes —video of me, and Cody, and gawkers at crime scenes and Dark Passenger knows what else.

So he was clearly going to modify the clip of me working on Doncevic so that my face showed. As well as I was coming to know Weiss, or at least his handiwork, I knew this would not be a make work project. He was going to use this to make some lovely piece of decoration that would destroy me. And all because of an hour's frolic with his sweetheart, Doncevic.

I had done it, of course, and rather enjoyed it, too. But this seemed like cheating —it was unfair to put my face in after the fact, wasn't it? Especially since, added afterwards or not, it would be more than enough to start a series of very awkward questions coming my way.

The final drawing was the most terrifying of all. It showed a giant and wickedly smiling Dexter from the film loop raising up the power saw, projected onto the facade of a large building, while below him on the ground crouched what appeared to be half a dozen or so ornamental corpses, all adorned with the sort of accessories that Weiss had used on his other bodies so far. The whole thing was framed by a double row of royal palm trees, and it was such a beautiful picture of tropical and artistic splendor that it might have brought a tear to my eye if modesty hadn't interfered.

It all made perfect sense in a Weiss-y sort of way. Use the film he already had, subtly changed to feature moi in a starring role, and project it onto a very public building so there could be no doubt at all that we were seeing Decapitating Dexter at work. Throw me to the sharks and at the same time create a large communal art work for all to admire. A perfect solution.

I arrived at my car and sat in the driver's seat, looking through the notebook one more time. Of course it was possible that these were just sketches, a paper and pencil fantasy that would never see the light of day. But this had all started with Weiss and Doncevic making public displays out of bodies, and the only difference here was one of scale —that and the fact that at some point in the last few days Dexter had become Weiss's art fair project. The Mona Dexter.

And now he planned to make me a great public works project, too. Dexter the Magnificent, who doth bestride the world like a colossus, many lovely corpses at his feet, brought to you in living color just in time for the evening news. Oh, Mama, who is that large and handsome man with the bloody saw? Why, that's Dexter Morgan, dear, the horrible man they arrested a little while ago. But Mama, why is he smiling? He likes his work, dear. Let that be a lesson to you —always find a worthy job that keeps you happy.

I had learned enough in college to appreciate the fact that a civilization was judged by its art. It was humbling to think that, if Weiss was successful, future generations would look back on the twenty-first century and weigh its accomplishments with my image.

This kind of immortality was a very tempting idea —but there were a few drawbacks to this particular invitation to eternal fame. First of all, I am far too modest, and second —well, there was the whole thing about people discovering what I really am. People like Coulter and Salguero, for example. Which they certainly would, if this video of my image was projected onto a large public building with a pile of corpses at its feet. Really a lovely thought, but unfortunately it would lead these people to ask certain questions, make a few connections, and before long the meal of the day would be Cream of Dexter Soup, lovingly cooked on Old Sparky and served up to you on the front page of the Herald.

No, this was very flattering, but I was not really prepared to become a living icon of twenty-first century art. With all possible reluctance, I would have to extend my regrets and decline the honor.

And how?

It was a fair question, after all. The pictures told me what Weiss wanted to do —but they told me nothing about how far along his plans were, or when he wanted to do it, or even where.

But wait a minute: they did tell me where. I turned to the last picture again, the one that showed the whole lunatic project in brightly colored detail. The drawing of the building that served as a projection screen was very specific and looked familiar —and the two rows of royal palms, I had seen this somewhere before, I was quite sure. Someplace I had actually been, too; but where and when?

I stared at the picture and let my giant brain whirl. I had been there in the not-too-distant past. Perhaps only a year or so before I got married?

And with that one word, “married', I remembered. It had been just about a year and a half ago. Rita's friend from work, Anna, had gotten married. It had been a lavish and remarkably expensive wedding, owing to the bride's family wealth, and Rita and I had attended the reception at a ridiculously posh old hotel called the Breakers in Palm Beach. The building pictured here was unmistakably the front of the Breakers.

Wonderful; now I knew exactly where Weiss planned to set up this noble Dexter-ama. So what did I do with that knowledge?

I couldn't very well stake out the hotel night and day for the next three months and wait for Weiss to show up with the first load of bodies. But I also couldn't afford to do nothing. Sooner or later, he would either set it up or —or was it possible that this was another trap of some kind, intended only to draw me away to Palm Beach while Weiss did something else down here in Dade County?

But that was silly; he hadn't planned to limp away over the horizon with a pencil in his leg and the imprint of a small fist in his crotch, leaving his drawings behind. This was his plan, for better or worse —and I had to believe it was for worse, at least as far as my reputation was concerned. So, the only remaining question was: when did he plan to do it? The only answer I could come up with was: soon, and that really didn't seem specific enough.

There was really no other way -1 would have to take some time off from work and wait at the hotel. That meant leaving Rita and the kids alone and I didn't like that, but I could not see any way around it. Weiss had been moving very fast, from one idea to the next, and I thought he would most likely concentrate on this one project and act quickly. It was a huge gamble, but it was certainly worth it if I could stop him from projecting a giant image of me onto the front of the Breakers.

All right; I would do it. When Weiss began in Palm Beach, I would be there waiting for him. With that settled I flipped open the notebook for one last look at handsome Comic Book Dexter. But before I could really sink into a self-admiring trance a car pulled up next to mine and a man got out.

It was Coulter.

TWENTY-EIGHT

Detective Coulter came around the rear end of his car and paused, looked at me, and then went back to the driver's side of his car and disappeared for a moment.

I used the time to slip the notebook under my seat, and Coulter popped right back up and again came around the tail end of the car, this time with his two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew in one hand. He leaned his backside against his car, looked at me, and took a large sip of soda. Then he wiped his mouth on the back of his arm.

“You weren't in your office” he said.

“No, I wasn't” I said. After all, here I was.

“So when the call comes on the radio, it's your wife, I look in to tell you” he said, and he shrugged. “You're not there. You're here already, right?” He didn't wait for an answer, which was just as well, since I didn't have one. Instead he took another swig from his soda bottle, wiped his mouth again, and said, “Same school where we got that Scout leader guy, too, huh?”

“That's right.”

“But you were already here when it happened?” he said, trying to look innocently surprised. “How'd that happen, anyway?” I was very sure that telling Coulter I'd had a hunch would not make him want to shake my hand and congratulate me. So, launching myself off my legendary wit once again, I heard myself saying, “I thought I'd come down and surprise Rita and the kids.” Coulter nodded as if he found that very believable. “Surprise “em” he said. “Guess somebody else beat you to it.”

“Yes” I said carefully. “It certainly looks like it.” He took another long pull on the soda bottle, but this time he didn't wipe his mouth, he just turned and stared back at the main road where the tow truck was now hauling away Weiss's car. “You got any idea who that might have been that did this to your wife and kids?” he said without looking back at me.

“No” I said. I guess I just assumed it was, you know. An accident?”

“Huh” he said, and now he was staring at me. “An accident. Jeez, I hadn't even thought of that one. “Cause, you know. It's the same school where that Cub Scout guy was killed. And also it's you here again. So, hey. An accident. Really? You think?” I, I just —why wouldn't it be?” I have practiced for a lifetime, and my expression of surprise is certainly a very good one, but Coulter didn't look terribly convinced.

“This guy Donkey wit” he said.

“Doncevic” I said.

“Whatever.” He shrugged. “Looks like he's disappeared. You know anything about that?”

“Why would I know about that?” I said, putting as much astonishment on my face as I could.

“Just skipped bail, run away from his boyfriend, and disappeared,” he said. “Why would he do that?” I really don't know” I said.

“You ever read, Dexter?” he said, and the way he used my first name worried me —it sounded like he was talking to a suspect. And of course he was, but I was still hoping he wouldn't think of me that way.

“Read?” I said. “Um, not a whole lot, no. Why?” I like to read” he said. And then apparently shifting gears he went on, “Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action.”

“Excuse me?” I said. He had lost me somewhere around “I like to read“.

“It's from Goldfinger,” he said. “Where he's telling James Bond, I come across you three times where you don't belong, it ain't a coincidence.” He sipped, wiped his mouth, and watched me sweat.

“Love that book. Must of read it like three, four times” he said.

I haven't read it” I said politely.

“So, we got you here” he went on. “And we got you at the house that blows up. And that's two times we shouldn't have you anywhere around. Am I s'posed to think that's coincidence?”

“What else would it be?” I said.

He just looked without blinking. Then he took another sip of his Mountain Dew. I don't know” he said at last. “But I know what Goldfinger would say it is if there's a third time.”

“Well, let's hope there isn't” I said, and I truly meant it this time.

“Yeah” he said. He nodded, stuck his index finger into the mouth of the soda bottle, and stood up. “Let's just hope the shit out of that” he said. He turned away, walked back around his car, got in, and drove away.

If I had been a little bit more of a fond observer of human foible, I'm sure I would have taken great joy in discovering new depths in Detective Coulter. How wonderful to find that he was a devotee of the literary arts! But the joy of this discovery was diminished by the fact that I really had no interest in what Coulter did with his time, provided he did it away from me. I had barely gotten Sergeant Doakes off perpetual Dexter watch, and now here came Coulter to take his place. It was like I was the victim of some strange and sinister Dexter-persecuting Tibetan sect —whenever the old Dexter-hating lama died, a new one was born to take his place.

But there was very little I could do about that right now. I was about to become a major work of art, and at the moment that was a far more pressing problem. I got into my car, started the engine, and drove home.

When I got to the house I had to stand outside and knock for several minutes, since Rita had decided to fasten the security chain on the inside of the door. I suppose I was lucky that she had not piled the couch and the refrigerator in front of the door as well.

Possibly that was only because she needed to use the couch; she was huddled on it with the two children clutched tightly to her, one on each side, and after letting me in —somewhat reluctantly —she resumed her position, throwing a protective arm around each child.

Cody and Astor had almost identical looks of annoyed boredom on their faces. Apparently, cringing in terror in the living room was not the sort of quality bonding time they truly appreciated.

“You took so long” Rita said as she slid the chain back on the door.

I had to talk to a detective” I said.

“Well, but” she said, sliding back onto the couch between the children. I mean, we were worried.”

“We weren't worried” Astor said, rolling her eyes at her mother.

“Because I mean, that man could be anywhere right now” Rita said. “He could be right outside, right now.” And even though none of us really believed that —not even Rita —all four of us swivelled our heads to the door for a look. Happily for us, he wasn't there, at least not as far as we could tell by trying to look through a closed and locked door. “Please, Dexter” Rita said, and the edge of fear was so sharp in her voice I could smell it. “Please, this is —what is ... why is this happening? I can't...” She made several large but incomplete motions with her hands and then dropped them into her lap. “This has to stop” she said. “Make it stop.” In all honesty, I could only think of a few things I would rather do than make it stop —and several of those things could easily be part of making it stop, just as soon as I caught Weiss. But before I could really concentrate on making happy plans, the doorbell rang.

Rita responded by lurching up into the air and then settling back down again with one child pulled in tight on each side of her. “Oh God” she said. “Who could that be?” I was pretty sure it was not a Mormon youth ministry, but I just said, “I'll get it” and went to the door. Just to be safe, I peaked through the little spy hole —Mormons can be so persistent —and what I saw was even scarier.

Sergeant Doakes stood on my doorstep.

He was clutching the little silver computer that now spoke for him, and at his elbow was a clean-cut middle-aged woman in a grey suit, and even though she was not wearing a fedora I was reasonably sure she was the fed I had been threatened with.

Looking at the two of them and thinking of all the trouble they might represent, I actually considered leaving the door bolted and pretending we weren't home. But it was an idle thought; I have found that the faster you run from trouble, the quicker it catches you, and I was quite sure that if I did not let in Doakes and his new friend they would be right back with a warrant, and probably Coulter and Salguero as well. So, thinking unhappy thoughts and trying to settle my face into the right mixture of surprise and weary shock, I opened the door.

“Move. It. Motherfucker!” Doakes's cheerful artificial baritone voice called out as he stabbed his claw three times at the keyboard of his little silver box.

The fed put a restraining hand on him, and then glanced back at me. “Mr Morgan?” she said. “Can we come in?” She held up her credentials patiently while I looked at them; apparently, she was Special Agent Brenda Recht of the FBI. “Sergeant Doakes offered to bring me down here to talk to you” she said, and I thought about what a nice thing that was for Doakes to do.

“Of course you can come in” I said, and then I had one of those happy inspirations that sometimes come at just the right time and I added, “But the children have had such a shock —and Sergeant Doakes kind of scares them. Can he wait out here?”

“Motherfucker!” Doakes said, sounding like he was happily calling out, “Howdy, neighbor!”

“Also, his language is a bit rough for the kids” I added.

Special Agent Recht glanced at Doakes. As an FBI agent, she could not admit that anything scared her, even Doakes the cyborg, but she looked like she thought that was a very good idea. “Sure” she said. “Why don't you wait out here, Sergeant?” Doakes glared at me for a very long moment, and in the dark distance I could almost hear the angry scream of his Passenger. But all he did was raise one silver claw, glance at his keyboard, and punch one of his pre-recorded sentences. I am still watching you, motherfucker” the cheerful voice assured me.

“That's fine” I said. “But watch me through the door, all right?” I motioned Recht inside, and as she brushed past Doakes and came in I closed the door behind her, leaving an unblinking Doakes to glare at the outside of the door.

“He doesn't seem to like you” Special Agent Recht observed, and I was impressed with her keen eye for detail.

“No” I said. “I think he blames me for what happened to him” which was at least partly true, even though he had disliked me well before he lost his hands, feet and tongue.

“Uh-huh” she said, and although I could see she was thinking about that, she didn't say anything more on the subject. Instead, she moved on over to the couch, where Rita still sat clutching Cody and Astor. “Mrs Morgan?” she said, holding up her credentials again.

“Special Agent Recht, FBI. Can I ask you a few questions about what happened this afternoon?”

“FBI?” Rita said, as guiltily as if she was sitting on stolen bearer bonds. “But that's —why would —yes, of course.”

“Do you have a gun?” Astor said.

Recht looked at her with a sort of wary fondness. “Yes, I do” she said.

“Do you get to shoot people with it?”

“Only if I have to” Recht said. She glanced around and found the nearby easy chair. “Can I sit down and ask you a few questions?”

“Oh” Rita said. “I'm so sorry. I was only —yes, please sit down.”

Recht settled herself onto the edge of the chair and looked at me before addressing Rita. “Tell me what happened” she said, and when Rita hesitated she went on, “You had the kids in the car, you pulled out onto US-1 ...”

“He just, he came out of nowhere” Rita said.

“Boom” Cody added softly, and I looked at him with surprise.

He was smiling just a little, which was equally alarming. Rita looked at him with dismay, and then went on.

“He hit us” she said. “And while I was still —before I could —he just, he was there at the door, grabbing at the children.” I punched him in the crotch” Astor said. “And Cody stabbed him with a pencil.”

Cody frowned at her. I stabbed first,” he said.

“Whatever” Astor said.

Recht looked at the two of them with mild astonishment. “Good for you both” she said.

“And then the policeman came over and he ran away” Astor said, and Rita nodded.

“And how did you come to be there, Mr Morgan?” she said, swinging her head toward me with no warning.

I had known that she would ask this, of course, but I had still not come up with any really socko answer. My claim to Coulter that I had wanted to surprise Rita had fallen very, very flat, and Special Agent Recht seemed to be considerably sharper —and she was looking at me expectantly as the seconds ticked by, waiting for a sane and logical reply that I did not have. I had to say something, and soon; but what?

“Um” I mumbled, I don't know if you heard I had a concussion ...?”

The interview with Special Agent Brenda Recht of the FBI will never appear on any highlight reel that wants my endorsement. She did not seem to believe that I had gone home early because I felt bad, stopping at the school because it was that time of day —and I can't really say I blamed her. It sounded remarkably feeble, but since it was all I could come up with, I had to stick with it.

She also seemed to have trouble accepting my statement that whoever had attacked Rita and the children was a random maniac, the product of road rage, Miami traffic, and too much Cuban coffee.

She did, however, finally accept that she was not going to get any other answer. She stood up at last, looking at me with an expression that might best be called thoughtful. “All right, Mr Morgan” she said. “Something doesn't quite add up here, but I guess you're not going to tell me what it is.”

“There's really nothing to tell” I said, perhaps too modestly.

“These things happen all the time in Miami.”

“Uh-huh” she said. “The problem is, they seem to be happening around you an awful lot.” Somehow, I stopped myself from saying, “If you only knew ...” and I ushered her to the front door.

“We'll keep a cop posted here for a couple of days, for safety's sake” she said, which was not really welcome news, and with unfortunate timing, as she said it I swung open the door to reveal Sergeant Doakes in almost the exact position we had left him, staring malevolently at the door. I said my fond goodbyes to them both, and as I closed the door the last thing I saw was Doakes's unblinking glare, for all the world like the Cheshire Cat's evil twin.

The FBI's interest had done very little to make Rita feel better, however. She still clutched at the children and spoke in jangled half sentences. So I reassured her the best I could, and for a while we all sat there together on the couch, until finally the squirming of Cody and Astor made it too difficult to sit all together like that. Rita gave up and put on a DVD for them to watch and went into the kitchen, where she began her alternative comfort therapy by rattling pots and pans, and I went down the hall to the small extra room she called “Dexter's Office” to look at Weiss's sketch book again and think dark thoughts.

The list of people who could not be considered friendly was certainly growing: Doakes, Coulter, Salguero, and now the FBI.

And of course, Weiss himself. He was still out there, and he still wanted to get at me to get his revenge. Would he come after the children again, limping out of the shadows to grab them, perhaps wearing Kevlar pants and a groin protector this time? If so, I would have to stay with the kids until it was over, which was not the best way to catch him —especially not if he tried something different.

And if he wanted to kill me, staying with Cody and Astor endangered them; judging by his exploding house trick, he clearly didn't worry about collateral damage.

But I did —I had to. I was worried about the children, and protecting them was a top priority. It was a very strange epiphany, to realize that I was concerned with their safety as much as with protecting my secret identity. It did not fit with how I thought of myself, how I had built up my careful self-image. Of course, I had always taken special delight in tracking down predators who preyed on children, but I had never really thought about why that was. And certainly I planned to do my duty to Cody and Astor, both as their stepfather and, far more importantly, as their guide onto the Harry Path. But to see myself spinning in mother-hen circles at the thought of someone trying to hurt them was new and somewhat unsettling.

So, stopping Weiss was important in a brand new way. I was Daddy Dexter now, and I had to do it for the children, as well as for myself, and I was experiencing a surge of something dangerously close to emotion at the thought of any attempt to harm them.

All right; then I clearly had to figure out Weiss's next move and try to stop him before he could pull it off. I picked up his notebook and flipped through the drawings one more time, perhaps unconsciously hoping I had missed something before —an address where I could find Weiss, perhaps, or even a suicide note. But the pages were still the same, and truthfully the novelty had worn off and I took no real joy in looking at the pictures of me. I have never been all that interested in looking at me, and looking at me in a series of pictures intended to depict me as I really am to the world at large took any possible vestigial joy out of it.

On top of all the other unfairness, it did not really seem to add up to very much at all —certainly not enough to justify all the trouble it was causing me. I suppose I would have objected even if it was the Mona Lisa, if it had my face. And this was very far from being the Mona Lisa. It seemed to have been sketched out idly and then, on the last page, thrown together without any real soul searching.

Of course, the point was to expose me, not to create a great work of art —or was it? I paused and studied several of the detail drawings, the ones depicting the other elements of the display. It may sound self-centered for me to say so since they were competing for space with the pictures of me, but they were really not very interesting. You could probably call them clever, but no more.

They lacked any real originality and seemed rather lifeless —even for dead bodies.

And to be brutally honest, even the pictures of me were something any talented high school kid might have done. They might be projected in huge scale on the front of the Breakers Hotel, but they were not in the same class as anything I had seen so recently in Paris —not even the stuff in the small galleries. Of course, there was that last piece, “Jennifer's Leg'. It had used amateurish videos, too but there the whole point had been the audience's reaction and not the ...

For a moment there was absolute silence in Dexter's brain, a silence so thick it obscured everything else. And then it rolled away to reveal a jabbering little monkey of a thought.

Audience reaction.

If you were interested in the reaction then the quality of the work is not so important, as long as it provokes shock. You would arrange to capture that reaction —for example, on videotape. And perhaps you would use the services of a video professional —someone like, just for example, Kenneth Wimble, whose house Weiss had blown up. It made much more sense to think of Wimble as one of them, rather than a random victim.

And when Weiss had made the jump to full-scale murder, instead of stealing bodies to play with, Wimble had probably gotten squeamish, and Weiss had blown him up in his own house at the same time that he tried to take out irreplaceable me.

But Weiss was still videoing, even without his expert. Because that was what this was about for him. He wanted pictures of people seeing what he had done. More and more he wanted to do it, too with the Scout leader and with Wimble and the attempt on me. But the video, that was what mattered. And he would happily kill to get it.

No wonder the Dark Passenger had been bemused. Ours was very much a hands-on kind of art, and the results were extremely private. Weiss was different. He might want his revenge on me, but he would happily take it indirectly, something the Passenger and I would never consider. To Weiss, the art still mattered. He needed his pictures.

I looked at the last large, full-color rendering of me projected onto the Breakers Hotel. The picture was clearly drawn and you could easily see the basic architecture of the place. The front was U-shaped, with the front door in the center and a wing sticking forward on each side. There was a long mall leading up to the front door, with its rows of royal palm trees, a perfect place for a crowd to gather and gape in horror. Weiss would be there somewhere in the crowd with his camera, getting pictures of the faces.

But as I looked at the picture I realized that even before that, he would want to get a room in one of the wings overlooking the front where the projection was displayed, and he would set up a camera there, something like one of the remote cameras he had used already but this time with a really good lens, to capture the faces of the people watching.

The whole trick would be to stop him before he set things up stop him when he arrived at the hotel. And to do that all I had to do was find out when he checked in. That would be very simple if only I had access to the hotel's records —which I didn't —or knew a way to force my way into them —which I didn't. But as I thought about it, I realized something.

I knew somebody who did.

TWENTY-NINE

Kyle Chutsky sat across from me at the same small corner table in the hospital cafe. In spite of the fact that I didn't think he'd left the grounds in several days, he was clean-shaven and wore what seemed to be a clean shirt, and he looked across the table at me with a look of amusement that moved the corners of his mouth up and crinkled the skin around his eyes but did not touch the eyes themselves, which stayed cold and watchful.

“That's funny” he said. “You want me to help you hack in to registration at this hotel, the Breakers? Ha.” He gave a short laugh that was not very convincing. “Why do you think I can help you do that?”

Unfortunately, it was a fair question. I did not, in fact, know that he could help me, not based on anything he had said or done. But the little I did know about Chutsky indicated that he was a member in good standing of the shadow government, the deliberately non monitored and unconnected clan of people who worked for various alphabet agencies that were more or less affiliated with the federal government, and sometimes even with each other. As such, I was quite confident that he would know any number of ways to find out when Weiss registered at the hotel.

But there was the small problem of protocol: that I was not supposed to know and he was not supposed to admit it. To get past that I had to impress him with something that was urgent enough to overcome his instinctive reluctance. I can think of almost nothing more important than the pending demise of Dashing Dexter, but I did not think somehow that Chutsky would share my high self evaluation. He would probably put higher ratings on foolish trifles like national security, world peace, and his own relatively worthless life and limb.

But it occurred to me that he also put a very high rating on my sister, and this provided at least a potential opening. So, with my best artificial manly directness I said, “Kyle —this is the guy that stabbed Deborah.” And in any scene of any macho TV show I have ever seen that would be more than enough; but apparently Chutsky did not watch a great deal of TV. He just raised one eyebrow and said, “So?”

“So” I said, somewhat taken aback, and trying to remember a few more specifics from those scenes on TV, “he's out there, and, um, getting away with it. Uh —and he might do it again.” This time he raised both eyebrows. “You think he might stab Deborah again?” he said.

This was really not going well, not at all the way I'd thought it would. I had assumed that there was some kind of Man-of-Action Code in place, and all I had to do was bring up the subject of direct action and express my eagerness to be up and at “em, and Chutsky would leap to his feet equally eager and we would charge up Pork Chop Hill together. But instead, Chutsky was looking at me as if I had suggested an enema.

“How can you not want to catch this guy?” I said, and I made a little bit of awkward desperation slide into my voice.

“It's not my job” he said. “And it's not your job, either, Dexter. If you think this guy is going to check into this hotel, tell the cops.

They got plenty of guys they can use to stake it out and grab him.

You just got you, buddy —and don't take this wrong, but this could be a little rougher than you are used to.”

“The cops will want to know how I know” I said, and I regretted it instantly.

Chutsky picked it up just as quickly. “Okay. So how do you know?” he said.

There comes a time when even Disingenuous Dexter has to place at least one or two cards face up on the table, and clearly it had arrived. And so, throwing my inborn inhibitions out the window, I said, “He's stalking me.” Chutsky blinked. “What does that mean?” he said.

“It means he wants me dead” I said. “He's made two tries already.”

“And you think he's about to try again? At this hotel, the Breakers?”

“Yes.”

“So why don't you just stay home?” he said.

I am not really being conceited when I say that I am not used to having all the cleverness on the other side of a conversation. But Chutsky was clearly leading in this dance, and Dexter was several laps behind, limping along on two left feet with blisters blossoming on heel and toe. I had walked into this with a very clear picture of Chutsky as a real two-fisted man, even though one of the fists was now a steel hook —but nevertheless the kind of gung-ho, over-the top, damn the torpedoes guy who would leap into battle at the merest suggestion, especially when it concerned getting his hook on the man who had stabbed his true love, my sister Deborah. Clearly, I had miscalculated.

But this left a very large question mark: who was Chutsky, in fact, and how did I get his help? Did I need some cunning stratagem to bend him to my will, or would I have to resort to some form of the unprecedented uncomfortable unspeakable truth? The very thought of committing honesty made me tremble in every leaf and branch —it went against everything I had ever stood for. But there seemed no way out; I would have to be at least marginally truthful.

“If I stay home” I said, “he is going to do something terrible. To me, and maybe the kids.” Chutsky stared at me, then shook his head. “You were making more sense when I thought you wanted revenge” he said. “How can he do anything to you if you're at home and he's in the hotel?” At a certain point you really have to accept the fact that there are days when you have not brought your A game, and this was one of them. I told myself that I was most likely still suffering from my concussion, but my self answered back that this was a pitiful and now overused excuse at best, and with much more self-annoyance than I could remember experiencing for quite some time, I pulled out the notebook I had taken from Weiss's car and flipped it open to the full-color drawing of Dexter the Dominator on the front of the Breakers Hotel.

“Like this” I said. “If he can't kill me he'll get me arrested for murder.”

Chutsky studied the picture for a long moment, and then whistled quietly. “Boy howdy” he said. “And these things down here around the bottom ...”

“Dead bodies” I said. “Fixed up like the ones that Deborah was investigating when this man stabbed her.”

“Why would he do this?” he said.

“It's a kind of art” I said. I mean, he thinks it is.”

“Yeah, but why would he do this to you, buddy?”

“The guy that was arrested when Deborah was stabbed” I said. I kicked him hard, right in the head. That was his boyfriend.”

“Was?” said Chutsky. “Where is he now?” I have never really seen the point in self-mutilation —after all, life itself is on the job and doing really well at it. But if I could have taken back that word “was” by biting down hard on my own tongue, I would cheerfully have done so. However, it had been said and I was stuck with it, and so floundering about for a small chunk of my formerly sharp wit I found a little piece of it and came out with, “He skipped bail and disappeared'.

“And this guy blames you because his boyfriend took off?” 1 guess so” I said.

Chutsky looked at me and then looked down at the drawing again. “Listen, buddy” he said. “You know this guy, and I know you gotta go with your gut feeling. It's always worked for me, nine times out of ten. But this is, I don't know.” He shrugged. “Kind of, really thin, don't you think?” He flipped a finger at the picture. “But anyway, you were right about one thing. If he's going to do this, you do need my help. A lot more than you thought.”

“What do you mean?” I asked politely.

Chutsky smacked the drawing with the back of his hand. This hotel” he said. “It isn't the Breakers. It's the Hotel Nacional. In Havana.” And seeing that Dexter's mouth was hanging open in a most unbecoming way he added, “You know, Havana. The one in Cuba.”

“But that's not possible” I said. I mean, I've been there. That's the Breakers.”

He smiled at me, the irritating, superior kind of smile that I would love to try sometime when I'm not in disguise. “You didn't read your history, did you?” he said.

I don't think this chapter was assigned. What are you talking about?”

“Hotel Nacional and the Breakers are built from the same blueprint, to save money” he said. “They're virtually identical.”

“Then why are you so sure this isn't the Breakers?”

“Lookit” Chutsky said. “Look at the old cars. Pure Cuba. And see the little golf cart thing, with the bubble top? That's a Coco Loco, and you only find “em there, not Fort Lauderdale. And the vegetation. That stuff on the left? You don't see that at the Breakers.

Definitely only in Havana.” He dropped the notebook and leaned back. “So actually, I'd say problem solved, buddy.”

“Why would you say that?” I said, irritated both at his attitude and at the lack of any sense in what he said.

Chutsky smiled. “It's just too hard for an American to get over there” he said. I don't think he could pull it off.” A small nickle dropped through the slot and a light went on in Dexter's brain. “He's Canadian” I said.

“All right” he said stubbornly. “So he could go down there.” He shrugged. “But hey —you maybe don't remember that things are sort of tight down there? I mean —there's no way he gets away with anything like this.” He smacked the notebook with the back of his hand again. “Not in Cuba. The cops would be all over him like ...” Chutsky frowned and thoughtfully raised his bright silver hook toward his face. He caught himself just before he put the hook into his eye. “Unless ...” he said.

“What?” I said.

He shook his head slightly. “This guy's pretty smart, right?”

“Well” I said grudgingly, I know he thinks so.”

“So he's gotta know. Which maybe means” Chutsky said, politely refusing to finish a sentence with anything resembling a noun. He fumbled out his phone, one of those larger ones with the bigger screen. Holding it in place on the table with his hook, he began to poke rapidly at the keyboard with a finger, muttering, “Damn ...

okay ... Uh-huh” and other bright observations under his breath.

I could see that he had Google on the screen, but nothing else was legible from across the table. “Bingo” he said at last.

“What?”

He smiled, clearly pleased with how smart he was. “They do all these festivals down there” he said. “To prove how sophisticated and free they are.” He pushed the phone across the table at me. “Like this one” he said.

I pulled the phone to me and read the screen. “Festival Internacional de Artes Multimedia” I said, scrolling down.

“It starts in three days” Chutsky said. “And whatever this guy does —projectors or film clips or whatever —the cops will have orders to back off and let him do his thing. For the festival.”

“And the press will be there” I said. “From all over the world.

Perfect.” And it was —it would provide Weiss with a free pass to set up his awful project, and then deliver all the attention he so desperately craved, all in one gift-wrapped holiday package. Which did not seem like it could possibly be a good thing for me. Especially since he knew that I could not get to Cuba to stop him.

“All right” Chutsky said. “It might make sense. But why are you so sure he will go there?” It was, unfortunately, a fair question. I thought about it. First of all, was I really sure? Casually, not wanting to startle Chutsky in any way, I sent a careful, silent question mark to the Dark Passenger. Are we sure about this? I asked.

Oh, yes, it said with a sharp-toothed smirk. Quite sure.

All right, then. That was settled. Weiss would go to Cuba to expose Dexter. But I needed something a little more convincing than silent certainty; what proof did I really have, aside from the drawings, which were probably not admissible in a court of law? It was true that some of them were very interesting —the image of the woman with the six breasts, for example, was the kind of thing that really stuck in your head.

I remembered that drawing, and this time there was a nearly audible CLANG as a very, very big nickel dropped.

There had been a piece of paper wedged into the binding at the page in question.

It had listed airline flights from Havana to Mexico.

Just exactly the kind of thing you might like to know about if, for example, you thought you would need to leave Havana in a hurry. If, just hypothetically, you had just scattered some unusual dead bodies around in front of the city's flagship five star hotel.

I reached for the notebook, fished out the flight schedule, and flipped the paper onto the table. “He'll be there” I said.

Chutsky picked up the paper and unfolded it. “Cubana Aviacion” he read.

“From Havana to Mexico” I said. “So he can do it and then get out in a hurry.”

“Maybe” he said. “Uh-huh, could be.” He looked up at me and cocked his head to one side. “What's your gut telling you?” Truthfully, the only thing my gut ever told me was that it was dinner time. But it was obviously very important to Chutsky, and if I stretched the definition of “gut” to include the Passenger, my gut was telling me that there was absolutely no doubt about it. “He'll be there,” I said again.

Chutsky frowned and looked down at the drawing again. Then he started nodding his head, slowly at first and then with increasing energy. “Uh-huh,” he said, and then he looked up, flipped the flight schedule to me, and stood up. “Let's go talk to Deborah,” he said.

Deborah was lying in her bed, which should not really have been a surprise. She was staring at the window, even though she couldn't see out from her bed, and in spite of the fact that the television was on and broadcasting scenes of unearthly merriment and happiness. Debs didn't seem interested in the cheerful music and cries of bliss coming from the speaker, however. In fact, if you were to judge strictly from the look on her face, you would have to say she had never felt happiness in her life, and never intended to if she could help it. She glanced at us without interest as we came in, just long enough to identify us, and then looked back in the direction of the window.

“She's feeling kind of low,” Chutsky muttered to me. “Happens sometimes after you get chopped up.” From the number of scars all over Chutsky's face and body I had to assume he knew what he was talking about, so I just nodded and approached Deborah.

“Hey sis” I said, in the kind of artificially cheerful voice I had always understood you were supposed to use at an invalid's bedside.

She turned to look at me, and in the deadness of her face and the deep blue emptiness of her eyes, I saw an echo of her father Harry; I had seen that look before, in Harry's eyes, and out of those blue depths a memory came out and wrapped itself all around me.

Harry lay dying. It was an awkward thing for all of us, like watching Superman in the throes of kryptonite. He was supposed to be above that kind of common weakness. But for the last year and a half he had been dying, slowly, in fits and starts, and now he was very close to the finish line. Harry was dying, beyond any doubt, and as he lay there in his hospice bed his nurse had decided to help. She had been deliberately and lethally increasing the dose of his pain medicine and feeding on Harry's death, savoring his shrinking away, and he had known it and told me. Oh the joy and bliss, Harry had given me permission to make this nurse my very first real live human playmate, the first I had ever taken away with me to the Dark Playground.

And I had done so. First Nurse became the very first small drop of blood on the original glass slide in my brand new collection. It had been several hours of wonder, exploration and ecstacy, before First Nurse went the way of all flesh, and the next morning when I went to the hospice to report to Harry, the experience still filled me with brilliant darkness.

I came into Harry's room on feet that barely touched the ground, and as Harry opened his eyes and looked into mine he saw this, saw that I had changed and become the thing that he had made me, and as he watched me the deadness came into his eyes.

I sat anxiously beside him, thinking he might be at some new crisis. “Are you okay?” I said. “Should I call the doctor?” He closed his eyes and slowly, fragilely, shook his head.

“What's wrong?” I insisted, thinking that since I felt better than I ever had before, everyone else really ought to cheer up a little, too.

“Nothing wrong,” he said, in his soft, careful, dying voice. And he opened his eyes again and looked at me with that same glazed look of blue-eyed emptiness. “So you did it?” I nodded, almost blushing, feeling that talking about it was somehow embarrassing.

“And after?” he said.

“All cleaned up,” I said. I was really careful.”

“No problems?” he said.

“No,” I told him, and blurted out, “It was wonderful.” And seeing the pain on his face and thinking I could help I added, “Thank you, Dad.”

Harry closed his eyes again and turned his head away. For six or seven breaths, he stayed like that, and then, so softly I almost 229

couldn't hear him, he said, “What have I done ... Oh, Jesus, what have I done ...”

“Dad?” I said. I could not remember that he had ever spoken like this, saying bad words and sounding so very anguished and uncertain, and it was very unsettling and absolutely took the edge off my euphoria. And he just shook his head, eyes closed and would say nothing more.

“Dad ...?” I said again.

But he said nothing, just shook his head a few more painful times and then lay there quietly, for what seemed to me like a very long time, until at last he opened his eyes and looked at me, and there it was, that dead-eyed blue gaze that had moved beyond all hope and light and into the darkest place there is. “You are,” he said, “what I have made you.”

“Yes,” I said, and I would have thanked him again, but he spoke.

“It's not your fault,” he said, “it's mine,” and I did not know then what he meant by that, although these many years later I think I have begun to understand. I still wish I could have done or said something then, some small thing that would have made it easier for Harry to slide happily into the final dark; some carefully crafted sentence that made the self-doubt go away and let the sunlight back into those empty blue eyes.

But I also know, these many years later, that there is no such sentence, not in any language I know. Dexter is what Dexter must be, always and evermore, world without end, and if Harry saw that at the end and felt a final surge of horror and guilt —well, I really am sorry, but what else is there? Dying makes everyone weaker, subject to painful insight, and not always insight into any kind of special truth —it's just the approaching end that makes people want to believe they are seeing something in the line of a great revelation.

Believe me, I am very much an expert in what dying people do. If I were to catalog all the strange things that my Special Friends have said to me as I helped them over the edge it would make a very interesting book.

So, I felt bad about Harry. But as a young and awkward geek of a monster there was very little I could have said to make it easier on him.

Now, all these years later, seeing the same look in Deborah's eyes, I felt the same unhappy sense of helplessness wash over me. I could only gawk at her as she turned away and looked at the window once more.

“For Christ's sake,” she said, without looking away from the window. “Quit staring at me.” Chutsky slid into a chair on the opposite side. “She is a little cranky lately,” he said.

“Fuck you,” she said without any real emphasis, tilting her head to look around Chutsky and keep her focus on the window.

“Listen, Deborah,” he said. “Dexter knows where this guy is that hurt you.” She still didn't look, just blinked her eyes, twice. “Uh, and he was thinking that him and me might go get him actually. And we wanted to talk to you about it,” Chutsky said. “See how you feel about it.”

“How I feel,” she said with a flat and bitter voice, and then she turned to face us with a pain in her eyes that was so terrible even I could feel it. “Do you want to know what I really feel?” she said.

“Hey, it's okay,” said Chutsky.

“They told me I was dead on the table,” she said. I feel like I'm still dead. I feel like I don't know who I am or why or anything and I just ...” A tear rolled down her cheek and again, it was very unsettling. “I feel like he cut out all of me that matters,” she said, “and I don't know if I will ever get it back.” She looked back at the window again. I feel like crying all the time, and that's not me. I don't cry, you know that, Dex. I don't cry,” she repeated softly as another tear rolled down the track made by the first one.

“It's okay,” Chutsky said again, even though it clearly wasn't.

I feel like everything I always thought is wrong now,” she went on. “And I don't know if I can go back to being a cop if I feel like this.”

“You're gonna feel better,” Chustky said. “It just takes time.”

“Go get him,” she said, and she looked at me with a little trace of her good old anger showing now. “Get him, Dexter,” she said. “And do what you have to do.” She held my gaze for a moment, then turned back to the window.

“Dad was right,” she said.

THIRTY

THAT IS HOW EARLY NEXT MORNING I FOUND MYSELF standing at a small building on the outer edge of the runway at Miami International, clutching a passport in the name of David Marcey, and wearing what can only be called a leisure suit, green, with bright yellow matching belt and shoes. Next to me stood my associate director at Baptist Brethren International Ministries, the Reverend Campbell Freeney, in an equally hideous outfit and a big smile that changed the shape of his face and even seemed to hide some of the scars.

I am not truly a clothing-oriented person, but I do have some basic standards of sartorial decency, and the outfits we were wearing crushed them utterly and spat them into the dust. I had protested, of course, but Reverend Kyle had told me there was no choice. “Gotta look the part, buddy,” he said, and he brushed a hand against his red sport coat. “This is Baptist missionary clothing.”

“Couldn't we be Presbyterians?” I asked hopefully, but he shook his head.

“This is the pipeline I got,” he said, “and this is how we gotta do it. Unless you speak Hungarian?”

“Eva Gabor?” I said, but he shook his head.

“And don't try to talk about Jesus all the time, they don't do that,” he said. “Just smile a lot and be kind to everybody, and you'll be fine.” He handed me another piece of paper and said, “Here. This is your letter from Treasury to allow you to travel to Cuba for missionary work. Don't lose it.” He had been a fountain of a great deal more information in the few short hours between deciding he would take me to Havana and our dawn arrival at the airport, even remembering to tell me not to drink the water, which I thought was close to quaint.

I'd barely had time to tell Rita something almost plausible —that I had an emergency to take care of and not to worry, the uniformed cop would stay at her front door until I got back. And although she was quite smart enough to be puzzled by the idea of emergency forensics, she went along with it, reassured by the sight of the police cruiser parked in front of the house. Chutsky, too, had done his part, patting Rita on the shoulder and saying, “Don't worry, we'll take care of this for you.” Of course, this confused her even more, since she had not requested any blood spatter work, and if she had, Chutsky would not have been involved. But overall, it seemed to give her the impression that somehow vital things were being done to make her safe and everything would soon be all right, so she gave me a hug with minimal tears, and Chutsky led me away to the car.

And so we stood there together in the small building at the airport waiting for the flight to Havana, and after a short spell we were out the door and onto the runway, clutching our phony papers and our real tickets and taking our fair share of elbows from the rest of the passengers as we all scuttled onto the plane.

The airplane was an old passenger jet. The seats were worn and not quite as clean as they could have been. Chutsky —I mean Reverend Freeney —took the aisle seat, but he was big enough that he still crowded me over against the window. It would be a tight fit all the way to Havana, tight enough that I would have to wait for him to go to the restroom before I could inhale. Still, it seemed a small price to pay for bringing the Word of the Lord to the godless communists. After only a few minutes of holding my breath, the plane rattled and bumped down the runway and into the air, and we were on our way.

The flight was not long enough for me to suffer too much from oxygen deprivation, especially since Chutsky spent much of the time leaning into the aisle and talking to the flight attendant; within only about half an hour we were banking in over the green countryside of Cuba and thumping onto a runway that apparently used the same paving contractor as Miami International. Still, as far as I could tell the wheels did not actually fall off, and we rolled along up to a beautiful modern airport terminal —and rolled right past it until we finally came to a halt next to a grim old structure that looked like the bus station for a prison camp.

We trooped down off the plane on a rolling stairway, and crossed the tarmac into the squat grey building, and the inside was not a great deal more welcoming. Some very serious-looking uniformed men with mustaches stood around inside clutching automatic weapons and glaring at everyone. As a bizarre contrast, several television sets hung down from the ceiling, all playing what seemed to be a Cuban sitcom, complete with a hysterical laughter track that made its US counterpart sound bored. Every few minutes one of the actors would shout something I couldn't decipher, and a blast of music would rise up over the laughter.

We stood in a line that moved slowly toward a booth. I could see nothing at all on the far side of the booth and for all I knew they could be sorting us into cattle cars to take us away to a gulag, but Chutsky didn't seem terribly worried, so it would have been poor sportsmanship for me to complain.

The line inched ahead and soon, without saying a word to me, Chutsky stepped up to the window, and shoved his passport in through a hole at the bottom. I could not see or hear what was said, but there were no wild shouts and no gunfire and after a moment he collected his papers and vanished on the far side of the booth, and it was my turn.

Behind the thick glass sat a man who could have been the twin of the nearest gun-toting soldier. He took my passport without comment and opened it, looked inside, looked up at me, and then pushed it back to me without a word. I had expected some kind of interrogation -1 suppose I'd thought he might rise up and smite me for being either a capitalist running dog, or possibly a paper tiger and I was so startled at his complete lack of response that I stood there for a moment before the man behind the glass jerked his head at me to go, and I did, heading around a corner the way Chutsky had gone and into the baggage claim area.

“Hey buddy,” Chutsky said as I approached the spot he had staked out by the unmoving belt that would soon, I hoped, bring our bags out. “You weren't scared, were you?” I guess I thought it would be a little more difficult than that,” I said. I mean, aren't they kind of mad at us or something?” Chutsky laughed. I think you're gonna find out that they like you,” he said. “It's just your government they can't stand.” I shook my head. “Can they really separate them like that?”

“Sure,” he said. “It's simple Cuban logic” As nonsensical as that seemed, I had grown up in Miami and knew perfectly well what that was; Cuban logic was a running joke in the Cuban community, placed right before being Cubanaso in the emotional spectrum. The best explanation I'd ever had was from a professor in college. I'd taken a poetry course in the vain hope of learning to see into the human soul, since I don't have one. And the professor had been reading aloud from Walt Whitman —I still remembered the line, since it is so utterly human. “Do I contradict myself? Well then —I contradict myself. I am large. I contain multitudes.” And the professor had looked up from the book and said, “Perfect Cuban logic,” waited for the laughter to die down, and then gone back to reading the poem.

So, if the Cuban people disliked America and liked Americans, it involved no more mental gymnastics than I had seen and heard nearly every day of my life. In any case, there was a clatter, a buzzer blasted a loud note, and our baggage began to come out on the belt.

We didn't have a lot, just one small bag each —just a change of socks and a dozen bibles —and we wrestled the bags out past a female customs agent who seemed more interested in talking to the guard beside her than in catching us smuggling in weapons or stock portfolios.

She merely glanced at the bags and waved us through, without losing a syllable of her rapid-fire monologue. And then we were free, walking improbably out the door and into the sunshine outside. Chutsky whistled up a taxi, a grey Mercedes, and a man stepped out in grey livery and matching cap and grabbed our bags.

Chutsky said, “Hotel Nacional,” to the driver, he threw our bags in the trunk, and we all climbed in.

The highway into Havana was badly pock-marked, but it was very close to deserted. We saw only a few other cabs, a couple of motorcycles, and some army trucks moving slowly along, and that was it —all the way into the city. Then the streets suddenly exploded into life, with ancient cars, bicycles, crowds of people flowing over the sidewalks, and some very strange-looking buses that were pulled by diesel trucks. They were twice as long as an American bus, and shaped something like the letter “M” with the two ends going up like wings and then sloping down to a flat-roofed low spot in the middle.

They were all packed so full of people that it seemed impossible for anyone else to get on, but as I watched one of them stopped and sure enough, another clump of people crowded in.

“Camels” Chutsky said, and I stared at him curiously.

“Excuse me?” I said.

He jerked his head at one of the strange buses. “They're called camels” he said. “They'll tell you it's because of the shape, but my guess is it has to do with the smell inside at rush hour.” He shook his head. “You get 400 people inside there, coming home from work, no air conditioning and the windows don't open. Unbelievable.” It was a fascinating tidbit of information, or at least Chutsky apparently thought so, because he had nothing more profound to offer, even though we were moving through a city I had never seen before. But his impulse to be a tour guide was apparently dead, and we slid through traffic and onto a wide boulevard that ran along the water. High up on a cliff on the other side of the harbor I could see an old lighthouse and some battlements, and beyond that a black smudge of smoke climbing into the sky. Between us and the water there was a broad sidewalk and a sea wall. Waves broke on the wall, sending spray up into the air, but nobody seemed to mind getting a little wet. There were throngs of people of all ages sitting, standing, walking, fishing, lying and kissing on the sea wall. We passed some strange contorted sculpture, thumped over a rough patch of pavement, and turned left up a short hill. And then there it was, the Hotel Nacional, complete with its facade that would soon feature the smirking face of Dexter, unless we could find Weiss first.

The driver stopped his car in front of a grand marble staircase, a doorman dressed like an Italian admiral stepped up and clapped his hands, and a uniformed bellboy came running out to grab our bags.

“Here we are” said Chutsky, somewhat unnecessarily. The admiral opened the door and Chutsky climbed out. I was allowed to open my own door, since I was on the side away from the marble stairs. I did so, and climbed out into a forest of helpful smiles.

Chutsky paid the driver, and we followed the bellboy up the stairs and into the hotel.

The lobby looked like it had been carved out of the same block of marble as the stairs. It was somewhat narrow, but it stretched away past the front desk and vanished in the misty distance. The bellboy led us right up to the desk, past a cluster of plush chairs and a velvet rope, and the clerk at the desk seemed very glad to see us.

“Senor Freeney” he said, bowing his head happily. “So very good to see you again.” He raised an eyebrow. “Surely, you are not here for the art festival?” His accent was less than many I had heard in Miami, and Chutsky seemed very pleased to see him, too.

Chutsky reached across the counter and shook his hand. “How are you, Rogelio?” he said. “Nice to see you, too. I'm here to break in a new guy” He put his hand on my shoulder and nudged me forward, as if I was a sullen boy being forced to kiss Granny on the cheek. “This is David Marcey, one of our rising stars” he said. “Does a hell of a sermon.”

Rogelio shook my hand. I am very pleased to meet you, Senor Marcey.”

“Thank you” I said. “You have a very nice place here.” He gave a half-bow again and began to tap on a computer keyboard. I hope you will enjoy your stay” he said. “If Senor Freeney does not object, I will put you on the executive floor? That way you are closer to the breakfast.”

“That sounds very nice” I said.

“One room or two?” he said.

“I think just one this time, Rogelio” Chutsky said. “Gotta watch the old expense account this trip.”

“Of course” Rogelio said. He tapped out a few more quick key strokes and then, with a grand flourish, slid two keys across the desk. “Here you go” he said.

Chutsky put his hand on the keys and leaned in a little closer.

“One more thing, Rogelio” he said, lowering his voice. “We have a friend coming in from Canada” he said. “Name of Brandon Weiss.” He pulled the keys toward himself over the counter, and a twenty dollar bill lay on the counter where they had been. “We'd like to surprise him” he said. “It's his birthday” Rogelio flicked out a hand and the twenty dollar bill disappeared like a fly grabbed by a lizard. “Of course” he said. I will let you know immediately”

“Thanks, Rogelio” Chutsky said, and he turned away, motioning me to follow. I trailed along behind him and the bellboy with our bags, to the far end of the lobby, where a bank of elevators stood ready to whisk us up to the executive floor. A crowd of people dressed in very nice resort-wear stood waiting, and it may have been only my feverish imagination, but I thought they glared in horror at our missionary clothing. Still, there was nothing for it but to follow the script, and I smiled at them and managed to avoid blurting out something religious, possibly from Revelations.

The door slid open and the crowd surged into the elevator. The bellboy smiled and said, “Go ahead, sir, I follow in two minute” and the Right Reverend Freeney and I climbed in.

The doors closed. I caught a few more anxious glances at my shoes, but no one had anything to say, and neither did I. But I did wonder why we had to share a room. I hadn't had a roommate since college, and that hadn't really worked out very well. And I knew full well that Chutsky snored.

The doors slid open and we stepped out. I followed Chutsky to the left, to another reception area, where a waiter stood beside a glass cart. He bowed and handed us each a tall glass.

“What's this?” I asked.

“Cuban Gatorade” Chutsky said. “Cheers.” He drained his glass and put the empty down on the cart, so I allowed myself to be shamed into doing the same. The drink tasted mild, sweet, slightly minty, and I found that it did, indeed, seem to be kind of refreshing in the way that Gatorade is on a hot day. I put the empty down next to Chutsky's. He picked up another one, so I did, too. “Salad,” he said. We clinked glasses and I drank. It really did taste good, and since I'd had almost nothing to eat or drink in the scramble of getting to the airport, I let myself enjoy it.

Behind us the elevator doors slid open and our bellboy dashed out clutching our bags. “Hey, there you are” Chutsky said. “Let's see the room.” He drained his glass, and I did too, and we followed the bellboy down the hall.

About halfway down the hall I began to feel a little bit odd, as if my legs had suddenly been turned into balsa wood. “What was in that Gatorade?” I asked Chutsky.

“Mostly rum” he said. “What, you never had a mojito before?” I don't think so” I said.

He gave a short grunt that might have been intended as a laugh.

“Get used to it” he said. “You're in Havana now.” I followed him down the hall which had suddenly grown longer and a little brighter. I was feeling very refreshed now. But somehow I made it all the way to the room and through the door. The bellboy heaved our suitcases up onto a stand and flung open the curtains to reveal a very nice room, tastefully furnished in the classical style.

There were two beds, separated by a night stand, and a bathroom to the left of the room's door.

“Very nice” said Chutsky, and the bellboy smiled and gave him a half-bow. “Thanks” Chutsky said, and held out his hand with a ten dollar bill in it. “Thanks very much.” The bellboy took the money with a smile and a nod and promised that we only had to call and he would move heaven and earth to help fulfill our slightest whim, and then he disappeared out the door as I flopped face down onto the bed nearest the window. I chose that bed because it was closest, but it was also much too bright with the sun rocketing in through the window so aggressively, and I closed my eyes. The room did not spin, and I did not suddenly slip into unconsciousness, but it seemed like a very good idea to lie there for a while with my eyes closed.

“Ten bucks” Chutsky said. “That's what most of the people here make in a month. And boom-bah —he gets it for five minutes work.

He's probably got a PhD in astrophysics.” There was a short and welcome pause, and then Chutsky said, in a voice that seemed much farther away, “Hey, you all right buddy?”

“Never better” I said, and my voice was kind of far away, too.

“But I think I'll just take a nap for a minute.”

THIRTY-ONE

WHEN I WOKE UP THE ROOM WAS QUIET AND DARK AND my mouth was very dry. I fumbled around on the night stand for a moment until I found a lamp, and I switched it on. In its light I saw that Chutsky had closed the curtains and then gone out somewhere. I also saw a bottle of drinking water beside the lamp, and I grabbed it and ripped the top off, gratefully sucking down about half the bottle in one fell swoop.

I stood up. I was a little bit stiff from sleeping on my face, but other than that I felt surprisingly good, as well as hungry, which was not surprising. I went to the window and opened the curtains.

It was still bright daylight, but the sun had moved off to one side and calmed down a little, and I stood looking out at the harbor and the seawall and the large sidewalk that ran along beside it filled with people. None of them seemed in any hurry; they were strolling rather than going anywhere, and groups of them collected here and there for talking, singing, and, from what I could gather from some of the visible activity, advice to the lovelorn.

Farther out in the harbor a large inner tube bobbed in the swell, a man dangling through its center and holding what looked to be a Cuban yo-yo, which is a spool of fishing line with no reel or pole.

Farther still, just on the inside of the horizon, three large ships were steaming past, whether freighters or passenger liners I couldn't tell.

The birds wheeled above the waves, the sun sparkled off the water; all in all it was a beautiful sight, and it made me realize that there was absolutely nothing to eat at the window, so I found my room key on the bedside table and headed down to the lobby.

I found a very large and formal dining room on the far side of the elevators from the front desk, and tucked into a corner beside it was a dark wood-paneled bar. They were both very nice, but not really what I was looking for. The bartender told me, in perfect English, that there was a snack bar in the basement, down the stairs at the far side of the lobby, and I thanked him, also in perfect English, and headed for the stairs.

The snack bar was decorated in tribute to the movies, and I had a bad moment until I saw the menu and realized they served more than popcorn. I ordered a Cuban sandwich, naturally, and an Iron Beer, and sat at a table contemplating lights, camera and action with just a trace of bitterness. Weiss was somewhere nearby, or about to be, and he had promised to make Dexter a big star. I did not want to be a star. I much preferred toiling in shadowy obscurity, quietly compiling a record of flawless excellence in my chosen field. This would soon be utterly impossible unless I managed to stop Weiss, and since I was not really sure how I planned to do that it was a very distressing prospect. Still, the sandwich was good.

When I had finished eating I went back up the stairs and, on a whim, down the grand marble staircase and outside, to the front of the hotel, where a line of taxis stood guard. I walked aimlessly by them and up the long sidewalk, past a row of ancient Chevys and Buicks, and even a Hudson —I had to read the name off the front end. Several very happy-looking people leaned against the cars, and all of them were eager to take me for a ride, but I smiled my way past them and headed for the distant front gate. Beyond these was an untidy heap of what seemed to be golf carts with brightly colored plastic shells attached to them. Their drivers were younger and not quite so high-end as those attending the Hudson, but they were equally eager to prevent me from having to use my legs. But I managed to get through them as well.

At the gate I paused and looked around. Ahead of me was a crooked street that led past a bar or night club. To my right a road led downhill to the boulevard that ran along the seawall, and to my left, also down a hill, I could see what looked like a movie theater on the corner and a row of shops. As I was contemplating all this and trying to decide which way to go, a taxi stopped beside me, the window rolled down, and Chutsky called to me urgently from inside. “Get in” he said. “Come on, buddy. In the cab. Hurry up.” I had no idea why it was so important, but I climbed in and the cab took us on up to the hotel, turning right before the front door and pulling into a parking lot that butted up against one wing of the building.

“You can't be wandering around out front” Chutsky said. “If this guy sees you, the game's over.”

“Oh” I said, feeling slightly stupid. He was right, of course; but Dexter was so unused to daytime stalking that it had not occurred to me.

“Come on” he said, and he climbed out of the cab, holding a new leather briefcase. He paid the driver and I followed him in through a side door that led past a few shops and right to the elevators. We went straight up to our room with nothing else to say, until we got inside. Chutsky threw the briefcase on the bed, flung himself into a chair, and said, “Okay, we got some time to kill, and it's best to do it right here in the room.” He gave me a look that one might give to a very slow child and added, “So this guy doesn't know we're here.” He looked at me for a moment to see if I understood him and then, apparently figuring out that I did, he pulled out a battered little booklet and a pencil, opened the book, and began to do sudoku.

“What's in your briefcase?” I said, mostly because I was a little irritated.

Chutsky smiled, pulled the case toward him with his steel hook, and flipped it open. It was full of cheap souvenir percussion instruments, most of them stamped, “CUBA'.

“Why?” I asked him.

He just kept smiling. “You never know what might turn up” he said, and turned back to his no-doubt fascinating sudoku puzzle.

Left to my own devices, I pulled the other chair in front of the television, switched on, and watched Cuban sitcoms.

We sat there peacefully enough until very close to dusk. Then Chutsky glanced at the clock and said, “Okay, buddy, let's get going.”

“Going where?” I said.

He winked at me. “Meet a friend” he said, and he would say no more. He picked up his new briefcase and headed out the door. So even though it was a little bit disturbing to be winked at, I had no real choice, and I followed meekly along out of the room, out the hotel's side door again, and into a waiting taxi.

The streets of Havana were even busier in the fading light.

I rolled down my window to see, hear, and smell the city, and was rewarded by an ever-changing but never-stopping surge of music, seemingly coming from every door and window we passed, as well as from the many groups of musicians clustered on the street.

Their song rose and fell and mutated as we drove through the city, but somehow it always seemed to come back to the chorus of “Guantanamera'.

The cab followed a tortured path over rough cobbled streets, always through crowds of people singing, selling things and, strangely, playing baseball. I lost all sense of direction very quickly, and by the time the cab stopped at a barrier of large iron globes in the middle of the road I had no idea what direction we had come from. So I followed Chutsky up a side street, through a plaza, and into an intersection in front of what seemed to be a hotel. It was bright orange-pink in the light of the setting sun, and Chutsky led me in, past a piano bar and a number of tables spread with pictures of Ernest Hemingway that looked like they'd been painted by elementary school children.

Beyond these was an old-fashioned elevator cage at the far end of the lobby, and we went over to it and Chutsky rang the bell. As we waited I looked around me. Off to one side was a row of shelves containing merchandise of some kind and I wandered over for a look. There were ashtrays, mugs and other items, all containing a likeness of Ernest Hemingway, in this case done by someone a bit more skillful than the grade school artists.

The elevator arrived and I walked back. A massive grey iron gate slid open to reveal the inside, complete with a grim old man operating the controls. Chutsky and I got in. A few more people crowded in with us before the operator slid the iron gate shut and cranked the handle into the UP position. The cage lurched and we began to move slowly upward, until we reached the fifth floor. Then the elevator operator yanked the handle and we thumped to a stop.

“The room of Hemingway,” he said. He pulled the gate open and the rest of the people on board skittered out. I glanced at Chutsky, but he shook his head and pointed up, so I stood and waited until the gate slid shut again and we jerked our way up two more flights before staggering to a halt. The man slid the gate open and we stepped gratefully out into a small room, really no more than a roof over the elevator and the top of a flight of stairs. I could hear music playing nearby, and Chutsky, with a wave of his hand, led me out onto the roof and toward the music.

A trio was playing a song about ojos verdes as we walked around a trellis to where they were set up, three men in white pants and guayaberas. A bar was against the wall beyond them, and on the other two sides there was just the city of Havana spread out below us in the orange light of the setting sun.

Chutsky led the way to a low table with a cluster of easy chairs around it and he nudged his briefcase under the table as we sat down. “Pretty nice view, huh?” he said.

“Very pretty” I said. “Is that why we came here?”

“No, I told you” he said. “We're gonna meet a friend.” Whether he was kidding me or not, that was apparently all he was going to say on the subject. In any case, the waiter appeared at our table at that point. “Two mojitos” Chutsky said.

“Actually, I think I'll stick to beer”1 said, remembering my mojitoinduced nap a little earlier.

Chutsky shrugged. “Suit yourself” he said. “Try a Crystal, it's pretty good.”

I nodded at the waiter; if I could trust Chutsky for anything at all, I was pretty sure it would be beer selection. The waiter nodded back and went to the bar to get our drinks and the trio launched into “Guantanamera'.

We'd had no more than one sip of our drinks when I saw a man approaching our table. He was very short and dressed in brown slacks and a lime green guayabera, and he carried a briefcase that looked very much like Chutsky's.

Chutsky jumped up and held out his hand. “Ee-bangh!” he yelled, and it took me a moment to realize that Chusky was not experiencing a sudden attack of Tourette's syndrome, but only the Cuban pronunciation of the newcomer's name, Ivan. Ee-bangh held out his hand, too, and embraced Chutsky as they shook hands.

“Cahm-BEYL!” Ee-bangh said, and again it took a moment —this time because I hadn't really remembered that Chutsky was Reverend Campbell Freeney. By the time all the gears had meshed Ivan had turned to look at me with one raised eyebrow.

“Oh, hey” Chutsky said, “this is David Marcey. David, Ivan Echeverria.”

“Mucho gusto,” Ivan said, shaking my hand.

“Nice to meet you” I told him in English, since I was not sure whether “David” spoke any Spanish at all.

“Well, sit down” Chutsky said, and he waved at the waiter as Ivan sat. The waiter hurtled over to our table and took Ivan's order for a mojito, and when it arrived Chutsky and Ivan sipped and talked cheerfully in very rapid Cuban Spanish. I could probably have followed along if I had really worked at it, but it seemed like an awful lot of hard labor for what seemed to be a private conversation made up mostly of fond memories —and in truth, even if they had been discussing something far more interesting than What Happened That Time, I would have tuned it out; because it was full night now, and coming up over the rim of the roof was a huge, reddish-yellow moon, a bloated, simpering, blood-thirsty moon, and the first sight of it turned every inch of my skin into a chilled carpet of goose bumps, all the hairs on my back and arms stood up and howled, and running through every corridor of Castle Dexter was a small and dark footman carrying orders to every Knight of the Night to, “Go now and do it.” But of course it was not to be. This was not a Night of Letting Go; it was very unfortunately a Night of Clamping Down. It was a night to sip rapidly warming beer, pretend I could hear and enjoy the trio; a night to smile politely at Ee-bahng and wish it was all over and I could get back to being happy homicidal me in peace and tranquility. It was a night to endure, and hope that some day soon would find me with a knife in one hand and Weiss in the other.

Until then, I could only take a deep breath, a sip of beer, and pretend to enjoy the lovely view. Practice that winning smile, Dexter.

How many teeth can we show? Very good; now without teeth, just the lips. How far up can you make the corners of your mouth go before it looks like you are in very great internal pain?

“Hey, you all right, buddy?” Chutsky called. Apparently I had let my face stretch past Happy Smile and into Rictus.

“I'm fine” I told him. “Just, ah —fine, really”

“Uh-huh” he said, though he didn't look convinced. “Well, maybe we better get you back to the hotel.” He drained his glass and stood up, and so did Ivan. They shook hands, and then Ivan sat back down and Chutsky grabbed his briefcase and we headed for the elevator.

I looked back to see Ivan ordering another drink, and I raised an eyebrow at Chutsky.

“Oh” he said. “We don't want to leave together. You know, at the same time.”

Well, I suppose that made as much sense as anything else, since we were now apparently living in a spy movie, so I watched everyone else carefully, all the way down in the elevator, to make sure they weren't agents of some evil cartel. Apparently they weren't since we made it safely all the way down and into the street. But as we crossed the street to find a taxi we passed a horse and buggy waiting there, something I really should have noticed and avoided, because animals don't like me, and this horse reared up —even though he was old and tired and had been placidly chewing something in a nose bag. It was not a very impressive maneuver, hardly a John Wayne moment, but he did get both front feet off the ground and make a noise of extreme displeasure at me, which startled his driver nearly as much as it did me. But I hurried on by and we managed to get into a taxi without any clouds of bats swarming out to attack me.

We rode back to the hotel in silence. Chutsky sat with his briefcase on his lap and looked out the window, and I tried not to listen to that fat overwhelming moon. But that didn't work very well; it was there in every postcard view of Havana we drove through, always bright and leering and calling out wonderful ideas, and why couldn't I come out to play? But I could not. I could only smile back and say, Soon. It will be soon.

Just as soon as I could find Weiss.

THIRTY-TWO

WE GOT BACK TO OUR ROOM WITHOUT INCIDENT AND with no more than a dozen words between the two of us. Chutsky's lack of wordiness was proving to be a really charming personality trait, since the less he talked the less I had to pretend I was interested, and it saved wear on my facial muscles. And in fact, the few words he did say were so pleasant and winning that I was almost ready to like him. “Lemme put this in the room” he said, holding up the briefcase. “Then we'll think about dinner.” Wise and welcome words; since I would not be out in the wonderful dark light of the moon tonight, dinner would be a very acceptable substitute.

We took the elevator up and strolled down the hall to the room, and when we got inside, Chutsky put the briefcase carefully on the bed and sat beside it, and it occurred to me that he had brought it with us to the rooftop bar for no reason I could see, and was now being rather careful of it. Since curiosity is one of my few flaws, I decided to indulge it and find out why.

“What's so important about the maracas?” I asked him.

He smiled. “Nothing” he said. “Not a single damn thing.”

“Then why are you carrying them all over Havana?” He held the briefcase down with his hook and opened it with his hand. “Because” he said, “they're not maracas anymore.” And sliding his hand into the briefcase, he pulled out a very serious looking automatic pistol. “Hey presto” he said.

I thought of Chutsky lugging the briefcase all over town to meet Ee-bangh, who then came in with an identical briefcase —both of which were shoved under the table while we all sat and listened to “Guantanamera'.

“You arranged to switch briefcases with your friend” I said.

“Bingo.”

It does not rank among the smartest things I ever said, but I was surprised, and what came out of my mouth was, “But what's it for?”

Chutsky gave me such a warm, tolerant, patronizing smile that I would gladly have turned the pistol on him and pulled the trigger.

“It's a pistol, buddy” he said. “What do you think it's for?”

“Um, self-defense?” I said.

“You do remember why we came here, right?” he said.

“To find Brandon Weiss” I said.

“Find him?” Chutsky demanded. “Is that what you're telling yourself?

We're going to find him?” He shook his head. “We're here to kill him, buddy. You need to get that straight in your head. We can't just find him, we have to put him down. We've got to kill him. What'd you think we were going to do? Bring him home with us and give him to the zoo?”

I guess I thought that sort of thing was frowned on here” I said. I mean, this isn't Miami, you know.”

“It isn't Disneyland, either” he said, unnecessarily, I thought.

“This isn't a picnic, buddy. We're here to kill this guy, and the sooner you get used to that idea the better.”

“Yes, I know, but—”

“There ain't no but,” he said. “We're gonna kill him. I can see you have a problem with that.”

“Not at all” I said.

He apparently didn't hear me —either that or he was already launched into a pre-existing lecture and couldn't stop himself. “You can't be squeamish about a little blood” he went on. “It's perfectly natural. We all grow up hearing that killing is wrong.” It kind of depends on who, I thought, but did not say.

“But the rules are made by people who couldn't win without “em. And anyway, killing isn't always wrong, buddy” he said, and oddly enough he winked. “Sometimes it's something you have to do. And sometimes, it's somebody who deserves it. Because either a whole lot of other people will die if you don't do it, or maybe it's get him before he gets you. And in this case —it's both, right?” And although it was very odd to hear this rough version of my life-long creed from my sister's boyfriend, sitting on the bed in a hotel room in Havana, it once again made me appreciate Harry, both for being ahead of his time and also for being able to say all this in a way that didn't make me feel like I was cheating at Solitaire. But I still couldn't warm to the idea of using a gun. It just seemed wrong, like washing your socks in the baptismal font at church.

But Chutsky was apparently very pleased with himself. “Walther, nine millimeter. Very nice weapons.” He nodded and reached into the briefcase again and pulled out a second pistol. “One for each of us” he said. He flipped one of the guns to me and I caught it reflexively. “Think you can pull the trigger?” I do know which end of a pistol to hold onto, whatever Chutsky might think. After all, I grew up in a cop's house, and I worked with cops every day. I just didn't like the things —they are so impersonal, and they lack real elegance. But he had thrown it at me as something of a challenge, and on top of everything else that had happened, I was not about to ignore it. So I ejected the clip, worked the action one time, and held it out in the firing position, just like Harry had taught me. “Very nice” I said. “Would you like me to shoot the television?”

“Save it for the bad guy” Chutsky said. “If you think you can do it.” I tossed the gun on the bed beside him. “Is that really your plan?” I asked him. “We wait for Weiss to check into the hotel and then play OK Corral with him? In the lobby, or at breakfast?” Chutsky shook his head sadly, as if he had tried and failed to teach me how to tie my shoes. “Buddy, we don't know when this guy is going to turn up, and we don't know what he's going to do.

He may even spot us first.” He raised both eyebrows at me, as if to say, “Ha —didn't think of that, did you?”

“So we shoot him wherever we find him?”

“The thing is to just be ready, whatever happens” he said. “Ideally, we get him off someplace quiet and do it. But at least we're ready” He patted the briefcase with his hook. “Ivan brought us a couple of other things just in case, too.”

“Like landmines?” I said. “Maybe a flame-thrower?”

“Some electronic stuff” he said. “State-of-the-art stuff. For surveillance. We can track him, find him, listen in on him —with this stuff we can hear him fart from a mile away.” I really did want to get into the spirit of things here, but it was very hard to show any interest in Weiss's digestive process, and I hoped it wasn't absolutely essential for Chutsky's plan.

In any case his entire James Bond approach was making me uncomfortable. It may be very wrong of me, but I began to appreciate just how lucky I had been so far in life. I had managed very well with only a few shiny blades and a hunger —nothing state of the art, no vague plots, no huddling in foreign hotel rooms awash with uncertainty and fire power. Just happy, carefree, relaxing carnage. Certainly, it seemed primitive and even slapdash in the face of all this high-tech steel-nerved preparation, but it was at least honest and wholesome labor. None of this waiting around spitting testosterone and polishing bullets. Chutsky was taking all the fun out of my life's work.

Still, I had asked for his help, and now I was stuck with it. So there was really nothing to do but put the best possible face on things and get on with it. “It's all very nice”1 said, with an encouraging smile that did not even fool me. “When do we start?” Chutsky snorted and put the guns back in the briefcase. He held it up to me, dangling it from his hook. “When he gets here” he said.

“Put this in the closet for now.” I took the briefcase from him and carried it to the closet. But as I reached to open the door I heard a faint rustling of wings somewhere in the distance and I froze. What is it? I asked silently. There was a slight inaudible twitch, a raising of awareness, but no more.

So I reached in the briefcase and got my ridiculous gun, holding it at the ready as I reached for the closet's door knob. I opened the door —and for a moment I could do nothing but stare into the unlit space and wait for an answering darkness to spread protective wings over me. It was an impossible, surreal, dream-time image —but after staring at it for what seemed like an awfully long time, I had to believe it was true.

It was Rogelio, Chutsky's friend from the front desk, who was going to tell us when Weiss checked in. But it certainly didn't look like he was going to tell us much of anything, unless we listened to him through a Ouija board. Because if appearances were any guide at all, judging by the belt so tightly wrapped around his neck and the way his tongue and eyes bulged out, Rogelio was extremely dead.

“What is it, buddy?” Chutsky said.

I think Weiss has already checked in” I said.

Chutsky lumbered up from the bed and over to the closet. He stared for a moment and then said, “Shit.” He reached his hand in and felt for a pulse —rather unnecessarily, I thought, but I suppose there's a protocol for these things. He felt no pulse, of course, and mumbled, “Fucking shit.” I didn't see how repetition would help, but of course, he was the expert, so I just watched as he slid a hand into each of Rogelio's pockets in turn. “His pass key” he said. He put that into his pocket. He turned out the usual junk —keys, a handkerchief, a comb, some money. He looked carefully at the cash for a moment.

“Canadian twenty here” he said. “Like somebody tipped him for something, huh?”

“You mean Weiss?” I said.

He shrugged. “How many homicidal Canadians you know?” It was a fair question. Since the NHL season had ended a few months ago, I could only think of one —Weiss.

Chutsky pulled an envelope out of Rogelio's jacket pocket.

“Bingo” he said. “Mr B Weiss, room 865.” He handed the envelope to me. “I'm guessing it's complimentary drink tickets. Open it up.” I peeled back the flap and pulled out two oblongs of cardboard.

Sure enough: two complimentary drinks at the Cabaret Parisien, the hotel's famous cabaret. “How did you guess?” I said.

Chutsky straightened up from his ghoulish search. I fucked up” he said. “When I told Rogelio it was Weiss's birthday, all he could think was to make the hotel look good, and maybe pick up a tip.” He held up the Canadian twenty dollar bill. “This is a month's pay” he said. “You can't blame him.” He shrugged. “So I fucked up, and he's dead. And our ass is deep in the shit.” Even though he had clearly not thought through that image, I got his point. Weiss knew we were here, we had no idea where he was or what he was up to, and we had a very embarrassing corpse in the closet.

“All right” I said, and for once I was glad to have his experience to lean on —which was assuming, of course, that he had experience at fucking up and finding strangled bodies in his closet, but he was certainly more knowledgeable about it than I was. “So what do we do?”

Chutsky frowned. “First, we have to check his room. He's probably run for it, but we'd look really stupid if we didn't check.” He nodded at the envelope in my hand. “We know his room number, and he doesn't necessarily know that we know. And if he is there then we have to, what'd you call it, play OK Corral on his ass.”

“And if he's not there?” I said, because I, too, had the feeling that Rogelio was a farewell gift and Weiss was already sprinting for the horizon.

“If he's not in his room” Chutsky said, “and even if he is in his room and we take him out —either way, I'm sorry to say it, buddy, but our vacation is over.” He nodded at Rogelio. “Sooner or later they find this, and then it's big trouble. We gotta get the hell out of Dodge.”

“But what about Weiss?” I said. “What if he's already gone?” Chutsky shook his head. “He's got to run for his life, too,” he said. “He knows we're after him, and when they find Rogelio's body somebody will remember them together -1 think he's already gone, heading for the hills. But just in case, we gotta check his room. And then beat feet out of Cuba, muy rapido!

I had been terribly afraid he would have some high-tech plan for getting rid of Rogelio's body, like dipping it in laser solution in the bathtub, so I was very relieved to hear that for once he was speaking sound common sense. I had seen almost nothing of Havana except the inside of a hotel room and the bottom of a mojito glass, but it was clearly time to head for home and work on Plan B. “All right” I said. “Let's go.” Chutsky nodded. “Good man” he said. “Grab your pistol.” I took the cold and clunky thing and shoved it into the waistband of my pants, pulling the awful green jacket over it, and as Chutsky closed the closet door I headed for the hallway.

“Put the Do Not Disturb sign on the door” he said. An excellent idea, proving that I was right about his experience. At this point it would be very awkward to have a maid come in to wash the coat hangars. I hung the sign on the door knob and Chutsky followed me out of the room and down the hallway to the stairs.

It was very, very strange to feel myself stalking something in the brightly lit hall, no moon churning through the sky over my shoulder, no bright blade gleaming with anticipation, and no happy hiss from the dark back seat as the Passenger prepared to take the wheel; nothing at all except the lump-thump of Chutsky's feet, the real one and the metal one alternating, and the sound of our breathing as we found the fire door and climbed up the stairs to the eighth floor.

Room 865, just as I had guessed, overlooked the front of the hotel, a perfect spot for Weiss to place his camera. We stood outside the door quietly while Chutsky held his pistol with his hook and fumbled out Rogelio's pass key. He handed it to me, nodded at the door, and whispered, “One. Two. Three.” I shoved the key in, turned the door knob, and stepped back as Chutsky rushed into the room with his gun held high, and I followed along behind, self-consciously holding my pistol at the ready, too.

I covered Chutsky as he kicked open the bathroom door, then the closet, and then relaxed, tucking the pistol back into his pants.

“And there it is” he said, looking at the table by the window. A large fruit basket sat there, which I thought was a little ironic, considering what Weiss was known to do with them. I went over and looked; happily, there were no entrails or fingers inside. Just some mangos, papayas, and so on, and a card that said, “Feliz Navidad. Hotel Nacional.” A somewhat standard message; nothing at all out of the ordinary. Just enough to get Rogelio killed.

We looked through the drawers and under the bed, but there was nothing at all there. Aside from the fruit basket, the room was as empty as the inside of Dexter on the shelf marked “soul'.

Weiss was gone.

THIRTY-THREE

AS FAR AS I KNOW, I HAVE NEVER SAUNTERED. To BE completely honest, I doubt very much that I have even strolled, but sauntering is far beyond me. When I go somewhere, it is with a clear purpose in mind and although I hesitate to sound boastful, more often than not I tend to stride.

But after leaving Weiss's empty hotel room and stepping into the elevator, Chutsky spoke as he stuffed the guns back into the briefcase and impressed upon me the importance of looking casual, unhurried and unworried, to such an extent that as we stepped into the lobby of the Hotel Nacional, I believe I actually did, in fact, saunter. I am quite sure that's what Chutsky was doing, and I hoped I looked more natural at it than he did —of course, he had one artificial foot to deal with, so perhaps I really did look better.

In any case, we sauntered through the lobby, smiling at anyone who bothered to glance at us. We sauntered out the door, down the front steps and over to the man in the admiral's uniform, and then sauntered behind him to the curb as he called up the first taxi in the row of waiting cars. Our slow and happy meanderings continued inside the cab, because Chutsky told the driver to take us to El Morro Castle. I raised an eyebrow at him, but he just shook his head and I was left to puzzle it out for myself. As far as I knew there was no secret tunnel out of Cuba from El Morro. It was one of the most crowded tourist destinations in Havana, absolutely overrun with cameras and the scent of sunscreen. But I tried to think like Chutsky for a moment —which is to say, I pretended to be a conspiracy buff and after only a moment of reflection, I got it.

It was precisely the fact that it was a popular tourist spot that led Chutsky to tell the driver to take us there. If the worst happened, and I had to admit that's the way things were going right now, then our trail would end there, in a crowd, and tracking us down would be just a little bit harder.

So I sat back and enjoyed the ride and the splendid moonlit view and the idea that I had absolutely no idea where Weiss would go now and what he would do next. I found some comfort in thinking that he probably didn't know, either, but not enough to make me really happy.

Somewhere this same soothing glow of happy laughing light from a pale moon was shining on Weiss. And perhaps it whispered the same terrible, wonderful things into his inner ear —the sly and smiling ideas for things to do tonight, now, very soon -1 had never felt such a strong pull on the tidal pool of Dexter Beach from such a paltry moon. But there it was, its soft chortles and chuckles filling me with such a static charge that I felt like I had to burst into the darkness and slash the first warm-blooded biped I could find. It was probably just the frustration of missing Weiss again, but it was very strong, and I chewed my lip all the way up the road to El Morro.

The driver let us out by the entrance to the fortress, where a great crowd swirled about waiting for the evening show, and a number of vendors had set up their carts. An elderly couple in shorts and Hawaiian shirts climbed into the cab as we got out and Chutsky stepped over to one of the vendors and bought two cold green cans of beer. “Here you go, buddy” he said, handing me one. “Let's just stroll down this way.”

First sauntering and now strolling —all in one day. It was enough to make my head spin. But I strolled, I sipped my beer, and I followed Chutsky about a hundred yards to the far end of the crowd. We stopped once at a souvenir cart and Chutsky bought a couple of T-shirts with a picture of the lighthouse on the front, and two caps that said “CUBA” on the front. Then we strolled on to the end of the pavement. When we got there he took a casual look around, threw his beer can into a trash barrel, and said, “All right. Looks good.

Over here.” He moved casually toward an alley between two of the old fort buildings and I followed.

“Okay” I said. “Now what?” He shrugged. “Change” he said. “Then we go to the airport, get the first flight out, no matter where it's going, and head for home.

Oh —here” he said. He reached inside the briefcase and pulled out two passports. He flipped them open and handed me one, saying, “Derek Miller. Okay?”

“Sure, why not. It's a beautiful name.”

“Yeah, it is” he said. “Better than Dexter.”

“Or Kyle” I said.

“Kyle who?” He held up his new passport. “It's Calvin” he said.

“Calvin Brinker. But you can call me Cal.” He started taking things out of his jacket pockets and transferring them to his pants. “We need to lose the jackets now, too. And I wish we had time for a whole new outfit. But this will change our profile a little. Put this on” he said, handing me one of the T-shirts and a cap. I slipped out of my awful green jacket, quite gratefully, really, and the shirt I had on as well, quickly pulling on my brand new wardrobe. Chutsky did the same, and we stepped out of the alley and stuffed the Baptist missionary outfits into the trash.

“Okay” he said, and we headed back to the far end, where a couple of taxis were waiting. We hopped into the first one, Chutsky told the driver, “Aeropuerto Jose Marti” and we were off.

The ride back to the airport was pretty much the same as the ride in. There were very few cars, except for taxis and a couple of military vehicles, and the driver treated it like an obstacle course between pot holes. It was a little tricky at night, since the road was not lit, and he didn't always make it, and several times we were bounced severely, but we got to the airport eventually without any life-threatening injuries. This time the cab dropped us at the beautiful new terminal, instead of the Gulag building where we had come in.

Chutsky went straight to the screen showing departures.

“Cancun, leaving in thirty-five minutes” he said. “Perfect.”

“And what about your James Bond briefcase?” I asked, thinking it might be a slight inconvenience at security, since it was loaded with guns and grenade launchers and who knew what.

“Not to worry” he said. “Over here.” He led the way to a bank of lockers, shoved in a few coins, and stuffed the briefcase inside. “All right” he said. He slammed the locker shut, took the key, and led the way to the AeroMexico ticket counter, pausing on the way to drop the locker's key into a trash bin.

There was a very short line, and in no time at all we were buying two tickets to Cancun. Sadly, there were no vacancies outside of First Class, but since we were fleeing from the repression of a communist state I thought the extra expense was justified, even poetically fitting.

The nice young woman told us they were boarding now and we must hurry, and we did, pausing only to show our passports and pay an exit tax, which was not as bad as it sounds, since I had expected a little more difficulty with the passports, frankly, and when there was none, I didn't mind paying the tax, no matter how ridiculous the idea seemed.

We were the last passengers to board, and I am sure the flight attendant would not have smiled so pleasantly if we were flying coach. But we even got a glass of champagne to thank us for being wonderful enough to arrive late in First Class, and as they closed and locked the cabin door and I began to think we might really get away, I found that I actually enjoyed the champagne, even on an empty stomach.

I enjoyed it even more when we were finally up in the air, wheels up, and headed for Mexico, and I probably would have had more when we landed in Cancun after our short flight, but the flight attendant didn't offer me any. I suppose my First Class status had worn off somewhere along the line, leaving just enough to earn me a polite smile as we left the plane.

Inside the terminal, Chutsky went to arrange the rest of our trip home, and I sat in a shiny restaurant and ate enchiladas. They tasted like airport food everywhere else I had ever had it —a bland and strange approximation of what they were supposed to taste like, and bad, but not so clinically vile that you could demand your money back. It was hard work, but I had finished them by the time Chutsky got back with our tickets.

“Cancun to Houston, Houston to Miami” he said, handing me a ticket. “We'll get in around seven a.m.” After spending most of the night in molded plastic chairs, I can't remember a time when my home town looked quite so welcoming as when the rising sun lit up the runway and the plane finally landed and rolled up to the Miami International terminal. I was warmed by that special feeling of homecoming as we fought our way through the hysterical and often violent crowd and out to get a shuttle to long term parking.

I dropped Chutsky at the hospital to reunite with Deborah, at his request. He climbed out of the car, hesitated, and then stuck his head back in the door. “I'm sorry it didn't work out, buddy” he said.

“Yes” I said. “So am I.”

“You let me know if I can help out any way to finish this thing” he said. “You know —if you find the guy and you're feeling squeamish, I can help.”

Of course, that was the one thing I was certainly not feeling squeamish about, but it was such a thoughtful gesture on his part to offer to pull the trigger for me, I just thanked him. He nodded, said, I mean it” and then closed the car door and limped on into the hospital.

I headed home against the rush hour traffic, making fairly good time, but still arriving too late to see Rita and the kids. So I consoled myself with a shower, a change of clothes, and then a cup of coffee and some toast before heading back across town to work.

It was no longer full rush hour, but as always there was still plenty of traffic, and in the stop-and-go on the turnpike I had time to think, and I didn't like what I came up with. Weiss was still at large, and I was reasonably sure that nothing had happened to make him change his mind about me and move on to somebody else. He was still after me, and he would find some other way, soon, either to kill me or make me wish he had. And as far as I could tell, there was nothing I could do about it except wait —wait either for him to do something, or for some wonderful idea to fall out of the sky and hit me on the head.

Traffic wound to a stop. I waited. A car roared past on the shoulder of the road, blasting its horn, and several other cars blasted back, but no ideas fell on me. I was just stuck in traffic, trying to get to work, and waiting for something awful to happen. I suppose that is a terrific description of the human condition, but I had always thought I was immune, since I am not technically human.

Traffic lurched forward. I crawled slowly past a flatbed truck that was pulled off onto the grass beside the road. The hood of the truck was up. Seven or eight men in dingy clothes sat on the bed of the truck. They were waiting, too, but they seemed a little happier about it than I was. Maybe they weren't being pursued by an insane homicidal artist.

Eventually I made it into work, and if I had been hoping for a warm welcome and a cheery hello from my co-workers I would have been bitterly disappointed. Vince Masuoka was in the lab and glanced up at me as I came in. “Where have you been?” he said, in a tone of voice that sounded like he was accusing me of something terrible.

“Fine, thanks” I said. “Very glad to see you, too.”

“It's been crazy around here” Vince said, apparently without hearing me at all. “The migrant worker thing, and on top of that yesterday some douche bag killed his wife and her boyfriend.”

“I'm sorry to hear it” I said.

“He used a hammer, and if you think that was fun ...” he said.

“Doesn't sound like it” I said, mentally adding, except for him.

“Could have used your help” he said.

“It's nice to be wanted” I said, and he looked at me with disgust for a moment before turning away.

The day didn't get much better. I ended up at the site where the man with the hammer had given his little party. Vince was right —it was an awful mess, with the now-dried blood spattered across two and a half walls, a couch, and a large section of formerly beige carpet.

I heard from one of the cops on the door that the man was in custody; he'd confessed and said he didn't know what came over him. It didn't make me feel any better, but it's nice to see justice done once in a while, and the work took my mind off Weiss for a while. It's always good to stay busy.

But it didn't drive away the bad feeling that Weiss would probably think so, too.

THIRTY-FOUR

I DID STAY BUSY, AND WEISS DID, TOO. With CHUTSKY'S help, I learned that he had taken a flight to Toronto that left Havana just about the time we arrived at the Havana airport.

But what he did after that no amount of computer snooping could uncover. A small voice inside me was stuttering hopefully that maybe he would give up and stay home, but this little voice was answered by a large and very loud bray of laughter from most of the other voices inside me.

I did the very few small things I could think of; I ran some Internet searches that technically I should not have been able to do, and I managed to find a little bit of credit card activity, but all of it in Toronto. This led me to Weiss's bank, which was easy enough to make me a little bit indignant: shouldn't people guarding our sacred money be a little bit more careful about it? Weiss had made a cash withdrawal of a few thousand dollars, and then that was it. No activity at all for the next few days.

I knew that the cash withdrawal would somehow turn into bad news for me, but beyond that I could think of no way to turn that certainty into any kind of specific threat. In desperation, I went back to his YouTube page. Shockingly, the whole “New Miami” motif was completely gone, as were all the little thumbnail film boxes. Instead, the background was a dull grey and there was a rather horrible picture, a nasty-looking nude male body, with the privates partially hacked off. Underneath it was written, “Schwarzkogler was just the beginning. The next step is on the way” Any conversation that starts with, “Schwarzkogler was just the beginning” is not going anywhere that a rational being could possibly want to go. But the name sounded vaguely familiar to me and, of course, I could not possibly leave a potential clue unexamined, and so I did my due diligence and ran a Google check.

The Schwarzkogler in question turned out to be Rudolf, an Austrian who considered himself an artist, and in order to prove it he reportedly sliced his penis off a little bit at a time and took photographs of the process. This was such an artistic triumph that he continued his career, until his masterpiece finally killed him. And I remembered as I read it that he had been an icon of the group in Paris who had so brilliantly given us “Jennifer's Leg'.

I don't know much about art, but I like hanging on to my body parts. So far even Weiss had proven to be stingy with his limbs, in spite of my best efforts. But I could see that this whole artistic movement would have a very definite aesthetic appeal to him, particularly if he took it one step further, as he said he was doing. It made sense; why create art with your own body, when you can do the same thing with someone else's and it won't hurt? And your career would last a lot longer,, too. I applauded his great common sense, and I had a very deep feeling that I was going to see the next step in his artistic career sometime soon, and someplace far too close to Dexter the Philistine.

I checked the YouTube page several more times over the next week, but there was no change, and the rhythm of a very busy week at work began to make it all seem like an unpleasant memory.

Things at home were no easier; a cop was still waiting at our door when the kids came home, and although most of them were very nice, their presence added to the strain. Rita got a little bit distant and distracted, as though she was perpetually waiting for an important long distance telephone call, and this caused her usually excellent cooking to suffer. We had leftovers twice in one week previously unheard of in our little house. Astor seemed to pick up on the weirdness and, for the only time since I had known her, she got relatively silent, sitting in front of the TV with Cody and watching all her favorite DVDs over and over, with no more than two or three words at a time for the rest of us.

Cody, oddly enough, was the only one showing any kind of animation. He was very eagerly looking forward to his next Cub Scout meeting, even though it meant wearing his dreaded uniform shorts. But when I asked him why he'd had a change of heart, he admitted it was only because he was hoping the new den leader might turn up dead, too, and this time he might see something.

So the week dragged on, the weekend was no relief, and Monday morning came around again as it almost always seems to do. And even though I brought a large box of doughnuts into work, Monday had nothing much to offer me in return, either, except more work.

A drive-by shooting in Liberty City took me out onto the hot streets for several unnecessary hours. A sixteen-year-old boy was dead, and it was obvious from one quick look at the blood pattern that he had been shot from a moving vehicle. But “obvious” is never enough for a police investigation, so there I was sweating under the hot sun and doing things that came perilously close to physical labor, just so I could fill out the correct forms.

By the time I got back to my little cubby at headquarters I had sweated away most of my artificial human covering and I wanted nothing more out of life than to take a shower, put on some dry clothes, and then possibly slice up somebody who thoroughly deserved it. Of course, that led my slowly chugging train of thought straight down the track to Weiss, and with nothing else to do except admire the feel and smell of my own sweat, I checked his YouTube page one more time.

And this time there was a brand new thumbnail waiting for me at the bottom of the page.

It was labeled, “Dexterama!” There wasn't any realistic choice in the matter. I clicked on the box.

There was an unfocused blur, and then the sound of trumpets that led into noble-sounding music that reminded me of high school graduation. Then a series of pictures; the “New Miami” bodies, intercut with reaction shots from people seeing them, as Weiss's voice came in, sounding like a wicked version of a newsreel announcer.

“For thousands of years” he intoned, “terrible things have happened to us ...” and there were some close-up shots of the bodies and their plastic-masked faces. “And man has asked the same question: why am I here? For all that time, the answer has been the same ...” A close-up of a face from the crowd at Fairchild Gardens, looking puzzled, confused, uncertain, and Weiss's voice coming over it in dopey tones. I dunno ...” The film technique was very clumsy, nothing at all like the earlier stuff, and I tried not to be too critical —after all, Weiss's talents were in another area, and he had lost his two partners who were good at editing.

“So man has turned to art” Weiss said with artificially solemn breathlessness, and there was a picture of a statue with no arms and legs. “And art has given us a much better answer ...” Close-up of the jogger finding the body on South Beach, followed by Weiss's famous scream.

“But conventional art can only take us so far” he said. “Because using traditional methods like paint and stone create a barrier between the artistic event and the experience of art. And as artists we have to be all about breaking down barriers.” Picture of the Berlin Wall falling as a crowd cheers.

“So, guys like Chris Burden and David Neruda began to experiment and make themselves the art —one barrier down! But it's not enough, because to the average audience member” another dopey face from the crowd, “there's no difference between a lump of clay and some crazy artist; the barrier is still there! Bummer!” Then Weiss's face came on screen; the camera jiggled a little, as if he was positioning the camera as he talked. “We need to get more immediate. We need to make the audience part of the event, so the barrier disappears. And we need better answers to the bigger questions. Questions like, “What is truth? What is the threshold of human agony? And most important...” and here the screen showed that awful loop of Dexter Dumping Doncevic into the white porcelain tub, “what would Dexter do —if he became part of the art, instead of being the artist?” Here there was a new scream —it was muffled, but it sounded tantalizingly familiar; not Weiss's, but something I had heard before, although I couldn't place it, and Weiss was back on screen, smiling slightly and glancing over his shoulder. “At least we can answer that last one, can't we?” he said. And he picked up the camera, twirled it around off his face and onto a twitching heap in the background. The heap swam into focus and I realized why the scream had sounded familiar.

It was Rita.

She lay on her side with her hands tied behind her and her feet bound at the ankles. She squirmed furiously and made another loud and muffled sound, this time one of outrage.

Weiss laughed. “The audience is the art” he said. “And you're going to be my masterpiece, Dexter.” He smiled, and even though it was not an artificial smile, it was not particularly pretty, either. “It's going to be an absolute ... art-stravaganza” he said. And then the screen went dark.

He had Rita —and I know very well that I should have leapt up, grabbed my squirrel gun, and charged into the tall pine screaming a war cry —but I felt a curious calmness spread over me, and I simply sat there for a long moment, wondering how he'd taken her and what he would do to her, before I finally realized that, one way or another, I really did have to do something. And so I started to take a large breath to get me out of the chair and through the door.

But I had time for only one small breath, not even enough to get one foot on the floor, when a voice came from close behind me .

“That's your wife, right?” said Detective Coulter.

After I peeled myself from the ceiling I turned and faced him.

He stood just inside the door, several feet away, but close enough that he must have seen and heard everything. There was no way to dodge his question.

“Yes” I said. “That's Rita.” He nodded. “That looked like you, with the guy in the bathtub.”

“That, I...” I stammered. I don't think so.” Coulter nodded again. “That was you” he said. And since I had nothing to say and didn't want to hear myself stammer again, I just shook my head. “You going to just sit there, guy got your wife?” he said.

I was just about to get up” I said.

Coulter cocked his head to one side. “You get the feeling this guy doesn't like you or something?” he said.

“It's starting to look like that” I admitted.

“Why do you think that is?” he said.

I told you. I hurt his boyfriend” I said, which sounded very weak, even to me.

“Yeah, that's right” Coulter said. “The guy that disappeared. You still don't know where he went, do you?”

“No, I don't” I said.

“You don't” he said, cocking his head. “Because that wasn't him in the bathtub. And it wasn't you standing over him with a saw.”

“No, of course not.”

“But this guy maybe thinks it was, cuz it looks like you” he said, “so he took your wife. Kind of a trade thing, right?”

“Detective, I don't know where the boyfriend is, really” I said.

And it was true, considering tide, current, and the habits of marine scavengers.

“Huh” he said, and he put an expression on his face that I assumed was meant to look thoughtful. “So he just decides to, what? Make your wife into some kind of art, right? Because ...?”

“Because he's crazy?” I said hopefully. And that was true, too, but that didn't mean that Coulter would be impressed.

Apparently, he wasn't. “Uh-huh” he said, looking a little dubious. “He's crazy. That would make sense, right.” He nodded, like he was trying to convince himself. “Okay, so we got a crazy guy, and he's got your wife. And so what now?” He raised his eyebrows at me with a look that said he hoped I might come up with something really helpful.

I don't know” I said. I guess I should report this.”

“Report it” he said, nodding his head. “Like to the police. Because last time when you didn't do that I spoke harshly to you on the subject.”

Intelligence is generally praised as a good thing, but I really have to admit that I had liked Coulter a lot more when I thought he was a harmless idiot. Now that I knew he was not, I was caught between the urge to be very careful what I said to him and an equally powerful desire to break my chair over his head. But good chairs are expensive; caution won.

“Detective” I said. “This guy has my wife. Maybe you've never been married—”

“Twice” he said. “It didn't work.”

“Well, it works for me” I said. “I'd like to get her back in one piece.”

He stared at me for a very long moment before he finally said, “Who is this guy? I mean, you know.”

“Brandon Weiss” I said, not sure where this was going.

“That's just his name” he said. “Who the fuck is he?” I shook my head, not truly sure what he meant, and even less sure that I wanted to tell him.

“But this is the guy that, you know. Did all those fancy dead body displays that the governor was pissed off about?”

“I'm pretty sure he did” I said.

He nodded and looked at his hand, and it occurred to me that there was no Mountain Dew bottle hanging from it. The poor man must have run out.

“Be a good thing to nail this guy” he said.

“Yes, it would” I said.

“Make all kinds of people happy” he said. “Good for the career.” I suppose so” I said, wondering if perhaps I should have hit him with the chair after all.

Coulter clapped his hands. “All right” he said. “Let's go get him.” It was a wonderful idea, very decisively delivered, but I saw one small problem with it. “Go where?” I said. “Where has he taken Rita?” He blinked at me. “What? He told you” he said.

I don't think so” I said.

“Come on, you don't watch public television?” he said, sounding like I had committed some kind of crime with small animals.

“Not very much” I admitted. “The kids have outgrown Barney.”

“They been running promos for it for three weeks” he said. “The Art-stravaganza.”

“The what?”

“The Art-stravaganza, at the Convention Center” he said, starting to sound like the promo. “Over 200 cutting edge artists from across North America and the Caribbean, all under one roof.” I could feel my mouth moving in a game attempt to make words, but nothing came out. I blinked and tried again, but before I could make any sound at all, Coulter jerked his head at the door and said, “Come on. Let's go get “em.” He took one step backward. “Afterwards we can talk about why that looks like you with the guy in the tub.” This time I actually got both of my feet on the floor, together, ready to propel me up and out —but before I could take it any further my cell phone rang. Out of habit more than anything else, I answered it. “Hello” I said.

“Mr Morgan?” a tired young female voice asked.

“Yes” I said.

“This is Megan? At the after-school program? That, you know, um, with Cody? And Astor?”

“Oh, yes” I said, and a new alarm began to clatter on the main floor of my brain.

“It's like five after six?” Megan said. “And I gotta go home now?

“Cause I have my accounting class tonight? Like, at seven?”

“Yes, Megan” I said, “how can I help you?”

“Like I said? I need to go home?” she said.

“All right” I said, wishing I could reach through the telephone and fling her away to her house.

“But your kids?” she said. I mean, your wife never came for them? So they're here? And I'm not supposed to go if there are kids here?”

It seemed like a very good rule —especially since it meant that Cody and Astor were both all right, and not in Weiss's clutches. “I'll come get them” I said. “I'll be there in twenty minutes.” I snapped the telephone shut and saw Coulter looking at me expectantly. “My kids” I said. “Their mother never picked them up, and now I have to.”

“Right now?” he said.

“Yes.”

“So you're gonna go get them?”

“That's right.”

“Uh-huh” he said. “You still want to save your wife?” I think that would be best” I said.

“So you'll get the kids and come for your wife” he said. “And not, like, try to leave the country or anything.”

“Detective” I said, I want to get my wife back.” Coulter looked at me for a long moment. Then he nodded. “I'll be at the Convention Center” he said, and turned around and walked out the door.

THIRTY-FIVE

THE PARK WHERE CODY AND ASTOR WENT AFTER SCHOOL each day was only a few minutes from our house, but it was the far side of town from my office, and so it was a bit more than twenty minutes before I finally got there. Since it was rush hour traffic, I suppose you could say it was lucky that I got there at all. But I had plenty of time to reflect on what might be happening to Rita, and I found to my surprise that I actually hoped she was all right. I was just starting to get used to her. I liked having her cooking every night, and certainly I could not manage both kids on a full time basis and still have the freedom to blossom in my chosen career —not yet, not for a few more years, when they had both been trained.

So I hoped that Coulter had taken reliable back-up, and that they would have Weiss tucked away and Rita secured, perhaps sipping coffee and wrapped in a blanket, like on television.

But that brought up an interesting point, one that filled the rest of my otherwise pleasant drive through the homicidal homeward bound crowd with genuine worry. Suppose they did have Weiss all safely cuffed and mirandized? What would happen when they started to ask him questions? Things like, why did you do it? And more importantly, why did you do it to Dexter? What if he had the very poor taste to answer them truthfully? So far he had showed an appalling willingness to tell everyone all about me, and although I am not particularly shy, I would rather keep my real accomplishments hidden from the public eye.

And if Coulter added the things Weiss might blather to what he already suspected from seeing the video, things might get very unhappy in Dexterville.

It would have been a much better thing if I had been able to confront Weiss by myself —settle things amicably, mano a mano —or possibly cuchillo a cuchillo —and solve the problem of Weiss's urge to communicate by feeding my Passenger. But I'd had no real choice in the matter —Coulter had been there and heard it, and I'd had to go along. After all, I was a law-abiding citizen -1 really was, technically speaking; I mean, innocent until proven guilty in a court of law, right?

And it was looking more and more like it would come down to a court of law, starring Dexter in an orange jumpsuit and leg irons, which I could not look forward to at all —orange is a very bad color for me. Of course, being accused of murder would really be a major roadblock to my true happiness. I don't have any illusions about our legal system; I see it on the job every day, and I am quite sure that I could beat it, unless they actually catch me in the act, on film, in front of a bus filled with US senators and nuns. But even an open accusation would put me under the kind of scrutiny that would spell an end to my playtime activities, even if I was found to be completely innocent. Just look at poor OJ; once he was under suspicion, it was bound to end up badly.

But what could I do about it? My options were very limited.

I could either let Weiss talk, in which case I was in trouble, or stop him from talking —in which case, exact same result. There was no way around it. Dexter was in deep, and the tide was rising.

It was therefore a very thoughtful Dexter who finally pulled up at the community hall at the park. Good old Megan was still there, holding Cody and Astor by the hand, and hopping from one foot to the other in her anxiety to be rid of them and off into the exciting world of accounting class. They all seemed happy to see me, in their own individual ways, which was so gratifying that I forgot all about Weiss for three or four full seconds.

“Mr Morgan?” Megan said. I really gotta go.” And I was so stunned to hear her complete a sentence that was not a question, I merely nodded and pried Cody and Astor's hands from hers. She skittered away to a small beat-up Chevy and raced off into the evening traffic.

“Where's Mom?” Astor demanded.

I am sure there is a caring and sensitive and very human way to tell children that their mother is in the clutches of a homicidal monster, but I did not know what it was, so I said, “That bad guy has her. The one that crashed into your car.”

“The one I got with a pencil?” Cody asked me.

“That's right” I said.

I hit him in the crotch” Astor said.

“You should have hit him harder” I said. “He's got your mom.” She made a face at me that showed she was deeply disappointed in my dorkiness. “Are we going to go get her?”

“We're going to help” I said. “The police are there now.” They both looked at me like I was crazy. “The policeV.” Astor said.

“You sent the policelV

“I had to come get you two” I said, surprised to find myself on the defensive all of a sudden.

“So you're going to let this guy go, and he'll just go to jail?” she demanded.

I had to” I said, and suddenly I felt like I really was in court and I had already lost. “One of the cops found out, and I had to come get you.”

They exchanged one of their silent but very meaningful looks, and then Cody looked away. “Are you taking us with you now?” Astor asked.

“Uh” I said, and it really didn't seem fair to have first Coulter and now Astor reduce honey-tongued Dashing Dexter to monosyllabic idiocy in the same day, but there it was. Things being what they were —exceedingly unpleasant and uncertain —I had not really thought this through. Of course I could not take them with me to corner Weiss. I knew that his whole performance was aimed at me, and it would not really start until I got there, if he could help it; I could not be certain that Coulter had him cornered, and it would be far too dangerous.

As if she heard me thinking it, Astor said, “We already beat him once.”

“He wasn't expecting anything from you then” I said. “This time he will be.”

“This time we'll have more than a pencil” Astor said, and the cool ferocity she said it with absolutely warmed my heart —but it was still out of the question.

“No” I said. “It's too dangerous.” Cody muttered, “Promise” and Astor rolled her eyes in an epic fashion and blew out a matching breath.

“You keep saying we can't do anything,” she said. “Not until you teach us. And we say go ahead and teach us, and we don't do anything. And now when we have a chance to really learn something real you say it's too dangerous.”

“It is too dangerous” I said.

“Then what are we supposed to do while you go doing something dangerous?” she demanded. “And what if you don't save Mom and you both never come back?” I looked at her, and then at Cody. She was glaring at me with her lower lip quivering, while he settled for a stony-faced expression of contempt, and once again the best I could manage was to open my mouth soundlessly a few times.

And that is how I ended up driving to the Convention Center, going slightly faster than the speed limit, with two very excited children in the back seat. We got off 1-95 at 8th Street and headed over to the Convention Center on Brickell. There was a lot of traffic and no place to park —apparently, a lot of other people had been watching public television and were aware of the Art-stravaganza.

Under the circumstances, it seemed a little silly to waste time looking for a parking spot, and just as I decided to park on the sidewalk police-style, I saw what had to be Coulter's motor-pool car, and I pulled up onto the walk beside it and slapped my Department placard on the dashboard and turned to face Cody and Astor.

“Stay with me” I said, “and don't do anything without asking me first.”

“Unless it's an emergency” Astor said.

I thought about how they'd done so far in emergencies; pretty good, in fact. Besides, it was almost certainly all over by now. “All right” I said. “If it's an emergency.” I opened the car door. “Come on” I said.

They didn't budge.

“What?” I said.

“Knife” Cody said softly.

“He wants a knife” Astor said.

“I'm not giving you a knife,” I said.

“But what if there is an emergency?” Astor demanded. “You said we could do something if there's an emergency but then you won't let us have anything to do it with!”

“You can't wander around in public holding a knife” I said.

“We can't go totally defenseless” Astor insisted.

I blew out a long breath. I was reasonably sure that Rita would be safe until I got there, but at this rate, Weiss would die of old age before I found him. So I opened the glove compartment and took out a Phillips head screwdriver and handed it to Cody. After all, life is all about compromise. “Here” I said. “That's the best I can do.”

Cody looked at the screwdriver and then looked at me.

“It's better than a pencil” I said. He looked at his sister, and then he nodded. “Good” I said, reaching once again to open the door.

“Let's go.”

This time they followed me, up across the sidewalk and to the main entrance of the big hall. But before we got there Astor stopped dead.

“What is it?” I asked her.

I have to pee” she said.

“Astor” I said. “We have to get moving here.” I have to pee really bad” she said.

“Can't it wait five minutes?”

“No” she said, shaking her head vigorously. I gotta go now.” I took a very deep breath and wondered if Batman ever had this problem with Robin. “All right” I said. “Hurry.” We found the restroom over to one side of the lobby and Astor hurried in. Cody and I just stood and waited. He changed his grip on the screwdriver a few times, and finally settled for the more natural blade-forward position. He looked at me for approval, and I nodded, just as Astor came out again.

“Come on” she said. “Let's go.” She breezed past us toward the door to the main hall and we followed. A doughy man with large glasses wanted to collect fifteen dollars from each of us to let us enter, but I showed him my police credentials. “What about the kids?” he demanded.

Cody started to raise his screwdriver, but I motioned him back.

“They're witnesses” I said.

The man looked like he wanted to argue, but when he saw the way Cody was holding the screwdriver, he just shook his head. “All right” he said with a very large sigh.

“Do you know where the other officers went?” I asked him.

He just kept shaking his head. “There's only one officer that I know of” he said, “and I am quite sure I would know if there were more, since they all think they can just parade past me without paying.” He smiled to show that he really did mean it as an insult, and beckoned us forward into the hall. “Enjoy the show.” We went into the hall. There were actually several booths showing things that were recognizable as art —sculpture, paintings, and so on. But there were many more that really seemed to be working a little too hard at stretching the boundaries of the human experience into new frontiers of perception. One of the very first we saw was nothing more than a pile of leaves and twigs with a faded beer can lying beside it. Two more featured multiple TV monitors; one showed a fat man sitting on a toilet, the other an airplane flying into a building. But there was no sign of Weiss, Rita or Coulter.

We walked down to the far end of the hall and turned, glancing up each aisle as we passed. There were many more interesting and horizon-expanding displays, but none of them involved Rita. I began to wonder if I had been wrong to think Coulter was secretly smart.

I had blindly accepted his statement that Weiss would be here —but what if he was wrong? What if Weiss was somewhere else, happily carving up Rita, while I looked at art that merely added depth and understanding to a soul that I really didn't have?

And then Cody stopped in his tracks and slowly came up on point. I turned to see what he was looking at, and I came to a point, too.

“Mom” he said.

And it was.

THIRTY-SIX

A CROWD OF ABOUT A DOZEN PEOPLE HAD GATHERED IN the far corner of the room, beneath a flat-screen TV monitor that had been mounted to the wall. On the monitor was a close-up of Rita's face. She had a gag pulled between her teeth, but her eyes were as wide open as they could possibly be and she was tossing her head from side to side in terror. Before I could do anything but lift a foot, Cody and Astor were already plunging ahead to save their mother.

“Wait!” I called to them, but they did not, so I hurried after them, scanning frantically for Weiss. The Dark Passenger was completely quiet, silenced by my near-panicked concern for Cody and Astor, and in my rapidly skittering imagination Weiss was waiting to jump out at them from behind every easel, ready to lurch out from under every table, and I did not like rushing to meet him blind and sweating, but the children running to Rita left me no choice at all. I went faster, but they were already pushing through the small crowd to their mother's side.

Rita was bound as well as gagged and strapped down to a table saw. The blade was whirling between her ankles, and the implication was clear that some very bad person was ready and willing to push her forward toward the shiny teeth of the saw. A sign taped to the front side of the table said, “Who Can Save Our Nell?” and below that, in block letters, “PLEASE DO NOT DISTURB THE PERFORMERS'.

Around the edge of the space ran a model train, towing a series of flat cars with a sign propped up on them that said, “The Future Of Melodrama'.

And finally I saw Coulter —but it was not a happy and reassuring sighting. He was propped up in a corner, head lolling to one side.

Weiss had put an old-fashioned conductor's hat on his head, and a heavy electric cable was attached to his arms by large, jumper-cable clips. A sign was propped in his lap: “SEMI-CONDUCTOR'. He was not moving, but I could not tell if he was dead or merely unconscious, and considering the circumstances finding out was not high on my list.

I pushed into the crowd, and as the model train went by again I heard Weiss's patented pre-recorded scream played in a taped loop that repeated every few seconds.

I still could not see Weiss —but as I reached the crowd the image on the TV monitor changed —to my face. I spun frantically, searching for the camera, and found it, mounted on a pole on the far side of the exhibit's space. And before I could spin back around again, I heard a whistling sound and a loop of very heavy fishing line whipped tight around my neck. As things started to go dark and whirly I had only a moment to appreciate the bitter irony that he was using a fishing line noose, one of my own techniques; the phrase “my own petard” trundled through my brain, and then I was on my knees and stumbling dreadfully forward in the direction of Weiss's exhibit.

With a noose that tight around your neck, it's really quite remarkable how quickly you lose interest in everything and slide into a dim region of distant sounds and dark lights. And even though I felt the pressure slacken slightly, I couldn't raise enough interest to use the looseness to get free. I slumped on the floor, trying to remember how to breathe, and from far away I heard a woman's voice saying, “That isn't right —stop them!” And I was mildly grateful that someone was going to stop them until the voice went on, “Hey, you kids! It's an art exhibit! Get away from there!” And it filtered through to me that somebody wanted to stop Cody and Astor from ruining the piece by saving their mother.

Air came in through my throat, which suddenly felt sore and much too big; Weiss had let go of the noose and picked up his camera. I took a ragged breath and managed to focus one eye on his back as he began to pan across the crowd. I took another breath; pain raced through my throat, but it felt pretty good, and enough light and thought came back with the breath that I managed to get up on one knee and look around.

Weiss was pointing the camera at a woman on the edge of the crowd —the woman who had scolded Cody and Astor for interfering.

She was fifty-ish, dressed very stylishly, and she was still yelling at them to back away, leave it alone, somebody call security, and happily for us all the kids were not listening. They had freed Rita from the table, although her hands were still bound, and the gag was still wedged into her mouth. I stood up —but before I could take more than a half-step toward them, Weiss grabbed my leash again and pulled tight, and I went back into the midnight sun.

Dimly, from very far away, I heard scuffling, and the line around my throat went slack again as Weiss said, “Not this time you little shit!” There was a smacking sound and a small thump, and as a little light came back into my world I saw Astor lying on the floor and Weiss struggling to take the screwdriver away from Cody. I raised a hand to my neck and scrabbled feebly at the line, and got it loose enough to take a huge breath, which was probably the right thing to do, but nonetheless caused a fit of the most painful coughing I have ever experienced, so very choked and dry that the lights went out again.

When I could breath again, I opened my eyes to see that Cody was on the floor next to Astor, on the far side of the exhibit space beyond the table saw, and Weiss stood over them with the screwdriver in one hand and his video camera in the other. Astor's leg twitched, but other than that they did not move. Weiss stepped toward them and raised the screwdriver, and I lurched drunkenly up to my feet to stop him, knowing I could never get there in time and feeling all the darkness drain out of me and puddle around my shoes at the thought of my helplessness.

At the last possible second, as Weiss stood gloating over the small still bodies of the children and Dexter leaned forward with horrible slowness, Rita stumbled forward into the picture —hands still tied, mouth still gagged, but feet fast enough to bring her charging into Weiss, slamming him with a deadly hip that sent him twirling sideways, away from the children, and straight at the table saw. And as he staggered upright she bumped him again, and this time his feet tangled together and he fell, the arm holding his camera flailing out protectively to keep him from falling onto the spinning saw blade. And he almost succeeded —almost.

Weiss's hand slapped the table on the far side of the blade, but the force of his fall brought all his weight down, and with a grinding whine an explosive red mist shot into the air as Weiss's forearm, hand still clutching the camera, came off altogether and thumped onto the model train track at the edge of the crowd. The spectators gasped and Weiss stood slowly upright, staring at the stump of his arm as the blood pumped out. He looked at me and tried to say something, shook his head and stepped toward me, and looked at his rapidly squirting stump again, and then came another step toward me. And then, almost like he was walking down a flight of invisible stairs, he walked slowly down onto his knees and knelt there, swaying, only a few feet away from me.

Paralyzed by my fight with the noose and my fear for the children and above all the sight of that awful wet nasty viscous horrible blood pouring out and onto the floor, I simply stood there as Weiss looked up at me one last time. His lips moved again, but nothing came out and he shook his head slowly, carefully, as if he was afraid that it, too, might fall off and onto the floor. With exaggerated care he locked his eyes onto mine and very carefully, very distinctly, he said, “Take lots of pictures.” And he smiled a faint and very pale smile and pitched face forward into his own blood.

I took a step back as he fell and looked up; on the TV screen the model train chugged forward and slammed into the camera still clutched in the hand at the end of Weiss's severed arm. The wheels churned for a moment, and then the train fell over.

“Brilliant” said the stylish old lady in the front of the crowd.

“Absolutely brilliant.”

EPILOGUE

THE EMERGENCY MEDICS IN MIAMI ARE VERY GOOD, partly because they get so much practice. But alas, they did not manage to save Weiss. He was very nearly bled out by the time they got to his side, and at the urging of a frantic Rita the meds spent a crucial two more minutes looking at Cody and Astor as Weiss slipped away down the long dark slope into the pages of art history.

Rita hovered anxiously while the EMS guys got Cody and Astor to sit up and look around. Cody blinked and tried to reach for his screwdriver, and Astor immediately started to complain about how rotten the smelling salts smelled, so I was reasonably sure they were going to be all right. Still, they almost certainly had minor concussions, which gave me a warm feeling of family togetherness; so young, and already following in my footsteps. So the two of them were sent off to the hospital for twenty-four hours of observation, “just to be safe'. Rita went along, of course, to protect them from the doctors.

When they were gone, I stood and watched as the two EMS techs shook their heads over Weiss and then moved on over to Coulter. I was still feeling a little woozy from my time in Weiss's noose, and a little strange at the way things had wobbled away from me so quickly. Normally I am Dexter on the Spot, at the center of all important action, and to have so much death and destruction all around me and not be a crucial part of it didn't seem right. Two whole bodies, and me no more than an observer with the vapors, fainting on the outskirts of the drama like a Victorian maiden.

And Weiss: he actually looked peaceful and content. Extremely pale and dead, too, of course, but still —what could he be thinking?

I had never seen such an expression on the face of the dear departed, and it was a bit unsettling. What did he have to feel happy about? He was absolutely, certifiably dead, and that did not seem to me like anything that should inspire good cheer.

Maybe it was just a trick of the facial muscles settling into death.

Whatever it was, my pondering was interrupted by a hurried scuffle behind me and I turned around.

Special Agent Recht came to a halt a few feet away and stood looking at the carnage with a face locked rigidly into a professional mask, even though it did not hide the shock, or the fact that she was rather pale. Still, she didn't faint or throw up, so I thought she was well ahead of the game.

“Is that him?” she said in a voice as tightly locked as her face. She cleared her throat before I could answer and added, “Is that the man who attempted to kidnap your children?”

“Yes” I said, and then, showing that my giant brain was at last swimming back to the controls, I anticipated the awkward question and said, “My wife was sure that's him, and so were the kids.” Recht nodded, apparently unable to take her eyes off Weiss. “All right” she said. I couldn't tell what that meant, but it seemed like an encouraging sign. I hoped it meant that the FBI would lose interest in me now. “What about him?” Recht said, nodding toward the back of the exhibit where the EMS guys were finishing their examination of Coulter.

“Detective Coulter got here before me” I said.

Recht nodded. “That's what the guy on the door says” she said, and the fact that she had asked about that was not terribly comforting, so I decided that a few careful dance steps might be called for.

“Detective Coulter” I said carefully, as if fighting for control and I have to admit that the rasp remaining in my voice from the noose was very effective —“He got here first. Before I could ... I think he —he gave his life to save Rita.” I thought that sniffling might be overkill so I held back, but even I was impressed with the sound of the manly emotion in my voice.

Alas, Special Agent Recht was not. She looked again at Coulter's body, and at Weiss's, and then at me. “Mr Morgan” she said, and there was official doubt in her voice. But then she just shook her head and turned away.

In a sane and well-ordered universe, any ruling deity would have said that was enough for one day. But things being what they are, it was not, because I turned around to leave and bumped directly into Israel Salguero.

“Detective Coulter is dead ?” he asked, sliding a step back without blinking.

“Yes” I said. “Urn, before I got here.” Salguero nodded. “Yes” he said. “That's what the witnesses said.” On the one hand, it was very good news that the witnesses said that, but on the other, it was very bad that he had already asked them, since it meant his first concern was: Where was Dexter when the bodies began to fall ? And so, thinking that some grand, emotional flummery might save the day, I looked away and said, I should have been here.”

There was such a long silence from Salguero that I finally had to turn back and look at him, if only to make sure he had not drawn his weapon and pointed it at my head. Happily for Dexter's Dome, he had not. Instead, he was just looking at me with his completely detached and emotionless gaze. I think it is probably a very good thing that you were not here” he said at last. “Good for you, and your sister, and the memory of your father.”

“Urn ...?” I said, and it is a testament to Salguero's savvy that he knew exactly what I meant.

“Apart from these gallery-goers, there are now no witnesses ...” He paused and gave me a look very much like what you might see if cobras ever learn to smile. “No surviving witnesses” he said, “to anything that happened, in any of these ... circumstances.” He made a slight movement of his shoulders that was probably a shrug. “And so ...” He did not finish the sentence, letting it dangle so it might mean, “and so I will kill you myself” or, “and so I will simply arrest you” or even, “and so that's the end of it.” He watched me for a moment and then repeated, “And so,” this time so that it sounded like a question. Then he nodded and turned away, leaving me with the image of his bright and lidless gaze burned into my retina.

And so.

That was, happily, just about the last of it. There was a minor bit of excitement provided by the stylish lady from the front of the crowd, who turned out to be Dr Elaine Donazetti, a very important figure in the world of contemporary art. She pushed her way through the perimeter and began taking Polaroids, and had to be restrained and led away from the bodies. But she used the pictures and some of the video tape Weiss had made and published a series of illustrated articles that made Weiss semi-famous with the people who like that sort of thing. So, at least he got his last request for pictures. It's nice when things work out, isn't it?

Detective Coulter was just as lucky. Department gossip told me that he had been passed over for promotion, twice, and I suppose he thought he could jump-start his career by making a dramatic arrest single-handed. And it worked! The department decided it needed some good publicity out of this whole dreadful mess, and Coulter was all they had to work with. So he was promoted posthumously for his heroism in single-handedly almost saving Rita.

Of course, I went to Coulter's funeral. I love the ceremony, the ritual, the outpouring of all that rigid emotion, and it gave me a chance to practice some of my favorite facial expressions —solemnity, noble grief, and compassion, all rarely used and in need of a workout.

The whole department was there, in uniform, even Deborah.

She looked very pale in her blue uniform, but after all, Coulter had been her partner, at least on paper, and honor demanded that she attend. The hospital fussed, but she was close enough to being released anyway that they didn't stop her from going. She did not cry, of course —she had never been nearly as good at hypocrisy as I was. But she looked properly solemn when they lowered the coffin into the ground, and I did my best to make the same kind of face.

I thought I did it rather well, too —but Sergeant Doakes did not agree. I saw him glaring at me from the ranks, as if he thought I had personally strangled Coulter, which was absurd; I had never strangled anyone. I mean, a little noose play now and then, but all in good fun —I don't like that kind of personal contact, and a knife is so much cleaner. Of course, I had been very pleased to see Coulter pronounced dead and Dexter therefore off the hook, but I'd had nothing at all to do with it. As I said, it's just nice when things work out, isn't it?

Life staggered back onto its feet and lurched into its old routines once again. I went to work, Cody and Astor went to school, and two days after Coulter's funeral Rita went to a doctor's appointment.

That night after she tucked the children in she settled down beside me on the couch, put her head on my shoulder and pried the remote control out of my hands. She turned the TV off and sighed a few times, and finally, when I was mystified beyond endurance, I said, “Is something wrong?”

“No” she said. “Not wrong at all. I mean, I don't think so. If you don't, um, think so.”

“Why would I think so?” I said.

I don't know” she said, and she sighed again. “It's just, you know, we never talked about it, and now ...”

“Now what?” I said. It was really too much; after all I had gone through, to have to endure this kind of circular non-conversation, and I could feel my irritation level rising rapidly.

“Now, just” she said. “The doctor says I'm all right.”

“Oh” I said. “That's good.”

She shook her head. “In spite of” she said. “You know.”

I didn't know, and it didn't seem fair that she expected me to know, and I said so. And after a great deal of throat-clearing and stammering, when she finally told me, I found that I lost the power of speech just as she had, and the only thing I could manage to say was the punchline of a very old joke that I knew was not the right thing to say, but I could not stop it and it came out anyway, and as if from a great distance, I heard Dexter's voice calling out: You're going to have a WHAT?!

THE END

Jeff Lindsay

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

THIRTY-SIX

THIRTY-SEVEN

THIRTY-EIGHT

THIRTY-NINE

FORTY

EPILOGUE

Jeff Lindsay

Dexter is delicious

This part of the hospital seems like foreign country to me. There is no sense of the battlefield here, no surgical teams in gore-stained scrubs trading witty remarks about missing body parts, no steely-eyed administrators with their clipboards, no herds of old drunks in wheelchairs, and above all, no flocks of wide-eyed sheep huddled together in fear at what might come out of the double steel doors. There is no stench of blood, antiseptic, and terror; the smells here are kinder, homier. Even the colors are different: softer, more pastel, without the drab, battleship utilitarianism of the walls in other parts of the building. There are, in fact, none of the sights and sounds and dreadful smells I have come to associate with hospitals, none at all. There is only the crowd of moon-eyed men standing at the big window, and to my infinite surprise, I am one of them.

We stand together, happily pressed up to the glass and cheerfully making space for any newcomer. White, black, brown; Latin, African-American, Asian-American, Creole-it doesn't matter. We are all brothers. No one sneers or frowns; no one seems to care about getting an accidental nudge in the ribs now and again, and no one, wonder of all, seems to harbor any violent thoughts about any of the others. Not even me. Instead, we all cluster at the glass, looking at the miraculous commonplace in the next room.

Are these human beings? Can this really be the Miami I have always lived in? Or has some strange physics experiment in an underground supercollider sent us all to live in Bizarro World, where everyone is kind and tolerant and happy all the time?

Where is the joyfully homicidal crowd of yesteryear? Where are the well-armed, juiced-up, half-crazed, ready-to-kill friends of my youth? Has all this changed, vanished, washed away forever in the light from yonder window?

What fantastic vision beyond the glass has taken a hallway filled with normal, wicked, face-breaking, neck-snapping humans and turned them into a clot of bland and drooling happy-wappys?

Unbelieving, I look again, and there it is. There it still is. Four neat rows of pink and brown, tiny wiggling creatures, so small and prunish and useless-and yet it is they who have turned this crowd of healthy, kill-crazy humans into a half-melted splotch of dribbling helplessness. And beyond this mighty feat of magic, even more absurd and dramatic and unbelievable, one of those tiny pink lumps has taken our Dark Dabbler, Dexter the Decidedly Dreadful, and made him, too, into a thing of quiet and contemplative chin spittle. And there it lies, waving its toes at the strip lights, utterly unaware of the miracle it has performed-unaware, indeed, even of the very toes it wiggles, for it is the absolute Avatar of Unaware-and yet, look what it has done in all its unthinking, unknowing wigglehood. Look at it there, the small, wet, sour-smelling marvel that has changed everything.

Lily Anne.

Three small and very ordinary syllables. Sounds with no real meaning-and yet strung together and attached to the tiny lump of flesh that squirms there on its pedestal, it has performed the mightiest of magical feats. It has turned Dexter Dead for Decades into something with a heart that beats and pumps true life, something that almost feels, that so very nearly resembles a human being There: It waves one small and mighty hand and that New Thing inside Dexter waves back. Something turns over and surges upward into the chest cavity, bounces off the ribs and attacks the facial muscles, which now spread into a spontaneous and unpracticed smile. Heavens above, was that really an emotion? Have I fallen so far, so fast?

Yes, apparently I have. There it goes again.

Lily Anne.

"Your first?" says a voice beside me, and I glance to my left-quickly, so as not to miss a single second of the spectacle on the far side of the window. A stocky Latin man stands there in jeans and a clean work shirt with MANNY stitched over the pocket.

"Yes," I say, and he nods.

"I got three," he says, and smiles. "I don't get tired of it, either."

"No," I say, looking back at Lily Anne. "How could you?" She is moving her other hand now-and now both at the same time! What a remarkable child.

"Two boys," he says, shaking his head, and adds, "and at last, a girl." And I can tell from the tone of his voice that this thought makes him smile and I sneak another glance at him; sure enough, his face is stretched into an expression of happy pride that is nearly as stupid-looking as my own. "Boys can be so dumb," he says. "I really wanted a girl this time, and…" His smile stretches even wider and we stand together for several minutes in companionable silence, contemplating our bright and beautiful girls beyond the glass.

Lily Anne.

Lily Anne Morgan. Dexter's DNA, living and moving on through time to another generation, and more, into the far-flung future, a day beyond imagination-taking the very essence of all that is me and moving it forward past the clock-fingered reach of death, sprinting into tomorrow wrapped in Dexter's chromosomes-and looking very good doing it. Or so it seems to her loopy father.

Everything has changed. A world with Lily Anne Morgan in it is so completely unknown: prettier, cleaner, neater edges, brighter colors. Things taste better now, even the Snickers bar and cup of vending machine coffee, all I have had for twenty-four hours. The candy bar's flavor was far more subtle than I had known before, and the coffee tasted of hope. Poetry flows into my icy cold brain and trickles down to my fingertips, because all is new and wonderful now. And far beyond the taste of the coffee is the taste of life itself. Now it is something to nurture, protect, and delight in. And the thought comes from far out beyond bizarre that perhaps life is no longer something to feed on in the terrible dark frenzy of joy that has defined me until this new apocalyptic moment. Maybe Dexter's world should die now, and a new world of pink delight will spring from the ashes. And the old and terrible need to slash the sheep and scatter the bones, to spin through the wicked night like a thresher, to seed the moonlight with the tidy leftovers of Dexter's Dark Desiring? Maybe it's time to let it go, time to let it drain away until it is all gone, vanished utterly.

Lily Anne is here and I want to be different.

I want to be better than what I have been.

I want to hold her. I want to sit her on my lap and read her Christopher Robin and Dr. Seuss. I want to brush her hair and teach her about toothpaste and put Band-Aids on her knees. I want to hug her in the sunset in a room full of puppies while the band plays "Happy Birthday," and watch her grow up into wonderful beautiful cancer-curing symphony-writing adulthood, and to do that I cannot be who I have always been-and that is fine with me, because I realize one more important thing.

I don't want to be Dark Dexter anymore.

The thought is not so much a shock as a completion. I have lived my life moving in one direction and now I am there. I don't need to do those things anymore. No regrets, but no longer necessary. Now there is Lily Anne and she trumps all that other dancing in the dark. It is time to move on, time to evolve! Time to leave Old Devil Dexter behind in the dust. That part of me is complete, and now Now there is one small and very sour note singing in the choir of Dexter's happiness. Something is not quite right. Somewhere nearby some small gleam of the old wicked life flashes through the rosy glow of the new and a dry rattle of scales grates across the new melody.

Someone is watching me.

The thought comes as a silky whisper only one step removed from a chuckle. The Dark Passenger, as ever, is amused at the timing as well as the sentiment-but there is truth in the warning, too, and I turn very casual-careful, smile now stitched in place in the old fake way, and I scan the hallway behind me: first to the left, toward the vending machines. An old man, his shirt tucked into pants pulled much too high, leans against the soda machine with his eyes closed. A nurse walks by without seeing him.

I turn and look to the right, down to where the hallway ends in a "T" that goes one way to a row of rooms and the other way to the elevators. And there it is, as plain as a blip on any radar screen, or what is left of the blip, because someone is going around the corner toward the elevators, and all I can see is half his back as he scuttles away. Tan pants, a greenish plaid shirt, and the bottom of one athletic shoe, and he is gone, and he does not leave any explanation at all of why he was watching me, but I know that he was, and this is confirmed by the cheesy smirk I feel oozing from the Passenger, as if to say, Oh, really, we're leaving what behind?

I know of no reason in this world, or any other, why anyone would be interested in little old me. My conscience is as clean and empty as it can possibly be-which means, of course, that I have always tidied up carefully, and in any case, my conscience has the same hard reality as a unicorn.

But someone very definitely was watching me and this is oh-so-more-than-slightly bothersome, because I can think of no wholesome and happy reason why anyone would want to watch Dull-as-Dishwater Dexter, and I must now think that whatever threatens Dexter might also be a danger to Lily Anne-and this is not a thing that I can allow.

And of course the Passenger finds this highly amusing: that moments ago I was sniffing the bright buds of spring and forswearing the way of all flesh, and now I am once again up on point and eager to slay-but this is different. This is not recreational homicide. This is protecting Lily Anne, and even after these very first moments of life, I will quite happily rip the veins out of anything that comes near her, and it is with this comforting thought that I stroll to the corner of the hall and glance toward the elevator.

But there is nothing there. The hallway is empty.

I have only a few seconds to stare, barely enough time to enjoy my own slack-jawed silence, and my cell phone begins to vibrate on my hip. I draw it from its holster and glance at the number; it is Sergeant Deborah, my own adopted flesh and blood, my cop sister, no doubt calling to coo over the arrival of Lily Anne and offer me sibling best wishes. So I answer the phone.

"Hi," I say.

"Dexter," she says. "We got a shit-storm and I need you. Get down here right away."

"I'm not on duty right now," I say. "I'm on paternity leave." But before I can reassure her that Lily Anne is fine and beautiful and Rita is in a deep sleep down the hall, she gives me an address and hangs up.

I went back and said good-bye to Lily Anne. She waved her toes, rather fondly, I thought, but she didn't say anything.

TWO

The address Deborah gave me was in an old part of Coconut Grove, which meant there were no high-rises or guard booths. The houses were small and eccentric, and all the trees and bushes spread up and out into an overgrown riot of green that hid almost everything except the actual road. The street itself was small and darkened by the canopy of overhanging banyans, and there was barely room for me to steer my car through the dozen or so official vehicles that had already arrived and claimed all the parking spots. I managed to find a crevice beside a sprawling bamboo plant about a block away; I wedged my car in and took the long hike back, lugging my blood-spatter kit. It seemed much heavier than usual, but perhaps it was just that being so far from Lily Anne sapped my strength.

The house was modest and mostly hidden by plant life. It had a flat, tilted roof of the kind that had been "modern" forty years ago, and there was a strange and twisted chunk of metal out front that was probably supposed to be a sculpture of some kind. It stood in a pool of water, and a fountain squirted up next to it. Altogether it was the very picture of Old Coconut Grove.

I noticed that several of the cars parked in front looked rather federal motor pool-ish, and sure enough, when I got inside there were a couple of gray suits in among the blue uniforms and pastel guayaberas of the home team. They were all milling about in clusters, a kind of colloidal motion made up of groups-some doing question and answer, some forensics, and others just staring around for something important to do to justify the expense of driving over here and standing at a crime scene.

Deborah was in a group that could best be described as confrontational, which was no surprise to those who know her and love her. She was facing two of the suits, one of them a female FBI agent I knew, Special Agent Brenda Recht. My nemesis, Sergeant Doakes, had sicced her on me when an attempted kidnapping of my step-kids, Cody and Astor, had gone down. Even filled with the good sergeant's helpful paranoia she had not managed to prove anything against me, but she had been deeply suspicious, and I was not looking forward to renewing my acquaintance with her.

Standing beside her was a man I can only describe as a generic fed, with a gray suit and white shirt and shiny black shoes. They were both facing my sister, Sergeant Deborah, and another man I didn't know. He was blond, about six feet tall, muscular, and absurdly good-looking in a rugged, masculine way, as if God had taken Brad Pitt and decided to make him really handsome. He was staring off to the side at a floor lamp while Deborah snarled something forceful at Special Agent Recht. As I approached, Deborah glanced up and caught my eye, turned back to Special Agent Recht, and said, "Now keep your goddamned wingtips out of my crime scene! I have real work to do," and she turned away and took my arm, saying, "Over here. Take a look at this."

Deborah dragged me toward the back of the house, muttering "Fucking feds" to herself, and because I was so very much filled with love and understanding from my time in the maternity ward I said, "Why are they here?"

"Why are they ever here?" Debs snarled. "They think it's kidnapping, which makes it federal. Which also makes it impossible for me to do my fucking job and find out if it's kidnapping, with all those assholes in their goddamned Florsheims clomping around. Here," she said, switching gears very smoothly and propelling me into a room at the end of a hall. Camilla Figg was already there, crawling across the floor very slowly on all fours on the right side of the room and avoiding the left side altogether. That was a very good idea, because the left side of the room was so spattered with blood that it looked like a large animal had exploded. The blood glistened, still moist, and I felt a twitch of unhappiness that there could be so much of the awful stuff.

"Does that look like a fucking kidnapping to you?" Deborah demanded.

"Not a very efficient one," I said, looking at the huge smear of blood. "They left almost half of their victim behind."

"What can you tell me?" Deborah said.

I looked at her, feeling mildly annoyed at her assumption that I would know what had happened instantly, on first look, by some kind of instinct. "At least let me read the tarot cards," I said. "The spirits have to come a long way to talk to me."

"Tell them to hurry," she said. "I got the whole fucking department breathing down my neck, never mind the feds. Come on, Dex; there must be something you can tell me. Unofficially?"

I glanced at the largest splotch of blood, the one that started in the middle of the wall over the bed and went in all directions. "Well," I said, "unofficially, it looks more like a game of paintball than a kidnapping."

"I knew it," she said, and then frowned. "What do you mean?"

I pointed at the red splat on the wall. "It would be very difficult for a kidnapper to inflict a wound that did that," I said. "Unless he picked up his victim and threw him at the wall at about forty miles an hour."

"Her," Deborah said. "It's a her."

"Whatever," I said. "The point is, if it's a child small enough to throw, then she lost so much blood here she has to be dead."

"She's eighteen years old," Debs said. "Almost nineteen."

"Then assuming she's average size, I don't think we want to try to catch somebody who could throw her that hard. If you shoot him, he might get very annoyed and pull off your arms."

Deborah was still frowning. "So you're saying this is all fake," she said.

"It looks like real blood," I said.

"Then what does it mean?"

I shrugged. "Officially, it's too soon to tell."

She punched my arm. It hurt. "Don't be a jerk," she said.

"Ow," I said.

"Am I looking for a body, or a teenager sitting at the mall and smirking at the dumb-ass cops? I mean, where would a kid get this much blood?"

"Well," I said hopefully, not really wanting to think about that, "it might not even be human blood."

Deborah stared at the blood. "Sure," she said. "Of course. She gets a jar of fucking cow blood or something, throws it at the wall, and takes off. She's scamming her parents for money."

"Unofficially, it's possible," I said. "At least let me analyze it."

"I got to tell those assholes something," she said.

I cleared my throat and gave her my best Captain Matthews imitation. "Pending analysis and lab work, there is a very real possibility that, uh, the crime scene may not be. Um. Evidence of any actual crime."

She punched my arm again, right in the same spot, and it hurt even more this time. "Analyze the fucking blood," she said. "Fast."

"I can't do it here," I said. "I have to take some back to the lab."

"Then take it," she said. She raised her fist for another devastating arm punch, and I was proud of the nimble way I skipped out of her reach, even though I nearly crashed into the male model who had been standing beside her while she talked to the feds.

" 'Scuse me," he said.

"Oh," Deborah said, "this is Deke. My new partner." And she said the word "partner" in a way that made it sound like "hemorrhoid."

"Pleased to meet you," I said.

"Yeah, sure," Deke said. He shrugged and moved off to the side, where he could stare at Camilla's rear end as she inched along the floor, and Deborah gave me a very eloquent look that said many four-letter things about her new partner.

"Deke has just come down from Syracuse," Deborah said, in a voice pleasant enough to peel paint. "Fifteen years on the force up there, chasing stolen snowmobiles." Deke shrugged again without looking. "And because I was careless enough to lose my last partner, they decided to punish me with him." He held up one thumb and then bent over to see what Camilla was doing. She immediately began to blush.

"Well," I said, "I hope he works out better than Detective Coulter." Coulter, Deborah's previous partner, had been killed as part of a performance art piece while Deborah lay in the hospital, and even though his funeral had been very nice I was sure the department was watching Deborah very carefully now, since they frowned on cops who developed the habit of carelessness with partners.

Deborah just shook her head and muttered something I didn't quite catch, although I heard several hard consonants in it. So because I always try to bring cheer wherever I go, I changed the subject. "Who is that supposed to be?" I said, nodding at the gigantic bloodstain.

"The missing girl is Samantha Aldovar," she said. "Eighteen, goes to that rich kids' school, Ransom Everglades."

I looked around the room. Aside from the blood spatter, it was not a remarkable room: desk with chair, a laptop computer that seemed to be a few years old, an iPod dock. On one wall, happily unmarked by blood, was a dark poster of a pensive young man. Underneath was labeled, TEAM EDWARD, and below that, TWILIGHT. There were some nice-looking clothes hanging in the closet, but nothing extraordinary. Neither the room nor the house it was in seemed like it belonged to somebody wealthy enough for a fancy prep school, but stranger things have happened, and there were no bank statements pasted up on the walls that I could see.

Was Samantha faking her own kidnapping to get money from her parents? It was a surprisingly common ploy, and if the missing girl had been surrounded by rich kids all day it might have created pressure on her to come up with some designer-label jeans of her own. Kids can be extremely cruel, bless them, especially to someone who can't afford a five-hundred-dollar sweater.

But the room didn't tell me enough either way. Mr. Aldovar might be a reclusive billionaire able to buy the entire neighborhood while flying to Tokyo for sushi. Or perhaps their financial means really were modest and the school gave Samantha financial aid of some kind. It didn't really matter; all that mattered was to make sense of that horrible wet splat of blood and get it cleaned up.

I realized that Debs was staring at me expectantly, and so rather than risk another knockout punch to my triceps, I nodded at her and exploded into vigorous action. I put my kit down on the desk and opened it. My camera was right on top, and I snapped a dozen pictures of the stain on the wall and the area around it. Then I went back to my kit, took out a pair of latex gloves, and pulled them on. I grabbed a large cotton swab from a plastic bag and a jar to hold it, and carefully approached the glistening splat of blood.

I found a place where it was thick and still wet and twirled the head of the swab slowly through it, lifting enough of the awful stuff to make a useful sample. Then I carefully pushed the swab into the little jar, sealed it, and stepped away from the mess. Deborah was still staring at me as if she were looking for a soft spot to punch, but as I watched, her face softened slightly. "How's my niece?" she said, and the dreadful red splat on the wall faded to a wonderful soft pink background.

"She's beyond amazing," I said. "All fingers and toes in the right place and absolutely beautiful."

For just a moment something else fluttered across my sister's face, something that seemed slightly darker than the thought of a perfect niece. But before I could say what it was, Deborah's same old on-duty grouper face swam back into place.

"Great," she said, and she nodded at the sample in my hand. "Get that analyzed, and don't stop for lunch," she said, and turned away.

I closed up my kit and followed Debs out the bedroom door and down the hall to the living room. Off to the right, Captain Matthews had arrived and planted himself where everyone could see that he was on the scene and relentlessly pursuing justice.

"Shit," Deborah said. But she squared her jaw and marched over to him anyway, possibly to make sure he didn't step on a suspect. I would have loved to watch, but duty sounded its clarion call, so I turned away for the front door, and found Special Agent Brenda Recht standing in my path.

"Mr. Morgan," she said, tilting her head and raising an eyebrow as if she were not quite sure whether to call me that or something more familiar, like "Guilty."

"Special Agent Recht," I said, pleasantly enough, considering. "What brings you here?"

"Sergeant Morgan is your sister?" she said, which did not really answer my question.

"That's right," I said anyway.

Special Agent Recht looked at me, then stared across the room to where Deborah was talking to the captain. "What a family," she said, and walked past me to rejoin her generic-looking partner.

I thought of several very good comebacks that would have put her neatly in her place, but after all, her place was actually several rungs above mine on the food chain, so I just called out, "Have a nice day," to her back and headed out the door to my car.

THREE

The test I needed to run to find out if the blood was human was a fairly basic one, simple and relatively quick, so I stopped for lunch even though Deborah had told me not to. Just to keep things righteous, it was only a take-out sandwich, but after all, I had nearly starved myself at the hospital, and I had rushed away from Lily Anne to work on a day off, so one small Cuban sandwich did not seem like too much. In fact, it seemed like almost nothing at all, and I finished it in the car before I even got off I-95, but I arrived at my little laboratory in a much better mood.

Vince Masuoka was in the lab staring at something under a microscope. He looked up at me when I entered and blinked several times. "Dexter," he said. "Is the baby all right?"

"Never better," I said, a combination of truth and poetry that pleased me more than it should.

Apparently Vince did not agree; he frowned at me. "You're not supposed to be here," he said.

"The pleasure of my company was requested," I said.

He blinked again. "Oh," he said. "Your sister, huh?" He shook his head and then ducked back down to the microscope. "There's fresh coffee," he said.

The coffee may have been freshly made, but the grounds had apparently been sitting in a vat of toxic chemicals for several years, because the stuff was as close to undrinkable as something can be and still be liquid. Still, life is a series of trials, and only the tough survive them, so I sipped a cup of the wretched stuff without whimpering as I ran the test on the blood sample. We had several vials of antiserum in the lab, so it was only a matter of adding my sample to one of them and swirling the two together in a test tube. I had just finished when my cell phone began to chime. For a brief, irrational moment, I thought it might be Lily Anne calling, but reality reared its ugly head in the form of my sister, Deborah. Not that her head is actually ugly, but she is very demanding.

"What have you got," she demanded.

"I think I may have dysentery from the coffee," I told her.

"Don't be an asshole," she said. "I'm getting enough asshole from the Fibbies."

"I'm afraid you may have to put up with some more," I said, looking at my test tube. A thin line of precipitate had formed between the antiserum and the sample from the crime scene. "It looks like it's human blood."

Deborah was silent for a moment, and then said, "Fuck. You're positive?"

"The cards never lie," I said, in my best Gypsy accent.

"I need to know whose blood it is," she said.

"You're looking for a thin man with a mustache and a limp. Left-handed and wearing black, pointy shoes," I said.

She was silent for a second, and then she said, "Fuck you. I need some help here, goddamn it."

"Deborah, there's only so much I can do with a blood sample."

"Can you at least tell me if it belongs to Samantha Aldovar?" she said.

"I can run another test and find out the blood type," I said. "You'll have to ask the family what hers is."

"Do it," she snarled, and hung up.

Have you noticed how difficult it is just to get along in the world? If you're no good at all in your job, people treat you badly and eventually you will be unemployed. And if you're a little better than competent, everyone expects miracles from you, every single time. Like most of life, it's a no-win situation. And if you dare to mention it, no matter how creatively you phrase your complaints, you are shunned as a whiner.

In truth, I do not mind being shunned. If only Deborah had shunned me, I would still be at the hospital admiring Lily Anne and her blossoming motor-control skills. But I could not risk being shunned full-time, not with the economy as bad as it is, and a growing family to think about. And so with a world-weary sigh, I bent my aching back to the dreary task at hand.

It was late afternoon when I called Deborah with the result of my test. "It's type O," I said. I did not expect her to respond with flowery gratitude, and she didn't. She simply grunted, said "Get your ass back over here," and hung up.

I got my ass back into my car and drove it south to Coconut Grove and the Aldovars' house. The party was still going when my ass got there, and my parking spot by the bamboo-on-steroids was gone now. I circled the block one time, wondering if Lily Anne missed me. I wanted to be there with her, not here in the dull and deadly world of blood splatter and Deborah's temper. I would run in, tell Debs I was leaving, and get back to the hospital-assuming I could find a place to put my car, which I could not.

I circled again, and finally found a place twice as far away, beside a large Dumpster in the yard of a small and empty house. Dumpsters are one of the new and fashionable lawn ornaments in South Florida, and they spring up all over our town like mushrooms after a summer rain. When a house goes into foreclosure, which they do quite often nowadays, a crew arrives with the Dumpster and empties the house into it, almost as though they picked it up by one side and poured everything out. The former occupants of the house presumably find a nice freeway overpass to live under, the bank resells the house for ten cents on the dollar, and everyone is happy-especially the company that rents the Dumpsters.

I took the long hike back to the Aldovars' house from my charming Dumpster-view parking spot. The walk was not as horrible as it might have been. The day was cool for Miami, with the temperature only in the low eighties and the humidity no more than a steam bath, so there were still several dry spots left on my shirt when I pushed through the swarming flock of reporters gathered in front of the house and trudged on in.

Deborah stood in another group that looked like they were facing off for a tag-team wrestling match. Clearly the main event would be Debs versus Special Agent Recht; they were already nose-to-nose and exchanging rather heated opinions. Their respective partners, Deke and the Generic Fed, stood to one side of the main couple like good wingmen, glaring at each other coldly, and to Deborah's other side was a large, distraught woman of around forty-five who was apparently trying to decide what to do with her hands. She raised them, and then dropped one, and then hugged herself, and then raised the left one again, so I could see that she was clutching a sheet of paper. She fluttered it, then dropped both hands again, all in the span of the three seconds it took me to cross the floor to join the happy little group.

"I don't have time for you, Recht," Debs was snarling. "So let me say it for you in one-syllable words: If I got that much blood, I got assault and attempted murder at the least." She glanced at me, and then back to Recht. "That's what my expert says, and that's what my experience says."

"Expert," Recht said, with very nice federally provided irony in her voice. "You mean your brother? He's your expert?" She said "brother" as if it was something that ate garbage and lived under a rock.

"You got a better one?" Debs said with real heat, and it was very flattering to see her go to bat for me.

"I don't need one; I have a missing teenage girl," Recht said, with a certain amount of her own heat, "and that's kidnapping until further notice."

"Excuse me," the fluttering woman said. Debs and Recht ignored her.

"Bullshit," Deborah said. "There's no note, no phone call, nothing but a room full of blood, and that's not kidnapping."

"It is if it's her blood," Recht said.

"Excuse-If I… Officer?" the fidgeting woman said, fluttering the piece of paper.

Deborah held her glare on Recht for a moment, then turned to face the woman. "Yes, Mrs. Aldovar," she said, and I looked at the woman with interest. If she was the missing girl's mother, it would explain the eccentric hand movements.

"This could… I… I found it," Mrs. Aldovar said, and both of her hands went up helplessly for a moment. Then the right one fell to her side, leaving the left in the air with the sheet of paper.

"You found what, ma'am?" Deborah said, already looking back at Recht as if she might lunge forward and grab the paper.

"This is… You said to look, um… medical report," she said, and she twitched the piece of paper. "I found it. With Samantha's blood type."

Deborah made a wonderful move that looked like she had been playing professional basketball her whole life. She stepped between the woman and the feds and got her backside directly in front of Recht, effectively screening her out from any chance of seeing the paper, all while reaching out and plucking the paper politely from Mrs. Aldovar's hand. "Thank you, ma'am," she said, running a finger down the page. After only a few seconds she looked up and glared at me.

"You said type O," she said.

"That's right," I said.

She flipped the page with a fingertip. "This says AB positive."

"Let me see that," Recht demanded, trying to lurch forward and get at the paper, but Deborah's NBA butt-block was too much for her.

"What the fuck, Dexter," Deborah said accusingly, as if it were my fault the two blood types were different.

"I'm sorry," I said, not at all sure what I was apologizing for, but quite certain from her tone of voice that I should.

"This girl, Samantha-she has AB-positive blood," she said. "Who has type O?"

"Lots of people," I reassured her. "It's very common."

"Are you saying-" Mrs. Aldovar tried to say, but Deborah plowed on.

"This is no help," Debs said. "If it's not her blood in there, then… who the hell flings somebody else's blood on the wall?"

"A kidnapper," Special Agent Recht said. "Trying to cover his tracks."

Deborah turned and looked at her, and the expression on her face was truly wonderful to see. With just a few rearranged facial muscles and one small raised eyebrow, Debs managed to say, How is it possible that someone this stupid can tie her own shoes and walk among us?

"Tell me," Deborah said, looking her over with disbelief, "is 'special agent' kind of like 'special education'?" Deborah's new partner, Deke, give a vacuous syllable of laughter, and Recht blushed.

"Let me see that paper," Recht said again.

"You went to college, didn't you?" Deborah went on, very conversationally. "And that fancy FBI school in Quantico."

"Officer Morgan," Recht said sternly, but Deborah waved the paper at her.

"It's Sergeant Morgan," she said. "And I need you to get your people off my crime scene."

"I have jurisdiction with kidnapping-" Recht started to say, but Deborah was gaining steam now and cut her off without any real effort.

"Do you want to tell me that the kidnapper threw that much of his own blood on the wall, and was still strong enough to take away a struggling teenager?" she said. "Or did he bring some blood in a mayonnaise jar and say, 'Splat, you're coming with me'?" Deborah shook her head slightly and added a small smirk. "Because I can't see that either way, Special Agent." She paused, and she was on such a roll that Recht apparently didn't dare speak. "What I see," Deborah said, "is a girl pranking us and faking her own kidnapping. And if you have evidence that this is anything else, now is the time to whip it out."

"Whip it out," Deke said with a goofy chuckle, but nobody apparently noticed except me.

"You know very well-" Recht began, but once again she was interrupted-this time by Deborah's new partner, Deke.

"Hey," he said, and we all turned to look at him.

Deke nodded at the floor. "The lady fainted," he said, and we all turned to look where he had nodded.

Mrs. Aldovar, as advertised, was out cold on the floor.

FOUR

For a very long moment we all stood in a frozen tableau of hostile indecision. Debs and Recht stared at each other, Deke breathed through his mouth, and I tried to decide whether assisting the fallen woman was technically within my jurisdiction as a blood-spatter analyst. And then there was a clatter at the front door and I heard a minor commotion behind me.

"Shit," a male voice called out, quite clearly. "Shit, shit, shit."

It was impossible to argue with the general sentiment, but nevertheless I turned around to see if I could gather some specifics. A middle-aged man hurried toward us. He was tall and soft-looking and had close-cropped gray hair and a matching beard. He slid to one knee beside Mrs. Aldovar and picked up her hand. "Hey, Emily? Honey?" he said as he patted her hand. "Come on, Em."

I have spent my entire career working with first-rate professional investigators, and some of it must have rubbed off on me, because I almost immediately deduced that this had to be Mr. Aldovar. And my sister is no slouch, either, because she had arrived at the same startling conclusion. She managed to rip her gaze away from Recht and look down to the man on the floor.

"Mr. Aldovar?" she said.

"Come on, honey," he said, hopefully not to Deborah. "Yes, I'm Michael Aldovar."

Mrs. Aldovar opened her eyes and wobbled them from side to side. "Michael?" she muttered.

Deborah knelt down beside them, apparently thinking that conscious parents are more interesting than the fainted kind. "I'm Sergeant Morgan," she said. "I'm investigating your daughter's disappearance."

"I don't have any money," he said, and Deborah looked startled for a moment. "I mean, if there's a ransom, or-She knows that. Samantha can't think-Has there been any phone call?"

Deborah shook her head as if trying to shake water off. "Can you tell me where you've been, sir?"

"There was a conference in Raleigh," Mr. Aldovar said. "Medical statistics. I had to-Emily called and said Samantha had been kidnapped."

Deborah looked up at Recht and then quickly back to Mr. Aldovar. "It wasn't kidnapping," she said.

He didn't move at all for a second, and then he looked directly at Deborah, still holding his wife's hand. "What are you saying?" he said.

"Can I talk to you for a moment, sir?" Deborah said.

Mr. Aldovar looked away, then down at his wife. "Can we get my wife into a chair or something?" he said. "I mean, is she all right?"

"I'm fine," Mrs. Aldovar said. "I just…"

"Dexter," Debs said, jerking her head at me. "Get some smelling salts or something. You and Deke help her up."

It's always nice to have a question answered, and now I knew. Apparently, it actually was within my jurisdiction to help women who faint at a crime scene.

So I squatted down beside Mrs. Aldovar, and Deborah led Mr. Aldovar off to one side. Deke looked at me anxiously, reminding me very much of a large and handsome dog who needs a stick to fetch. "Hey, you got some of that smelling stuff?" he said.

Apparently it had become universally accepted that Dexter was the Eternal Keeper of the Smelling Salts. I had no idea where that baffling canard had come from, but in truth, I was completely without.

Luckily, Mrs. Aldovar apparently was not interested in sniffing anything. She gripped my arm, and Deke's, and murmured, "Help me up, please," and the two of us heaved her to her feet. I looked around for a horizontal surface uncluttered by law enforcement where we could deposit her, and spotted a dining table complete with chairs in the next room.

Mrs. Aldovar did not need a great deal of help getting into the chair. She sat right down as if she had done the same thing many times before.

I looked back into the next room. Special Agent Recht and her generic companion were edging their way toward the door, and Deborah was very carefully not noticing them. She was instead busy chatting with Mr. Aldovar. Angel Batista-No-Relation was standing on the patio, just outside a sliding glass door, dusting the glass for fingerprints. And I knew that just down the hallway, the huge bloodstain still hung on the wall, calling for Dexter. This was my world, the land of violence, gore, and mayhem. Both personally and professionally, this was where I had lived my whole life.

But today it had lost the rosy glow that had for so many years kept me enchanted. I did not want to be here, browsing through the residue of someone else's happy frolic-and even more, I did not want to be off on a carefree romp of my own. I needed different vistas today. I had come to the old turf unwillingly, out of duty to Deborah, and now I wanted to go back to my new country, where all was bright and beautiful, the Land of Lily Anne.

Deborah glanced up at me without any real recognition and then back to Mr. Aldovar. I was scenery to her, part of what a crime scene looked like, Dexter as Background. Enough: It was time for me to leave, to go back to Lily Anne and Wonder.

And so without lingering for any awkward farewells, I slid out the door and walked back to my car, where it still sat nestled in by the Dumpster. I drove to the hospital in the prelude to evening rush hour, a magical time when everyone on the road felt empowered and entitled to all the lanes at once because they had left work early, and in my past life I had taken great joy in the sight of so much naked contempt for life. Today it left me cold. These people were endangering others, not something I could tolerate in a world where I would soon be driving Lily Anne to ballet lessons. I drove at a careful ten miles per hour over the speed limit, which only served to enrage most of the other drivers. They flew past me on both sides, honking and extending their middle fingers, but I held firm to my safe and sane course, and soon I arrived at the hospital, without any actual exchange of gunfire.

As I came off the elevator on the floor for maternity I paused for a second as the faint echo of a whisper rattled off the back wall of Dexter's Dark Subbasement. This was where I had almost seen somebody who might have been watching me for some reason. But the thought came out sounding so ludicrous that I could do no more than shake my head and send a distant Tut-tut to the Passenger. "Almost Somebody" indeed. I moved on past, turning the corner to the nursery.

All my new friends at the nursery window were gone, replaced by a new crop, and Lily Anne, too, was no longer visible on the other side of the glass. I had a moment of crippling disorientation-where had she gone?-but then logic reasserted itself. Of course-it had been several hours. They would not leave her there alone and on display for so long. Lily Anne would be with her mother, feeding and growing closer. I felt a small surge of jealousy. Rita would have this important and intimate bond with the baby that I could never know-a head start on Lily Anne's affections.

But happily for all, I heard the soft and mocking chuckle that lives inside, and I had to agree. Come now, Dexter: If you suddenly choose to feel emotions, is breast envy the best one to start with? Your role is just as important: to provide firm and loving guidance on the thorny path through Lily Anne's life. And who better than me, who had lived on the twisted trail, savoring the thorns, and who now wanted nothing more than to help her through the thickets unharmed? Who better, in short, than No-Longer-Demented Daddy Dexter?

It was all so neat and logical. I had lived the wicked life in order to know how to steer Lily Anne into the light. Everything made sense at last, and although bitter experience has taught me that if everything makes sense you are looking at it wrong, I nevertheless felt great comfort from the notion. There was a Plan, a True Pattern, and at long last Dexter knew what it was and could actually see his feet on the game board. I knew why I was Here-not to harry the wicked, but to shepherd the pure.

Feeling greatly enlightened and uplifted, I walked briskly past the nurses' station and down to Rita's room at the far end of the hall, right where it was supposed to be. Even better, Lily Anne was there, sound asleep on her mother's chest. A large bouquet of roses sat on the bedside table, and all was right with the world.

Rita opened her eyes and looked up at me with a tired smile. "Dexter," she said. "Where have you been?"

"There was an emergency at work," I said, and she looked at me blankly.

"Work," she said, and she shook her head. "Dexter, I-This is your newborn child here." And right on cue, Lily Anne wiggled slightly and then continued sleeping. She did it very well, too.

"Yes, I know," I said reassuringly.

"It's not-How can you just wander off to work?" she said, and she sounded very peeved, in a way I had never heard before. "When your brand-new baby is-I mean, work? At a time like this?"

"I'm sorry," I said. "Deborah needed me."

"So did I," she said.

"I'm really very sorry," I said, and weirdly enough, I really was. "I'm very new at this, Rita." She looked at me, shaking her head again. "I'll try to get better," I added hopefully.

Rita sighed and closed her eyes. "At least the flowers you sent were nice," she said, and a tiny bell began to ring in the dark backseat of Dexter's wicked wagon. I had not sent any flowers, of course. I was not experienced enough at all the many subtle hypocrisies of married life to think of such a clever ploy-I had not even realized that responding to an emergency at work was wrong, let alone that I needed to apologize with flowers. Of course, Rita had many friends who might have sent them, and I knew several people who were theoretically friends-even Deborah might have had a moment of sensitivity, unlikely as that seemed. In any case, there was absolutely no reason a few fragrant blossoms should set off any kind of alarm.

But they did. They definitely did-a steady, annoying ding-ding-ding of an alarm that very definitely meant all was not what it should be. So I leaned casually over and pretended to sniff the roses, while actually trying to read the accompanying card. Again, there was nothing at all unusual about it, just a small tag that said, Congratulations to us! and scribbled in blue ink underneath was, An admirer.

From the same general region that provided the little alarm bell, I heard a soft and wicked chuckle well up. The Dark Passenger was amused, and no wonder. Dexter is many things, but "admirable" is not one of the top ten. As far as I knew, I had no admirers. Anyone who really knew me well enough to admire me was theoretically already dead, dissected, and disposed. So who would sign the card like that? I knew enough about humans to know that a friend or family member would sign their own name to make absolutely sure they got credit for the flowers. An ordinary human, in fact, would already have called on the telephone to say, "Did you get my flowers? I wanted to be sure because they're so expensive!"

Clearly, no such call had come, since Rita assumed the roses were from me. Just as clearly, there was nothing really threatening about such a minor mystery.

So why did I feel small and icy feet walking up the back of my neck? Why was I so certain that some hidden danger threatened me and, therefore, Lily Anne? I tried to be logical, which is something I had once been very good at. Of course, I told myself reasonably, it was not merely the anonymous flowers-I also had the alarm from the possible sighting of a potential someone earlier on. And when I added it all up, I realized what I had: a very strong possible maybe something or not, which might or might not be an actual threat or not. Or something.

Put that way, in clear and logical form, it made perfect sense for me to feel uneasy. Lily Anne was being stalked by an idiot.

Me.

FIVE

I spent an hour sitting with rita and watching lily Anne sleep, fuss, and feed. Objectively speaking, it was not really a great deal of activity, but it was far more enjoyable and interesting than I would have imagined. I suppose it is no more than a form of egotism to find your own baby so very fascinating-certainly, I had never found other babies compelling-but whatever it might say about me, I did it now and I liked it. Rita dozed, waking only once when Lily Anne twitched and kicked for a few seconds. And then a few minutes later, Rita frowned, opened her eyes, and looked at the clock on the wall above the door.

"The kids," she said.

"Yes," I said, watching as Lily Anne reacted to Rita's voice by curling and uncurling one tiny hand.

"Dexter, you have to pick up Cody and Astor," she said. "At the after-school program."

I blinked. It was true: The program closed at six, and the young women running it began to get very cranky by quarter past. The clock said ten minutes of six. I would just make it.

"All right," I said, and I stood up, reluctantly tearing myself away from my baby watching.

"Bring them back here," Rita said, and she smiled. "They need to meet their new sister."

I headed out the door, already imagining the wonderful scene: Cody and Astor stepping softly into the room, their little faces lit up with love and amazement, seeing for the first time the tiny wonder that was Lily Anne. The scene was crystal clear in my mind, rendered with the combined genius of Leonardo da Vinci and Norman Rockwell, and I found myself smiling as I ambled down the hall to the elevator. It was a real smile, too. An actual, unfaked, spontaneous human expression. And surely Cody and Astor would soon be wearing the same fond smile, gazing down at their new sister and realizing as I had that a life on the Dark Path was no longer necessary.

For Cody and Astor had also been condemned to walk in shadows, monsters like me, flung into the darkness by the savage abuses of their biological father. And I, in my own wicked pride, had promised to steer their little feet onto the Harry Path, teaching them to be safe and Code-abiding predators, as I was. But surely the coming of Lily Anne had changed all that. They, too, would have to see that everything was new and different. There was no longer any need to slink and slash. And how could I, in this brave new world, even think of helping them spin away into that dreadful abyss of death and delight?

I could not; everything was new now. I would lead them to the light, set their feet on the path to the Good Life, and they would grow to be decent, upstanding human beings, or the best possible imitations. People can change-wasn't I already changing, right before my very own eyes? I had already had an emotion and a real smile; anything was possible.

And so with a true surge of genuine human confidence that all would soon be rose petals, I drove to the after-school program, which was at a park near our house. The traffic was in full rush-hour, homicidal flow, and I had a new insight into what made Miami drivers tick. These people weren't angry-they were anxious. Each one of them had someone waiting for them at home, someone they hadn't seen all miserable workday long. Of course they got upset if another driver slowed them down. Everyone had a Lily Anne of their own to get home to and they were understandably eager to get there.

It was a dizzying image. For the first time I felt a real kinship with these people. We were connected, one great ocean of humanity bound together by a common goal, and I found myself humming a pleasant tune and nodding with forgiveness and understanding toward each upraised middle finger that came my way.

I made it to the park only a few minutes late, and the young woman standing anxiously at the door gave me a relieved smile as she handed Cody and Astor over to me. "Mr. Um Morgan," she said, already fishing for keys in her purse. "How is, um…?"

"Lily Anne is doing very well," I said. "She will be in here finger-painting for you in no time."

"And Mrs. Um Morgan?" she said.

"Resting comfortably," I said, which must have been the correct cliche, because she nodded and smiled again and stuck the key into the door of the building.

"All right, kids," she said. "I'll see you both tomorrow. Bye!" And she hurried off to her car, at the other end of the parking lot from mine.

"I'm hungry," Astor said as we approached my car. "When is dinner?"

"Pizza," Cody said.

"First we're going back to the hospital," I said. "So you can meet your new sister."

Astor looked at Cody, and he looked back, and then they both turned to me.

"Baby," Cody muttered, shaking his head. He never said more than two or three words at a time, but his eloquence was astounding.

"We wanna eat first," Astor said.

"Lily Anne is waiting for you," I said. "And your mother. Get in the car."

"But we're hungry," Astor said.

"Don't you think meeting your new sister is more important?" I said.

"No," Cody said.

"The baby isn't going anywhere, and it isn't really doing anything except lying there, and maybe pooping," Astor said. "We've been sitting in that dumb building for hours and we're hungry."

"We can get a candy bar at the hospital," I said.

"Candy bar?!" Astor said, making it sound like I had suggested she eat week-old roadkill.

"We want pizza," Cody said.

I sighed. Apparently rosy glows were not contagious. "Just get in the car," I said, and with a glance at each other and a surly double stare for me, they did.

The drive back to the hospital theoretically should have been about the same distance as the trip in from the hospital to the park. But in fact it seemed to be twice as long, since Cody and Astor sat in complete and sullen silence the whole way-except that, every time we passed a pizza place, Astor would call out, "There's Papa John's," or Cody would say quietly, "Domino's." I had been driving these streets my entire life, but I'd never before realized how completely the entire civilization of Miami is devoted to pizza. The city was littered with the stuff.

A lesser man would certainly have weakened and stopped at one of the many pizza parlors, especially since the smell of hot pizza somehow drifted into the car, even with the air-conditioning on, and it had been several hours since I had eaten, too. My mouth began to water, and every time one of the kids said, "Pizza Hut," I was sorely tempted to park the car and attack a large with everything. But Lily Anne was waiting, and my will was strong, and so I gritted my teeth and kept to the straight and narrow of Dixie Highway, and soon I was back in the hospital parking lot and trying to herd two unwilling children into the building.

The foot dragging continued all the way across the parking lot. At one point, Cody even stopped dead and looked around as if he had heard someone call his name, and he was very reluctant to move again, even though he was not yet standing on the sidewalk.

"Cody," I said. "Move along. You'll get run over."

He ignored me; his eyes roved across the rows of parked cars and fixed on one about fifty feet away.

"Cody," I said again, and I tried to nudge him along.

He shook his head slightly. "Shadow Guy," he said.

I felt small and prickly feet on my spine and heard a cautious unfolding of dark leathery wings in the distance. Shadow Guy was Cody's name for his Dark Passenger, and although it was untrained it could not be ignored. I stopped and looked at the small red car that had caught his attention, searching for some clue that might resonate with my own inner sentinel. Someone was half-visible through the windshield of the car, reading the New Times, Miami's weekly alternative paper. Whoever it was gave no sign of interest in us, or anything else besides the cover story, an expose of our city's massage parlors.

"That guy is watching us," Astor said.

I thought of my earlier alarm, and the mysterious bouquet of roses. It was the flowers that decided me; unless there was a slow-acting nerve toxin in the roses, there was no real threat hovering around me. And while it was possible that the person in the car really was a predator of some kind-this was Miami, after all-I felt no twinge of warning that he was focused on us.

"That guy is reading the paper," I said. "And we are standing in the parking lot wasting time. Come on."

Cody turned slowly to look at me, an expression of surprised peevishness on his face. I shook my head and pointed at the hospital; the two of them exchanged one of their patented looks, and gave me a matching expression that said they were disappointed but not surprised at my substandard performance. Then they turned together and began to walk again toward the hospital door. Cody glanced back at the car three times, and finally I did, too, but there was nothing to see except a man reading the paper, and eventually we got inside.

Dexter is nothing if not a man of his word, and I led them straight to the vending machine for the promised candy bar. But once again they dropped into sullen silence, staring at the vending machine as if it was some kind of torture device. I began to fidget with impatience-another real human emotion, making two of them so far, and I had to say I was not enjoying my transformation to the species. "Come on," I said. "Just pick one."

"But we don't want one," Astor said.

"Would you rather be hungry?" I said.

"Rather have pizza," Cody said softly.

I could feel my jaw beginning to tighten, but I maintained my icy control and said, "Do you see pizza in this vending machine?"

"Mom says that too much candy can make you have diabetes," Astor said.

"And too much pizza makes you have high cholesterol," I said through clenched teeth. "And going hungry is actually good for you, so let's forget the candy bar and go upstairs." I held out my hand to them and half turned toward the elevator. "Come on," I said.

Astor hesitated, mouth half-open, and we stood that way for several long seconds. Then Cody finally said, "Kit Kat," and the spell was broken. I bought Cody his Kit Kat, Astor chose a Three Musketeers, and at last, after what had seemed as long and painful as major surgery, we all got into the elevator and headed upstairs to see Lily Anne.

We made it all the way to Rita's room without a word about pizza or diabetes, which I regarded as a miracle, and in my new human optimism I actually thought we might get through the door and into Lily Anne's presence. But Astor stopped dead just outside the closed door, and Cody trickled to a halt behind her. "What if we don't like her?" Astor said.

I blinked; where does this stuff come from? "How can you not like her?" I said. "She's a beautiful little baby. She's your sister."

"Half sister," Cody said softly.

"Jenny Baumgarten has a little sister and they fight all the time," Astor said.

"You're not going to fight with Lily Anne," I said, appalled at the thought. "She's just a baby."

"I don't like babies," Astor said, a stubborn expression growing on her face.

"You're going to like this one," I said, and even I was surprised at the tone of firm command in my voice. Astor looked at me uncertainly, and then at her brother, and I took advantage of their hesitation and seized the moment. "Come on," I said. "Inside." I put a hand on each one and herded them both through the doorway.

Not much had changed in the tableau; it was still Madonna and Child, with Lily Anne lying on her mother, who held her with one arm. Rita opened her eyes sleepily and smiled as we came in, but Lily Anne simply twitched a little and kept sleeping.

"Come meet your sister," Rita said.

"You both keep saying that," Astor said. She stood there looking peevish until Cody pushed past her and walked over to stand beside the bed. His head was just about level with Lily Anne's, and he studied her for a long moment with apparent interest. Astor finally dribbled over to stand next to him, seemingly more interested in Cody's reaction than in the baby. We all watched as Cody slowly put a finger out toward Lily Anne and very carefully touched her tiny curled-up fist.

"Soft," Cody said, and he stroked her hand gently. Lily Anne opened up her fist and Cody let her grasp his finger. She closed her hand again, holding on to Cody, and wonder of all, Cody smiled.

"She's holding me," he said.

"I wanna try," Astor said, and she tried to get around him to touch the baby.

"Wait your turn," he told her, and she took a half step back and jiggled impatiently until he finally took his finger away from Lily Anne's fist and let Astor have a turn. Astor moved right in to repeat what Cody had done, and she smiled, too, when Lily Anne clutched her finger, and the two of them took turns at this new game for the next fifteen minutes.

And for a whole half hour we didn't hear a single word about pizza.

SIX

It was very enjoyable for me to watch the three children-my three children!-bonding with one another. But of course, any child could have told me that when you are enjoying yourself within sight of a grown-up it is only a matter of time before the fun ends. And Rita, as the only real grown-up in the room, did not let us down. After a short while she looked at the clock and then spoke up. "All right," she said, adding the dreaded words, "it's a school night."

Cody and Astor exchanged another of their eloquent looks, in which no sound was made but a great deal was said. "Mom," Astor said, "we're playing with our new sister." She said it as if it were in quotation marks, so Rita couldn't possibly object. But Rita was an old hand at the game, and she shook her head.

"You can play with Lily Anne more tomorrow," she said. "Right now, Dex-Daddy-has to take you home and put you to bed."

They both looked at me as if I had betrayed them, and I shrugged. "At least there's pizza," I said.

The kids were nearly as reluctant leaving the hospital as they had been going in, but somehow I managed to herd them out the door and into my car. Rather than repeat the horrors of the trip over and reel from the fumes of pizza all across town, I let Astor use my phone to order as we drove, and we had only been home for ten minutes or so when our dinner was delivered. Cody and Astor tore into the pizza as if they hadn't eaten in a month, and I felt lucky to get two small slices without losing an arm.

After we ate we watched TV until bedtime, and then plunged into the familiar rituals of brushing teeth, putting on pajamas, and climbing into bed. It was a little bit strange for me to perform the ceremony; I had witnessed it often enough, but Rita had always been the High Priestess of bedtime, and stupidly enough, I felt a little anxious that I might do some part of it wrong. But I kept thinking of what Rita had said in the hospital, when she had verbally stumbled and called me "Dex-Daddy." I truly was Dex-Daddy now, and all this was my turf. Soon I would perform the same rites with Lily Anne, guiding her, and her siblings, through the treacherous shoals of night time and safely into bed, and I found this an oddly comforting thought. In fact, it sustained me all the way up to the time when I finally had Cody and Astor tucked in and I reached for the light switch.

"Hey," Astor said. "You forgot prayers."

I blinked, suddenly very uncomfortable. "I don't know any prayers."

"You don't have to say it," she said. "Just listen."

I suppose that anyone with even a little bit of self-awareness will eventually feel like a complete hypocrite in the company of children, and this was my time. But I sat down with a very solemn face and listened to the singsong nonsense they recited every night. I was reasonably sure they didn't believe any of it any more than I did, but it was part of the procedure, and therefore it had to be done, and we all felt better when it was over with.

"All right," I said, standing up and turning off the light. "Good night."

"Good night, Dexter," Astor said.

"Night," Cody said softly.

In the normal course of things, I would probably sit down on the couch with Rita and watch another hour of television, just for the sake of disguise maintenance; but tonight there was no need to subject myself to the ordeal of pretending the programs were funny or interesting, so I didn't return to the living room. Instead, I went down the hall to the small room that Rita called my study. I had used it mostly for research connected to my hobby. There was a computer for me to track down those special individuals who deserved my attention, and there was a small closet where I could store a few harmless items like duct tape and fifty-pound-test fishing line.

There was also a small filing cabinet, which I kept locked, that contained a few folders holding notes on prospective playmates, and I sat at my little desk and opened this up. There wasn't a great deal there at the moment. I had two possibilities, but due to the press of events I had not really pursued either of them, and now I wondered if I ever would. I opened a folder and looked inside. There was a murderous pedophile who had twice been released because of a convenient alibi. I was fairly sure I could break the alibi and prove his guilt-not in the legal sense, of course, but enough to satisfy the strict standards my cop adoptive father, Harry, had poured into me. And there was a club in South Beach that was listed as the last place where several people had been seen before disappearing. Fang, it was called, a truly stupid name for a club. But in addition to the missing-persons reports, the club had turned up in a few INS documents. Apparently, they had an alarmingly high rate of turnover in their kitchen staff, and someone at INS suspected the dishwashers were not all running home to Mexico because the Miami water tasted wrong.

Illegal immigrants are a wonderfully easy target for predators. Even if they vanish there is no official complaint; family, friends, and employers don't dare complain to the police. And so they do vanish, in numbers that no one can really guess, although I believe it is high enough to raise a few eyebrows, even in Miami. And someone at this club was clearly taking advantage of the situation-probably, I thought, the manager, since he would have to be aware of the turnover. I flipped through my file and found his name: George Kukarov. He lived on Dilido Island, a very nice Beach address not too far from his club. A handy commute for work and play: balance the books, hire a DJ, kill the dishwasher, and home for dinner. I could practically see it-a lovely setup, so clean and convenient that it almost made me envious.

I set down the file for a moment and thought about it. George Kukarov: club manager, killer. It made perfect sense, the kind of sense that got Dexter's inner hound up on point and salivating, whining eagerly, quivering with the need to be out and after the fox. And the Passenger fluttered in agreement, stretching its wings with a sultry rustle that said, Yes, he is the one. Tonight, together, Now…

I could feel the moonlight coming through the window and pouring through my skin, slicing deep inside me, stirring the dark soup of my center and making these wonderful thoughts float up to the top, and as the smell of the simmering broth drifted up and out on the night air I could picture him taped to the table, squirming and curdling with the same sweaty terror he had sauteed from who knows how many, and I could see the happy knife go up But the thought of Lily Anne drifted in, and now the moonlight was not so bright, and the whisper of the blade faded. And the raven of Dexter's newborn self croaked, Nevermore, and the moon went behind the puffy silver cloud of Lily Anne, the knife went back in its sheath, and Dexter came back to his small suburban life as Kukarov skittered away into freedom and continued wickedness.

My Dark Passenger fought back, of course, and my rational mind sang harmony. Seriously, Dexter, it crooned with oh-so-sweet reason. Could we really let all this predatory frolicking go unchallenged? Let monsters wander through the streets when it is well within our power to stop them in a final and very entertaining way? Could we really and truly ignore the challenge?

And I thought again of the promise I had made in the hospital: I would be a better man. No more Demon Dexter-I was Dex-Daddy now, dedicated to the welfare of Lily Anne and my fledgling family. For the first time human life seemed rare and valuable, in spite of the fact that there was so much of it, and for the most part it consistently failed to prove its worth. But I owed it to Lily Anne to change my ways, and I would do it.

I stared at the file folder in my lap. It sang softly, seductively, pleading with me to sing along and make lovely music in the moonlight-but no. The grand opera of my brand-new child covered it over, overture swelling, and with a firm hand I fed the folder into the shredder and went to bed.

I got to work just a little bit later than usual the next morning, since I had to deliver Cody and Astor to school first. In the past this had always been Rita's task. Now, of course, everything was different; it was Year One of the Lily Anne Golden Epoch. I would be dropping the two older children at school for the foreseeable future, at least until Lily Anne was a little bit older and could safely ride around in a car seat. And if it meant that I no longer got to work with the first robins of the day, it seemed like a very small sacrifice.

The sacrifice seemed slightly larger, however, when I finally got to the office and found that someone other than Dutiful Dexter had actually brought in doughnuts-and they were all gone, leaving only a tattered and stained cardboard box. But who needs doughnuts when life itself is so sweet? I went to work anyway, with a smile in my heart and a song on my lips.

For once there was no frantic call for me to rush off to a crime scene, and I managed to get through a great deal of routine paperwork in the first ninety minutes of the day. I also called Rita, mostly to make sure that Lily Anne was doing well and had not been kidnapped by aliens, and when Rita had reassured me in a sleepy voice that all was well, I told her I would come to visit that afternoon.

I ordered some supplies, filed some reports, and got my whole professional life almost entirely squared away, and although that did not quite make up for the doughnuts, it nonetheless made me feel very pleased with myself; Dexter dislikes disorder.

I was still wrapped in my pink cloud of satisfaction a little before ten o'clock, when the phone on my desk rang. I stepped over and picked it up with a cheerful, "Hello, Morgan!" and was rewarded with the surly voice of my sister, Deborah.

"Where are you?" she said, rather unnecessarily, I thought. If I was talking to her from a phone attached to my desk by a long wire, where would I be? Maybe cell phones really do destroy brain tissue.

"I'm right here, on the other end of the telephone," I said.

"Meet me in the parking lot," she said, and hung up before I could protest.

I found Deborah beside her motor pool car. She was leaning impatiently against the hood and scowling at me, so in a fit of strategic brilliance I decided to attack first. "Why do I have to meet you out here?" I said. "You have a perfectly good office, and it has chairs and air-conditioning."

She straightened up and reached for her keys. "My office is infested," she said.

"With what?"

"Deke," she said. "The smarmy dim-witted son of a bitch won't leave me alone."

"He can't leave you alone," I said. "He's your partner."

"He's making me nuts," she said. "He leans his ass on my desk and just sits there, waiting for me to fall all over him."

It was a striking image, Deborah falling up out of her desk chair and all over her new partner, but however vivid the picture, it made no sense to me. "Why would you fall all over your partner?"

She shook her head. "Maybe you noticed he is like stupid good-looking?" she said. "If you haven't, you're the only one in the entire fucking building. Including especially Deke."

I had noticed, of course, but I didn't see what his ridiculous good looks had to do with anything under discussion. "Okay," I said. "I noticed. So what?"

"So he thinks I'm going to throw myself at him, like every other chick he's ever met," she said. "Which is nauseating. He's dumber than a box of rocks, and he sits there on the corner of my desk flossing his perfect fucking teeth and waiting for me to tell him what to do and if I have to look at him for two seconds longer I'm going to blow his fucking head off. Get in the car," she said.

Deborah had never been one to disguise her real feelings, but even so, this was quite an outburst, and I just stood for a moment and watched her as she climbed into the car and started the engine. She revved it for a moment and then, to make sure I got the message that she was in a hurry, she hit the siren in a brief whoop that startled me out of my reverie and into the passenger seat. Before I even had the door closed she had put the car in gear and we were rolling out of the lot and onto the street.

"I don't think he's following us," I said as she hit the gas hard and accelerated out into traffic. Deborah didn't reply. She simply swerved around a flatbed truck piled high with watermelons and sped away from the station and her partner.

"Where are we going?" I asked, clinging for dear life to the armrest.

"The school," she said.

"What school?" I asked her, wondering if the roar of the engine had hidden an important part of our conversation.

"The rich kids' school Samantha Aldovar went to," she said. "What's it called, Ransom Everglades."

I blinked. It didn't seem like a destination that required this much haste, unless Deborah thought we were late for class, but here we were, hurtling through traffic at a dangerous pace. In any case, it seemed like good news that, if I survived the car trip over there, I would face nothing more life-threatening than a possible spitball. And of course, considering the school's economic and social status, it would almost certainly be a very high-quality spitball, which is always a consolation.

So I did no more than grit my teeth and hang on tightly as Deborah raced across town, turned onto LeJeune, and took us into Coconut Grove. A left on US 1, a right on Douglas, and a left on Poinciana to cut through to Main Highway, and we were at the school, in what would certainly be record time, if anybody kept track of that sort of thing.

We went through the coral rock gate and a guard stepped out to stop us. Deborah showed her badge and the guard leaned in to examine it before waving us through. We drove around behind a row of buildings and parked under a huge old banyan tree in a spot that said RESERVED FOR M. STOKES. Deborah shoved the car into park and climbed out, and I followed. We walked down a shaded walkway and into sunlight, and I looked around at what we had all grown up thinking of as "the rich kids' school." The buildings were clean and looked new; the grounds were very well kept. The sun shone a little brighter here, the palm fronds swayed just a little more gently, and altogether it seemed like a very nice day to be a rich kid.

The administration building ran sideways across the center of the campus, with a breezeway in the middle, and we stopped at the reception area inside. They had us wait for the assistant something-or-other. I thought about our assistant principal in middle school. He had been very large, with a Cro-Magnon forehead that looked like a knuckle. And so I was somewhat surprised when a small and elegant woman came in and greeted us.

"Officers?" she said pleasantly. "I'm Ms. Stein. How can I help you?"

Deborah shook her hand. "I need to ask you some questions about one of your students," she said.

Ms. Stein raised an eyebrow to let us know that this was very unusual; the police did not come around asking about her students. "Come into my office," she said, and she led us a short way down the hall and into a room with a desk, a chair, and several dozen plaques and photographs on the walls. "Sit down, please," Ms. Stein said, and without even a glance at me Deborah took the one molded plastic chair opposite the desk, leaving me to look for a spot on the wall free from framed memories so I could at least lean in comfort.

"All right," Ms. Stein said. She settled into the chair behind the desk and looked at us with a polite but cool expression. "What's this about?"

"Samantha Aldovar is missing," Deborah said.

"Yes," Ms. Stein said. "We heard, of course."

"What kind of student is she?" Deborah asked.

Ms. Stein frowned. "I can't give you her grades, or anything like that," she said. "But she is a pretty good student. Above average, I would say."

"Does she have financial aid to come here?" Debs asked.

"That's confidential information, of course," Ms. Stein said, and Deborah gave her a hard look, but amazingly, Ms. Stein did not seem to wither. Perhaps she was used to intimidating glares from the wealthy parents. It was clearly an impasse, so I decided to help out.

"Does she take a lot of teasing from the other kids?" I said. "You know, about money or anything?"

Ms. Stein glanced at me and gave me a that's-not-really-funny half a smile. "I take it you think there might be a financial motive for her disappearance," she said.

"Does she have a boyfriend, that you know of?" Debs said.

"I don't really know," Ms. Stein said. "And if I did, I'm not at all sure I should tell you."

"Miss Stern," Debs said.

"It's Stein," Ms. Stein said.

Deborah waved that off. "We are not investigating Samantha Aldovar. We're investigating her disappearance. And if you stonewall us, you're keeping us from finding her."

"I don't really see-"

"We'd like to find her alive," Deborah said, and I was proud of the cold and hard way she said it; Ms. Stein actually turned pale.

"I don't…" she said. "The personal stuff, I really don't know. Perhaps I could get one of her friends to talk to you…"

"That would be very helpful," Deborah said.

"I think she's closest to Tyler Spanos," Ms. Stein said. "But I would have to be present."

"Go get Tyler Spanos, Miss Stein," Deborah said.

Ms. Stein bit her lip and stood up, heading out the door without nearly as much cool composure as she'd had coming in. Deborah settled back in her chair and squirmed a little, as if trying to find a comfortable way to sit in it. There wasn't one. She gave up after a minute and sat up straight, crossing and uncrossing her legs impatiently.

My shoulder was sore, and I tried leaning on the other one. Several minutes went by; Deborah looked up at me two or three times, but neither one of us had anything to say.

Finally, we heard voices drifting in through the door, rising in pitch and volume. That lasted for about half a minute, and then there was relative quiet again. And after several long minutes in which Deborah recrossed her legs and I switched back to leaning on the original shoulder, Ms. Stein hurried back into her office. She was still pale, and she did not look happy.

"Tyler Spanos didn't come in today," Ms. Stein said. "Or yesterday. So I called her home." She hesitated, as if she were embarrassed, and Deborah had to urge her on.

"She's sick?" Debs said.

"No, she…" Again, Ms. Stein hesitated and chewed on her lip. "They… She was working on a class project with another student," she said at last. "They said she's, ah, in order to work on it… they said she's been staying with the other girl."

Deborah sat bolt upright. "Samantha Aldovar," she said, and it was not a question.

Ms. Stein answered it anyway. "Yes," she said. "That's right."

SEVEN

BEtween the laws that any school can call upon to protect its students from official harassment and the clout that the parents and alumni of a school like Ransom Everglades could muster, it could have been very difficult for us to gather any information on what was now a double disappearance. But the school chose to take the high road and use the crisis as an exercise in community activism. They sat us down in the same office with the cluttered walls while Ms. Stein hustled around alerting teachers and administrators.

I looked around the room and noticed that there were still the same number of chairs. My leaning spot on the wall no longer seemed terribly inviting. But I decided that our significance in the grand scheme of things had gone up several notches when two of the school's students turned up missing, and, in short, I was now far too important to lean against the wall. And there was, after all, one more perfectly good chair in the room.

I had just settled into Ms. Stein's chair when my cell phone rang. I glanced at the screen, which told me that the call was from Rita. I answered. "Hello?"

"Dexter, hi, it's me," she said.

"That was my first guess," I told her.

"What? Oh. Anyway, listen," she said, which didn't seem necessary, since I was. "The doctor says I'm ready to come home, so can you come get us?"

"You're what?" I said, completely astonished. After all, Lily Anne had just been born yesterday.

"Ready," she repeated patiently. "We're ready to come home."

"It's much too soon," I said.

"The doctor says it's not," she said. "Dexter, I've done this before."

"But Lily Anne-she might catch something, or the car seat," I said, and I realized I was so filled with panic at the thought of Lily Anne leaving the safety of the hospital that I was talking like Rita.

"She's fine, Dexter, and so am I," she said. "And we want to come home, so please come pick us up, okay?"

"But Rita," I said.

"We'll be waiting," she said. "Bye." And she hung up before I could come up with any kind of rational reason for why she shouldn't leave the hospital yet. I stared at the phone for a moment, and then the thought of Lily Anne actually outside, in a world full of germs and terrorists, galvanized me into action. I slammed the cell phone into its holster and jumped to my feet. "I have to go," I said to my sister.

"Yeah, I got that," she said. She threw me her car keys. "Get back here as fast as you can."

I drove south in pure Miami style, which is to say fast, moving smoothly in and out of traffic as if there were no real lanes. I did not usually drive so flamboyantly; I have always felt that, contrary to the true spirit of our city's roads, getting there is just as important as maintaining a forceful image along the way. But the moves came naturally to me-I grew up here, after all, and the current situation seemed to call for all the haste and macho firmness I could muster. What was Rita thinking? And more, how had she persuaded the doctors to go along with it? It made no sense: Lily Anne was tiny, fragile, terribly vulnerable, and to send her out into cold hard life so quickly seemed to be complete and callous madness.

I stopped at home just long enough to grab the brand-new infant car seat. I had been practicing for weeks, wanting to be perfect with it when the time came-but the time had come too soon, and I found that my fingers, usually so deft, were icy blocks of clumsiness as I tried to fumble it into place with the seat belt. I couldn't get it through the slot in the back of the thing at all. I pushed, pulled, and finally cut my finger on the molded plastic and flung the whole thing down as I sucked at the cut.

This was supposed to be safe? How could this protect Lily Anne when it attacked me so aggressively? And even if it worked as it should-and nothing ever did-how could I keep Lily Anne safe in a world like ours? Especially so soon after birth-it was madness to send her home now, one day old. Typical medical arrogance and indifference; doctors think they're so smart, and all because they passed organic chemistry. But they don't know everything-they did not see what a father's heart so clearly told me. It was much too soon to fling Lily Anne out and into the cold cruel world, merely to save a few dollars for the insurance company. This could never end well.

I finally got the car seat in place, and then rushed on to the hospital. But contrary to my perfectly logical fears, when I arrived I did not find Rita standing outside the hospital, dodging bullets while Lily Anne played with used syringes in the trash. Instead, Rita was in a wheelchair in the lobby, a tightly wrapped bundle of baby in her arms. She looked up at me with a loose smile when I rushed in and said, "Dexter, hi, that was very fast."

"Oh," I said, trying to register the fact that somehow everything was fine. "Well, actually, I was sort of nearby."

"You're not going to drive us home that fast, are you?" she said. And before I could point out that I would never drive fast with Lily Anne in the car and in any case I thought she should stay here a little longer, a cheerful and hairy young man hustled over to us and grabbed at the handles on the back of Rita's wheelchair.

"Hey, here's Daddy," he said. "You folks ready to go?"

"Yes, that's-Thank you," Rita said.

The young man blinked and then said, "All righty then," and he stomped down to release the wheel brake and began to push Rita toward the door. And since at some point even I have to cooperate with the inevitable, I took a deep and resigned breath and followed along behind.

At the car I took Lily Anne from Rita and placed her carefully in the aggressive car seat. But for some reason, all the practicing I had done with Astor's old Cabbage Patch doll did not quite translate to the real baby; finally Rita had to help me get Lily Anne properly fastened in place. And so it was a completely helpless, all-thumbs Dexter who finally climbed behind the wheel and started the engine. And with many anxious glances in the mirror to make sure that the car seat had not burst into flames, I nosed the car out of the parking lot and onto the street.

"Don't drive too fast," Rita told me.

"Yes, dear," I said.

I drove slowly home-not slowly enough to risk the heavily armed outrage of my fellow citizens, but within spitting distance of the speed limit. Each blast of a horn, every thump of an overcranked car stereo, seemed new and threatening, and when I stopped at red lights I found myself glancing anxiously at the nearby cars to see if any automatic weapons were pointed our way. But somehow, miraculously, we got home safely. Undoing the straps of Lily Anne's car seat was not nearly as complicated as fastening them, and in no time at all I had her and Rita inside the house and comfortably ensconced on the couch.

I looked at the two of them, and suddenly everything seemed so different now, because for the first time they were here, at home, and just seeing my new baby in this old setting seemed to underline the fact that life was new and wonderful and fragile.

I dawdled shamelessly, soaking it up and reveling in the utter wonder of it all. I touched Lily Anne's toes, and ran the back of my finger over her cheeks; they were softer than anything I had ever felt before, and somehow I thought I could smell the pink newness of her right through my fingertips. Rita held the baby and slid into a smiling semidoze as I touched and sniffed and looked, until at last I glanced at the clock and saw how much time had passed, and I remembered that I was here in a borrowed car whose owner had been known to verbally behead people for far less.

"You're sure you're all right?" I asked Rita.

She opened her eyes and smiled, the ancient smile Leonardo did so well, mother with wonder child. "I've done this before, Dexter," she said. "We'll be fine."

"If you're sure," I said, with a brand-new sensitivity that I actually felt.

"I'm sure," she said, and very reluctantly, I left them there.

When I got back to the Ransom Everglades campus with Debs's car I found that she had been assigned a room in an old wooden building with a view of the bay, as a sort of temporary interrogation room. The Pagoda, as the building was called, perched on a bluff above the athletic field. It was a rickety old wooden building that didn't look like it could survive a single summer storm, and yet somehow it had stood long enough to become a historical landmark.

Deborah was talking to an exceedingly clean-cut young man when I came in, and she just glanced up at me and nodded without interrupting the boy's response. I settled into the chair next to her.

For the rest of the day, both students and faculty came into the rickety old building one at a time to tell us what they knew about Samantha Aldovar and Tyler Spanos. The students we saw were all bright, attractive, and polite, and the teachers all seemed to be smart and dedicated, and I began to appreciate the benefits of a private school education. If only I'd had the opportunity to attend a place like this, who knows what I might have become? Perhaps instead of a mere blood-spatter analyst who slunk away at night to kill without conscience, I could have become a doctor, or a physicist, or even a senator who slunk away at night to kill without conscience. It was terribly sad to think of all my wasted potential.

But private education is expensive, and it had been far beyond Harry's means-and even if he could have afforded it, I doubt that Harry would have gone for it. He had always been wary of elitism, and he believed in all of our public institutions. Even public school-or perhaps especially public school, since it taught a brand of survival skills he knew we would need.

It was clearly a set of skills the two missing girls could have used. By the time Debs and I finished the interviews, around five-thirty, we had learned some very interesting things about both of them, but nothing that suggested they could survive in the wilds of Miami without a credit card and an iPhone.

Samantha Aldovar remained a little bit of a puzzle, even to those who thought they knew her well. The students were aware that she got financial aid, but it seemed to be no big deal to anybody. They all said she was pleasant, quiet, good at math, and had no boyfriend. No one could think of any reason why she would stage her own disappearance. No one could remember ever seeing her hanging around with any kind of disreputable character-except Tyler Spanos.

Tyler was apparently a true wild child, and on the face of things, the friendship between the two girls was extremely unlikely. Where Samantha got a ride to and from school with her mother in a four-year-old Hyundai, Tyler drove her own car-a Porsche. While Samantha was quiet and shy, Tyler seemed to be the original Good Time Charlene, a perpetual loud party just looking for a place to happen. She did not have a boyfriend only because she could not limit herself to one boy at a time.

And yet a close friendship had developed over the last year or so and the two girls were almost always together at lunch, after school, and on weekends. Not only was this puzzling, it was the one thing that bothered Deborah more than any other. She had calmly listened and asked questions, put out a BOLO on Tyler's Porsche, and (with a shudder) sent her partner, Deke, to talk to the Spanos family, and none of these things had caused so much as a ripple on the face of the Sea of Deborah. But the strange friendship between the two girls had, for some reason, caused her to come up on point like a cocker spaniel sniffing steak.

"It makes no fucking sense," she said.

"They're teenagers," I reminded her. "They're not supposed to make sense."

"Wrong," Deborah said. "Some things always make sense, especially with teenagers. Nerds hang with nerds; jocks and cheerleaders hang with jocks and cheerleaders. That never changes."

"Perhaps they have some kind of secret mutual interest," I suggested, glancing casually at my watch, which told me that it was very close to time for me to go home.

"I'd bet on it," said Debs. "And I'd bet that if we find it, we find out where they are."

"Nobody else here seems to know what it might be," I said, even though I was actually trying to construct a graceful exit line.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Deborah said abruptly.

"Excuse me?"

"You keep squirming around like you have to pee," she said.

"Oh, um, actually," I said, "it's almost time for me to go. I have to pick up Cody and Astor before six."

My sister stared at me for what seemed like a long time. "I never would have believed it," she said at last.

"Believed what?"

"That you'd be married, kids, you know. A family man, with all you got going on."

And by that I knew she meant my darker side, my former role as Dexter the Avenger, the lone blade in the moonlight. She had found out about my alter ego, and had apparently become reconciled with it-and just in time for me to abandon the persona. "Well," I said, "I don't suppose I would have believed it either. But…" I shrugged. "Here I am with a family."

"Yeah," she said, and she looked away. "And before me."

I watched her face working to rearrange itself back to her usual mask of perpetual grumpy authority, but it took several moments, and in the interval she looked shockingly vulnerable.

"Do you love her?" she said suddenly, swinging back to face me, and I blinked with surprise. Such a blunt and personal question was very unlike Deborah, which was one reason we got along so well. "Do you love Rita," she repeated, leaving me no wiggle room whatsoever.

"I… don't know," I answered carefully. "I'm, uh, used to her."

Deborah stared and then shook her head. "Used to her," she said. "Like she's an easy chair or something."

"Not that easy," I said, trying to inject a little levity into what had suddenly become a very unsettling conversation.

"Do you even feel love at all?" she demanded. "I mean, can you?"

I thought of Lily Anne. "Yes," I said. "I think so."

Deborah watched my face for several long seconds, but there was really not much to see, and she finally turned away and looked out through the old wooden window frame at the bay. "Shit," she said. "Go home. Go get your kids and hang out with your easy-chair wife."

I had not been human for very long, but even so, I knew something was not quite right in the Land of Deborah and I could not leave her on that note. "Debs," I said. "What's wrong?"

I saw her neck muscles tense, but she continued to look away, out over the water. "All this family shit," she said. "With these two girls and their fucked-up families. And your family with fucked-up you. It's never what it should be, and it's never right but everybody gets it except me." She took a deep breath and shook her head. "And I really want it." She swung back at me with ferocity. "And no goddamn jokes about the biological clock, all right?"

To be completely honest, which I am when I have to be, I was far too deeply shocked by Deborah's behavior for any jokes, whether about clocks or anything else. But joke or no, I knew I had to say something, and I cast about for the right thing and could only come up with a question about Kyle Chutsky, her live-in boyfriend of several years. I had seen the approach on a daytime drama a few years back. I liked to study them for clues on how to act in ordinary situations, and it looked like that was going to pay off here. "Is everything okay with Kyle?" I said.

She snorted, but her face softened. "Fucking Chutsky. Thinks he's too old and beat-up and useless for a nice young thing like me. Keeps saying I can do better. And when I say maybe I don't want to do better, he just shakes his head and looks sorrowful."

It was all very interesting, a truly riveting look into the life of someone who had been a human being much longer than I had, but I was all out of ideas for constructive commentary, and I felt very much the pressure of the clock-the one on my wrist, not the biological one. So, floundering about for something to say that would be properly comforting and yet hint at my need for immediate departure, all I could come up with was, "Well, I'm sure he means well."

Deborah stared at me long enough to make me wonder if I had really said the right thing. Then she sighed heavily and turned to face out the window again. "Yeah," she said. "I'm sure he means well, too." And she looked out at the bay and didn't say anything but, worse than any words she could have uttered, she actually sighed.

This was a side of my sister I had not seen before, and it was not a side I wanted to see a great deal more of. I was used to Deborah being full of sound and fury, signifying arm punches. To see her soft and vulnerable and roiling with self-pity was unsettling in the extreme. Even though I knew I should say something comforting, I had no idea where to begin, and so I stood there awkwardly, until finally the need to leave was stronger than my sense of obligation.

"I'm sorry, Debs," I said, and oddly enough, I was. "I have to get the kids now."

"Yeah," she said without turning around. "Go get your kids."

"Um," I said, "I need a ride, back to my car."

She turned slowly away from the window and looked over at the building's door, where Ms. Stein was hovering. Then she nodded and stood up. "All right," she said. "We're done here." She walked past me, paused only to thank Ms. Stein with flat politeness, and led the way back to her car in silence.

The silence lasted almost all the way to my car and it was not very comfortable. I felt like I should say something, lift the mood a bit, but my first two attempts fell so flat that I stopped trying. Debs pulled into the parking lot at work and stopped beside my car, staring straight ahead through the windshield with the same look of unhappy introspection she'd been wearing for the whole trip. I watched her for a moment, but she didn't look back.

"All right," I said at last. "See you tomorrow."

"What's it like?" she said, and I paused with the door half-open.

"What's what like?" I said.

"When you held your baby for the first time," she said.

I didn't have to think very hard to answer that. "Amazing," I said. "Absolutely wonderful. It's not like anything else in the world."

She looked at me, and I couldn't tell whether she was going to hug me or hit me, but she didn't do either, and finally she just shook her head, slowly. "Go get your kids," she said. I waited for a second, to see if she would say anything else, but she didn't.

I got out of the car and as she drove slowly away I stood and watched, trying to fathom what was going on with my sister. But it was clearly something far too complicated for a newly minted human, so I shrugged it off, got into my car, and went to get Cody and Astor.

EIGHT

Traffic was heavy as I drove south on old Cutler Road to pick up Cody and Astor, but for some reason everyone seemed to be very polite in this part of town tonight. A man driving a large red Hummer even paused to let me in when the lanes merged and I had to get over, which I had never seen before. It made me wonder if perhaps terrorists had slipped something into the Miami water system to make us all soft and lovable. First I had resolved to quit my Dark Ways; then Debs had thrown a fit of near-weeping-and now a Hummer driver in rush hour was polite and thoughtful. Could this be the Apocalypse?

But I saw no flaming angels on the remainder of the drive to the park where Cody and Astor were interred, and once again I got there just before six o'clock. The same young woman was waiting by the door with Cody and Astor, jiggling her keys and practically dancing with impatience. She very nearly flung the children at me and then, with a mechanical smile that was not in the same league as one of my fakes, she vaulted for her car at the far end of the parking lot.

I loaded Cody and Astor into the backseat of my car and climbed behind the wheel. They were relatively silent, even Astor, and so, in my role of new human father I decided I should open them up a little bit. "Did everybody have a good day?" I said with immense synthetic good cheer.

"Anthony is such an asshole," Astor said.

"Astor, you shouldn't use that word," I told her, mildly shocked.

"Even Mom says that word when she's driving," she said. "And anyway, I heard it on the radio in her car."

"Well, you still shouldn't use it," I said. "It's a bad word."

"You don't have to talk me to like that," she said. "I'm ten years old."

"That's not old enough to use that word," I said. "No matter how I talk to you."

"So you don't care what Anthony did?" she said. "You just want to make sure I don't use that word?"

I took a deep breath and made a special effort not to ram the car in front of me. "What did Anthony do?" I said.

"He said I wasn't hot," Astor said. "Because I don't have any boobs."

I felt my mouth open and close a few times, all by itself, and just in time I remembered that I still needed to breathe. I was clearly in far over my head, but just as clearly I had to say something. "Well, I-I, um, ah," I said, quite distinctly. "I mean, very few of us do have boobs at ten."

"He's such a butt-head," she said darkly, and then, in a very syrupy-sweet tone, she added, "Can I say butt-head, Dexter?"

I opened my mouth again to stammer something or other but before I could utter a single meaningless syllable Cody spoke up. "Somebody's following us," he said.

Out of reflex I glanced in the rearview mirror. In this traffic, it was impossible for me to tell if somebody was, in fact, following us. "Why do you say that, Cody?" I asked. "How can you tell?"

In the mirror I could see him shrug. "Shadow Guy," he said.

I sighed again. First Astor with her barrage of forbidden language, and now Cody with his Shadow Guy. Obviously, I was in for one of those memorable evenings parents have now and then. "Cody, the Shadow Guy can be wrong sometimes," I said.

He shook his head. "Same car," he said.

"Same as what?"

"It's the car from the hospital parking lot," Astor interpreted. "The red one, where you said the guy wasn't looking at us but he really was. And now he's following us even though you think he isn't."

I like to think I am a reasonable man, even in unreasonable situations, like most of those involving kids. But at this point, I felt I had let unreality intrude just a little too far, and a small lesson was called for. Besides, if I was going to follow my resolve to cross over to the sunny side of the street, I had to start weaning them away from their dark imaginations at some point, and this was as good a time as any.

"All right," I said. "Let's see if he really is following us."

I moved into the left lane and signaled for a turn. Nobody followed us. "Do you see anybody?" I said.

"No," Astor said, very grumpily.

I turned left down a street beside a strip mall. "Is anybody following us now?"

"No," said Astor.

I accelerated down the street and turned right. "How about now?" I called cheerfully. "Anybody behind us?"

"Dexter," Astor grumbled.

I pulled over in front of a small and ordinary house much like ours, putting two wheels on the grass and my foot on the brake. "And now? Anybody following us?" I said, trying not to gloat audibly at making my point so dramatically.

"No," Astor hissed.

"Yes," Cody said.

I turned around in the seat to scold him, and stopped dead. Because through the rear window of the car I could see that a few hundred feet away, a car was nosing slowly toward us. There was just enough light from the setting sun to see a quick flash of red color from the small car, and then it was crawling toward us through the shadows of the tree-lined street. And as if awakened by those shadows, the Dark Passenger carefully uncoiled and spread out its wings and hissed a warning.

Without thinking I stepped down hard on the gas, even before I turned back around to face front, and I left a small patch of torn grass behind me and narrowly missed plowing into a mailbox as I looked forward again. The car skidded slightly as it regained the pavement. "Hold on," I told the kids, and with some something far too close to panic I raced down the street and turned right, back toward US 1.

I could see the other car behind me, but I was well ahead by the time I got back to the highway, and I turned right quickly into heavy traffic. I began to breathe again, just once or twice, as I powered across three lanes of rapidly moving cars and into the far left lane. I gunned it through a light just as it changed to red, and sped up the street for a half mile before I saw an opening in the oncoming traffic and screeched through a left-hand turn and down another quiet residential street. I drove through two intersections and then turned left again so that I was now running parallel to US 1. The street was dark and quiet and there was no sign of anything at all behind us now, not even a bicycle.

"All right," I said. "I think we lost him."

In the mirror I saw Cody staring out the back window, and he turned around and caught my eye, and nodded.

"But who was it, Dexter?" Astor said.

"Just some random lunatic," I said, with more reassurance in my voice than I actually felt. "Some people get off on scaring people they don't even know."

Cody frowned. "Same guy," he said. "From the hospital."

"You can't know that," I said.

"Can," he said.

"It's just a coincidence. Two different crazy people," I told him.

"Same," he said dismissively.

"Cody," I said. But I could feel the adrenaline draining out of me and I really didn't want an argument, so I let it go at that. He would learn as he grew that the greater Miami area was filled with a varied and impressive collection of wackos and predators, and many that were half of each. There was no way to know why someone had followed us, and it didn't really matter. Whoever it was, they were gone now.

Just to play it safe I continued to drive on the side streets all the way home, in case our follower was watching the highway. Besides, with the sun going down it was easier to see somebody behind us in darker house-lined streets, away from the bright orange glow of the lights along US 1. And there was nobody to see; once or twice headlights flared in the rearview mirror, and each time it was simply a homeward-bound commuter, turning down his own street and parking in his driveway.

We came finally to the cross street that took us to our own little bungalow. I turned onto it and edged up to US 1 carefully, looking in all directions. There was nothing to see but traffic, and none of it looked sinister, and when the light finally changed to green I crossed the highway and drove through the two more turns that took us to our street.

"All right," I said, as our little patch of heaven heaved into sight. "Let's not say anything about this to your mom. She'll just worry. Okay?"

"Dexter," Astor said, and she leaned forward against the back of the front seat, pointing ahead to our house. I slid my gaze along her outstretched arm and hit the brakes hard enough to rattle my teeth.

A small red car was parked directly in front of the house, nose pointed at us. The lights were on and the motor was running and I could not see inside it, but I did not need to see in order to feel the rapid beat of dark leathery wings and the angry hiss of a wide-awake Passenger.

"Stay here, doors locked," I told the kids, and I handed Astor my cell phone. "If anything happens call nine-one-one."

"Can I drive away if you're dead?" Astor said.

"Just stay here," I said, and I took a deep breath, gathering the darkness "I can drive," Astor said, unsnapping her seat belt and lurching forward.

"Astor," I said sharply, and there was an echo of the other voice, the cold commander, in my own. "Stay put," I said, and she settled back into her own seat almost meekly.

I got out slowly and faced the other car. There was no way to see inside, and no sign of anything dangerous; just a small red car with the lights on and the engine running. I felt the equivalent of a long drumroll from the Passenger-ready for action but no hint of what; it could be flaming chain saws; it could be a pie in the face.

I stepped toward the car, trying to plan what to do, which was impossible because I did not know what they wanted, or even who they were. It was no longer believable that it was merely a random crazy-not if he knew where I lived. But who was it? Who had any reason to act like this? Among the living, I mean, because there were plenty of former victims who might have loved to come after me, but they were all far beyond any sort of action at all, other than decomposition.

I walked forward trying to be ready for everything, another impossibility. Still no sign of life in the other car, and nothing at all from the Passenger except a puzzled and cautious flutter of wings.

And when I was about ten feet away the driver's window slithered down and I stopped in my tracks. For a long moment nothing happened, and then a face came out the window, a familiar face, wearing a bright fake smile.

"Wasn't that fun?" the face said. "When were you going to tell me I'm an uncle?"

It was my brother, Brian.

NINE

I had not seen my brother since that memorable evening several years earlier when we had met, for the first time as adults, in a storage container at Port of Miami, and he had offered me a knife so I could assist him in the vivisection of his chosen playmate. As it had happened, I had not been able to bring myself to do so, odd as it sounds. That may be because he had chosen Deborah, and Harry's long-dead hand had squeezed my hypothetical soul so strongly I was unable to hurt her-even though she was not my blood relation, and Brian was.

In fact, he was my only biological relative, as far as I knew, although considering the little I had uncovered about our round-heeled mother, anything was possible. For all I knew, I could have a dozen half brothers and sisters living in a trailer park in Immokalee. At any rate, far more important than the bond of blood we shared was-well, another kind of bond of blood altogether. Because Brian had been forged in the selfsame fire that had turned me into Dexter the Dark, and it had also given him an inarguable need to slice and dice. Unfortunately, he had grown to maturity without the restraints of Harry's guiding Code, and he was very happy to practice his art on anyone, provided they were youngish and female. He had been working his way through a string of Miami prostitutes when our paths had first crossed.

The last time I had seen him, he had been staggering off into the night with a bullet in his side, the only head start I could give him, considering that Deborah was there and somewhat anxious to speak with him in an official capacity. Apparently he'd found medical attention, because he looked quite healthy now; a little older, of course, but he still looked a lot like me. He was very close to my height and build, and even his features looked like a crude and battered imitation of my own, and the bright empty mockery I remembered was in his eyes as he looked up at me from his little red car.

"Did you get my flowers?" he asked, and I nodded, moving forward.

"Brian," I said, leaning onto the car. "You look good."

"As do you, dear brother," he said, still smiling. He reached out and patted my stomach. "I believe you've put on a little weight-your wife must be a good cook."

"She is," I said. "She takes very good care of me. Body and, um, soul."

We chuckled together at my use of that fairy-tale word, and I thought again how good it was to know somebody who really understood me. I'd had a brief and tantalizing glimpse of this all-accepting bond on that one night we were together, and now I realized just how much I had given up-and perhaps he did, too, because here he was.

But of course, nothing is ever that simple, especially not with us residents of the Dark Tower, and I felt a small flutter of suspicion. "What are you doing here, Brian?"

He shook his head with pretended self-pity. "Already feeling suspicious? Of your own flesh and blood?"

"Well," I said, "I mean, really. Um, considering…?"

"True enough," he said. "Why don't you invite me in and we'll talk?"

The suggestion was like sudden ice water flung on my neck. Invite him in? Into my house, where my other carefully separate life lay nestled in its bed of clean white cotton? Let a dribble of blood spatter onto the pristine damask of my disguise? It was a terrible idea and it sent a surge of horrid discomfort right through me. Besides, I had never even mentioned to anyone that I had a brother, and in this case the "anyone" was Rita, and she would certainly wonder at the omission. How could I invite him in-into the world of Rita's pancakes, Disney DVDs, and clean sheets? Invite him inside, by all that was unholy, to the Inner Sanctum of Lily Anne? It was not right. It was sacrilegious, a blasphemous violation of…

Of what? Wasn't he my very own brother? Shouldn't that cover over everything else in a blanket of sanctimony? Surely I could trust him-but with everything? With my secret identity, my Fortress of Solitude-and even Lily Anne, my Kryptonite?

"Don't drool, brother," Brian said, interrupting my flight of panicked musing. "It's so very unbecoming."

Without thinking, I dabbed at the corner of my mouth with my sleeve, still floundering desperately for some kind of coherent response. But before I could even arrive at a single syllable, a car horn bleated nearby, and I turned to see Astor's peevish face glaring through the windshield of my car. Cody's head was right next to hers, silent and watchful. I could see Astor squirming and mouthing the words, Come on, Dexter! She beeped again.

"Your stepchildren," Brian said. "Charming little sprats, I'm sure. May I meet them?"

"Um," I said, with really impressive authority.

"Come on, Dexter," Brian said. "I won't eat them." He gave a strange little laugh that did nothing to reassure me, but at the same time I realized that he was, after all, my brother-and Cody and Astor were far from helpless, as they had shown several times. Surely there could be no harm in allowing them to meet their, ah, stepuncle?

"Okay," I said, and I waved back at Astor, beckoning her to come and join us. With very commendable speed they both scrambled out of the car and came over to us, allowing Brian just barely enough time to clamber out of his car and stand beside me.

"Well, well," he said. "What handsome children!"

"He's handsome," Astor said. "I'm just cute until I grow my boobs, and then I'm going to be hot."

"I'm sure you are," Brian said, and he turned his attention to Cody. "And you, little man," he said. "Are you…" And he trickled to a halt as he met Cody's gaze.

Cody stood looking up at Brian, his feet spread apart and his hands hanging stiffly at his sides. Their eyes locked together and I could hear the leathery unfolding of wings between them, the dark and sibilant greeting of twin interior specters. There was a look of belligerent wonder on Cody's face, and he just stared for a long moment and Brian stared back, and finally Cody looked at me. "Like me," he said. "Shadow Guy."

"Amazing," Brian said, and Cody turned back to meet his gaze. "Brother, what have you done?"

"Brother?" Astor said, clearly demanding equal time in the spotlight. "He's your brother?!"

"Yes, my brother," I said to Astor, and added to Brian, "I didn't do anything. Their biological father did."

"He used to beat us up really bad," Astor said matter-of-factly.

"I see," Brian said. "Thus supplying the Traumatic Event that spawns us all."

"I guess so," I said.

"And what have you done with this wonderful untapped potential?" Brian said, his eyes still on Cody.

I was now in very uncomfortable territory, considering that my plan had been to train them in Harry's Way, a course I was now just as determined to avoid, and I found that I really didn't want to talk openly about this, not at this point in time. "Let's go inside," I said. "Would you like a cup of coffee or something?"

Brian turned slow and empty eyes away from Cody and onto me. "I'd be delighted, brother," he said, and with another glance at the children, he turned and walked toward my front door.

"You never said you had a brother," Astor said.

"Like us," Cody added.

"You never asked," I said, feeling strangely defensive about the whole thing.

"You should have said," Astor said, and Cody looked at me with an equal, unspoken accusation, as if I had violated some basic trust.

But Brian was already standing at the front door, so I turned away and followed. They came along behind, clearly fuming, and it occurred to me that this would not be the last time I heard similar words. What would I say to Rita when she asked the same thing, as she certainly would? I mean, of course I had never told them I had a brother. Considering that Brian was just like me but without any of Harry's restraints on him, a kind of Dexter Unbound, what could I possibly say? The only really appropriate introduction would be, "This is my brother-run for your life!"

And in any case, I had not anticipated ever seeing him again after that one brief and dizzying encounter. I had not even known if he would survive. He clearly had-but why had he come back? I would have thought it made more sense to stay far away; Deborah would certainly remember him. Theirs had not been the sort of encounter one forgets, and she was, after all, exactly the kind of person who took great professional satisfaction from arresting people like him.

I knew very well, too, that he had not come back because of any kind of sentimental feelings for me, either. He did not have sentimental feelings. So why was he here, and what did I do about it?

Brian reached the front door and turned to look at me, raising one eyebrow. Apparently, the first thing I had to do about it was to open the door and let him in. I did; he gave me a small bow and entered, and Cody and Astor trooped in after him.

"What a lovely home," Brian said, looking around the living room. "So very homey."

There were heaps of DVDs lying across the tattered couch, and a pile of socks on the floor, and two empty pizza boxes on the coffee table. Rita had been in the hospital for nearly three days, and naturally enough she had not had the energy to clean up since she returned this morning. And although I do prefer a neat environment, I had been far too distracted myself to do anything about it, and the place really was not at its best. In fact, it was a frightful mess.

"I'm sorry," I said to Brian. "We've been, um-"

"Yes, I know, the blessed event," he said. "Into each life some domesticity must fall."

"What does that mean?" Astor demanded.

"Dexter?" Rita called from the bedroom. "Is that-Is somebody with you?"

"It's me," I said.

"His brother is here," Astor said belligerently.

There was a pause, replaced by the sound of panicked rustling of some kind, and then Rita came out, still brushing at her hair with one hand. "Brother?" she said. "But that's-Oh." And she stumbled to a halt, staring at Brian.

"Dear lady," Brian said with knife-edged mocking joy, "how lovely you are. Dexter always did have an eye for beauty."

Rita fluttered her hands at her head. "Oh, my God, I'm such a mess," she said. "And the house is-But, Dexter, you never even said you had a brother, and this is-"

"It certainly is," Brian said. "And I apologize for the inconvenience."

"But your brother," Rita repeated. "And you never said."

I felt my jaw muscles moving, but no matter how carefully I listened, I did not hear myself saying anything. Brian watched me with real enjoyment for a moment before he finally spoke up.

"I'm afraid it's all my fault," he said at last. "Dexter thought I was long dead."

"That's right," I said, feeling like one of the Three Stooges picking up a bobbled line cue.

"Still," Rita said, still fussing absently with her hair. "I mean, you never-You said you were-I mean, how could you not…?"

"It's very painful," I said tentatively. "I don't like to talk about it."

"Still," Rita repeated, and even though there was no guidebook for the territory we had entered, I knew I had not heard the last of this. So, hoping to maneuver us back onto firmer terrain, I blurted out the only words I could find.

"Could we have a cup of coffee?" I said.

"Oh," Rita said, her peevishness changing at once to a look of startled guilt. "I'm sorry-would you like-I mean, yes, here, sit down." And she moved to the couch and removed the assorted litter that blocked it with a rapid series of precision moves that did us all proud, domestically speaking. "There," she said, piling the armful of clutter beside the couch and waving at Brian. "Please-sit down, and-Oh! I'm Rita."

Brian stepped forward with brittle gallantry and took her hand. "My name is Brian," he said. "But please sit down, dear lady; you should not be on your feet so soon."

"Oh," Rita said, and she was actually blushing. "But the coffee, I ought to-"

"Surely Dexter is not so hopeless that he can't make coffee?" Brian said, arching one eyebrow at her, and she giggled.

"I suppose we'll never know unless we let him try," she said, and she actually simpered at him as she sank onto the couch. "Dexter, would you please-It's three scoops for six cups, and you put the water into the-"

"I think I can manage," I said, and if I sounded a little surly, who had a better right? And as Brian sat beside my wife, on my couch, I stalked into the kitchen to make coffee. And as I clattered through the motions of filling the pot from the sink and pouring the water into the machine, I heard from deep inside a quiet settling of bat wings as the Passenger stood down. But from the icy coils of Dexter's allegedly powerful brain I heard only stammers of confusion and uncertainty. The ground seemed to be turning under my feet; I felt exposed and threatened and assailed by all the wicked armies of the night.

Why had my brother returned? And why did that make me feel so terribly insecure?

TEN

A few minutes later i had poured the coffee into mugs and set them on a tray with the sugar bowl and two spoons. I carried it carefully to the doorway into the living room, and stopped dead. The picture I saw was one of domestic bliss, charming in every aspect-except for the fact that it did not include me. My brother had settled onto the couch with Rita as if he had always lived there. Cody and Astor stood a few feet away looking at him with fascination, and I froze in the kitchen door and stared at the tableau with a growing sense of discomfort. Seeing Brian here, on my couch, Rita leaning toward him as she spoke, and Cody and Astor watching-it was just too weirdly surreal. The images did not quite mesh, but they were very unsettling, as if you had entered a cathedral for high mass and found people copulating on the altar.

Brian, of course, seemed completely undisturbed. I suppose it is one of the great advantages of being incapable of feeling things; he looked as comfortable on my couch as if he had grown there. And just to emphasize the fact that he apparently belonged there more than I did, he saw me lurking with the coffee and waved a hand at the chair next to the couch.

"Sit down, brother," he said. "Make yourself at home." Rita jerked upright, and Cody and Astor swung their heads to me and watched as I approached with the coffee.

"Oh!" Rita said, and to me she sounded a little guilty. "You forgot the cream, Dexter." And before anyone could speak she was gone into the kitchen.

"You keep calling him brother," Astor said to Brian. "How come you don't use his name?"

Brian blinked at her, and I felt a surge of kinship. It wasn't just me-Astor had reduced him to mere eye movements, too. "I don't know," he said. "I suppose it's because the relationship is such a surprise to both of us."

Cody and Astor swung their heads to face me in perfect unison.

"Yes," I said, and it was very true. "A complete surprise."

"Why?" Astor said. "Lots of people have brothers."

I had no idea how to explain, and I stalled by putting down the tray and sinking into the chair. And once again it was Brian and not me who jumped into the silence.

"Lots of people have families, too," he said. "Like you two. But brother-Dexter and I did not. We were, ah, abandoned. Under very unpleasant circumstances." He gave her the bright smile again, and I am quite sure I only imagined that there was some real glint behind it this time. "Especially me."

"What does that mean?" Astor said.

"I was an orphan," Brian said. "A foster child. I grew up in a whole bunch of different homes where they didn't like me and didn't really want me, but they were paid to keep me."

"Dexter had a home," Astor said.

Brian nodded. "Yes, he did. And he has another one now."

I felt cold talons on my back and did not know why. Surely there was no threat in Brian's words, but still "You two need to realize how very lucky you have been," Brian said. "To have a home-and even somebody who understands you." He looked at me and smiled again. "And now, two somebodies." And he gave them a horrible fake wink.

"Does that mean you're going to hang around with us?" Astor said.

Brian's smile grew a fraction. "I just might," he said. "What else is family for?"

Brian's words jerked me into action, and I leaned toward him as if somebody had burned me on the back. "Are you sure?" I said, and I felt the words turn into cold and clumsy lumps in my mouth. Nonetheless, I stammered on. "I mean, you know, um, it's wonderful to see you and all, but-there's a certain amount of risk involved."

"What risk?" Astor demanded.

"I can be very careful," Brian said to me, "as we both know."

"It's just, you know, Deborah might come around here," I said.

"She hasn't come around for the last two weeks," he said. And he raised a mocking eyebrow at me. "Has she?"

"How do you know that?" Astor said. "Why does it matter if Aunt Deborah comes around?"

It was very interesting to hear that "two weeks," and know exactly how long Brian had been watching us, and we both ignored Astor's interruption because it quite clearly mattered a great deal. If Deborah were to see Brian here, we would both be in unspeakably hot water. But what Brian said was true: Deborah did not come around very often lately. I hadn't really thought about why that might be, but perhaps in light of her recent meltdown on the subject of my having a family before she did, I could assume that she found it painful in some way.

Luckily for me, I was spared another lesson in family dynamics, as Rita came bustling in bearing a small milk pitcher, and even a plate of cookies. "There," she said, putting down her load and arranging things in a more perfect display. After all, she was Rita the Mighty, absolute Ruler of the Domestic and All Things Kitchen. "We had some of that Jamaican blend left that you said was so good, Dexter. Did you use that?" I nodded mutely as she moved things around on the coffee table. "Because after all, you liked it so much, maybe your brother would like it, too." And she loaded the word "brother" with so much extra weight that I was very sure I had not heard the last of it.

"It smells absolutely wonderful," Brian said. "I can already feel myself perking up."

Brian's words were so patently fake that I was sure Rita would turn on him with a raised eyebrow and a curled lip. Instead, she actually blushed a little as she sank back onto the couch and pushed a cup toward him. "Do you take milk and sugar?" she said.

"Oh, no," Brian said, smiling right at me. "I like it very dark."

Rita turned the cup's handle toward him and placed a small napkin beside it. "Dexter likes a little sugar," she said.

"Dear lady," Brian gushed, "I would say he's found it."

I don't know what terrible suffering had turned Brian into the Fountain of Phoniness I now saw sitting on my couch, but I can only believe it was a very good thing that he was incapable of feeling shame. I have always prided myself on being smooth and somewhat plausible; he clearly never learned either. His compliments were coarse, obvious, and quite clearly fake. And as the evening went on-through more coffee, then a pizza, because naturally my brother had to stay for dinner-he heaped it on higher and deeper. I kept waiting for the heavens to open up and shatter him with lightning, or at least for some great voice to urge him to put a sock on it, as Harry would have said. But the more outrageous Brian's flattery and flummery got, the happier it made Rita. Even Cody and Astor simply watched him in an admiring silence.

And to cap off my discomfort, when Lily Anne began to fuss in the next room, Rita brought her into the living room and put her on display. Brian obliged with the most exorbitant display yet, praising her toes, her nose, her tiny perfect fingers, and even the way she cried. And Rita absolutely ate it up, smiling, nodding, and even unbuttoning her shirt to feed Lily Anne right there in front of us all.

Altogether, it was one of the most uncomfortable evenings I had spent since-well, quite honestly, since the last time I had seen Brian. It was all made worse because there was truly nothing I could say or do-and this was partly because I did not know what I found objectionable. After all, as Rita took such pleasure in saying at least three times, we were all family. Why shouldn't we sit around together and trade cheerful lies? Isn't that what families do?

When Brian finally got up to go at around nine o'clock, Rita and the kids were all thrilled with their new relative, Uncle Brian. Their old relative-battered and anxious Daddy Dexter-was apparently the only one who felt nervous, uneasy, and uncertain. I walked Brian to the front door, where Rita gave him a large hug and told him to please come around as often as possible, and Cody and Astor both shook his hand in what must be described as a fawning manner.

Of course I'd had no chance at all to speak with Brian privately, since he had been surrounded by the admiring crowd all night. So I took the chance to walk him out to his car, firmly closing the door on his groupies. And just before he climbed into the little red car, he turned and looked at me.

"What a lovely family you have, brother," he said. "Domestic perfection."

"I still don't know why you're here," I said.

"Don't you?" Brian said. "Wasn't I obvious?"

"Painfully obvious," I said. "But not at all clear."

"Is it so hard to believe that I want to belong to a family?" he said.

"Yes."

He cocked his head to the side and looked at me with perfect emptiness. "But isn't that what brought us together the first time?" he said. "Isn't it completely natural?"

"It might be," I said. "But we're not."

"Alas, too true," he said with his usual melodramatic flair. "But nevertheless, I found myself thinking about it. About you. My only blood relative."

"As far as we know," I said, and to my surprise I heard him say the same words at the same time, and he smiled broadly as he realized it, too.

"You see?" he said. "You can't argue with DNA. We are stuck with each other, brother. We're family."

And even though the same thought had been repeated endlessly all evening, and even though it was still ringing in my ears as Brian drove away, it did nothing to reassure me, and I went to bed still feeling the slow creep of uneasy toes along my spine.

ELEVEN

It was a fretful night for me, with patches of sleep separated by deep bogs of restless wakefulness. I felt assailed by something I could only think of as nameless dread, a terrible lurking thing egged on by a voiceless unease from the Passenger, who seemed for once to be absolutely uncertain, just as flummoxed as I was. I might possibly have flogged this beast into its cage and found a few hours of blissful unconsciousness-but then, there was also Lily Anne.

Dear, sweet, precious, irreplaceable Lily Anne, the heart and soul of Dexter's new and human self, turned out to have another wondrous talent far beyond her more obvious charms. She had, apparently, a wonderfully powerful set of lungs, and she was determined to share this gift with all of us, every twenty minutes, all night long. And by some quirk of malignant nature, every time I managed to slide into a brief interlude of real sleep, it coincided exactly with one of Lily Anne's crying spells.

Rita seemed completely undisturbed by the noise, which did nothing to raise her stock with me. Every time the baby cried, she would say, "Bring her to me, Dexter," apparently without waking up, and then the two of them would drift off into sleep until Rita, again without opening her eyes, would say, "Put her back, please." And I would lurch to the crib, put Lily Anne down and cover her carefully, and silently beg her to please, please, sleep for just one small hour.

But when I returned to bed, even in the dark and temporary silence sleep eluded me. As much as I despise a cliche, I did, in fact, toss and turn, and neither option gave me any comfort. And in the few real moments of sleep that came to me, for some reason I dreamed, and they were not happy dreams. I do not, as a rule, dream at all; I believe the act may be connected to having a soul, and since I am quite sure I don't have one, for the most part I am blissfully brain-dead when I go to sleep, without any disturbance from the subconscious.

But in the sweaty depths of this night, Dexter dreamed. The images were as twisted as the bedsheets: Lily Anne holding a knife in her tiny fist, Brian collapsing into a pool of blood while Rita breast-fed Dexter, Cody and Astor swimming through that same awful red pool. Typical for such nonsense, there was no real meaning in any of it, and yet it still made me vastly uncomfortable on the bottom shelf of my inner cabinet, and when I finally staggered out of bed the next morning I was very far from rested.

I made it into the kitchen unaided, and Rita thumped a cup of coffee in front of me, with not nearly the care she had shown arranging Brian's cup. And even as I had this unworthy thought, Rita picked up on it, as if she were reading my mind.

"Brian seems like such a great guy," she said.

"Yes, he does," I said, thinking to myself that seeming is very far from being.

"The children really like him," she said, adding to my undefined sense of discomfort, which my pre-coffee partial consciousness had done nothing to dispel.

"Yes, um…" I said, taking a large slurp and silently willing the coffee to work quickly and get my brain back online. "Actually, he's never really been around kids before, and-"

"Well, then, this will be good for all of us," Rita said happily. "Has he ever been married?"

"I don't think so," I said.

"Don't you know?" Rita said sharply. "I mean, honestly, Dexter-he is your brother."

Perhaps it was my newfound human feeling erupting, but irritation at last pushed its way through my morning fog. "Rita," I said peevishly, "I know he's my brother. You don't need to keep telling me."

"You should have said something," she said.

"But I didn't," I said, quite logically, though admittedly still a bit cranky. "So can we change the channel, please?"

She looked like she had a lot more to say on the subject, but she very wisely held her tongue. She did, however, undercook my fried eggs, and so it was with a sense of real relief that I finally grabbed Cody and Astor and fled out the door. And of course, life being the unpleasant business that it is, they were stuck on the same page as their mother.

"How come you never told us about Uncle Brian, Dexter?" Astor demanded as I pushed the car into gear.

"I thought he was dead," I said, with what I really hoped was a note of finality in my voice.

"But we don't have any other uncles," she said. "Everybody else does, and we don't. Melissa has five uncles."

"Melissa sounds like a fascinating individual," I said, swerving to avoid a large SUV that had stopped in the middle of the road for no apparent reason.

"So we like having an uncle," Astor said. "And we like Uncle Brian."

"He's cool," Cody added softly.

Of course, it was very good to hear that they liked my brother, and it really should have made me happy, but it did not. It simply added to the sense of mean-spirited tension that had been rising in me ever since he had appeared. Brian was up to something-I knew it as well as I knew my own name-and until I knew what that something was I was stuck with my sense of lurking dread. It had not gone away by the time I dropped the kids at school and headed into work.

For once there were no freshly discovered headless bodies lying in the streets of Miami and frightening the tourists, and as if to underline this great mystery, Vince Masuoka had even brought in doughnuts. Considering the ragged assault my home life was making on me, this was very welcome indeed, and it seemed to me to call for some positive reinforcement. "Hail, doughnut, well brought," I said to Vince as he staggered in under the weight of the pastry box.

"Hail, Dexterus Maximus," he said. "I bring tribute from the Gauls."

"French doughnuts?" I said. "They don't put in parsley, do they?"

He flipped open the lid to reveal rows of gleaming doughnuts. "No parsley and no escargot filling, either," he said. "But they do include Bavarian cream."

"I shall ask the Senate to declare a triumph in your honor," I said, quickly grabbing one. And in a world built on the principles of love, wisdom, and compassion, that would have marked an end to the very uncomfortable course my morning had been following. But of course, we live in no such blissful world, and so the doughnut had barely had a chance to settle happily into my stomach where it belonged, when the phone on my desk began to rattle for my attention, and somehow, just from the way it sounded, I could tell it was Deborah.

"What are you doing?" she demanded without saying hello.

"Digesting a doughnut," I said.

"Do it up here in my office," she said, and hung up.

It is very difficult to argue with someone who is already off the line, as I am certain Deborah knew, so rather than go through the huge physical effort of redialing, I headed to the Homicide area and Deborah's desk. It was not, to be fair, actually an office at all but more of an area within a partition. Still, she seemed in no mood for the quibble, so I let it lie.

Deborah was in her chair at the desk clutching what looked like an official report. Her new partner, Deke, stood over by the window with a look of detached and vacuous amusement on his unreasonably handsome face. "Look at this," Deborah said, smacking the pages with the back of her hand. "Can you believe this shit?"

"No," I said. "That's because from this far away I can't even read that shit."

"Mr. Chin Dimple," she said, indicating Deke, "went to interview the Spanos family."

"Oh, hey," Deke said.

"And he found me a suspect," Debs said.

"Person of interest to the investigation," Deke said very seriously in official reportese. "He's not really a suspect."

"He's the only fucking lead we've got, and you sit on it all night," Debs snarled. "I have to read it in the goddamn report at nine-fucking-thirty the next morning."

"I had to type it," he said, sounding slightly hurt.

"With two teenage girls missing, the captain on my ass, and the press about to blow up like Three Mile Island, you type it and don't tell me first," she said.

"Hey, well, what the fuck," Deke said with a shrug.

Deborah gnashed her teeth. I mean, really; it's something I'd only read about before, mostly in fantasy stories, and I'd never believed it happened in real life, but there it was. I watched, fascinated, as she gnashed her teeth, started to say something very forceful, and instead threw the report on her desk. "Go get some coffee, Deke," she said at last.

Deke straightened up, made a clicking noise as he pointed a finger at her, and said, "Cream and two sugars," and sauntered away toward the coffeepot down the hall.

"I thought you liked your coffee black," I said as Deke disappeared.

Deborah stood up. "If that's his last fuckup, I am the happiest girl in the world," she said. "Come on."

She was already moving down the hall in the opposite direction from Deke, and so once again any protest I might have made was largely irrelevant. I sighed and followed, wondering if Deborah had learned this kind of behavior, perhaps from a book called The Management Style of Bulldozers.

I caught up with her at the elevator and said, "I suppose it would be too much to ask where we're going?"

"Tiffany Spanos," she said, hammering at the "down" button a second time, and then a third. "Tyler's older sister."

It took me a moment, but as the elevator doors slid open I remembered. "Tyler Spanos," I said, following her into the elevator. "The girl who's missing with, um, Samantha Aldovar."

"Yeah," she said. The doors slid shut and we lurched down. "Nimnut talked to Tiffany Spanos about her sister." I assumed Nimnut meant Deke, so I just nodded. "Tiffany says that Tyler has been into that Goth shit for a while, and then she met this guy at a party who was, like, Goth squared."

I suppose I lead a very innocent life, but I had thought that "Goth" was a sort of fashion statement for teenagers with bad complexions and a particularly repulsive form of angst. As far as I knew, the whole thing involved cultivating a look of black clothes and very pale skin, and perhaps listening to Euro-tech pop music while looking longingly at a DVD of Twilight. It seemed to me something that would be very hard to conceive of squared. But Deborah's imagination knew no such boundary.

"Am I allowed to ask what 'Goth squared' means?" I said humbly.

Deborah glared at me. "Guy's a vampire," she said.

"Really," I said, and I admit I was surprised. "In this day and age? In Miami?"

"Yeah," she said, and the elevator doors slid open. "Even had his teeth filed," she said, heading out the door.

I hurried after her again. "So we're going to see this guy?" I asked. "What's his name?"

"Vlad," she said. "Catchy name, huh?"

"Vlad what?" I said.

"I don't know," she said.

"But you know where he lives?" I said hopefully.

"We'll find him," she said, stalking toward the exit, and I finally decided that enough was enough. I grabbed her arm, and she turned to glare at me.

"Deborah," I said, "what the hell are we doing?"

"One more minute with that brain-dead bag of muscles and I'm going to lose it," she said. "I gotta get out of here." She tried to pull away, but I held on.

"I am as willing as anyone to flee in terror from your partner," I said. "But we are going to find somebody and we don't know his full name or where he might be. So where are we going?"

She tried again to jerk her arm away from my grip, and this time she succeeded. "Cybercafe," she said. "I'm not stupid." Apparently I was, because once again I was playing follow the leader as she stormed out the door and into the parking lot.

"You're paying for coffee," I said rather feebly as I hurried after.

There was an Internet cafe only about ten blocks away, and so in no time at all I was sitting at a keyboard with a very good cup of coffee and an impatient Deborah fidgeting at my elbow. My sister is an excellent shot with a pistol, and no doubt has many other sterling character traits, but putting her in front of a computer is like asking a donkey to do the polka, and she very wisely left all her Googling to me. "All right," I said. "I can search for the name 'Vlad,' but-"

"Cosmetic dentistry," she snapped. "Don't be an asshole."

I nodded; it was the smart move, but after all, she was the trained investigator. Within minutes I had a list of dozens of dentists in the Miami area, all of whom practiced cosmetic dentistry. "Shall I print it out?" I said to Debs. She looked at the long list and chewed on her lip so hard I thought she might well need a dentist herself soon.

"No," she said, grabbing for her cell phone. "I got an idea."

It must have been a very secret idea, because she didn't tell it to me, but she called a number she had on speed dial and in just a few seconds I heard her say, "This is Morgan. Gimme the number for that forensic dentist." She scribbled a hand in the air, indicating that she wanted a pen, and I found one beside the keyboard and passed it to her, along with a scrap of paper from the nearby trash can. "Yeah," she said. "Dr. Gutmann, that's the guy. Uh-huh." She wrote the number down and disconnected.

She immediately punched in the number she'd written down and after a minute of talking to a receptionist and then, judging by the way she began to tap her toe, listening to elevator music, Gutmann came on the line. "Dr. Gutmann," Deborah said. "This is Sergeant Morgan. I need the name of a local dentist who might sharpen a guy's teeth so he looks like a vampire." Gutmann said something and Deborah looked surprised. She scrabbled for the pen and wrote as she said, "Uh-huh. Got it, thanks," and then flipped the phone closed. "He said there's only one dentist in town stupid enough to do that. Dr. Lonoff on South Beach."

I found it quickly on the page of dentists I had called up on the computer. "Just off Lincoln Road," I said.

Deborah was already out of her chair and moving toward the door. "Come on," she said, and once again Dutiful Dexter lurched up and followed along.

TWELVE

Dr. Lonoff's office was on the first floor of a relatively old two-story building on a side street two blocks from Lincoln Road Mall. The building was one of those semi-Deco buildings South Beach had once been infested with, and it had been nicely restored and painted a very light lime green. Deborah and I went in past a sculpture that looked like a geometry lesson having sex in a hardware bin and we walked straight to the back, where a door announced, DR. J. LONOFF, DDS: COSMETIC DENTISTRY.

"I think this is it," I said, trying to sound like David Caruso.

Deborah just gave me a quick and mean look and opened the door.

The receptionist was a very thin African-American man with a shaved head and dozens of piercings in his ears, eyebrows, and nose. He was wearing raspberry-colored scrubs and a gold necklace. A sign on his desk said, LLOYD. He looked up as we entered, smiled brightly, and said, "Hi! Can I help you?" in a way that sounded like, Let's start the party!

Deborah held up her badge and said, "I'm Sergeant Morgan, Miami-Dade Police. I need to see Dr. Lonoff."

Lloyd's smile got even bigger. "He's with a patient right now. Can you wait just a couple of minutes?"

"No," Deborah said. "I need to see him now."

Lloyd looked a bit uncertain, but he didn't stop smiling. His teeth were large, very white, and perfectly shaped. If Dr. Lonoff had done Lloyd's teeth, he did really good work. "Can you tell me what this is about?" he said.

"It's about me coming back with a warrant to look at his drug register if he isn't out here in thirty seconds," Deborah said.

Lloyd licked his lips, hesitated for two seconds, and then got to his feet. "I'll tell him you're here," he said, and he vanished around a curved wall and into the back of the office.

Dr. Lonoff beat the thirty-second deadline by a full two seconds. He came huffing around the curved wall, wiping his hands on a paper towel and looking frazzled. "What the hell are you-What's this about my drug register?"

Deborah just watched him as he skidded to a stop in front of her. He seemed young for a dentist, maybe thirty, and in all honesty he looked a little too buff, too, as though he had been pumping iron when he should have been filling cavities.

Deborah must have thought so, too. She looked him over from head to toe and said, "Are you Dr. Lonoff?"

"Yes, I am," he said, still a little huffish. "Who the hell are you?"

Once again Deborah held up her badge. "Sergeant Morgan, Miami-Dade Police. I need to ask you about one of your patients."

"What you need to do," he said with a great deal of medical authority, "is to stop playing storm trooper and tell me what this is about. I have a patient in the chair."

I saw Deborah's jaw stiffen, and knowing her as well as I did I braced myself for a round or two of tough talk; she would refuse to tell him anything, since it was police business, and he would refuse to let her at his records, because doctor-patient records were confidential, and they would go back and forth until all the high cards were played, and meanwhile I would have to watch and wonder why we couldn't just cut to the chase and break for lunch.

I was just about to find a chair and curl up with a copy of Golf Digest to wait it out-but Deborah surprised me. She took a deep breath and said, "Doctor, I got two young girls missing, and the only lead I have is a guy with his teeth fixed so he looks like a vampire." She breathed again and held his eye. "I need some help."

If the ceiling had melted away to reveal a choir of angels singing "Achy Breaky Heart," I could not have been more surprised. For Deborah to open up and look vulnerable like this was completely unheard-of, and I wondered if I should help her find professional counseling. Dr. Lonoff seemed to think so, too. He blinked at her for several long seconds, and then glanced at Lloyd.

"I'm not supposed to," he said, looking even younger than his thirty or so years. "The records are confidential."

"I know that," Deborah said.

"Vampire?" Lonoff said, and he peeled his own lips back and pointed. "Like here? The canines?"

"That's right," Deborah said. "Like fangs."

"It's a special crown," Lonoff said happily. "I have them made by a guy in Mexico, a real artist. Then it's just a standard crown procedure, and the result is pretty impressive, I gotta say."

"You've done that to a lot of guys?" Deborah said, sounding a bit surprised.

He shook his head. "I've done about two dozen," he said.

"A young guy," Deborah said. "Probably not more than twenty years old."

Dr. Lonoff pursed his lips and thought. "Maybe three or four of those," he said.

"He calls himself Vlad," Deborah said.

Lonoff smiled and shook his head. "Nobody by that name," he said. "But I wouldn't be surprised if they all call themselves that. I mean, it's a kind of popular name with that crowd."

"Is it really a crowd?" I blurted out. The idea of a large number of vampires in Miami, whether actual or fake, was a little bit alarming-even if only for aesthetic reasons. I mean, really: all those black clothes? So very New York-last year.

"Yeah," Lonoff said. "There's quite a few of them. They don't all want their fangs done," he said with regret, and then he shrugged. "Still. They have their clubs, and raves, and so on. It's quite a scene."

"I only need to find one of them," Deborah said with a little bit of her old impatience.

Lonoff looked at her, nodded, and unconsciously flexed his neck muscles. His shirt collar didn't quite pop. He pushed his lips out and then in, and, suddenly reaching a decision, he said, "Lloyd, help them find that in the billing records."

"You got it, Doctor," Lloyd said.

Lonoff held out his hand toward Deborah. "Good luck, ah-Sergeant?"

"That's right," Deborah said, shaking his hand.

Dr. Lonoff held on a little too long, and just when I thought Debs would yank away her hand, he smiled and added, "You know, I could fix that overbite for you."

"Thanks," Debs said, pulling her hand away. "I kind of like it."

"Uh-huh," Lonoff said. "Well, then…" He put a hand on Lloyd's shoulder and said, "Help them out. I've got a patient waiting." And with a last longing look at Deborah's overbite, he turned around and disappeared into the back room again.

"It's over here," Lloyd said. "On the computer." He pointed to the desk he'd been sitting at when we came in, and we followed him over.

"I'm going to need some parameters," he said. Deborah blinked and looked at me, as if the word were in a foreign language-which I suppose it was, to her, since she did not speak computer. So once again, I stepped into the awkward void and saved her.

"Under twenty-four," I said. "Male. Pointy canine teeth."

"Cool," Lloyd said, and he hammered at the keyboard for a few moments. Deborah watched impatiently. I turned away and looked at the far side of the waiting room. A large saltwater fish tank sat on a stand in the corner next to a magazine rack. It looked a little crowded to me, but maybe the fish liked it that way.

"Gotcha," Lloyd said, and I turned around in time to see a sheet of paper come whirring out of the printer. Lloyd grabbed it and held it out to Debs, who snatched it and glared at it. "There's just four names," Lloyd said with a touch of the same regret Dr. Lonoff had shown, and I wondered if he got a commission on the fangs.

"Crap," said Deborah, still looking at the list.

"Why crap?" I said. "Did you want more names?"

She flicked the paper with a finger. "First name on here," she said. "Does the name Acosta mean anything to you?"

I nodded. "It means trouble," I said. Joe Acosta was a major figure in the city government, a sort of old-school commissioner who still carried the kind of clout you might have found fifty years ago in Chicago. If our Vlad was his son, we might be in for a fecal shower. "Different Acosta?" I asked hopefully.

Deborah shook her head. "Same address," she said. "Shit."

"Maybe it's not him," Lloyd said helpfully, and Debs looked up at him, just for a second, but his bright smile vanished as if she'd hit him in the crotch.

"Come on," she said to me, and she whirled away toward the door.

"Thanks for your help," I told Lloyd, but he just nodded, one time, as if Debs had sucked all the joy out of his life.

Deborah was already in the car with the motor running by the time I caught up with her. "Come on," she called out the window. "Get in."

I climbed in beside her and she had the car in gear before I got the door closed. "You know," I said, fastening my seat belt, "we could leave Acosta for last. It could just as easily be one of the others."

"Tyler Spanos goes to Ransom Everglades," she said. "So she hangs with the upper crust. The fucking Acostas are the upper crust. It's him."

It was hard to fault her logic, so I said nothing; I just settled in and let her drive too fast through the midmorning traffic.

We drove over the MacArthur Causeway and let it take us onto the 836 all the way to LeJeune, where we went left into Coral Gables. Acosta's house was in a section of the Gables that would have been a walled community if it was built today. The houses were large, and many of them, like Acosta's, were built in the Spanish style out of large blocks of coral rock. The lawn looked like a putting green and there was a two-story garage on the side, attached to the house by a breezeway.

Deborah parked in front of the house and paused for a moment after turning off the engine. I watched her take a deep breath, and I wondered if she was still going through the same strange molecular meltdown that had lately made her seem so soft and emotional. "Are you sure you want to do this?" I asked her. She glanced at me, and she did not really look like the fierce and focused Deborah I knew so well. "I mean, you know," I said. "Acosta could make your life pretty miserable. He's a commissioner."

She snapped back into focus like she'd been slapped and I saw the familiar sight of her jaw muscles working. "I don't care if he's Jesus," she snarled, and it was very good to see the old venom return. She got out of the car and began to stride up the sidewalk to the front door. I got out and followed, catching up to her just as she pushed the doorbell. There was no response, and she shifted her weight impatiently from foot to foot. Just as she reached a hand up to ring a second time, the door swung open, and a short, square woman in a maid's uniform peered out at us.

"Yes?" the maid said in a thick Central American accent.

"Is Robert Acosta here, please," Deborah said.

The maid licked her lips, and her eyes darted from side to side for a moment. Then she shivered and shook her head. "Why you wan' Bobby?" she said.

Deborah held up her badge and the maid sucked in her breath loudly. "I need to ask him some questions," Debs said. "Is he here?"

The maid swallowed hard, but said nothing.

"I just need to talk to him," Debs said. "It's very important."

The maid swallowed again, and glanced past us out the door. Deborah turned and looked, too. "The garage?" she said, turning back to the maid. "He's in the garage?"

At last, the maid nodded. "El garaje," she said, softly and very fast, as if she was afraid she would be heard. "Bobby vive en el piso segundo."

Deborah looked at me. "In the garage. He lives on the second floor," I translated. For some reason, in spite of being born and bred in Miami, Debs had chosen to study French in school.

"Is he here right now?" Deborah asked the maid.

She nodded her head jerkily. "Creo que si," she said. She licked her lips again and then, with a sort of spasmodic lurch, she pushed the door closed, not quite slamming it.

Deborah looked at the shut door for a moment, then shook her head. "What was she so scared of?" she said.

"Deportation?" I said.

She snorted. "Joe Acosta wouldn't hire an illegal. Not when he can get a green card for anybody he wants to."

"Maybe she's afraid to lose her job," I said.

Deborah turned and looked at the garage. "Uh-huh," she said. "And maybe she's afraid of Bobby Acosta."

"Well," I said, but Deborah jerked into motion and headed around the corner of the house before I could say any more. I caught up with her as she got to the driveway. "She's going to tell Bobby we're here," I said.

Deborah shrugged. "It's her job," she said. She came to a halt in front of the double-size garage door. "There's got to be another door, maybe some stairs," she said.

"Around the side?" I offered, and I took two steps farther toward the left side when I heard a rumbling sound and then the garage door began to roll up. I turned back around and watched. I could hear a muted purring coming from inside and it got louder as the door opened wider, and when it was up far enough to see into the garage, I saw that the sound came from a motorcycle. A thin guy of twenty or so sat on the bike, letting it idle and looking out at us.

"Robert Acosta?" Deborah called to him. She took a step forward and reached to grab her badge to show him.

"Fucking cops," he said. He revved the engine once, and then kicked it into gear, very deliberately aiming the bike right at Deborah. The motorcycle leaped forward, straight at Deborah, and she barely managed to dive to one side. Then the bike was into the street and accelerating away into the distance, and by the time Deborah got back onto her feet, it was gone.

THIRTEEN

In the course of my work with the miami-dade police Department, I had heard the phrase "shit-storm" used on more than one occasion. But in all honesty, I would have to say that I had never truly seen the actual meteorological event until after Debs called in a BOLO for the only son of a powerful county commissioner. Within five minutes we had three squad cars and a TV news van pulled up in front of the house next to Debs's car, and at the six-minute mark Debs was on the phone with Captain Matthews. I heard her say, "Yes, sir. Yes, sir. No, sir," and not much else in the course of a two-minute conversation, and by the time she put the phone away her jaw was locked shut so tight I didn't think she could ever again eat solid food.

"Shit," she said through her tightly clenched teeth. "Matthews pulled my BOLO."

"We knew this was coming," I said.

Debs nodded. "It's here," she said, and then, looking past me to the road, she added, "Aw, shit."

I turned and followed her gaze. Deke was climbing out of his car, hitching up his pants, and giving a big smile to the woman who stood in front of the news van brushing her hair and setting up a shot. She actually stopped brushing for a moment and gaped back at him, and he nodded to her and sauntered toward us. She watched him go for a moment, licked her lips, and went back to her hair with renewed vigor.

"Technically, he is your partner," I said.

"Technically he's a brain-dead asshole," she said.

"Hey," Deke said as he strolled up to us. "Captain says I should keep an eye on you, make sure you don't fuck nothing else up."

"How the hell are you going to know if I fuck up?" Debs snarled at him.

"Oh, hey, you know," he said, shrugging. He looked back at the TV newswoman. "I mean, just don't talk to the press or something, right?" He winked at Deborah. "Anyway, I got to stay with you now," he said. "Keep this thing on track."

For a moment I thought she would let loose a blast of seven separate killing remarks that would drop Deke where he stood and singe the Acostas' manicured lawn, but Debs had clearly received the same message from the captain, and she was a good soldier. Discipline won out and she just looked at Deke for a long moment and finally said, "All right. Let's check the other names on this list," and walked meekly to her car.

Deke pulled up his pants again and watched her go. "Well, all right," he said, and followed her. The TV newswoman watched him go with a somewhat distracted expression, until her producer almost smacked her with a microphone.

I got a ride back to headquarters with one of the squad cars, driven by a cop named Willoughby who seemed obsessed with the Miami Heat. I learned a great deal about point guards and something called the pick and roll by the time I got out of the car. I am sure it was wonderfully useful information, and someday it will come in handy, but I was nevertheless very grateful to climb out into the afternoon heat and trudge back to my little cubicle.

And there I was, left to my own devices for most of the rest of the day. I went to lunch and tried out a new place not too far away that specialized in falafels. Unfortunately, it also specialized in dark hairs swimming in a vile sauce, and I came back from my break with a very unhappy stomach. I went through some routine lab work, filed a few papers, and enjoyed the solitude until about four o'clock, when Deborah wandered into my cubicle. She was carrying a thick folder and she looked as distressed as my stomach. She hooked a chair out with her toe and slouched into it without speaking. I put down the file I was reading and gave her my attention.

"You look beat, sis," I said.

She nodded and looked at her hands. "Long day," she said.

"You checked out the other names on the dentist's list?" I asked her, and again she just nodded, and so, because I wanted to help her be a little more socially adept, I added, "With your partner, Deke?"

Her head jerked up and she glared at me. "That fucking idiot," she said, and then she shrugged and slumped again.

"What did he do?" I asked.

She shrugged again. "Nothing," she said. "He's not totally terrible at the routine stuff. Asks all the standard questions."

"So why the long face, Debs?" I asked.

"They took away my suspect, Dexter," she said, and once again I was struck by the weary vulnerability that crept into her voice. "The Acosta kid knows something; I know it. He may not be hiding those girls, but he knows who is, and they won't let me go after him." She waved a knuckle toward the hallway. "They even have that asshole Deke babysitting me to make sure I don't do anything that might embarrass the commissioner."

"Well," I said, "Bobby Acosta may not be guilty of anything."

Debs showed me her teeth. It would have been a smile if she were not so clearly miserable. "He's guilty as shit," she said, and she held up the folder in her hand. "He's got a record you wouldn't believe-even without the stuff they blacked out when he was a minor."

"A juvie record doesn't make him guilty this time," I said.

Deborah leaned forward, and for a moment I thought she was going to hit me with Bobby Acosta's file. "The hell it doesn't," she said, and then, happily for me, she opened the file instead of swinging it at my head. "Assault. Assault with intent. Assault. Grand theft auto." She looked up at me apologetically as she said "grand theft" and shrugged before dropping her eyes back to the folder. "Twice he was arrested because he was caught on the scene when somebody died in suspicious circumstances, and it should have been manslaughter at the very least, but both times his old man bought him out of trouble." She closed the folder and slapped it with the back of her hand. "There's a lot more," she said. "But it all ends the same way, with blood on Bobby's hands and his father bailing him out." She shook her head. "This is one bad, fucked-up kid, Dexter. He's killed at least two people, and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he knows where those girls are. If he hasn't already killed them, too."

I thought Debs was probably right. Not because a record of past crimes always meant present guilt-but I had felt a slow and sleepy stir of interest from the Passenger, a speculative raising of inner eyebrows as Deborah read from the file, and the old Dexter would very definitely have added the name of Bobby Acosta to his little black book of potential playmates. But of course, Dexter 2.0 didn't do those things. Instead, I merely nodded sympathetically. "You may be right," I said.

Deborah jerked her head up. "May be," she said. "I am right. Bobby Acosta knows where those girls are, and I can't fucking touch him because of his old man."

"Well," I said, acutely conscious of speaking a cliche but unable to think of anything else worth saying, "you really can't fight city hall, you know."

Deborah stared at me for a moment with an absolutely blank face. "Wow," she said. "Did you think that up by yourself?"

"Well, come on, Debs," I said, and I admit I was a little peevish. "You knew this would happen, and it happened, so why should it bother you?"

She blew out a long breath, and then folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them, which was somehow much worse than the snarling comeback I'd expected. "I don't know," she said. "Maybe it's not just this." She turned her hands over and looked at the back side. "Maybe it's… I don't know. Everything."

If everything really was bothering my sister, it was much easier to understand her weary misery; being in charge of everything would be a crushing burden. But in my small experience with humans, I have learned that if someone says they are oppressed by everything, it usually means one small and very specific something. And in my sister's case, even though she had always acted like she was in charge of everything, I thought this would hold true; some particular something was eating at her and making her act like this. And remembering what she had said about her live-in boyfriend, Kyle Chutsky, I thought that was probably it.

"Is it Chutsky?" I said.

Her head jerked up. "What. You mean does he beat me up? Is he cheating on me?"

"No, of course not," I said, holding up a hand in case she decided to hit me. I knew he wouldn't dare cheat on her-and the idea of anybody trying to beat up my sister was laughable. "It's just what you were saying the other day. About, you know-tick-tock, bio clock?"

She drooped over again and looked at her hands in her lap. "Uh-huh. I said that, didn't I," she said. She shook her head slowly. "Well, it's still true. And fucking Chutsky-he won't even talk about it."

I looked at my sister, and I admit that my feelings did me no credit, because my first truly conscious reaction to Deb's outpouring was to think, Wow! I really am feeling empathy with an actual human emotion! Because Deborah's continuing descent into a soft pudding of self-pity had actually reached me, deep down on the brand-new human level recently opened by Lily Anne, and I found that I did not have to search my memory for a response from some old daytime drama. I really felt something, and that was very impressive to me.

So without actually thinking it through at all, I got up from my chair and went over to her. I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently and said, "I'm sorry, sis. Is there anything I can do?"

And naturally enough, Deborah stiffened and slapped my hand away. She stood up and looked at me with something that was at least halfway back to her natural snarl. "For starters, you can stop acting like Father Flanagan," she said. "Jesus, Dex. What's got into you?"

And before I could utter a single syllable of completely logical rebuttal, she stalked out of my office and disappeared down the hall.

"Glad to help," I said to her back.

Maybe I was just too new to having feelings to really understand them and act accordingly. Or maybe it was just going to take Debs a little time to get used to the new, compassionate Dexter. But it was starting to seem even more likely to me that some terribly wicked person or persons had put something sinister in the Miami water supply.

Just as I was getting ready to leave for the day, the weirdness went up one more notch. My cell phone rang and I glanced at it, saw that it was Rita, and answered. "Hello?" I said.

"Dexter, hi, um, it's me," she said.

"Of course it is," I said encouragingly.

"Are you still at work?" she said.

"Just getting ready to leave."

"Oh, good, because-I mean, if, instead of picking up Cody and Astor?" she said. "Because you don't have to tonight."

A quick mental translation told me that I didn't have to pick up the kids for some reason. "Oh, why not?" I said.

"It's just, they're already gone," she said, and for one terrible moment, as I struggled to understand what she meant, I thought that something awful had happened to them.

"What-Where did they go?" I managed to stammer.

"Oh," she said. "Your brother picked them up. Brian. He's going to take them for Chinese food."

What a wonderful world of new experiences I was having with being human. Right now, for example, I was struck speechless with astonishment. I felt wave after wave of thoughts and feelings wash over me: things like anger, amazement, and suspicion, ideas like wondering what Brian was really up to, why Rita would ever go along with it, and what Cody and Astor would do when they remembered that they didn't like Chinese food. But no matter how copious and specific my thoughts were, nothing at all came out of my mouth, except, "Uhk," and as I struggled for coherent sounds, Rita said, "Oh. I have to go. Lily Anne is crying. Bye." And she hung up.

I'm sure it was only a few seconds that I stood there listening to the sound of absolutely nothing, but it seemed like a very long time. Eventually I became aware that my mouth was dry, since it was hanging open, and my hand was sweaty from where I had clamped the cell phone into my fist. I closed my mouth, put the phone away, and headed for home.

Rush hour was in full swing as I headed south from work, and oddly enough, all the way home I saw no acts of random violence, no violent swerving or fist waving, no shots fired. The traffic inched along as slowly as ever, but nobody really seemed to mind. I wondered if I should have read my horoscope-perhaps that would explain what was going on. It could well be that somewhere in Miami really knowledgeable people-druids, perhaps-were nodding their heads and murmuring, "Ahhh, Jupiter is in a retrograde moon of Saturn," and pouring another cup of herb tea while they lounged around in Birkenstocks. Or maybe it was a group of the vampires Debs was chasing-was it called a flock? Perhaps if enough of them sharpened their teeth a new age of harmony would dawn for us all. Or at least for Dr. Lonoff, the dentist.

I spent a quiet evening at home watching TV and holding Lily Anne whenever I could. She did a lot of sleeping, but it worked for her just as well if I was holding her at the time, so I did. It seemed to me to indicate a remarkable degree of trust on her part. On the one hand, I hoped she would grow out of that, since it was not terribly wise to trust others so much. But on the other tiny, perfect hand, it filled me with a sense of wonder and a resolve to protect her from all the other beasts of the night.

I found myself sniffing Lily Anne's head frequently-certifiably odd behavior, I know, but, from what I could gather, completely in keeping with my new human persona. The smell was remarkable, unlike anything else I had ever smelled. It was an odor that was almost nothing at all, and it did not really fit into any category like "sweet" or "musty," although it contained elements of both-and more, and neither. But I sniffed and was unable to say what the smell was, and then I sniffed again just because I wanted to, and then suddenly a new odor welled up from the region of the diaper, one that was quite easy to identify.

Changing a diaper is really not as bad as it sounds, and I didn't mind it at all. I am not suggesting that I would embrace it as a career choice, but at least in the case of Lily Anne's diaper it was something that did not actually cause me any suffering-in some ways it was even enjoyable, since I was doing a very specific and necessary service for her. I got further pleasure from seeing Rita swoop in like a dive-bomber, probably to make sure I didn't accidentally boil the baby, and then pause and just watch when she saw my quiet competence, and I felt a warm glow of satisfaction when I finished and she took the baby off the changing table, saying only, "Thank you, Dexter."

While Rita fed Lily Anne, I returned to the TV and watched a hockey game for a few minutes. It was disappointing; in the first place, the Panthers were already down by three goals, and in the second place, there were no fights. I had originally been attracted to the game because of the honest and laudable bloodlust the players showed. Now, however, it occurred to me that I really ought to frown on that sort of thing. The New Me, Diaper Daddy Dexter, was strongly opposed to violence and could not possibly approve of a sport like hockey. Perhaps I could switch to bowling. It seemed awfully boring, but there was no blood, and it was certainly more exciting than golf.

Before I could reach any decision, Rita came back with Lily Anne. "Would you like to burp her, Dexter?" she said with a Madonna-like smile-the Madonna in the paintings, not the one with the fancy bra.

"I would like nothing better," I said, and weirdly enough, I meant it. I placed a small towel over my shoulder and held the baby facedown on it. And once again, for some reason it was not at all awful, even when Lily Anne made her delicate barfing noises and small bubbles of milk came out and onto the towel. I found myself murmuring quiet congratulations to her with each little blarp she made, until finally she drifted back into sleep and I switched her around to the front position, holding her to my chest and gently moving her from side to side in a rock-a-bye motion.

I was in this position when Brian brought Cody and Astor home at around nine o'clock. Technically, this was pushing the envelope a bit, since nine o'clock was bedtime and now the kids would be at least fifteen minutes late climbing into their beds. But Rita didn't seem to mind, and it would have been churlish of me to object, since everyone had so clearly had a very good time. Even Cody was almost smiling, and I made a note to find out what conceivable Chinese restaurant Brian might have taken them to in order to get that kind of reaction.

I was at a bit of a disadvantage, since I was holding Lily Anne, but as Rita hustled the two older kids off to pajamas and teeth brushing I stood up for a friendly word with my brother. "Well," I said as he stood by the door with an air of quiet satisfaction, "they look like they had a good time."

"Oh, they did," he said with his dreadful fake smile. "Remarkable children, both of them."

"Did they eat the spring rolls?" I asked, and Brian looked extremely blank for a moment.

"The spring-Oh yes, they devoured everything I put in front of them," he said, and there was such an ominous happiness in the way he said it that I was absolutely certain we were not talking about food.

"Brian," I said, but I got no further as Rita came whirling out.

"Oh, Brian," she said, snatching Lily Anne from my arms. "I don't know what on earth you did, but the children had a wonderful time. I've never seen them like this."

"It was entirely my pleasure," he said, and it made small icicles blossom along my spine.

"Won't you sit for a few minutes?" Rita said. "I could make some coffee, or a glass of wine…?"

"Oh, no," he said happily. "Thank you very much, dear lady, but I really must be going. Believe it or not, I have an appointment this evening."

"Oh!" Rita said with a guilty blush. "I hope you didn't-I mean, with the children, and you might have-You shouldn't-"

"Not at all," Brian said, as if it had all made sense. "I have plenty of time. But I must take my fond farewells now."

"Well," Rita said, "if you're sure that-And I really can't thank you enough because it's-"

"Mom!" Astor called from down the hall.

"Oh, dear," Rita said. "Excuse me, but-thank you so much, Brian." And she leaned in and kissed him on the cheek.

"Entirely my pleasure," Brian said again, and Rita smiled and hurried away to Astor and Cody.

Brian and I looked at each other for a moment, and while there was a great deal I wanted to say to him, I did not really know what it was specifically enough to say it. "Brian," I said again, but it stopped there, and he smiled that terrible fake, knowing smile.

"I know," he said. "But I really do have an appointment." He turned and opened the front door, and then glanced back at me. "They truly are remarkable children," he said. "Good night, brother."

And he was out the door and gone into the night, leaving me with no more than the afterglow of his dreadful smile and a very uncomfortable sense that something very wrong was going on.

FOURTEEN

I was more than a little curious to find out what had actually gone on with my brother and the kids, but Rita hustled them into bed before I could speak to them. I went to sleep unsatisfied, and in the morning there was no chance to speak to them away from their mother. This was a very necessary condition, since if anything had happened other than Chinese food, I most certainly didn't want Rita to hear about it. And the kids had probably been warned not to say anything, if I knew Brian-which I really didn't, come to think of it. I mean, I thought I knew how he would think and act in certain matters, but beyond that-who was he? What did he want from life, beyond the occasional slash-happy play session? I had no idea, and I did not find one in spite of pondering it all the way through breakfast and the drive to work.

Happily for my self-esteem, I did not get a great deal more time to worry about my inability to figure out my brother, because when I arrived at work the second floor where Forensics was located was buzzing with the kind of whacked-out frenzy that only a really interesting crime can cause. Camilla Figg, a square forensics tech in her mid-thirties, went dashing past me clutching her kit and she barely even blushed as she brushed against my arm. And when I walked into the lab, Vince Masuoka was already jumping about stuffing things into his bag.

"Have you got a pith helmet?" he called to me.

"Thertainly not," I said. "Thilly quethtion."

"You may want one," he said. "We're going on safari."

"Oh, Kendall again?" I said.

"Everglades," he said. "Something really wild went down last night."

"Ungowa," I said. "I'll pack the bug spray."

And so only an hour later I climbed out of Vince's car and stood beside Route 41 in the Everglades, just a couple of miles from Fortymile Bend. Harry had brought me camping in the area when I was a teenager, and I actually had some happy memories here involving several small animals that had contributed to my education.

Aside from the official vehicles parked by the road, there were two big vans pulled onto the small dirt parking area. A little trailer was hooked onto one of them. A flock of about fifteen teenage boys and three men in Boy Scout uniforms huddled uncertainly around the vans, and I saw two detectives talking to them, one at a time. There was a uniformed cop standing beside the road, waving the traffic to keep moving, and Vince tapped him on the shoulder.

"Hey, Rosen," Vince said. "What's up with the Scouts?"

"They're the ones that found it. Got here this morning for a camping trip," Rosen said, adding, "Keep moving," to a car that had slowed down to look.

"Found what?" Vince asked him.

"I just wave at the fucking cars," Rosen said sourly. "You're the ones that get to play with the bodies. Keep moving, come on," he said to another gawker.

"Where do we go?" Vince said.

Rosen pointed to the far side of the parking area, and turned away. I guess if I had to stand in the traffic while someone else got to play with the bodies, I would have been surly, too.

We walked toward the trailhead, past the Scouts. They must have found something awful out there, but they didn't look terribly shocked or frightened. In fact, they were chuckling and shoving one another as if this were a special kind of holiday, and it made me sorry I had never joined the Boy Scouts. Perhaps I could have earned a merit badge for body-part recycling.

We went down the trail that led south into the trees, and then curved around to the west for about half a mile until it came out into a clearing. By the time we got there, Vince was sweating and breathing heavily, but I was almost eager, since a soft voice had been whispering to me that something worth seeing was waiting for me.

But at first glance, there seemed to be very little to see except a large trampled-down area surrounding a fire pit and, to the left of the fire, a small heap of something or other that I could not quite see past Camilla Figg's hunched-over form. Whatever it was, it caused a leathery whir of interest from the Dark Passenger, and I moved forward with just a trace of eagerness-forgetting for the moment that I had forsworn such Dark Pleasures.

"Hi, Camilla," I said to her as I approached, "what have we got?" She instantly blushed furiously, which was, for some reason, her usual habit when I talked to her.

"Bones," she said softly.

"No chance they're from a pig or a goat?" I asked.

She shook her head violently and, in one gloved hand, held up what I thought I recognized as a human humerus, which was not all that funny. "No chance," she said.

"Well, then," I said, noticing the charred marks on the bones and listening to the happy sibilant chuckle from within. I could not tell if they had been burned after death, as a way to get rid of the evidence, or I looked around the clearing. The ground had been stamped flat; there were hundreds of footprints, indicating a large party, and I didn't think it could have been the Scouts. They had arrived only this morning, and hadn't had time to do something like this. The clearing looked like a lot of people had been very active for several hours. Not just standing here, but moving around, jumping up and down, getting rowdy. And all centered around the fire pit, where the bones were, as if I closed my eyes, and I could almost see it as I listened to the rising tide of reptilian sound from my soft and deadly inner voice. Look, it said, and in the small window it showed me I saw a large, festive group. A solitary victim tied up by the fire. Not torture, but execution, done by one person-while all the others watched and partied? Was that possible?

And the Passenger chuckled and answered. Yes, it said. Oh, absolutely. Dancing, singing, carrying on. Plenty of beer, plenty of food. A good old-fashioned barbecue.

"Hey," I said to Camilla, opening my eyes. "Is there anything on the bones that looks like teeth marks?"

Camilla flinched and looked around at me with an expression that was very close to fear. "How did you know?" she said.

"Oh, just a lucky hunch," I said, but she did not look convinced, so I added, "Any guess at the gender?"

She stared at me for a moment longer, and then appeared to hear my question at last. "Um," she said, turning back to the bones with a jerk. She raised a gloved finger and pointed it at one of the larger bones. "Pelvic girdle indicates a female. Probably young," she said.

A little something clicked inside the mighty supercomputer that was Dexter's brain and a card slid into the out-tray. Young female, the card read. "Oh, um, thanks," I said to Camilla, backing away to look at this small and interesting idea. Camilla just nodded and bent over the bones.

I looked around the clearing. Over where the trail disappeared deeper into the swamp I saw Lieutenant Keane, chatting with a man I recognized from FDLE, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which is sort of a state-level version of the FBI; they have jurisdiction everywhere in Florida. And standing with them was one of the largest men I have ever seen. He was black, about six and a half feet tall, and at least five hundred pounds, which on him did not look particularly fat somehow-possibly because of the focused ferocity of his stare. But since the FDLE guy was talking to him and not calling for backup, I had to assume he belonged here, too, although I had no idea why. If he was representing either the Sheriff's Department or Broward County I was sure I would have seen him before, or at least heard rumors about someone that large.

But as interesting as it was to see a real giant, it was not enough to hold my attention, and I looked to the other side of the clearing. Across from the small clot of cops there was a clean area of the clearing, where several detectives were standing around. I went there and set my kit down, thinking hard. I knew of a young female who was missing, and I knew someone looking for a young female who would be very interested in making this connection. But what was the right way to do this? I am not really a political animal, although I understand it well enough-politics is just a way to indulge in my former hobby using metaphorical knives instead of real ones. But it seemed like no fun at all to me. All the careful maneuvering and backstabbing were so obvious and pointless and didn't really lead to anything all that exciting. Still, I knew it was important in a structured environment like the Miami-Dade Police Department. And Deborah was not very good at it, although she usually managed to bull her way through with a combination of toughness and good results.

But Deborah had been so very unlike herself of late, with her pouting and self-pity, and I didn't know if she was up to a confrontation that was likely to prove extremely political-a different detective was leading on this, and for her to try to yank it away would be difficult, even when she was at her best. Still, maybe a good challenge was just what she needed to bring her back to herself. So perhaps the best thing to do was simply to call her and tell her-let loose the dogs of war and let the chips fall where they may. It was a wonderfully mangled metaphor, which made it seem even more convincing, so I stepped away from the group of cops and reached for my cell phone.

Deborah let it ring several times; again, this was very unlike her. Just when I was ready to give up, she answered. "What," she said.

"I'm in the Everglades at a crime scene," I said.

"Good for you," she said.

"Debs, I think the victim was killed, cooked, and eaten in front of a crowd."

"Wow, awful," she said, with no real enthusiasm, which I found a little bit irritating.

"Did I mention that this victim appears to be young and female?" I said.

She didn't say anything at all for a moment. "Debs?" I said.

"I'm on my way," she said, with a little bit of the old fire in her voice, and I closed my phone with satisfaction. But before I could put it away and get to work, I heard someone behind me scream, "Fuuuuuck!" and then a volley of gunshots broke out. I ducked down and tried to hide behind my blood-spatter kit, rather difficult considering it was about the size of the average lunch box. But I took what cover I could get and peeked over the top toward the gunfire, half expecting to see a horde of Maori warriors charging at us with their spears raised and their tongues out. What I saw instead was almost as unlikely.

The officers who had been standing around a moment earlier were now all crouched in combat firing position and frantically shooting their weapons into a nearby bush. Contrary to the very best of established police procedure, their faces were not set in cold and grim masks, but looked wild and wide-eyed. One of the detectives was already ejecting an empty clip from his pistol and frantically trying to fumble in a spare, and the others just kept firing with berserk abandon.

And the bush they were apparently trying to kill began to thrash about spastically, and I saw the glint of something silver-yellow. It flashed in the sunlight one time, and then was gone, but the officers kept firing for several more seconds, until finally Lieutenant Keane ran over, yelling at them to hold their fire. "What the fuck is wrong with you idiots?!" Keane yelled at them.

"Lieutenant, I swear to God," one of them said.

"A snake!" said the second guy. "Fucking huge snake!"

"A snake," Keane said. "You want me to step on it for you?"

"You got really big feet?" the third guy said. " 'Cause it was a Burmese python, about eighteen feet long."

"Aw, shit," Keane said. "Are those protected?"

I realized I was still crouched down, and I stood up as the FDLE man sauntered over. "Actually, they're thinking about a bounty on those bad boys," the FDLE guy said, "if any of you Wyatt Earps was lucky enough to hit it."

"I hit it," the third guy said sullenly.

"Bullshit," said one of the others. "You couldn't hit shit with a shoe."

The giant black man wandered over to the bush and looked, then turned to the group of nonmarksmen, shaking his head, and, realizing that the excitement was over, I picked up my kit and went back to the fire pit.

There was a surprising amount of blood spatter for me, and in just a few moments I was happily at work, making sense of the nasty stuff. It was not yet completely dry, probably because of the humidity, but a great deal of it had soaked into the ground, since it had not rained for quite some time, and in spite of the moisture in the air, things on the ground were relatively parched at the moment. I got a couple of good samples to take back with me for analysis, and I also began to get a picture of what had probably happened.

The majority of the blood was in one area, right by the fire pit. I cast about in ever-widening circles, but the only traces of it I found more than six feet away appeared to have been tracked there on someone's shoes. I marked these spots in the forlorn hope that somebody might be able to get an identifiable footprint from them and went back to the main spatter. The blood had poured out of the victim, not spurted, as it would have from a slash wound. And there were no secondary splashes anywhere nearby, which meant that there had been only one wound, like bleeding out a deer-nobody else in the crowd had jumped in and stabbed or slashed. This had been a slow, deliberate killing, a literal butchering, performed by one person, very controlled and businesslike, and I found myself reluctantly admiring the professionalism of the work. That kind of restraint was very difficult, as I well knew-and with a crowd watching, too, presumably shouting drunken encouragement, offering rude suggestions. It was impressive, and I took my time, giving it the kind of reciprocal professionalism it deserved.

I was on one knee, just finishing an examination of a last probable footprint, when I heard raised voices, threats of unpleasant and intimate dismemberment, and assorted profane expressions of anatomical impossibility. It could only mean one thing. I stood up and looked over toward the trailhead, and sure enough, I was right.

Deborah had arrived.

FIFTEEN

It was a pretty good fight, as these things go, and it would have lasted a whole lot longer if not for the FDLE man. He was a guy I knew about by reputation, named Chambers, and he literally stepped in between Deborah and the other detective, a large man named Burris. Putting one hand out onto Burris's chest, and the other politely in the air in front of Deborah, Chambers said, "Cut it out." Burris shut up immediately. I saw Debs take a breath to say something, and Chambers looked at her. She looked back and held her breath, and then just let it out silently.

I was impressed, and I edged around to get a better look at the man from the FDLE. He had a shaved head and he was not tall, but as he swung around I could see his face, and I knew why Debs had buttoned her lip, even without the small warning flutter from the Passenger. The man had gunfighter's eyes, the kind you see on the old pictures of Wild West lawmen. You did not argue with those eyes. It was like looking into two cold, blue pistol barrels.

"Lookit," Chambers was saying. "We want to solve this thing, not fight about it." Burris nodded, and Deborah said nothing. "So let Forensics finish up, try to get an ID on the victim. If the lab work says it's your girl," he said, nodding at Deborah, "it's your case. If not"-and he tilted his head to Burris-"go crazy. It's all yours. Until then"-he looked straight at Debs and, to her great credit, she looked back without whimpering-"you stay quiet and let Burris work. All right?"

"I get access," Deborah said sullenly.

"Access," Chambers said. "Not control."

Debs looked at Burris. He shrugged and looked away. "All right," she said.

And so the Battle of the Everglades was over, ending happily for everyone-except, of course, for Dexter the Drudge, because Debs apparently interpreted "access" to mean following me around and peppering me with questions. I was almost finished anyway, but it did not make things easier to have a shadow, especially one like Deborah, who was likely to attack me with one of her agonizing arm punches at any moment if I failed to answer her satisfactorily. I filled her in on what I knew and what I had guessed as I sprayed my Bluestar in a few final spots, looking for any last traces of blood. The spray would reveal even the tiniest hint of blood, down to the smallest droplet, and it did not affect the DNA of the sample.

"What is it?" Deborah demanded. "What did you find?"

"Nothing," I said. "But you're standing on a footprint." She stepped aside guiltily and I got my camera out of my bag. I stood and turned back around, bumping squarely into Deborah. "Debs, please," I said. "I really can't do this with you attached to my hip."

"Fine," she said, and she stalked away to a spot opposite the fire pit.

I had just taken a last picture of the main blood spatter when I heard Deborah calling. "Dex," she said. "Hey, bring your spray over here." I looked over to where she stood. Vince Masuoka was kneeling and taking a sample of something. I got my Bluestar and joined them.

"Spray it right here," Deborah said, and Vince shook his head.

"It's not blood," he said. "It's the wrong color."

I looked down at the spot he was examining. There was a flattened area, as if a heavy object had stood there backed up against a row of vegetation. The leaves were wilted from heat, and on them, as well as at the edge of the depression, there were a few small brown stains. Something had spilled out from some kind of container that had been there.

"Spray it," Deborah said.

I looked at Vince, who shrugged. "I got a clean sample already," he said. "It's not blood."

"All right," I said, and I sprayed a small spot on one of the bushes.

Almost immediately a very faint blue glow was visible. "Not blood," Debs said scornfully. "So what the fuck is that?"

"Shit," Vince mumbled.

"It's not much blood," I said. "The glow is too faint."

"But it's some blood?" Debs demanded.

"Well, yes," I said.

"So it's some other kind of shit, with blood in it," she said.

I looked at Vince. "Well," he said. "I guess so."

Deborah nodded and looked around. "So you got a party," she said. She pointed at the fire pit. "And way over there you got the victim. And way over here on the other side of the party you got this." She glared at Vince. "With blood in it." She turned to me. "So what is it?" she demanded.

I should not have been surprised that this was suddenly my problem, but I was. "Come on, Debs," I said.

"No, you come on," she said. "I need one of your special hunches here."

"I have a special hunch back at the station," Vince said. "His name is Ivan."

"Shut up, dickless," Deborah said. "Come on, Dexter."

Apparently there was nothing for it, so I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and listened…

And almost immediately got a very amused answer from the Passenger. "Punch bowl," I said, snapping my eyes open.

"What?" Deborah said.

"It's the punch bowl," I said. "For the party."

"With human blood in it?" she said.

"Punch?" Vince said. "Jesus' tits, Dex, you're a sick fuck."

"Hey," I said innocently, "I didn't drink any of it."

"You're fucking crazy," Deborah added helpfully.

"Debs, look," I said. "It's away from the fire, and we got this dent in the ground." I knelt next to Vince and pointed to the depression in the dirt. "Something heavy, stuff spilled out to the sides, lots of footprints around it-you don't have to call it punch if that makes you nervous. But it's the beverage."

Deborah stared at the spot I pointed to, looked across the clearing at the fire pit, and then back to the ground at her feet. She shook her head slowly, dropped into a squat beside me, and said, "Punch bowl. Fuck."

"You're a sick fuck," Vince repeated.

"Yeah," Debs said. "But I think he's right." She stood up. "I bet you a dozen doughnuts you find some kind of drug traces in there, too," she said with a very noticeable note of satisfaction.

"I'll check it," Vince said. "I got a good test for ecstasy." He gave her his hideous sex leer and added, "Would you like to take the ecstasy test with me?"

"No, thanks," she said. "You don't have the pencil for it." She turned away before he could try one of his awful comebacks, and I followed. It took me only three steps to realize that something about her was very wrong, and when it registered I stopped dead and turned her to face me.

I looked at my sister with surprise. "Debs," I said. "You're actually smiling."

"Yeah," she said. "Because we just proved that this is my case."

"What do you mean?"

She punched me, hard. It may have been a happy punch for her, but it still hurt me. "Don't be stupid," she said. "Who drinks blood?"

"Ouch," I said. "Bela Lugosi?"

"Him and all the other vampires," she said. "You want me to spell 'vampire' for you?"

"So what-Oh," I said.

"Yeah, oh," she said. "We turn up a vampire wannabe, Bobby Acosta. And now we got a whole fucking vampire frat party. You think that's a coincidence?"

I didn't think so, but my arm hurt too much to say so. "We'll see," I said.

"Yes, we will," she said. "Get your stuff; I'll drive you back."

It was definitely lunchtime when we got back to civilization, but none of the subtle hints I threw out to Debs seemed to register, and she drove straight back to headquarters without pausing, in spite of the fact that Route 41 turns into Calle Ocho, and we could easily have pulled over at a number of excellent Cuban restaurants. Just thinking about them made my stomach growl, and I imagined I could smell the platanos sizzling in the frying pan. But as far as Deborah was concerned, the wheels of justice were already in motion, grinding their inexorable way toward a guilty verdict and a safer world, which apparently meant that Dexter could very well do without lunch for society's sake.

And so it was a very hungry Dexter who made his weary way back to the forensics lab, chivvied every step of the way by his sister's demands for rapid identification of the victim from the Everglades scene. I unpacked my samples and flung myself into my chair, searching for answers to the burning question: Should I drive all the way back to Calle Ocho? Or simply head to Cafe Relampago, which was much closer and had excellent sandwiches?

Like most important questions in life, this one had no easy answer, and I thought hard about the implications. Was it better to eat quickly, or well? If I chose instant gratification, did that make me a weaker person? And why did it have to be Cuban food today? Why not, for example, barbecue?

The moment that thought popped into my head, I began to lose my appetite. The girl in the Everglades had been barbecued, and for some reason that troubled me a great deal. I could not get the pictures out of my mind: the poor girl lashed in place, slowly bleeding out as the flames reached higher, the crowd howling, and the chef dabbing on barbecue sauce. I could almost smell the cooking flesh, and that drove all thoughts of ropa vieja and lunch completely out of my head.

Was this the way life was going to be from now on? How could I do my job if I felt actual human empathy for the victims I saw every day? Worse, how could I stay in a job that came between me and lunch?

It was a terribly sad state of affairs, and I let the self-pity wash over me for a few minutes. Dexter in the Dumps, an absurd figure. I, who had sent dozens of the deserving into the afterlife, was now mourning the loss of one insignificant girl, and merely because whoever killed her had not wasted the meat.

Preposterous; and in any case, the mighty machine that was me needed some kind of fuel. So I brushed away the unhappy thoughts and trudged down the hall to the vending machines. Looking through the glass at the meager selection of snack foods brought me no joy, either. At the hospital a Snickers bar had seemed like manna from heaven. Now it looked like punishment. Nothing else called out to me and promised fulfillment, either. In spite of all the bright wrappers and gleeful slogans, all I could see was a case filled with preservatives and chemically enhanced colors. It was all artificially flavored with genuine synthetic replicas, and it seemed about as appetizing as eating a chemistry set.

But duty called, and I needed to eat something to function at the necessary high level. So I settled on the least offensive choice-crackers with a substance in the middle that claimed to be peanut butter. I fed in some money and pushed the button. The crackers dropped out into the tray, and as I bent to pick them up a small and shadowy figure in the dark basement of Castle Dexter opened a door and stuck its head out. I froze for a moment in the bent-over position and listened. I heard nothing except the silken fluttering of a tiny warning flag, that things were not what they should be, and I stood up slowly and carefully and turned around.

There was nothing at all behind me: no maniac with a knife, no semi truck careening toward me out of control, no turbaned giant with an assegai-nothing. Still, the small voice whispered at me to beware.

Clearly, the Passenger was playing with me. Perhaps it was miffed at me for failing to feed and exercise it. "Just shut up," I told it. "Go away and leave me alone." It continued to smirk at me, so I ignored it and stepped into the hall.

And I walked almost directly into Sergeant Doakes-or most of him, anyway.

Doakes had always hated me, even before a crazed doctor had cut away his hands, feet, and tongue when I had failed to rescue him. I mean, I had tried-really-but things had just not worked out, and as a direct consequence Doakes had lost a few overrated body parts. But even before that, he had hated me because, out of all the cops I had ever met, he was the only one who suspected what I was. I had given him no reason and no evidence, but somehow he just knew.

And now he stood there on his artificial feet, glaring at me with all the venom of a thousand cobras. For a moment I wished that the mad doctor had taken away his eyes, too, but I quickly realized that this was an unkind thought, unsuitable for the new and human me, so I put it out of my mind and instead gave him a friendly smile. "Sergeant Doakes," I said. "It's good to see you, and moving around so well, too."

Doakes did nothing at all, just kept looking at me, and I looked down at the silvery metallic claws that had replaced his hands. He was not carrying the small notebook-size speech box he used to talk-possibly he wanted both claws free to strangle me, or more likely, he planned to use the vending machines, too. And since he no longer had a tongue, his attempts at speech without the synthesizer were so embarrassing, filled with "ngah" sounds and so on, that he probably didn't want to risk looking silly. So he just stared at me for a moment, until finally the anticipation of a sprightly encounter withered away within me.

"Well," I said, "it's been very nice speaking with you. Have a lovely day." I walked away toward my lab, turning back to look only once. Doakes was still watching me with his poisonous stare.

I told you so, gloated the soft voice of the Passenger, but I just waved at Doakes and went back to the lab.

When Vince and the others got back around three, the taste of the crackers was still lingering unpleasantly in the back of my mouth.

"Wow," Vince said as he came in and dropped his bag on the floor. "I think I got a sunburn."

"What did you do about lunch?" I asked him.

He blinked as if I'd asked a crazy question, and maybe I had. "One of the cops drove back to a Burger King," he said. "Why?"

"You didn't lose your appetite thinking about that girl being roasted and eaten right there?"

Vince looked even more astonished. "No," he said, shaking his head slowly, "I had a double Whopper with cheese, and fries. Are you okay?"

"I'm just hungry," I said, and he looked at me a moment longer, so rather than sit through a staring contest, I turned away and went back to work.

SIXTEEN

The telephone woke me up while it was still dark, and I rolled over to look at the clock radio beside the bed. It said 4:47 in obnoxiously cheerful digits. I'd had just over twenty minutes of real sleep since the last time Lily Anne had cried, and I did not appreciate the wake-up call. But hoping against hope that the ringing would not reawaken her, I grabbed at the telephone. "Hello," I said.

"I need you here early," declared the voice of my sister. She did not sound at all tired, in spite of the hour, and I found that just as annoying as being wakened at this dreadful time of night.

"Deborah," I said, the hoarseness of sleep still in my throat, "it's another two and a half hours until early."

"We matched up your DNA sample," she said, ignoring what was really a pretty clever remark, considering the hour. "It's Tyler Spanos."

I blinked rapidly a few times, trying to bring my brain into some kind of state that approached wakefulness. "The girl in the Everglades?" I said. "That was Tyler Spanos? Not Samantha Aldovar?"

"Yeah," she said. "So this morning they're setting up a task force. Chambers is coordinating, but I got lead investigator." And I could hear the excitement in her voice as she said it.

"That's great," I said, "but why do you need me early?"

She dropped her voice as if she was afraid someone would hear her. "I need your help, Dex," she said. "This is turning into a huge thing and I can't fuck it up. And it's getting, you know. Political." She cleared her throat slightly, sounding a little bit like Captain Matthews. "So I got you down to lead Forensics on the task force."

"I have to take the kids to school," I protested, and beside me I heard a soft rustling.

Rita's hand came down on my arm, and she said, "I can take the kids."

"You shouldn't drive yet," I protested. "Lily Anne is too small."

"She'll be fine," Rita said. "And so will I. Dexter, I've done this before, and without help the first two times."

We never talked about Rita's ex, the bio dad of Cody and Astor, but I knew enough about him to know that he could not have been terribly helpful. Clearly, she really had done this before. And in truth, Rita looked fine, not at all unhealthy-but naturally enough, it was Lily Anne I was worried about. "But the car seat," I said.

"It's fine, Dexter, really," Rita said. "Go do your job."

I heard something that might have been a snort from Deborah. "Tell Rita I said thanks," Debs said. "See you soon." And she hung up.

"But," I said into the phone, even though the line was dead.

"Get dressed," Rita said, and she repeated, "Really, we'll be fine."

Our society has many laws and customs to protect women from the brute force of men, but when two women make up their minds about something and gang up on a man there is absolutely nothing he can do but go along. Perhaps someday we will elect a compassionate woman as president, and she will pass new laws on the subject; until then, I was a helpless victim. I got up and showered, and by the time I was dressed Rita had a fried-egg sandwich ready for me to eat in the car, and a cup of coffee in a shiny metal travel mug.

"Work hard," she said with a tired smile. "I hope you catch these people." I looked at her with surprise. "It was on the news," she said. "They said it was-That poor girl was eaten." She shuddered and took a sip of coffee. "In Miami. In this day and age. I don't-I mean, cannibals? A whole group of them? How can you…" She shook her head, took another sip of coffee, and put the cup down-and to my surprise I saw a tear form in one corner of her eye.

"Rita," I said.

"I know," she said, knuckling away the tear. "It's just hormones, I'm sure, because-And I don't really…" She sniffled. "It's just the baby," she said. "And now somebody else's little girl-Go on, Dexter. This is important."

I went. I was not really awake yet, and still suffering from psychological whiplash from my treatment at the hands of Rita and Debs, but I went. And oddly enough, I was surprised as much by what Rita had said as by her tears. Cannibals. It seems very stupid to say so, but I had not really thought of that word yet. I mean, Dexter is not dull: I knew the poor girl had been eaten by people, and I knew that people who ate other people were called cannibals. But to put those thoughts together and say cannibals had eaten Tyler Spanos-it brought the whole thing onto a level of everyday, toe-stubbing reality that was somehow a little bit strange and scary. I know that the world is full of bad people: After all, I am one of them. But a whole group of partygoers eating a young girl at an outdoor barbecue? That made them real cannibals-contemporary, modern-day, right-here-in-Miami cannibals-and it felt like the level of badness had just gone up a few notches.

And there was an additional tinge of quaintness to the whole thing, too, as if a book of frightening fairy tales had come to life: first vampires and now cannibals. What a very interesting place Miami had suddenly become. Perhaps next I would meet a centaur or a dragon, or even an honest man.

I drove to work in darkness and light traffic. A large chunk of moon hung in the sky, scolding me for my sloth. Get to work, Dexter, it whispered. Slice something up. I gave it the finger and drove on.

One of the conference rooms on the second floor had been set aside to make a command center for Deborah's task force, and it was already buzzing with activity when I strolled in. Chambers, the shaven-headed man from FDLE, sat at a large table that was already heaped with folders, lab reports, maps, and coffee cups. He had a pile of six or seven cell phones beside him, and he was talking into another one.

And, unfortunately for all concerned-except possibly the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover, who must have been hovering protectively in a spectral house frock-sitting next to Chambers was Special Agent Brenda Recht. She had a pair of very chic reading glasses on the end of her nose that she pushed down even farther in order to look at me with disapproval. I smiled back at her and looked to the far end of the room, where a man in a state trooper uniform was standing next to the giant black man I had seen at the crime scene. He turned to stare at me, so I just nodded and moved on.

Deborah was briefing two Miami-Dade detectives, with her partner, Deke, sitting beside her, flossing his teeth. She looked up at me and beckoned for me to join her. I pulled a chair over next to her group and sat as one of the detectives, a guy named Ray Alvarez, interrupted her.

"Yeah, hey, listen," he said. "I don't like it at all. I mean, the guy is fucking city hall-you been called off once already."

"It's different now," Deborah told him. "We got a murder like nobody's ever seen, and the press is going nuts."

"Yeah, sure," Alvarez said, "but you know fucking well Acosta is just waiting to bust somebody's balls."

"Don't worry about it," Deborah said.

"Easy for you," Alvarez said. "No balls to bust."

"That's what you think," said Hood, the other detective, a hulking brute I knew a little. "She got twice your balls, Ray."

"Fuck you," Alvarez said. Deke snorted, either a laugh, or perhaps some small particle of food had gotten flossed out and become lodged in his nose.

"You just find Bobby Acosta," Debs said sharply, "or you won't have any balls to worry about." She glared at him, and he shrugged, looking up at the ceiling as if to ask why God was picking on him. "Start with the motorcycle," she said. She glanced at a folder in her lap. "It's a red Suzuki Hayabusa, one year old."

Deke whistled and Alvarez said, "A what?"

"Hayabusa," Deke said, looking suitably impressed. "Very hot bike."

"Right, got it," Alvarez said, looking at Deke with weary resignation, and Debs turned to Hood.

"You get on Tyler Spanos's car," she said. "It's a 2009 Porsche, blue, convertible. It's gotta turn up somewhere."

"Probably Colombia," Hood said, and as Deborah opened her mouth to scold him he added, "Yeah, I know; I'll find it if it isn't gone already." He shrugged. "Not that it'll do any good."

"Hey," Deke said. "Gotta do the routine stuff, you know?"

Hood looked at him with amusement. "Yeah, Deke," he said. "I know."

"All right," Chambers said in a loud voice, and all eyes in the room clicked over to him as if they were on the same switch. "If I could have your attention over here for a minute."

Chambers stood up and backed to a spot where he could see everybody. "First, I want to thank Major Nelson"-he nodded at the man in the trooper uniform-"and Detective Weems from the Miccosukee Tribal Police." And the giant man raised a hand to wave and, oddly, smiled at everyone.

I nudged Deborah and whispered, "Watch and learn, Debs. Politics."

She elbowed me hard and whispered, "Shut up."

Chambers went on. "They're here because this thing is turning into an A-one, world-class, top-of-the-line screamer, and we might need their help. We got a possible connection into the Everglades," he said, nodding again to Weems, "and we're gonna need all the help we can get covering the roads statewide." Major Nelson didn't even blink at this.

"What about the Fibby?" Hood said, pointing at Special Agent Recht, and Chambers stared at him for a moment.

"The FBI is here," Chambers said carefully, "because this is a group we're looking for, and if it's at all organized, maybe national, they want to know about it. Besides, we still got one girl missing, and it may turn out to be kidnapping. And frankly, since this is such a freaking mess, you are damned lucky you don't have Treasury, ATF, and Naval Intelligence in here, too, so shut up and cowboy on."

"Yes, sir," Hood said with a sarcastic little salute. Chambers watched him just long enough to make Hood squirm, before he started talking again.

"All right," he said. "Sergeant Morgan has the lead here in the Miami area. Anything points somewhere else, bring it to me first." Deborah nodded.

"Questions," Chambers said, looking around the room. Nobody said anything. "Okay," he said. "Sergeant Morgan is going to give you a summary of what we know so far."

Deborah stood up and walked over to where Chambers stood, and he sat down, yielding the floor to her. Debs cleared her throat and started on her summary. It was painful to watch; she is not a good public speaker, and aside from that she is extremely self-conscious. It seems to me that she has always felt ill at ease in the body of a beautiful woman, since she has a personality more suited to Dirty Harry, and she hates to have people looking at her. So for anyone who really cared about her, which was probably limited to me at the moment, it was an uncomfortable experience to see her stumble over words, repeatedly clear her throat, and lunge at cop-talk cliches as if she were drowning.

Still, everything has to end sometime, no matter how unpleasant it is, and after a long and nerve-racking interlude Debs finished up and said, "Questions?" And then she blushed and looked at Chambers, as if he would be upset that she had used his line.

Detective Weems raised a finger. "What you want us to do in the Everglades?" he said in a remarkably soft and high-pitched voice.

Deborah cleared her throat. Again. "Just, you know," she said, "put the word out. If anybody sees something out there, if these guys try to throw, you know, another party. Or if there's an old one we don't know about yet, a place that maybe there's some evidence on the site we could find." And she cleared her throat. I wondered if I should offer her a cough drop.

Luckily for Deborah's image as a two-fisted investigator, Chambers decided that enough was enough. He stood up before Deborah actually melted, and said, "All right. You all know what to do. The only thing I want to add is, keep your mouth shut. The press is having too much fun with this already, and I don't want to give them anything else to kick around. Got it?"

Everybody nodded, even Deborah.

"All right," Chambers said. "Let's go get the bad guys."

The meeting broke up to the sound of squeaking chairs, shuffling feet, and cop chatter, as everyone sitting stood up and formed into little conversation groups with those already standing-except for Major Nelson of the Highway Patrol, who just jammed his hat onto his closely cropped head and marched out the door as if the "Colonel Bogey March" was playing. The huge man from the tribal police, Weems, sauntered over to talk to Chambers, and Special Agent Recht sat by herself and looked around the room, quietly disapproving. Hood caught her eye and shook his head.

"Shit," he said. "I fucking hate the Fibbies."

"I bet that worries them," Alvarez said.

"Hey, Morgan, seriously," Hood said. "Is there some way we can twist that federal bitch's tail?"

"Sure," said Debs, in a tone of voice so reasonable that it could only mean trouble for somebody. "You can find the fucking girl, catch the fucking killer, and do your fucking job so she doesn't have an excuse to do it for you." She showed him some teeth; it was not a smile, although possibly Bobby Acosta might have thought so. "Think you can do that, Richard?"

Hood looked at her for a moment and then just shook his head. "Shit," he said.

"Hey, how about that, you were right," Alvarez said. "And she got more balls than you, too."

"Shit," Hood said again, and, clearly looking for an easy target to win back a few points, he said, "What about you, Deke?"

"What's that?" Deke said.

"What are you doing?" Hood said.

Deke shrugged. "Oh, you know," he said. "Captain wants me to stick with, uh, Morgan here."

"Wow," Alvarez said. "Really dangerous."

"We're partners," Deke said, looking slightly hurt.

"You be careful, Deke," Hood said. "Morgan is pretty hard on her partners."

"Yeah, she kind of loses 'em now and then," Alvarez said.

"You two assholes want me to hold your hand all the way to the DMV database?" Deborah said. "Or can you get your head out of your ass long enough to find it by yourself?"

Hood stood up and said, "On my way, boss," and headed for the door, and Alvarez followed. "Watch your back, Deke," he said as he left.

Deke watched them go with a slight frown, and as the door closed behind them he said, "Why they gotta bust my chops? 'Cause I'm the new guy, or what?" Deborah ignored him, and he turned to me. "I mean, what? What'd I do? Huh?"

I had no answer for him other than the obvious, which was that cops are like all other pack animals-they pick on any member of the herd that seems different or shows weakness. With his absurd good looks and somewhat limited mental abilities, Deke was both, and therefore an obvious target. Still, it seemed like a tough idea to get across without a lot of unpleasantness and groping for small words, so I just gave Deke a reassuring smile. "I'm sure they'll ease up when they see what you can do," I told him.

He shook his head slowly. "How'm I supposed to do anything?" he said, leaning his head toward Debs. "I gotta stick with her like a fuckin' shadow."

He watched me as if I was supposed to supply an answer, so I said, "Well, I'm sure a chance will come up for you to show some initiative."

"Initiative," he said, and for a moment I thought I would have to tell him what that meant. But happily for me, he just shook his head sourly and said, "Shit," and before we could explore any of the subtleties of that thought, Chambers came over and put a hand on Deborah's shoulder.

"All right, Morgan," he said. "You know what you gotta do. Downstairs, ninety minutes."

Debs looked at him with an expression that was closer to terror than anything I had ever seen on her face before. "I can't," she said. "I mean, I thought you were going to-Can't you do it?"

Chambers shook his head with something like malicious glee in his smile. It made him look like a wicked and very deadly elf. "Can't," he said. "You're the lead here. I'm just the coordinator. Your captain wants you to do this." He patted her shoulder again and moved away.

"Shit," Deborah said, and for a moment I felt intense irritation that this was the only word anyone could come up with this morning; and then she ran a hand through her hair and I noticed that her hand was shaking.

"What is it, Debs?" I said, wondering what on earth could cause my fearless sister to tremble like a fragile leaf in a storm.

She took a deep breath and squared her shoulders. "Press conference," she said. "They want me to talk to the press." And she swallowed and then licked her lips as if everything inside her had just gone completely dry. "Shit," she said again.

SEVENTEEN

One of the things i find most rewarding about my job is that there is always a certain amount of variety. Some days I get to use large and expensive machinery to run very modern scientific tests; some days I simply peer into a microscope. And if nothing else, the scenery changes when I go out to crime scenes. Of course, the crimes are all different, too, ranging from the common and vulgar wife slashing to some really quite interesting eviscerations from time to time.

But in all my vast and varied experience with the department, I had never before been asked to use my scientific training and acumen to prepare my terrified sister for a press conference, and I have to say this was a good thing, because if it had been a regular part of my job, I would have seriously considered quitting forensics and getting a job teaching middle school physical education.

Deborah dragged me off to her cubicle and immediately burst into a very unattractive cold sweat; she sat down, stood up, paced three steps in each direction, sat down again, and began to squeeze her hands together. And just to add to an already sky-high Irritant Quotient, she began to say, "Shit. Shit shit shit shit shit," over and over in various volumes and inflections, until I began to think she had lost the power of intelligent speech altogether.

"Debs," I said at last, "if that's your statement, Captain Matthews is going to be very unhappy."

"Shit," she said, and I wondered if I should slap her. "Dexter, Jesus, please, what am I supposed to say?"

"Anything but 'shit,' " I said.

She stood up again and walked to the window, still mangling her hands. Every little girl who has ever lived has grown up wanting to be an actress or dancer or some kind of performer-all of them except Deborah. All she ever wanted out of life, even at the tender age of five, was a badge and a gun. And through hard work, dogged intelligence, and really painful arm punches, she had achieved her goal-only to find that in order to keep it, she now had to be an actress. The word "irony" is terribly overused, but still, the situation seemed to call for a bit of wry amusement at the very least.

But it also called for a certain amount of Dexter's newfound Lily Anne-born compassion, since I could tell that without my help, my sister was going to prove once and for all that there really was something to the idea of spontaneous combustion. So when I decided that Debs had suffered enough, I got up from my rickety little chair and went to stand beside her. "Debs," I said. "This is something so easy that Captain Matthews is good at it."

I think she almost said "shit" again, but she caught herself and just bit her lip instead. "I can't do it," she said. "All those people-and reporters-cameras-I just can't, Dexter."

I was glad to see that she had recovered a little, enough to separate "people" from "reporters," but clearly I still had work to do. "You can, Deborah," I told her firmly. "And it will be a lot easier than you think. You may even get to like it."

She ground her teeth and I think she would have punched me if she hadn't been so distracted. "Don't hold your breath," she said.

"It's easy," I said again. "We're going to write out a few short paragraphs, and all you have to do is read them out loud. Just like giving a book report in sixth grade."

"I flunked book reports," she growled.

"You didn't have me to help," I said, with a great deal more confidence than I felt. "Now come on; let's sit down and write this thing."

She ground her teeth and squeezed her hands together some more for a few seconds, and she seemed to think about jumping out the window. But it was only the second floor, and the windows were sealed shut, so finally Debs turned away and slumped back into her chair. "All right," she said through clenched teeth. "Let's do it."

There are only a very few cop cliches that are necessary for saying almost anything to the press. That is one reason, of course, that a talking suit like Captain Matthews could become good enough at it to rise up to his lofty rank based solely on his ability to memorize them all and then put them in the right order when standing in front of a camera. It was really not even a skill, since it took a great deal less ability than the simplest card trick.

Still, it was a talent Deborah did not have, not even a little, and trying to explain it to her was like describing plaid to a blind person. Altogether it was a nasty and unpleasant interlude, and by the time we headed down to the press conference I was nearly as sweaty and frazzled as my sister. Neither of us felt any better when we saw the standing-room-only crowd of salivating predators waiting for us. For a moment Deborah froze in place, one foot raised in the air. But then, as if somebody had flipped a switch, the reporters turned on her and began their routine of shouting questions and taking pictures, and as I saw Deborah clamp her jaw and frown, I took a deep breath. She's going to be all right, I thought, and I watched her climb to the podium with something like pride in my creation.

Of course, that lasted only until she opened her mouth, and after that began one of the most miserable fifteen-minute spells I can remember. Deborah trying to speak to a roomful of cops was profoundly uncomfortable. Deborah trying to make a statement at a press conference was torture so intensely painful that I am quite sure that the men in black hoods who worked for the Inquisition would have shuddered and refused to participate. Deborah stammered, stuttered, stumbled, sweated, and lurched from phrase to carefully polished phrase in a tangled sweat so thorough she looked like she was confessing to child rape, and when she finally finished the prepared statement I had worked on so hard there was stunned silence in the room for several seconds. And then, alas, the reporters smelled blood in the water and leaped on Deborah with a savage frenzy. All that had come before was cupcakes and kitties by comparison, and I watched as Deborah slowly and carefully tied the rope around her own neck and hoisted herself into the air, where she twisted in the wind with agonizing completeness until finally, mercifully, Captain Matthews had suffered enough and stepped forward to say, "No more questions." He did not quite shove Deborah off the podium, but it was clear that he had to think about it.

The captain glared forcefully at the assembled lynch mob, as if he could beat them into submission with his manly stare, and they did actually quiet down just a bit. "All right," he said after a moment. "The, uh, family members." He put a fist to his mouth and cleared his throat and I wondered if Deborah was contagious. "Mr. and Mrs. Um Aldovar. Would like to make a brief statement." He nodded and then held out an arm in a half embrace.

A stunned-looking Mr. Aldovar led his wife up to the microphones. She looked exhausted and several years older, but as they stood there in front of the crowd she visibly gathered herself, pushed away from her husband, and fumbled out a sheet of paper. And the reporters, bizarrely enough, actually went silent for a moment.

"To the person or persons who took our little girl," she began, and then she had to stop for a moment and, just for consistency, clear her throat. "Our Samantha," she said. "We don't have a lot of money, but whatever we have or can get, it's yours. Just please don't hurt our little girl… Just…" And that was as far as she could get. She covered her face with her hands and the paper fluttered to the ground. Mr. Aldovar stepped forward and took her into his arms and glared at the crowd as if they knew where Samantha was and refused to tell.

"She's a good kid," he said angrily. "There's no reason in the world to, to-Please," he said with a softer tone. "Please just let her go. Whatever it is you want, just please let her go…" And then his face crumpled and he just turned away. Captain Matthews stepped forward and glared out at the room again.

"All right," the captain said. "You all have a picture of the girl. Samantha. We're asking that you help us get it out there, and, uh-if people see her, you know, citizens. You can call that special task force hotline, which-you have that number, too, in the media. And if we can, uh, circulate the number, and the picture, let's get this girl back. Alive." He gave the room his money shot, a determined and virile glare straight into the cameras, and held it for a beat before he said, "Thank you for your help." And he stood there for a moment longer with his manly jaw clenched, to give the photographers one last good shot of his commanding facial features, and then he said, "All right, that's it," and turned away.

Predictably enough, the room erupted into enormously loud chaos, but Matthews just waved an arm and turned away to say comforting things to the Aldovars, and that really was it. I pushed forward to get to Deborah, collecting and distributing several hard elbows to the ribs along the way. I found my sister standing off to the side, opening and closing her fists. A little bit of color had returned to her cheeks and she looked oddly rumpled, as if somebody had just woken her from a bad dream.

"If I ever have to do that again," she said through her teeth, "I'll turn in my goddamn badge."

"If you ever try to do it again," I said, "Captain Matthews will take it from you himself."

"Jesus fuck," she said. "Was it as bad as it felt?"

"Oh, no," I said. "Much worse."

I suppose my sour mood prevented me from seeing it coming, but Debs whacked me with an arm punch. On the one hand, it was nice to see her recovering from her ordeal. But on the other hand, it really hurt.

"Thanks for the support," she said. "Let's get out of here." She turned and began pushing angrily through the crowd, and I followed, rubbing my arm.

Reporters are odd creatures. They have to think very highly of themselves in order to do their job at all, and clearly some of them who had seen Deborah's pitiful performance must have been very good at that kind of self-delusion, because they apparently believed that if they only shoved a microphone at Debs and shouted a question, she would cave in under the pressure of their perfect hair and teeth and blurt out an answer. Unfortunately for their professional self-esteem, however, Deborah just kept moving forward, batting away anything they put in front of her, and pushing hard at anyone foolish enough to stand in her way. And even the reporters standing back toward the exit, who saw quite clearly what happened to their colleagues, thought so highly of themselves that they tried the exact same thing-and seemed surprised when they got the same result.

Because I was following Deborah, several of them eyed me speculatively, but after many years of diligent maintenance, my disguise was too good for them, and they all decided that I was exactly what I wanted to appear-an absolute nonentity with no answers to anything. And so, relatively unmolested, battered only on the upper arm from Deborah's arm punch, I made it out of the press conference and, with my sister, back to the task force command center on the second floor.

Somewhere along the way, Deke joined us, trickling in behind to lean against the wall. Somebody had set up a coffee machine and Deborah poured some into a Styrofoam cup. She sipped it and made a face. "This is worse than the coffee service stuff," she said.

"We could go for breakfast," I said hopefully.

Debs put down the cup and sat down. "We got too much to do," she said. "What time is it?"

"Eight forty-five," Deke said, and Deborah looked at him sourly, as if he had chosen an unpleasant time. "What," he said. "It is."

The door swung open and Detective Hood came in. "I am so fucking good I scare myself," he said as he swaggered over and slumped into a seat in front of Deborah.

"Scare me, too, Richard," Deborah said. "What have you got?"

Hood pulled a sheet of paper out of his pocket and unfolded it. "In record time," he said. "Tyler Spanos's 2009 blue convertible Porsche." He flicked a finger at the paper, making a popping sound. "Guy runs a chop shop, he owed me a favor; I cut him a break last year." He shrugged. "It woulda been his third fall, so he called me with this." He flicked the paper again. "It's in a repaint place up at Opa-Locka," he said. "I got a squad car there now, holding the guys were painting it, a couple of Haitians." He tossed the paper on the desk in front of Deborah. "Who's your daddy?" he said.

"Get out there," Debs said. "I want to know who sold it to them, and I don't care how you find out."

Hood gave her a huge meat-eating smile. "Cool," he said. "Sometimes I love this job." He slid up and out of the chair with a surprising grace and was out the door and away, whistling "Here Comes the Sun."

Deborah watched him go and as the door swung closed she said, "Our first break, and that dickhead gets it for me."

"Hey, I dunno, break?" Deke said. "By the time they're painting it, won't be any prints or anything."

Debs looked at him with an expression that would have sent me scurrying under the furniture. "Somebody got stupid, Deke," she said, with a little extra emphasis on the word "stupid." "They should have put the car in a sinkhole, but somebody wanted to make a quick couple of grand, so they sold it. And if we find who sold it to them-"

"We find the girl," Deke said.

Deborah looked at him, and her face looked almost fond. "That's right, Deke," she said. "We find the girl."

"Okay, then," Deke said.

The door swung open again, and Detective Alvarez came in. "You're gonna love this," he said, and Deborah looked at him expectantly.

"You found Bobby Acosta?" she said.

Alvarez shook his head. "The Spanos family is here to see you," he said.

EIGHTEEN

If the man who came through the door first was Mr. Spanos, then Tyler's father was a twenty-eight-year-old bodybuilder with a ponytail and a suspicious bulge under his left arm. That would have meant he fathered Tyler at the age of ten, which seemed to be pushing the envelope, even in Miami. But whoever this man was, he was very serious, and he looked the room over carefully, which included glaring at me and Deke, before he stuck his head back into the hall and nodded.

The next man into the room looked a little bit more like you would hope a teenage girl's father might look. He was middle-aged, relatively short, and a little chubby, with thinning hair and gold-rimmed glasses. His face was sweaty and tired and his mouth hung open as if he had to gasp for breath. He staggered into the room, looked helplessly around for a moment, and then stood in front of Deborah, blinking and breathing heavily.

A woman came hustling in behind him. She was younger and several inches taller, with reddish blond hair and way too much very good jewelry. She was followed by another young bodybuilder, this time with a buzz cut instead of a ponytail. He carried a medium-size aluminum suitcase and he closed the door behind him and leaned against the doorframe. The woman marched over to where Deborah sat, pulled a chair out, and guided Mr. Spanos into it. "Sit down," she said to him. "And close your mouth." Mr. Spanos looked at her, blinked some more, and then let her lever him into the chair by his elbow, although he did not close his mouth.

The woman looked around and found another chair at the conference table, and pulled it over beside Mr. Spanos. She sat, looked at him, and then shook her head before turning her attention to Deborah.

"Sergeant-Morgan?" she said, as if unsure of the name.

"That's right," Deborah said.

The woman looked hard at Deborah for a moment, as if she was hoping my sister would morph into Clint Eastwood. She pursed her lips, took a breath, and said, "I'm Daphne Spanos. Tyler's mother."

Deborah nodded. "I'm very sorry for your loss," she said.

Mr. Spanos sobbed. It was a very wet sound, and it took Deborah by surprise, because she goggled at him as if he had started to sing.

"Stop it," Daphne Spanos said to him. "You have to pull yourself together."

"My little girl," he said, and it was very clear that he was not really pulling himself together quite yet.

"She's my little girl, too, goddamn it," Daphne hissed at him. "Now quit blubbering." Mr. Spanos looked down at his feet and shook his head, but at least he did not make any more wet noises. Instead he took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and then sat up as straight as he could and looked at Deborah.

"You're in charge of finding the animals that did this," he said to Debs. "That killed my little girl." And I thought he was going to snivel again, but he clamped his jaw shut tightly, and nothing more came out except a ragged breath.

"It's a task force, Mr. Spanos," she said. "We have a team made up of officers from all the different branches of-"

Mr. Spanos held up his hand and waved it to cut her off. "I don't care about the team," he said. "They said you're in charge. Are you?"

Deborah glanced at Alvarez, who looked away with a suddenly very innocent face. She looked back at Spanos. "That's right," Deborah said.

He stared at her for a long moment. "Why not a man?" he said. "Is this a politically correct thing, they put a woman in charge?"

I could see Alvarez struggling to control himself; Deborah didn't need to struggle. She was used to this, which is not the same thing as saying she liked it. "I am in charge," she said, "because I am the best and I have earned it. If you have a problem with that, too bad."

Spanos looked at her, shook his head. "I don't like this," he said. "It should be a man."

"Mr. Spanos," Deborah said, "if you have something to say, spit it out. If not-I am trying to catch a killer here, and you are wasting my time." She glared at him, and he looked uncertain. He glanced at his wife, who compressed her lips and then nodded, and Spanos turned to Mr. Ponytail. "Clear the room," he said, and Ponytail took a step toward Deke.

"Back off," Deborah barked, and Ponytail froze. "We're not clearing the room," she said. "This is a police station."

"I have something for your ears only," Spanos said. "I want it confidential."

"I'm a cop," Debs said. "You want confidential, get a lawyer."

"No," Spanos said. "This is for you only, for the head of the investigation, not these other guys."

"It doesn't work that way," Debs said.

"Just this once," Spanos said urgently. "It's my little girl."

"Mr. Spanos," Deborah said.

Mrs. Spanos leaned forward. "Please," she said. "It will only take a minute." She reached over and grabbed Deborah's hand and gave it a squeeze. "It's important," she said. "For the investigation." She saw Deborah look uncertain, just for a second, and she squeezed the hand again. "It will help you find them," she said in a seductive whisper.

Deborah pulled her hand away and looked at the two of them. Then she glanced up at me for an opinion, and I admit I was curious, so I just shrugged.

"Your guys wait in the hall," Deborah said at last. "I'll send out two of my guys."

Spanos shook his head. "Just you and us," he said. "So it's family."

Deborah jerked her head in my direction. "My brother stays," she said, and Mr. and Mrs. Spanos looked at me.

"Your brother," he said, and looked at Mrs. Spanos; she nodded. "All right."

"Mackenzie," Mr. Spanos said, holding out his hand. The guy with the buzz cut came over and gave him the suitcase. "You and Harold wait outside," Spanos said, placing the suitcase on his lap, and the two bodybuilders marched to the door and went out. "Sergeant?" he said to Debs, and she waved at Deke.

"Deke, Alvarez," she said, "keep an eye on those two guys in the hall."

"I'm s'posa keep an eye on you," Deke said. "Captain said."

"Get out," Debs said. "Two minutes."

Deke stared at her stubbornly for a moment, and then Alvarez stepped over and put a hand on his back. "Come on, sport," he said. "Boss lady says go, we go."

Deke jutted out his dimpled chin at Deborah, and for just a second he looked every inch the manly Saturday-morning TV hero. "Two minutes," he said. He looked at her a little longer, as if he was going to say something else, but apparently he couldn't think of anything, so he merely turned away and went out. Alvarez gave Debs a mocking smile and followed.

The door closed behind them, and for a second nobody moved. Then Mr. Spanos made a grunting noise and plopped the aluminum suitcase into Deborah's lap. "Open it," he said.

Deborah stared at him. "Go on, open it," he said. "It won't explode."

She stared for just a second longer, and then she looked down at the suitcase. It had two locks holding it closed and she slowly undid them and then, with a last look at Spanos, she flipped the lid open.

Deborah looked inside and froze absolutely still, her hand motionless on the raised lid and her face caught between expressions-and then she looked up at Spanos with one of the coldest expressions I had ever seen. "What the fuck is this," she said through her teeth.

Having human feelings was new to me, but having curiosity was not, and I leaned forward for a look, and it did not take a great deal of scrutiny to see what the fuck it was.

It was money. Lots of it.

From the visible top layer it appeared to be bundles of hundred-dollar bills, all with the bank's tape around them. The suitcase was crammed full, so full that I didn't see how Spanos had gotten it closed, unless Mr. Ponytail had stood on top while Spanos locked it.

"Half a million dollars," Spanos said. "In cash. Untraceable. I deliver it anywhere you say. Cayman Islands bank, whatever."

"For what," Deborah said in a very flat voice, and, if he had known her as I did, Mr. Spanos should have gotten very nervous.

But Spanos did not know Deborah, and he seemed to gain confidence from the fact that she had asked what it was for. He smiled, not really a happy smile, more like he wanted to show his face could still do that. "For almost nothing," he said. "Just this." He held up his hand and wagged one finger in the air. "When you find the animals that killed my little girl…" His voice broke a little and he stopped, took his glasses off, and wiped them on his sleeve. He put the glasses back on, cleared his throat, and looked at Deborah again. "When you find them, you tell me first. That's all. Ten minutes before you do anything else. One phone call to me. And that money is all yours."

Deborah stared at him. He stared back, and for a few seconds he was no longer a sniveling, snuffling man, but instead a man who always knew exactly what he wanted, and exactly how to get it.

I looked at the money in the still-open suitcase. Half a million dollars. It seemed like an awful lot. I had never really been motivated by money-after all, I had not gone to law school. Money to me had always been merely something the sheep used to show each other how wonderful they were. But now, as I looked at the stacks of cash in the suitcase, it did not look like abstract markers for keeping score. It looked like ballet lessons for Lily Anne. An entire college education. Pony rides and new dresses and braces and finding shells on the beach in the Bahamas. And it was all right there in that one small suitcase, winking its sly greenbacked eyes and saying, Why not? What could it hurt?

And then I realized that the silence had gone on a little too long for comfort, and I tore my eyes away from Lily Anne's future happiness and looked up to Deborah's face. As far as I could tell neither she nor Spanos had changed expression. But at last Deborah took a deep breath and put the suitcase on the floor and looked back at Spanos.

"Pick it up," she said, and she nudged it toward him with her foot.

"It's yours," he told her, shaking his head.

"Mr. Spanos," she said, "it is a felony to bribe a police officer."

"What bribe?" he said. "It's a gift. Take it."

"Pick it up, and get it out of here," she said.

"It's one phone call," he said. "Is that such a crime?"

"I am very sorry for your loss," Deborah said very slowly. "And if you pick that up and get it out of here right now, I will forget this happened. But if it is still there when the other detectives come back in, you are going to jail."

"I understand," Spanos said. "You can't say anything right now; that's fine. But take my card, call me when you find them, the money's yours." He flipped a business card to her and Deborah stood up, letting the card fall to the floor.

"Go home, Mr. Spanos," she said. "Take that suitcase with you." And she walked past him to the door and opened it.

"Just call me," Spanos said to her back, but his wife was once again more practical.

"Don't be an idiot," she said. She leaned down and grabbed the suitcase and, with a mighty shove down on the top, just barely got it locked before Deke and Alvarez came back in with the two bodyguards. Mrs. Spanos handed the suitcase to the one with the buzz cut and stood up. "Come on," she said to her husband. He looked at her, and then he turned and looked at Deborah by the door.

"Call me," he said.

She held the door open. "Good-bye, Mr. Spanos," she said.

He looked at her for a few seconds more, and then Mrs. Spanos took him by the elbow and led him out.

Deborah closed the door and let out a loud breath, then turned around and went back to her chair. Alvarez watched her sit, grinning. She looked up at him before he could wipe the smile off.

"Very fucking funny, Alvarez," she snarled.

Deke came over and leaned in the same spot he'd been leaning before the interruption. "How much?" he asked her.

Deborah looked at him in surprise. "What?"

Deke shrugged. "I said, how much?" he said. "How much was in the suitcase?"

Deborah shook her head. "Half a million," she said.

Deke snorted. "Chump change," he said. "Guy in Syracuse tried to give my buddy Jerry Kozanski two mil, and it was only a rape."

"That's nothing," Alvarez said. "Few years ago one of the cocaine cowboys offered me three million for the junkie that stole his car."

"Three million and you didn't take it?" Deke said.

"Ah," Alvarez said, "I was holding out for four."

"All right," Deborah said. "We lost enough time with that shit. Let's get back to it." She pointed at Alvarez. "I got no time for your crap. I want Bobby Acosta. Go get him."

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.

NINETEEN

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.

"It's Nichole," she said to Hood. "Not Nick." Hood smirked at her, and she shook her head, swirling a shining mass of dark and curly hair. "In fact, for you, it's Ms. Rickman." She looked him in the eye, but Hood just kept smirking, and she gave up and came to the table. She was tall and fashionably dressed and she carried a large sketch pad in one hand and a handful of pencils in the other, and I recognized her as the department's forensic artist. Deborah nodded at her and said, "Nichole. How are you?"

"Sergeant Morgan," she said. "It's nice to be drawing somebody who's not dead." She arched an eyebrow at Debs. "He's not dead, is he?"

"I hope not," Deborah said. "He's my best hope to save this girl."

"Well, then," Nichole said, "let's give it a shot." She put her pad and pencils down on the table, slid into a chair, and began to arrange herself to work.

Meanwhile, Deborah was looking over the two men Hood had brought in. "What happened to these two?" she said to Hood.

He shrugged and looked preposterously innocent. "Whataya mean?" he said.

Debs stared at Hood a little longer. He shrugged and leaned against the wall, and she turned her attention back to the prisoners. "Bonjour," she said. Neither of them said anything; they just looked at their feet, until Hood cleared his throat. Then the one with the swollen eye jerked his head up and looked at Hood nervously. Hood nodded toward Deborah, and the prisoner turned to her and began to speak in rapid Creole.

For some quixotic reason, Deborah had studied French in high school, and for a few seconds she apparently thought it was going to help her understand the man. She watched him as he raced through several paragraphs, and then finally shook her head. "Je nais comprend-Goddamn it, I can't remember how to say it. Dexter, get somebody up here to translate."

The other man, the one with the sore leg, finally looked up. "There is no need," he said. His words were very heavily accented, but at least they were easier to understand than Deborah's attempts at French.

"Good," Deborah said. "What about your friend?" She nodded at the other man.

Sore Leg shrugged. "I will speak for my cousin," he said.

"All right," Debs said. "We're going to ask you to describe the man who sold you that Porsche-it was a man, wasn't it?"

He shrugged again. "A boy," he said.

"Okay, a boy," Debs said. "What did he look like?"

Another shrug. "A blanc," he said. "He was young-"

"How young?" Deborah interrupted.

"I could not say. Old enough to shave, because he did not-maybe three, four days."

"Okay," Deborah said, and frowned.

Nichole leaned forward. "Let me do this, Sergeant," she said. Deborah looked at her for a moment, then leaned back and nodded.

"All right," she said. "Go ahead."

Nichole smiled at the two Haitians. "Your English is very good," she said. "I just need to ask you a few simple questions, all right?"

Sore Leg looked at her suspiciously, but she kept smiling, and after a moment he shrugged. "All right," he said.

Nichole went into what seemed to me like a very vague series of questions. I watched with interest, since I had heard that she was supposed to be good at what she did. At first, I thought her reputation was inflated; she just asked things like, "What do you remember about this guy?" And as Sore Leg answered her she would just nod, scribble on her pad, and say, "Uh-huh, right." She led him through an entire description of someone coming into their garage with Tyler's Porsche, what they had said, and so on, all the boring details. I didn't see how it could possibly lead to a picture of anyone living or dead, and Deborah clearly thought the same thing. She began to fidget almost immediately, and then to clear her throat as if she were trying not to interrupt. Every time she did, the Haitians would glance at her nervously.

But Nichole ignored her and continued with her hopelessly general questions, and very slowly I began to realize that she was getting a pretty good description. And at just that point she shifted to more specific things, like, "What about the outside shape of his face?" she said.

The prisoner looked at her blankly. "Outside…?" he said.

"Answer her," Hood said.

"I don't know," the man said, and Nichole glared at Hood. He smirked and leaned back against the wall, and she turned back to Sore Leg.

"I'd like to show you a few shapes," she said, and she took out a large sheet of paper with several roughly oval shapes on it.

"Does one of these remind you of the shape of his face?" she said, and the prisoner leaned forward and studied them. After a moment, his cousin leaned forward to look, and said something softly. The first man nodded and said, "That one, on the top."

"This one?" Nichole said, pointing at one with her pencil.

"Yes," he said. "That one."

She nodded and began to draw, using quick and very certain strokes, pausing only to ask questions and show more pictures: What about his mouth? His ears? One of these shapes? And so on, until a real face began to take form on the page. Deborah kept quiet and let Nichole lead the two men through it. At each of her questions they would lean together and confer in soft Creole, and then the one who spoke English would answer while his cousin nodded. Altogether, between the two handcuffed men doing their muted Creole patter and the nearly magical emergence of a face on the page, it was a riveting performance, and I was sorry to see it end.

But end it did, at last. Nichole held up the notebook for the two men to study, and the one who spoke no English looked hard and then began to nod. "Oui," he said.

"That is him," the other said, and he gave Nichole a sudden very large smile. "Like magic." He said majeek, but the meaning was clear.

Deborah had been leaning back in her chair and letting Nichole work. Now she stood and walked around the conference table, looking in over Nichole to look at the drawing. "Son of a bitch," she said. She looked up at Hood, who was still lounging around by the door with a faintly sleazy smirk still on his face. "Get that file over there," Debs said to him. "The one with the photos."

Hood stepped over to the far end of the table, where a stack of folders teetered beside the telephone. He flipped through the top five or six while Deborah fidgeted. "Come on, goddamn it," she said to him, and Hood nodded, held up one folder, and brought it over to her.

Deborah scattered a pile of photographs on the table, sorted through them quickly, and nudged one out and over to Nichole. "Not bad," she said, as the artist picked up the photo and held it beside her sketch, and Nichole nodded.

"Yeah, not bad at all," Nichole said. She looked up at Deborah with a happy smile. "Damn, I am good." She flipped the photo back to Deborah, who grabbed it and held it up for the two Haitians to see.

"Is this the man who sold you the Porsche?" Deborah asked them.

The man with the swollen eye was already nodding and saying, "Oui." His cousin made a great show of staring at the picture, leaning forward to study it carefully, before finally saying with complete authority, "Yes. Absolutely. That is him."

Deborah looked at the two of them and said, "You are positive? Both of you?" And both of them nodded vigorously.

"Bon," Debs said. "Tres beaucoup bon." The two Haitians smiled, and the one with the swollen eye said something in Creole.

Deborah looked at the cousin for a translation.

"He says, will you please speak English, so he can understand you," the man said with an even bigger smile, and Vince and Hood both snickered.

But Deborah was far too happy with the picture to let a minor jab bother her. "It's Bobby Acosta," she said, and she looked at me. "We got the little bastard."

TWENTY

The uniformed cop led the two prisoners away to a holding cell. Nichole gathered her things and left, and Deborah sat back down and stared at the picture of Bobby Acosta. Vince looked at me with a shrug and an expression of, Now what? and Deborah looked up at him. "Are you still here?" she said.

"No, I left ten minutes ago," Vince said.

"Beat it," Deborah said.

"I wouldn't have to beat it if you'd just hold it for a minute," Vince said.

"Go shit in your ear," Debs said, and Vince walked out with one of his horrible artificial laughs trailing behind him. Deborah watched him go and, since I know her very well, I knew what was coming, so I was not surprised when it came. "All right," she said to me when Vince had been gone for about thirty seconds. "Let's go."

"Oh," I said, trying very hard to look like I had not expected this, "do you mean you're not going to wait for your partner, as department policy and a specific order from Captain Matthews have suggested?"

"Just get your ass out the door," she said.

"What about my ass?" Hood said.

"Go boil it," Deborah said, snapping up out of her chair toward the door.

"What do I tell your partner?" Hood said.

"Tell him to check the salvia dealers," she said. "Come on, Dex."

It occurred to me that I spent far too much of my time obediently following my sister around. But it did not occur to me how I could avoid doing so again, so I followed.

In the car, Deborah drove us up onto the Dolphin Expressway and then north on 95. She did not volunteer any information, but it was not terribly hard to figure out where we were going, so just for the sake of small talk, I said, "Have you somehow figured out a way to find Bobby Acosta, just by staring at his picture?"

"Yeah," she snapped, very grumpy again. Deborah had never been very good with sarcasm. "As a matter of fact, I have."

"Wow," I said, and I thought about it for a moment. "The list from the dentist? The guys who got the vampire fangs?"

Deborah nodded, steering around a battered pickup hauling a trailer. "That's right," she said.

"And you didn't check all of them with Deke?"

She looked at me, which I thought was a bad idea, since we were going ninety miles an hour. "One left," she said. "But this is the one; I know it."

"Look out," I said, and Debs glanced at the road just in time to steer us around a large gasoline tanker that had decided to switch lanes for no apparent reason.

"So you think this last name on the list can tell us how to find Bobby Acosta?" I said, and Deborah nodded vigorously.

"I had a gut feeling about this one, right from the start," she said, steering into the far right lane with one finger.

"And so you saved it for last? Deborah!" I said as a pair of motorcycles cut in front of us and began to brake for the exit.

"Yeah," she said, gliding back into the middle lane.

"Because you wanted to build the suspense?"

"It's Deke," Deborah said, and I was thrilled to see that she was watching the road now. "He's just…" She hesitated for a moment, and then blurted out, "He's bad luck."

I have spent my life around cops so far, and I expect that the rest of my life I'll do the same, especially if I get caught someday. So I know that superstitions can pop up at some odd times and places. Even so, I was surprised to hear them from my sister. "Bad luck?" I said. "Debs, do you want me to call a santero? Maybe he can kill a chicken, and-"

"I know how it sounds, goddamn it," she said. "But what the hell else can it be?"

I could think of a lot of other things it could be, but it didn't seem politic to say so, and after a moment Deborah went on.

"All right, maybe I'm full of shit," she said. "But I need some luck on this thing. There's a clock ticking here, and that girl…" She paused almost as if she were feeling strong emotion, and I looked at her with surprise. Emotion? Sergeant Iron Heart?

Deborah didn't look back at me. She just shook her head. "Yeah, I know," she said. "I shouldn't let it get to me. It's just…" She shrugged and looked grumpy again, which was a bit of a relief. "I guess I've been a little… I dunno. Weird lately."

I thought about the last few days, and realized that it was true: My sister had been uncharacteristically vulnerable and emotional. "Yes, you have," I said. "Why do you think that is?"

Deborah sighed heavily, another action that was very unlike her. "I think… I dunno," she said. "Chutsky says it's the knife wound." She shook her head. "He says it's like postpartum depression, that you always feel bad for a while after a major injury."

I nodded. It made a certain amount of sense. Deborah had recently been stabbed, and had come so close to death from blood loss that the difference was a matter of a few seconds in the ambulance. And certainly Chutsky, her boyfriend, would know about that-he had been some kind of intelligence operative before being disabled, and his body was a raised-relief road map of scar tissue.

"Even so," I said, "you can't let this case get under your skin." As soon as I said it I braced myself, since it was a surefire setup line for an arm punch, but once again Debs surprised me.

"I know," she said softly, "but I can't help it. She's just a girl. A kid. Good grades, nice family, and these guys-cannibals…" She trickled off into a moody and reflective silence, which was a really striking contrast to the fact that we were speeding through heavy traffic. "It's complicated, Dexter," she said at last.

"I guess so," I said.

"I think I empathize with the kid," she said. "Maybe because she's so vulnerable at the same time I am." She stared straight ahead at the road, but didn't really seem to see it, which was a little bit alarming. "And all this other stuff. I dunno."

It might have been because I was hanging on for dear life in a vehicle that was careening through traffic at breakneck speed, but I didn't quite get her point. "What other stuff?" I said.

"Ah, you know," she said, even though I had said quite clearly that I did not know. "The family shit. I mean…" She scowled suddenly and looked at me again. "If you say one fucking word to Vince or anybody else about my bio clock ticking, I swear I'll kill you."

"But it is ticking?" I said, feeling mildly astonished.

Deborah glared at me for a moment and then, happily for life and limb, looked back at the road again. "Yeah," she said. "I think it is. I really want a family, Dex."

I suppose I could have told her something comforting based on my experience: perhaps that families were overrated and kids were really just a sinister device to make us all prematurely old and crazy. But instead, I thought of Lily Anne, and I suddenly wanted my sister to have her family so she could feel all the things I was learning to feel. "Well," I said.

"Shit, that's the exit," Deborah said, swerving hard for the off-ramp and effectively killing the mood, as well as guaranteeing that I lost all sense of what I had been about to say. The sign that flashed by, seemingly just a few inches from my head, told me we were heading for North Miami Beach, into an area of modest houses and shops that had changed very little in the last twenty years. It seemed like a very odd neighborhood for a cannibal.

Deborah slowed down and nosed into traffic at the end of the off-ramp, still moving too fast. She took us several blocks east, then a few more north, and then steered into six or seven blocks of houses where the residents had planted rows of hedges to seal off all the roads leading in, except one main entry street. It was a practice that had become common in this part of town, and was supposed to cut down crime. Nobody had told me whether it worked.

We went through the entrance to the minicommunity and two blocks over, and then Debs pulled up onto the grass in front of a modest, pastel yellow house and the car rocked to a stop. "That's it," Deborah said, glancing at the paper on the seat beside her. "Guy's name is Victor Chapin. He's twenty-two. House is owned by Mrs. Arthur Chapin, age sixty-three. She works downtown."

I looked at the little house. It was slightly faded and very ordinary. There were no skulls stacked outside, no hex signs painted on the yellow walls, nothing at all to say that evil lived here. A ten-year-old Mustang squatted in the driveway, and everything about the place was still and suburban.

"He lives with his mom?" I said. "Are cannibals allowed to do that?"

She shook her head. "This one does," she said, opening her door. "Let's go."

Deborah got out of the car and marched briskly toward the front door, and I could not help remembering that I had been sitting in the car and watching when she had gone alone to another door and been stabbed-so I got out quickly and joined her just as she pushed the doorbell. From inside the house we heard an elaborate chime playing, something that sounded very dramatic, although I couldn't quite place it. "Very nice," I said. "I think it's Wagner."

Deborah just shook her head and tapped her foot impatiently on the cement stoop.

"Maybe they're both at work," I suggested.

"Can't be. Victor works at a late-night club," Debs said. "Place on South Beach called Fang. They don't even open until eleven."

For a moment I felt a small twitch somewhere on the ground floor of my deepest and darkest dungeon. Fang. I had heard of that before, but where? In the New Times? In one of Vince Masuoka's tales of late-night clubbing? I couldn't quite remember, and it went out of my head when Deborah snarled and slapped the doorbell again.

Inside, the music swelled up a second time, but this time, over the top of the most dazzling chord, we heard somebody shout, "Fuck! All right!" and a few seconds later the door swung open. A person who was presumably Victor Chapin stood there holding the door and glaring out at us. He was thin, about five inches short of six feet tall, with dark hair and several days of stubble on his cheeks, and he was wearing a pair of pajama bottoms and a wife-beater undershirt. "Yeah, what!" he said belligerently. "I'm tryna sleep!"

"Victor Chapin?" Deborah asked, and the official cop tone of her voice must have penetrated his sulkiness, because he stiffened suddenly and looked at us a bit more warily. His tongue darted out and moistened his lips, and I could see one of his Dr. Lonoff-capped fangs for a second as his eyes moved from Debs to me and back again.

"Whuddya-Why?" he said.

"Are you Victor Chapin?" Deborah repeated.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

Deborah reached for her badge. As soon as it was obvious that it was, in fact, a badge, and even before she flipped it open, Chapin said, "Fuck!" and tried to slam the door. Purely out of reflex, I got my foot in the way, and as the door bounced back open and swung toward Chapin, he turned and ran for the rear of the house.

"Back door!" Deborah said, already running for the corner of the house. "Stay here!" And then she was gone around the side. In the distance I heard a door slam, and then Deborah yelling at Chapin to stop, and then nothing. I started thinking again of the time so recently when my sister had been stabbed, and the bleak helplessness I had felt watching her life drain out onto the sidewalk. Debs had no way of knowing Chapin had actually run for a back door-he could just as easily have gone for a flamethrower. He could be attacking her right now. I peeked into the dimness of the house, but there was nothing to see, and no sound of any kind except for the rush of a central air conditioner.

I stepped back outside and waited. Then I waited a little bit more. Still nothing happened, and I heard nothing new. In the distance a siren warbled. A plane flew overhead. Somewhere nearby somebody strummed a guitar and began to sing "Abraham, Martin, and John."

Just when I had decided that I couldn't stand it any longer and I had to go take a look, I heard a petulant voice rising up in the side yard, and Victor Chapin came into view, his hands cuffed behind him and Deborah right behind, frog-marching him toward the car. There were grass stains on the knees of his pajamas, and one side of his face looked red.

"You can't-fuck-lawyer-shit!" Chapin said. Possibly it was some kind of verbal shorthand used by cannibals, but it made no apparent impression on Debs. She simply pushed him forward and, as I hurried over to join her, she gave me a look that was as close to happy as I had seen from her in quite some time.

"What the fuck!" Chapin said, turning his eloquence on me.

"Yes, it is, isn't it?" I said agreeably.

"This is fucked!" he yelled.

"Get in the car, Victor," Deborah said.

"You can't-What!" he said. "Where are you taking me?!"

"We're going to take you to the detention center," she said.

"You can't just fucking take me," he said.

Deborah smiled at him. I hadn't met very many vampires, but I thought her smile was probably scarier than anything the bloodsuckers could come up with. "Victor, you refused a lawful order and ran away from me. That means I can just fucking take you," she said. "And I'm going to just fucking take you, and you are going to answer some fucking questions for me, or you are not going to see the outside for a long time."

He opened his mouth and just breathed for a moment. His nice shiny fangs didn't look so intimidating all of a sudden. "What kind of questions?" he said.

"Been to any good parties lately?" I asked him.

I have often heard or read of all the blood draining from somebody's face, but this was the first time I had ever seen it-except, of course, in the very literal sense, in connection with my playtime activities. Victor turned paler than his shirt, and before Deborah could even glare at me for talking out of turn, he blurted out, "I swear to Christ I didn't eat any of it!"

"Any of what, Victor?" Deborah said pleasantly.

He was trembling now, and shaking his head back and forth. "They'll kill me," he said. "Jesus fuck, they'll fucking kill me."

Deborah gave me one quick glance of absolute triumph and joy. Then she stuck her hand on Victor's shoulder and pushed him gently toward the car. "Get in the car, Victor," she said.

TWENTY-ONE

Deborahhad very little to say on the way to the detention center. She tried to call Deke to have him meet us there, but for some reason he wasn't answering, neither his radio nor his cell phone. Debs left word with the dispatcher for him to join us, and other than that we rode in silence-if that's the right word for it when you are forced to listen to a ten-minute disjointed monologue consisting mostly of the word "fuck." Chapin was secured in the backseat-the motor-pool cars had rings bolted to the floor for just that reason-and he sat in his durance vile mumbling, ranting, threatening, and overusing the same naughty word. For my part, I was thrilled when we reached our destination, but Debs seemed quite happy to have it go on forever. She had a look on her face that was very nearly a smile every time she glanced at Chapin in the mirror, and she was downright cheerful when she parked the car and pulled him out.

By the time we had the paperwork done, Victor was comfortably locked up in an interrogation room, and Chambers of the FDLE had arrived to see our prize. He stood with us as we looked in at Chapin, who had placed his forearms on the table and slumped forward over them, head hanging just a few inches over his cuffs.

"All right," Chambers said. "I know I don't have to remind you that this goes absolutely by the book." Deborah gave him a startled glance, and he went on without even looking at her. "You did good work, Morgan; you got a really good suspect here, and we pay attention to the rules, with just a little bit of luck we're gonna stick this guy with a couple of felonies."

"I don't give a shit about a conviction," Deborah said. "I want to get the girl back."

"We all want that," Chambers said. "But it would be really nice to put this guy away, too."

"Listen," Deborah said. "This isn't about politics or public relations."

"I know that," Chambers said, but Debs rode right over him.

"I got a guy in there who knows something," she said. "And I got him feeling all alone and naked and scared to death and ready to break, and I'm going to fucking break him."

"Morgan, you've got to do your job right and-"

Deborah turned on Chambers as if he were personally hiding Samantha Aldovar. "My job is to find this girl," she said, poking Chambers in the chest with her index finger. "And that little asshole in there is going to tell me how."

Chambers very calmly grabbed Deborah's finger and pushed it down to her side, slowly and deliberately. He put his hand on her shoulder and moved his face closer to hers, and said, "I hope he will tell us what we need to know. But if he does or if he doesn't, you are going to play by the rules and not let your feelings take over and fly you into the hillside. All right?"

Deborah glared at him, and he looked back; neither one of them blinked, breathed, or said a word, and for several long seconds it was her anger versus his gunfighter's cool-fire against ice. It was an absolutely fascinating face-off, and under other circumstances I could have watched it all day just to see who would win. But things being what they were, I thought it had gone on quite long enough, and I cleared my throat in a deliberately artificial way. "Ahem," I said, and they both glanced at me. "I really hate to interrupt," I said, and nodded through the glass at Chapin. "But tempus is kind of fugiting, isn't it?"

They both stared at me and I felt as if one side of my face was melting and the other freezing. Then Chambers looked at Debs with one eyebrow raised, she looked back at him and finally nodded, and the spell was broken.

"Where's your partner?" Chambers said. "He should be here for this."

Deborah shook her head. "He's not answering," she said, "and I can't wait."

"All right," Chambers said. "I'll do this with you." He turned to look at me and the impact of his cold blue eyes almost hurt. "You stay here," he said, and I felt absolutely no impulse to argue.

I watched through the glass as the two of them went into the room with Chapin. I could hear through the speaker everything that went on, but based on what was said, it was hardly worth the expense of miking the room. Deborah said, "You're in a ton of fucking trouble, Chapin," and he didn't even look up. So she stood about three feet behind him, crossed her arms, and said, "What did you mean when you told me you didn't eat any of it?"

"I want a lawyer," Chapin said.

"Kidnapping, murder, and cannibalism," Deborah said.

"It's Vlad; it's all Vlad," he said.

"Vlad made you do it? You mean Bobby Acosta?"

Chapin looked up at Deborah, mouth hanging open, and then put his head back down. "I want a lawyer," he said.

"You give us Bobby, they'll go easy on you. Otherwise… that's about five hundred years in prison," Debs said. "If they let you live."

"I want a lawyer," Chapin said. And he looked up again, and focused past Debs to where Chambers stood, across the table from him. "I want a lawyer," he repeated, and then he jumped to his feet and yelled it. "I want a fucking lawyer!"

For the next two minutes there was more, but nothing really instructive. Chapin yelled louder and louder that he wanted a lawyer and, aside from a few tediously repeated naughty words, that was all he had to say. Chambers tried to calm him down and get him back into his chair and Deborah stood with her arms folded and glared. When Chambers finally got Chapin seated again, he took Debs by the arm and led her from the room.

I joined them in the hallway just in time to hear Chambers say, "… and you know damned well we have to get him one now."

"Fuck it, Chambers!" Deborah said. "I can bend the paperwork and hold him twenty-four hours!"

"He has asked for a lawyer," Chambers said, as if he were telling a child she can't have a cookie before dinner.

"You're killing me," Deborah said. "And you're killing that girl."

For the first time I saw a little flash of heat run across Chambers's face, and he took a short step in to stand right in Deborah's face. I thought I was about to witness another attempt on my sister's life and I tensed, ready to leap in and separate them. But Chambers took a deep breath, clamped both his hands on Deborah's upper arms, and said very carefully, "Your suspect has asked to see an attorney, and we are required by law to provide one for him. Now." He stared at her, she stared back, and then Chambers let go of her arms and turned away. "I'll go get a public defender," he said, and disappeared down the hall.

Deborah watched him go, a series of unpleasant thoughts obviously running through her head. She looked back through the window in the door to the interrogation room. Chapin was seated again, in his opening pose, leaning over the table. "Fuck," Debs said. "Fucking Chambers." She shook her head. "This wouldn't have happened if that asshole Deke was here."

"He'd be here if you hadn't ditched him," I said.

"Go fuck yourself, Dexter," she said, and she turned away and followed after Chambers.

Miami is a city with an overcrowded court system, and the public defender's office may well be stretched thinner than all the rest of it. This is one of the very good reasons why Dexter has been careful to save his money over the years. Of course, the capital cases get priority, but then, there are so many of those that someone facing a mere murder charge had better be able to afford his own attorney, because the public defender's office, once a nest of hardworking liberal idealists, has become a small and temporary burnout stop for young lawyers hoping to make a splash. It takes a really special case to get anything more than their flustered, part-time attention.

So it was a pretty good indication of how high the profile of our case was when, less than an hour later, a smart young woman fresh out of Stetson Law School showed up to represent Victor Chapin. She wore a very nice business pantsuit, the latest Hillary Clinton model. She walked with a swagger that said she was the Avatar of American Justice, and she carried a briefcase that probably cost more than my car. She took it and her attitude into the interrogation room and sat down across from Chapin and, laying the briefcase on the table, she said crisply to the guard, "I want all the microphones and recording devices turned off, and I mean now."

The guard, an elderly guy who looked like he hadn't cared about anything since Nixon resigned, just shrugged and said, "Yeah, sure, okay," and walked out into the hall and flipped the switch, and the speaker went silent.

Behind me somebody said, "Fuck!" and I realized that my sister had returned. I glanced over my shoulder, and sure enough, Deborah was glaring into the now-silent room. I wasn't sure if we were speaking to each other, since I had disobeyed her direct order and failed to go fuck myself, so I just turned back around and watched the peep show. There was really very little to see: Chapin's brand-new attorney leaned in toward him and spoke rapidly for a few minutes. He looked up at her with growing interest, and eventually he talked back. She pulled out a legal pad and took a few notes, and then asked him a few questions, which he answered with increasing animation.

After only ten or fifteen minutes the attorney stood up and went to the door, and Deborah went to meet her as she stepped into the hall. She looked Deborah over from head to toe with something that was not really approval. "You are Sergeant Morgan?" she asked, with icicles forming in the air as she spoke.

"Yes," Deborah said grimly.

"You are the arresting officer?" the attorney said, as though that was another term for "baby rapist."

"Yes," Deborah said. "And you are?"

"DeWanda Hoople, public defender's office," she said, like everybody would know that name. "I think we're going to have to let Mr. Chapin go."

Deborah shook her head. "I don't think so," she said.

Ms. Hoople revealed a world-class set of front teeth, though it would be an exaggeration to call it a smile. "It doesn't matter what you think, Sergeant Morgan," she said. "Plain and simple, in one-syllable words, You Don't Have a Case."

"That little shit is a cannibal," Deborah snarled, "and he knows where I can find a missing girl."

"Oh, my," Ms. Hoople said. "I assume you have some proof of that?"

"He ran from me," Deborah said, a little sulky, "and then he said he didn't eat any of it."

Hoople raised her eyebrows. "Did he say any of what?" she said with sweet reason dripping from her tongue.

"The context was clear," Debs said.

"I'm sorry," said Hoople. "I'm not familiar with the statutes concerning context."

Knowing my sister as well as I did, I could see that she was about to explode, and if I had been Ms. Hoople I would be backing away with my hands held out in front of me. Deborah took a very deep breath and said through her teeth, "Ms. Hoople. Your client knows where Samantha Aldovar is. Saving her life is the important thing here."

But Ms. Hoople just smiled wider. "Not more important than the Bill of Rights," she said. "You're going to have to let him go."

Deborah looked at her and I saw that she was almost trembling as she fought to control herself. If ever there was a situation that clearly called for a strong right fist to the nose, this was it, and it was not normally my sister's way to ignore that call. But she struggled, and she won. "Ms. Hoople," she said at last.

"Yes, Sergeant?"

"When we have to tell Samantha Aldovar's parents their daughter is dead and this guy could have saved her but we had to let him go," Deborah said, "I want you to come with me."

"That's not my job," Ms. Hoople said.

"It shouldn't be mine, either," Deborah told her. "But you just made sure it is." Ms. Hoople had nothing to say to that, and Deborah turned and walked away.

TWENTY-TWO

I drove home through the rush-hour traffic at the usual snail's pace, and I will admit that I was pondering. So many strange and baffling things going on at once; Samantha Aldovar and cannibalism in Miami and Deborah's strange emotional meltdown and the troubling reappearance of my brother, Brian. And perhaps strangest of all was the New Dexter who stood facing all these challenges. No longer the Sly Master of Dark Delights, now amazingly transformed into Daddyman, Champion of Children and the Family Way.

… And yet here I was spending all my time away from my family, in a pointless chase after bad people and a girl I didn't even know. I mean, a job is one thing, but could I really excuse neglecting my new child for all these extra hours just to support Deborah's Freudian search for a missing family? Wasn't it just a little bit of a contradiction?

And now, even more bizarre and unsettling, as I pondered these things, I began to feel bad. Me, Dark Dead Dexter, not merely feeling but feeling bad; it really boggled the imagination. I had been patting myself on the back for my amazing transformation, and yet in reality I had turned from the Happy Slasher into just another absentee parent, which was no more than a different kind of abuse. Aside from the fact that I hadn't actually killed anybody lately, what was there to be proud of?

Feelings of guilt and shame washed over me. So this was what it was like to be a real human parent. I had three wonderful kids, and all they had was me. They deserved so much more. They needed a father who was there to guide their steps and teach them about life, and they were stuck with someone who apparently cared more about finding somebody else's girl than playing with his own. It was horrible, inhuman. I had not really reformed at all-I had just changed into a different kind of monster.

And the older two, Cody and Astor-they still lived willingly in a desire for darkness. They looked to me to teach them to chase through the shadows. I had not only neglected to do that, but far worse, I had never even begun to steer them away from wanting to do it. Guilt upon guilt: I knew that I had to spend real quality time with them, bring them back to the light, show them that life held joys deeper than any knife could go. And to do all this, I had to be there, do things with them, and I had failed.

But maybe it wasn't too late. Maybe I could still make my mark with them. After all, I could not change completely just by wanting to, bursting from my wicked cocoon and emerging as a totally new human father. It took time to learn how to be a human, let alone to be a parent, and I was very new at this. I had to give me a little bit of credit-I had much to learn, but I was trying. And kids are very forgiving. If I could really start now and do something rare and special, as a way to show them that things had changed and that their Real Father had arrived, surely they would respond with gladness and respect.

And with that resolved I felt instantly better-Dex-Daddy was back on track. As if to prove that things were falling into place just the way a wise and compassionate Universe wanted them, I saw a giant toy store in a strip mall on my left, and without hesitation I pulled into the lot, parked, and went in.

I looked around the store and what I saw was not encouraging. There were rows and rows of violent toys, almost as if I had wandered into a store designed for the children of the old Dexter. There were swords, knives, light sabers, machine guns, bombs, pistols and rifles that shot plastic bullets and paintballs and Nerfs, rockets that blew up your friends or your friends' whole city-aisle after aisle of training devices for recreational slaughter. No wonder our world was such a mean and violent place-and no wonder there were people like I had been. If we teach children that killing is fun, can we really be surprised if now and then someone is smart enough to learn?

I wandered through the havoc factory until I finally found a small corner of the store labeled EDUCATIONAL. There were several shelves of crafts, some science kits, some board games. I looked it all over carefully, searching for something that hit just the right tone. It had to be educational, yes, but not dull or geeky, and not something that you did by yourself, like the kits. I needed something that was inspiring, but fun for us all.

I finally settled on a quiz game called Head of the Class. One person asked questions and everyone else took turns answering-perfect. It would bring us all together as a family, and we would all learn so much-and enjoy doing it. Cody would even have to speak in full sentences. Yes, this was it.

As I headed for the register I passed a shelf stacked with talking books, the kind with the row of buttons you push to make sound effects. There were several with fairy tales, and I immediately thought of Lily Anne. What a great way to hook her into a lifetime of reading enjoyment-I could read her the stories while she pushed the appropriate button on cue, and all while reading classic fairy tales. It was much too good to pass by, and I picked three of the most promising fairy tales.

I took the box and the books to the register and paid. The game was almost twenty dollars with tax, but I truly felt it was worth it, money well spent, and I did not regret the expense.

It was already dark by the time I turned my car down the street where I lived. Three-quarters of a lonely moon guttered low on the horizon and called to me in a voice of longing, making plaintive and playful suggestions about what Dexter could do with a knife and a night like this. We know where Chapin lives, it whispered. We could cut him to the canines and make him tell us many useful things, and everybody would be happy…

For a moment I rolled with that seductive tug, the intoxicating whirl of the dark tide as it flowed around me and pulled at my feet. But then I felt the weight of the game and the books I had bought, and it pulled me out of the rising surge of moonlight and back to the dry land of New Dexter. No more; I would not give in to that moon-voiced urge. With a few harsh words I pushed the Passenger back in its place, deep in cold storage. Go away, I told it, and with a reptilian sniff it coiled itself away. It had to understand that I was not that man anymore. I was Dex-Daddy, the man who comes home filled with longing for Lily Anne and all the clean and common comforts of domestic life. I was the breadwinner, the pathfinder for small feet, the shield against all harm. I was Dex-Daddy, the rock upon which Lily Anne's future would be built, and I had Head of the Class to prove it.

And as I slowed to a stop in front of my house and saw Brian's car already parked there, I realized that apparently I was also Dex-Dopey, because I had no idea what my brother was doing here again but I did not like it, whatever it was. He stood for all I had been and did not want to be anymore, and I did not want any of that anywhere near Lily Anne.

I got out of the car and circled slowly around Brian's little red car and I caught myself looking at it as if it were the real danger. That was stupid, of course. Brian's style did not run to car bombs, but to the quick slice with the sly knife, just like the old me. I was not like that anymore, no matter how much I felt it pulling at me as I approached the front door and heard squeals of childish glee from inside the house. Of all the mounting absurdities this was the worst; that I should feel resentment, suspicion, even so-very-human anger, because the kids were clearly having a good time without me.

And so it was a very confused Dex-Daddy who pushed open the front door to see his little family-plus-brother gathered in front of the television. Rita sat at one end of the couch holding Lily Anne, Brian sat at the other end, with Astor between them, all with large smiles stretched across their faces. Cody stood between them and the TV holding some kind of grayish plastic thing, which he was waving at the TV as he jumped up and down and the others cheered him on.

As I came in all eyes but Cody's swung to me and then back to the TV without any real recognition of what I was-all eyes but Brian's, which stayed fastened on me, his large and phony smile growing larger as he watched me trying, and failing, to figure out what was happening in the living room of my very own hearth and home.

And then a great burst of cheering from the crowd ended in a prolonged, "Aawwwwwww…" and a suddenly frowning Cody jerked himself away from the screen.

"Great try, Cody," Brian said without taking his eyes off me. "Really, really great."

"I got high score," Cody said, an astonishingly long speech for him.

"Yes, you did," Brian said. "Let's see if your sister can beat that."

"Course I can!" Astor shouted, leaping into the air and waving another of the plastic things. "You're toast, Cody!"

"Would somebody tell me what on earth is going on here?" I said, and even to me it sounded forlorn.

"Oh, Dexter," Rita said, looking at me as if I were something very common and she was seeing me ground into her carpet for the first time. "Brian is just-Your brother bought the children a Wii, and it's very-But he can't just," she went on, turning back away from me to look at the TV. "I mean, it's way too expensive, and-Can you ask him? Because-Oh! Good shot, Astor!" Rita actually bounced a little bit with excitement, causing Lily Anne's head to roll slightly, and it was clear that I could take off my clothes and set myself on fire and no one but Brian would even notice.

"It's really quite good for them," Brian said to me with his Cheshire Cat smile. "Very good exercise, and they develop their motor skills. And," he added with a shrug, "it's an awful lot of fun. You should try it, brother."

I looked at my brother with his huge, phony, mocking smile, and I heard the moon call from the street, promising clean and happy fulfillment, so I turned away from him and saw the children and Rita all wrapped in the joy of this wonderful new experience, and suddenly the box under my arm-Head of the Class, almost twenty dollars with tax-felt as heavy and useless as an old oil drum filled with fish heads. I let it drop to the floor, and into my head popped a brief cartoon picture of Dexter running from the room in tears to flop facedown on the bed and cry away his tattered heart.

And happily for the worldwide image of tough-but-caring fatherhood, the mental picture was so ridiculous that all I did was take a deep breath, say, "Oops," and bend to pick up the package.

There was no room for me on the couch, so I walked past the cozy group sitting there, watching them twist to see around me so they would not miss a single riveting second of Astor's epic television battle. I put my game on the floor and sat, uneasy in the easy chair. I could feel Brian's eyes on me but I did not look back; I simply concentrated on forming and maintaining a facade of polite excitement, and after a few seconds he looked away, back at the TV, and as far as the rest of the room was concerned, I had disappeared as completely as if I had never been.

I watched Cody and Astor take turns with their expensive new game system. Somehow, no matter how animated they got, I could not feel any real enthusiasm. They switched to a different game that involved killing things with a sword instead of a gun, and even the use of a blade sparked absolutely no fire in my breast. And of course, they were so thoroughly happy that only a true curmudgeon could possibly object-which merely meant that I could now add "curmudgeon" to my resume. Dexter Morgan, BS. Blood-spatter Analyst, Reformed Slasher; Currently employed as killjoy. I almost wished Debs could have been here-in the first place, because Brian would leave, but more important, so I could say, "See what you're missing? Kids, family-Ha!" And I would give a bitter chuckle that underlined the ultimate fickleness of all family.

Astor said, "Ooooooooohhh," in a very loud and high voice, and Cody jumped up to play. It was clear to me that it wouldn't matter what I did-they would never truly appreciate me or learn what I had to offer. They were far beyond fickle-they were insensible, like kittens, predatory little things, distracted by the first bit of string or shiny bauble that rolled across the floor, and nothing I could ever say or do could possibly make any kind of dent in their willful ignorance.

And then they grew up-into what? Into murderous dead-eyed pretenders like Brian and me, ready at the drop of a hat to stab each other in the back, literally or figuratively. Where was the point? Because they would clatter through childhood leaving a wake of random chaos and by the time they were old enough to understand what I had to say they would be too old to change. It was enough to make me renounce my new humanity and simply slip outside into the liquid moonlight and find somebody to take apart-no finesse, no careful selection, just sudden and cleansing savagery and release, exactly like Brian did it.

I looked at my brother where he sat-on my couch, with my wife, making my children happier than I seemed able to do. Is that what he wanted to do? Become me, but a better me than I had ever managed to be? Something rose up in me at the thought, something in between bile and anger, and I made up my mind that I would confront him tonight, demand to know what he thought he was doing, and make him stop. And if he would not listen to me-well, there was always Deborah.

So I sat grimly with a polite and completely fake half smile stitched onto my face for another half hour of dragons and magic fists and happy yelling. Even Lily Anne seemed content, which felt like an ultimate betrayal. She blinked and waved her fists in the air when Astor yelled and then snuggled back down onto Rita's chest, more enthusiasm than I had seen her show before for anything except feeding. And finally, when I didn't think I could maintain my artificial composure for even a second longer, I cleared my throat and said, "Hey, Rita? Did you have any plans for dinner?"

"What?" she said, without looking at me, still totally engrossed in the game. "Did you have a-Oh, Cody! I'm sorry, Dexter, what did you say?"

"I said," I said in overdistinct syllables, "Did You Have Any Plans for Dinner?"

"Yes, of course," she said, still without looking away from the TV. "I just have to-Oh!" she said with real alarm, and this time it was not from something in the game but because she glanced up and saw the clock. "Oh, my God, it's after eight! I didn't even-Astor, set the table! Oh, my God, and it's a school night!"

I watched with mild satisfaction as Rita leaped up off the couch at last and, thrusting Lily Anne at me, ran into the kitchen still talking. "For the love of-Oh, I know it's burned, what was I-Cody, get the silverware out! I've never been such a-Astor, don't forget to set a place for Uncle Brian!" And then a nonstop clatter for several minutes as she opened the oven, slammed pots and pans around, and set normal life back on the tracks.

Cody and Astor glanced at each other, clearly reluctant to leave their new TV world even to eat, and then, still wordless, they looked in unison at Uncle Brian. "Well, come on," he said with his awful fake cheeriness, "you have to do what your mother says."

"I wanna play some more," Cody said, which was several more syllables than I had heard him say together in a very long time.

"Of course you do," Brian said. "But right now you can't." He gave them his big smile, and I could see that he was trying very hard to look sympathetic, but it was truly not all that convincing, nowhere near as good as I did it. But Cody and Astor apparently accepted it at face value; they just looked at each other, nodded, and trundled off to the kitchen to help get ready for dinner.

Brian watched them go and then turned to look at me, his eyebrows raised in artificially polite anticipation. Naturally enough, he could not hope to anticipate any of the things I wanted to say to him, but as I took a deep breath to start, it occurred to me that I really couldn't, either. I felt that I had to accuse him of something-but of what? Buying an expensive toy when I had bought one so much cheaper? Of taking the kids for Chinese food and probably something slightly more sinister? Of trying to be me when I was too busy to play the part? I suppose the old, dead-inside Dexter would simply say, "Whatever you're doing, stop." But the new me simply could not wrap his tongue around all the many complicated things-feelings-that swirled through me. And to make matters even worse, as I sat there with my brain idling and my mouth open, Lily Anne made a burbling noise and my shirt was suddenly covered with a sour milk pudding of baby blarp.

"Oh, my," Brian said with a sympathy that was every bit as real as all his other emotions.

I got to my feet and went down the hall, holding Lily Anne at a kind of port-arms position. In the bedroom there was a changing table that had a stack of towels for the purpose stored on a shelf underneath. I grabbed two of them-one to mop up the mess, and the second to place under the baby to preserve whatever might remain of my shirt.

I went back to the easy chair and sat, draping the second towel over my shoulder and arranging Lily Anne facedown on top of it, gently patting her on the back. Brian looked at me again, and I opened my mouth to speak.

"Dinner," Rita said, roaring into the room with a platter held between two large oven mitts. "I'm afraid it's not-I mean, it isn't actually burned, but I didn't-It's just a little too dry and, Astor, get the rice into the blue bowl. Sit down, Cody."

Dinner was a cheerful affair, at least as far as the video warriors were concerned. Rita kept apologizing for the Orange Juice Chicken-which indeed, she really should have. It was one of her signature dishes, and she had let it overcook to the point of dryness. But Cody and Astor found it very funny that she was embarrassed, and began to play her with just a touch of cruelty. "It's dry," Cody said after Rita's third apology. "Not like usual." And he smirked at Brian.

"Yes, I know, but-I really am sorry, Brian," Rita said.

"Oh, it's delicious; think nothing of it, dear lady," Brian said.

"Think nothing at all, dear Mom," Astor echoed loftily, and she and Brian laughed. And so it went until dinner was over and the kids jumped up to clear the table, goaded on by the promise of fifteen more minutes of Wii before bed. Rita took Lily Anne down the hall for a diaper change, and for just a moment, Brian and I faced each other across the table. This was the moment to speak, to bring things out in the open between us, and I leaned forward to seize it.

"Brian," I said.

"Yes?" he said, raising his eyebrows expectantly.

"Why have you come back?" I said, trying very hard not to sound like I was accusing him of something.

He gave me a look of cartoon astonishment. "Why, to be with my family, of course," he said. "Why else?"

"I don't know why else," I said, irritated even more. "But there must be something."

He shook his head. "Why would you think that, brother?" he said.

"Because I know you," I said.

"Not really," he told me, locking his eyes onto mine. "You only know one small part of me. And I thought-Oh, damn," he said, as the tinny notes of "Ride of the Valkyries" swelled up from somewhere in his pocket. He pulled out his cell phone, glanced at the screen, and said, "Oh, my. I'm afraid I have to eat and run. As much as I've enjoyed talking with you. I'd better make my apologies to your lady wife." And he got quickly to his feet and swept into the kitchen, where I could hear him flinging his flowery compliments and apologies.

The entire family followed him to the front door, but I managed to cut them off by stepping outside with Brian and firmly closing the door between them and my brother and me. "Brian," I said, "we need to talk a little more."

He paused and turned to face me. "Yes, brother, let's," he said. "A good old-fashioned chin-wag. Catch up with each other and all that. Tell me, how are you coming along with finding that missing girl?"

I shook my head. "That's not what I mean," I said, determined to see this through to the end and drag things into the light. But once again his phone began its frantic Wagnerian chorus and he glanced at it and shut it off.

"Another time, Dexter," he said. "I really do have to go now." And before I could protest, he patted me awkwardly on the shoulder and then hurried away to his car.

I watched him drive away, and my only consolation was that the shoulder he had patted was still slightly damp from Lily Anne's blarp.

TWENTY-THREE

I stood and watched the taillights of brian's car until they were gone in the distance. But my unhappiness did not leave with my brother. It swirled around me and rose higher as the moonlight poured in and mixed with the irritation and once more the serpent voice began to wheedle and coax and make its sly suggestions. Come with us, it whispered in honeyed tones of pure and perfect reason. Come away into the night; come and play and you will feel much better…

And I pushed it away, standing firm on the shores of my new land, human fatherhood-but the moonlight flowed back and tugged harder and I closed my eyes for just a moment to shut it out. I thought of Lily Anne. I thought of Cody and Astor, and the fawning pleasure they showed with Brian, and another small rivulet of irritation surged up. I pushed it down, and thought of Deborah and her deep unhappiness. She had been so pleased with catching Victor Chapin, and so miserable when she'd had to let him go. I wanted her to be happy. I wanted the kids to be happy, too-and the wicked little voice trickled back in and said, I know how to make them happy, and you, too.

For just a moment I listened, and everything clicked together with perfect sharpness and clarity and I saw myself slipping away into the night with my duct tape and a knife And I pushed back one more time, hard, and the picture shattered. I took a deep breath and opened my eyes. The moon was still there, beaming at me expectantly, but I shook my head firmly. I would be strong, and I would prevail. I turned away from the night with brittle resolve and marched briskly back into the house.

Inside, Rita was in the kitchen cleaning up. Lily Anne burbled in the bassinet, and Cody and Astor were already back on the couch in front of the TV, playing with the Wii. Now was the time to start, to set things straight between us, to stamp out the embers of Brian's influence and get these children moving out of the darkness; it could be done. I would do it. I went straight to Cody and Astor and stood between them and the TV screen. They looked up at me and seemed to see me for the first time tonight.

"What," Astor said. "You're in the way."

"We need to talk," I said.

"We need to play Dragon Blade," Cody said, and I did not like what I heard in his voice. I looked at him, and I looked at Astor, and the two of them looked back at me with smug and self-righteous irritation, and it was too much. I leaned over to the Wii's control box and pulled its plug out of the wall socket.

"Hey!" Astor said. "You lost the game! Now we gotta start over on level one!"

"The game is going in the trash," I said, and their mouths dropped open in unison.

"Not fair," Cody said.

"Fair has nothing to do with this," I said. "This is about what's right."

"That doesn't make any sense," Astor said. "If it's right then it's fair, too, and you said…" And she was going to go on, but she saw my face and trickled to a stop. "What?" she said.

"You don't even like Chinese food," I said sternly. Two small and blank faces looked at me, and then at each other, and I heard the echo of what I had just said. It didn't even make sense to me. "What I mean is," I said, and their eyes swung back to me, "when you went out with Brian. My brother. Uncle Brian."

"We know who you mean," Astor said.

"You told your mother you went for Chinese food," I said. "And that was a lie."

Cody shook his head, and Astor said, "He told her that. We would have said pizza."

"And that would have been a lie, too," I said.

"But Dexter, you told us already," she said, and Cody nodded. "Mom isn't supposed to know about, you know. All that other stuff. So we have to lie to her."

"No, you don't," I said. "What you have to do is not do it anymore."

I watched astonishment blossom on their faces. Cody shook his head with bewilderment and Astor blurted, "But that's not-I mean, you can't really-What do you mean?" And for the first time in her life she sounded just like her mother.

I sat down on the couch between them. "What did you do with Uncle Brian that night?" I said. "When he said you went for Chinese food?"

They looked at each other, and an entire conversation went on between them with no audible words. Then Cody looked back at me. "Stray dog," he said.

I nodded, and anger surged through me. Brian had taken them out and found them a stray dog to learn and experiment with. I had known it was something like that, of course, but to hear it confirmed fed my sense of moral outrage-with my brother and with the children. And oddly enough, even as I drew myself up into a lofty tower of righteous indignation, a small and mean voice whispered that it should have been me who did this with them. It should have been my hand guiding their fledgling knife strokes, my wise and patient voice steering and explaining and teaching them how to catch and cut and then how to clean up when playtime was over.

But that was absurd; I was here to lead them away from darkness, not to teach them how to enjoy it. I shook my head and let sanity flow back in. "What you did was wrong," I said, and once more they both looked blank.

"What do you mean?" Astor said.

"I mean," I said, "that you have to stop-"

"Oh, Dexter," Rita said, bursting into the room wiping her hands on a dish towel. "You can't let them play anymore; it's a school night. Look at the time, for goodness' sake, and you haven't even-Come on, you two; get ready for bed." She hustled them up and out of the room before I could do more than blink. Cody turned back to look at me just before his mother pushed him into the hallway, and his face was a jumble of confusion, hurt, and irritation.

And as the three of them clattered into the bathroom and the sounds of running water and toothbrushing came back to me, I felt myself grinding my teeth in frustration. Nothing was going right. I had tried to bring my little family together, and found my brother there before me. When I tried to confront him, he had fled with the words still forming on my tongue. And I had finally begun my important job of shepherding the kids away from wickedness, only to be interrupted at the crucial point. Now the kids were mad at me, Rita ignored me, and my sister was jealous of me-and I still didn't know what Brian was up to.

I had worked just as hard as I knew how to be the new and squeaky-clean straight-arrow family man I was supposed to be, and at each attempt I had been slapped down, sneered at, and utterly crushed. Irritation grew inside me and morphed into anger, and then that started to change, too, as I felt a cold and acid bath of contempt burble up inside: contempt for Brian, and Rita, and Deborah, and Cody and Astor, for all the dribbling idiots in the whole stumble-footed world -and most of all, contempt for me, Dexter the Dummkopf, who wanted to walk in the sunlight, smelling the flowers and watching rainbows curl across the rose-tinted sky. But I had forgotten that the sun is nearly always hidden by clouds, flowers have thorns, and rainbows are always out of reach. You could dream the impossible dream all you wanted to, but it was always gone when you woke up. I was finding that out the hard way, each new reminder grinding my nose further and further into the dirt, and now all I really wanted was to grab something by the throat and squeeze The monotonous drone of Rita and the kids saying their prayers came down the hall at me. I still didn't know the words, and it was just one more annoying reminder that I was not really Dex-Daddy and probably never would be. I thought I could be the first leopard in history to change his spots, but in reality I was just another alley cat forced to dine on garbage.

I stood up. I just needed to move around, try to calm down, collect my thoughts, tame these weird and wild and brand-new emotions, before they carried me away on a flood tide of stupidity. I walked into the kitchen, where the dishwasher was already whirring away at the dinner dishes. Past the refrigerator, its ice-maker clicking. I walked into the back hall by the washer and dryer. All around me, through the whole house, everything was clean and functional, all the machinery of domestic bliss, in its place and ready to do exactly what it was supposed to do-all of it but me. I was not made to fit under the counter of this or any other house. I was made for moonlight gleaming off a very sharp knife and the soothing ratchet of duct tape purring off the roll and the muffled horror of the wicked in their neat and careful bonds as they met their unmaker But I had turned my back on that, turned away from all I really was, tried to fit myself into a picture of something that did not even exist, like squeezing a demon onto a Saturday Evening Post cover, and I had done nothing but make myself look like a complete idiot. No wonder Brian could so easily take away my kids. I would never bring them away from the dark side if I couldn't even give them a convincing performance of virtuous normality.

And with such a vast amount of wickedness in the world, how could I beat my bright blade into a dull and functional plowshare? There was so much yet to do, so many playground bullies who needed to learn the new rules to the game, Dexter's rules-there were even cannibals abroad in my very own city. Could I really just sit on the couch and knit while they worked their horrible will on the Samantha Aldovars of the world? After all, she was somebody's daughter, and someone felt about her just the way I felt about Lily Anne.

And as that thought hit home a red-hot surge of anger roared up inside me, burning away all my careful control. It could have been Lily Anne. Someday it still could be, and I was doing nothing to protect her. I was a self-deluded fool. I was being attacked from all sides, and I was simply letting it happen. I was allowing the predators to stalk and slay, and if someday they came for Lily Anne-or Cody and Astor-it would be my fault. It was in my power to protect my family from a very nasty world, and instead I was pretending that kind thoughts would keep the dragon away, while in fact it was roaring at my very own door.

I stood at the back door and looked out the window into the darkness of the yard. The clouds had rolled in up above, covering over the moon and bringing complete darkness. That was it, a perfect picture of all that was real; just darkness, hiding a few patches of brown grass and dirt. Nothing worked. Nothing ever worked, not for anyone anywhere. It was all just darkness, decay, and dirt, and trying to pretend there was anything else got you nothing but grief, and there was not a thing I could do about it. Nothing.

… And the clouds rolled open to let one small moonbeam trickle through to light up the darkness, and the sibilant whisper tickled and teased once more and said, There is one thing…

And that one simple thought made all the sense in the world.

"I'll be right back," we said to Rita as she sat on the couch with the baby held close. "I left some things at work."

"Back?" she warbled in confusion. "You mean you're going to-But it's night!"

"Yes, it is," we said, and we let a cold gleam of teeth show in our face at the thought of that welcoming velvet darkness just outside the door.

"Well, but don't you-Can't it wait until morning?" she said.

"No," we said, and the happy madness of it echoed in our voice. "It can't wait. It's something I need to do tonight."

The truth of it clearly showed on our face. Rita frowned but said no more than, "Well, I hope you-Oh! But I emptied the diaper pail, and it's really-Could you take the bag and-" She jumped up and went into the hall and the cold acid roiled through me at the interruption, but she was back in mere seconds, clutching a garbage bag. She thrust it at me and said, "On your way out, if you-You really have to go in? I mean, it won't take too long? Because, I mean, drive carefully, but-"

"It won't take long," we said, and then impatience flooded in and we were out the door into the welcoming night with its thin fingers of moonlight trickling through the clouds and promising that one wonderful thing that could wash away all the cramped misery of trying to be something we were not and never would be. In a hurry now, we flung the garbage bag onto the floor of the backseat with our playtime toys and got into the car.

We drove north through thin traffic, north to work, just as we had said we would, but not the daytime work of office and disorder; we went to a much happier task, beyond the dull and into delight, north past the airport, onto the off-ramp that led to North Miami Beach, and slower now, carefully nosing down the trail in our memory, to a certain small pastel yellow house in a modest neighborhood.

The club doesn't even open until eleven, Deborah had said. We drove past with care and saw the lights on, inside and out, and a car in the driveway that had not been there before. The mother's car, of course, and it made perfect sense-she took it to work during the day. Closer to the house, half into the shadows, was the Mustang. He was still here. It was not yet ten o'clock and the drive to South Beach was not a long one. He would be inside, enjoying his unjust freedom and thinking that all was once more right with his little world, and that was just the way we wanted it. We had made it with plenty of time and we felt a cold and pleasing certainty that we would not be disappointed.

We went one time around the block and watched for any sign that things were not what they should be and we found nothing. All was quiet and safe and all the little houses were clean and lighted and buttoned up against the razor-sharp fangs of the night.

We drive on. Four blocks away there is a house with a Dumpster squatting in its overgrown yard and this was just what we wanted. The houses nearby are dark, too, one light showing in a place two doors away, but otherwise it is all a quiet part of our night, and the house with the Dumpster is perfect. Foreclosed, empty, waiting for somebody to come in with a new dream, and very soon somebody will, but it will not be a pretty dream. We find a broken streetlight a block away and park there, beside a hedge. We get out slowly, enjoying the anticipation, enjoying as always the happy task of preparation, making things just right for all that had to happen and now would happen once more and oh so soon.

The back door of the foreclosed house is hidden from any possible prying eyes and it opens silently, quickly. Inside, the house is all empty darkness-except for the kitchen, where a skylight spills moonbeams across a butcher-block countertop, and as we see it the inner whisper rises into a chorus of delight. Here was a sign that this night was meant to be and it had been made just for us; this room was the perfect place for what we must do, and as if to underline the fact that all was right with the wicked world, there is even half a box of garbage bags on the counter.

Quickly now; time is pressing, but neatness counts. Slit the seams of the garbage bags and turn them into flat plastic sheets. Spread them carefully across the butcher block, the floor around it, the nearby walls, anyplace a random dreadful red splat might fall unobserved in the lighthearted rush of playtime, and soon it is ready.

We take a breath. We are ready, too.

It is a quick walk back to the small yellow house. Hands empty now, nothing needed, except the one small loop of nylon. Fifty-pound-test fishing line, perfect for making a leader, even better for making a follower out of some naughty playmate who would hear the light and powerful noose whistle through the air and settle on his throat and he would feel it speak into his surprise and say, Come with us now. Come and learn your limit. And he would follow, because he had to, as the world grew dark and dim and even his last few breaths would be given to him in pain and only when we wished it.

And if he squirmed or fought more than what was right we would pull just a little bit more until the breath no longer came and he heard nothing but the frantic growing thunder of his heartbeat in his ears and the whisper of the nylon saying, See? We have taken away your voice and your breath, and soon we will take away more, much more, take away everything, and then we will tumble you back into dust and darkness and a few neat bundles of garbage And the thought comes in on a slightly ragged breath and we paused to be calm, to let the icy fingers soothe away jangled nerves and rub them toward the first careful trickle of pleasure.

Steady now: Another breath until we become cool and certain and knew that all was bright and wary readiness and we let the clean steely awareness grow into the one true fact of the night: This will happen now. Tonight.

Now.

Our eyes snap open to a landscape of shadows and all our cool awareness slithered out and stretched into every dim hint of darkness, searching for movement, seeking any small trace of a watcher. There was nothing, no one, not human, animal, or Other like me. Nothing stirred or lurked; we were the only hunter on the trail tonight and all was what it should be. We were ready.

One careful foot in front of the other, a perfect imitation of casual walking, back around the block to the modest yellow house. Oh so carefully we slip past the house and into the shadow of a hedge next door and then we wait. No sound comes to challenge us; nothing moves or waits with us. We are alone and unseen and ready and we slide closer, careful and quiet, until we are there at the faded yellow corner of the house and we breathe deeply, quietly, and become a small and silent part of the shadows.

Closer, still careful and quiet, and all is exactly what it should be and then we are at the door of the Mustang.

Unlocked-the contemptible little beast has made it far too easy for us and we slide into the backseat so careful-quiet and melt into the unseen darkness on the car's floor-and then we wait.

Seconds, minutes-time passes and we wait. Waiting is easy, natural, part of the hunt. Our soft and steady breath comes in and out and everything about us is cool and coiled and waiting for the moment that must come.

And it does.

A distant yell; the front door opens and the tail end of the very last argument comes out to us.

"-lawyer said to do!" he says in his mean little tantrum voice. "I gotta go to work now, all right?" And he slams the door shut and storms over to the Mustang. His small and nasty voice mutters on as he opens the door and jerks himself into the car behind the wheel and as he puts the key into the ignition and starts the engine the shadows on the floor behind him spit out a shape and up we come with all our hushed and silent speed and the whistle of a nylon noose that whips around his throat and closes off all thought and air.

"Not a sound, not a move," we say in our terrible cold Other Voice, and he jerks to rigid stillness. "Listen carefully and do exactly what we say and you will live a little longer. Do you understand?"

He nods stiffly, bug-eyed with terror, face slowly growing dark from the lack of air, and we let him feel it, feel what it is to stop breathing, just a taste of what will come, a sample of his approaching forever, the endless darkness when all breathing is ended.

And we pull just a little, just enough to let him know that we could pull so very much harder, pull until it all stops right now, and his face gets even darker while his eyes begin to push out of his face and grow bright with blood -and we give him a breath, letting slackness run down our arm and into the nylon loop, just a little, just enough for one dry and tattered gasp of air, and then we tighten it once more before he can cough or speak.

"You belong to me," we tell him, and the cold truth of it is in our voice and for just a moment he forgets that he cannot breathe as the true shape of his future fills his mind and he flails his arms for just one second before we pull again, a little harder now.

"Enough," we say, and the frigid hiss of our command voice stops him immediately. We let his nasty little world grow dark again, not as much now, just enough so that when we loosen again he will have a very small hope-a frail hope, a hope made of moonbeams, a hope that will live just long enough to keep him docile and quiet until that quietness, too, becomes forever. "Drive," we tell him, with a very slight twitch of the noose, and we let him rasp in a breath.

For a moment he does not move and we jerk the noose. "Now," we say, and with a spasm of movement to tell us he is eager to please, he pushes the car into gear and we roll slowly out of the driveway and away from the pastel yellow house, away from his small and dirty life on earth and into the dark and joyous future of this wonderful moonlit night.

We take him to the empty house with the nylon tight around his throat, quickly and carefully marching him through the darkness and into the room we have readied, into the plastic-wrapped room where golden shafts of moonlight stab through the skylight and light up the butcher block as if it were the altar in a cathedral of pain. And it is: a true temple of suffering, and tonight we are its priest, master of the rites, and we will lead him through our ritual and into the last epiphany, to the final release into grace.

We hold him there by the butcher block and let him breathe, just for a moment, just long enough to let him see what is waiting, and his fear grows once more as he understands that this is all just for him, and he twists around to look at us and see if maybe this is some rough joke "Hey," he says in a voice already half-ruined. Recognition trickles into his face and he shakes his head slightly, as much as the noose will let him. "You're that cop," he says, and now there is new hope in his eyes and it blossoms into boldness as he ratchets on in his newly raspy voice. "You're the fucking cop that was with that crazy bitch cop! Motherfucker, you are in so much fucking trouble! I am fucking well going to have your ass in jail for this, you piece of shit-"

And we pull on the noose, very hard now, and the sound of his filthy crow-sounding words stops as though it had been cut off by a knife, and once more his world grows dark, and he scrabbles feebly at the nylon on his throat until he forgets what his fingers are for and his hands fall away as he drops to his knees and sways there for just a moment while I pull it tighter, tighter, until at last his eyes roll up into his head and he goes slack, flopping bonelessly to the floor.

We work quickly now, heaving him onto the butcher block, cutting away the clothing, taping him down into unmoving readiness before he wakes-which he quickly does, eyes fluttering open, arms twitching slightly against the tape as he explores his new and final position. The eyes go wider and he tries so very hard to move away but he cannot. And we watch him for just a moment, letting the fear grow, and with it grows the joy. This is who we are. This is what we are for, the conductor of the dark ballet, and this night is our concert.

And the music rises and we take him away to where the dance begins, the lovely choreography of The End, with its same sharp steps and familiar movements and its smells of fear amid the soft sounds of tape and terror, and the knife is sharp and swift and certain tonight as it races to the well-known rhythm of the slowly swelling music of the moon that rises and grows into the final chorus of fulfillment until joy, joy, joy is in the world.

Just before the end we pause. A very small and awful lizard of doubt has scuttled into our pleasure and squatted on the halo of our happiness and we look down at him, still writhing in eye-popping horror at what has happened to him and the certainty that even more will come.

It is nearly done, comes the whisper. Don't stop now…

And we do not-could not stop; but we pause. We look at the thing that squirms beneath our knife. He is nearly done and his breath comes slower now, but he is still moving against his bonds with one last bubble of hope forming and fighting to rise up behind the terror and pain. And there is one little thing we must know before we pop that bubble, one tiny detail we need to hear to make this complete, to blow down the floodgates and let our pleasure pour out across the land.

"Well, Victor," we say in our frosty happy hiss, "how did Tyler Spanos taste?" And we pull the duct tape from his lips; he is too far gone into true pain to notice the rip of the sticky tape coming off, but he breathes in deep and slow and his eyes find mine. "How did she taste?" we say again, and he nods with that final acceptance of what must be.

"She tasted great," he says in a raspy voice that knows there is no time left for anything but very final truth. "Better than the others. It was… fun…" He closes his eyes for a moment and when he opens them again that small hope still floats in his eyes. "Are you going to let me go now?" he says in a raspy, lost-little-boy voice, although he knows what the answer must be.

The whir of wings surrounds us and we do not even hear our voice as we answer, "Yes, you can go," we say, and very soon after, he does.

We left Chapin's Mustang behind a Lucky 7 convenience mart three-quarters of a mile from the house, the key still in it. It was far too tempting to last all night in Miami; by morning it would be repainted and on a boat for South America. We'd had to rush things with Victor just a little more than we wanted to, things being what they were, but we felt a great deal better now, as always, and I was very nearly humming when I climbed out of my trusty little car and trudged into the house.

I washed myself carefully, feeling the glow begin to fade. Debs would be a little happier-not that I would tell her, of course. But Chapin had earned his leading role in the night's little drama, and the world was a tiny bit better for it.

And so was I-much calmer, drained of tension, far readier to face the rush and tumble of recent events. It was true that I had tried to put this kind of thing behind me, and true that I had failed-but it was one small and necessary slip, and I would be very careful to see that it was the last. One little step backward, one time, no big deal-after all, nobody quits smoking right away, do they? I was much more collected and composed now, and this would not happen again. End of incident, back to my sheep's clothing-permanently this time.

Even as this thought tried to plant itself in the sunlight of my new persona, I felt a smug twitch of claws from the Passenger, and the almost-voiced thought, Of course… until next time…

The sudden sharpness of my reaction surprised us both: a quick flash of anger and my unspoken shout of, No! No next time-go away! And clearly I really meant it this time, so clearly that there was a stunned silence, followed by a sense of great and leathery dignity receding up the staircase until it was gone. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. Chapin was the last time, one minor setback on my new and sparkling path to Lily Anne's future. It would not happen again. And just to be sure, I added, And stay away!

There was no answer, only the distant slamming of a door in one lofty tower of Castle Dexter. I looked into the mirror over the sink as I scrubbed my hands. That was the face of a new man looking back at me. It was over now, really and truly over, and I would not go into that dark place ever again.

I dried off, put my clothes in the hamper, and tiptoed into the bedroom. The bedside clock said 2:59 as I slid quietly into bed.

The dreams came right away, immediately after my nearly instant slide into darkness. I am standing over Chapin once again, raising the knife for a perfect slice-but it is no longer Chapin on the table; it is Brian now, Brian lying taped below me. He gives me a smile so large and fake I can see it through the duct tape across his mouth, and I lift the knife higher-and then Cody and Astor are there beside me. They raise up their plastic Wii controllers and point them at me, clicking furiously, and I find myself moving to their control, lowering the knife, turning away from Brian and pointing the knife at myself until the blade is at my own throat and a terrible wailing cry comes from the table behind me and I turn to see Lily Anne taped in place and reaching up for me with her tiny perfect fingers -and Rita is thumping me with her elbow and saying, "Dexter, please, come on, wake up," and at last I do. The bedside clock says 3:28 and Lily Anne is crying.

Rita groaned beside me and said, "It's your turn," before rolling over and dragging a pillow over her head. I got up, feeling like my limbs were made of lead, and staggered to the crib. Lily Anne was waving her feet and hands in the air and for one dark and dreadful moment I couldn't tell it from the dream I'd just had and I stood there, wavering and stupid as I waited for things to make sense. But then the expression on Lily Anne's small and lovely face began to change and I could see that she was about to launch herself into all-out, full-volume wailing, and I shook my head to clear away the fumes of sleep. Stupid dream-all dreams are stupid.

I picked up Lily Anne and placed her gently on the changing table, mumbling soothing nothings to her that sounded strange and far from comforting as they came from my sleep-raspy throat. But she got quieter as I changed her diaper, and when I settled with her into the rocking chair beside the changing table she twitched a few times and went right back to sleep. The sense of dread that lingered from my idiotic dream began to fade, and I rocked and hummed softly for a few more minutes, enjoying it far more than seemed right, and when I was sure that Lily Anne was sound asleep I got up and placed her carefully into the crib, tucking the blanket around her into a snug little nest.

I had just settled myself back into my own little nest when the phone rang. Instantly, Lily Anne began to cry, and Rita said, "Oh, Jesus," which was quite shocking coming from her.

There was never any real doubt who it would be, calling at this hour. Of course it was Deborah, calling to tell me of some hideous new emergency and make me feel guilty if I didn't instantly leap out of bed and run to her side. For a moment I considered not answering-after all, she was a grown woman, and it was time she learned to stand on her own two feet. But duty and habit kicked into gear, combined with an elbow from Rita. "Answer it, Dexter, for God's sake," she said, and at last I did.

"Yes?" I said, letting the grumpiness show in my voice.

"I need you here, Dex," she said. There was real fatigue in her voice, and something else as well, some trace of the pain she had been showing lately, but it was still an old refrain, and I was tired of the song. "I'm coming to pick you up now."

"I'm sorry, Deborah," I said with real firmness. "Work hours are over and I need to be here with my family."

"They found Deke," she said, and from the way she said that I knew I didn't want to hear the rest, but she went on anyway. "He's dead, Dexter," she said. "Dead, and partly eaten."

TWENTY-FOUR

Itis a well-worn truth that cops grow callous, A cliche so tattered that it is even common on television. All cops face things every day that are so gruesome, brutal, and bizarre that no normal human being could deal with them on a daily basis and stay sane. And so they learn not to feel, to grow and maintain a poker-faced whimsy toward all the surprising things their fellow humans find to do to each other. All cops practice not-feeling, and it may be that Miami cops are better at it than others, since they have so many opportunities to learn.

So it is always a little unsettling to arrive at a crime scene and see grave and shocked faces on the uniforms holding the perimeter; even worse to slide under the tape and see ace forensic geeks Vince Masuoka and Angel Batista-No-Relation standing pale and mute to one side. These are people who find the sight of an exposed human liver a rare opportunity for wit, and yet whatever they had seen here was apparently so horrific that it had failed to tickle their funny bones.

All cops grow a layer of unfeeling in the presence of death-but for some reason, if the victim is another cop the layer of callus splits and the emotions run out like sap from a tree. Even if it's a cop that nobody cared for, like Deke Slater.

His body had been dumped behind a small theater on Lincoln Road, beside a pile of old lumber and canvas and a barrel overflowing with plastic trash bags. And it lay on its back, rather theatrically, shirtless, with hands folded over chest and clutching the shaft of what looked to be a plain wooden stake, pounded into the approximate area of his heart.

His face was set in a tight mask of agony, presumably caused by the stake slamming through living skin and bone, but it was quite clearly Deke, even with the chunks of flesh gouged out from his face and arms, the teeth marks visible from ten feet away. And even I felt a small twinge of pity for the man as I stood and looked down on all that was left of my sister's annoying and ridiculously handsome ex-partner.

"We found this," Debs said, standing at my shoulder and holding up a plastic evidence bag with a sheet of plain white paper in it. There was a red-brown stain of dried blood on one corner, but I took the bag from her and looked: On the paper was written a short message, in a large and ornate font that could have come from any computer printer in the world. It said, He disagreed with someone who ate him.

"I didn't realize cannibals were so clever," I said. Deborah stared at me, and all the soft despair she had been fighting with lately seemed to settle on her face and begin to smolder.

"Yeah," she said. "It's pretty funny. Especially to somebody like you who enjoys this kind of thing."

"Debs," I said, looking around me to see if anybody might have overheard. There was no one in immediate earshot, but judging by her face, I doubt she would have cared.

"Which is why I need you here now, Dexter," she went on, and now there was definitely fire in her voice as it rose higher and louder. "Because I have run out of patience with this shit, and I have run out of partners-and Samantha Aldovar has run out of time and I need to fucking understand this shit-" She paused and took a deep, ragged breath before going on in a quieter tone. "So I can find these assholes and put them away." She poked me in the chest with her finger and got even quieter, without losing any intensity. "And that is where you come in. You"-poke, poke-"put yourself into your trance, or talk to your spirit guide, or get your Ouija board, whatever it is you do"-and she poked me with each syllable-"and-you-do-it-now."

"Deborah, really," I said. "It isn't that simple." My sister was the only living person I had tried to talk to about my Dark Passenger, and I think she deliberately misunderstood my clumsy description of the whispered not-quite-voice that lurked in the basement just under consciousness. Of course, it had helped me in the past with some good guesses, but Debs apparently pictured it as some kind of dark Sherlock I could summon up at will.

"Make it that simple," she said, and she turned away and walked back toward the yellow-tape perimeter.

Not terribly long ago I had thought of myself as lucky to have family. Now, in one night, I had been ignored by my wife and children, replaced by my brother, and shoved into a late-night session of impossible expectation by my sister. My loving family-I would have traded them all for one decent jelly doughnut.

Still, I really was on the spot, and I had to try. So I took a deep breath and tried to put away all my brand-new emotions. I laid down my kit and knelt beside the ravaged body of Deke Slater, looking carefully at the wounds on the face and arms, almost certainly caused by human teeth and showing some dried blood-which meant the wounds had been made while his heart was still pumping. Eaten alive.

There were traces of blood starting where the stake punctured the chest and running all over the exposed torso, indicating that he had also been alive briefly after they had pounded it in. Probably the blood had soaked his shirt, which was why they removed it. Or maybe they just liked his abs. That would explain why several mouthfuls of them were missing.

Around the teeth marks on the stomach wounds there was a faint brown stain: I didn't think it was blood, and after a moment I remembered the stuff we had found in the Everglades. The party drink, made of ecstasy and salvia. I reached behind me and got some collection tools out of my kit, swabbing carefully at the brown spots and then placing the swab in an evidence bag.

I looked higher, up by the chest wound, and then to the hands gripping tightly around the wooden stake: not a lot to see there. A plain piece of wood that could have come from anywhere. Under several of the visible fingernails I could see something dark, possibly collected in a struggle-and as I looked and tried to analyze it by sight, I realized I was behaving exactly like Dark Sherlock, and it was a waste of time. The rest of the forensics team would swoop in and do all this better than I could hope to do with the naked eye. What I needed and what Deborah expected from me was one of my special insights into the twisted and wicked minds that had come up with this particular way to kill Deke. Always before I had been able to see these things a little clearer than the others in forensics, because I was twisted and wicked myself.

But now? Now that I had reformed, changed into Dex-Daddy? Ignored and even snubbed the Passenger? Could I still do it?

I didn't know if I could, and I didn't really want to find out, but it seemed like my sister had left me no choice-just like in every other situation involving family, my options were limited to either impossible or unpleasant.

So I closed my eyes and listened, waited for the sly whispered hint.

Nothing. Not a leathery rustle of wings, not a suggestion of offended disregard, not even an almost-syllable of huffish dismissal. The Passenger was as silent as if it had never been there at all.

Oh, come on, I said silently to the place where it lived. You're just sulking.

There was at last a ruffle of aloof disregard, as if I were not worth answering.

Please…? I thought at it.

For a moment there was no response, and then I quite clearly almost heard a kind of reptilian Hmmph, a reordering of wings, and then a snide echo of my own voice right back at me-And stay away-and then silence, as if it had hung up on me.

I opened my eyes. Deke was still dead, and I had no more idea about how and why than I'd had before my mini-seance. And quite clearly, if I was going to come up with any kind of idea, I was going to have to do it alone.

I looked around. Deborah was standing behind me about thirty feet away and she stared back at me with angry expectation. I had nothing to tell her, and although I did not know what she might do when I told her that, I had a feeling that we were beyond arm-punch territory into something new and potentially much more painful.

All right, then: Scientific forensics was for the others, there was no time for diligence, and the Passenger was on huffy hiatus-that left dumb luck. I looked around the body. There were no telltale footprints from tailor-made left-handed shoes, nobody had dropped a one-of-a-kind matchbook or a business card, and Deke had apparently not scrawled the name of his killer in blood. I looked further around, and at last something caught my eye. In the heap of plastic trash bags overflowing the garbage can by the door, all of the bags were semitransparent yellowish brown industrial garbage bags. But one of them, shoved into the pile halfway down, was white.

It almost certainly meant nothing: Probably the cleaning service had run out of the other bags, or somebody brought their garbage from home. Still, if I was really relying on luck, I might as well roll the dice. I stood up, trying to remember the name of the old Roman goddess of chance-Fortuna? It didn't matter. I was quite sure she only spoke Latin, and I didn't.

I approached the garbage pile carefully, not wanting to disturb any potential evidence that might be lying on the ground, and I crouched again, putting my face a few inches from the white bag. It was smaller than the others, too, a standard kitchen trash bag that anybody might use at home. Even more interesting, it was much less than half-full. Why would anybody throw away a bag of trash that close to empty? At the end of a business day, maybe-but this one was shoved in under three or four others; it had either come out at the same time only part-full… or somebody had shoved it into the pile later. And why not just drop it on top of the heap? Because somebody in a hurry wanted to hide this bag, and had done a half-assed rush job.

I took a ballpoint pen from my pocket and poked at the bag with the blunt end. Whatever was inside was soft, yielding-fabric? I pushed a little harder and the inside of the plastic bag came up against something, close enough so that I could just see dark red blotches on whatever was inside, and I shuddered involuntarily. It was blood; I was certain. And even though it was not really one of my Passenger-driven hunches, I was reasonably sure the blood had not come from someone inside the theater cutting their finger on the popcorn machine.

I stood up and looked for my sister. She was in the same place, still glaring at me. "Deborah?" I called. "Come look at this."

She crossed the space between us quickly, and as I squatted down again, she did, too.

"Look," I said. "This bag is different from all the others."

"Big fucking deal," she said. "That's the best you got?"

"No," I said. "This is." Once more I poked at the bag with my pen, and once more the awful red stains swam into view pressed against the white plastic. "It's probably a coincidence," I said.

"Shit," she said with quiet violence. Then she rose up and looked over at the barricade. "Masuoka! Get over here!" Vince looked at her like a deer caught in the headlights, and she yelled, "Move it!" He clumped into motion and hustled over.

Standard procedure is only one step away from ritual, and so I have always found it kind of comforting. I really like doing things that have definite rules and a well-established order, because that means I don't have to worry about how to fake something appropriate for the occasion. I can just relax and follow the correct steps. But this time, the routine seemed dull, pointless, and frustrating. I wanted to rip open that bag, and I found that I was fretting with impatience as Vince slowly and methodically dusted for fingerprints; all over the garbage can, the wall behind it, and then each individual garbage bag on top of the white one. We had to lift each bag up in careful gloved hands, dust it, examine it under regular and then UV light, and then cautiously open it, removing and examining each item inside. Junk, garbage, waste, crap. By the time we finally got to the white bag I was ready to scream and fling the garbage at Vince's head.

But we did get to it at last, and the difference was obvious immediately, even to Vince, the moment he dusted.

"Clean," he said, goggling up at me with surprise. The other bags had been like mosaics of smudged and greasy fingerprints. This one was as pristine as if it had just come out of the box.

"Rubber gloves," I said, and my impatience burst. "Come on, open it up." He looked at me as if I had suggested doing something indecent. "Open it!" I said.

Vince shrugged and began to carefully undo the plastic tie. "So impatient," he said. "You must learn to wait, Grasshopper. All things come to those who-"

"Just open the goddamn bag," I said, which startled me a great deal more than it did Vince. He just shrugged again and removed the tie, placing it carefully into an evidence bag. I realized I was leaning in a little too close, and I straightened up-and bumped into Deborah, who had been leaning over me. She didn't even blink, just hunkered down into the position I had left.

"Come on, goddamn it," she said.

"You guys must be related or something," Vince said. But before I could kick him, he opened the top of the bag and began to peel it slowly back. He reached into it cautiously and, with a truly irritating lack of speed, began to pull out "Deke's shirt," Deborah said. "He was wearing that this afternoon." She looked at me and I nodded: I remembered the shirt, a beige guayabera sprinkled with light green palm trees. But it had a new pattern on it now, an awful wet soaked-in swirl of blood, kept damp inside the sealed bag.

Slowly and carefully Vince pulled the bloody shirt out of the bag, and as it came all the way out at last, something else clattered onto the ground and rolled away toward the building's back door. Deborah said, "Shit," and jumped up to follow the thing as it wobbled to a stop a few feet away. I came right behind her and, since I was wearing gloves, I bent and picked it up.

"Let me see," Deborah demanded, and I held it out on the palm of my hand.

There was not really much to see. The thing looked like a poker chip, perfectly round, the edges grooved like a gear. But it was jet black, and on one face there was a gold symbol embossed onto it. It looked something like a 7, except it had a line drawn through the vertical leg.

"The fuck is that?" Debs said, staring at the symbol.

"Maybe a European seven?" I said. "That's how they make 'em sometimes, with the line through it."

"Okay," she said, "and so what the fuck does a European seven mean?"

"That's not a seven," Vince said. He had crowded in behind us and was peering over Deborah's shoulder. We both looked at him. "It's a cursive 'F,' " he said, as if that were an obvious truth.

"How do you know?" Debs demanded.

"I've seen it before," he said. "You know, out clubbing."

"What do you mean, clubbing?" Debs said, and Vince shrugged.

"Hey, you know," he said. "Nightlife out on South Beach. I've seen those things." And he looked back down at the black token and reached in between us, poking the thing with his gloved fingertip. " 'F,' " he said.

"Vince," I said, very politely refraining from putting my hands around his throat and squeezing until his eyes popped out. "If you know what this thing is, please tell us before Deborah shoots you."

He frowned and raised both hands, palms up. "Hey, take it easy. Jeez." He poked it again. "It's an entrance token. 'F,' for Fang." He looked up at us and smiled. "You know, Fang? The club?" Something tickled at the back of my brain as he said that, but before I could scratch it, Vince poked the token again and went on talking. "You can't get in without one of these things, and they're really hard to get. I tried. 'Cuz it's a private club-they're open like all night, after all the other clubs close, and I heard it gets like totally wild in there."

Deborah stared at the token as if she were waiting for it to speak. "What's Deke doing with one of these?" she said.

"Maybe he likes to party," Vince said.

Deborah looked at Vince, and then over to Deke's body. "Yeah," she said. "Looks like he had a real rave." Then she turned to Vince. "How late does this place stay open?"

Vince shrugged. "Pretty much all night, you know," he said. "It's like vampire theme, I mean, 'Fang'? So all night. And it's private, members only. So they can do that."

Deborah nodded and grabbed my arm. "Come on," she said.

"Come on where?"

"Where do you think?" she snarled.

"No, wait a second," I said. This wasn't making any sense. "How did the token get in there with Deke's shirt?" I said.

"What do you mean?" Debs said.

"There's no pocket in the shirt," I said. "And it's not the kind of thing you hold in your hand while you get rid of a body. So somebody put the token in there. On purpose."

Deborah stood absolutely still for a moment, not even breathing. "It could have fallen in, and…" She stopped, hopefully realizing how stupid that sounded.

"It couldn't have," I said. "You don't believe that for a second. Somebody wants us to go into that club."

"All right," she said, "then let's go."

I shook my head. "Debs, that's crazy. This has got to be a trap."

She set her jaw and looked stubborn. "Samantha Aldovar is in that club," she said. "I'm going to get her out."

"You don't know where she is," I said.

"She's in there," Debs said through her teeth. "I know she is."

"Deborah-"

"Fuck it, Dexter," she said. "It's the only lead we've got."

Once again I seemed to be the only one who could see the runaway locomotive hurtling down at us. "For God's sake, Debs, it's way too dangerous. Somebody put that thing in there to get us into the club. It's either a trap or a red herring."

But Deborah just shook her head and pulled on my arm, leading me away toward the perimeter. "I don't give a shit if it's a red herring," she said. "It's the only fish we got."

TWENTY-FIVE

Theclub was on ocean drive in south beach, on the edge of the area that TV programs always show when they want to portray the glittering superhip world of Miami nightlife. Every night of the week, the sidewalks were crowded with people wearing minimal clothing and showing off bodies that made that seem like a good idea. They strolled and rolled past the Deco hotels lit up from the inside with neon, loud music, and throngs of even more people who looked just like them, spilling in and out of the buildings in a kind of ultra-chic Brownian motion. A few years ago those same buildings were all cheap retirement hotels, filled with old people who could barely walk and had come south to die in the sun. Now a room that used to cost fifty dollars a night went for ten times that, and the only difference was that the tenants were prettier and the buildings had been on television.

Even at this hour of the night there were people on the sidewalk, but these were the leftovers, the ones who had partied too hard and couldn't remember how to get home, or those who just didn't want to call it a night and lose the glow, even after all the clubs had closed.

All but one: Fang was at the end of the block in a building that was not as dark and quiet as the others, although the front side was subdued for South Beach. But down the alley on the far end there was a glow of black light and a relatively small sign that said FANG in a sort of nouveau Gothic script, and sure enough, the initial "F" matched the one on the black token we had found with Deke's shirt. The sign hung over a dim door that appeared to be painted black and studded with silver metallic brads, like a teenager's idea of what an old dungeon door should look like.

Deborah didn't bother trying to find a parking spot. She just jammed her car up onto the sidewalk and jumped out into the thinning crowd. I got out quickly, but she was already halfway down the alley before I caught up with her. As we got closer to the door I began to feel a rhythmic thumping deep in the folds of my brain. It was an annoying and insistent sound that seemed to come from inside me and demand that I do something, now, without making any concrete suggestions about what. It pounded relentlessly, at twice the speed of a healthy heartbeat, and turned into actual sound only when we were finally standing in front of the glossy black door.

There was small sign with raised gold letters in the same script as the token and the sign above the door. It said, PRIVATE CLUB. MEMBERS ONLY. Deborah didn't seem impressed. She grabbed at the doorknob and turned; the door stayed closed. She thumped her shoulder into it, but it didn't budge.

I leaned past her. "Excuse me," I said, and I pushed the small button set into the doorframe below the sign. She twitched her lips angrily, but didn't say anything.

After only a few seconds the door opened, and I had a very unsettling moment of disorientation. The man who opened the door and stood looking down at us was very nearly a dead ringer for Lurch, the butler on the old Addams Family TV show. He was close to seven feet tall and wore a classic butler's outfit, complete with morning coat. But happily for my sense of unreality, when he spoke to us it was in a high voice with a thick Cuban accent. "Joo rang?" he said.

Deborah held up her badge; she had to hold it straight up in the air, as high as her arm could reach, to get it anywhere close to Lurch's face. "Police," she said. "Let us in."

Lurch put a long knobby finger on the sign that said PRIVATE CLUB. "Hee's a pribait clope," he said.

Deborah looked up at him, and in spite of the fact that he was almost two feet taller and had a cooler costume, he took a half step backward. "Let me in," she said, "or I will come back with a warrant, and la migra, and you will wish you had never been born." And whether it was the threat of INS or just the magic of Deborah's glare, he stepped to the side and held the door open for us. Debs put away her badge and stormed in past the man, and I followed.

Inside the club, the thumping sound that had been annoying outside turned into a pure agony of overwhelming noise. Riding over the top of the torturous beat was a reedy electronic sound, two notes played together that did not quite harmonize but went through a ten-second pattern that repeated over and over. Every two or three times the pattern repeated, a deep electronically distorted voice would whisper something over the music, low and wicked and suggestive and sounding far too much like the nearly heard voice of the Passenger.

We went down a short hallway toward the place where the hideous din was coming from, and as we got closer I could see the reflected fluttering of what appeared to be a strobe light, except that it was black light. Somebody shouted, "Whoo!" and the lights went wine red, flickered rapidly, and then, as a new and more horrible "song" started up, the light turned bright white and then back to ultraviolet. The beat never stopped and never changed, but the two reedy notes went into a new pattern, accompanied now by a shattering screech that might have been a distorted and badly tuned electric guitar. And then the voice again, this time audible-"Just drink it," it said, and it was answered by several voices calling "Whoo!" and other syllables of modern encouragement, and then as we got to the doorway, the deep malignant voice gave a kind of old-movie evil chuckle, "Moo-hahahaha," and then we were looking into the main room of the club.

Dexter has never been a real partygoer: Large gatherings of people generally make me feel quite grateful that I am not ruled by human impulse. But never before had I seen a more compelling example of all that is wrong with trying to have fun with others, and even Deborah stopped dead for a moment in a vain attempt to take it all in.

Through a thick haze of incense we could see that the room was packed with people, almost all apparently under the age of thirty, and all dressed in black. They were writhing back and forth across the floor to the beat of the horrible noise, their faces twisted into expressions of glazed delirium, and, as the black light strobed, it lit up the sharpened fangs that many of them had so that their teeth glowed weirdly.

Off to my right was a raised platform, and standing in the middle of it, rotating slowly on two facing turntables, were two women. They both had long dark hair and very pale skin that turned almost greenish in the flickering lights that played over them. They wore sleek black dresses that looked painted on, with high collars that completely covered their necks and a front that opened up in a diamond-shaped cutout to show the area between their breasts. They stood very close together, and as they turned around past each other their faces would touch gently, and they would brush their fingertips lightly over each other.

Along the side of the room three thick velvet curtains hung down and as I looked, one of them slid open to reveal an alcove containing an older man dressed all in black. He held a young woman by the arm and wiped at his mouth with his other hand. For a moment a flash of the lights glistened off something on the woman's bared shoulder and a small voice whispered to me that this was blood-but the woman smiled at the man and leaned her head on his arm, and he led her out of the alcove and back onto the dance floor. They vanished into the crowd.

At the far end of the room was a giant fountain. A darkish liquid burbled up from it, lit from underneath with a colored light that pulsed and faded from one color to the next in time to the relentless drumbeat. And standing behind the fountain and lit from below with a terribly theatrical blue light was none other than Bobby Acosta. He held up a huge, two-handed golden goblet with an enormous red gem on the front, and he poured from it into every cup raised up by the passing dancers. He was smiling a little too hard, obviously showing off his expensive pointed crowns from Dr. Lonoff, and as he raised the goblet high above his head and looked happily around the room, his eyes fell on Deborah and he froze, which unfortunately made whatever was in the goblet slop out onto his head and roll down into his eyes. Several of the partiers held their cups up imperiously and bounced in place, but Bobby just stared at Deborah, and then dropped the goblet and ran into a back hallway. Deborah said, "Motherfucker!" and lurched forward onto the crowded dance floor and I had no choice but to follow into the madly twisting herd.

The dancers were moving in one direction in a tightly packed mass, and Deborah was trying to cut straight across them to get to the hallway where Bobby Acosta had disappeared. Hands clutched at us, and one slender hand with black-painted fingernails held a cup up to my face and sloshed something onto my shirtfront. I looked down the arm and saw it belonged to a svelte young woman wearing a T-shirt that said TEAM EDWARD. She licked her black-painted lips at me, and then I was bumped hard from behind, and I turned toward my sister. A large and vacuous-looking guy wearing a cape and no shirt grabbed at Debs and tried to pull her shirt open. She slowed down just long enough to plant her feet and throw a perfect right cross at the guy's jaw and he went down. Several people nearby shouted happily and began to push harder, and the rest of the crowd heard them and turned, and in just an eyeblink they were all pushing toward us and chanting rhythmically, "Hai! Hai! Hai!" or words to that effect, and we were slowly forced backward, back toward the door guarded by Lurch where we had come in.

Deborah struggled, and I could see her lips moving in the right shape for some of her favorite X-rated syllables, but it was no good. We were slowly and inevitably pushed off the dance floor, and as we got close to our original entrance, very strong hands clamped onto our shoulders from behind and pulled us up and out of the room as if we were small children, and set us down in the hallway.

I turned to face our rescuers and saw two exceptionally large guys, one white and one black, both with enormous sculpted muscles bulging out of their sleeveless tuxedo shirts. The black man had a long and gleaming ponytail tied back with what looked like a string of human teeth. The white one had a shaved head and a very large golden skull in one ear, and they both looked like they were perfectly ready to pull off our heads if anybody wanted to see them do it.

And in between them, as they stood at a kind of bored attention, stepped someone who seemed like he might suggest exactly that. If the doorman was Lurch, here was Gomez Addams himself: forty-ish, dark-haired, with the pin-striped suit, blood-red rose pinned to the lapel, and a pencil-thin mustache. But this was a very angry Gomez, and he jabbed a finger at Deborah as he spoke over the din of the music. "You got no right coming in here!" he said. "This is harassment and I will sue your ass!"

He glanced at me and away, and then he looked back again and our eyes locked for just a moment, and suddenly there was a chill in the stale fug of the club's air and a faint leathery huff rattled through me as the Passenger sat up and whispered a warning, and something black and reptilian formed in the air between us and a small piece of a neglected puzzle fluttered up into my brain. I remembered where I had heard of Fang before; it had been in my recently shredded file of potential playmates. And now I knew who this other predator was. "George Kukarov, I presume?" I could see Deborah look at me, startled, but that did not matter; all that mattered was that two Dark Passengers were meeting and exchanging sibilant warnings.

"Who the fuck are you?" Kukarov said.

"I'm with her," I said, and though it sounded mild there was a message in it that only another predator would hear, and the message was, Leave her alone or you will deal with me.

Kukarov stared back and there was a distant, just-below-sound roaring of hidden monsters, and then Deborah said, "Tell this asshole to get his hands off me. I am a police officer!" And the spell was broken as Kukarov jerked his eyes away and back to Debs.

"You've got no fucking right to be here," he hissed, and then he yelled again, just for the effect. "This is a private club and you are not invited!"

Deborah matched his volume and raised his venom. "I have reason to believe a felony was committed on these premises-" she said, but Kukarov cut her off.

"You got due cause?" he snarled. "You got no due cause." And Deborah bit her lip. "I got lawyers who will eat you alive!" he said. The white bouncer thought that was pretty funny, but Kukarov glared at him and he wiped the smirk off his face and went back to staring straight ahead. "Now you get the fuck outta my club!" he said, and he pointed at the door. The two bouncers stepped forward and grabbed Deborah and me by the elbows and half carried us down the short hallway. Lurch held the door open and they threw us out onto the sidewalk. We both managed to avoid falling onto our heads, but it was a near thing.

"Stay the fuck outta my club!" Kukarov shouted, and I turned to look just in time to see Lurch smile brightly and slam the door shut.

"Huh," said my sister, "looks like you were wrong." And she spoke so calmly that I looked at her with very real concern, thinking that she must have hit her head in all the scuffle-because the two things she cared about most in the entire world were the authority of her badge, and not letting anybody push her around, and both of those had just been trampled. And yet here she was standing on the sidewalk and dusting herself off as if nothing at all had happened, and I was so astonished that her words didn't really register for a moment. When they did, they seemed like the wrong words.

"Wrong?" I said, and I felt like I was in the wrong conversation. "What do you mean, I was wrong?"

"Who gets thrown out of a trap?" she said; it took me a second to realize what she meant, and by then she had gone right on. "What kind of red herring has bouncers that toss us onto the sidewalk after two minutes?"

"Well," I said.

"Goddamn it, Dexter!" she said. "Something is going on in there!"

"Quite a lot, actually," I admitted, and she punched my arm, hard. It was nice to see her recovering her spirits, but on the other hand, it really hurt.

"I mean it!" she said. "Either somebody goofed and that token fell in by accident-which is stupid-or else…" She paused, and I understood what she meant. There was definitely an "or else" here-but what was it? I waited politely for her to supply it, and when she didn't, I finally said it.

"Or else… somebody connected with this wants us to take a look at what's going on without anybody else knowing it."

"Right," she said, and she turned back to glare at the glossy black door. The door didn't even flinch. "Which means," she said thoughtfully, "that you are going back in there."

I opened my mouth, but nothing came out except air, and after a moment I had to believe I hadn't really heard her. "I'm sorry?" I said, and I admit it was a bit squeaky.

Debs grabbed both of my arms and shook me. "You are going to go back inside that club," she said, "and find out what they're hiding."

I pulled my arms out of her grasp. "Debs, those two bouncers will kill me. To be honest, it would probably only take one of them."

"That's why you're going in later," she said, almost like she was suggesting something reasonable. "When the club is closed."

"Oh, good," I said. "So I won't just be trespassing and get beaten. I'll be breaking and entering, too, so they can shoot me. Great idea, Deborah."

"Dexter," she said, and she looked at me with more intensity than I could remember seeing from her in quite some time. "Samantha Aldovar is in there. I know it."

"You can't know that."

"But I do," she said. "I can feel it. Goddamn it, you think you're the only one with a voice inside? Samantha Aldovar is in there, and she is out of time. If we back off, they kill her and eat her. And if we take the time to go through channels and go in with SRT and all that, she disappears and she's dead. I know it. She's in there now, Dex. I got such a strong feeling; I've never been more sure about something."

It was all very compelling, but aside from one or two minor problems with her argument-like how she knew it-there was one overwhelming flaw with the whole thing. "Debs," I said. "If you're so sure-why not do it right, get a warrant? Why does it have to be me?"

"No way I get a warrant in time. No probable cause," she said, and I was glad to hear that, since it might mean she wasn't completely insane. "But I can trust you," she said. She patted my chest, and it felt wet. I looked down, and saw that there was a large brownish stain across the front of my shirt, and I remembered the girl who had spilled her drink on me on the dance floor.

"Look," I said, pointing at the stain. "This is that same stuff we found in the Everglades-salvia and ecstasy." And just to show her that two could play, I said, "I know it's the same stuff. And it's illegal-with this sample, you have probable cause, Debs."

But she was already shaking her head. "Illegally obtained," she said. "And by the time we got it argued in front of a judge it'll be too late for Samantha. This is the only way, Dexter."

"Then you do it."

"I can't," she said. "I'd lose my job if I got caught, maybe even do jail time. You'll just get a fine-and I'll pay it."

"No, Debs," I said. "I'm not going to do it."

"You have to, Dex," she said.

"No," I said. "Absolutely not."

TWENTY-SIX

And that is how i found myself sitting in Deborah's car a few hours later and watching the doorway at Club Fang. There wasn't a whole lot to see at first. People trickled out a few at a time and either wandered away down the street or climbed into a car and drove off. As far as I could tell, nobody turned into a bat, or flew off on a broom. Nobody noticed us, but Deborah had reparked the car in a dark spot across the street, in the shadow of a delivery van nosed up onto the sidewalk. She didn't have much to say, and I was still too peeved for light conversation.

This was Deborah's case, and this was Deborah's hunch, and yet here I was getting ready to take on the stupid part. I didn't even agree with her that it had to be done, but merely because I was her brother-and adopted, at that-I had to do it. I don't ask for fair; I know better than that. But shouldn't things at least make sense? I go through life and work hard to blend in, follow the rules, and be a good sport-and yet when it comes time for the cigar to explode, somehow it's always me puffing on it.

But there was no point in arguing anymore. If I refused to break into the club, Deborah would do it, and she was right; as a sworn officer of the law, she could go to prison if they caught her, while I would probably just get community service, picking up trash at a park, or teaching inner-city kids to knit. And Deb's stay in the ICU with the knife wound was far too recent for me to let her take any kind of risk-which I'm quite sure was part of her calculations. So it was Dexter through the window, and that was that.

Just before dawn, the sign above the club's door switched off and a lot of people came out at the same time, and then nothing at all happened for half an hour. Out over the far end of the ocean the sky got lighter and somewhere a bird began to sing, which showed how little he knew. The first jogger went by on Ocean Drive, and a delivery truck rumbled past. And finally, the black door swung open and Lurch came out, followed by the two bouncers, then Bobby Acosta, and a couple of other drudges I hadn't seen before. A few minutes later, Kukarov himself came out, locked the door, and got into a Jaguar parked half a block away. The car started right up, which contradicted all I had ever heard about Jaguars, and Kukarov drove away, off into the dawn to Morticia and a peaceful day of rest in his crypt.

I looked at Deborah, but she just shook her head, so I waited some more. A bright orange finger of light poked up out over the ocean, and then suddenly it was a new day. Three young men in tiny swimsuits walked by speaking German and headed for the beach. I pondered the rising sun and, in a rush of dawn-inspired optimism, decided there was a one-in-three chance that this was not my last day on earth.

"Okay," Deborah said at last, and I looked at her. "It's time," she said.

I looked at the club. It didn't feel to me like it was time-time for bed, maybe, but not time for sneaking into the dragon's den, not in all this daylight. Dexter needs shadows, darkness, guttering moonlight. Not bright morning in the Twinkie Capital of the Western World. But as usual, I was not being offered a choice.

"There might be somebody in there. A guard or whatever," she said. "So be careful."

I really didn't feel like dignifying that kind of remark with a response, so I simply took a deep breath and tried to bring up the darkness to prepare myself.

"You got your phone, right?" she went on. "If there's trouble, or if you see her and she's, like, got a guard, just call nine-one-one and get out of there. It should be simple."

"Not as simple as sitting in the car," I said, and I admit I was irritated. On top of everything else, Debs had suddenly developed motormouth. How can a guy call his Passenger when everyone else wants to chat?

"Fine," she said. "Just be careful, that's all I'm saying, all right?"

It was quite clear to me that the small talk was not going to stop, so I put a hand on the door and said, "I'm sure I'll be fine. What could possibly go wrong, breaking into a nest of vampires and cannibals who have already kidnapped and murdered several people?"

"Jesus, Dexter," Deborah said, but I felt no mercy.

"After all, I have a cell phone," I said. "If they catch me, I'll threaten to text."

"All right, shit," she said. I pushed the car door open.

"Pop the trunk," I said to her.

She blinked. "What?"

"Open up the trunk of the car," I repeated. She opened her mouth to say something or other, but I was already out of the car and around to the trunk. The release thumped and I opened it, found the tire iron, and slid it into my pocket, pulling my shirt over the protruding handle to hide it. I closed the trunk and stepped around to Deborah's window. She rolled it down.

"Farewell, sis," I said. "Tell Mother I died game."

"For Christ's sake, Dexter," she said, and I crossed the street, leaving her muttering a few syllables of worried profanity.

In truth, I was hoping that it was going to be as simple as Deborah wanted to believe it would be. Getting in would certainly be easy enough for someone of my modest abilities-I had broken into many places, in the pursuit of my innocent hobby, that seemed a great deal more formidable than this one, and most of those were inhabited by real monsters, not these playtime Halloween freaks, with their opera capes and fake teeth. In the light of the morning sun that now poured onto South Beach, it seemed very hard to take their adolescent party games at all seriously.

It was also surprisingly hard to bring the Dark Passenger online. I really needed the soft voice of guidance, the invisible cloak of interior darkness, that only the Passenger could provide, but in spite of the brief flutter of alarm in the club, apparently the snit was not over. I paused on the far side of the street and closed my eyes, placing my hand on a telephone pole and thinking, Hello? Anybody home? Somebody was home, but they still didn't feel like visiting: I felt a slow and silken rustle of wings, as if it were merely recrossing its legs and waiting for something good to happen. Come on, I thought. Still nothing.

I opened my eyes. A truck went by on Ocean Drive, its radio playing salsa music much too loud. But it was the only music I heard. Apparently, I was going to have to do this alone.

All right, then: When the going gets tough and so on. I put my hands in my pockets and started to amble around the building as if I didn't really have anyplace to go and was just gawking. Gee whiz, look at the palm trees. Nothin' like that back in Iowa. Golly.

I strolled around the building one time, looking it over without really seeming to do anything but walk and gawk. As far as I could tell, nobody cared enough to be impressed by my wonderful Innocent Act, but it never hurts to be thorough, so I played tourist for five minutes. The building took up the entire block, and I walked along past all four sides. The vulnerable spot was obvious: In a short and narrow alleyway on the far side of the club's door there was a Dumpster. It stood beside a doorway that obviously led into the club's kitchen. The door was protected from view unless someone stood right in the mouth of the alley.

I pulled my right hand out of my pocket and "accidentally" scattered half a handful of coins onto the sidewalk and, stooping to pick them up, I looked around me in all directions. Unless there was somebody on a rooftop with binoculars, I was not being watched. I left thirty-seven cents on the sidewalk and slid quickly into the alley.

It was much darker in the narrow alley, but that did not encourage the Passenger to start a conversation, and I hurried to the Dumpster all alone. I reached the back door quickly and examined it. It had two dead-bolt locks on it, which was discouraging. I could have opened them both easily enough given a little time and my own set of very special tools, but I had neither, and the tire iron would just not do: The door was out of the question. I would have to get inside by some other, less genteel entryway.

I looked up at the building: Directly above the doorway was a row of windows, one every five or six feet, that went along the side of the building to the street. The second one to my left was in easy reach from the top of the Dumpster, and an agile person could pull himself up and through the window without too much trouble. No problem: Dexter is deft, and assuming I could slide open the window it would be simple.

The Dumpster had two lids, side by side, and one of them was open. I put both hands on the closed side-and something bolted up and out of the opening with a horrible screech and flew past my ear and I was absolutely paralyzed by sheer terror before I recognized it as a cat. It was tattered and filthy and beat-up, but it landed a few feet away and arched its back and spit at me in the full Halloween pose. I just looked back and for a second I thought the music had started up again in the club, until I realized the thumping was only my heartbeat. The cat turned and stalked away out of the alley, I leaned on the Dumpster and took a deep breath, and the Passenger stirred itself just enough to give me a serves-you-right chuckle.

I took a moment to recover, and then, just to be safe, I looked inside the Dumpster. There didn't seem to be anything else inside except garbage, which I thought was a very positive development. I hoisted myself up onto the closed side and, looking once more toward the mouth of the alley to make sure nobody was watching, I reached up and touched the window. I pushed at it and it rattled ever so slightly. Good news: That meant it was not nailed shut, or sealed by too many years of sloppy paint jobs.

I could not see the very top of the window frame, but as far as I could tell there was no alarm sensor anywhere on the frame, which was also good news but not too surprising. Most places save a little money by pretending that any break-in will take place on the ground floor. It was nice to know that even vampires can be thrifty.

I reached for the tire iron and almost dropped it as it cleared my pocket. It would have hit the Dumpster's lid with enough of a clatter to wake up the whole neighborhood, and I realized my hands were slick with sweat. This was a new experience; always before I had been icy cold and calm, but between the Passenger's sulking and the feral cat's levitation I seemed to be in something of a stew. Certainly sweat was understandable-this was Miami. But fear sweat? On Dexter the Dark and Dashing, the King of Cool? This was not a good sign, and I paused one more time for a deep breath before I reached up and slid the tire iron between the window and the bottom of the frame.

I pulled down on the tire iron's handle, gently at first, and then with increasing force as the window refused to budge. I didn't want to pull too hard, since the frame might well give way, which would shatter the glass and make so much noise that I might as well bounce a dozen tire irons off the Dumpster's lid. I pulled for about ten seconds, slowly increasing the pressure, and just when I thought I would have to try something else there was a pop! and the window slid upward. I held very still for a moment, listening for any movement or shouting or alarms going off. Nothing: I pulled myself up, slid through the window, and pulled it closed behind me.

I stood up and looked around me. I was in a hallway that dead-ended at the street to my left and led to a corner down to the right. There was one door along the hall, and I went quietly over to it. There was a dead-bolt lock on the door, but no doorknob. I pushed gently and the door opened. The room was completely dark, but there was a faint smell of Lysol and urine, and I suspected it was a restroom. I stepped inside, closed the door, and found a light switch by feeling along the wall. I flipped it on; it was, in fact, a small restroom, with a sink, one toilet, and a cupboard built into the wall. Just to be thorough I opened the cupboard and found nothing more sinister than toilet paper. There was nothing else in the room, no place they could have hidden a body, alive or dead, so I switched off the light and stepped back out into the hallway.

I cat-footed down the hall to the corner, where I paused, and then slowly and carefully peeked around. The hallway was empty, lit by a single security lamp that hung above a door halfway down. There were two other doors along the hall, and what looked like the top of a staircase at the far end.

I stepped around the corner and went to the first door on my left. I turned the knob slowly and carefully, and it gave way. I pushed the door open and went in, once again closing the door behind me and feeling for the light switch on the wall. I found it, flipped it on. The light was dimmer than even that from the security light in the hall, but it was enough to show a private party room. There was a flat-screen TV on the left wall, and a long, low couch along the right with a coffee table in front of it. Behind the couch was a bar topped with greenish marble, with a small refrigerator underneath. Along the back wall, a thick red velvet curtain hung down.

I went to the bar. There were a few bottles, but instead of glasses there was a rack of what looked like laboratory beakers. I picked one up; it was, indeed, a Pyrex beaker. The side was stamped FIRST NATIONAL BLOOD BANK in gold letters.

I pulled the velvet curtain away from the wall. There was a door behind it, and I pulled it open, holding the curtain up and away so I could see inside. It was nothing more than a small closet, empty except for cleaning supplies: broom, mop, and bucket, a bag of rags. I closed the door and dropped the curtain.

The next door along the hall was on the right, underneath the security light. It was locked, and I procrastinated by moving along the hall to the last door down on my left. It was unlocked; I slipped inside and found another private party room, a virtual duplicate of the first one.

That left the locked door. Reason told me that anything worth seeing would be locked away, but it also told me that the lock would be a good one, and I would not get it open without leaving some very obvious hints that I had been there, and possibly even setting off an alarm. Did I want to stay invisible, or just assume that if I found Samantha Aldovar it didn't matter who knew I had been there? I hadn't talked about it with Deborah, and it had just become an important question. I thought about it, and after only a moment of really high-order thinking, I decided that I was here to find Samantha, and I had to look everywhere-especially places that they didn't want anyone to see, like behind this locked door.

And so, with my courage screwed to the sticking place, I went to work on the locked door with the tire iron. I tried to be quiet and leave the fewest possible marks, but I was a little better controlling the noise than the damage to the wooden doorframe, and by the time I had the door pried open it looked like it had been attacked by rabid beavers. Still, the door was open, and I went through it.

As far as carefully hidden secrets went, the room would have been a major disappointment to anyone but an accountant. It was clearly the club's office, with a large wooden desk, a computer, and a four-drawer filing cabinet. The computer had been left on, and I sat at the desk and quickly scanned the hard drive. There were some Quicken files showing that the club was making a nice profit, some Word documents, standard letters to club members and prospective members. There was a rather large file named Coven.wpd that was password-encrypted with a security program so old I could have broken it in two minutes. But I didn't have two minutes, so I merely admired their naivete and moved on.

There was nothing else remotely interesting, no file labeled Samantha.jpg or anything similar that might have told me where she was. I went quickly through the drawers of the desk and the filing cabinet, and again found nothing.

All right-I had trashed the doorframe for no reason. I did not feel any real guilt about that, which was a relief, but I had wasted quite a lot of time, and I had to start thinking about finishing my mission and getting out of here; there could well be a cleaning crew coming in, or Kukarov returning to admire his office doorframe.

I left the office and pushed the door closed, and then I headed for the stairs. I was reasonably sure that I didn't need to look through the main public areas of the club. It was just plain impossible that everybody who came in was in on the cannibalism-there was no way that hundreds of people could keep a secret like that. So if Samantha really was here somewhere, it would be in an area that most people didn't see.

And so I went down the stairs and across the dance floor without pausing to look around. At the back, behind the raised area that Bobby had stood on with his goblet, there was a short hallway, and I went down it. It led to the kitchen area and the back door I had admired from the outside. It was not an elaborate kitchen, just a small stove, microwave, sink, with a metallic hanging rack holding pots and several very nice-looking knives. At the far side of the room was a large metal door that looked like it led to a walk-in refrigerator. Nothing else, not even a locked pantry.

Out of a compulsion to be thorough more than anything else I went over to the refrigerator. There was a small window at eye level, made of thick plate glass, and to my surprise, it revealed that there was a light on inside the walk-in. Since I had always believed that the light goes out when you close the door, I stuck my nose to the glass and peeked in.

The refrigerator was about six feet wide and stretched back a good eight feet. There were rows of shelves on each side, most of them loaded with a series of large, gallon-size jars, and stuck up against the back wall was something you don't usually see in a refrigerator: an old folding cot.

And stranger than that, the cot was occupied. Sitting there quietly, huddled up inside a blanket, was a bundle that appeared to be a young human female. Her head was down and she was not moving, but as I watched she raised her head slowly, as if she was exhausted or drugged, and her eyes met mine.

It was Samantha Aldovar.

Without a moment's thought I grabbed for the handle of the door and pulled. It was not locked from the outside, although I could see that it could not be opened from the inside. "Samantha," I called to her. "Are you all right?"

She gave me a weary smile. "Really great," she said. "Is it time?"

I had no idea what that meant, so I just shook it off. "I'm here to rescue you," I said. "Take you home to your parents."

"Why?" she said, and I decided that she was indeed doped. It made sense; drugs would keep her calm and reduce the amount of work it took to watch her. But it also meant I would have to carry her out of here.

"All right," I said. "Just a second." I looked around me for something to prop the door open, and settled on a large five-gallon cooking pot that hung from the rack above the stove. I grabbed it, stuck it between the refrigerator door and the frame, and went into the refrigerator.

I got just two steps in when I realized what was in all the jars that filled the shelves in the big refrigerator.

Blood.

Jar after jar, gallon after gallon, they were filled with blood, and for a very long moment I looked at the blood and it looked back and I could not move. But I took a deep breath, let it out, and reality slid back into focus. It was just a fluid, nicely locked away where it couldn't hurt anybody, and the important thing was to get Samantha and get out of here. So I took the last few steps to the cot and looked down at her.

"Come on," I said. "You're going home."

"Don't want to," she said.

"I know," I said soothingly, thinking that this was a clear example of Stockholm syndrome. "Let's go." I put an arm around her and lifted her off the cot and she came up without resistance. I slung her arm around my shoulder and walked her toward the door and freedom.

"Wait a sec," she said, and the words were a little slurred. "Need my purse. On the bed," she said, nodding toward the cot, and she took her arm off me and held on to the shelf.

"Okay," I said, and I returned to the cot and looked down. I didn't see a purse-but I did hear a clatter, and I turned around to see that Samantha had kicked the five-gallon pot out of the way and, as I watched, was pulling the refrigerator door closed.

"Stop!" I said, which felt even stupider than it sounds, and I guess Samantha thought so, too, because she didn't stop, and before I could get to her she had slammed the door shut and turned to look at me with an expression of half-glazed triumph on her face.

"Told you," she said. "I don't want to go home."

TWENTY-SEVEN

It was cold inside the refrigerator. you might think that would be obvious, but obviousness doesn't provide any warmth, and I had been shivering since the shock of Samantha's betrayal wore off. It was cold, and the small room was filled with jars of blood, and there was no way out, not even with the help of my tire iron. I had tried to shatter the small glass window in the refrigerator's door, which shows how low I had descended into panicked unreason. The glass was an inch thick and reinforced with wire, and even if I had managed to break it, the opening was barely big enough for one of my legs.

Naturally enough, I had tried to call Deborah on my cell phone, and of course, more naturally, there was no reception at all inside an insulated box with thick metal walls. I knew they were thick, because after I gave up trying to break the window and then bent the tire iron trying to pry open the door, I had hammered on the walls for a few minutes, which was almost as effective as twiddling my thumbs would have been. The tire iron bent a little more, the rows and rows of blood seemed to close in on me, and I started to breathe hard-and Samantha just sat and smiled.

And Samantha herself-why did she sit there with that Mona Lisa smile of perfect contentment? She had to know that at some point in the not-too-distant future, she would become an entree. And yet when I had arrived on my white horse in perfectly serviceable armor, she had kicked the door shut and trapped us both. Was it the drugs they had obviously fed her? Or was she so delusional that she believed they wouldn't really do to her what they had already done to her best friend, Tyler Spanos?

Gradually, as the impulse to hammer at the walls faded and the shivering took over, I began to wonder about her more and more. She paid no attention at all to my feeble and comical efforts to break out of a giant steel box with a cheesy piece of iron-it should have been called a "tire tin" in this case-and she just smiled, eyes half-closed, even when I gave up and sat beside her and let the cold get at me and take over.

It really started to annoy me, that smile. It was the kind of expression you might see on someone who had taken too many recreational downers after making a killing in real estate; filled with a relaxed sense of complete satisfaction with herself, all she had done, and the world as she had shaped it, and I began to wish they had eaten her first.

So I sat beside her and shivered and alternated anxiety with thinking terrible thoughts about Samantha. As if she hadn't behaved badly enough already, she didn't even offer to share her blanket with me. I tried to shut her out-difficult to do in a small and very cold room when you are sitting right next to the thing you want to forget, but I tried.

I looked at the jars of blood. They still made me faintly queasy, but at least they took my mind off Samantha's treachery. So much of the awful sticky stuff-I looked away, and finally found a patch of metal wall to stare at that was not filled with either blood or Samantha.

I wondered what Deborah was going to do. It was selfish of me, I know, but I hoped she was starting to get very worried about me. I had been gone just a little bit too long by now, and she would be sitting in the car and grinding her teeth together, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, glaring at her watch, wondering if it was too soon to do something and, if not, what that something ought to be. It cheered me up a little-not just the thought that she was certainly going to do something, but that she was fretting about it, too. It served her right. I hoped she would grind her teeth so hard she needed dental work. Maybe she could see Dr. Lonoff.

For no other reason than because I was anxious and bored, I took out my cell phone and tried to call her again. It still didn't work.

"That won't work in here," Samantha said in her slow and happy voice.

"Yes, I know," I said.

"Then you should stop trying," she said.

I know I was new to having human feelings, but I was pretty certain that the one she was inspiring in me was annoyance verging on loathing. "Is that what you've done?" I said. "Given up?"

She shook her head slowly with a kind of low-pitched two-syllable chuckle. "No way," she said. "Not me."

"Then for God's sake, why are you doing this? Why did you trap me in here and now you just sit there and smirk?"

She turned her head toward me and I got the feeling that she actually focused on me for the first time. "What's your name?" she asked.

I saw no reason not to tell her-of course, I also saw no reason not to slap her, but that could wait. "Dexter," I said. "Dexter Morgan."

"Whoa," she said, with another syllable of that annoying laugh. "Weird name."

"Yes, completely bizarre," I said.

"Anyway," she said. "Dexter. Do you have anything in your life that you really, really want?"

"I'd like to get out of here," I said.

She shook her head. "But something that's, you know. Like, totally, totally, ahh… forbidden? Like, really wrong? But you want it anyway, so much it's like-I mean, you can't even talk about it to anybody, but it's all you can think about sometimes?"

I thought about the Dark Passenger, and it stirred slightly as I did, as if to remind me that none of this had to happen if only I'd listened. "No, not a thing," I said.

She looked at me for a long moment, her lips parted but still smiling. "Okay," she said, as if she knew I was lying but it didn't really matter. "But I have. I mean, there is something. For me."

"It's wonderful to have a dream," I said. "But wouldn't it be a lot easier to make it come true if we got out of here?"

She shook her head. "Um, no," she said. "That's just it. I have to be in here. Or, you know. I don't get to-" And she bit her lip in a kind of funny way and shook her head again.

"What?" I said, and her coy act was nudging me even closer to an uncontrollable urge to rattle her teeth. "You don't get to what?"

"It's really hard to say, even now," she said. "It's kind of like…" She frowned, which was a pleasant change. "Don't you have some kind of secret that, you know… you can't help it, but it makes you kind of, like, ashamed?"

"Sure," I said. "I watched a whole season of American Idol."

"But that's everybody," she said, waving a hand dismissively and making a sour-lemon face. "Everybody does that. I mean something that… You know, people want to fit in, be like everybody else. And if there's something inside you that makes you… You know it's totally wrong, weird; you'll never be like everybody else-but you still really want it. And that hurts, and it also makes you maybe more careful? About trying to fit in. Which is maybe more important when you're my age."

I looked at her with a little bit of surprise. I had forgotten that she was eighteen, and rumored to be bright. Perhaps whatever drugs they had given her were wearing off, and maybe she was just glad to have somebody to talk to for the first time in quite a while. Whatever the case, she was finally showing a little bit of depth, which at least removed one small layer of torture from durance vile.

"It's not," I said. "It stays important your whole life."

"But it feels so much more hurtful," she said. "When you're young, and it's like there's a party going on all around you, but you weren't invited." She looked away, not at the blood, but at the bare steel wall.

"All right," I said. "I do know what you mean." She looked at me encouragingly. "When I was your age, I was different, too. I had to work very hard to pretend to be like everyone else."

"You're just saying that," she said.

"No," I said. "It's true. I had to learn to act like the cool kids, and how to pretend I was tough, and even how to laugh."

"What," she said with another of her two-syllable chuckles. "You don't know how to laugh?"

"I do now," I said.

"Let's see."

I made one of my perfect happy faces, and gave her a very realistic that's-a-good-one chuckle.

"Hey, pretty good," she said.

"Years of practice," I said modestly. "It sounded pretty horrible at first."

"Uh-huh, well," she said, "I'm still practicing. And for me it's a whole lot harder than just learning to laugh."

"That's just teenaged self-involvement," I told her. "You think everything is harder for you, because it's you. But the fact is, being a human being is very hard work and it always has been. Especially if you feel like you're not one."

"I think I am," she said softly. "Just a really, really different kind."

"Okay," I said, and I admit that I was starting to feel a little bit intrigued. Who knew she would turn out to be such a person? "But that's not a bad thing. And if you can just give it some time, it might actually turn out to be a good thing."

"Yeah, right," she said.

"And you can't do that if you don't get out of here-staying here is a permanent solution to a temporary problem."

"That's cute," she said.

She was back to being flippant again, which frayed at my new human temper. She had begun to seem interesting, and I had opened up, started to like her, even felt real, actual empathy for her-and now she was slipping back into her aloof, teenage, you-can't-know disguise, and it made me just a little bit cranky and filled me with the urge to shake her up. "For God's sake," I said. "Don't you understand why you're in here? These people are going to cook you and eat you!"

She looked away again. "Yeah, I know," she said. "That's what I want." She looked back at me, her eyes large and moist. "That's my big secret," she said.

TWENTY-EIGHT

It's funny how many little sounds you can hear when you think you're sitting in absolute silence. For example, I could hear my heartbeat lub-dubbing away in my ears, and right next to me Samantha took a long, slow breath-and beyond that there was a metallic whirring sound as the little fan ticked on and blew more cold air across the length of the walk-in refrigerator, and I even heard something scuttling in a piece of paper under the cot I sat on, probably a palmetto bug or cockroach.

Even with all this thunderous noise, the most overwhelming sound was the all-enveloping white noise of Samantha's last words as they crashed and echoed around the little room, and after a while they stopped making sense to me, even the individual syllables, and I turned my head to look at her.

Samantha sat unmoving, the annoying smile once again in place on her face. Her shoulders were hunched and she looked straight ahead, not really avoiding eye contact so much as just waiting to see what might happen next, and at last it was more than I could stand.

"I'm sorry," I said. "When I said they're going to eat you, and you said that's what you want-what the hell do you mean?"

She was silent for several seconds, but at least her smile faded and her face settled into a look of dreamy thoughtfulness. "When I was really little," she said at last, "my father was always away somewhere, at a conference or whatever. So when he finally came home he would read these stories to me to make up. You know, fairy tales. And he would come to the part where the ogre or the witch eats somebody, and he would, you know. Make these eating noises and pretend to eat my arm, or my leg. And, you know, I mean, I'm just a kid, and I love it, and I'm like, 'Do it again, do it again.' And he'd go, 'Gobble gobble,' and I'd be laughing like crazy, and…"

Samantha paused and pushed a tuft of hair off her forehead. "After a while," she went on, quieter now, "I started to get older. And…" She shook her head, which made the hair fall back down onto her forehead, and she pushed it away again. "I realized it wasn't the stories I loved so much. It was… my dad gobbling on my arm. And the more I thought about it, the more it was just the idea of somebody eating me. Of having some witch or, you know, just somebody slowly, slowly roasting my body, and cutting off little slices, and eating me, and really… liking it. Liking me, and liking the way I tasted and…"

She took a deep breath and shuddered, but not from fear. "And I get, you know, puberty and all that. And all the other girls are talking about, 'Ooh, this boy, that one, I'd like to do whatever with him, and I'd let him do anything to me'-and I can't really get into that at all, all the squealing and comparing boys and-Because all I can think about, all I really want is, I want to be eaten." She began nodding her head rhythmically and speaking in a low husky voice. "I want to be slow-roasted while I'm still alive and can still watch these people chew me up and go, 'Yum, yum,' and come back for more until…"

She shivered again and pulled the blanket tighter around her shoulders, hugging herself tightly, and I tried to think of something to say, something better than asking if she'd thought of trying counseling. But nothing came to me, except a favorite remark of Deborah's.

"Holy shit," I said to Samantha.

She nodded. "Yeah, I know," she said.

Beyond that there did not seem to be very much to say, but after a moment I remembered that I was paid by the City of Miami to investigate things, so I asked her, "Tyler Spanos?"

"What?" she said.

"You two were friends," I said. "But you seemed to have nothing in common."

She nodded, and the half-dreamy smile slid back onto her face. "Yeah. Nothing except this," she said.

"This was her idea?"

"Oh, no," she said. "These people have been here for, you know, years." She nodded at the jars filled with blood and smiled. "But Tyler, she's a little wild?" She shrugged and her smile got bigger. "Was a little wild. She met this guy at a dark rave."

"Bobby Acosta?"

"Bobby, Vlad, whatever," she said. "So he's trying to impress her, you know, to hook up? And he says, 'I'm in this group; you wouldn't believe what we do. We eat people.' And she says, 'You can eat me,' and he thinks she doesn't get it and says, 'No, I mean really eat them.' And Tyler says, 'Yeah, well, I mean really, too, me and my friend.' "

Samantha shivered again and hugged herself tightly, rocking back and forth very slightly. "We had talked about finding somebody like this. I mean, we did the Yahoo chat groups and all, but it's mostly bullshit and porn, and anyway, how can you trust somebody you meet online? And now this guy comes right out with it and says, 'We eat people.' " She shivered more, really big this time. "Tyler comes to me and says, 'You won't believe what happened last night.' Which she says a lot, and I'm like, 'Okay, again?' And she says, 'No, really,' and she tells me about Vlad and his group…"

Samantha closed her eyes and licked her lips before going on. "It's like a dream come true," she said. "I mean, it's too good. I don't believe her at first. Because Tyler is-was-kind of flaky, and guys could see that and they would say stuff to her just, you know, to have sex with her? And I'm sure she'd taken X or something anyway, so how can I be sure this guy is for real? But she takes me to meet Vlad, and he shows us some pictures and things, and I think, 'This is it.' "

Samantha looked straight at me and brushed the hair from her forehead. It was nice hair, a mousy brown color, but clean and shiny, and she looked for all the world like a normal teenage girl telling a sympathetic adult about something interesting that happened in French class-until she started talking again.

"I always knew I would do this someday," she said. "Find somebody who would eat me. It's what I wanted most. But I thought it would be later, you know, after college or-" She shrugged and shook her head. "But here he was, and Tyler and me are like, 'Why wait?' Why should I spend my parents' money on college, when I can have what I want without it, right now? So we told Vlad, 'Okay, totally, we're in,' and he takes us to meet the head of the group, and…" She smiled. "Here I am."

"And Tyler isn't," I said.

Samantha nodded. "She was always lucky. She got to go first." The smile got bigger. "But I'm next. Soon."

And her apparent eagerness to follow Tyler into the cauldron dried up all my professional zeal, and I had nothing more to say. Samantha just watched me to see what I would do-and for the first time in my life, I had absolutely no idea what that would be. What is the correct facial expression to put on when someone tells you their lifelong fantasy is to be eaten? Should I go for shock? Disbelief? What about moral outrage? I was quite sure the subject had never come up in any of the movies or TV shows I had studied, and even though I am considered a clever and creative person in some circles, I could not imagine anything at all that might be appropriate.

So I stared, and Samantha looked back at me, and there we were: a perfectly normal married man with three kids and a promising career who just happened to enjoy killing people, staring at a perfectly normal eighteen-year-old girl who went to a good school and liked Twilight and who wanted to be eaten, sitting next to each other in a walk-in refrigerator at a vampire club in South Beach. I had been trying so hard lately to achieve some close approximation of normal life, but if this was it, I thought I would prefer something else. Outside of Salvador Dali I really can't believe the human mind could handle anything more extreme.

And at last even the mutual staring began to seem too strange, even for two dedicated non-humans like us, and we both blinked and looked away.

"Anyway," she said. "It doesn't matter."

"What doesn't matter?" I said. "Wanting to be eaten?"

She shrugged, an oddly genuine teen gesture. "Whatever," she said. "I mean, they'll be here soon."

I felt like someone was tickling my spine with an icicle. "Who will?" I said.

"Somebody from the coven," she said, and she glanced back at me. "That's what they call it. The, you know. The group that, um, eats people."

I thought of the file I had seen on the computer. Coven. I wished I had copied it and run for home. "How do you know they're coming?" I said.

She shrugged again. "They have to feed me. Like, three times a day, you know."

"Why should they?" I said. "If they're just going to kill you, why do they have to take care of you?"

She gave me a you-are-so-dumb look, combined with a head shake. "They're going to eat me, not kill me," she said. "They don't want me to get all sick and skinny. I gotta be, you know. Chubbed up. Marbled. For flavor."

Between my job and my hobby I have to say without bragging that I have a pretty strong stomach, but this was putting it to a real test. The idea that she would cheerfully eat three healthy meals a day so her flesh would taste better was just a little too much before breakfast, and I turned away again. But happily for my appetite, a practical thought nudged its way in. "How many of them will come?" I asked.

She looked at me, then looked away. "I don't know," she said. "It's usually just two guys. In case, you know, I decide to change my mind and run. But…" She looked at me. And then down at her feet. "I think Vlad is coming with them this time," she said at last, and it did not sound like a happy thought.

"Why do you think that?" I said.

She shook her head but did not look up. "When it was going to be Tyler," she said, "he started to come with them. And he would, you know… do things to her." She licked her lips but still did not look up. "Not just, you know… Not sex. I mean, not normal sex. He, um. He really, really hurt her. Like that was how he got off, and…" She shuddered, and at last she looked up. "I think that's why they put stuff in my food, some kind of tranquilizer?" she said. "So it keeps me, you know, kind of calm and quiet? Because otherwise…" She looked away again. "Maybe he won't come," she said.

"But at least two guys will come?" I said.

She nodded. "Yeah."

"Are they armed?" I said, and she looked up at me, blank. "You know, knives, guns, bazookas? Are they carrying any weapons?"

"I don't know," she said. "I mean, I would."

I thought that I would, too, and although it might have been uncharitable, I also thought that I would have noticed what weapons my captors were carrying. Of course, I didn't think of myself as a banquet, and that would almost certainly affect my powers of observation.

So there would be two of them, probably armed, which probably meant guns, since this was Miami. And it might mean Bobby Acosta, too, who would have some kind of weapon, since he was a wealthy fugitive. And I was in a small room with no place to hide, and I was burdened with Samantha, who would probably yell, "Watch out!" at them if I tried to surprise them. On the plus side, my heart was pure and I had a bent tire iron.

It wasn't much, but I have learned that if you examine the situation carefully, you can almost always find a way to improve your odds. I stood up and looked around the room, thinking that someone might have left an assault rifle lying on a shelf; I even made myself touch the jars and look behind them, but no such luck. "Hey," Samantha said. "If you're thinking, like, you know-I mean, I don't want to be rescued or anything."

"I think that's wonderful," I said. "But I do." I looked at her, sitting there hunched up in her blanket. "I don't want to be eaten. I have a life, and a family. I have a new baby," I said, "and I want to see her again. I want to watch her grow up, and read her fairy stories."

She flinched a little bit and looked uncertain. "What's her name?" she said.

"Lily Anne."

Samantha looked off to the side again, and I could see her trying to swim through the doubt, so I pushed a little. "Samantha," I said. "Whatever it is you want, you don't have the right to force it on me." I felt remarkably hypocritical preaching to her, but after all, there was an awful lot at stake, and in any case I had been practicing hypocrisy all my adult life.

"But-I want this," she said. "I mean, my whole life…"

"Do you want it enough to kill me?" I said. "Because that's what you're doing."

She looked at me and then looked away again quickly. "No," she said. "But…"

"Yes, but," I said. "But if I don't get past the guys who feed you, I am going to be dead, and you know that."

"I can't just give this up," she said.

"You don't have to," I told her, and she looked at me attentively. "All you have to do is let me escape, and you can stay here."

She chewed on her lower lip for a few seconds. "I don't know," she said. "I mean, how can I trust you not to, you know. Call the cops and come storming back here to get me?"

"By the time I could get back here with the cops," I said, "they will have moved you someplace else."

"Yeah," she said, nodding slowly. "But how do I know you won't, like, drag me out of here and, you know. Save me from myself?"

I went down on one knee in front of her. It was melodramatic, I know, but she was a teenager, and I thought she would probably buy it. "Samantha," I said. "All you have to do is just let me try. Do nothing, and I won't try to get you out of here against your will. You have my solemn word of honor." There was no crash of thunder, not even the sound of distant laughter, and in spite of my recent epidemic of unpleasant emotions, I felt no shame. And I believe I did it very convincingly. In fact, I think it was the performance of a lifetime-I didn't mean a word of it, of course, but under the circumstances I would gladly have promised her a ride on my flying saucer if it would get me out of here.

And Samantha began to look more than half-convinced. "So-I don't know. I mean, what. I just sit here and like don't say anything? That's all?"

"That's all," I said. I took her hand and looked deep into her eyes. "Please, Samantha," I said. "For Lily Anne." Totally shameless, I know, but to my surprise, I found I actually meant it-and even worse, I felt moisture collecting in the corners of my eyes. Perhaps it was just a Method actor moment, but it interfered with my vision and was extremely disconcerting.

And, apparently, extremely effective. "All right," she said, and she actually squeezed my hand. "I won't say anything."

I squeezed back. "Thank you," I said. "Lily Anne thanks you." Again, maybe a bit over-the-top, but there were so few guidelines for this situation. I stood and picked up my tire iron. It wasn't much, but it was better than nothing. I went to the door and tried to wedge myself in beside the frame, where I would be invisible if they looked through the small window first. I chose the side closest to the handle; the door opened outward, and it would be much easier for them to see into the other corner. I had to hope that they would not notice anything and, after glancing in and seeing Samantha in her place on the cot, they would simply walk in unsuspecting. Then with any luck at all it would be one-two, snicker-snak, and Dexter would go galumphing back.

I had been scrunched into my place for about five minutes when I heard voices coming faintly through the thick door. I took a deep breath, let it out slowly, and tried to make myself even smaller in my corner. I looked at Samantha, and she licked her lips, but nodded at me. I nodded back, and then I heard someone pulling on the door's handle and the big door swung open.

"Sooo-wee, piggy," somebody said, with a very mean-sounding chuckle. "Oink, oink."

A man stepped through carrying a red nylon insulated bag. I brought the tire iron down on his head, hard, and he pitched forward without another sound. Like greased lightning, I stepped around his body and into the doorway, holding my tire iron up, ready for anything -except for the huge arm that was already swinging at my face and sweeping me back against the wall, and I had time for only one quick glimpse of the massive bouncer with the shaved head, as he pinned me with a forearm across my throat, and Bobby Acosta standing behind him yelling, "Kill the fucker!"

And then the bouncer swung a fist the size of a grand piano at my chin and I was gone into darkness.

TWENTY-NINE

I was far away in a place where tiny sparks of light flittered through a great sea of darkness and Dexter swam through it with legs made of lead and arms that did not move at all with a very unpleasant buoyancy that seemed to float up from a queasiness in my center and there was no other thought or feeling of any kind except for mere being for a very long time until finally, from far away, an urgent sound came in to me and carried on its back a very strong idea that tumbled into focus in one crystal-clear syllable: Ow! And I became aware that "ow" was not a mystic word for use in meditation, nor a lost land of the Bible, but, in fact, the only way I could succinctly sum up the State of Dexter, from shoulders upward. Ow…

"Come on, wake up, Dexter," a soft female voice said, and I felt a cool hand on my forehead. I had no idea whose hand, nor whose voice, and in truth it really did not seem nearly as important as the fact that my head was an endless ocean of pain and I could not move my neck.

"Dexter, please," the voice insisted, and the cool hand patted my cheek a great deal harder than seemed to be polite, strictly speaking, and each little pat-pat sent an echoing wave of ow rolling through my head, and at last I found the controls for my arms and moved one up to brush away the hammering hand.

"Ow," I said out loud, and it sounded like the distant cry of a large and weary bird.

"You're alive," the voice said, and then that damned hand came back and patted my cheek again. "I was really worried." I thought I might have heard that voice before, but I couldn't say where, and it wasn't a high priority at the moment, considering that my head was filled with flaming oatmeal.

"Owww," I said again, with a little more force. It was really all I could think of to say, but that didn't matter, since it summed things up so nicely.

"Come on now," the voice said. "Open up your eyes, Dexter. Come on."

I thought about that word: "eyes." I was pretty sure I knew that one. Something to do with, um-seeing? Located somewhere in or near the face? That sounded right, and I felt a dull and dim glow of pleasure; I got one right. Good boy.

"Dexter, please," the female voice said again. "Open up, come on." I felt her hand move again, as if to pat my cheek, and the sheer annoyance of that idea sparked a memory-I could open my eyes like this. I tried it. The right one popped open while the left fluttered a few times before finally coming open to a blurry world. I blinked them both several times and the picture settled into focus, but it did not make any sense.

I was looking straight up at a face only a little more than a foot away from my own. It was not a bad face, and I was pretty sure I had seen it before. It was young, female, and creased with concern at the moment, but as I blinked at it and tried to remember where I had seen it, it broke into a smile. "Hey, there you are," she said. "You had me so totally worried." I blinked again; it was an awful lot of work, and it was just about all I could manage. Trying to think at the same time was just too hard, so I stopped blinking.

"Samantha," I croaked, and I was very pleased with myself. That was the name that went with that face. And her face was so close to mine because my head was resting in her lap.

"The one and only," she said. "Nice to have you back with us."

Things were slowly filtering into my throbbing brain: Samantha, cannibals, refrigerator, giant fist… It took some work, but I began to connect the separate thoughts and the picture came slowly together into a memory of what had happened-and it was far more painful than my head and I closed my eyes again. "Owww…" I said.

"Yeah, you said that already," Samantha said. "I don't have any aspirin or anything, but this might help-here." I felt her turn a bit under me and I opened my eyes. She held a large plastic water bottle up and twisted the top off. "Take a sip," she said. "Slow. Not too much, you might hurl."

I sipped. The water was cool, with a very faint taste I couldn't identify, and as I swallowed I realized how parched and sore my throat was. "More," I said.

"A little bit at a time," Samantha said, and she let me take another small sip.

"Good," I said. "I was thirsty."

"Wow," she said. "Three whole words together. You're really coming around." She took a sip, too, and then put the water bottle down.

"Could I have a little more?" I said, and added, "That's six words."

"It sure is," she said, and she sounded happy with my wonderful new talent for using multiple words. She held the bottle to my lips and I took another sip. It seemed to ease the muscles in my throat and brought a slight relief to my headache, as well as a growing awareness that things were not entirely as they should be.

I turned my head to look around, and was rewarded with an electrifying stab of pain running from my neck right up through the top of my head. But I could also see a little bit more of the world than Samantha's face and shirt, and the picture was not encouraging. There was a fluorescent strip light overhead, and it lit up a light green wall. In the place where reason said a window might have been, there was a plain, unpainted piece of plywood. And I could see nothing else without moving my head some more, which I very definitely did not want to do, considering the searing pain I had just experienced moving it this far.

I slowly rolled my head back to where it had been and tried to think. I did not recognize my surroundings, but I was no longer in the refrigerator, at least. I could hear a mechanical rattle nearby, and I knew it, as any Floridian would, as the sound of a window air conditioner. But neither that nor the plywood told me anything important.

"Where are we?" I asked Samantha.

She swallowed a sip of water. "In a trailer," she said. "Way out in the Everglades somewhere, I don't know. One of the guys in the coven has like fifty acres out here with this thing on it, trailer, for hunting. And they brought us here, like, totally isolated. Nobody will ever find us out here." She sounded happy about that, but at least she remembered to look a little guilty about it and tried to cover it with a sip of water.

"How?" I said, and it sounded croakish again, and I reached for the water bottle. I took another swig, a bigger one this time. "How did they get us out of the club?" I said. "With nobody seeing us?"

She waved a hand, and the movement jolted my head-a slight jolt, but a much larger pain. "They rolled us up in rugs," she said. "These two guys in overalls come in and carry out the rugs, with us inside, and dump 'em into a van, and just drive us out here. 'Gonzalez Carpet Cleaners,' it said. Easy." She gave a half smile, half shrug, and took a sip of water.

I thought about it. If Deborah had still been watching, seeing two large bundles carried out would certainly have made her suspicious-and, being Debs, if she got suspicious she would have jumped out with her gun drawn and stopped them right then and there. So she had not been watching-but why not? Would she really abandon me, her own dear brother? Leave me to a fate worse than death, although certainly including it? I didn't think she would, not willingly. I took a sip of water and tried to think it through.

She would not willingly leave me. On the other hand, she couldn't really call in backup-her partner was dead, and she was technically doing something just a little bit outside department regulations and, for that matter, the Florida Penal Code. So what would she do?

I took another sip of water. The bottle was more than half-empty now, but it did seem to ease the pain in my head a bit-not that the pain went away, but hey-it wasn't really so bad. I mean, pain meant I was alive, and who was it who said, "Where there's life there's hope"? Maybe Samantha knew-but as I opened my mouth to ask her she took the water bottle back and took a big sip and I remembered I was trying to think about what my sister would have done, and why that led to my being here.

I took the bottle back from Samantha and sipped the water. Deborah wouldn't leave me like that. Of course not. Deborah loved me. And the realization flooded into me-I loved her, too. I took another swig of water. It's a funny thing, love. I mean, to realize this at my age was weird, but I was actually surrounded by so much love-my whole life, from my adoptive parents, Harry and Doris; they didn't have to love me-I wasn't really their kid-but they did. They did love me, like so many others, all the way up to now, with Debs-and Rita, Cody, Astor, and Lily Anne. Beautiful, wonderful, miraculous Lily Anne, the ultimate bringer of love. But all those others, too, they all loved me in their own way Samantha took the water bottle and sipped, and it hit me with a tremendous rush of insight: Even Samantha had shown me so much love. She had proved it by risking everything that meant anything to her, everything she had always wanted, just to give me a chance to escape! Wasn't that an act of pure love?

I took another sip of water and felt myself completely surrounded by all these wonderful people, people who loved me even though I had done some very bad things-but what the hell, I had stopped, hadn't I? Wasn't I now trying to live a life of love and responsibility, in a world that had suddenly blossomed into a place of wonder and joy?

Samantha grabbed the bottle and took a big swig. She handed it back and I finished it eagerly-delicious, the best water I'd ever tasted. Or maybe I was just appreciating things more. Yes. The world was really an amazing place after all, and I fit in perfectly. And so did Samantha. What a wonderful person she was. She had taken care of me, too, and she didn't have to. And she was taking care of me now! Nurturing me and stroking my face with what could only be called love-what a wonderful girl she was! And if she wanted to be eaten-wow: I had an epiphany. Food is love-so wanting to be eaten was just another way to share love! And that was the way Samantha had chosen because she was so filled with love she couldn't possibly hope to express it except in some ultimate form like this! Amazing!

I looked up at her face with a new appreciation. This was a wonderful, giving person. And even though it hurt my neck, I had to show her that I understood what she was doing and truly appreciated what a wonderful, beautiful person she was-so I raised my arm up and put my hand on her face. The skin felt soft, warm, vibrantly alive, and I rubbed the palm of my hand softly across her cheek for a moment. She looked back at me, smiling, and put her hand back on my face.

"You are so beautiful," I said. "I mean, just saying the word, 'beautiful'-that doesn't really sum it up, except in a kind of superficial way that only talks about the outside and doesn't really get at the true, absolute depths of what I mean by beautiful-especially in your case, because I think I just understood what it is you're doing with this whole 'eat me' business-I mean, you're beautiful on the outside, too; that's not what I mean, not to take any of that away from you, because I know it's important to a girl. A woman. You're eighteen; you're a woman, I know, because you've made a very adult choice with what to do with your life, and there's no turning back from it, which makes it a really adult choice, and I'm sure you understand the consequences of your decision, and there can't be a better definition of adulthood than that, to make a decision with ultimate consequences and know you can't turn back from it, and I really admire you for that. And also because like I said you are really, really beautiful."

Her hand rubbed my face and then slid down across my neck and through the collar of my shirt and she rubbed my chest. It felt good. "I know what you're saying exactly and you are the first person who I think really understood what it means for me to go through all this-" She took her hand away from my chest to wave it in the air, indicating everything all around us, and I reached up and pulled it back down onto my chest because it felt really good and I wanted to keep touching her. She smiled and rubbed softly across my chest again. "Because it isn't something that's easy to understand, I know that, and that's one reason why I never thought I could ever talk about it to anybody and why, you know, I've been so completely alone for most of my life, all of it really, because who could ever understand something like this? I mean, if I just say it to somebody, 'I want to be eaten,' then it's gotta be like this whole, 'Oh, my God, we're getting you to a shrink' thing and nobody ever looking at you like you're normal ever again and I feel like this is totally normal, a totally normal expression of-"

"Love," I said.

"You do understand!" she said, and she slid her hand lower, across my stomach, and then back up onto my chest again. "Oh, God, I knew you would get it, because even when we were in that refrigerator there was just something about you that was different from everybody else I have ever met in my whole life and I thought maybe just once before it happens I can talk to somebody who really gets it and they won't look at me like I'm some kind of perverted sick twisted freak monster!"

"No, no, you're just so beautiful," I said. "Nobody could ever think that about you, just even your face is so amazing-"

"No, but that's not it-"

"No, I know that, that's not what I mean," I said. "But it's part of what makes you who you are, and to see that part really leads to understanding about the rest-I mean, if you're not a total idiot, you can't look at your face and not think, Wow, what an incredible person, and then to see that the insides are even more beautiful is just amazing." And because mere words could not really express it completely and I really wanted her to understand what I meant, I pulled her face down to mine and kissed her. "You are beautiful inside and out," I said.

She smiled with an incredible warmth and appreciation that just made me feel like everything would always be all right. "You are, too," she said, and she lowered her face and kissed me again and this time the kiss was longer and it led into another kind of feeling that was new for me and I could tell that it was new for her, too, but neither one of us wanted to stop until she stretched out beside me on the floor as we kissed and after a long time of that she did stop, just for a second, and said, "I think they put something in the water."

"I don't think that matters," I said. "Because what we have started to understand doesn't really come from anything you can put in water because it comes from inside us, the real inside, and it is really true, which I know you can feel as well as I can." I kissed her and she kissed back for a minute before she stopped and put both hands on my cheeks.

"In any case," she said, "even if it is just something in the water it doesn't matter because I always kind of thought that this is just so important-I mean love, and you know, I mean, not just the kind that you feel but the kind you do and I thought, I'm eighteen; I should do it at least once before I check out, don't you think?"

"At least once," I said, and she smiled and closed her eyes and brought her face back to mine and we did.

More than once.

THIRTY

"i'm thirsty," Samantha said. There was a whining note in her voice. I found it irritating but I didn't say anything. I was thirsty, too. What was the point to saying it again? We were both thirsty. We had been thirsty for some time. The water was all gone. There wasn't any more. That was the least of my problems: My head hurt, and I was trapped in a trailer in the Everglades, and I had just done something I couldn't begin to understand. Oh, and somebody was coming to kill me, too.

"I feel sooooo stupid," Samantha said. And again, there was very little to say in response. We both felt stupid, now that whatever was in the water had worn off, but she seemed to have more trouble accepting that we had acted under the influence of the drugs. As we had come back to our senses Samantha had gradually looked uncomfortable, then nervous, and then downright alarmed, scrabbling around the trailer for articles of clothing that had been enthusiastically misplaced. In spite of how awkward she made it look, I decided it was the right idea. I found and put on all my clothing, too.

And a small touch of intelligence returned to me with my pants. I got up and looked over the trailer from one end to the other. It didn't take long. It was only around thirty feet long. All the windows were securely boarded with three-quarter-inch marine plywood. I thumped on them. I threw my full weight against them. They didn't budge. They were reinforced from the outside.

There was only one door. Same story: Even when I ran my shoulder against it, I got nothing except more pain in my head. Now I had a matching pain in my shoulder. I sat down to nurse it for a few minutes. That was when Samantha had started whining. Apparently putting her clothes on made her feel she could complain about almost anything, because it didn't end with the water. And through some mean-spirited trick of acoustics or plain bad luck, the pitch of her voice was in perfect resonance with the throbbing of my head. Every time she complained it sent an extra pulse of dull pain deep into the battered gray tissue in my cranium.

"It smells… funky in here," she said.

It did actually smell funky, a combination of very old sweat, wet dog, and mold. But it was far beyond pointless to mention something when there was nothing we could do about it. "I'll get my herbal sachet," I said. "It's out in the car."

She looked away. "You don't have to get sarcastic," she said.

"No," I said. "But I do have to get out of here."

She didn't look at me, and she didn't have any response, which seemed like a small blessing. I closed my eyes and tried to will away the thumping anguish. It didn't work, and after a minute Samantha interrupted again.

"I wish we hadn't done that," she said. I opened my eyes. She still looked away, over to a plain corner of the trailer. It was completely barren and blank, but apparently better to look at than me.

"Sorry," I said.

She shrugged, still looking away. "It's not your fault," she said, which I thought very generous, though accurate. "I knew there was probably something in the water. They always put something in." She shrugged again. "I never had ecstasy before, though."

It took me a moment to realize she meant the drug. "Me either," I said. "Is that what it was?"

"I'm pretty sure," she said. "I mean, from what I heard. Tyler said-she takes it a lot-took it a lot." She shook her head and then she actually started to blush. "Anyway. She said it makes you want to… I mean, touch everybody and… you know. Be touched."

If that had indeed been ecstasy, I would have to agree. I would also have to say that either we had taken far too much, or it was a very powerful drug. I could nearly blush myself when I remembered what I had said and done. Trying to become a little more human was one thing-but this had been far over the edge into the sludge of dumb, yammer-headed personhood. Perhaps the stuff should be called excess-tasy. In retrospect, I was very glad there was a drug to blame. I did not like to think of myself as behaving like a cartoon.

"Anyway, I got to do it," Samantha said, still blushing. "I won't miss it much." Another shrug. "It wasn't that great."

I don't know an awful lot about what is popularly called "pillow talk," but I rather thought that this kind of honesty was not considered proper form. From the little I did know, I was pretty sure you were supposed to make flattering remarks, even if you thought it was a mistake. You said things like, "It was wonderful-let's not soil the memory by trying to equal that magic." Or, "We'll always have Paris." In this case, "We'll always have that horrible smelly trailer in the Everglades," didn't have quite the same ring, but at least she could have tried. Maybe Samantha was getting revenge for the massive discomfort she was feeling, or maybe it was true and she, as a callow youth, didn't know she wasn't supposed to say such things.

In any case, it combined with my headache and activated a mean streak I didn't know I had. "No, it wasn't that great," I said. She looked at me now, with an expression that actually approached anger, but she didn't say anything, and after a moment she looked away again, and I took a last stretch and rub at my neck muscles and stood up.

"There has to be a way out of here," I said, more to myself than her, but of course she answered anyway.

"No, there doesn't," she said. "It's secure. They keep people here all the time, and nobody ever gets out."

"If they're always drugged, did anyone ever try?"

She half closed her eyes and slowly shook her head to indicate that I was stupid, and looked away. And maybe I was stupid, but not enough to sit and wait for them to come and eat me-not without trying my best to get away.

I went once more through the trailer. There was nothing new to see, but I looked at everything a little more carefully. There was no furniture at all, but down at the far end there was one built-in bench that had obviously served as a bed. It had a thin strip of foam rubber on it, covered by a ratty gray sheet. I lifted the mattress onto the floor. Under it there was a square of plywood fitted into an opening. I pulled up the plywood. Underneath was something that was clearly a locker. There was a very flat pillow inside, covered with a case that matched the sheet. The locker seemed to run the whole width of the trailer, although I could not see into the darkness on either side.

I pulled out the pillow. There was nothing else inside except a short length of an old two-by-four, maybe a foot and a half long. One end of it was cut to a very dull, flat point and there was dirt all over the tapered part. At the other end there were notches cut into each side, and a groove worn into the wood, possibly by rope. The wood had been used as a stake for whatever arcane reason, hammered into the ground to hold something or other with rope tied to it. There was even an old and bent nail stuck in the top to tie off the rope. I took the stake out and laid it beside the pillow. I stuck my head into the locker as far as I could, but there was nothing else to see. I pushed on the bottom and felt a little bit of give, so I pushed harder and was rewarded with a whump-ah of flimsy metal bending.

Bingo. I pushed harder, and the metal visibly bent. I pulled my head out and stood up, stepping into the locker with both feet. I just barely fit into the opening, but it was enough, and I started to jump as hard as I could. It made a very loud booming sound, and after about the seventh boom! Samantha came to see what all the noise was.

"What are you doing?" she said, which struck me as silly as well as annoying.

"Escaping," I said, and gave an extra hard jump. Boom!

She watched as I jumped several more times, and then shook her head and raised her voice, very thoughtfully, so I could hear her negativity over the noise. "I don't think you can get out like that," she said.

"The metal is thin here," I said. "Not like the floor."

"It's the tensile strength," she said in her loud voice. "Like surface cohesion in a cup of water. We did this in physics."

I took a second to marvel at the kind of physics class that taught its students about the tensile strength of a trailer's floor when one is escaping from a cannibal coven, and then I paused in midjump. Perhaps she was right-after all, Ransom Everglades was a very good school and they probably taught things that never made it into the public school curriculum. I stepped out of the locker and looked at what I had accomplished so far. It wasn't much. There was a noticeable dent, but nothing that could really inspire hope.

"They'll be here way before you get out like that," she said, and somebody who lacked charity might have said she was gloating.

"Maybe so," I said, and my eye fell on the two-by-four. I did not actually say, "Aha!" but I certainly had one of those moments when the lightbulb goes on. I picked up the chunk of wood and worried out the old nail. I wedged the head of it into a crack on the point of the stake, and placed the point in the center of the dent I had already made. Then, with a significant glance at Samantha, I pounded on the top of the stake as hard as I could.

It hurt. I counted three splinters in my hand.

"Ha," Samantha said.

It has been said that behind every successful man there is a woman, and by extension we can say that behind every escaping Dexter is a really annoying Samantha, because her happiness at seeing me fail spurred me to new heights of inspiration. I took off my shoe and fitted it over the top of the stake and smacked it experimentally. It didn't hurt nearly as much, and I was sure I could hammer it hard enough to make a hole in the locker's floor.

"Ha yourself," I said to Samantha.

"Whatever," she said, and walked back to where she had been sitting in the middle section of the trailer.

I went right back to work, pounding on the sole of my shoe with all my strength. I paused after a couple of minutes and looked; the dent had gotten much deeper, and there were signs of stress at the edges. The point of the nail had gone into the metal, and a few more minutes could very well see a small hole; I went back at it with a will. After two more minutes, the tone of the thumping seemed to change, and I pulled out the stake and had another look.

There was a small hole all the way through, just large enough to see daylight under the trailer. With a little more time and effort, I was sure I could punch through, enlarge the hole, and be on my way.

I wiggled the point of the stake back into the opening as far as I could and pounded even harder. I could feel it sinking slowly through, and then suddenly I pounded and the stake dropped several inches. I stopped pounding and began to work the wood back and forth, stretching the metal back, making the hole as big as possible. I worked it and worried it and jammed the stake sideways and even put my shoe back on and kicked at it, and for twenty minutes the metal of the trailer fought back, but at last I had a way out.

I paused for a moment, looking at the hole I had made. I was exhausted and sore and soaked with sweat, but I was one step away from freedom.

"I'm outta here," I called to Samantha. "This is your last chance to get away."

"Bye-bye," she called back. "Have a nice trip." It seemed a little bit callous after all we had gone through together, but it was probably all I would get from her.

"Okay," I said, and I climbed into the locker, pushing my legs down into the hole I had made. My feet touched ground and I wiggled the rest of me downward. It was a very tight fit, and I felt first my pants and then my shirt catch on the metal edges and tear. I held my arms up above my head and kept wiggling and in just a moment I was through, sitting on the warm and wet dirt of the Everglades. I could feel it soak through my pants, but it felt wonderful, much better than the floor of the trailer.

I took a deep breath; I was free. Around me was the trailer's concrete-block foundation, holding it several feet off the ground. There were two gaps in it, one of them close by and opposite the trailer's door. I rolled onto my stomach and crawled toward it. And just as my head poked out into the light of day and I began to think I was going to get away, a massive hand came down and grabbed me by the hair. "That's far enough, asshole," a voice snarled at me, and I felt myself lifted almost straight up with only a short pause to bang my head against the trailer. Through the bright lights bursting in my already painful head I could see my old friend, the bouncer with the shaved head. He threw me up against the side of the trailer and, as he had when he knocked me out in the refrigerator, he pinned me with a forearm across my throat.

Behind him I could see that the trailer sat in a small clearing, surrounded by the lush vegetation of the Everglades. A canal ran along one side, and mosquitoes hummed and homed in on us happily. Somewhere a bird called. And from a path at the near end of the clearing came Kukarov, the club manager, followed by two other nasty-looking men, one of them carrying the insulated lunch bucket and the other a leather tool pouch.

"Well, piggy," Kukarov said with a truly awful smile. "Where do you think you're going?"

"I have a dentist's appointment," I said. "I really can't miss it."

"Yes, you can," Kukarov said, and the bouncer slapped me, hard. On top of the growing collection of head pains I already had, it hurt far more than it should have.

People who know me well will tell you that Dexter never loses his temper, but enough was enough. I swung my foot up, fast and hard, and kicked the bouncer in the crotch with enough force to make him let go of me and bend over, and he began to make small retching noises. And since that had been so easy and rewarding I turned to face Kukarov with my hands raised to fighting position.

But he was holding a pistol, and pointing it directly between my eyes. It was a very large and expensive pistol, a.357 Magnum by the look of it. The hammer was pulled back, and the only thing darker than the hole at the end of the barrel was the expression in his eyes.

"Go ahead," he said. "Try it."

It was an interesting suggestion, but I decided against it, and raised my hands up high. He watched me for a moment and then, backing away a few steps without taking his eyes off me, he called to the others. "Tie him up," he said. "Smack him around a little, but don't damage the meat. We can use a male piggy."

One of them grabbed me and pulled my arms behind me, hard enough to hurt, and the other one started pulling duct tape off a roll. He had just gotten a few loops around my wrists when I heard what might be the most beautiful sound I had ever heard in my life-the squeal of a bullhorn, followed by Deborah's voice coming through it.

"This is the police," she said. "You are surrounded. Drop your weapons and lie facedown on the ground."

The two helpers flinched away from me and looked at Kukarov with their mouths hanging open. The bouncer was still leaning on his knees and retching. Kukarov snarled. "I'll kill this asshole!" he shouted, and I could see his finger tighten on the trigger as he raised the pistol.

A single shot split the air and the front half of Kukarov's head disappeared. He whipped away sideways as if pulled by a rope and fell in a heap on the ground.

The two other cannibals dove to the ground in unison, and even the bouncer flopped over onto his face, and I watched as Deborah charged out of the vegetation at the edge of the clearing and ran toward me, followed by at least a dozen police officers, including a bunch of heavily armed and armored guys from SRT, the Special Response Team, and Detective Weems, the ebony giant from the Miccosukee Tribal Police.

"Dexter," Deborah called. She grabbed me by the arms and looked into my face for a moment. "Dex," she said again, and it was gratifying to see a little anxiety on her face. She patted my arms and almost smiled, a very rare display for her. Of course, since it was Debs, she had to spoil the effect immediately. "Where's Samantha?" she said.

I looked at my sister. My head was pounding, my pants were torn, my throat and my face hurt from the bouncer's rough treatment, I was embarrassed by what I had recently done, my hands were still taped behind me-and I was thirsty. I had been beaten, kidnapped, drugged, beaten again, and threatened with a very large revolver, all without a single complaint-but Debs could only think about Samantha, who was well fed and sitting inside in air-conditioned comfort-sitting there willingly, even eagerly, whining about minor discomforts while I tried and failed to dodge all the slings and arrows and, I could not fail to notice, an increasing number of mosquitoes that I could not swat with my hands taped behind me.

But of course, Deborah was family, and anyway I couldn't use my hands, so slapping her was out of the question. "I'm fine, sis," I said. "Thank you for asking."

As always, it was wasted on Deborah. She grabbed my arms and shook me. "Where is she?" she said. "Where is Samantha?"

I sighed and gave it up. "Inside the trailer," I said. "She's fine." Deborah looked at me for a second and then whirled away around the trailer to the door. Weems followed her and I heard a loud crunching noise as he apparently pulled the door off its hinges. A moment later he wandered past, the door dangling by its knob from one enormous hand. Debs came right after him with an arm around Samantha, leading her away to the car and murmuring, "I've got you, you're all right now," to a plainly pissed-off Samantha, who was hunched over and muttering, "Leave me alone."

I looked around the little clearing. A handful of cops in SRT outfits were cuffing Kukarov's guys, none too gently. Things were definitely winding down-except for a new and frantic burst of activity from the nine million mosquitoes that had found my unprotected head. I tried to swat them away-impossible, of course, with my hands taped behind me. I shook my head to scare them away, but it didn't work, and it hurt so much that it wasn't worth it even if it did. I tried to wave my elbows at them-also impossible, and I thought I heard the mosquitoes laughing at me and licking their chops as they called all their friends to the feast.

"Could somebody please undo my hands?" I said.

THIRTY-ONE

I did eventually get the duct tape off my wrists. after all, I was surrounded by cops, and it would have been terribly wrong for so many sworn officers of the law to keep me tied up as if I was some kind of-well, to be honest, I actually was some kind of, but I was trying really hard not to be one anymore. And since they did not know what I had been, it made sense that sooner or later one of them would take pity on me and cut me loose. And one of them finally did: It was Weems, the gigantic man from the tribal police. He came over and looked at me, a very large smile growing on his very large face, and shook his head. "Why you standing there with your hands all taped up?" he said. "Nobody love you no more?"

"I guess I'm just a low priority," I said. "Except to the mosquitoes."

He laughed, a high-pitched and overly joyful sound that went on for several seconds-much too long, in my still-taped opinion, and just when I was thinking of saying something rather sharp he pulled out a huge pocketknife and flipped the blade open. "Let's get you slapping flies again," he said, and motioned with the blade for me to turn around.

I was happy to oblige, and very quickly he laid the edge of the knife onto the tape binding my wrists. The knife was apparently very sharp; there was almost no pressure at all, and the tape burst open. I brought my hands in front of me and peeled off the tape. It also peeled off most of the hair on my wrists, but since my first swat at the back of my neck squashed at least six mosquitoes, it seemed like a good trade-off.

"Thank you very much," I said.

"No problem," he told me in that soft, high voice. "Nobody oughta be all bound up like that." He laughed at his own great wit and I, thinking it was the least I could do in return for his kindness, gave him a small sample of my very best fake smile.

"Bound up," I said. "That's very good." I might have been laying it on a bit thick, but I was grateful, and in any case my head still hurt too much for any really good comeback to blossom in it.

It wouldn't have mattered in any case, because Weems was no longer paying attention. He had gone very still, tilted his nose up into the air, and half closed his eyes as if he were hearing something calling his name in the far distance.

"What is it?" I said.

He didn't say anything for a moment. Then he shook his head. "Smoke," he said. "Somebody got an illegal fire going out there." He jerked his chin in the direction of the heart of the Everglades. "This time of year, that's not good."

I didn't smell anything except the standard loamy Everglades aroma, plus sweat and a faint trace of gunpowder that still hung in the air, but I was certainly not going to argue with my rescuer. Besides, I would have been arguing with his back, since he had already spun away and headed off toward the edge of the clearing. I watched him go, rubbing my wrists and taking my terrible vengeance on the mosquitoes.

There was really not a great deal more to see around the trailer. The regular cops were frog-marching the cannibals away to durance vile, and the viler the better, as far as I was concerned. The SRT guys were standing around one of their own, probably the one who had made the shot that took off Kukarov's face; his expression was a combination of ebbing adrenaline and shock, and his fellow shooters watched him protectively.

Altogether, the excitement was fading and it was clearly time for Dexter's Departure. The only problem, of course, was that I had no transportation, and depending on the kindness of strangers is always an iffy thing. Depending on the kindness of family is often much worse, of course, but it still seemed like the best bet, so I went to look for Deborah.

My sister was sitting in the front seat of her car trying to be sensitive, nurturing, and supportive of Samantha Aldovar. These were not things that came naturally to her, and it would have been tough sledding even if Samantha were willing to play along. She was not, of course, and the two of them were rapidly approaching an emotional impasse when I slid into the backseat.

"I'm not going to be all right," Samantha was saying. "Why do you keep saying that like I'm some kind of ree-tard?"

"You've had a really big shock, Samantha," Debs said, and in spite of the fact that she clearly meant to be soothing, I could almost hear quotation marks around her words, as if she was reading from The Rescued Hostage Handbook. "But it's over now."

"I don't want it over, goddamn it," she said. She looked back at me as I closed the car door. "You bastard," she said to me.

"I didn't do anything," I said.

"You brought them here," she said. "This was all a setup."

I shook my head. "Nope," I said. "I have no idea how they found us."

"Riiiiight," she sneered.

"Really," I said, and I turned to Debs. "How did you find us?"

Deborah shrugged. "Chutsky came out to wait with me. When the carpet van came, he slapped a tracer on it." It made sense: Her boyfriend, Chutsky, a semiretired intelligence operative, would certainly have the right sort of toys for that. "So they carried you out and drove away; we stayed back and followed. When we all got out here in the swamp, I called in for SRT. I really hoped we'd get Bobby Acosta, too, but we couldn't wait." She looked back at Samantha. "Saving you was the highest priority we had, Samantha."

"For fuck's sake, I didn't want to be saved," Samantha said. "When are you going to get that?" Deborah opened her mouth, and Samantha rode right over her with, "And if you say I'm going to be all right again, I swear to God I'll scream."

To be honest, it would have been a relief if she had screamed. I was so tired of Samantha's carping that I was ready to scream myself, and I could see that my sister was not far behind me. But apparently Debs still nurtured the delusion that she had rescued an unwilling victim from a terrible experience, and so even though I could see her knuckles turn white with the effort of refraining from strangling Samantha, Deborah kept her cool.

"Samantha," she said very deliberately. "It's perfectly natural for you to be a little confused right now about what you're feeling."

"I am so totally not confused," Samantha said. "I'm feeling pissed off, and I wish you hadn't found me. Is that perfectly natural, too?"

"Yes," Deborah said, although I could see a little doubt creeping into her face. "In a hostage situation, the victim often starts to feel an emotional bond with her captors."

"You sound like you're reading that," Samantha said, and I had to admire her insight, even though her tone still set my teeth on edge.

"I'm going to recommend that your parents get you some counseling-" Deborah said.

"Oh, great, a shrink," Samantha said. "That's all I need."

"It will help you if you can talk to somebody about all that's happened to you," Deborah said.

"Sure, I can't wait to talk about all that's happened to me," Samantha said, and she turned and looked right at me. "I want to talk about all of it, because some stuff happened that was, you know, totally against my will, and everybody is really going to want to hear about that."

I felt a sharp and very unwelcome shock-not so much at what she said, but at the fact that she was saying it to me. There was no way to mistake what she meant; but would she really tell everyone about our little ecstasy-inspired interlude, and claim it was against her will? It hadn't occurred to me that she would-after all, it was kind of a private thing, and it hadn't actually been my will, either. I hadn't put the drugs into the water bottle, and it certainly wasn't something I would ever brag about.

But an awful sinking feeling began to bloom in my stomach as her threat began to hit home. If she claimed it had been against her will-technically speaking, the word for that was "rape," and although it was really quite far outside my normal area of interest, I was pretty sure the law frowned on it, nearly as much as some other things I had done. If that word came up, I knew that none of my clever and wonderful excuses would count for anything. And I could not really blame anyone for believing it; older man about to die, penned up with young woman, no one would ever know-it was a picture that wrote its own caption. Perfectly believable-and totally unforgivable, even if I thought I'd been about to die. I had never heard a rape defense based on extenuating circumstances, and I was pretty sure it wouldn't work.

And no matter what I said, even if Dexter's eloquence overflowed the bounds of human speech and moved the marble statue of justice to tears-the very best outcome would be he-said/she-said, and I would still be a guy who'd taken advantage of a helpless captive girl, and I knew very well what everyone would think of me. After all, I had cheered aloud every time I heard about older married men losing their jobs and their families for having sex with younger women-and that was exactly what I had done. Even if I convinced everyone that the drugs made me do it and it really wasn't my fault, I would be finished. Drug-induced teen sex party sounded more like a tabloid headline than an explanation.

And not even the greatest lawyer who had ever lived could get me off the hook with Rita. There was still a lot I did not understand about human beings, but I had seen enough daytime drama to figure this one out. Rita might not believe I had committed rape, but that wouldn't matter. She would not care if I had been bound hand and foot, drugged, and then forced to have sex at gunpoint. She would divorce me when she found out, and she would raise Lily Anne without me. I would be all alone, out in the cold without roast pork, with no Cody and Astor, and no Lily Anne to brighten my days; Dex-Daddy Dumped.

No family, no job-nothing. She would probably even take custody of my fillet knives. It was terrible, hideous, unthinkable; everything I cared about yanked away, my entire life flung into the Dumpster-and all because I'd been drugged? It was far beyond unfair. And some of this must have shown on my face, because Samantha kept looking at me, and she began to nod her head.

"That's right," she said. "You just think about that."

I looked back at Samantha and I did think about it. And I wondered if just this once I could dispose of somebody because of something they hadn't done yet; proactive playtime.

But luckily for Samantha, before I could even reach for the duct tape Deborah decided to impose herself again in the role of compassionate rescuer. "All right," she said. "This can all wait. Let's just get you home to your parents now." And she put her hand on Samantha's shoulder.

Naturally enough, Samantha pushed the hand off as if it were a loathsome insect. "Great," she said. "I can't fucking wait."

"Put your seat belt on," Deborah told her, and, completely as an afterthought, she turned to me and said, "I guess you can ride along."

I almost told her, No, don't bother, I will stay here and feed mosquitoes, but at the last second I remembered that Deborah's record with sarcasm was not good, so I just nodded and buckled up.

Deborah called the dispatcher and said, "I've got the Aldovar girl. I'm taking her home," and Samantha muttered, "Big whoopee-shit." Deborah just glanced at her with something that looked like a rictus but was probably supposed to be a reassuring smile, and then she put the car in gear, and I had a little over half an hour to sit in the backseat and picture my life splintering into a million decorative shards. It was a terribly depressing picture-Dexter Disenfranchised, tossed on the scrap heap, stripped of his carefully built costume and all its comfy props-flung naked and unloved into the cold and lonely world, and I could see no way to avoid it. I'd had to go down on my knees and beg just to get Samantha to do nothing while I tried to escape-and she had been neutral then. Now that she was peeved with me, there was nothing I could possibly do to stop her from telling, short of actual vivisection. I couldn't even give her back to the cannibals; with Kukarov dead and the rest of the group either captured or on the run, there would be no one left to eat her. The picture was grim and very clear: Samantha's fantasy was over, she blamed me, and she would take her terrible revenge-and there was nothing I could do about it.

I have never really had an appetite for irony, but I couldn't help but see more than a little of it here: After all I had done, willingly and joyfully, and now I would be brought down by a sulking young woman and a bottle of water? It was so subtly ludicrous that only the French could truly appreciate it.

Just to underline my predicament and her own determination, Samantha turned and glared at me every few miles as we drove the long, depressing way to her home, back along Route 41 and then over LeJeune and into the Grove to the Aldovars' house. And just to remind me that even the worst joke has a punch line, when we turned down Samantha's street and approached her house, Deborah muttered, "Shit," and I hunched forward and looked through the windshield at what appeared to be a carnival in front of the house.

"That goddamned son of a bitch," she said, and she smacked the steering wheel with the palm of her hand.

"Who?" I said, and I admit I was eager to see somebody else take a little heat.

"Captain Matthews," she snarled. "When I called it in, he got the whole fucking press corps here so he can hug Samantha and jut his fucking chin at the cameras."

And sure enough, as Deborah brought the car to a stop in front of the Aldovars' house, Captain Matthews appeared at the passenger door as if by magic, and reached in to help a still-sullen Samantha out of the car as flashbulbs popped and even the horde of savage reporters murmured, "Awwww." The captain flung a protective arm around her shoulders and then waved commandingly at the crowd to move aside and let them through-a truly great moment in the history of irony, since Matthews had summoned them all here to watch this exact moment, and now he was pretending he wanted them to leave him alone while he comforted Samantha. I admired the performance so much that for a full minute I only worried about my future two or three times.

Deborah did not seem quite as impressed as I was. She trailed along behind Matthews with a wicked scowl on her face, shoving at any reporter foolish enough to get in her way, and generally acting like she had just been indicted for waterboarding. I followed the happy little group through the crowd until Matthews reached the front door, where Mr. and Mrs. Aldovar were waiting to smother their wayward daughter with hugs and kisses and tears. It was an extremely touching scene, and Captain Matthews played it perfectly, as if he had been rehearsing for months. He stood beside the family group and beamed at them as the parents snuffled and Samantha scowled and finally, when he could sense that the reporters were reaching the end of their attention span, he stepped in front of them and held up a hand.

Just before he spoke to the crowd, he leaned over to Deborah and said, "Don't worry, Morgan; I won't make you say anything this time."

"Yes, sir," she said through her teeth.

"Just try to look proud and humble," he told her, and he patted her shoulder and smiled at her as the cameras rolled. Deborah showed him her teeth, and he turned back to the crowd.

"I told you we would find her," Matthews told the crowd in a manly growl, "and we found her!" He turned around and looked at the Aldovar trio so the reporters would get a shot of him gloating protectively at them. Then he turned back around and gave a short speech of praise for himself. Of course there was no word about Dexter's terrible sacrifice, nor even Deborah's diligence, but perhaps that would have been too much to expect. It went on predictably enough for a little longer, but finally the Aldovars went in their house, the reporters got tired of the captain's chin, and Deborah grabbed my arm, pulled me through the crowd to her car, and took me home.

THIRTY-TWO

Deborah drove up to dixie highway and turned south toward my house without speaking, but after a few minutes the angry glare faded from her face, and her hands on the wheel lost their white-knuckled grip. "Anyway," she said at last, "the important thing is that we got Samantha."

I admired my sister's ability to identify the "important thing," but I really felt I should point out that it was the wrong one, because it did not include me. "Samantha didn't want to be got," I said. "She wants to be eaten."

Deborah shook her head. "Nobody wants that," she said. "She said that because she's maybe a little fucked-up, and she started to identify with the assholes that grabbed her. But wants to be? I mean, eaten?" She made the sour-lemon face again and shook her head. "Come on, Dex."

I could have told her that I was quite convinced, and that she would be, too, if she talked to Samantha for five minutes. But when Deborah makes up her mind, it takes a written order from the police commissioner to change it, and I didn't think there was one in the works.

"And besides," she said, "she's back with her family now, and they can get her a shrink or whatever. The more important thing for us is to wrap this thing up, round up Bobby Acosta and the last of the group."

"The coven," I told her, and maybe I was being pedantic. "Samantha says it's called a coven."

Deborah frowned. "I thought that was witches," she said. "It's apparently cannibals, too," I said.

"I don't think you can call a group of guys a coven," she said stubbornly. "I think it has to be witches. You know, women."

It seemed like such a small point, especially after all I had just been through, and I was far too tired to argue it. Happily, my time with Samantha had prepared me to give exactly the right response. "Whatever," I said. Deborah seemed satisfied with that, and after a few more empty remarks we were at my street. Deborah let me out in front of my house and drove off, and I thought no more about it in the pleasure of being home.

Home was waiting for me, and for some reason I found that surprising and touching. Deborah had called Rita and told her I would be late, not to worry, everything was fine, which seemed very close to callous overconfidence on her part. Rita had seen the news, though, which had made the capture into the evening's lead story-and really, how could they possibly resist? Cannibals, missing teen, Everglades shootout-it was a perfect story. There had already been a phone call from a premium cable network, trying to get the rights to the story.

In spite of Deborah's reassurance, Rita had known somehow that I was right in the middle of things and in grave danger, and she responded like a true champion. She was waiting for me at the door in a state of ditherhood that was unmatched in my experience. "Oh, Dexter," she sniffled as she half-drowned me in hugs and kisses. "We were so-It was on the news, and I saw you there, but even after Deborah called," she said, and kissed me again. "The children were watching TV, and Cody said, 'It's Dexter,' and I looked-It was a newsbreak," she said, I suppose reassuring me that I had not made a surprise guest appearance on SpongeBob. "Oh, my God," she went on, pausing to shudder and then hug me, burying her head up to the shoulders in my neck. "You shouldn't have to do those things," she said, with a great deal of justice. "You're supposed to do forensics and-You don't even have a gun, and it isn't-How can they-But your sister said, and on TV they said it was the cannibals and they had you, and at least you found that girl, which I know was very important, but oh, my God, cannibals, I can't even think how-And they had you, and they could have-" And she finally broke off, possibly from oxygen deprivation, and concentrated on snuffling into my shirt for a minute.

I took advantage of the break to look around with satisfaction at my modest kingdom. Cody and Astor were sitting on the couch watching us with matching expressions of disgust at the emotional exhibition, and right next to them sat my brother, Brian, beaming a huge and dreadful smile at one and all. Lily Anne was in her basket beside the couch, and she waved her toes at me in a warm and heartfelt greeting. It was a perfect family picture, suitable for framing; The Hero Returns to His Home. And although I was not completely pleased to see Brian here I could think of no reason to wish him gone, either. Besides, all the good will was infectious, even the artificial stuff coming from my brother, and the air was filled with a wonderful, saliva-inducing aroma that I recognized as one of the great miracles of the modern world: Rita's roast pork.

Dorothy was right. There's no place like home.

It would have been terribly rude to tell Rita she had snuffled long enough, but I had been through an awful lot, including starvation, and the smell that filled the house was setting off a frenzy in my guts that made the overdose of ecstasy look tame. Rita's roast pork was a great work of art that could have made a statue lunge off its pedestal and cry, "Yummy!" So after I managed to disengage myself and dry my shoulder, I thanked her profusely and headed straight for the table, with only a brief pause to see Lily Anne and count her fingers and toes, just to make sure they were all still there.

And so we sat around the table, looking like a perfect family portrait, and it occurred to me how deceptive pictures can be. At the head of the table, of course, sat Dex-Daddy, a true monster trying to be a little more human. At his left was Brother Brian, a far worse monster and still completely unrepentant; and across from him sat two fresh-faced, innocent-seeming children, who wanted nothing more than to be just like their wicked uncle. And all of them wearing totally fake expressions of the deepest, most mundane humanity possible. It would have made a wonderful subject for Norman Rockwell, especially if he was feeling particularly sardonic.

Dinner went its tasty way, the silence broken mostly by lip smacking, moans of pleasure, and Lily Anne demanding to be fed, probably overcome by the smell and sound of the pork roast. Rita would occasionally shatter the silence with small non sequiturs of concern, rambling on until someone held out their plate for more-which we all did several times, except Lily Anne. And as the meal meandered on to its end and we proved again that "leftover roast pork" was an oxymoron in our house, I was very glad indeed to have returned in one piece to my little nest.

The feeling of bloated satisfaction continued, even after dinner, when Cody and Astor stampeded for the Wii and a game that involved killing awful-looking monsters, and I sat on the couch burping Lily Anne while Rita cleaned up. Brian sat next to me, and we watched the kids absentmindedly for a while before Brian finally spoke.

"Well," he said at last. "So you survived your run-in with the coven."

"Apparently," I said.

He nodded and, as Cody obliterated a very nasty-looking creature, Brian called out, "Good one, Cody!" After a moment he turned back to me and said, "And have they caught the head witch yet?"

"George Kukarov," I said. "He was shot and killed on the scene."

"The man who ran that club, Fang?" he said, with surprise in his voice.

"That's right," I said. "And I have to say it was a very good shot, and just in time."

Brian was silent for a minute, and then said, "I always thought the head of a coven had to be a woman."

This was the second time tonight someone had argued with me about this, and I was a little tired of hearing about it. "It really isn't my problem," I said. "Deborah and her task force will round up the rest of them."

"Not if she thinks that Kukarov guy is the leader," he said.

Lily Anne erupted with a small but explosive belch, and I felt it soak slowly through the towel and into my shirt as she settled her head down and nodded off to sleep. "Brian," I said. "I have spent a very bad day with these people, and I'm all done. I don't care if the real leader of the coven is a man, or a woman, or a two-headed lizard from the Planet Nardone. It's Deborah's problem, and I'm all done with it-and why do you care, anyway?"

"Oh, I don't care," he said. "But you're my little brother. Naturally I'm interested."

And I might have said something else, something really cutting, but Astor overwhelmed any possible response with an anguished wail of "Nooooooo!" and we both jerked around to look at the TV screen, just in time to see the little golden-haired figure that represented her on-screen being eaten by a monster. Cody said, "Ha," quietly but triumphantly, and raised his controller; the game went on, and I thought no more about witches, covens, and my brother's interest in them.

The evening wound relentlessly on to its conclusion. I found myself yawning, hugely and loudly, and even though it was a little bit embarrassing, I could not stop myself. Of course, the dreadful ordeal I had been through was taking its toll on my poor battered system, and I am sure that roast pork is loaded with tryptophan or something like it. Perhaps it was the combination, but whatever the case it soon became plain to all that Dex-Daddy was on the ropes and about to join Lily Anne in Dreamland.

And just as I was about to excuse myself from the delightful company-several of whom would not have noticed, judging from their concentration on the video game-the swelling notes of "Ride of the Valkyries" began to pour out of Brian's cell phone. He pulled it from its holster and glanced at it, frowning, and almost immediately stood up and said, "Oh, darn. I'm afraid I have to leave at once, as delightful as the company may be."

"It may be," Astor muttered, watching Cody rack up points on the screen, "but it isn't yet."

Brian gave her his large and phony smile. "It is for me, Astor," he said. "It's family. But," he said, and the smile got wider, "duty calls, and I have to go to work."

"It's night," Cody said without looking up.

"Yes, it is," Brian said. "But sometimes I have to work at night." And he looked at me happily, almost as if he was about to wink at me, and my curiosity overcame my sleepiness.

"What kind of work are you doing right now?" I asked him.

"Service industry," he said. "And I really do have to go." He patted me on the shoulder, the one that Lily Anne wasn't using, and said, "And I'm sure you need your sleep after all you've been through."

I yawned again, which made it pointless to deny that I really did need sleep. "I think you're right," I said, and I stood up. "I'll walk you out."

"No need," Brian said, and headed for the kitchen. "Rita? I thank you again for another wonderful meal and a delightful evening."

"Oh," Rita said, and she came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel. "But it's still early, and-Did you want some coffee? Or maybe-"

"Alas," Brian said, "I really do have to leave posthaste."

"What does that mean?" Astor said. " 'Posthaste'?"

Brian winked at her. "It means, quick as a mailman," he said, and he turned back to Rita and gave her a clumsy hug. "Many thanks, dear lady, and good night."

"I'm just so sorry that-I mean, it is getting a bit late for work, and you-Maybe a new job? Because this isn't really-"

"I know," Brian said. "But this job actually matches my skill set perfectly." He looked at me, and I felt a cold nausea burble up in the pit of my stomach. He had only one skill that I knew of, and as far as I knew, nobody would pay him for it. "And," he went on to Rita, "it does have its compensations, and at the moment I do need to do it. And so, a fond farewell to one and all," he said, and he raised his hand, presumably in fond farewell, and headed for the door.

"Brian," I said to his back, and I had to stop as another real jaw-creaker of a yawn took control of my entire body.

Brian turned back with a raised eyebrow. "Dexter?" he said.

I tried to remember what I had been about to say, but another yawn hammered it out of my head. "Nothing," I said. "Good night."

Once again his terrible fake smile stretched across his face. "Good night, brother," he said. "Get some sleep." And he opened the front door and was gone into the night.

"Well," Rita said. "Brian really is getting to be one of the family."

I nodded, and I could feel myself sway slightly, as if nodding my head might overcome my balance and pitch me face-forward onto the floor. "Yes, he is," I said, and of course I punctuated it with a yawn.

"Oh, Dexter, you poor-You need to get to bed right now; you must be-Here, give me the baby," Rita said. She threw the dish towel into the kitchen and rushed over to grab Lily Anne. In my sadly depleted state it seemed barely short of amazing that she could move so fast. But in no time at all she had Lily Anne tucked into her basket and was propelling me down the hall to the bedroom. "Now," she said, "you take a nice hot shower and get into bed, and I think you should sleep late in the morning. They can't really expect-I mean, after all you've been through?"

I was far too tired to respond. I did manage to stumble through a shower before falling into bed, but even though I could feel the accumulated slime and grime of the dreadful day all over me, it was hard work to stay awake under the stream of hot water long enough to get thoroughly clean, and it was with a feeling of almost supernatural bliss that I finally collapsed onto the pillow, closed my eyes, and pulled the sheet up to my chin…

And naturally enough, once I was actually in bed, I couldn't sleep at all. I lay there with my eyes closed, and I could feel a deep sleep welling up just on the other side of the pillow, but it would not come to me. I listened to Cody and Astor down the hall, still playing the Wii, now a little more hushed at Rita's insistence, since I was, as she told them, trying to sleep-and I was trying, really I was, but I was having no success.

Thoughts trudged through my brain like a slow-motion parade. I thought about the four of them just down the hall: my little family. It still seemed faintly bizarre. Dex-Daddy, protector and provider, family man. Even more bizarre was that I liked it.

I thought about my brother. I still didn't know what he was up to, why he kept coming around. Was it really possible that he simply wanted to feel some kind of family connection? It was very hard to believe-but then, it would have been just as hard to believe it about me before Lily Anne, and here I was, forswearing all Dark Delights and wallowing in the bosom of a real family. Maybe Brian wanted the same simple, human connection. Maybe he wanted to change, too.

And maybe I could clap my hands three times and bring Tinker-bell back to life, too. It was just as likely; Brian had lived his whole life on the Dark Path and he couldn't possibly change, not that much. He had to have some other reason for shoehorning into my nest, and sooner or later it would come out. I didn't think he would hurt my family-but I would watch him until I knew for certain what he was doing.

And of course, I thought about Samantha and her threat to tell all. Was it just a threat, an acting out of her large frustration at being alive and well and uneaten? Or would she really talk, tell everyone a vindictive version of what had happened? The moment that awful word "rape" was out, everything changed forever, and not for the better. It would be Dexter in the Docket, ground to a pulp beneath the wheels of the injustice system. It was horrible beyond measure, and completely unfair. No one who knew me could possibly think of me as a leering sex-mad ogre. I had always been a very different kind of ogre. But people believe cliches, even when they're untrue, and the older man with the teen girl qualified as one. It truly wasn't my fault-but who would hear that without a wink and a smirk? I hadn't willingly taken the drugs-would she really punish me for a situation in which I had been the real victim? It was hard to say for sure, but I thought she might. And that would destroy every piece of my carefully constructed life.

But what could I do? I could not avoid the idea that killing her would solve everything-and I could even get her to cooperate by promising to nibble a few small pieces before I finished her off. I wouldn't, of course-yuck-but if a small lie makes somebody happy, where's the harm?

It would never come to that, anyway. It seemed like another great irony, but I couldn't kill Samantha, as much as we both wanted it. Not that I had grown a conscience yet; it was just that it would be totally contrary to the Harry Code, and far too dangerous, too, since she was very much in the spotlight right now, much too closely watched for me to get close. No, it was too risky. I would have to think of some other way to save my life.

But what? The solution would not come to me, and neither would slumber, and the thoughts kept up their leaden tumbling across the soggy floor of my sleep-starved brain. Covens-who cared if it was led by a woman or a man? Kukarov was dead, and the coven was over.

Except for Bobby Acosta. Maybe I could find him and feed him Samantha. And then give him to Deborah. It would cheer them both up.

Debs really needed cheering: She had been acting very weird lately. Did it mean something? Or was it just the emotional hangover from her knife wound?

Knives-could I really give up my Dark Delights forever? For Lily Anne?

Lily Anne: I thought about her for what seemed like a long time, and then suddenly it was morning.

THIRTY-THREE

I took Rita's advice and slept late the next morning. I woke up to the sounds of an empty house; a distant drip in the shower, the air conditioner coming on, and the tick of the dishwasher switching gears down the hall in the kitchen. I lay there for a few minutes enjoying the relative quiet and the feeling of dopey fatigue that ran through me from my toes to my tongue. Yesterday had been quite a day and, on the whole, I thought it was a very good thing that I had survived it. My neck was still a little stiff, but the headache was gone and I felt a lot better than I should have-until I remembered Samantha.

So I lay there awhile longer wondering if there was anything at all I could do to persuade her not to talk. There was a very small chance that I could reason with her, I suppose. I had managed it once, in Club Fang's refrigerator, and reached soaring heights of emotive rhetoric I had never touched before. Could I do it again, and would it work on her a second time? I was not sure-and as I mulled my chances that moth-eaten line about "the tongues of men and of angels" popped into my head. I couldn't remember how it ended, but I didn't think it was happy. I wished I'd never read Shakespeare.

I heard the front door open and Rita hustled into the house, home from dropping the children at school. She went through the living room and into the kitchen making all the loud and distinct sounds of someone trying to be quiet. I heard her talking softly to Lily Anne as she changed a diaper, and then she went back into the kitchen and a moment later I heard the coffee machine clear its throat and begin to brew. Soon the smell of fresh coffee drifted into the bedroom, and I began to feel a little bit better. I was home, with Lily Anne, and all was well, at least for now. It was not really a rational feeling, but then, as I was learning, feelings never are, and you might as well enjoy the good ones while you can. There aren't very many of them, and they don't last long.

I sat up on the side of the bed at last, slowly rotating my neck to get the last of the soreness out of it. It didn't work, but it wasn't too bad. I stood up, which was a little harder than it should have been. My legs were stiff and a bit sore, too, and so I tottered into the shower and ran hot water all over myself for ten long and luxurious minutes, and it was a renewed and nearly normal Dexter who finally made his way into his clothes and all the way to the kitchen, where a medley of heavenly smells and sounds told me that Rita was hard at work.

"Oh, Dexter," she said, and she put down the spatula and gave me a kiss on the cheek. "I heard you in the shower, and so I thought-would you like some blueberry pancakes? I had to use the frozen berries, which aren't really as-But how are you feeling? Because it isn't-I could make you eggs instead and freeze the pancakes for-Oh, honey, sit down; you look exhausted."

I made it into a chair with Rita's help and said, "Pancakes would be wonderful," which they were. I ate far too many of them, telling myself that I had earned it, and trying not to listen to the wicked whisper in my inner ear saying that after all, this could be the last time, unless I did something final about Samantha.

After breakfast I sat in the chair and sipped several cups of coffee, in the vain hope that it would live up to the advertisement and fill me with energy. It was very good coffee, but it didn't quite wash away the fatigue, and so I dawdled around the house a bit longer. I sat and held Lily Anne for a while. She threw up on me once, and I thought how strange it was that it didn't bother me. And then she fell asleep in my arms and I just sat for a while longer and enjoyed that, too.

But finally the small and unwelcome voice of duty began to nag at me, and so I put Lily Anne in her basket, gave Rita a kiss, and headed out the door.

Traffic was light, and I let my mind wander a little bit as I headed up Dixie Highway, but as I nosed onto the Palmetto Expressway I began to get a very uneasy feeling that things were not what they should be and I brought Dexter's mighty brain back online and searched for what was wrong. It was a very quick search, not because of the power of my logic, but because of the power of the smell, which was coming from behind me, somewhere in the backseat of my car. It was a terrible smell, an odor of old and unnameable things decomposing and fermenting and growing deader and deader, and I could not say what it might be except that it was awful and getting worse.

I couldn't see anything behind me while driving, even when I tipped the mirror down, and as I drove north to work I pondered, until a school bus wandering across the road brought my attention back to driving. Even in light traffic it does not do to turn your thoughts away from the road, not in Miami, so I rolled down the window and concentrated on getting to work alive.

And as I pulled into the lot at work and slowed to nose into my parking spot, the smell built up again and I thought about it. The last time I had driven my car had been right before the whole mess with Samantha that started at Fang, and before that Chapin.

I had taken the car to my playdate with Victor Chapin, and I had carried away the leftovers in garbage bags when I was done-was it possible that some small piece had fallen out and was still there, slowly rotting in the heat of a car closed up all day, and now making this hideous smell? Unthinkable, I was always so careful-but what else could it be? The odor was far beyond dreadful, and now it seemed to get worse, fumes fanned by my near-panic. I stepped on the brake and turned all the way around to look A garbage bag. I had missed one somehow-but that was impossible, I could never be so stupid, so careless Except I had hurried that night, rushed through the whole thing to get it done and get back to bed. Laziness-stupid, selfish sloth, and now here I was at police headquarters with a bag of body parts in my car. I shoved the gear lever into park and climbed out, and the panic sweat was already soaking my back and rolling off my face as I opened the back door and knelt down to look.

Yes, a garbage bag. But how? How did it get here, on the floor in the backseat, when all the others had gone carefully into the trunk, and then And then a car pulled into the slot next to mine and after a bright stab of total panic I took a deep and calming breath. This was not a problem, not for me. Whoever it was, I would simply give them a cheerful hello and they would be off and into the building, and I would drive this bag of Chapin away. No big deal, I was just good old Dexter, the blood-spatter guy, and there was no one on the entire force who had any reason to think otherwise.

No one, except for the man who climbed out of the car and glared down at me. Or to be precise, the two-thirds of a man. His hands and feet were gone, of course, as well as his tongue, and he carried a small notebook computer to help him speak, and as I struggled for breath, he flipped it open and, without taking his eyes off me, he punched buttons to make an electronic sentence.

"What-is-in-bag?" Sergeant Doakes said through his computer.

"Bag?" I said, and I admit it was not my very best moment.

Doakes glared at me, and whether it was just the fact that he hated me and suspected me of being what I really was, or whether I actually looked guilty squatting there and fingering a bag of leftovers, I don't know. Whatever the case, I saw a bright gleam of something horrible flash into his eyes and before I could do anything except gape, Doakes jerked forward, whipped his metallic claw of a hand down, and grabbed the bag out of my car.

And as I watched with horror and dread and a growing sense of my own very imminent mortality, he placed his artificial voice box on the roof of the car, opened the bag, reached inside with a triumphant show of teeth at me-and pulled out a truly filthy, rotting, and horrible diaper.

And as I watched Doakes's face run the entire spectrum from victory to utter disgust, I remembered. As I had left for my impromptu session with Chapin, Rita had thrust the bag of dirty diapers at me. In my haste, I had left it for later. Then the whole business of Deke's death, my abduction, the dreadful episode with Samantha-it had all driven that tiny unimportant diaper bag out of my mind. But as the memory flooded back, I felt a rising happiness wash back in with it, made even tastier by the realization that Lily Anne, that wonderful, magical child-Lily Anne, the diaper queen, the paragon of poop-my own sweet Lily Anne had saved me with her dirty diapers. And even better, she had humiliated Doakes at the same time.

Life was good; fatherhood was once more a wonderful adventure.

I stood up and faced Doakes with great good cheer. "I know it's toxic," I said. "And it probably breaks several city ordinances, too." I held out my hand for the bag. "But I beg you, Sergeant, don't arrest me. I promise to throw it away properly."

Doakes turned his eyes away from the diaper and onto me, and he looked at me with an expression of loathing and rage so powerful that for just a moment it overpowered the open diaper bag. Then he very carefully said, "Nguggermukker," and opened the claw holding the bag. It dropped to the pavement, and a moment later the diaper he held in the other claw flopped down beside it.

"Nguggermukker?" I said brightly. "Is that Dutch?" But Doakes just grabbed his silver voice box from the roof of the car, turned away from me and the dirty diapers, and stomped away across the parking lot on his two artificial feet.

I felt utter and complete relief as I watched him go, and when he vanished at the far end of the parking lot I took a deep, relaxing breath-which was a very big mistake, considering what lay at my feet. Coughing slightly, and blinking away the tears, I bent down and pushed the diaper back into the bag, twisted the bag closed, and carried it to the Dumpster.

It was one-thirty in the afternoon by the time I finally got to my desk. I fiddled with a few lab reports, ran a routine test on the spectrometer, and suffered through a cup of truly despicable coffee while the hands on the clock trudged 'round the dial to four-thirty. And just when I thought I had made it safely all the way through my first day back from bondage, Deborah walked in with a horrible expression on her face. I could not read it, but I knew that something had gone terribly wrong, and it seemed to be something she was taking rather personally. And because I have known Deborah my whole life and I knew how her mind worked, I assumed it meant trouble for Dexter.

"Good afternoon," I said brightly, in the hope that if I was cheerful enough the problem would go away, whatever it was. It didn't, of course.

"Samantha Aldovar," my sister said, looking straight through me, and all my anxiety from the night before washed over me, and I knew that Samantha had talked already and Deborah was here to arrest me. My irritation with the girl went up several notches; she couldn't even wait a decent interval for me to come up with some kind of airtight excuse. It was as if her tongue was spring-loaded and had to burst out into furious activity the moment she took her first free breath. She had probably been babbling about me before the front door of her house even swung shut, and now it was all over for me. I was finished, washed up, completely-and with no pun intended-screwed. I was immediately filled with apprehension, alarm, and bitterness. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned discretion?

Still, it was done, and there was nothing left for Dexter except to face the music and pay the piper. So taking a deep breath, I looked it square in the face and did so. "It wasn't my fault," I said to Deborah, and I began to gather my soggy wits for Stage One of Dexter's Defense.

But Deborah blinked, and a small frown of confusion crept into the bleakness on her face. "What the fuck do you mean, it's not your fault?" she said. "Who said anything about-How could it possibly be your fault?"

Once again, I had the sensation that everyone else was working off a fully rehearsed script, and I was being asked to improvise. "I just meant-nothing," I said, hoping for a clue on what my line was supposed to be.

"Jesus fuck," she said. "Why is everything always about you?"

I suppose I could have said, Because somehow I am always in the middle of it, usually unwilling, and usually because you have pushed me there, but cooler heads prevailed. "I'm sorry," I said. "What's wrong, Debs?"

She stared at me a little longer, and then shook her head and slumped down in the chair beside my desk. "Samantha Aldovar," she repeated. "She's gone again."

Sometimes I think it is a very good thing that I have had so many years of practice at showing only what I want to show on my face, and this was absolutely one of those times, because my first impulse was to shout, Whoopee! Good girl! and burst into lighthearted song. And so it was quite possibly one of the greatest demonstrations of acting skill our age has yet seen when I managed instead to look shocked and concerned. "You're kidding," I said, thinking, I really hope you're not kidding.

"She stayed home from school today, resting," Deborah said. "I mean, she went through an awful lot." It apparently didn't occur to my sister that I had gone through even more, but nobody's perfect. "So around two o'clock, her mother went out to the store," she said. "And she comes back a little while ago, and Samantha was gone." Deborah shook her head. "She left a note: 'Don't look for me; I'm not coming back.' She ran, Dex. She took off and ran."

I was feeling so much better that I actually managed to fight down the impulse to say, I told you so. After all, Debs had refused to believe me when I told her Samantha had gone into cannibal captivity willingly, even eagerly, the first time. And since I was right about that, it made perfect sense that she would take off again at the first opportunity. It was not a terribly noble thought, but I hoped she found a good hiding place.

Deborah sighed heavily and shook her head again. "I never heard of Stockholm syndrome so strong the victim ran back to the bad guys," she said.

"Debs," I said, and now I really couldn't help it, "I told you. It's not Stockholm. Samantha wants to be eaten. It was her fantasy."

"That's bullshit," she said angrily. "Nobody wants that."

"Then why did she run away again?" I said, and she just shook her head and looked down at her hands.

"I don't know," she said. She stared at her hands where they lay in her lap, as if the answer might be written on her knuckles, and then she straightened up. "It doesn't matter," she said. "What matters is where she went." She looked up at me. "So where would she go, Dex?"

To be honest, I didn't really care where Samantha went, as long as she stayed there. Still, I had to say something.

"What about Bobby Acosta?" I said, and it made sense. "Did you find him yet?"

"No," she said, very grumpy, and she shrugged. "He can't stay lost forever," she said. "We're bringing way too much heat. Besides," she said, and she raised both palms, "his family has money, and political clout, and they're gonna figure they can get him off."

"Can they?" I asked.

Deborah looked at her knuckles "Maybe," she said. "Fuck. Yeah, probably. We got witnesses who can connect him to Tyler Spanos's car-but a good lawyer could chop up those two Haitians in two seconds on the stand. And he ran from me-but that's not much, either. The rest is guesswork and hearsay so far, and-Shit, yeah, I guess he could walk." She nodded to herself and looked at her hands again. "Yeah, sure, Bobby Acosta will walk," she said softly. "Again. And then nobody goes down for this…" She studied her knuckles again, and then looked up at me, and her face was wearing an expression unlike anything I had ever seen before.

"What is it?" I said.

Deborah bit her lip. "Maybe," she said. She looked away. "I don't know." She looked back at me and took a deep breath. "Maybe there's something, you know," she said. "Something you could do about it."

I blinked several times, and I just barely managed to stop myself from looking down to see if there was still a floor underneath our feet. It was impossible to misunderstand what she was suggesting. As far as Debs was concerned I only did two things, and my sister was not talking about using my forensic skills on Bobby Acosta.

Deborah was the one person on earth who knew about my hobby. I thought she had come to accept it, however reluctantly-but to have her suggest that I should actually use it on somebody was so completely outside the limits of what I thought Deborah would ever approve of that the idea never occurred to me, and I was truly stunned. "Deborah," I said, and the shock had to be showing in my voice. But she leaned as far forward as she could without tipping out of her chair and lowered her voice.

"Bobby Acosta is a killer," she said with savage intensity. "And he's going to walk-again-just because he's got money and clout. It's not right, and you know it-and that has to be the kind of thing that Dad wanted you to take care of."

"Listen," I said, but she wasn't quite done.

"Goddamn it, Dexter," she said, "I tried like hell to understand you, and what Daddy wanted with you, and I finally do-I get it, okay? I know exactly what Daddy was thinking. Because I'm a cop like he was, and every cop comes up against a Bobby Acosta someday, somebody who does murder and walks, even if you do everything right. And you can't sleep and you grind your teeth and you want to scream and strangle somebody but it's your job to eat the shit and like it and there's nothing you can do about it." She actually stood up, and she leaned her fist on my desk and put her face about six inches away from mine. "Until now," she said. "Until finally Daddy solved this whole thing, the whole fucked-up mess." She poked me in the chest. "With you," she said. "And now I need you to be what Daddy wanted you to be, Dexter. I need you to take care of Bobby Acosta."

Debs glared at me for several seconds as I scrambled for something to say. And in spite of my well-deserved reputation for a glib tongue and a ready wit, there were absolutely no words there for me to grab on to and speak. I mean, really; I had been trying so hard to reform, to live a normal life, and because of that I had been drugged, forced into an orgy, taunted and beaten by cannibals-and now my sister, a sworn officer of the law and a lifelong opponent of everything I held dear, was actually asking me to kill someone. I began to wonder if perhaps I was still lying somewhere, tied up and drugged, and hallucinating all this. The idea was very comforting-but my stomach was growling, and my chest hurt where Debs had poked me, and I realized that something so unpleasant was probably true, and that meant I had to deal with it.

"Deborah," I said carefully. "I think you're a little bit upset-"

"You're goddamned right I'm upset," she said. "I bust my ass to get Samantha Aldovar back, and now she's gone again-and I'm betting Bobby Acosta has her, and he's going to get away with it."

Of course, it would have been more accurate for Debs to say she had busted my ass getting Samantha back-but now was not the best time to correct her, and anyway I suspected she was right about Bobby Acosta. Samantha had gotten into this because of him, and he was one of the last people left who could still help her fulfill her dream. But at least it offered a way out of the awkward moment-if I could steer the conversation on to where Acosta was, rather than what to do with him.

"I think you're right," I said. "Acosta got her started on all this. Samantha would go to him now."

Deborah still didn't sit back down, and she was still looking at me with red spots on her cheeks and fire in her eyes. "All right," she said. "I'm going to find the little bastard. And then…"

Sometimes a short reprieve and a change of subject is the very best you can hope for, and clearly I was there now. I could only hope that in the time it took to find Acosta, Debs would calm down a little bit and decide that feeding her felon to Dexter was not the wisest course. Maybe she would shoot him herself. In any case, I was off the hook-temporarily, at least.

"Okay," I said. "How are you going to find him?"

Deborah straightened up and ran a hand through her hair. "I'll talk to his old man," she said. "He's got to know Bobby's best chance is to walk in here with a lawyer."

That was almost certainly true-but then, Joe Acosta was a rich and powerful man, and my sister was a tough and stubborn woman, and a meeting of two such people would probably go a lot smoother if at least one person present had just a tiny smidgen of tact. Deborah had never had any; she probably couldn't even spell it. And judging from his reputation, Joe Acosta was the kind of man who would buy tact if he ever needed any. So that left me.

I stood up. "I'll come with you," I said.

She studied me for a moment, and I thought perhaps she was going to tell me "no" out of sheer perverseness. But then she nodded. "Okay," she said, and she headed out the door.

THIRTY-FOUR

Like most people who live in miami, i knew a good deal about Joe Acosta from what I'd read in the newspapers. It seemed like he had been a county commissioner forever, and even before that little chunks of his life story had slipped into the media from time to time. It was the kind of story that makes for wonderful, heartwarming reading, a real boy-makes-good tale. Or in Acosta's case, perhaps it should be chico makes bueno.

Joe Acosta had come to Miami from Havana on one of the first Pedro Pan Freedom Flights. He had been young enough at the time to make an easy transition to America, but he stayed gusano enough over the years to keep a high standing in the Cuban community, and he had done very well for himself. He had gone into real estate in the boom time of the eighties and put all his profits into one of the first big developments south of South Miami. It had sold out in six months. And now Acosta's construction and development business was one of the largest in South Florida, and driving around town you saw a sign with his name on it at nearly every construction site. He was so successful that even the current financial meltdown apparently hadn't hurt him too badly. Of course, he didn't need to rely solely on his construction business. He could always fall back on the salary of six thousand dollars a year he made as a county commissioner.

Joe was about ten years into a second marriage, and it seemed like even the divorce had not wiped him out, because he still lived very well and publicly. He was often in the celebrity gossip section of the papers, pictured with his new wife. She was a British beauty who had been responsible for a number of truly terrible techno-pop dance hits in the nineties and then, when the public realized how awful her music was, she came to Miami, found Joe, and settled into a comfortable life as a trophy wife.

Acosta kept a business office on Brickell Avenue, and that's where we found him. He had the entire top floor of one of the newer skyscrapers that were remaking the Miami skyline into something that looked like a giant mirror had fallen from outer space and shattered into tall and jagged shards that were now jammed into the ground at random intervals. We got past the guard in the lobby and rode up to the top in a sleek elevator. Even Acosta's ultrachic steel-and-leather waiting room had a wonderful view of Biscayne Bay, though, and that turned out to be a good thing. We had plenty of opportunity to enjoy it, because Acosta kept us waiting for forty-five minutes; after all, there is no real point in having clout if you don't use it to make the police uncomfortable.

And it worked wonderfully well, at least on Deborah. I sat and flipped through a couple of very high-end sports-fishing magazines, but Deborah fidgeted, clenching and unclenching her hands and her jaw, crossing and recrossing her legs, and drumming her fingers on the arm of her chair. She looked like someone waiting for the methadone clinic to open.

After a while, I couldn't even concentrate on all the glossy pictures of ridiculously rich men with one arm around a bikinied model and the other around a big fish, and I put down the magazine. "Debs, for God's sake, stop fidgeting. You'll wear out the chair."

"That son of a bitch is keeping me waiting because he's up to something," she hissed.

"That son of a bitch is a busy man," I said. "As well as being rich and powerful. Besides, he knows you're after his son. And that means he can keep us waiting as long as he wants. So relax and enjoy the view." I picked up a magazine and offered it to her. "Have you seen this issue of Cigar Aficionado?"

Debs slapped the magazine away, making a thwack noise that sounded unnaturally loud in the hushed and clinical elegance of the waiting area. "I'm giving him five more minutes," she snarled.

"And then what?" I said. She didn't have an answer for that, at least not in words, but the look she gave me would almost certainly have curdled milk if I'd been holding any.

I never got to find out what she might have done after five minutes, because after only three and a half minutes more of watching my sister grind her teeth and jangle her legs like a teenager, the elevator door opened and an elegant woman strolled past us. She was tall, even without the spike heels, and her platinum-colored hair was short, possibly to keep it from hiding the gigantic diamond that hung around her neck on a thick gold chain. The jewel was set in the eye of what looked to be an ankh, but with a sharp, daggerlike point to it. The woman gave us one snooty glance and went right to the receptionist.

"Muriel," she said in an icy British accent. "Send in some coffee, won't you." And without pausing she went by the receptionist, opened the door to Acosta's office, and sauntered in, closing the door behind her.

"That's Alana Acosta," I whispered to Debs. "Joe's wife."

"I know who it is, goddamn it," she said, and went back to grinding her teeth.

It was clear that Deborah was beyond any of my paltry efforts at bringing her comfort and joy, so I grabbed another magazine. This one was devoted to showing the kind of clothing you have to wear on boats that cost enough to buy a small country. But I had not even looked at it long enough to discover why twelve-hundred-dollar shorts were better than the kind that cost fifteen dollars at Walmart when the receptionist called to us.

"Sergeant Morgan?" she said, and Deborah shot up out of her chair as if she were sitting on a big steel spring. "Mr. Acosta will see you now," the receptionist said, and waved us at the office door.

"About fucking time," Debs muttered under her breath, but I think Muriel heard her, because she gave us a superior smile as my sister stormed by her with me in her wake.

Joe Acosta's office was big enough to host a convention. One whole wall was taken up by the largest flat-screen TV I had ever seen. Covering the entire wall opposite was a painting that really belonged in a museum under armed guard. There was a bar, complete with a kitchenette, a conversation area with a couple of couches, and a handful of chairs that looked like they had come from an old British Empire men's club and cost more than my house. Alana Acosta lounged in one of the chairs, sipping from a bone china coffee cup. She didn't offer us any.

Joe Acosta sat at a massive glass-and-steel-frame desk in front of a tinted glass wall that framed Biscayne Bay as if it was a photo of Joe's personal cottage in the woods. In spite of the tint, the late-afternoon light came up off the water and filled the room with a supernatural glow.

Acosta stood up as we entered, and the light from the window behind him surrounded him in a bright aura, making it hard to look at him without squinting. But I looked at him anyway, and even without the halo he was impressive.

Not physically; Acosta was a thin and aristocratic-looking man with dark hair and eyes, and he wore what looked like a very expensive suit. He was not tall, and I was sure his wife would tower over him in her spike heels. But perhaps he felt that the power of his personality was strong enough to overcome a little thing like being a foot shorter than her. Or maybe it was the power of his money. Whatever it was, he had it. He looked at us from behind his desk, and I felt a sudden urge to kneel, or at least knuckle my forehead.

"Sorry to keep you waiting, Sergeant," he said. "My wife wanted to be here for this." He waved an arm at the conversation area. "Let's sit where we can talk," he said, and he walked around the desk and sat down in the big club chair opposite Alana.

Deborah hesitated for a moment, and I saw that she looked a little bit uncertain, as if it had really hit her for the first time that she was confronting somebody who was only a few steps down the chain of command from God. But she took a breath, squared her shoulders, and marched over to the couch. She sat down, and I sat beside her.

The couch was apparently built on the same principle as a Venus flytrap, because when I sat I was immediately sucked down into a deep plush cushion, and as I struggled to remain upright it occurred to me that this was on purpose, another silly little trick Acosta used to dominate people, like putting his desk in front of the bright window. Deborah apparently came to the same conclusion, because I saw her tighten her jaw, and pull herself forward with a jerk to perch awkwardly on the edge of the couch.

"Mr. Acosta," she said. "I need to talk to your son."

"What about?" Acosta said. He sat comfortably in his chair, his legs crossed, and an expression of polite interest on his face.

"Samantha Aldovar," Debs said. "And Tyler Spanos."

Acosta smiled. "Roberto has a lot of girlfriends," he said. "I don't even try to keep up."

Deborah looked angry, but happily for us all she managed to control herself. "As I am sure you are aware, Tyler Spanos was murdered, and Samantha Aldovar is missing. And I think your son knows something about both of them."

"Why do you think that?" Alana said from her chair opposite Joe. Another trick: We had to whip our heads back and forth to keep up, like watching a Ping-Pong match.

But Deborah looked at her anyway. "He knows Samantha," she said. "And I have witnesses that say he sold them Tyler's car. That's felony car theft and accessory to murder, and that's just the beginning."

"I am not aware that any charges have been filed," Acosta said, and we both swung our heads back to face him.

"Not yet," Deborah said. "But they will be."

"Then perhaps we should have a lawyer here," Alana said.

Deborah looked at her briefly, then back to Acosta. "I wanted to talk to you first," she said. "Before the lawyers get into it."

Acosta nodded, as if he expected a police officer to show that kind of consideration for his money. "Why?" he said.

"Bobby is in trouble," she said. "I think he knows that. But his best chance at this point is to walk into my office, with a lawyer, and surrender himself."

"That would save you some work, wouldn't it?" Alana said with a superior smile.

Deborah stared at her. "I don't mind the work," she said. "And I'll find him anyway. And when I do it's going to go very hard on him. If he resists arrest, he might even get hurt." She looked back at Acosta. "It's going to be a whole lot better for him if he comes in on his own."

"Why do you think I know where he is?" Acosta said.

Deborah stared at him, then looked away for a moment, out the bright window at the bay. "If it was my son," she said, "I would know where he was. Or how to find out."

"You have no children, do you?" Alana said.

"No," Debs said. She looked at Alana for a long and awkward moment, and then swung her head back to face Acosta. "He's your son, Mr. Acosta. If you know where he is and don't tell when I file charges, that's concealing a fugitive."

"You think I should turn in my own son?" he demanded. "You think that looks good?"

"Yeah, I do," she said.

" 'Commissioner upholds law, even when it hurts,' " I said in my best headline-news voice. He looked at me with an anger that was almost physical, and I shrugged. "You can come up with something better if you want," I said.

He didn't even try. He just stared at me for another long moment. There was nothing to hide under, so I just looked back, and finally he turned back to Deborah. "I won't rat out my own son, Sergeant," he said, in a voice that was almost a hiss. "No matter what you think he's done."

"What I think is that he's involved in drugs, murder, and worse," Deborah said. "And it's not the first time."

"That's all over," he said. "In the past. Alana straightened him out."

Debs glanced at Alana, who just gave her another superior smile. "It's not over," Deborah said. "It's getting worse."

"He's my son," Acosta said. "He's just a kid."

"He's a bug," Deborah said. "Not a kid. He kills people and he eats them." Alana snorted, but Acosta turned pale and tried to say something. Debs didn't let him. "He needs help, Mr. Acosta. Shrinks, counseling, all of that stuff. He needs you."

"Goddamn you," Acosta said.

"If you let this play out, he's going to get hurt," she said. "If he comes in on his own-"

"I won't turn in my own son," Acosta said again. He was clearly fighting for control, but he seemed to be winning.

"Why not?" Deborah said. "You know damned well you can get him off; you have before." She sounded very hard now, and it seemed to surprise Acosta. He looked back at her and moved his jaw, but no sound came out, and Debs went on in a deadly, factual voice. "With your connections, and your money, you can get the best lawyers in the state," she went on. "Bobby will walk away from this with a slap on the wrist. It's not right, but it's a fact, and we both know it. Your son will walk, just like the other times. But not unless he comes in voluntarily."

"So you say," Acosta said. "But life is uncertain. And however it goes, I have still sold out my son." And he glared at me again. "For a sound bite." He looked back at Deborah. "I won't do it."

"Mr. Acosta-" she said, but he raised a hand and cut her off.

"In any case," he said, "I don't know where he is."

They looked at each other for a moment, and it was plain to me that neither of them knew how to give in, and it quickly became obvious to them, too; Deborah just looked at him, and then shook her head slowly and struggled up out of the couch. She stood for a second looking down at Acosta, and then she just nodded.

"All right," she said. "If that's how you want to play it. Thank you for your time." She turned and headed for the door, and before I could break the grip of the carnivorous couch she had a hand on the doorknob. As I lurched up and onto my feet, Alana Acosta unfolded her long legs and rose up from her chair. The movement was so sudden and dramatic that I paused only halfway up and watched as she slid up to her great height and sauntered past me to Acosta.

"That was rather boring," she said.

"You're going home?" Acosta asked her.

She bent and pecked at his cheek. The huge diamond ankh swung forward and bumped his cheek, too. It didn't open a cut, and he didn't seem to mind. "Yes," she said. "I'll see you tonight." She sauntered for the door, and after a moment, realizing I was still staring, I shook myself and followed.

Deborah was standing by the elevator, arms crossed, tapping her foot impatiently. And evidently unaware that there was any awkwardness in the situation at all, Alana strolled right up and stood next to her. Deborah looked at her; she had to crane her neck to see all the way up to Alana's face, but she did. Alana looked back with no expression, and then looked away as a chime sounded and the elevator doors slid open. Alana went right in and Deborah, gritting her teeth, marched in after, leaving me no choice at all but to jump in between them and hope I could stop the knife fight.

But there was no fight. The doors slid shut, the elevator lurched downward, and before Deborah could even recross her arms, Alana looked down at her and said, "I know where Bobby is."

THIRTY-FIVE

Nobody said anything at first. It was one of those moments when the words were hanging in the air, and everybody knew what the individual words meant, but we couldn't quite get them mentally strung together to mean what we thought they meant. The elevator hurtled downward. I looked up at Alana. My eyes were just about at her chin, and I had a very good view of her necklace. The pendant actually was an ankh, as I had guessed. It was slightly elongated and came to a point that was sharp enough to puncture skin. I wondered if she had any scars from it. And although I really don't know a lot about diamonds, even up this close it looked real, and it was very large.

Of course, Deborah didn't have my view of the jewelry, so she recovered first. "What the hell does that mean?" she said.

Alana looked down her nose at Deborah. Naturally, from her great height she would have to, but there was more to it than that. She gave Debs that look of condescending amusement that only the Brits can really master, and said, "What would you like it to mean, Sergeant?" And she made "sergeant" sound like some kind of funny insect, which was not lost on my sister. She blushed.

"I mean, is that supposed to be some kind of tease, to watch us little people squirm, like some kind of game?" Deborah said. "Why the fuck would you say you know where he is, when we both know you won't tell me?"

Alana looked even more amused. "Who says I won't tell you?" she said.

Deborah stepped to the side and slapped at the big red button on the elevator's control panel. The elevator jerked to a stop and outside the car a bell began to ring.

"Listen," Deborah said, stepping right up into Alana's face-or her neck, anyway. "I don't have time for bullshit games. I got a girl out there whose life is in danger, and I think Bobby Acosta has her, or at least knows where she is, and I need to find her before she gets killed. If you know where Bobby is, tell me. Now. Or you're coming to the detention center with me on a charge of withholding evidence of a murder."

It didn't seem to impress Alana. She smiled, shook her head, and leaned past Debs and pushed the button. The elevator lurched into motion again. "Really, Sergeant," Alana said. "You needn't threaten me with your whips and chains. I'm happy to tell you."

"Then quit jerking me around and tell me," Deborah said.

"Joe has a property that Bobby's quite fond of," she said. "It's rather large, over a hundred acres, and completely deserted."

"Where?" Deborah said through her teeth.

"Did you ever hear of Buccaneer Land?" Alana said.

Deborah nodded. "I know it," she said. So did I. Buccaneer Land used to be the greatest amusement park in South Florida, and we had both been there many times as young children, and loved it. Of course, we were yokels back then who didn't know any better, and when an overaggressive mouse opened a place north of us, we realized how hokey Buccaneer Land was. So did everyone else in South Florida, and Buccaneer Land closed shortly afterward. But I still had a few memories of the place.

"That closed years ago," I said, and Alana looked at me.

"Yes," she said. "It went bankrupt and sat there for ages, and finally Joe bought it up for pennies. It's a very good piece of commercial property. But he hasn't done anything with it. Bobby likes to go there. Sometimes he turns on the rides for his friends."

"Why do you think he's there?" Debs said.

Alana shrugged, an elegant gesture that was somehow another put-down. "It makes sense," she said, sounding like she hoped Deborah knew that word. "It's empty, completely isolated. He likes it there. And there's an old caretaker's cottage on the property he's kept fixed up." She smiled. "I believe he takes girls there from time to time."

The elevator thumped to a stop. The doors slid open and a dozen people began to stampede inside. "Walk me to my car," Alana said above the crowd, and she moved forward through the pedestrians with absolute confidence that they would melt away at her approach. Somehow, they all did.

Deborah and I followed her, not quite so easily, and I took an elbow to the ribs from a large middle-aged woman, and then had to stop the closing door with my hand before I managed to get off the car and into the building's lobby. Debs and Alana were already at the far side of the lobby, walking briskly toward the door to the parking garage, so I had to hurry to catch up.

I caught them just as they were pushing through the door to the garage and heard the tail end of what sounded like a rather querulous question from Deborah. "… supposed to believe you?" she was saying.

Alana moved briskly through the door and into the parking area. "Because, ducks," she said, "Bobby is jeopardizing everything I have worked for."

"Worked?" Deborah said scornfully. "Isn't that kind of a strong word for what you do?"

"Oh, I assure you, it's work," Alana said. "Starting at the beginning, with My Recording Career." She said the words like they were the title of a foolish and boring book. "But believe me, a musical career is very hard work, especially if you have no talent, like me." She smiled fondly at Debs. "A great deal of it involves fucking terribly unpleasant people, of course. I'm sure you'll grant me that that isn't easy."

"A lot harder than turning in your own son, I guess," Debs said.

"Stepson, actually," Alana said, totally unfazed. She shrugged and stopped beside a bright orange Ferrari convertible parked by a No Parking sign. "Bobby and I never really got on, no matter what Joe thinks. And in any case, as you so cleverly pointed out, with Joe's money and influence intact, Bobby will certainly walk away from this. But if this situation is allowed to escalate, we could lose all that. And then Bobby will serve hard time, Joe will neglect business and go broke trying to get him out, and I will have to try to find a new way to make a living, which would be much harder now, as I'm afraid I'm a few years past my prime."

Deborah looked at me with a frown, and I frowned back. What Alana said made sense, of course, especially to someone untroubled by human feelings, like I used to be. It was clinically cold reasoning, serpentine but clear, and that certainly fit what we were coming to know about Alana. And yet-something was wrong with it, whether it was the way she said it or something else, I couldn't say; it didn't quite add up for me.

"What will you do if Joe finds out you've told us?" I asked Alana.

She looked at me, and then I knew what was wrong, because I saw something very dark and leather-winged at the back of her eyes, just for a moment, before the cover of icy amusement slid back into place on her face. "I shall make him forgive me," she said, and her lips turned up higher in a wonderful fake smile. "Besides, he won't find out, will he?" And she turned to Deborah. "This will be our little secret, all right?" she said.

"I can't keep this a secret," Deborah said. "If I take the task force into Buccaneer Land, people are going to know."

"Then you must go alone," Alana said. " 'Acting on an anonymous tip'-isn't that how they say it? You go alone, without telling anyone. And when you show up with Bobby, who will care how you knew where he was?"

Deborah stared at Alana, and I was quite sure she would tell her the idea was ridiculous, out of the question, an unacceptable deviation from police procedure, and far too dangerous. But Alana curved her lips and raised an eyebrow, and there was no question now that it was a challenge. And just to be sure a dullard like Debs couldn't miss that, Alana said, "Surely you can't be afraid of one young man? You have a lovely pistol, after all, and he's quite alone and unarmed."

"That's not the point," Debs said.

All the amusement left Alana's face. "No, it's not," she said. "The point is that you must go alone or there will be a huge fuss and Joe will find out I told you, and in truth I really don't wish to risk that. And if you insist on taking a team out there and making a great bloody riot of it, I shall go warn Bobby that you're coming and he'll be in Costa Rica before you can do a thing about it." The dark wings fluttered in her eyes one more brief time, and then she forced a smile back onto her face, but it still wasn't very pleasant. "What's the expression? 'My way or the highway.' All right?"

I could see a lot of other options besides taking the on-ramp to Alana's particular road, and I certainly didn't like the idea of going into a deserted and hostile environment and trying to catch Bobby Acosta without considerable backup, merely because Alana said he was alone and unarmed. But apparently Deborah was made of sterner stuff, because she just looked back, and after a moment she nodded.

"All right," Debs said. "I'll do it your way. And if Bobby's there, I don't have to let Joe know how we found out."

"Brilliant," Alana said. She opened the Ferrari's door, slid onto the seat, and fired up the engine. She revved it twice for effect, and the thick concrete walls of the parking garage trembled. She gave us one last cold and terrible smile-and once again, just for a second, I saw the shadow flutter behind her eyes. Then she closed the door, put the car in gear, and was gone in a wail of rubber.

Deborah watched her go, which gave me a little time to recover from my encounter with the inner Alana. It surprised me that I was shocked to find a predator in such a cool and beautiful package. After all, it made a great deal of sense. From what I knew about Alana, her biography told a ruthless story, and as I knew very well, it takes a special kind of person to slip the knife in so many times, and apparently so well.

And at least it made sense of her betrayal of Bobby Acosta. It was precisely the right sort of move for a dragon trying to protect her hard-won golden nest; in one clever stroke she safeguarded the treasure and eliminated a rival. Very sound gamesmanship, and the dark part of me admired her thinking.

Debs abruptly turned away from the sound of the vanishing Ferrari and headed for the door back into the lobby. "Let's get it done," she said over her shoulder.

We hurried back through the building and out the front door to Brickell Avenue without conversation. Deborah had angled her car in at an illegal spot by the curb in a perfect job of Cop Parking, and we climbed in. But in spite of her haste coming to the car, she didn't start the engine right away. Instead, she put her forearms on the steering wheel and leaned forward with a frown.

"What?" I said at last.

She shook her head. "Something just isn't right here," she said.

"You don't think Bobby is there?" I said.

She made a face and didn't look at me. "I just don't trust that bitch," she said.

I thought that was very sensible. I knew quite well from my glimpse into Alana's real self that she could only be trusted to do what was best for Alana, no matter what the consequences might be for everyone else. But secretly helping us put Bobby in jail seemed to fit her agenda nicely. "You don't need to trust her," I said. "But she is acting in her own self-interest."

"Shut up, okay?" she said, and I shut. I watched Deborah drum her fingers on the wheel, purse her lips, rub her forehead. I wished I could find some similar twitch to fill the time, but nothing occurred to me. I did not like the whole idea of the two of us trying to corner Bobby Acosta. He didn't seem particularly dangerous-but of course, most people thought the same thing about me, and look where that got them.

Bobby might not be deadly-but there was too much about the situation that was unknown and gravely random. And to be perfectly honest, which is sometimes necessary, I thought that any small chance of Samantha remaining silent would be gone forever if I showed up again with another rescue party.

On the other hand, I knew very well that I could not let Deborah go alone. That would break every rule I had carefully learned over the course of a studiously wicked life. And to my surprise, I found that New Dexter, Lily Anne's dad, who was working so hard to be human, actually had a feeling on the subject. I felt protective of Deborah, unwilling to see harm come to her, and if she was going to put herself in harm's way I wanted to be there to keep her safe.

It was a very strange sensation, to be torn by the conflicting emotions of concern for Deborah and at the same time a very real desire to see Samantha out of the way somehow-polar opposites, both pulling at me strongly. I wondered if that meant that I was exactly halfway on my journey between Dark Dexter and Dex-Daddy. Dark-Daddy? It had possibilities.

Deborah snapped me out of my pathetic fugue by slapping her hands on the steering wheel. "Goddamn it," she said. "I just don't fucking trust her."

I felt better: Common sense was winning. "So you're not going?" I said.

Deborah shook her head and started the engine. "No," she said. "Of course I'm going." And she put it in gear and pulled out into traffic. "But I don't have to go alone."

I suppose I should have pointed out that since I was right there beside her, she was not technically alone. But she was already accelerating to a speed at which I began to fear for my life, so I simply grabbed for my seat belt and buckled it on extra tight.

THIRTY-SIX

I have always regarded it as an acute mental defect that some people think it's perfectly safe to drive at high speeds while talking on a cell phone. But Deborah was one of those people, and family is family, so I didn't say anything to her when she pulled out her phone. As we roared up onto I-95 she had one hand on the wheel while she dialed a number with the other. It was only one digit, which meant it was speed dial, and I had a pretty good idea who it would be, which was confirmed when she spoke.

"It's me," she said. "Can you find Buccaneer Land? Yeah, north. Okay, meet me outside the main gate, ASAP. Bring some hardware. Love you," she said, and hung up.

There were very few living people Debs loved, and even fewer she would admit it to, so I was sure I knew who she had called.

"Chutsky's meeting us there?" I said.

She nodded, sliding the phone back into its holster. "Backup," she said, and then happily for my peace of mind she put both hands on the wheel and concentrated on weaving through the traffic. It was about a twenty-minute drive north up the highway to the spot where Buccaneer Land lay moldering, and Deborah made it in twelve minutes, flying down the off-ramp and onto the back road that leads up to the main gate at a rate of speed that seemed to me to be several very big steps beyond reckless. And since Chutsky was not there yet, we could have gone at a more reasonable pace and still had plenty of time to hang around waiting for him. But Debs kept her foot down until the gate was in sight, and then she finally slowed and pulled off the road beside what used to be the main gate to Buccaneer Land.

My first reaction was relief. Not just because Debs hadn't killed us, but because Roger, the twenty-five-foot-tall pirate I remembered so well from my childhood, was still there guarding the place. Most of his bright paint job had worn off. Time and weather had removed the parrot from his shoulder, and his raised sword was half-gone, but he still had his eye patch, and there was still a bright and wicked gleam in his remaining eye. I climbed out of the car and looked up at my old friend. As a child I had always felt a special kinship with Roger. After all, he was a pirate, and that meant he was allowed to sail around on a big sailboat and chop up anybody he wanted, which seemed like an ideal life to me back then.

Still, it was very strange to stand in his shadow again and remember what this place had been like once upon a time, and what Roger the Pirate had meant to me. I felt I owed him some kind of homage, even in his dilapidated state. So I stared up at him for a moment, and then said, "Aaarrhhh." He didn't answer, but Debs looked at me strangely.

I stepped away from Roger and looked through the chain-link fence that surrounded the park. The sun was setting, and in the last light of the day there wasn't much to see from here; the same clutter of gaudy signs and rides I remembered, now battered and greatly faded after so many years of neglect in the cruel Florida sunlight. Looming over everything was the tall and extremely unpiratical tower they had named the Mainmast. It had a half dozen metal arms hanging off it, each with a caged car dangling from the end. I had never understood what it had to do with buccaneers, no matter how many signs and flags they'd draped on it, but Harry had just patted my head when I asked him and said they got a deal on it, and anyway it had been fun to ride up to the top. There was a great view from up there, and if you closed one eye and muttered, "Yo, ho, ho," you could almost forget that the thing was so modern-looking.

Now the whole tower seemed to lean slightly to one side, and all the cars but one were either missing or shattered. Still, I wasn't planning on riding to the top today, so it didn't seem important.

From the fence where I stood I couldn't see much more of the park, but since there was nothing else to do but wait for Chutsky, I let the nostalgia in. I wondered if there was still water in the artificial river that wound through the park. There had been a pirate ship ride on that river: Roger the Pirate's pride and joy, the wicked ship Vengeance. It had cannons that really fired sticking out of each side. And on one bank of the river, they had one of those rides where you sit inside a fake log and ride down a waterfall. Beyond it, on the far side of the park, there was the Steeplechase. Just like with the tower, the connection between a Steeplechase and pirates had always escaped me, but the ride had been Debs's favorite. I wondered if she was thinking about it.

I looked at my sister. She was pacing back and forth in front of the gate, glancing up the road and then into the park, then standing still and folding her arms, and then snapping back into a walk, back and forth again. She was clearly about to pop from the nervous anticipation, and I thought this might be a good time to calm her down a little and share a family memory, so as she paced by me I spoke to her back.

"Deborah," I said, and she whipped around to look at me.

"What?" she said.

"Remember the Steeplechase?" I asked her. "You used to love that ride."

She stared at me as if I had asked her to jump off the tower. "Jesus Christ," she said. "We're not here to walk down memory fucking lane." And she spun back around and stalked away to the far side of the gate.

Obviously, my sister was not quite as overwhelmed by fond recollection as I was. I wondered if she was becoming less human while I became more so. But of course, there was the strange and very human moodiness that had been afflicting her lately, so it didn't seem likely.

In any case, Debs clearly thought that pacing and grinding her teeth was more fun than sharing happy memories of our youthful frolics in Buccaneer Land. So I let her stomp around while I looked through the fence for five more long minutes until Chutsky arrived.

And he finally did arrive, steering his car up behind Deborah's and climbing out holding a metallic briefcase, which he put down on the hood of his car. Deborah stormed over and gave him a typically warm and loving greeting.

"Where the fuck have you been?" she said.

"Hey," Chutsky said. He reached to give her a kiss, but she pushed past him and grabbed for the briefcase. He shrugged and nodded at me. "Hey, buddy," he said.

"What have you got?" she said, and he took the case from her and popped it open.

"You said hardware," he said. "I didn't know what you were expecting, so I brought a selection." He lifted out a small assault rifle with a folding stock. "Heckler and Koch's finest," he said, holding it up, then laid it on the hood and reached back into the case and came out with a pair of much smaller weapons. "Nice little Uzi here," he said. He patted one affectionately with the steel hook he had nowadays instead of a left hand, and then put it down and took out two automatic pistols. "Couple of standard service models, nine-millimeter, nineteen shots in the mag." He looked at Deborah fondly. "Any one of 'em a whole lot better than that piece of shit you carry around," he said.

"It was Daddy's," Deborah said, lifting up one of the pistols.

Chutsky shrugged. "It's a forty-year-old wheel gun," he said. "Almost as old as me, and that ain't good."

Deborah dropped the magazine out of the pistol, worked the action, and looked in the chamber. "This isn't the siege of Khe fucking Sanh," she said, and she slammed the magazine back into the pistol. "I'll take this one."

Chutsky nodded. "Uh-huh, good," he said. He reached past her into the case. "Extra magazine," he said, but she shook her head.

"If I need more than one, I'm dead and fucked," she said.

"Maybe," Chutsky said. "What are we expecting in there, anyway?"

Debs shoved the pistol into the waistband of her pants. "I don't know," she said. "We were told he's in there alone." Chutsky raised an eyebrow at her. "Twenty-two-year-old white male," she explained. "Five-foot-ten, a hundred fifty pounds, dark hair-but honest to God, Chutsky, we don't have a clue if he's really there, or if he's alone, and I sure as shit don't trust the bitch that gave us the tip."

"Okay, good, I'm glad you called me," he said, nodding happily. "Old days, you would have gone in there alone with your daddy's popgun." He looked over at me. "Dex?" he said. "I know you don't like guns and violence." He smiled and shrugged. "But hey-you don't wanna go in there naked, buddy." He tilted his head at his little armory, spread out on the hood of the car. "How 'bout joo say hello to my little fren?" It was the worst Scarface impression I'd ever heard, but I stepped forward for a look anyway. I really don't like guns-they're so loud and messy, and they take all the skill and pleasure out of things. Still, I was not here for the fun of it.

"If it's okay with you," I said, "I'll take the other pistol. And the extra magazine." After all, if I needed the thing at all, I would probably really need it, and nineteen extra bullets don't weigh that much.

"Yeah, great," he said happily. "You sure you know how to use it?"

It was a small joke between us-small mostly because only Chutsky thought it was funny. He knew very well I could handle a pistol. But I played along anyway and held it up by the barrel. "I think I hold this end and point it like that," I said.

"Perfect," Chutsky said. "Don't shoot off your balls, okay?" He picked up the assault rifle. It had a strap that he slid over his shoulder. "I'll take this little beauty. And if it turns into Khe Sanh after all, I'm ready for Charlie." He looked at the weapon for a moment with the same fondness as I had looked at Roger the Pirate-clearly there were some happy memories there.

"Chutsky," Deborah said.

He jerked his head up to Debs as if he had been caught looking at porn. "Okay," he said. "So how you wanna do this?"

"Through the gate," she said. "Fan out and head for the far side of the park. That's where the employees' area used to be." She looked at me, and I nodded.

"I remember," I said.

"So that's where the caretaker's place is," she said. "Where Bobby Acosta ought to be." She pointed at Chutsky. "You come in from the right and cover me. Dexter from the left."

"What," Chutsky said. "You're not gonna just kick down the door and charge in there. That's nuts."

"I'm going to tell him to come out," Deborah said. "I want him to think I'm alone. Then we see what happens. If it's some kind of trap, you guys got my back."

"Sure," Chutsky said dubiously. "But you're still out there in the open."

She shook it off, irritated. "I'll be fine," she said. "I think the girl is in there, too, Samantha Aldovar," she said. "So be careful. None of your Rambo shit."

"Uh-huh," he said. "But this kid, Bobby, you want him alive, right?"

Deborah looked at him for just a moment too long. "Of course," she said at last. It wasn't very convincing. "Let's go." She turned away and marched for the gate. Chutsky watched her for a second, then took two extra clips from the case and slipped them into his pocket. He closed the case and tossed it into the car.

"Okay, buddy," he said. And then he turned and looked at me, a long and surprisingly damp look. "Don't let anything happen to her," he said, and for the first time since I had known him, I saw what seemed like real emotion on his face.

"I won't," I said, slightly embarrassed.

He squeezed my shoulder. "Good," he said. He looked at me a moment longer, and then turned away and lurched after Deborah.

She was at the chain-link gate, reaching through the mesh for a padlock. "Shouldn't somebody point out that you're about to illegally enter the property?" I said. And even though that was true, I was really more worried about finding Samantha again and turning her loose on a world that was far too eager to listen to her lurid tales.

But Debs pulled at the lock, and it fell open in her hand. She looked at me. "This lock has been opened," she said in a voice meant for the witness stand. "Somebody has gone into the park, possibly illegally, and possibly to commit a felony. It is my clear duty to investigate."

"Yeah, hey, just a second," Chutsky said. "If this kid is hiding out in there, why would it be unlocked?"

I managed to stop myself from hugging him and instead merely added, "He's right, Debs. It's a setup."

She shook her head impatiently. "We knew it might be," she said. "That's why I brought you two."

Chutsky frowned, but he didn't move forward. "I don't like this," he said.

"You don't have to like it," Deborah said. "You don't even have to do it."

"I'm not letting you go in there alone," he said. "Dexter won't, either."

Normally I suppose I would have felt like kicking Chutsky for offering up Dexter's tender skin on the altar of unnecessary danger. But as it happened, I agreed-just this once. It was clear to me that someone with a little bit of common sense should tag along, and looking around our gathering, counting everyone, that left me. "That's right," I said. "Besides, we can always call in for backup if it gets sticky."

Apparently, that was exactly the wrong thing to say. Deborah glared at me, and then marched over to me and stood one quarter of an inch away from my face. "Give me your phone," she said.

"What?"

"Now!" she barked, and she held out her hand.

"It's a brand-new BlackBerry," I protested, but it was very clear that I was either going to hand it over or lose the use of my arms under a barrage of her arm punches, so I gave it to her.

"Yours, too, Chutsky," she said, stepping over to him. He just shrugged and handed over his phone.

"Bad idea, babe," he said.

"I'm not having one of you clowns panic and fuck it up," she said. She trotted back to her car and threw the phones into the front seat-hers, too-and came back to us.

"Listen, Debbie, about the phones-" Chutsky said, but she cut him off immediately.

"Goddamn it, Chutsky, I have to do this, and I have to do this now, my way, without worrying about Miranda or any of that shit, and if you don't like it shut up and go home." She yanked at the chain and it fell open. "But I'm going in and I'm going to find Samantha, and I'm going to take down Bobby Acosta," she said, and she yanked the lock off its chain and kicked at the gate. It bounced open with a tortured squeal and my sister glared at Chutsky and then at me. "See you later," she said, and she whipped away through the gate.

"Debs. Hey, Debbie, come on," Chutsky said. She ignored him and marched on into the park. Chutsky sighed and looked at me. "Okay, buddy," he said. "I got the right flank; you got the left. Let's move out." And he followed Deborah through the gate.

Have you ever noticed that no matter how often we all talk about freedom we never seem to have any? There were few things in the world I wanted to do less than follow my sister into the park, where a very obvious trap was set for us and, if everything went really well, the best I could hope for was having Samantha Aldovar ruin my life. If I truly had any freedom at all I would have taken Deborah's car and gone down to Calle Ocho for a palomilla steak and an Ironbeer.

But like everything else in the world that sounds good, freedom is an illusion. And in this case, I had no more choice than a man strapped into Old Sparky who is told he's free to stay alive as long as he can when they throw the switch.

I looked up at Roger the Pirate. His smile looked kind of mean all of a sudden. "Quit smirking," I told him. He didn't answer.

I followed my sister and Chutsky into the park.

THIRTY-SEVEN

I am sure we have all seen enough old movies to know that sensible people avoid abandoned amusement parks, especially when the sun is going down, which it was. Terrible things lurk in these places, and anyone who wanders in is only setting himself up for some kind of dreadful end. And perhaps I was being oversensitive, but Buccaneer Land really did seem spookier than anything I had ever seen outside of a bad movie. There was an almost audible echo of distant laughter hanging over the dark and moldering rides and buildings, and it had a mocking edge to it, as if the long years of neglect had turned the whole place mean and it just couldn't wait to see something bad happen to me.

But apparently Deborah had not done her due diligence in the old-movie department. She seemed quite undisturbed as she drew her weapon and strode into the park, looking for all the world as if she were headed into the corner store to shoot some bacon rinds. Chutsky and I caught up with her about a hundred feet inside the gate, and she barely glanced at us. "Spread out," she said.

"Take it easy, Debs," Chutsky said. "Give us time to work the flanks." He looked at me and nodded to the left. "Go nice and slow around the rides, buddy. Go back behind the booths, sheds, anyplace somebody could be hiding. Sneak and peek, buddy. Keep your eyes and ears open, keep one eye on Debbie, and be careful." He turned back to Deborah and said, "Debs, listen…" But she waved her gun at him to cut him off.

"Just do it, Chutsky, for God's sake."

He looked at her for a moment. "Just be careful," he said, and then he turned away and moved out to the right. He was a very large man, and he had one artificial foot, but as he glided off into the dusk the years and injuries seemed to melt away and he looked like a well-oiled shadow, his weapon moving from side to side automatically, and I was very glad that he was here with his assault rifle and his long years of practice.

But before I could begin to sing "Halls of Montezuma" Deborah nudged me hard and glared at me. "What the fuck are you waiting for?" she said. And so even though I would much rather have shot myself in the foot and gone home, I moved out to the left through the growing darkness.

We stalked carefully through the park in best paramilitary fashion, the lost patrol on its mission into the land of the B movie. To Deborah's credit, she was very careful. She moved stealthily from one piece of cover to the next, frequently looking right to Chutsky and then left at me. It was getting harder to see her, since the sun had now definitely set, but at least that meant it was harder for them to see us, too-whoever them might turn out to be.

We leapfrogged through the first part of the park like this, past the ancient souvenir stand, and then I came up to the first of the rides, an old merry-go-round. It had fallen off its spindle and lay there leaning to one side. It was battered and faded and somebody had chopped the heads off the horses and spray-painted the whole thing in Day-Glo green and orange, and it was one of the saddest things I had ever seen. I circled around it carefully, holding my gun ready, and peering behind everything large enough to hide a cannibal.

At the far side of the merry-go-round I looked to my right. In the growing darkness I could barely make out Debs. She had moved up into the shadow of one of the large posts that held up the cable car line that ran from one side of the park to the other. I couldn't see Chutsky at all; where he should have been there was a row of crumbling playhouses that fringed a go-kart track. I hoped he was there, being watchful and dangerous. If anything did jump out and yell boo at us, I wanted him ready with his assault rifle.

But there was no sign of him, and even as I watched, Deborah began to move forward again, deeper into the dark park. A warm, light wind blew over me and I smelled the Miami night: a distant tang of salt on the edge of rotting vegetation and automobile exhaust. But even as I inhaled the familiar smell, I felt the hairs go up on the back of my neck and a soft whisper came up at me from the lowest dungeon of Castle Dexter, and a rustle of leather wings rattled softly on the ramparts. It was a very clear notice that something was not right here and this would be a great time to be somewhere else; I froze there by the headless horses, looking for whatever had set off the Passenger's alarm.

I saw and heard nothing. Deborah had vanished into the darkness and nothing moved anywhere, except a plastic shopping bag blowing by in the gentle wind. My stomach turned over, and for once it was not from hunger.

My pistol suddenly looked very small and inadequate and I wanted to run out of the park more than I wanted my next breath. The Passenger might be peeved with me, but it would not let me walk into danger, and it was never wrong, not when it spoke this clearly. I absolutely had to grab Deborah and get us out of here before whatever it was hit us.

But how could I persuade her? She was so determined to free Samantha and collar Bobby that she would never listen, even if I could think of a way to explain how I knew that things were about to go terribly wrong. And as I clutched my pistol and dithered, the decision was taken out of my hands. There was a kind of giant thunk sound, and lights began to come on all over the park, and then the ground trembled, there was a terrible screech of rusty metal, and I heard a raspy groan And overhead, the cable cars lurched into motion.

I spent one long and precious second gaping upward and picturing all the awful things that might rain down on me from someone riding past over my head. Then I had another truly horrible moment in which vile altruism took over, and I looked to my right to see if Deborah was okay; there was no sign of her. And then from one of the cable cars swinging by overhead I heard a gunshot and a savage and happy screeching sound, the cry of a hunter who has spotted its prey, and I recovered my precious self-interest and dived for cover into the darkness under the canopy of the merry-go-round. In my haste to bury myself under one of the horses I banged my nose into a large and hard lump that turned out to be one of the severed fiberglass horse heads. By the time I scrabbled my way past it and shoved it uphill toward the outer rim of the merry-go-round, the screeching from above had stopped.

I waited; nothing happened. There were no more gunshots. No one opened fire with a howitzer. No napalm bombs whistled down from the cable cars. There was no sound at all except the dysfunctional thumping of the old and rusty cable running through its stanchions. I waited a little longer. Something tickled at my nose and I rubbed it; my hand came away with blood on it and for a very long and frozen second I stared at it, unable to think or move or see anything except that awful red smear of precious Dexter fluid. But happily for me, my brain came back online and I wiped my hand on my pants leg and put it out of my mind. Clearly, it had happened when I dived for cover and bumped my nose. No big deal. We all have blood in us. The trick is to keep it inside.

I wiggled carefully around into a position where I was still safe but I could see out, and I pushed the big horse head farther up the slope in front of me for cover and rested my pistol on top of it. Off to my right, above the last place I had seen Deborah, a shattered cable car went by on the wire. There was nothing left of it except the piece that attached to the cable and one small chunk of metal tubing that had been part of the seat, and it bobbed and wobbled crazily past. The next car lurched into view, and although there was more of it, the side panels were gone and it, too, was empty.

I watched several more of the broken cars go by. Only one of them seemed to be in good enough condition to hold a passenger, but it bounced past with no sign that it ever had, and I began to feel a little bit silly, huddling underneath a gilded, crumbling, Day-Glo merry-go-round pony and pointing my pistol at a series of broken-down and very empty cable cars. Another deserted and beat-up car went by-nothing. Still, I had certainly heard somebody pass by overhead, and the warning from the Passenger had been quite clear. There was danger out there in the park, lurking among the carefree memories of Buccaneer Land. And it knew I was here.

I took a deep breath. Clearly, Bobby was here, too, and it sounded like he was not alone. But there could not be more than two or three people total in one of those rickety old cable cars. So if we continued with the original plan and moved on through the park, the three of us should still be able to round up a few loopy kids. Nothing to worry about: Keep breathing, follow the plan, home in time for Letterman. I wriggled back out toward the rim of the merry-go-round, and I had one leg out and on the ground when I heard once again a kind of primitive, fraternity-house whooping sound-from behind me, in the direction of the front gate-and I slid back down the tilted spindle and into the cover of my headless horse.

A few seconds later, I heard happy voices, the shuffle of many feet, and I peeked out as a crowd of eight or ten people began to troop past me. They were mostly Bobby Acosta's age, the sort of bright-faced young monsters we had seen in Fang, possibly the exact same ones, and they were dressed in stylish buccaneer costumes, which I am sure would have pleased Roger the Pirate. They hurried past, excited and happy and clearly on their way to a party, and leading the way, with a rather lethal-looking sword raised high, was the ponytailed bouncer from Fang.

I watched from behind my decapitated pony until they were gone and the sound of their passing had faded away and I thought about it, and they were not terribly happy thoughts. The odds had changed, and the whole situation was different now. I am not a very sociable person by nature, but this seemed like a really good time to seek out my companions for some quality survival time together.

So I waited another minute to be sure there were no stragglers, and then I left my horse head behind and wormed my way slowly out to the rim of the merry-go-round. As far as I could see, they were gone and the park might as well be completely deserted. There was a building ahead and slightly to the left that I recognized from my childhood. I had spent several dull and puzzled hours wandering through it back then, completely unable to understand why it was supposed to be fun. But if it would provide cover for me, I would forgive it for its misleading name. And so, with a last glance at the still-vacant cable car, I rolled off the merry-go-round and ran for the funhouse.

The outside of the building was in very bad shape, and only a few vague shadows remained of the mural that had once decorated it. I could just barely make out the painted scene of cheerful pirates looting and raping a small town. Its loss was a great blow to the art world, but that was not my main concern at the moment. There was one dim light shining in front of the funhouse, so I circled around to the back at a half crouch, trying to stay in the shadows. It took me in the opposite direction from the last place I had seen Deborah, but I had to find new cover. Whoever was in the cable car had certainly seen me wallowing on the merry-go-round and I needed to get away from it.

I moved carefully around the back of the funhouse. The back door was hanging limply open on one hinge, with half a sign still visible on it. The faded red letters spelled out GENCY EX quite clearly. I paused at the side of the doorway, pistol ready. I didn't really think anyone would be hiding inside among the old mirrors. It was too much of a cliche, and surely even cannibals have some pride. And in any case, the mirrors had not really fooled anyone when they were in good condition. After so many years of neglect they were almost certainly no more reflective than the bottom of my shoe. But I took no chances; I moved past the door in a crouch with my pistol ready and aimed at the inside of the funhouse. Nothing lurked, nothing moved. I went on by to the next puddle of shadow.

At the far corner of the building I paused again, and peeked carefully around-still nothing. Was it possible that no one was actively looking for me? I remembered something my adoptive mother, Doris, had often said: The wicked flee where none pursueth. It was certainly true in my case. I spent far too much time fleeing, and so far no one had pursuethed me. But I knew with absolute certainty that they were in the park, and the only sensible move was to run for my life-but I knew just as certainly that my sister would never leave the park without Samantha Aldovar and Bobby Acosta, and I could not leave her to do it alone.

I heard unhappy muttering from the Passenger, and I felt the cold wind from his wings blowing through me, and every small voice of reason and common sense raised up on its toes and screamed at me to run for the exits-and I could not. Not without Deborah.

And so I took a breath, wondering how many more times I might be able to do so, and I scuttled for the next small and crumbling chunk of shelter. It had once been a ride for very young children, the kind with the large enclosed cars that go slowly around in a circle while you turn a big wheel in the center. Only two of the cars remained, and both were in very bad shape. I scuttled into the shade of the blue one and crouched there for a moment. The entire group of partying pirates had vanished and there was no sight or sound of anyone or anything paying attention to my hermit-crab progress. I could have been marching through the park leading a brass band and juggling live armadillos for all the attention they were paying me.

But sooner or later we would meet, and things being what they were, I wanted to see them first. So I got down on my hands and knees and peeked around the kiddie car.

I had come to the end of the area with the rides for small kids and was now in sight of the artificial river that had once held the pirate ship ride. It still had plenty of water in it, although it was not the most attractive tint I had ever seen. Even from here I could see that the water was a dull and vile green from years of neglect. Between me and the river there were three of the poles that supported the cable car. Each one of them had lamps hanging down from them, but only one of the lights actually worked. It was to my right, in the direction I had last seen Deborah. Straight ahead there was a dark open area about a hundred feet long that ended at the next chunk of cover, a grove of palm trees on a bluff above the water. The grove was not terribly large, barely big enough to hide a few small squads of Taliban waiting to ambush me. But there was no other cover in sight, so I eased out from behind the car and scuttled into the open at a running crouch.

It was an awful feeling to be unprotected, and it seemed to take several hours to cross the open and unshadowed ground until I came up next to the little grove. I paused beside the first palm tree. Now that I had the small security of its trunk, I worried again about what might be hiding on the other side. I hugged the tree and peered around it, in among the trees. A great deal of scrub and underbrush had grown up between them, and since a lot of it had sharp and pointy branches, it really did not look like a very attractive place to hide. I could see enough to be reasonably sure that nothing was lurking among the saw palmettos and thorny bushes, and I did not want to risk losing any flesh by lurking there either. I started to ease away from my tree trunk to look for better cover.

And then from up the river to my left I heard the unmistakable sound of fake cannon fire. I looked toward the sound and, in a clatter of torn cloth and half-shattered spars, the pirate ship came sailing around the bend.

It was only a decomposing husk of what it had once been. Chunks of wood dangled from the hull. The ratty remnants of its sails fluttered sadly, and less than half of the faded Jolly Roger still waved at the top of the mast, but still the ship came proudly on, just the way I remembered it. Another feeble broadside puffed out from the three cannons facing me and I took the hint and dove into the tangled scrub between the palm trees.

What had seemed like something to be avoided moments ago now seemed like precious security, and I wormed my way into the deepest clump of brush. Almost instantly, I was tangled in greenery and torn by thorns. I tried to pull away from a plant that had attacked me and I backed painfully into a small and well-named saw palmetto. By the time I had pulled myself free, I was bleeding from several deep cuts on my arms and my shirt was torn. But complaining never does any good, and I was sure no one had thought to bring Band-Aids, so I kept crawling.

I inched forward through the underbrush, leaving several more small and valuable pieces of my flesh behind on the carnivorous bushes, until I got to the far edge of the little forest, where I hunkered down behind a fan of palmetto fronds and peeked out at the river. The water roiled as if a giant hand just under the surface had begun to swirl it into motion, and then it settled into a slow and steady stream, as if it were a real river instead of a circular pond.

And as I watched, the pride of Buccaneer Land, the terror of the seven seas, the wicked ship Vengeance floated into view and came to a stop at the ancient and rotting pier that jutted into the river on the bank, just below me and to my right. The water roiled again, settled down into a slow flow, and the Vengeance rocked ever so slightly but stayed in place at the dock. And although there was no sign of the ship's roguish crew, there was at least one passenger on board.

Tied securely to the mainmast was Samantha Aldovar.

THIRTY-EIGHT

Samantha did not look like the kind of passenger I had seen on board the Vengeance in my youth. Aside from having no cotton candy or souvenir pirate hat, she was slumped over, perhaps unconscious, maybe even dead, her weight hanging against the ropes. From my hiding spot on the small bluff, I had a decent view of most of the things on the deck. Next to Samantha stood a large black barbecue grill, with a thin column of smoke wafting up from under the cover. Beside it was a big five-gallon cooking pot on a stand, and a small table where several indistinct but familiar-looking objects gleamed sharply as they caught the light.

For a moment, nothing moved but the shredded half of the Jolly Roger flag on top of the mast. The deck was deserted, except for Samantha. But someone else had to be on board. In spite of a large fake wheel at the stern, I knew the boat was controlled from inside the cabin. There had also been a lounge in there, with a refreshment stand. Somebody must be down there, working the controls. But how many? Just Bobby Acosta? Or enough of his fellow cannibals to make things dicey for the good guys, who oddly enough included me tonight?

The flag flopped. A jet flew overhead, wheels down, coming in to land at Fort Lauderdale Airport. The boat rocked gently. And then Samantha rolled her head to one side, another anemic broadside puffed out from the cannons, and the cabin door thumped open. Bobby Acosta came out on deck with a scarf tied around his head and a very unpirate-ish Glock pistol held up high. "Whoo-hoo!" he yelled, and he fired two shots into the air as a small gaggle of happy-looking partygoers about his age, male and female, followed him out on deck. They were all dressed in pirate gear, and they all headed directly to the big cooking pot beside Samantha and began filling cups from it and chugging the contents.

And as they settled into their lighthearted and carefree amusement, I actually felt a tiny glimmer of hope blossom in my heart. There were five of them and only three of us, true, but they were clearly lightweights, and they were guzzling something I was quite sure was the intoxicating punch they liked so much. In a few moments they would be high, goofy, and no threat at all. Wherever the rest of the party might have gone, this bunch would be easy. The three of us could step out of cover and round them up. Deborah would have what she came for, we could sneak away and call for help, and Dexter could get back to reinventing normal life.

And then the cabin door opened again, and Alana Acosta slithered out on deck.

She was followed by the ponytailed bouncer from Fang, and three nasty-looking men carrying shotguns, and the world turned dim and dangerous once more.

I had known Alana was a predator from what the Dark Passenger had whispered as we stood beside her Ferrari. And now, seeing her here so clearly in command, I knew that my brother, Brian, had been right: The head of the coven was a woman, and it was Alana Acosta. And this was not merely her trap; it was also her invitation to dinner. And if I could not come up with something really clever, I was going to be on the menu.

Alana strode right to the rail, looked out into the park more or less between me and where I thought Deborah should be, and she called out, "Olly olly oxen free!" She turned and nodded at her posse, and they obligingly put the shotguns to Samantha's head. "Or else!" Alana yelled happily.

Clearly her bizarre yodel about oxen was some sort of British children's ritual, meant to summon everyone to come in: Game over, come to home base. But she must have thought we actually were children, and very dull children at that, if she supposed we would come obediently out of our hard-earned cover and trudge into her clutches. Only the rankest ninny would fall into that kind of stupidity.

And as I hunkered down for what I assumed would be a long game of cat and mouse, I heard a shout to my right, and a moment later, to my very great horror, Deborah came into view. She was apparently so obsessed with saving Samantha-again!-that she had not even spent two seconds thinking about the consequences of what she was doing. She simply sprang out of hiding, ran over to the ship, and raced up beside the pier to surrender. She stood there below me looking defiant, and then very deliberately she drew her pistol and dropped it to the ground.

Alana clearly enjoyed the performance. She went to stand closer, where she could gloat at Debs properly, and then turned and said something to the bouncer. A moment later he wrestled the decrepit boarding ramp over the side and thumped it down onto the dock.

"Come on up, dearie," Alana said to Deborah. "Use the ramp."

Deborah stood still and looked up at Alana. "Don't hurt that girl," she said.

Alana's smile grew huge. "But she wants us to hurt her; don't you see?" she said.

Deborah shook her head. "Don't hurt her," she repeated.

"Let's talk about that, shall we?" Alana said. "Come on aboard."

Deborah looked up at her and saw nothing but happy reptile. She dropped her head and trudged up the ramp, and a moment later two of the shotgun-toting lackeys grabbed her, jerked her arms behind her, and duct-taped them in place. A mean little voice in the back of my head suggested that this was only fair, since very recently she'd merely watched them as they did the same thing to me. But kinder thoughts emerged and shouted that one down, and I began to fret and scheme on how to get my sister loose.

Alana, of course, had no intention of allowing any such thing. She waited for a moment, looking out across the park, and then cupped her hands to her mouth and yelled, "I'm quite sure your charming companion is out there somewhere!" She looked at Deborah, who stood with her head down, saying nothing. "We saw him at the carousel, dearie. Where is the bugger?" she said. Deborah didn't move. Alana waited for a moment with a smile of pleasant anticipation on her face, and then called out loudly, "Don't be bashful! We can't start without you!" I stayed where I was, frozen motionless among the thorns.

"Well, then," she called out cheerily. She turned and held out a hand, and one of the lackeys put a shotgun into it. For a moment I was torn by anxiety, and it was worse than the thorns. If she threatened to shoot Debs… But she was going to kill her anyway… and why should I let her kill me, too? But I couldn't let her hurt Debs Unconsciously I raised up my pistol. It was a very good pistol, extremely accurate, and from this distance I had about a twenty percent chance of hitting Alana. The odds of hitting Debs were just as good-or hitting Samantha, and as I thought that the pistol rose higher, all by itself.

Of course, such things would never happen in a just world, but we don't live in one, and this small movement must have caught a glimmer from one of the few battered lights still working in the park, and it gleamed just enough to attract Alana's eye. She pumped the shotgun, briskly enough to leave no doubt about whether she knew how to use it, and she raised it to her shoulder, pointed it almost directly at me, and fired.

I had only a second to react, and I just barely managed to dive down behind the nearest palm tree. Even so, I felt the wind from the pellets as they slashed into the foliage where I had so recently been hiding.

"That's better!" Alana said, and there was another blast from the shotgun. A chunk of my protective tree trunk vanished. "Peekaboo!"

A moment ago I had been unable to choose between leaving my sister in danger and placing my own head into the noose. Suddenly my decision was a whole lot easier. If Alana was going to stand there and remove the trees one shot at a time, my future was bleak either way, and since the more immediate danger was from buckshot, it seemed like a much better idea to give myself up and count on my superior intellect to find a way out of captivity again. Besides, Chutsky was still out there with his assault rifle, more than a match for a couple of amateurs with shotguns.

All things considered, it was not much of a choice, but it was all I had. So I stood up, staying behind the tree, and called out, "Don't shoot!"

"And spoil the meat?" Alana called. "Of course not. But let's see your smiling face, with hands in the air." And she waved her shotgun, just in case I was a little slow in getting her point.

As I've said, freedom is really an illusion. Anytime we think we have a real choice, it just means we haven't seen the shotgun aimed at our navel.

I put down my pistol, raised my hands as high as dignity would permit, and stepped out from behind the tree.

"Lovely!" Alana called. "Now over the river and through the woods, little piglet."

It stung a little more than it should have; I mean, on top of everything else, being called "piglet" was not much. It was just a minor indignity tossed lightly on top of some rather major calamities, and it may be that my new-grown semihuman sensibilities encouraged me to take it harder than necessary, but really: piglet? I, Dexter? Clean-limbed, physically fit, and tempered to a fine edge in the furnace of life's many fires? I resented it, and I beamed a mental message to Chutsky to shoot Alana carefully, so she would linger and suffer a little.

But of course, I also moved slowly down to the bank of the river with my hands in the air.

On the bank, I stood for a moment, looking up at Alana and her shotgun. She waved it encouragingly. "Come along, then," she said. "Walk the plank, old sod."

There was no arguing with the weapon, not at this range. I stepped onto the ramp. My brain whirled with impossible ideas: Dive under the boat, away from the aim of Alana's weapon, and then-what? Hold my breath for a few hours? Swim downstream and get help? Send more mental messages and hope for rescue by a gang of paramilitary telepaths? There was really nothing else to do except climb up the ramp to the deck of the Vengeance. And so I did. It was old and wobbly aluminum, and I had to hold on to the frayed guide rope that ran up the left side. I slipped once, and held tightly to the rope as the whole rickety thing pitched and yawed. But in far too short a time I was on the deck, looking at three shotguns pointed my way-and even darker and deader than the weapons' barrels, Alana Acosta's blue and empty eyes. She stood much too close, as the others duct-taped my hands behind me, looking at me with an affection I found very unsettling.

"Brilliant," she said. "This is going to be fun. I can't wait to get started." She turned away and looked off toward the park's gate. "Where is that man?"

"He'll be here," Bobby said. "I got his money."

"He'd better be here," Alana said, and looked back at me. "I don't like to be kept waiting."

"I don't mind," I said.

"I really would like to get started," Alana said. "There's rather a press of time this evening."

"Don't hurt that girl," Deborah said again, through her teeth this time.

Alana turned her gaze on Debs, which was nice for me, but I had the feeling that it was going to prove very unpleasant for my sister. "We really are rather mother hen-ish about this little girl piglet, aren't we?" Alana said, stepping toward Deborah. "Why is that, Sergeant?"

"She's just a girl," Debs said. "A child."

Alana smiled, a wide smile filled with hundreds of perfect white teeth. "She seems to know what she wants," she said. "And since it's the same thing we want-where's the harm?"

"She can't possibly want that," Deborah hissed.

"But she does, dear," Alana said. "Some of them do. They want to be eaten-just as much as I want to eat them." Her smile was very large, and almost real this time. "Almost makes one believe in a benevolent God, doesn't it?" she said.

"She's just a fucked-up kid," Deborah said. "She'll get over this-she has a family that loves her, and she has a life ahead of her."

"And so, overcome by remorse and the beauty of all that, I should let her go," Alana purred. "Family and church and puppies and flowers-how lovely your world must be, Sergeant. But it's somewhat darker than that for the rest of us." She looked at Samantha. "Of course, it does have its moments."

"Please," Deborah said, and she looked both desperate and vulnerable in a way I had never seen before, "just let her go."

"I don't think so," Alana said crisply. "In fact, with all this excitement, I find that I'm getting a bit peckish." She picked up a very sharp knife from the table.

"No!" Deborah said in a violent, hissing voice. "Goddamn you, no!"

"Yes, I'm afraid," Alana said, looking at her with cold amusement. Two of the guards held Debs in place and Alana watched them struggle, clearly enjoying it. And with one eye still on Deborah, Alana stepped over to Samantha and held the knife up indecisively.

"I could never really do the butchering part properly," she said. Bobby and his posse gathered around, jiggling with barely suppressed excitement like kids sneaking into a movie. "This is the whole reason I put up with tardiness from that saucy bastard," Alana said. "He's very, very good at this. Wake up, piggy." She slapped Samantha's face, and Samantha rolled her head upright and opened her eyes.

" 'S it time?" she said dopily.

"Just a snack," Alana told her, but Samantha smiled. It was very clear from her drowsy happiness that she had been drugged again, but at least it wasn't ecstasy this time.

"Great, okay," she said. Alana looked at her, and then at us.

"Come on, go for it," Bobby said.

Alana smiled at him, and then snaked out her hand and grabbed at Samantha's arm so quickly I saw almost nothing but a blurred gleam from the blade, and before I could blink she had sliced off most of the girl's triceps.

Samantha made a sound that was somewhere between a moan and a grunt, and it was neither pleasure nor pain but somewhere in between, a cry of agonized fulfillment. It set my teeth on edge and made all the hair on my neck rise straight up and then Deborah exploded into an insane fury that sent one of her guards spinning to the deck, and the other one dropped his shotgun and held on until the huge ponytailed bouncer stepped in and clubbed Debs to the floor with one gigantic hand. She went down like a rag doll and lay there unmoving.

"Take the good sergeant below," Alana said. "Make sure she's very well secured." The two lackeys grabbed Deborah and dragged her into the cabin. I did not at all like the way she hung between them, so completely limp and lifeless, and without thinking I took a step toward her. But before I could do much more than wiggle my toes in her direction, the enormous bouncer picked up the dropped shotgun and pushed it into my chest, and I was forced to do no more than watch helplessly as they took my sister through the doorway and into the cabin.

And as the bouncer prodded me back around to face Alana, she lifted the lid from the barbecue and placed the slice of Samantha-flesh on the grill. It hissed, and a tendril of steam rose up from it.

"Oh," Samantha said in a muted, faraway voice. "Oh. Oh." She rocked slowly against her bonds.

"Turn it in two minutes," Alana said to Bobby, and then she came back to me. "Well, piglet," she said to me, and she reached over and pinched my cheek; not as a doting grandmother might, but more like a shrewd shopper checking the cutlets. I tried to pull away, but it wasn't quite as easy as it sounds, with a very large man pushing a shotgun into my back.

"Why do you keep calling me that?" I said. It sounded more petulant than it should have, but I really didn't have a terribly strong position at the moment, unless you count the moral high ground.

My question seemed to amuse Alana. She reached forward again, both hands this time, and she grabbed my cheeks and shook my head fondly from side to side. "Because you are my piglet!" she said. "And I am going to absolutely devour you, darling!" And a small and very real gleam showed in her eyes this time, and the Passenger rattled its wings in alarm.

I would like to say that I had been in much tighter spots, and I had always found a way out. But the truth was that I could not think of any time I had ever felt quite so uncomfortably vulnerable. I was once again taped and helpless, with a gun in my back and an even more lethal predator in front. As for my companions, Deborah was unconscious or worse, and Samantha was truly being put over the coals. Still, I had one small hole card left: I knew that Chutsky was out there, armed and dangerous, and as long as he was alive he would never let any harm come to Debs or, by extension, to me. If I could keep Alana talking long enough, Chutsky would be here to save us.

"You have Samantha," I said as reasonably as I could. "There's more than enough of her to go around."

"Yes, but she wants to be eaten," Alana said. "The meat always tastes better if it's reluctant." She glanced at Samantha, who said, "Oh," again. Her eyes were wide now, wild with something I could not name, and focused on the grill.

Alana smiled and patted my cheek. "You owe us, darling. For escaping and causing all this trouble. And in any case, we need a male piggy." She frowned at me. "You look a bit stringy. We really should marinate you for a few days. Still, there's no time left, and I do love a nice man chop."

I will admit that it was a strange time and place for curiosity, but after all, I was trying to stall. "What do you mean, there's no time left?" I said.

She looked at me without expression, and somehow, the complete absence of emotion was more unsettling than her fake smile. "One last party," she said. "Then I'm afraid I must flee once again. Just as I had to flee England when the authorities decided that too many undocumented immigrants had gone missing there, as they now have here." She shook her head sadly. "I was just getting to like the taste of migrant worker, too."

Samantha grunted, and I looked. Bobby stood in front of her, slowly working the point of a knife across her partially exposed chest, as if he were carving his initials on a tree. His face was very close to hers, and he wore a smile that would wilt roses.

Alana sighed and shook her head fondly. "Don't play with your food, Bobby," she said. "You're supposed to be cooking. Turn it now, dear," she said, and he looked at Alana. Then he reluctantly put down the knife and reached onto the grill with a long-handled fork and flipped the flesh. Samantha moaned again. "And put something under that cut," Alana said, nodding at the growing pool of dreadful red blood dripping from Samantha's arm and spreading across the deck. "She's turning the deck into an abattoir."

"I'm not fucking Cinderella," Bobby said happily. "Stop the wicked-stepmother shit."

"Yes, but let's try to keep things a bit neater, shall we?" she said. He shrugged, and it was very clear that they were as fond of each other as two monsters could ever be. Bobby took a pot from the rack under the grill and placed it underneath Samantha's arm.

"I actually did straighten Bobby out," Alana said with just a trace of something that might have been pride. "He hadn't a clue how to do anything, and it was costing his father a small fortune to cover things up. Joe just couldn't understand, poor lamb. He thought he had given Bobby everything-but he hadn't given him the one thing he really wanted." She looked right at me with all her very bright teeth showing. "This," she said, waving at Samantha, the knives, the blood on the deck. "Once he had a small taste of long pig, and the power that goes with it, he learned to be careful. That dreary little club, Fang, that was Bobby's idea, actually. A lovely way to recruit for the coven, separating cannibals from vampires. And the kitchen help provided a wonderful source of meat."

She frowned. "We really should have stayed with eating immigrants," Alana said. "But I've grown so fond of Bobby, and he begged so prettily. Both girls did, too, actually." She shook her head. "Stupid of me. I do know better." She turned back to me, her bright smile back in place. "But, on the positive side, I have a good deal more cash this time for a new start, and a smattering of Spanish, too, which I shan't waste. Costa Rica? Uruguay? Someplace where all questions can be answered with dollars."

Alana's cell phone chirped, and it startled her for just a second. "Listen to me prattling on," she said, looking at the phone's screen. "Ah. About fucking time." She turned away and spoke a few words into the phone, listened for a moment, spoke again, and put the phone away. "Cesar, Antoine," she said, beckoning to two of the shotgun flunkies. They hurried over to her and she said, "He's here. But…" And she bent her head down next to theirs and added something I could not hear. Whatever it was, Cesar smiled and nodded and Alana looked up at the revelers by the grill. "Bobby," she said. "Go with Cesar and lend him a hand."

Bobby smirked and lifted up Samantha's hand. He took a knife from the table and raised it up, looking expectantly at Alana. Samantha moaned.

"Don't be a buffoon, love," Alana said to Bobby. "Run along and help Cesar."

Bobby dropped Samantha's arm, and she grunted, and then said, "Oh," several times as Cesar and Antoine led Bobby and his friends down the wobbly ramp and away into the park.

Alana watched them go. "We shall be getting started with you shortly," she said, and she turned away from me and walked over to Samantha. "How are we doing, little piggy?" she said.

"Please," Samantha said weakly, "oh, please…"

"Please?" Alana said. "Please what? You want me to let you go? Hm?"

"No," Samantha said, "oh, no."

"Not let you go, all right. Then what, dear?" Alana said. "I just can't think what." She picked up one of the oh-so-very-sharp-looking knives. "Perhaps I can help you speak up a bit, little piglet," she said, and she jabbed the point into Samantha's midsection, not terribly deep, but repeatedly, deliberately, which seemed more terrible, and Samantha cried out and tried to squirm away-quite impossible, of course, lashed to the mast as she was.

"Nothing at all to tell me, darling? Really?" she said, as Samantha at last collapsed, with terrible red blood seeping out in far too many places. "Very well, then, we'll give you some time to think." And she put the knife down on the table, and lifted the lid of the barbecue. "Oh, bother, I'm afraid this has burned," she said, and with a quick glance to be sure that Samantha was watching, she took the long-handled fork and flipped the piece of flesh over the rail and into the water.

Samantha gave a weak wail of despair and slumped over; Alana watched her happily, and then looked at me with her serpent's smile and said, "Your turn next, old boy," and went to the rail.

In truth, I was quite happy to see her go, as I had found her performance very hard to watch. Aside from the fact that I did not actually enjoy watching other people inflict pain and suffering on the innocent, I knew full well that it was at least partially intended for my benefit. I did not want to be next, and I did not want to be food-which I would be, apparently, if Chutsky didn't get here soon. I was sure he was out there in the dark, circling around to come at us at an unexpected angle, trying to find some way to improve his odds, performing some strange and deadly maneuver known only to hardened warriors, before he burst upon us with gun blazing. Still, I really wished he would hurry up.

Alana kept looking off toward the gate. She seemed to be a bit distracted, which was fine with me. It gave me a chance to reflect on my misspent life. It seemed terribly sad that it was ending now, so soon, long before I did anything really important, like taking Lily Anne to ballet lessons. How would she manage in life without me there to guide her? Who would teach her to ride a bicycle; who would read her fairy tales?

Samantha moaned weakly again, and I looked at her. She was rolling against her bonds in a kind of slow and spastic rhythm, as if her batteries were slowly running down. Her father had read to her, too. Read her fairy tales, she had said. Perhaps I shouldn't read Lily Anne fairy tales-it hadn't worked out very well for Samantha. Of course, as things stood now, I wouldn't be reading anything to anyone. I hoped Deborah was all right. In spite of her odd moodiness lately, she was tough-but she had taken a hard shot to the head, and she had looked very limp when they dragged her below.

And then I heard Alana say, "Aha," and I turned to look.

A group of figures was just now stepping into one of the pools of light cast from a working lamp. This new clump of young partiers in pirate costumes had come into the park and joined up with Bobby, and I had time to wonder: How many cannibals could there be in Miami? The group circled excitedly like a flock of gulls, waving pistols, machetes, and knives. At the center of their circle, five more figures came on. One of them was Cesar, the man Alana had sent off into the park. With him was Antoine, the other guard, as well as Bobby. Between them they were dragging another man. He was slumped over, apparently unconscious. Behind them stalked a man dressed in a black, hooded robe that hid his face.

And as the partiers circled and cawed, the unconscious man in the middle rolled back his head and the light caught his face so I could see his features.

It was Chutsky.

THIRTY-NINE

Einstein tells us that our notion of time is really nothing more than a convenient fiction. I have never pretended to be the kind of genius who actually understands that sort of thing, but for the first time in my life I began to get a glimmer of what it meant. Because when I saw Chutsky's face, everything stopped. Time no longer existed. It was as if I was trapped in a single moment that went on forever, or a still-life painting. Alana was etched against the dim lights at the railing of the old fake pirate ship, face frozen into an expression of carnivorous amusement. Beyond her in the park were the five unmoving figures in their pool of light, Chutsky with his head rolled limply back, the guards and Bobby pulling him along by his arms, the strange black-robed figure stalking behind them, holding Cesar's shotgun. The group of pirates held comic-menacing poses around them, all in lifelike postures without motion. I no longer heard any sound. The world had shrunk down to that one still picture of all hope ending.

And then in the near distance, in the direction of the Steeplechase, the horrible migraine-inducing beat of the music from Club Fang started up; somebody shouted, and normal time began to return. Alana started to turn from the rail, slowly at first, and then back up to regular speed, and once again I heard Samantha moaning, the Jolly Roger flopping at the masthead, and the remarkably loud pounding of my heart.

"Were you expecting someone?" Alana asked me pleasantly, as things came back to very horrible normal. "I'm afraid he's not going to be much help."

That thought had occurred to me, along with several others, but none of them offered me anything more than a semihysterical commentary on the rising sense of hopelessness that was now flooding the basements of Castle Dexter. I could still smell the lingering aroma of flesh toasting on the grill, and it did not take a great stretch of the imagination to picture that precious, irreplaceable Dexter would be sizzling there soon, one slice at a time. In a really good story with a perfect Hollywood structure, this would be the moment when a fantastically clever idea would pop into my head, and I would somehow cut my bonds, grab a shotgun, and blast my way to freedom.

But apparently, I was not in that kind of story, because nothing at all popped into my head except the forlorn and unshakable idea that I was about to be killed and eaten. I saw no way out, and I could not still the pointless yammering in my brain long enough to think of anything but that one central thing: This was It. End of game, all over, fade to black-Dexter into darkness. No more wonderful me, not ever again. Nothing left but a pile of gnawed bones and abandoned guts, and somewhere one or two people would have a few vague memories of the person I had pretended to be-not even the real me, which seemed deeply tragic, and not for very long. Life would go on without fabulous, inimitable me, and although it was not right, it was unavoidable. The end, finish, finito.

I suppose I should have died right then from pure misery and self-pity, but if those things were fatal, no one would ever make it past thirteen years old. I lived, and I watched as they dragged Chutsky up the wobbly ramp and dumped him on the deck with his hands taped behind him. The black-robed figure with Cesar's shotgun moved over to the grill where he could cover me and Chutsky, and Bobby and Cesar dragged Chutsky to Alana's feet and let him flop facedown into a limp and quivering heap. He had two darts sticking out of his back, which explained the quivering. They had somehow sneaked up behind Chutsky and Tasered him, and then knocked him out somehow while he shivered helplessly. So much for big-time professional rescue.

"He's rather a large brute," Alana said, nudging him with a toe. She glanced at me. "Friend of yours, is he?"

"Define friend," I said. After all, I had really been counting on him, and he was supposed to be good at this sort of thing.

"Yes," she said, looking back at Chutsky. "Well, he's no bloody use to us. Nothing but gristle and scar tissue."

"Actually, I'm told he's very tender underneath," I said hopefully. "I mean, much more than me."

"Ohhhh," Chutsky said. "Ohhh, shit…"

"Hey, looka that; he got a good jaw," Cesar said, nodding with approval. "I hit him good; he should still be out."

"Where is she?" Chutsky said, trembling. "Is she all right?"

"I did, I hit him good. I used to fight," Cesar said to no one in particular.

"She's here," I said to him. "She's unconscious."

Chutsky made a huge and apparently very painful effort and rolled his body so he could see me. His eyes were red and filled with anguish. "We fucked up, buddy," he said. "Fucked up bad."

It seemed a bit too obvious to call for comment, so I said nothing, and Chutsky collapsed back into his original shivering position with a weary, "Fuck."

"Take him down with Sergeant Morgan," Alana said, and Cesar and Bobby grabbed Chutsky again and dragged him to his feet and then through the door and into the cabin. "The rest of you, run along to the Steeplechase and make sure the fire is going. Enjoy yourselves," she said to the flock of pirates crowding the gangway, with a nod to Antoine. "Take along the punch bowl." Someone let out a whoop, and two of them grabbed the five-gallon pot by its handles. The figure in the black robe stepped carefully around them, keeping the shotgun pointed toward me while pirates trooped off down the gangway and away into the park. Then they were gone and Alana turned her frosty attention to me once again.

"Well, then," she said, and although I knew that she could not feel any emotions, there was certainly a dark and awful amusement shining out from the scaly thing that lived inside her as she looked at me. "And now we come to my man-piggy." She nodded at the bouncer and he backed away from me to the rail, gun still pointed at me, and Alana stepped forward.

It was a spring night in Miami and the temperature was in the upper seventies-and yet as she approached I felt an icy wind blow over me and through me and whip up from the darkest corners of the deepest parts of me, and the Passenger rose up on its many legs and cried out in helpless fury, and I felt my bones crumble and my veins turn to dust and the world shrank down to the steady and happy madness of Alana's eyes.

"Do you know about cats, love?" she said to me, and she was almost purring herself. It seemed rhetorical; in any case, my mouth was suddenly very dry and I didn't feel like answering. "They do love to play with their food, don't they?" She patted my cheek lovingly and then slapped it, very hard, with no change of expression. "I used to watch for hours. They torture their little mousie, don't they? Do you know why, dearie?" she asked me. She ran a long and very red fingernail down my chest and onto my arm, where she found one of the cuts there, made by the saw palmetto thorns. She frowned at it. "It's not mere cruelty, which seems a shame. Although I'm sure there's some of that, too." She put her fingernail into the cut. "But the torture releases the adrenaline in the little mousie."

Alana dug her fingernail into the tender open flesh of my wounded arm and I jumped as the pain needled in and the blood began to flow. She nodded thoughtfully. "Or in this case, the adrenaline in the piggy. The adrenaline flows out into the wee cowering timorous beastie's whole body. And guess what, love? Adrenaline is a marvelous natural meat tenderizer!" She jabbed her nail into the cut in rhythm with her words, deeper and deeper, twisting the nail to open the wound more, and although it did hurt, the sight of it was worse and I could not take my eyes off the terrible red of the precious Dexter blood running out in ever-increasing gouts as she poked harder and deeper.

"So first we play with our food, and then it actually tastes better! Some terrific, relaxing fun, and it pays off at table. Isn't nature wonderful?"

She held her long sharp nail deep in my arm and looked at me for a very long moment with her awful frozen smile. I heard a few of the revelers laughing madly somewhere in the distance, and Samantha moaned again, much softer now, and I turned my head toward her. She had lost a great deal of blood, and the pot Bobby had put under her arm had overflowed so that it was slopping onto the deck, and as I saw it I got a little bit dizzy and I pictured the blood from my cut pouring out to join it until the two of us covered the deck with a flood of terrible vile red sticky mess like that long-ago mommy time with my brother Biney in the cold box and my head began to spin and I felt myself whirl away from the pain and off into the red darkness And a new and deeper stab of pain brought me back to the deck of the wretched old pretend pirate ship, with the very real and elegant cannibal woman trying to push her fingernail all the way through my arm. I was sure she would soon open an artery, and then my blood would be everywhere. I hoped it would at least ruin Alana's shoes-not much as final curses go, but really just about all I had left.

I felt Alana's grip on my arm tighten, driving her fingernail even deeper into my arm, and for a moment the pain was so bad I thought I would have to yell, and then the cabin door banged open and Bobby and Cesar came back out onto the deck.

"Couple of lovebirds," Bobby sneered. "He's like, 'Debbie, oh, Debbie,' and she's like, nothing, still out cold, and he's like, 'Oh, God, oh, God, Debbie, Debbie.' "

"All very amusing," Alana said, "but is he tucked away safely, dear?"

Cesar nodded. "He's not going nowhere," he said.

"Brilliant," Alana said. "Then why don't you two totter away to the party?" She looked at me through hooded eyes. "I'm going to stay here and unwind for a few more minutes."

I am sure that Bobby answered with something he thought of as clever, and I am equally certain that he and Cesar clattered off down the rickety gangway and into the park to join the other revelers, but in truth none of that registered; my world had shrunk down to the horrible pictures forming in the air between Alana and me. She stood there looking at me, unblinking, with such a clear intensity of purpose that I began to think the force of her stare might actually open a wound on my face.

Unfortunately, she decided not to rely on the power of her eyes to tenderize me. She turned slowly, tauntingly, away from me, and stepped over to the table where the row of gleaming blades lay waiting for her. The black-hooded man stood there near the knives, and the muzzle of his shotgun never wavered from me. Alana looked down at the knives and put a finger to her chin as she regarded them thoughtfully. "So many really good choices," she said. "I do wish there was a little more time to do this properly. Really get to know you." She shook her head sadly. "I didn't have any time at all with that marvelous-looking policeman you sent me. I barely got a taste of him before I had to put him down. Rush, rush, rush. Takes all the joy out, doesn't it?" she said. So she had killed Deke. And I could not help hearing a slight echo of my own familiar playtime musings in her words, which did not seem fair at a time like this.

"But," Alana said, "I think you and I shall get on properly, any road. This one." She lifted up a large and very sharp-looking blade something like a bread knife that would almost certainly provide her with some quality amusement. She turned to me and raised the knife slightly and took one step back toward me and then stopped.

Alana looked at me, her eyes flicking over me as she rehearsed the things she was going to do, and it may be that I have an overactive imagination, or it may be that I recognized her intentions from my own modest experience, but I could feel every move she was thinking of making, every slice and cut she planned to try on me, and the sweat began to soak my shirt and pour off my forehead and I could feel my heart hammering at my ribs as if it was trying to punch through the bones and escape, and we stood there, ten feet apart, sharing a mental pas de deux from the classical ballet of blood. Alana let her moment of enjoyment stretch out for a very long time, until I felt like my sweat glands had run dry and my tongue had swollen to the roof of my mouth. And then she said, "Right," in a soft and throaty voice and took a step forward.

I suppose there may be something to this New Age notion after all, that everything balances out eventually-I mean, aside from the fact that I was now getting a taste of my own medicine, which is really beside the point. What I mean is that this evening I had already lived through a period when time slowed and stopped, and now, just to even things out, as Alana turned toward me and raised her knife, everything seemed to kick into high gear and happen all at once in a kind of jerky high-speed dance.

First, there was a shattering bang and the enormous, ponytailed bouncer exploded; his midsection quite literally vanished in a horrifying red spray and the rest of him went flying away over the railing of the boat with an expression of numb resentment on his face, and he was gone so fast it was as if he had been clipped out of the scene by an omnipotent film editor.

Second, and so quickly it seemed to be almost simultaneous with the bouncer flying over the rail, Alana whipped around with the knife raised and her mouth wide open and she jumped at the man in the black robe, who pumped the shotgun and fired, taking off Alana's upraised arm with the knife. And then he pumped again and swiveled, faster than seemed possible, and shot the last of the guards, who was just bringing his weapon up. And then Alana slid down at Samantha's feet, the guard slammed into the rail and went over, and suddenly it was very still on the deck of the wicked ship Vengeance.

And then that melodramatic, ominous, black-robed figure racked the shotgun one more time and turned until the smoking barrel was pointed directly at me. For just a moment, everything froze again; I looked at that dark mask and the darker gun barrel pointed, naturally enough, right at my midsection-and I wondered: Had I pissed off Somebody Up There? I mean, what had I done to be condemned to this endless smorgasbord of death? Seriously; how many different and equally horrible ends can one relatively innocent man face in one night? Is there no justice in this world? Other than the sort I specialize in, I mean?

It just went on and on-I'd been beaten and slapped and poked and tortured and menaced with knives and threatened with being eaten and stabbed and shot-and I'd had it. Enough was enough. I couldn't even get upset about this ultimate indignity. I was all out of adrenaline; my flesh was as tenderized as it was going to get, and it would almost be a relief to have it all over with. Every worm must turn at last, and Dexter had reached the point where he could take no more.

And so I drew myself up to my full height and I stood there, filled with noble readiness to step up to the plate and meet my final destiny with true courage and manly resolve-and once again life threw me a knuckleball.

"Well," the hooded figure said, "it looks like I'm going to have to pull your fat out of the fire one more time."

And as he raised the gun I thought, I know that voice. I knew it, and I didn't know whether to cheer, cry, or throw up. Before I could do any of those things, he turned around and fired at Alana, who had crawled slowly and painfully toward him, leaving a thick trail of blood. At close range the shot bounced her up off the deck and nearly cut her in half before dropping the two elegant pieces back down in a sadly untidy heap.

"Nasty bitch," he said as he lowered the shotgun, pulled back the hood, and took off his mask. "Still, the pay was excellent, and the work suited me-I'm very good with knives." And I was right. I did know that voice. "And really, anyone would think you would have figured it out," my brother, Brian, said. "I gave you enough hints-the black token in the bag, everything."

"Brian," I said, and even though it was one of the stupidest things I had ever said, I couldn't help adding, "You're here."

"Of course I'm here," he said, with his awful fake smile, and somehow it didn't seem quite so phony right now. "What's family for?"

I thought about the last few days: first Deborah getting me from the trailer in the Everglades, and now this, and I shook my head. "Apparently," I said, "family is for rescuing you from cannibals."

"Well, then," Brian said. "Here I am."

And for once his awful fake smile seemed very real and welcome.

FORTY

As every cliche-loving human being knows, no cloud dumps its load upon us unless it is hiding its very own silver lining. In this case, the one small perk of being held captive by cannibals is that there are always plenty of nice sharp knives lying around, and Brian had me cut free very quickly. Pulling the duct tape off my wrists didn't hurt quite as much the second time either, since there wasn't much arm hair left to rip out by the roots, but it still wasn't a great deal of fun, and I took a moment to rub my wrists. Apparently it was a moment too long.

"Perhaps you could massage yourself later, brother?" Brian said. "We really can't linger." He nodded at the gangway.

"I need to get Deborah," I said.

He sighed theatrically. "What is it with you and that girl?" he said.

"She's my sister."

Brian shook his head. "I suppose," he said. "But do let's hurry, all right? The place is crawling with these people, and we would really rather avoid them, I think."

We had to pass the mainmast to get to the cabin door and, in spite of Brian's urgency, I paused by Samantha, taking very great care to avoid the puddle of blood that spread out to her right. I stood on her left side and looked at her carefully. Her face was incredibly pale and she was no longer swaying or moaning and for a moment I thought she was already dead. I put a hand on her neck to feel for a pulse; it was there, but very faint, and as I touched her neck her eyes fluttered open. The eyeballs themselves twitched and did not quite focus and she clearly didn't recognize me. She half closed her eyes again and said something I could not hear and I leaned closer. "What did you say?" I said.

"Was I… good…?" she whispered hoarsely. It took me a moment, but I finally did realize what she meant.

They like to tell us that it is important to speak the truth, but it has been my experience that real happiness lies in having people tell you what you want to believe, usually not the same thing at all, and if you have to stub your toe on the truth later, so be it. For Samantha, there was not going to be any later, and that being the case, I could not really find it in myself to hold a grudge and be mean enough to speak the truth now.

So I leaned down close to her ear and told her what she wanted to hear.

"You were delicious," I said.

She smiled and closed her eyes.

"I really don't think we have time for sentimental scenes," Brian said. "Not if you want to save that darn sister of yours."

"Right," I said. "Sorry." I left Samantha with no real reluctance, pausing only to pick up one of Alana's very nice knives from the table beside the barbecue.

We found Deborah behind the counter in what had once been the concession stand down in the main cabin of the old pirate ship. She and Chutsky had both been tied to a couple of large pipes that ran from a missing sink into the deck. Their hands and feet were duct-taped. Chutsky, to his credit, had almost freed one hand-his only hand, of course, but give kudos where it's due.

"Dexter!" he said. "Christ, I'm glad to see you. She's still breathing; we gotta get her outta here." He saw Brian lurking behind me for the first time and frowned. "Hey-that's the guy with the Taser."

"It's all right," I said unconvincingly. "Um, actually, he's-"

"It was an accident," Brian said quickly, as if afraid I would actually introduce him by name. He had flipped the hood back up to mask his face. "Anyway, I rescued you, so let's just get out of here quickly, before anybody else shows up, all right?"

Chutsky shrugged. "Yeah, sure, okay, you got a knife?"

"Of course," I said. I leaned over him, and he shook his head impatiently.

"No, fuck, come on, Dex, get Deborah first," he said.

It seemed to me that a man with only one hand and one foot who is bound hand and foot, as well as tied to a pipe, is in no place to give orders in a cranky tone of voice. But I let it pass, and I knelt beside Deborah. I cut the tape off her wrists and picked up one hand. The pulse felt strong and regular. I hoped that meant she was just unconscious; she was very healthy, and very tough, and unless she had caught a really bad break I thought she would probably be all right, but I did wish she would wake up and tell me so in person.

"Come on, quit fucking around, buddy," Chutsky said in the same petulant tone, and I cut the rope that secured Deborah to the pipe, and the tape that held her ankles together.

"We do need to hurry," Brian said softly. "Do we have to bring him?"

"Very fucking funny," Chutsky said, but I knew that my brother was serious.

"I'm afraid so," I said. "Deborah would be upset if we left him behind."

"Then for goodness' sake, cut him loose and let's go," Brian said, and he went to the door of the cabin and looked out, holding the shotgun at the ready. I cut Chutsky loose and he lurched to his feet-or to be accurate, to his foot, since one of them was a prosthetic replacement, like his hand. He looked down at Deborah for a second and Brian cleared his throat impatiently.

"All right," Chutsky said. "I'll carry her. Help me out, Dex." And he nodded at Debs. Together we lifted her up and got her onto Chutsky's shoulder. He didn't seem to mind the weight; he shifted once to get her settled more comfortably, and then he moved toward the door as if he were off on a hike with a small day pack.

On deck, Chutsky paused briefly by Samantha, which made Brian hiss with impatience. "Is this the girl Debbie wanted to rescue so bad?" Chutsky said.

I looked at my brother, who was practically hopping on one foot in his eagerness to be gone. I looked back at my sister, draped across Chutsky's shoulder, and I sighed. "That's her," I said.

Chutsky shifted Deborah's weight slightly so he could reach over with his one real hand. He put it on Samantha's throat and held his fingers there for a few seconds. Then he shook his head. "Too late," he said. "She's dead. Debbie's going to be very upset."

"I'm awfully sorry," Brian said. "Can we go now?"

Chutsky looked at him and shrugged, which made Deborah slip a little bit. He caught her-fortunately not with his steel hook-readjusted her weight, and said, "Yeah, sure, let's go," and we scurried for the ramp off the boat.

Getting down the wobbly gangway was a bit tricky, especially since Chutsky was using his hand to hold on to Deborah, leaving only his hook to hold the guide rope. But we did manage, and once we were on terra firma we headed quickly for the gate.

I wondered if I should feel bad about Samantha. I didn't really think there was anything I could have done to save her-I hadn't even done a very good job of saving myself, which had a far higher priority-but it made me uncomfortable just to leave her body there. Perhaps it was because of all the blood, which always unsettles me. Or maybe it was just that I was always so tidy with my own leftovers. Certainly it was not because I thought her death was tragic or unnecessary-far from it. It was actually a small relief to have her out of the way without having to take any of the responsibility for it myself. It meant that I was in the clear; there was no piper to be paid, and my life could slip back onto its well-oiled and comfortable rails without any more worry about frivolous court proceedings. No, on the whole, it was a very good thing that Samantha got her wish, or most of it. The only thing gnawing at me was that it made me want to whistle, and that didn't seem right.

And then it hit me-I was feeling guilt! Me, Deeply Dead Dexter, King of the Unfeeling! I was wallowing in that soul-crushing, time-wasting, ultimate human self-indulgence-guilt! And all because I felt secret happiness from thinking that the untimely end of a young woman was a good thing for my selfish self-interests.

Had I finally grown a soul?

Was Pinocchio a real boy at last?

It was ludicrous, impossible, unthinkable-and yet, I was thinking it. Maybe it was true-maybe the birth of Lily Anne and my becoming Dex-Daddy and all the other impossible events of the last few weeks had finally and fatally killed the Dark Dancer I had always been. Maybe even the last few hours of mind-numbing terror under the reptile glare of Alana's dead blue eyes had helped, stirring the ashes until a seed sprouted. Maybe I was a new being now, ready to blossom into a happy, feeling human, one who could laugh and cry without pretending, and watch a TV show without secretly wondering what the actors would look like taped to a table-was it possible? Was I newborn Dexter, ready to take his place in a world of real people at last?

It was all fantastically interesting speculation, and like all such navel-gazing, it almost got me killed. As I blindly marveled at myself, we came through the park all the way to the go-cart track, and I had wandered slightly ahead of the others, unseeing because of my ridiculous self-absorption. I slid around the shed at the edge of the track and very nearly stepped on two party-hearty pirates who were kneeling on the ground trying to start a thirty-year-old go-cart. They looked up at me and blinked stupidly. Two large cups of punch stood on the ground beside them.

"Hey," one of them said. "It's the meat." He reached into his bright red pirate sash, and we will never know whether he was trying to get a weapon or a stick of chewing gum because, happily for me, Brian stepped around the shed just in time and shot him, and Chutsky came around and kicked the other one in the throat, so hard I could hear it crack, and he went over backward making gacking noises and clutching at his windpipe.

"Well," said Brian, looking at Chutsky with something like affection. "I see you're not just eye candy."

"Yeah, I'm terrific, huh?" Chutsky said. "Really useful." He sounded a little bit down for somebody escaping unharmed from a cannibal orgy, but perhaps getting Tasered left an emotional afterglow.

"Really, Dexter," Brian said. "You need to watch where you put your feet."

We made it to the main gate without further incident, which was a relief, since sooner or later our luck was bound to run out and we would stumble onto a large number of pirates, or enough who were sober, and we would have a very hard time. I had no idea how many shots Brian had left in his borrowed shotgun, but I didn't think it could be many. Of course, there were presumably plenty of kicks left in Chutsky's foot, but we couldn't count on being attacked by any more bad guys thoughtful enough to charge us from a kneeling position. Altogether, I was very glad to get through the gate and back to Debs's car.

"Open the door," Chutsky said to me in a demanding tone of voice, and I reached for the car's door handle. "The back door, Dexter," he snapped. "Jesus Christ." I made no attempt to correct his manners; he was too old and grumpy to learn, and after all, the strain of his failure this evening must have been taking some toll on his always basic etiquette. Instead I simply shifted to the car's back door and pulled on the handle. Naturally enough, it was locked.

"For fuck's sake," Chutsky said as I turned around, and I saw Brian raise an eyebrow.

"Such language," my brother said.

"I need the key," I said.

"Back pocket," Chutsky said. It gave me just a moment's hesitation, which was silly. After all, I was quite well aware that he had been living with my sister for several years. But still, I was surprised at the thought that he knew her this well, that he automatically knew where she kept her car keys. And it occurred to me that he knew her in other ways that I never would, too, knew other small domestic details of her life, and for some reason the thought made me hesitate for just a second, which was not, of course, a very popular choice.

"Come on, buddy, for Christ's sake, get your head out of your ass," Chutsky said.

"Dexter, please," Brian added. "We need to get out of here."

Clearly, I was going to be everybody's whipping boy tonight, a complete waste of protoplasm. But raising any objection would just take more time. Besides, anything that could get the two of them to agree was almost certainly inarguable. I stepped over to Deborah, where she lay across Chutsky's shoulder, and slid the keys out of the back pocket of her pants. I opened the back door of the car and held it wide as Chutsky put my sister down on the seat.

He began to go through a quick paramedic's exam of Deborah, which was harder than it should have been with his one hand. "Flashlight?" he said over his shoulder, and I got Debs's big police Maglite from the front seat and held it as Chutsky thumbed up her eyelids and watched her eyes react to the light.

"Ahem," Brian said behind us, and I turned to look at him. "If you don't mind," he said, "I would like to disappear?" He smiled, his old fake smile again, and nodded toward the north. "My car is a half mile away in a strip mall," he said. "I'll just ditch the gun and this corny robe, and I'll see you later-tomorrow for dinner, perhaps?"

"Absolutely," I said, and believe it or not I had to fight down a very real urge to give him a hug. "Thank you, Brian," I said instead. "Thank you very much."

"You're very welcome," he said. He smiled again, and then he turned away and walked off into darkness.

"She's gonna be okay, buddy," Chutsky said, and I looked back to where he still squatted beside the open back door of the car. He held her hand, and he looked overwhelmingly weary. "She's gonna be all right."

"Are you sure?" I said, and he nodded.

"Yeah, I'm sure," he said. "You should still take her to the ER, get her checked out, but she's okay, no thanks to me and-" He looked away from me and for a very long moment he didn't say anything, long enough that I began to feel uncomfortable; after all, we were agreed that we needed to get out of here. Was this really the time and place for quiet contemplation?

"Aren't you coming along to the hospital?" I said, more to move things along than because I wanted his company.

Chutsky didn't move or speak. He just kept looking away, off into the park, where there were still scattered sounds of revelry and the mindless thump of the music wafting toward us on the night breeze.

"Chutsky," I said, and I felt real anxiety growing.

"I fucked up," he said at last, and to my very great horror, a tear rolled down his cheek. "I fucked up big-time. I let her down when she needed me the most. She could have been killed, and I couldn't stop them, and…"

He took a deep and very ragged breath. He still didn't look at me. "I've been kidding myself, buddy. I'm too old for her, and I'm no fucking good to her or anybody else. Not with…" He held up his hook, and thumped his forehead against it, resting his head there and looking down at his fake foot. "She wants a family, which is stupid for a guy like me. Old. A mess, and a cripple-and I can't protect her, or even-It's not me she needs. I'm just a useless, old fuckup-"

There was a shriek of female laughter from inside the park, and the sound brought Chutsky back to the here and now. He snapped his head around to the front, took another deep breath, a little steadier, and looked down at Deborah's face. Then he kissed her hand, a long kiss with his eyes closed, and stood up. "Get her to the ER, Dexter," he said. "And tell her I love her." And then he marched to his car.

"Hey," I said. "Aren't you going to…"

Apparently, he wasn't going to. He ignored me, got into his car, and drove away.

I did not linger to watch his taillights flicker off into the night. I secured Debs in the backseat the best I could with a seat belt around her middle, and got in. I drove two miles or so, far enough to be safe, and then pulled over. I reached for my phone, then thought better of it and instead picked up Chutsky's phone from the seat where Debs had thrown it. His phone would be shielded from little things like caller ID. I dialed.

"Nine-one-one," the operator said.

"You all better get a whole lotta boys over to that ol' Buccaneer Land right fast," I said in my best Bubba voice.

"Sir, what is the nature of this emergency?" the operator asked.

"I'm a veteran," I said. "I done two tours in Eye-rack and I know gunfire when I hear it and that's sure as shit gunfire in Buccaneer Land."

"Sir, are you saying you heard gunshots?"

"More than jes' heard it. Went and took a look in there, and they's dead bodies everywhere," I said. "Ten, twenty dead bodies, and folks dancin' 'round 'em like a party," I said.

"You saw ten dead bodies, sir? You're sure?"

"And then somebody took a bite outta one and started to eat it an' Ah run. Never seen nothin' so groo-sum in mah life, an' Ah wuz in Baghdad."

"They-ate the body, sir?"

"You all best get all them SWAT boys over there pronto," I said, and I hung up and put the car in gear. They might not round up everybody in the park, but they would get most of them, enough to get a picture of what had happened, and that would be enough to get Bobby Acosta, one way or another. I hoped that it would make Deborah feel a little better about Samantha.

I nosed the car up onto I-95 and began the drive to Jackson. There were several closer hospitals, but if you are a Miami cop, you tend to home in on Jackson, which has one of the best trauma units in the country. And since Chutsky had assured me that the visit was precautionary only, I thought it best to go with the experts.

So I drove south as fast as I dared, quietly for the first ten minutes, and then just before the turnoff for the Dolphin Expressway, I heard sirens, and then more sirens, and a column of emergency vehicles long enough to deal with a major invasion went by in the opposite direction. They were followed closely by a matching column of satellite trucks from the local news departments-all headed north, presumably to Buccaneer Land. Moments after the noise had faded, I heard movement in the backseat and a few seconds later Deborah spoke. "Fuck," she said, not really a surprising first word, considering the source. "Oh, fuck."

"You're all right, Deborah," I said, craning my neck to see her in the mirror. She lay there with her hands clasped over her middle and a look of numb panic on her face. "We're on our way to Jackson, but just to check. Nothing to worry about; you're okay."

"Samantha Aldovar?" she said.

"Um," I said. "She didn't make it." I glanced again in the mirror; Debs closed her eyes and rubbed her stomach.

"Where's Chutsky?" she said.

"Well, ah, I don't really know," I said. "I mean, he's okay, you know, not hurt. He said, 'Tell Deborah I love her,' and then he drove away, but…" A large truck jerked in front of me, even though I was in the HOV lane, and I had to swerve and brake. When I looked back in the mirror again, her eyes were still closed.

"He's gone," she said. "He thinks he let me down, and so he got all noble and left me. Just when I need him most."

The idea of needing Chutsky at all, letting alone "most," seemed like stretching credibility to me, but I played along.

"Sis, you're going to be all right," I said, searching for the right reassuring words. "We'll get you checked out at Jackson, but I'm sure you're fine, and you'll be back at work tomorrow and everything will seem all right, and-"

"I'm pregnant," she said, which really left me nothing at all to say.

EPILOGUE

Chutsky really was gone-Deborah was right about that. After a few weeks it became clear that he wasn't coming back, and there was nothing she could do to find him. She tried, of course, with all the single-minded skill of a very stubborn woman who was also a very good cop. But Chutsky had spent a career in black operations, and he swam at a deeper level. We didn't really even know if Chutsky was his real name. After a lifetime of espionage, he probably didn't know either, and he vanished as completely as if he had never existed.

Deborah was right about the other thing, too. It soon became very obvious to everyone that all of her pants were suddenly too tight, and her usually bland shirts had changed into loose-fitting, Hawaiian-patterned things, the kind that she would normally never willingly accompany even to the drunk tank. Deborah was pregnant, and she was determined to have the baby, with Chutsky or without him.

I worried at first that her new status as an unmarried mother would hurt her standing at work; cops are generally very conservative people. But I had apparently not kept up with the New Conservatism. Nowadays, Family Values meant that getting pregnant when you were single was fine, as long as you stayed that way, and Deborah's prestige at work actually went up as her belly got bigger.

You would have thought that a pregnant detective would have been sympathetic enough to convince anyone of a person's wickedness, but at the bail hearing for Bobby Acosta, the lawyers played up the fact that Joe had just lost his wife-Bobby's stepmother, who had raised him and meant so much to him, now tragically departed, and they somehow forgot to mention that she had died in the act of torturing and murdering a few sundry people, like wonderful precious me. The judge set bail at five hundred thousand dollars, which was chump change for the Acosta family, and Bobby skipped happily out of the courtroom and into the arms of his ever-loving father, as we had known all along he would do.

Deborah took it better than I thought she would. She did say a bad word or two, but after all, she was Deborah, and all she really said was, "Well, fuck, so the little shit walks," and then she looked at me.

"Well, yes," I said, and that was pretty much that. Bobby was free until his trial, which could be years away, considering the caliber of lawyer his father brought to bear. By the time Bobby actually went before a jury, all the lovely headlines about "Cannibal Carnival" and "Buccaneer Bloodbath" would be forgotten, and Joe's money would get the charges reduced to hunting out of season, with a sentence of twenty hours' community service. A bitter pill to swallow, perhaps, but that's life in the service of that old whore Miami Justice, and we had certainly expected it.

And so life settled back into its normal rhythms, measured now by the growth of Deborah's waist, the fullness of Lily Anne's diaper pail, and the Friday-night dinners with Uncle Brian, now a highlight of our week. Friday was an ideal night, among other reasons, because that was when Debs had a birthing class, reducing the chance that she would drop in unexpectedly and embarrass my brother; after all, he had, speaking from a purely technical point of view, tried to kill her a few years back, and I knew very well she was not the kind to forgive and forget. But Brian planned to hang around for a while; apparently he truly enjoyed playing uncle and big brother. And, of course, Miami was his home, too, and he was quite certain that even in this economy it was the best place to find a new job that suited his unique skill set, and in any case he had enough money to tide him over for quite a while. Whatever her other faults, Alana had rewarded talent quite generously.

And to my very great surprise and growing unease, one more rhythm had begun to assert itself, even over the slow and steady blooming of my new human self. Gradually, at first so subtly I did not even notice it, I began to feel a tiny tugging at the back of my neck-but not my physical neck, not really my physical anything, just… something slightly behind and…?

And I would turn and look, puzzled, and see nothing, and shrug it off as imagination, no more than a delayed case of nerves from all I had suffered. After all, poor battered Dexter had truly been through the mill. It was perfectly natural that I should be uneasy, even jumpy, for a while after so much physical and mental trauma. Completely understandable, normal in every way, nothing to worry about, don't think twice. And I would go about my ordinary human business of work time-playtime-TV time-bedtime in its endless unchanging cycle without a care until the next time it happened and I would once again suddenly stop what I was doing and turn around at the call of an unheard voice.

So it went for several months as life got duller and Debs got larger, until she was big enough to set a date for her baby shower. And the night I held that invitation in my hand and wondered what perfect gift I could get her for her Blessed Event I felt the tug of that unvoiced sound again and turned around behind me and this time, framed in the window at my back, I saw it.

Moon.

Full, bright, saucy, lovely moon.

Calling, compelling, shining and beaming, wonderful bright loudmouth moon, whispering sweet nothings in its reptile tones of steel and stealth, saying the two soft syllables of my name in its same old shadow-loving dark-eyed voice, so very well known from so very many times before, so familiar and so comfortable and now so oddly welcome once again.

Hello, old friend.

One more time I feel the leathery wings rustle and unfold in the dark basement, hear once again the joyful whisper of a Passenger brushing off neglect and calling for happy reunion.

It's time, it says, with a small cold thrill of seeing just how things must be this one more time like always. It is very much time.

And it is.

And so although I thought I had gone beyond all this, away from the rattle and slash of the Passenger, I was wrong. I still feel it, feel it now stronger than ever, pulling at me from that great fat blood-red moon hanging in the window with its leering, mocking grin, daring me to do what must be done and do it now.

Now.

And in the tiny still-wet corners of my new human soul I know that I cannot, dare not, must not-I have family obligations-I am holding one in my hand, the invitation to Deborah's baby shower. Soon there will be a new Morgan, a new life to care for, an obligation not to be taken lightly, not in this wicked and dangerous world. And that molten brassy moon-voice, ever louder, whispers slyly that this is true; of course it is. The world is wickedness and danger, very true; no one would ever deny it. And so it is a very good thing to make the world a better and safer place, one small slice at a time, and especially when we can do this thing and meet our family obligations at the same time.

And yes, the thought comes slowly and uncoils with a sharp and perfect logic. It is true, very true, oh, so true and oh, so very neat as well, making perfect sense of so many messy little pieces that need to be nudged into line and made to behave and after all there are those family obligations and in any case there is that voice, that beautiful wailing siren-song voice, and it is calling far too strongly in its fat happy brassy voice for me to say no to it now.

And so we go to my dusty office closet and put a few small things into a gym bag.

And so we go into the living room where Rita and the children are watching TV and on Rita's lap is Lily Anne And for just a moment I stop dead, looking at her, face snuggled down into the warmth of her mother, and for several long heartbeats the sight of her is louder than any song the moon could sing. Lily Anne…

But eventually we breathe, and the deep melody of this perfect night rushes back into me with the air and I remember: It is for her sake that we do this tonight. For Lily Anne, for all the Lily Annes, to make a better place of the world they will grow into, and the wild happiness comes back, and then the cold control, and we bend down to kiss my wife on the cheek. "I need to go out for a little while," we say in a very good imitation of Dexter's human voice. Cody and Astor sit up straight when they hear our voice and they stare wide-eyed at the gym bag, but we stare them down and they are silent.

"What? Oh-but it's… All right, if you're-Could you get milk on the way…?" Rita says.

"Milk," we say. "Bye." And as Cody and Astor goggle in awe at what they know will happen now we are out the door and into the warm blanket of metallic moonlight that has clamped over the Miami night and holds it now in taut readiness for us, for our Night of Need and Necessity, for the thing we will do, must do; we slip once again into the welcome darkness for that one perfect present for a baby shower, the wonderful gift for a special sister, the one thing that only her brother knows she wants, the one thing only he can get for her.

Bobby Acosta.

Double Dexter

Jeff Lindsay

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

FIFTEEN

SIXTEEN

SEVENTEEN

EIGHTEEN

NINETEEN

TWENTY

TWENTY-ONE

TWENTY-TWO

TWENTY-THREE

TWENTY-FOUR

TWENTY-FIVE

TWENTY-SIX

TWENTY-SEVEN

TWENTY-EIGHT

TWENTY-NINE

THIRTY

THIRTY-ONE

THIRTY-TWO

THIRTY-THREE

THIRTY-FOUR

THIRTY-FIVE

Double Dexter

Jeff Lindsay

ONE

Of course there are clouds. they take over the sky and hide that pulsing swollen moon that is clearing its throat above them. The slow trickle of its light is there but any possible glimmer is hidden, invisible behind the clouds that have rolled in low and bloated and so very full. Soon the clouds will open up and pour down a heavy summer rain, so very soon, because they, too, are full of what they must do, full to the point of bursting, so very full that they, too, must work to hold back the flood that absolutely must come, and soon.

Soon but not now, not yet. They must wait, too, swelling with the power of all that is growing in them, the true and blinding current of what will come, of what must come when it is right, when it is beyond necessary and into the true shape of this moment, when it forges the real and necessary skeleton of now

But that time is not yet here, not yet. And so the clouds glower and bunch and wait, letting the need build, and the tension grows with it. It will be soon; it has to be soon. In only a few moments these dark and silent clouds will shatter the silence of the night with the unbearable bright omnipotence of their might and blast the darkness into flickering shards and then, only then, the release will come. The clouds will open up and all the tension of holding in so much weight will flow out in the pure bliss of letting go, and the clean joy of it will pour out and flood the world with its oh-so-happy gift of light and liberation.

That moment is near, so tantalizingly close but it is not yet. And so the clouds wait for that just-right moment, growing their darkness, swelling even bigger and heavier with shadow, until they absolutely must let go.

And here below, in the lightless night? Here on the ground, in the stark pool of shadow these clouds have made with their moon-sheltering sky-hogging sulkiness? What can this be, over there, skyless and dark, sliding through the night so very full and ready and waiting, just like the clouds? And it is waiting, whatever its dark self might be; it waits tense and coiled and watching for that perfect moment to do what it will, what it must, what it has always done. And that moment skitters closer on little mice feet as if it too knows what must come and fears it, and feels the terror of the stalking moment of rightness that is even now pattering up close, closer until it is right there behind you, looking at your neck and nearly tasting the warm flutter of those tender veins and thinking, Now.

And a shattering blast of lightning shreds the dark night and shows a large and soft-looking man scuttling across the ground, as if he, too, has felt the dark breath so close behind. Thunder booms and lightning flashes again and the figure is closer, juggling a laptop and a manila folder as he fumbles for keys and disappears into darkness again as the lightning ends. One more burst of lightning; the man is very close now, clutching his burden and holding a car key in the air. And he is gone again in black stillness. There is sudden silence, a complete hush, as if nothing anywhere is breathing and even the darkness is holding its breath

And then there comes a sudden rush of wind and a last hammer of thunder and the whole world cries out, Now.

Now.

And all that must happen in this dark summer night begins to happen. The skies open up and let go of their burden, the world begins to breathe again, and here in the newly wet darkness other tensions flex and uncoil so very slowly, carefully, reaching their soft sharp tendrils out toward the fumbling, clownlike figure now scrabbling to unlock his car in this sudden rain. The car s door swings open, the laptop and folder thump onto the seat, and then the soft and doughy man slides in behind the wheel, slams the door, and takes a deep breath as he wipes the water from his face. And he smiles, a smile of small triumph, something he does a lot these days. Steve Valentine is a happy man; things have gone his way a lot lately and he thinks they have gone his way again tonight. For Steve Valentine, life is very good.

It is also almost over.

Steve Valentine is a clown. Not a buffoon, not a happy caricature of inept normality. He is a real clown, who runs ads in the local papers and hires out for children s parties. Unfortunately, it is not the bright laughter of childish innocence that he lives for, and his sleight of hand has gotten somewhat out of hand. He has been arrested and released twice when parents pointed out to the police that you don t really need to take a child into a dark closet to show him balloon animals.

They had to let him go both times for lack of evidence, but Valentine took the hint; from that point on nobody has complained how could they? But he has not stopped entertaining the children, certainly not. Leopards do not change their spots, and Valentine has not changed his. He just got wiser, darker, as wounded predators do. He has moved on into a more permanent game and he thinks he has found a way to play and never pay.

He is wrong.

Tonight the bill comes due.

Valentine lives in a run-down apartment building just north of Opa-locka airport. The building looks at least fifty years old. Abandoned cars litter the street in front, some of them burned-out. The building shakes slightly when corporate jets fly low overhead, landing or taking off, and that sound interrupts the constant white noise of traffic on the nearby expressway.

Valentine s apartment is on the second floor, number eleven, and it has a very good view of a rotting playground with a rusting jungle gym, a tilting slide, and a basketball hoop with no net. Valentine has put a battered lawn chair on the balcony of his apartment, placed so he has a perfect view of the playground. He can sit and sip a beer and watch the children play and think his happy thoughts about playing with them.

And he does. He has played with at least three young boys that we know about and probably more. In the last year and a half small bodies have been pulled from a nearby canal on three occasions. They had been sexually abused and then strangled. The boys were all from this neighborhood, which means that their parents are poor and probably in this country illegally. That means that even when their children were killed they had very little to say to the police and that makes their children perfect targets for Valentine. Three times, at least, and the police have no leads.

But we do. We have more than a lead. We know. Steve Valentine watched those little boys at their games on the playground, and then he followed them away into the dusk and taught them his own very final games and then he put them into the murky trash-filled water of the canal. And he went satisfied back to his decrepit lawn chair, opened a beer, and watched the playground for a new little friend.

Valentine thought he was very clever. He thought he had learned his lesson and found a better way to live out his dreams and make a home for his alternative lifestyle and there was nobody smart enough to catch him and make him stop. Until now he has been right.

Until tonight.

Valentine had not been in his apartment when the cops came to investigate the three dead boys, and that was not luck. That was part of his predator s cleverness; he has a scanner for listening to police radio traffic. He knew when they were in the area. It would not be often. The police did not like to come to neighborhoods like this one, where the best they could hope for was hostile indifference. That is one reason Valentine lives here. But when the cops do come, he knows about it.

The cops come if they have to, and they have to if Somebody calls 911 to report a couple fighting in apartment eleven on the second floor, and if Somebody says the fight ended suddenly with the sound of screaming terror followed by silence, they come quickly.

And when Valentine hears them on his scanner, coming to his address, to his apartment, he will naturally want to be sure he is somewhere else before they get here. He will take any material he has that hints at his hobby and he will have some material, they always do and he will hurry downstairs and out into the darkness to his car, thinking that he can drive away until the radio tells him that things have calmed down again.

He will not think that Someone would bother to look up his car s registration and know that he drives a light blue twelve-year-old Chevrolet Blazer with CHOOSE LIFE! plates on it and a magnetic sign on the door that says, PUFFALUMP THE CLOWN. And he will not think that Something might be waiting for him in the backseat of this car, hunched down carefully into the shadows.

He will be wrong about both of those things. Someone does know his car, and Something does wait silently hunkered down on the floor of the dark backseat of the old Chevy, waits while Valentine finishes wiping his face and smiling his secret smile of small triumph and finally finally puts the key in the ignition and starts the engine.

And as the car sputters into life, the moment comes, suddenly, finally, and Something roars up and out of the darkness and snakes a blinding-fast loop of fifty-pound-test nylon fishing line around Valentine s doughy neck and pulls it tight before he can say anything more than, Guck! and he begins to flail his arms in a stupid, weak, pitiful way that makes Someone feel the cold contemptuous power running up the nylon line and deep into the hands holding it. And now the smile has melted from Valentine s face and flowed instead onto ours and we are there so close behind him that we can smell his fear and hear the terrified thumping of his heart and feel his lack of breath and this is good.

You belong to us now, we tell him, and our Command Voice hits him like a jolt of the lightning that crackles outside now to punctuate the darkness. You will do just what we say and you will do it only when we say it. And Valentine thinks he has something to say about that and makes a small wet sound and so we pull the noose tight, very tight, just for a moment, so he will know that even his breath belongs to us. His face goes dark and his eyes bulge out and he raises his hands to his neck and his fingers scrabble madly at the noose for a few seconds until everything goes dark for him and his hands slide down into his lap and he slumps forward and begins to fade away and so we ease up on the noose because it is still too soon, much too soon for him.

His shoulders move and he makes a sound like a rusty ratchet as he takes in one more breath, one more in the quickly dwindling number of breaths he has left to him, and because he does not yet know that the number is so very small he takes another quickly, a little easier, and he straightens up and wastes his precious air by croaking, What the fuck!

A string of nasty mucus drips from his nose and his voice sounds cramped and raspy and very irritating and so we pull once more on the noose, a little more gently this time, just enough so he will know that we own him now, and he very obediently gapes and clutches at his throat and then goes silent. No talking, we say.

Drive.

He looks up and into the rearview mirror and his eyes meet ours for the very first time only the eyes, showing cool and dark through the slits cut in the sleek silk hood that covers our face. For just a moment he thinks he will say something and we twitch the noose very gently, just enough to remind him, and he changes his mind. He looks away from the mirror, puts the car in gear, and drives.

We steer him carefully south, encouraging him now and then with small tugs on the noose, just to keep that one thought in his mind that even breathing is not automatic and will not happen unless we say so, and he is very good for most of the trip. Only one time at a stoplight does he look back at us in the mirror and clear his throat and say, What are you where are we going? and we pull very hard on his leash for a long moment and let his world go dim.

We are going where you are told to go, we say.

Just drive, and do not talk, and you might live a little longer. And that is enough to make him behave, because he does not yet know that soon, so very soon, he will not want to live a little longer, because living as he will come to know it is a very painful thing.

We steer him carefully along side streets and into an area of battered newer houses. Many of them are empty, foreclosed, and one of them in particular has been selected and prepared and we drive Valentine to this place, down a quiet street and under a broken streetlight and into an old-fashioned carport attached to this house and we make him park the car at the back of the carport, where it cannot be seen from the road, and turn off the engine.

For a long moment we do nothing except hold the noose and listen to the night. We push down the rising gurgle of the moon-music and the soft compelling rustle of inner wings aching to open wide and take us up into the sky, because we must be very careful. We listen for any sound that might stalk unwelcome into our night of need. We listen, and we hear the lash of the rain and the wind, and the splash of water from the carport s roof and the rattle of the trees as the summer storm moves through them, and nothing else.

We look: The house to our right, the only house that could see into this carport, is dark. It is empty, too, like the house where we have parked, and we have made certain that there is no one there either, and we silently reach out along the street, listening, carefully tasting the warm wet wind for the scent of any other thing that might see or hear and there is nothing. We breathe in, a deep and beautiful breath filled with the taste and smell of this marvelous night and the terrible-wonderful things we will soon be doing together, just us and Puffalump the clown.

And then Valentine clears his throat, trying so very hard to do it softly, quietly, trying to clear away the tight sharp pain of the line around his neck and somehow make sense of the impossible thing that is happening to special, wonderful him and the sound of it grates on our ears like all the awful clatter of a thousand cracking teeth and we pull hard on the noose, hard enough to break skin, hard enough to squeeze out forever the whole idea of making any sound ever again, and he arches back against the seat with his fingers scrabbling feebly at his throat for just a second before he slumps down into bulge-eyed silence. And we get rapidly out of the car, open the driver s door, and pull him out onto his knees on the shadowed pavement of the carport.

Quickly now, we say. We loosen the line so very slightly and he looks up at us with a face that says the whole concept of quickly is fading away from him for all time and as we see this new and wonderful awareness grow in his eyes we tighten the leash just enough to bring home to him the truth of that thought and he lurches up off his knees and trundles ahead of us through the jalousied back door and into the darkness of the empty house. And now we have him in his new home: the last place he will ever live.

We lead him into the kitchen and stop to let him stand for a few silent seconds and we stay close behind him with a taut hand on his noose and he clenches his fists and then wiggles his fingers and then he clears his throat again. Please, he whispers, in a ruined voice that has already gone on ahead of him into death.

Yes, we say with all our calm patience lapping at the edges of a wild shoreline of joy and it may be that he thinks he hears some hope in that smooth anticipation because he shakes his head, just a little bit, as if he could persuade the tide to go backward.

Why, he croaks. It s, it s, just why?

We pull the line very tight around his throat and watch as his breath stops and his face goes dark and he drops once more to his knees and just before he goes off into unconsciousness we loosen the line, just a little bit, just enough for a small cloud of air to roll into his lungs through his ravaged throat and bring him back up into his eyes, and we tell him all of it, with full and joyful truth.

Because, we say. And then we pull the noose tight again, tighter, very tight, and we watch happily as he slides down the long slope into airless sleep and flops over onto his now-dark-purple face.

We work quickly now, arranging everything just right before he can wake up and spoil things. We get our small bag of toys and tools from the car and pick up the manila folder he dropped onto the car s seat and we go quickly back to the kitchen with these things. Very soon Valentine is taped in place on the counter with his clothing cut away and his mouth sealed shut and around him we have arranged the pretty photos we found in his folder, lovely shots of small boys at play, laughing at a clown in a few of them, in others simply holding a ball or riding a swing. And three of them are placed oh-so-carefully in just the right place so he has to see them, three simple portrait shots taken from the newspaper stories of three small boys who had been found dead in a canal.

And as we finish making everything just right, just the way it has to be, Valentine s eyelids flutter. For a moment he lies still, perhaps feeling the warm air on his naked skin and the tight unyielding duct tape holding him motionless, and perhaps wondering why. Then he remembers and his eyes slam open and he tries impossible things, like breaking the duct tape or taking large breaths or screaming out of a carefully sealed mouth loud enough for anyone else in his receding world to hear. None of this can happen, not ever again, not for him. For Valentine, only one small thing is possible at all, only one unimportant, meaningless, wonderful, necessary thing, and now it will start to happen, now, whatever futile flopping struggles he might try.

Relax, we say, and we put a gloved hand onto his bare and heaving chest. Soon it will all be over. And we mean all of it, everything, every breath and blink, every leer and chuckle, every birthday party and balloon animal, every hungry trip into the dusk in the wake of a small and helpless boy all over, forever, and soon.

We pat his chest. But not too soon, we say, and the cold happiness of that simple truth floods up through us and into our eyes and he sees it and perhaps he knows for sure and perhaps he still feels stupid impossible hope. But as he melts back onto the counter in the tight unbreakable grip of the tape and the stronger need of this delirious night, the beautiful music of the Dark Dance begins to rise around us and we go to work, and for Valentine all hope washes away forever as that one essential thing begins to happen.

It starts slowly not tentative, not out of uncertainty, not at all, but slowly so it will last. Slowly to draw out and relish each well-planned well-rehearsed often-practiced stroke and bring the clown slowly to the point of final understanding: a clear and simple insight into how it ends for him, here, now, tonight. Slowly we paint for him a true portrait of how it must be, stroking strong dark lines to show that this is all there will ever be. This is his very last trick, and now, here, tonight, he will slowly, carefully, meticulously, slice by slice and piece by piece, pay the toll to the happy bridge keeper with the bright blade, and slowly cross that final span into an unending darkness that he will soon be very willing, even very anxious, to join, because by then he will know that it is the only way out of the pain. But not now, not yet, not too soon; first we have to get him there, get him to the point of no return and just beyond it to where it is oh-so-clear to him that we have arrived at the edge and he can never go back. He must see that, understand that, absorb that, accept it as right and necessary and immutable, and it is our happy task to take him there and then point back to the border at the edge of the end and say, See? This is where you are now. You have crossed over and now it all ends.

And so we go to work, with the music rising around us and the moon peeking in through a rift in the clouds and chuckling happily at what it sees, and Valentine is very cooperative. He pitches and hisses and hurls out muffled squeals as he sees that what is happening can never be undone, and it is happening so very thoroughly to rapidly disappearing him, Steve Valentine, Puffalump the clown, the funny happy man in whiteface who really and truly loves kids, loves them so much and so often and in such a very unpleasant way. He is Steve Valentine, party clown, who can take a child through the whole magic rainbow of life in one dark hour, all the way from happiness and wonder into the final agony of hopelessly fading sight and the dirty water of a handy canal. Steve Valentine, who was far too clever for anyone ever to make him stop or prove what he has done in a court of law. But he is not in a court of law now, and he never will be. Tonight he lies upon the bench in the Court of Dexter, and the final verdict gleams in our hand, and there is no access to court-appointed lawyers where he is going and no appeal will ever be possible.

And just before the gavel falls for the very last time we pause. A small and nagging bird has perched on our shoulder and chirped its troubled song: Cher-wee, cher-woo, it must be true. We know the song and we know its meaning. It is the song of the Code of Harry, and it says that we have to be sure, have to be certain that we have done the right thing to the right person, so the pattern will be complete and we can finish with pride and joy and feel the satisfied rush of fulfillment.

And so at the place where breath comes slow and very hard for all that is left of Valentine and the final light of understanding is in his red and swollen eyes, we pause, lean over, and turn his head to face the pictures we have placed around him. We rip up one corner of the tape on his mouth and it must hurt, but it is such a very small pain compared to what he has been feeling for so long now that he makes no sound at all beyond a slow hiss of air.

See them? we say, shaking his wet slack chin and turning his head to make sure he sees the pictures. See what you have done?

He looks, and he sees them, and a tired smile twitches onto the uncovered part of his face. Yes, he says, in a voice that is half-muffled by the tape and shattered by the noose but still sounds clear when he sees. He is drained of hope now, and every taste of life has faded from his tongue, but a small and warm memory tiptoes across his taste buds as he looks at the pictures of the boys he has taken away. They were beautiful . His eyes wander over the pictures and stay there for a long moment and then they close. Beautiful, he says, and it is enough; and we feel so very close to him now.

So are you, we say, and we push the tape into place over his mouth and go back to work, winding up into well-earned bliss as the climax of our sharp symphony blares up out of the cheerful growing moonlight, and the music takes us higher and higher until finally, slowly, carefully, joyfully, it comes to its final triumphant chord and releases everything into the warm wet night: everything. All the anger, unhappiness and tension, all the cramped confusion and frustration of the everyday pointless life we are forced to trudge through just to make this happen, all the petty meaningless blather of trying to blend with bovine humanity it is all gone, all of it shooting up and out and away into the welcoming darkness and with it, trailing along like a battered and beaten puppy, all that might have been left inside the wicked, tattered husk of Steve Valentine.

Bye-bye, Puffalump.

TWO

We were cleaning up and feeling the slow and tired contentment creeping into our bones as we always did, a smug and satisfied laziness at being done and done well with our very happy night of need. The clouds had rolled away and left a cheery afterglow of moonlight and we felt much better now; we always feel better afterward.

And it may be that we were not paying quite as much attention as we should have to the night around us, wrapped as we were in our satisfied cocoon but we heard a noise, a soft and startled breath, and then the whispered rush of feet, and before we could do any more than turn toward it, the feet ran toward the back door of the darkened house, and we heard that door bump shut. And we could only follow and stare through the door s glass jalousies in silent all-consuming dismay as a car parked at the curb leaped into life and sprinted away into the night. The taillights flare the left one dangles at an odd angle and we can only see that it is an old Honda, some uncertain dark color, with a large rust stain on the trunk that looks like a metallic birthmark. And then the car races out of sight and a cold and acid knot tightens in the pit of our stomach as the impossible, dreadful truth burns up inside us and pours out panic like the bright and awful blood from a newly opened wound.

We have been seen.

For a long appalling minute we just stare out the door, rocked by the endless echoes of that unthinkable thought. We have been seen. Someone had come in, unheard, unnoticed, and they had seen us as we really were, standing drained and contented over the half-wrapped leftovers. And they had very clearly seen enough to recognize the odd-shaped pieces of Valentine for what they were, because whoever it was had left in a lightning-fast panicked gallop and vanished into the night before we could do more than take a breath. They had seen they might even have seen our face; in any case they had seen enough to know what they were looking at, and they had raced away to safety and probably to call the police. They would be calling right now, sending patrol cars to scoop us up and put us away but here we stood, frozen into dumb astonished inaction, gaping and drooling at the place where the taillights had disappeared, stuck in stupid incomprehension like a child watching a familiar cartoon dubbed into a foreign language. Seen And at long last, the thought gives us the jolt of fear we need to galvanize us into action, kick us into high gear, and send us racing through the last stages of cleanup and out the door with the still-warm bundles of all we have done this once-fine night.

Miraculously, we make it away from the house and off into the night and there are no sounds of pursuit. No sirens wail their warning; no squealing tires or crackling radios rip the darkness with their threats of Descending Doom for Dexter.

And as I finally, tensely, vigilantly made my way out of the area, the blather-headed numbness of that single shattering thought came back and roiled through me like the never-ending rattle of waves on a rocky beach.

We had been seen.

The thought stayed with me as I disposed of the leftovers how could it not? I drove with one eye on the rearview mirror, waiting for the blinding burst of blue light to flare at my bumper and the brief harsh whoop! of a siren. But nothing came; not even after I ditched Valentine s car, climbed into mine, and drove carefully home. Nothing. I was left entirely at liberty, all alone, pursued only by the demons of my imagination. It seemed impossible someone had seen me at play, as plainly as it was possible to be seen. They had looked at the carefully carved pieces of Valentine, and the happy-weary carver standing above them, and it would not take a differential equation to arrive at a solution to this problem A plus B equals a seat in Old Sparky for Dexter, and someone had fled with this conclusion in perfect comfort and safety but they had not called the police?

It made no sense. It was crazy, unbelievable, impossible. I had been seen, and I had walked away from it consequence-free. I could not really believe it, but slowly, gradually, as I parked my own car in front of my house and just sat for a moment, Logic came back from its too-long vacation on the island of Adrenaline, and I sat hunched over the steering wheel, and communed once more with sweet reason.

All right, I had been seen in flagrante iugulo and had every right to expect that I would be instantly outed and arrested. But I hadn t been, and now I was home, evidence disposed of, and nothing remained to tie me to the happy horror in the abandoned house. Someone caught a very quick glimpse, yes. But it had been dark in there probably too dark to make out my face, especially in one brief, terrified glance, with me turned half away. There was no way to connect the shadowy figure holding the knife with any actual person, living or dead. Tracing the license plate of Valentine s car would only turn up Valentine, and I was reasonably sure he would not answer any questions, unless somebody was willing to use a Ouija board.

And in the incredibly unlikely event that my face was recognized and a wild accusation was made against me, they would find no evidence at all, only a man with a sterling reputation as a member of the Law Enforcement Community who could certainly stand on his dignity and scoff at these absurd allegations. Absolutely no one in their right mind would believe that I could possibly have done anything of the kind except, of course, for my very own personal nemesis, Sergeant Doakes, and he had nothing at all on me except suspicion, which he d had for so long that it was almost comforting.

So what remained? Aside from a dubious dark and partial glimpse of my features, what could anyone possibly have seen that might prove awkward to my ambitions for remaining at liberty?

The wheels and levers in my mighty brain clicked, whirled, and spat out their answer: Absolutely Nothing.

I could not possibly be connected to anything that some shadowy, frightened someone had seen in a dark abandoned house. It was an inescapable conclusion, pure deductive logic, and there was no way around it. I was home free, and I would almost certainly remain that way. I took a very deep breath, wiped my hands on my pants, and went into my house.

It was quiet inside, of course, since it was so very late. The sound of Rita s gentle snoring drifted down the hall to me as I peeked in at Cody and Astor; they were asleep, unmoving, dreaming their small and savage dreams. Farther down the hall, into my bedroom, where Rita lay fast asleep and Lily Anne was curled up in her crib wonderful, improbable Lily Anne, the one-year-old center of my new life. I stood looking down at her and marveling, as always, at the soft perfection of her face, the miniature beauty of her tiny fingers. Lily Anne, the beginning of all that is good about Dexter Mark II.

I had risked all that tonight. I had been stupid, wildly thoughtless, and almost paid the price capture, imprisonment, never again to cradle Lily Anne in my arms, never to hold her hand as she tottered through her first steps and, of course, never again to find some well-deserving friend like Valentine and take him out to the Dark Playground. It was far too much to risk. I would have to lie low and be very well behaved until I was absolutely sure I was in the clear. I had been seen; I had brushed up against the flowing skirts of that old whore Justice, and I could not take that chance again. I must drop Dark Dexter s Delights and let my Dex Daddy disguise morph into the real me. Perhaps this time it would be a permanent hiatus; did I really need to take such awful risks just to do these dreadful-wonderful things? I heard a soft and sated chuckle of mockery rise from the Dark Passenger as it slithered down into rest. Yessss, you do, it hissed with sleepy satisfaction.

But not for a while; tonight would last, would have to last; I had been seen. I climbed into bed and closed my eyes, but the brainless worries of capture scurried back into my mind. I batted at them, swept them away with the broom of logic; I was perfectly safe. I could not be identified, and I had left no evidence anywhere that could ever be found, and reason insisted that I had gotten away with it. All was good and even though I still did not quite believe it, I finally drifted off into anxious, dreamless sleep.

Nothing that happened at work the next day gave any indication that there was anything at all to worry about. Things were quiet in the forensics lab of the Miami-Dade Police Department when I arrived at my job, and I took advantage of the morning stupor to fire up my computer. A careful check of last night s duty logs revealed that no frantic call for help had come in with reference to a maniac and a knife in an abandoned house. No alarm had sounded, no one was looking for me, and if it had not happened by now it was not going to happen at all. I was in the clear so far.

Logic agreed with the official record; I was perfectly safe. In fact, Logic said this to me countless times over the next few days, but for some reason my lizard brain would not listen. I found myself hunched over at work, raising my shoulders against a blow that never fell that I knew would never fall, but I anticipated it anyway. I woke up at night and listened for the sounds of the Special Response Team scuffling into place around the house.

And nothing happened; no sirens came in the night. No knock on the door, squeal of bullhorn, demands that I come out with my hands up nothing at all. Life steamed along on its well-oiled tracks, with no one calling for Dexter s head, and it began to seem like some cruel invisible god was taunting me, mocking my watchfulness, sneering at my pointless apprehension. It was as if the whole thing had never happened, or my Witness had been consumed by spontaneous combustion. But I could not shake the thought that something was coming to get me.

And so I waited, and my jitters grew. Work became a painful test of endurance, sitting at home each night with my family was an annoying chore, and in short, all the zing and zest had fled from Dexter s life.

When the pressure builds too high, even volcanoes boil over, and they are made of stone. I am made of slightly softer stuff, and so it should have been no surprise when I finally erupted after three days of waiting for a blow that never fell.

My day at work had been particularly stressful for no real reason. The main corpse of the day was a floater, a badly decomposed thing that had probably been young and male and had apparently been standing on the wrong end of a large-caliber pistol when it fired. A retired couple from Ohio had found it when their rented pontoon boat ran over it. The floater s silk shirt had gotten tangled in the boat s propeller, and the man from Akron had suffered a small, nonfatal heart attack when he leaned over to clear the prop and saw the rotting face staring back up at him from the end of the motor s shaft. Peekaboo: Welcome to Miami.

There was a great deal of jollity among the cops and forensics geeks as this scenario became known, but the warm glow of camaraderie failed to penetrate Dexter s bosom. The gruesome jokes that would ordinarily bring forth my best fake chuckle seemed like fingernails on a chalkboard, and it was a miracle of self-control that I simmered silently through the moronic hilarity for ninety minutes without setting anyone on fire. But even the most trying experiences must end, and since there was no blood left on the body after so much time in the water, there was really no call for my particular expertise, and I was finally released to return to my desk.

I spent the rest of the workday on routine paperwork, snarling at misplaced files and seething at the stupidity of everyone else s report writing when did Grammar die? And when it was finally time to go home I was out the door and in my car before the last stroke of the hour rang out.

I found no cheer in the casual bloodlust of the evening traffic. For the first time I found myself honking my horn, returning the upraised middle fingers, and raging at delay along with all the other frustrated drivers. It had always been obvious that everyone else in the world is painfully stupid; but tonight that truly grated on my nerves, and when I finally arrived home I was in no mood to pretend I was glad to be back with my little family. Cody and Astor were playing Wii, Rita was giving Lily Anne a bath, all of them performing their empty, oblivious dumb show, and as I stood inside the front door and looked at the profoundly annoying idiocy of what my life had become, I felt something snap, and rather than smashing furniture and laying about me with my fist, I flung my keys on the table and stalked out the back door.

The sun was just starting to set, but the evening was still hot and very humid, and after three steps into the yard I already felt beads of sweat blooming on my face. They felt cool as they rolled down my cheeks, which meant that my face was hot I had flushed with an alien rage, a feeling that almost never took me over, and I wondered: What was going on in the Land of Dexter? Of course I was on edge, waiting for an inevitable apocalypse, but why should that suddenly blossom into anger, and why should it be directed at my family? The dull and anxious interior muck I d been mired in had suddenly erupted into rage, a new and dangerous thing, and I still did not know why. Why did I feel this steaming wrath growing out of what was no more than a few small and harmless examples of human stupidity?

I crossed the patchy brownish grass of our yard and sat at the picnic table, for no real reason except that I had come out here and so I thought I should do something. Sitting wasn t much as an activity and it didn t make me feel any better. I clenched and unclenched my fists and then my face, and I pulled in another hot, damp breath. It didn t calm me down, either.

Dull, petty, pointless frustrations, the very stuff of life, but they had built to a point where I was falling apart. Now more than ever I needed to stay icy calm and in complete control; someone had seen me. Even now he might be on my trail, pitter-pattering closer and bringing with him Dexter s Destruction, and I needed to be at my absolute Mr. Spock logical best anything less would be fatal. And so I needed to know whether this flight of angry passion was some final unraveling of the carefully woven artistic tapestry that is Dexter, or merely a temporary tear in the fabric. I took one more large hot breath and closed my eyes to listen as it steamed through my lungs.

And as I did, I heard a soft and reassuring voice over my shoulder, telling me that there was an answer, and really and truly it was very simple, just this one more time, if only I would listen for a single moment to the voice of clear and thrilling reason. I felt the breath inside me chill into a frosty blue mist and I opened my eyes and looked behind me, through a gap in the tree above me, over the top of the neighbor s hedge and off into the darkening horizon, where these silky words were floating down from a giant yellow-orange burbling happy moon, just now drifting up over the rim of the world and sliding into the sky to hover like the fat and happy friend from a childhood holiday.

Why wait for him to find you? it said. Why not find him first?

And it was a lovely, seductive truth, because I was good at two simple things: hunting my prey and then disposing of it. So why not do those things? Why couldn t I be proactive? Jump into the databases with both feet, find a list of every old, dark-colored Honda in the Miami area with a dangling taillight, and track them down one at a time until I found the right one, and then settle the whole thing once and for all by doing what Dexter does best clean, simple, and fun. If there was no Witness, there was no threat, and all my problems would melt away like ice cubes on a summer sidewalk.

And as I thought about that and breathed in again, I could feel the dim red tide recede completely, and my fists unclenched, and the flush drained out of my face as the cool and happy light of the moon blew its gentle feather breath across me, and from the shadowy corners of my inner fortress a silken purr uncoiled, agreed, chuckled encouragement, and told me oh-so-clearly, Yes, indeed. It really is just that simple.

And it was; all I had to do was spend some time on the computer, find a few names, and then slip away into the night, casually stroll off into darkness with a few harmless props no more than a roll of duct tape, a good blade, and some fishing line. Find my Shadow, and then lead him gently away to share with me the small pleasures of a fine summer evening. Nothing could be more natural and therapeutic: a simple unwinding, a carefree interval to untie all the unreasonable knots, and the end of an unjust threat to all I held dear. It made such good sense, on so many levels. Why should I let anything stand in the way of life, liberty, and the pursuit of vivisection?

I breathed in again. Slowly, soothingly, the seductive purr of this simple solution whispered through me, stropping its fur on my interior legs and promising me utter contentment. I looked up into the sky; the bloated moon gave me one more beguiling simper, an invitation to the dance tinged with the promise of endless regret if I should be stupid enough to say no. Everything will be fine, it hummed to me with a rising tempo and a delightful blend of major chords. Better than fine blissful. And all I had to do was be myself.

I had wanted something simple here it was. Seek and slice, and an end to all strife. I looked up at the moon, and it looked back fondly, beaming at its favorite student, who had at last worked through the problem and seen the light.

Thank you, I said. It didn t answer, except with one more sly wink. I took another cool breath, stood up, and went back into the house.

THREE

The next morning I woke up feeling better than I had in days. My decision to take a proactive path had released all the unwanted anger I d been wallowing in, and I jumped out of bed with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart. Of course, it was not the kind of song I could share with Lily Anne, since the lyrics were a little too sharp for her, but it made me happy. And why not? I was no longer simply waiting for something bad to happen; I was going to leap into action and make it happen even better, happen to someone else. That was much more to the point; I was meant to be a stalker, not a stalkee, and accepting that this was my lot in life was bound to make me more content. I hurried through breakfast and managed to get to work a little early in order to get right at my new research project.

The lab area was empty when I got there, and I sat down at my computer and called up the DMV database. I had spent my morning drive thinking about how to construct a search for the phantom Honda, so there was no need to ponder and dither. I called up a list of all Honda sedans more than eight years old and sorted them by the owner s age and location. I was quite certain that my Shadow had been under the age of fifty, so I quickly discarded anyone older. Next, I sorted for vehicle color. I could only say with certainty that the car was a darkish color; one very quick look at it racing away was not enough to be more specific. In any case, age, sunlight and the salty Miami air had done their work on the car and it would probably be impossible to say what color it was even if I looked at it under a microscope.

But I knew it was not light colored, so I pulled up all the dark-painted cars from the first search and tossed out the rest. Then I did one final sort for location, throwing away anything on the list registered to an address more than five miles away from the house where I had been seen. I would start with the assumption that my Witness lived somewhere nearby, in the South Miami area; otherwise, why would he be there, instead of Coral Gables or South Beach? It was a guess, but I thought it was a good one, and it immediately cut two-thirds of the entries from my list. All I needed was one quick glance at each car, and when I saw one with the dangling taillight and distinctive rusty birthmark on its trunk, I would have my Witness.

By the time my coworkers began to wander into the lab, I had compiled a list of forty-three old, dark-colored Hondas registered to under-fifty owners in my target area. It was a little daunting; I clearly had my work cut out for me. But at least it was my work, on my terms, and I was confident that I could get this done quickly and efficiently. I put the list into an encrypted file labeled Honda, which sounded innocent enough, and e-mailed it to myself. I could call it up on my laptop when I got home and go right to work.

And as if to prove that I was finally moving in the right direction, a mere two seconds after I sent myself the list and brought my computer back to its official home screen, Vince Masuoka came in carrying a white cardboard box that could only be pastry of some kind.

Ah, Young One, he said, holding up the box.

I have brought you a riddle: What is the essence of the moment but as fleeting as the wind?

All that lives, Master, I said. Plus, whatever is in the box.

He beamed at me and opened the lid. Snatch the cannoli, Grasshopper, he said, and I did.

Over the next few days I slowly, carefully, began to check the names on the list after work. I started with the ones closest to my house; these I could check on foot. I told Rita I needed exercise, and I jogged through the area in ever-widening circles, just another Normal Guy out for a run without a care in the world. And in truth, I began to feel as if I might really be back on the path to a worry-free life. The simple decision to take action had halted my fretting, stilled my churning bosom, and smoothed my furrowed brow, and the thrill of the hunt put the spring back in my step and brought a very good fake smile to my face. I fell back into the rhythms of Normal Life.

Of course, normal life for a forensics geek in Miami is not always what most people think of as normal. There are workdays when the hours are very long and filled with dead bodies, some of them killed in startling ways. I have never lost my sense of wonder at the endless ingenuity of human beings when it comes to inflicting fatal wounds on their fellow creatures. And as I stood in the rain one night almost two weeks after Valentine s Night, on the shoulder of I-95 at rush hour, I marveled again at this infinite creativity, because I had never before seen anything like what had been done to Detective Marty Klein. And in my small and innocent way, I was very glad that there was something new and noteworthy about Klein s exit, because Dexter was Drenched.

It was the dark of the moon, and I stood in the rain, in a cluster of people blinking at the lights of rush-hour traffic and the huddled police cars. I was soaked and hungry, with frigid water dripping from my nose, my ears, my hands, rolling down the neck of my useless nylon windbreaker, into the back of my pants, soaking into my socks. Dexter was very, very wet. But Dexter was at work, too, and so he must simply stand and wait and endure the endless babble of the police officers officers who can comfortably take all the time they want to repeat the same pointless details, because they have been thoughtfully provided with bright yellow rain suits. And Dexter is not actually a police officer. Dexter is a forensics geek, and forensics geeks don t get bright yellow rain suits. They must make do with whatever they might have flung in the trunk of their car in this case a flimsy nylon jacket that couldn t protect me from a sneeze, let alone a tropical downpour.

And so I stand in the rain and soak up cold water like a semihuman sponge while Officer Grumpy tells Officer Dopey one more time how he saw the Crown Vic pulled off onto the shoulder and went through all the standard procedures, which he repeats out loud again as if reading them from the manual.

And worse than the tedium, worse than the chill spreading through his bones and deep into his very center, Dexter must stand in all this dripping rain-soaked misery and maintain an expression of shocked concern on his face. This is never an easy expression to get right, and I can t really summon the urgency tonight, wallowing as I am in my blank misery. Every two minutes I find the necessary expression slipping away, replaced by a more natural look of soaking-wet annoyed impatience. But I fight it off, rearrange my features to the appropriate mask, and soldier on in the dark, wet, and endless evening. Because in spite of my cloudy disposition, I need to get it right. We are not looking at some nasty little drug dealer who got what he deserved. This is no headless wife caught in unfaithful performance by a temperamental husband. The body in the Crown Vic is one of us, a member of the fraternal order of Miami cops. At least, it seems to be, from what we can tell by glancing casually through the car s windows at the shapeless blob inside.

And it is shapeless, not because we cannot see it clearly through the windows unfortunately, we can and not because it has slumped down into a relaxed sprawl and curled up with a good book it hasn t. It is shapeless because it has, apparently, been hammered out of its formerly human shape, slowly, carefully, and thoroughly bludgeoned into a blob of shattered bones and bruised flesh that no longer resembles even a little bit anything that might be called a person, let alone a sworn officer of the law.

Of course, it is terrible to do such a thing, even worse to do it to a cop, a peacekeeper, a man with a badge and a gun whose only purpose in life is to stop such things from happening to everyone else. Squishing a cop like that, so slowly and deliberately, is an extra-awful affront to our well-ordered society, and it is a dreadful insult to every other brick in the thin blue wall. And we all feel outrage or at the very least, we present a reasonable facsimile. Because this kind of death has never been seen before, and even I can t imagine who, or what, could have done it this way.

Someone, or something, has spent a tremendous amount of time and energy smashing Detective Marty Klein into a glob of jelly and worse still, outrageous beyond measure, they ve done it at the end of a long day s work, when dinner is waiting. No punishment is too severe for the kind of animal who would do this, and I truly hoped that terrible justice would be served right after dinner and dessert, over a cup of dark coffee. Possibly with a small biscotti or two.

But it s no good; the stomach growls, and Dexter is drooling, thinking of the sublime pleasures of Rita s cooking that wait for him at home, and therefore not keeping his facial muscles locked into the required expression. Someone is bound to notice and wonder why Detective Klein s dreadfully battered corpse would make anyone salivate, and so with a major effort of my iron will, I realign my face again and wait, pointing my somber scowl at the puddle of rain growing around my sopping shoes.

Jesus, says Vince Masuoka, suddenly materializing at my side and craning his neck to see past the yellow rain suits and into the car. He wore an army surplus poncho and looked dry and contented and I wanted to kick him even before he spoke. It s unbelievable.

Very close to it, I said, marveling at the iron control that keeps me from attacking him for his ninny-hood.

That s all we need, Vince said. A maniac with a sledgehammer and a hard-on for cops. Jesus.

I would not have brought Jesus into the discussion, but naturally I d had the same thoughts as I stood there turning into a small piece of Florida s aquifer. Even when someone was beaten to death, we had never before seen it done so savagely, so thoroughly, and with such maniacal focus. Among all the annals of Miami crime fighting this was unique, unmatched, brand-new, never seen before until this evening, when Detective Klein s car had appeared on the shoulder of I-95 at rush hour. But I saw no point in encouraging Vince to make any more witless and obvious remarks. All clever conversation had washed out of me in the steady flow of the rain pouring into my clothing through my flimsy jacket, so I just glanced at Vince and then returned to concentrating on maintaining my solemn face: furrow the brow, turn down the mouth

Another car slid to a halt beside the patrol cars already parked there on the shoulder, and Deborah got out. Or to be more formally correct, Sergeant Deborah Morgan, my sister, and now lead investigator on this new and dreadful case. The uniformed cops glanced at Debs; one of them did a double take and nudged the other, and they moved aside as she stalked over to look inside the car. She was shrugging on a yellow rain jacket as she walked, and that did not endear her to me, but she was, after all, my sister, so I just nodded at her as she passed, and she nodded back. And her first word seemed carefully chosen to reveal not merely her command of the scene, but a picture of her true inner self as well. Fuck, she said.

Deborah looked away from the mess in the car and turned her head toward me. You got anything yet? she said.

I shook my head, which caused a small waterfall to roll down the back of my neck. We re waiting for you, I said. In the rain.

Had to get the sitter, she said, and shook her head. You should have worn a poncho or something.

Gosh, I wish I d thought of that, I said pleasantly, and Debs turned back to look at the leftovers of Marty Klein.

Who found it? she said, still staring through the Crown Vic s window.

One of the officers, a thick African-American man with a Fu Manchu mustache, cleared his throat and stepped forward. I did, he said.

Deborah glanced at him. Cochrane, right?

He nodded. That s right.

Tell me, she said.

I was on routine patrol, Cochrane said. I spotted the vehicle in its present location, apparently abandoned on the shoulder of Interstate 95, and recognizing that it was an official vehicle, I parked my patrol unit behind it and called in the tag. Receiving confirmation that it was indeed a police vehicle signed out to Detective Martin Klein, I exited my patrol vehicle and approached Detective Klein s vehicle. Cochrane paused for a moment, possibly confused by the number of times he had said vehicle. But he just cleared his throat and plowed on.

Upon arriving at a point where I could make a visual surveillance of the interior of Detective Klein s vehicle I, uh

Cochrane stumbled to a stop, as if he wasn t sure what the correct word might be in report-ese, but the cop beside him snorted and supplied the missing word. He hurled, the other cop said. Totally lost his lunch.

Cochrane glared at the other cop, and harsh words might have been spoken if Deborah had not called the men back to their purpose.

That s it? she said. You looked inside, threw up, and called it in?

I came, I saw, I blew chunks, Vince Masuoka muttered beside me, but happily for his health Deborah didn t hear him.

That s it, Cochrane said.

You saw nothing else? Debs said. No suspicious vehicle, nothing?

Cochrane blinked, apparently still fighting the urge to punch his buddy. It s rush hour, he said, and he sounded a little testy. What s a suspicious vehicle in this mess?

If I have to tell you that, Debs said, maybe you should transfer to code enforcement.

Vince said, Boom, very softly, and the cop beside Cochrane made a choking sound as he tried not to laugh.

For some reason, Cochrane didn t find it quite so amusing, and he cleared his throat again. Lookit, he said.

There s ten thousand cars going by, and they re all slowing down for a look. And it s raining, so you can t see anything. You tell me what to look for and I ll start looking, all right?

Debs stared at him without expression. It s too late now, she said, and she turned away, back to the blob in the Crown Vic. Dexter, she called over her shoulder.

I suppose I should have known it was coming. My sister always assumed that I would have some kind of mystical insight into a crime scene. She was convinced that I would know instantly all about the sick and murderous freaks we encountered after one quick glance at their handiwork, merely because I was a sick and murderous freak myself. And so every time she was faced with an impossibly grotesque killing, she expected me to provide the name, location, and social security number of the killer. Quite often I did, guided by the soft voice of my Dark Passenger and a thorough understanding of my craft. But this time I had nothing for her.

Somewhat reluctantly, I sloshed over to stand beside Deborah. I hated to disappoint my only sister, but I had nothing to say about this. It was so savage, brutal, and unpleasant that even the Passenger had pursed its glove-leather lips with disapproval.

What do you think? Deborah said to me, lowering her voice to encourage me to speak frankly.

Well, I said, whoever did this is off-the-charts insane.

She stared at me as if waiting for more, and when it was clear that no more was coming, she shook her head. No shit, she said. You figured that out by yourself?

Yes, I said, thoroughly annoyed. And after only one quick glance through the window. In the rain. Come on, Debs, we don t even know yet if that s really Klein.

Deborah stared inside the car. It s him, she said.

I wiped a small tributary of the Mississippi River off my forehead and looked into the car. I could not even say for sure that the thing inside had ever been a human being, but my sister sounded quite positive that this amorphous glob was Detective Klein. I shrugged, which naturally sent a sheet of water down my neck. How can you be sure?

She nodded at one end of the lump. The bald spot, she said. That s Marty s bald spot.

I looked again. The body lay across the car s seat like a cold pudding, neatly arranged and apparently intact, unpunctured. There were no visible breaks in the skin and no apparent blood spill, and yet the pounding Klein had taken was total, terrible. The top of the skull was perhaps the only part of the body that had not been shattered, probably to avoid ending Klein s life too quickly. And sure enough, the fringe of greasy hair around the bright pink circle of bare skin did look a lot like what I remembered about Klein s bald spot. I would not have sworn an oath that it truly was, but I was not a real detective like my sister. Is this a girl thing? I asked her, and I admit I said it only because I was wet, hungry, and annoyed. You can tell people apart by their hair?

She glanced at me, and for one terrifying moment I thought I had gone too far and she was going to attack my biceps with one of her ferocious arm punches. But instead, she looked over to the rest of the group from Forensics, pointed at the car, and said, Open it up.

I stood in the rain and watched as they did. A shudder seemed to go through the whole group of watchers as the car door swung open; this was a cop who had died this way, one of us, so terribly hammered into oblivion, and all of the watching cops took this as a very personal affront. But worse than that, somehow we were all quite sure it would happen again, to another one of us. Sometime soon, this frightful pounding would fall once more on one of our small tribe, and we could not know who, or when, only that it was coming

It was the dark of the moon, and a dark time for Dexter; there was dread spreading through the ranks of all Miami cops, and in spite of all this fearsome unease Dexter stood dripping and thinking only one dark thought:

I missed my dinner.

FOUR

It was past ten when I finished, and I felt as if I had been standing underwater for the last four hours. Even so, it seemed like a shame to head for home without checking some of the names on my list. So I cruised slowly past two of the more distant addresses that were more or less on my way. The first car was parked right in front of the house; its trunk was unblemished and I drove past.

The second car was under a carport, hidden by shadows, and I could not see the trunk. I slowed to a crawl, and then nosed into the driveway as if I was lost and merely turning around. There was something on the trunk but as my lights hit it, it moved, and the fattest cat I had ever seen raced away into the night. I turned the car around and drove home.

It was past eleven when I parked in front of my house. The light was on over the front door, and I got out of my car and stood just outside the small circle of light it cast. The rain had finally stopped, but there was still a low bank of dark clouds filling the sky, and it reminded me of the night almost two weeks ago when I had been seen, and an echo of unease clattered through me. I stared up at the clouds, but they did not seem intimidated. We made you wet, they sneered, and you re standing there like a schmuck while your whole body puckers.

It was true. I locked my car and went inside.

The house was relatively quiet, since it was a school night. Cody and Astor were asleep, and the late news muttered softly from the TV. Rita dozed on the couch with Lily Anne tucked onto her lap. Rita did not wake up when I came in, but Lily Anne looked up at me with bright and wide-awake eyes. Da, she said. Da da da!

She recognized me right away, a brilliant girl. I felt a few of the interior clouds roll away as I looked at her happy little face.

Lily-willy, I replied with all the great seriousness required for the occasion, and she chortled back.

Oh! Rita said, jerking awake and blinking at me.

Dexter are you home? I didn t, she said. I mean, you re out so late. Again.

Sorry, I said. All part of the job.

She looked at me for a long moment, doing no more than blinking, and then she shook her head. You re soaking wet, she said.

It was raining, I told her.

She blinked a few more times. It stopped raining an hour ago, she said.

I couldn t see why that mattered, but I am full of polite clich s, so I just said, Well, it just goes to show.

Oh, Rita said. She looked at me thoughtfully again and I began to feel a little self-conscious. But she finally sighed and shook her head. Well, she said, you must be very Oh. Your dinner. It was getting so Are you hungry?

Starving, I said.

You re dripping on the floor, Rita said.

You d better change into some dry clothes. And if you get a cold She waved a hand in front of her face. Oh, Lily Anne she s wide-awake. She smiled at the baby, that same mother-to-child smile Leonardo tried so hard to capture.

I ll get changed, I said, and I went down the hall to the bathroom, where I put my wet clothes in the hamper, toweled off, and put on some dry pajamas.

When I came back, Rita was crooning and Lily Anne was gurgling, and although I didn t really want to interrupt, I had some important things on my mind. You said something about dinner? I said.

It was getting very Oh, I hope it didn t get all dried out, because Anyway, it s in a Tupperware, and I ll just microwave the here, take the baby. She jumped up off the couch and held Lily Anne toward me, and I stepped in quickly and grabbed my baby, just in case I had not heard Rita correctly and she really did mean to microwave the child. Rita was already moving in the direction of the kitchen as Lily Anne and I sat back down on the couch.

I looked down at her: Lily Anne, the small and bright-faced doorway into Dexter s newfound world of emotions and normal life. She was the miracle that had brought me halfway into humanity, just by the pink and wonderful fact of her existence. She had made me feel for the first time, and as I sat and held her, I felt all the fuzzy sunrise thoughts that any mere mortal would feel. She was almost one year old, and already it was clear that she was a remarkable child.

Can you spell hyperbole? I asked Lily Anne.

Da, she said happily.

Very good, I said, and she reached up and squeezed my nose to show me that the word had been too easy for a highly intelligent person such as herself. She gave my forehead an openhanded smack and bounced a few times, her way of asking politely for something a little more challenging, perhaps involving movement and a good sound track, and I obliged.

A few minutes later, Lily Anne and I had finished bouncing through two verses of Frog Went A-Courtin and were already working out the final details to a unified field theory of physics when Rita came bustling back into the room with a fragrant and steaming plate in her hand. It s a pork chop, she said. I did the Dutch oven thing, with mushrooms? Except the mushrooms at the store were not very So anyway, I sliced in some tomatoes and a few capers? Of course, Cody didn t like it Oh! And I forgot to tell you, she said, putting the plate down in front of me on the coffee table.

I m sorry if the yellow rice is a little but the dentist said? Astor is going to need braces, and she s completely She fluttered one hand in the air and started to sit. She said that she would rather Damn, I forgot the fork, just a minute, she said, and raced back into the kitchen.

Lily Anne watched her go, and then turned to look at me. I shook my head. She always talks like that, I told her.

You get used to it.

Lily Anne looked a little unsure. Da da da, she told me.

I kissed the top of her head. It smelled wonderful, a combination of baby shampoo and whatever intoxicating pheromone it is that babies rub into their scalps. You re probably right, I said, and then Rita was back in the room, putting a fork and a napkin down beside the plate, lifting Lily Anne up out of my arms, and settling down beside me to continue the saga of Astor and the Dentist.

Anyway, she said. I told her it s just for a year, and a lot of other girls But she has this Has she told you about Anthony?

Anthony the asshole? I said.

Oh, Rita said. He s not really an I mean, she says that and she shouldn t. But it s different for a girl, and Astor is at the age It s not too dry, is it? she said, frowning at my plate.

It s perfect, I said.

It is dry; I m sorry. So I thought maybe if you would talk to her, Rita finished. I truly hoped she meant talk to Astor and not the pork chop.

What do you want me to say? I asked her around a mouthful of very tasty but slightly dry pork chop.

That it s perfectly all right, Rita said.

What, braces?

Yes, of course, she said. What did you think we were talking about?

Truthfully, I was often not quite sure what we were talking about, since Rita usually managed to combine at least three simultaneous subjects when she spoke. Perhaps it came from her job; even after several years with her, I only knew that it involved juggling large numbers, converting them to different foreign currencies, and applying the results to the real estate market. It was one of life s wonderful puzzles that a woman smart enough to do that could be so completely stupid when it came to men, because first she had married a man addicted to drugs who beat her savagely, beat Cody and Astor just as badly, and finally committed enough unpleasant and illegal acts that he had been tucked away in prison. And Rita, free at last from the long nightmare of marriage to a drug-addled demon, had danced happily into marriage with an even worse monster: Me.

Of course, Rita would never know what I really was, not if I could help it. I had worked very hard to keep her blissfully ignorant of the true me, Dexter the Dark, the cheerful vivisectionist who lived for the purr of duct tape, the gleam of the knife, and the smell of fear rising up from a truly deserving playmate who had earned his ticket to Dexterland by slaughtering the innocent and somehow slipping through the gaping cracks in the justice system.

Rita would never know that side of me, and neither would Lily Anne. My moments with new friends like Valentine were private or they had been, until the terrible accident of the Witness. For a moment I thought about that, and the remaining names on my Honda list. One of those names would be the right one, had to be, and when I knew which one I could almost taste the excitement of taking and taping him, almost hear the muffled squeals of pain and fear.

And because my mind had wandered onto my hobby, I committed the dreadful felony of chewing Rita s pork chop without tasting it. But happily for my taste buds, as I pictured the Witness thrashing against his binds, I bit down on the fork, which jolted me out of my pleasant reverie and back to dinner. I scooped the last mouthful of yellow rice and one caper onto my fork and put it in my mouth as Rita said, And anyway, it isn t covered by the insurance, so But I should have a nice bonus this year, and braces are very Astor doesn t smile very much, does she? But maybe if her teeth She paused suddenly, waved a hand, and made a face. Oh, Lily Anne, she said.

You really do need a diaper change. Rita got up and took the baby away down the hall to the changing table, trailing an aroma that was definitely not pork chop, and I put down my empty plate and settled back onto the couch with a sigh: Dexter Digesting.

For some strange and very irritating reason, instead of letting the cares of the day slip away into a fog of well-fed contentment, I slid headfirst back into work and thought about Marty Klein and the dreadful mess that was his corpse. I hadn t really known him well, and even if I had I am not capable of any kind of emotional bonding, not even the rough and manly kind so popular at my job. And dead bodies don t bother me; even if I had not been occasionally involved in producing them, looking at them and touching them is part of my job. And although I would rather not have my coworkers know it, a dead cop is no more disturbing to me than a dead lawyer. But a corpse like this one, so completely hammered out of human shape it was very different, almost supernatural.

The fury of the pounding that had killed Klein was completely psychotic, of course but the fact that it had been so thorough, and had taken such a very long time, was far beyond normal, comfortable, homicidal insanity, and I found it very disturbing. It had required remarkable strength, endurance, and, most frightening by far, a cool control during the whole wild process so as not to go too far and cause death too soon, before all the bones were broken.

And for some reason, I had the very strong conviction that it was not a simple and relatively harmless single episode in which somebody had slipped over the line and gone postal for a few hours. This seemed like a pattern, a way of being, a state that was permanent. Insane strength and fury, combined with a clinical control I could not imagine what kind of creature was capable of that, and I didn t really want to. But once again I had the feeling we would find more squashed cops in the near future.

Dexter? Rita called softly from the bedroom.

Aren t you coming to bed?

I glanced at the clock by the TV: almost midnight. Just seeing the numbers made me realize how tired I was. Coming, I said. I got up from the couch and stretched, feeling a very welcome drowsiness come over me. It was clearly sleepy time, and I would worry about Marty Klein and his awful end tomorrow. Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof; at least, on the very good days. I put my plate in the sink and went to bed.

From far away in the dim, wool-packed world of sleep I felt an uneasy sensation elbowing its way into my head and, as if in answer to a vague but demanding question, I heard a loud and explosive roaring sound and I was awake, my nose dripping from a powerful sneeze. Oh, lord, Rita said, sitting up beside me.

You caught a cold from all that I knew you were going to Here, here s a tissue.

Tanks, I said, and I sat up in bed and took the tissue from her hand and applied it to my nose. I sneezed again, this time into the tissue, and felt it disintegrate in my hand. Ohggg, I said, as the slime dripped onto my fingers and a dull ache rolled into my bones.

Oh, for heaven s Here, take another tissue, Rita said. And go wash your hands, because Look at the time, it s time to get up anyway. And before I could do more than raise the new tissue to my face, she was up and out of the bed, leaving me to sit there dripping and wondering why wicked fate had inflicted this misery on poor undeserving me. My head hurt, and I felt like it was stuffed with wet sand, and it was leaking all over my hand and on top of everything else, I had to get up and go to work, and with the way my head was rolling sluggishly through the fog I wasn t sure I could even figure out how.

But one of the things Dexter is truly good at is learning and following patterns of behavior. I have lived my life among humans, and they all think and feel and act in ways that are completely alien to me but my survival depends on presenting a perfect imitation of the way they behave. Happily for me, ninety-nine percent of all human life is spent simply repeating the same old actions, speaking the same tired clich s, moving like a zombie through the same steps of the dance we plodded through yesterday and the day before and the day before. It seems horribly dull and pointless but it really makes a great deal of sense. After all, if you only have to follow the same path every day, you don t need to think at all. Considering how good humans are at any mental process more complicated than chewing, isn t that best for everybody?

So I learned very young to watch people stumbling through their one or two basic rituals, and then perform the same steps myself with flawless mimicry. This morning that talent served me well, because as I staggered out of bed and into the bathroom, there was absolutely nothing in my head except phlegm, and if I had not learned by rote what I was supposed to do each morning I don t think I could have done it. The dull ache of a major cold had seeped into my bones and pushed all capacity for thinking out of my brain.

But the pattern of what I do in the morning remained: shower, shave, brush teeth, and stumble to the kitchen table, where Rita had a cup of coffee waiting for me. As I sipped it and felt a small spark of life flicker in response, she slid a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me. It might have been the effect of the coffee, but I remembered what to do with the eggs, and I did it very well, too. And as I finished the eggs, Rita dropped a pair of cold pills in front of me.

Take these, she said. You ll feel much better when they start to Oh, look at the time. Cody? Astor? You re going to be late! She refilled my coffee cup and hustled off down the hall, where I heard her rousting two very unwilling children out of their beds. A minute later Cody and Astor thumped into their chairs at the table, and Rita pushed plates in front of them. Cody mechanically began to eat right away, but Astor slumped on her elbow and stared at the eggs with disgust.

They re all runny, she said. I want cereal.

All part of the morning ritual: Astor never wanted anything Rita gave her to eat. And I found it oddly comforting that I knew what would happen next, as Rita and the kids followed the every-morning script and I waited for the cold pills to kick in and return to me the power of independent thought. Until then, no need to worry; I didn t have to do anything but follow the pattern.

FIVE

The pattern held true when I got to work. the same officer sat at the desk and nodded at my credentials; the same people crowded into the elevator as I rode to the second floor. And waiting for me in the coffeepot was apparently the same vile bilge that had been there since the dawn of time. All very comforting, and out of gratitude I actually tried to drink the coffee, making the same horrified face as I sipped. Ah, the consolation of dull routine.

But as I turned away from the coffee machine into what should have been empty space, I found an object in my path, so very close to me that I had to lurch to a stop which naturally caused the venomous brew in my cup to slop all over the front of my shirt.

Oh, shit, said the object, and I looked up from the scalding ruin of my shirtfront. Standing before me was Camilla Figg, one of my coworkers in Forensics. She was thirtyish and square, kind of drab and usually quiet, and at the moment she was blushing furiously, as she often seemed to do when I saw her.

Camilla, I said. I thought I said it quite pleasantly, considering that my shirt was relatively new and because of her it was probably going to dissolve. But if anything, she turned an even darker red.

It s only I m really sorry, she said in a staccato mutter, and she looked to both sides as if seeking a way to escape.

Perfectly all right, I said, although it wasn t. The coffee is probably safer to wear than to drink.

I didn t anyway you know want what, she said, and she raised a hand, either to grab her words back from the air or to brush the coffee off my shirt, but instead she wobbled the hand in front of me, and then ducked her head. Very sorry, she said, and she lurched away down the hall and around the corner.

I blinked after her stupidly; something new had broken the pattern, and I had no idea what it meant or what I should have done. But after pondering for a few pointless seconds, I shrugged it off. I had a cold, so I didn t have to try to make sense of Camilla s bizarre behavior. If I had said or done something wrong, I could say it was just the cold pills. I put the coffee down and went to the restroom to try to save a few scraps of fabric from my shirt.

I scrubbed with cold water for several minutes without really removing the stain. The paper towels kept falling apart, leaving dozens of small wet crumbs of paper all over the shirt without affecting the stain. This coffee was amazing stuff; perhaps it was part paint or fabric dye that would explain the taste. I finally gave up and blotted my shirt dry the best I could. I left the restroom wearing my semi-wet stained shirt and headed for the lab, hoping I might get some sartorial sympathy from Vince Masuoka. He was generally quite passionate and knowledgeable about clothing. But instead of receiving condolences and advice on stain removal, I walked into a room absolutely overflowing with my sister, Deborah, who was following Vince around and apparently hectoring him about something as he tried to work on the contents of a small evidence bag.

Leaning on the wall in one corner was a man I didn t know, about thirty-five, with dark hair and a medium build. No one offered to introduce him, and he was not pointing a weapon of any kind, so I just walked past him and into the lab.

Debs looked up at me and gave me the kind of warm and loving greeting I have come to expect from her. Where the fuck have you been? she said.

Ballroom dancing lessons, I said. We re doing the tango this week; would you like to see?

She made a sour face and shook her head. Get in here and take over from this moron, she said.

Great, now I m a moron, Vince grumbled, and nodded at me. You see how smart you are with Simone Legree halfway up your ass.

If it s only halfway up, I can see why you re upset, I said. Can I assume that there s been some development in the Marty Klein case? I asked Debs politely.

That s what I m trying to find out, Deborah said. But if ass-wipe can t get his ass in gear, we ll never know.

It occurred to me that Debs and Vince both seemed to be dwelling on ass this morning, which is not really the way I prefer to start my day. But we all need to show tolerance in the workplace, so I let it slide. What have you got? I said.

It s just a fucking wrapping paper, Vince said. From the floor of Klein s car.

It s from some kind of food, the stranger in the corner said.

I looked at the man, and then back at Deborah with a raised eyebrow. She shrugged.

My new partner, she said. Alex Duarte.

Oh, I said to the man. Mucho gusto.

Duarte shrugged. Yeah, right, he said.

What kind of food? I asked.

Deborah ground her teeth. That s what I m trying to find out, she said. If we know where he ate before he died, we got a good chance to stake it out and maybe find this guy.

I stepped over to where Vince was poking at a wad of greasy white waxed paper in an evidence bag. All that grease, he said. There s gotta be a fingerprint. I just wanted to look for it first. Standard procedure.

Asshole, we already got Klein s fingerprints, Deborah said. I want the killer.

I looked at the congealed grease through the plastic of the evidence bag. It had a reddish brown tinge to it, and although I don t usually hang on to food wrappers long enough to be certain, it looked familiar. I leaned over and opened the bag, sniffing carefully. The cold pills had finally dried my nose, and the smell was strong and unmistakable. Taco, I said.

Gesundheit, said Vince.

You re sure? Deborah demanded. That s a taco wrapper?

Absolutely, I said. Can t miss the smell of the spices. I held up the bag and pointed out a tiny yellow crumb on one corner of the waxed paper. And right there, that has to be a piece of the taco shell.

Tacos, my God, said Vince with horror. What have we come to?

What, Duarte said. Like from Taco Bell?

That would have a logo on the wrapper, wouldn t it? I said. Anyway, I think their wrappers are yellow. This is probably from a smaller place, maybe one of those lunch wagons.

Great, Deborah said. There must be a million of those in Miami.

And they all sell tacos, Vince said very helpfully. I mean, yuck.

Deborah looked at him. You re a total fucking idiot, you know that? she said.

No, I didn t know that, Vince said cheerfully.

Why tacos? Duarte said. I mean, who eats fucking tacos? I mean, come on.

Maybe he couldn t find empanadas, I said.

He looked at me blankly. Empa-what? he said.

Can you find out where it came from? Debs said.

You know, like analyze the spices or something?

Debs, for God s sake, I said. It s just a taco. They re all pretty much the same.

No, they re not, Deborah said. These tacos got a cop killed.

Killer tacos, Vince said. I like that.

Maybe it s a hangout, I said, and Deborah looked at me expectantly. I shrugged. You know, sometimes word gets around, like the burgers are great at Manny s, or the medianoche at Hidalgo is the best in town, or whatever.

Yeah, but these are tacos, Vince said. I mean seriously.

All right, so maybe they re cheap, I said. Or the girl who makes them is wearing a string bikini.

I know a lunch wagon they do that, Duarte said.

This very nice-looking woman, she wears a bikini? They go around to construction sites, and she does big business, believe me. Just from showing her boobs.

I can t believe you assholes, Debs said.

Why does it always end up about tits?

Not always. Sometimes it s ass, Vince said, cleverly bringing ass back into the conversation one more time. I began to wonder if there was a hidden camera, with a smirking game-show host handing out a prize every time we used the word.

We could ask around, Duarte said. See if any of the other detectives are talking about a great taco place.

Or great tits, Vince said.

Deborah ignored him, which should have made him grateful. Find out what you can from the wrapper, she said, and then she turned away and hustled out of the room. Duarte straightened up, nodded at us, and followed her out.

I watched them go. Vince blinked at me, and then bustled out of the room, mumbling something about reagent, and for a moment I just sat there. My shirt still felt damp, and I was very peeved with Camilla Figg. She had been standing right behind me, much too close for safety, and I could think of no reason for that kind of proximity. Even worse, I really should have known it when somebody got that near to my exposed back. It could have been a drug lord with an Uzi, or a crazed gardener with a machete, or almost anything else as lethal as a cup of that wretched coffee. Where was the Passenger when you really needed him? And now I was sitting in a chilly lab wearing a wet shirt, and I was pretty sure that would not help my already fragile health. Just to underline the point, I felt a sneeze coming on, and I barely got a paper towel up to my nose before it erupted. Cold pills bah, humbug. They were worthless, like everything else in this miserable world.

Just before I melted into a dripping heap of mucus and self-pity, I thought of the clean shirt hanging behind my desk. I always kept one on hand in case of a work-related accident. I took it off the hanger and put it on, tucking the damp, coffee-spattered shirt into a plastic grocery bag to take home. It was a nice shirt, a beige guayabera with silver guitars on the hem. Perhaps Rita would know a magic trick to get the stains out.

Vince was already back in the lab when I returned, and we went right to work. And we really tried our very best. We ran every test we could think of, visual, chemical, and electronic, and found nothing that would bring a smile to my sister s face. Deborah called us three times, which for her showed wonderful self-control. There was really nothing to tell her. I thought it was very likely that the wrapper held a taco and came from a lunch wagon, but I certainly couldn t have sworn to it in a court of law.

At around noon the cold pills wore off and I began to sneeze again. I tried to ignore it, but it s very difficult to do really high-quality lab work while holding a paper towel to your nose, so I finally gave up. I have to get out of here, I said to Vince. Before I blow my nose all over the evidence.

It couldn t hurt the tacos, he said.

I went to lunch alone, at a Thai restaurant over by the airport. It s not that looking at old taco wrappers had made me hungry, but I have always believed that a large bowl of spicy Thai soup fights a cold better than anything else, and by the time I finished my soup I could feel my system sweating out the unhealthy molecules, forcing the cold out through my pores and back into the Miami ecosphere where it belonged. I actually felt a great deal better, which made me leave a tip that was slightly too large. But as I walked out the door and into the afternoon heat, the entire front of my skull exploded with an enormous sneeze, and the accompanying ache kicked at my skeletal system as if someone was tightening vise grips on all my joints.

Happiness is an illusion and sometimes so is Thai soup. I gave up and stopped at a drugstore to buy more cold pills. This time I took three of them, and by the time I got back to the office the throbbing in my nose and my bones had subsided a little bit. Whether it was the cold pills or the soup, I began to feel like I might be able to handle any routine pain the day might throw at me. And because I was more or less prepared for something unpleasant to happen, it didn t.

The rest of the afternoon was completely uneventful. We worked on, using all our massive skill on what was really rather flimsy evidence. But by the end of the day, the only thing I d found out was that Masuoka disliked all Mexican food, not just tacos. If I eat that stuff, I get really bad gas, he told me. Which really has a negative impact on my social life.

I didn t know you had one, I said. I had the crumb from the taco shell under a microscope in the vain hope of finding some tiny clue, while Vince was examining a grease spot on the wrapper.

Of course I have a social life, he said. I party almost every night. I found a hair.

What kind of party is that? I said.

No, there s a hair in the grease, he said. For partying, I shave all over.

Way too much information, I said. Is it human?

Yeah, sure, he said. A lot of people shave.

The hair, I said. Is it a human hair?

He frowned into his microscope. I m gonna guess rodent, he said. Another reason I don t eat Mexican food.

Vince, I said, rat hair is not a Mexican spice. It s because this came from a sleazy lunch wagon.

Hey, I don t know; you re the foodie, he said. I like to eat someplace where they have chairs.

I ve never eaten one, I said. Anything else?

Tables are nice, he said. And real silverware.

Anything else in the grease, I said, winning a very tough struggle against the urge to push my thumbs deep into his eye sockets.

Vince shrugged. It s just grease, he said.

I had no better luck with the taco crumb. There was simply nothing there to find, except that it was made of processed corn and contained several inorganic chemicals, probably preservatives. We did every test we could do on-site without destroying the wrapper and found nothing significant. Vince s verbal wit did not leap magically to a higher level, either, and so by quitting time my mood had not really burbled up into steady good cheer. If anything, I felt even meaner than I had that morning. I fended off one last telephone attack from Deborah, locked up the evidence, and headed for the door.

Don t you want to go for tacos? Vince called as I hit the door.

Go jump up your ass, I said. After all, if there really was a prize for saying ass, I deserved a shot at it.

SIX

I drove home through the usual rush-hour traffic, a nerve-jangling crawl of aggressive lane jumping and near collisions. A pickup truck was on fire on the shoulder of the Palmetto Expressway. A shirtless man in jeans and a battered cowboy hat stood beside it, looking almost bored. He had a large tattoo of an eagle on his back and a cigarette in one hand. Everyone slowed to look at the smoldering pickup, and behind me I could hear a fire truck, siren shrieking and horn blasting as it tried to get through the dawdling gawkers. As I edged past the burning truck my nose began to drip again, and by the time I got home some twenty minutes later, I was sneezing, one good skull-splitting blast every minute or so.

I b hobe! I called out as I walked through the door, and a roar of something that sounded like rocket fire answered me; Cody was already at the Wii, working dutifully to destroy all the evil in the world with a massive artillery attack. He glanced up at me, and then quickly back to the TV screen; for him, it was a warm greeting. Where s your mom? I asked him.

He jerked his head toward the kitchen. Kitchen, he said.

That was always good news; Rita in the kitchen meant something wonderful was on the way. Purely out of habit, I tried to sniff the aroma, which turned out to be a very bad idea, since it tickled my sinuses and launched me into a debilitating multiple sneeze that nearly brought me to my knees.

Dexter? Rita called from the kitchen.

Ah -choo, I answered.

Oh, she said, appearing in the doorway wearing rubber gloves and holding a large knife in her hand. You sound awful.

Thag you, I said. Why glubs?

Glubs? Oh, gloves. I m making you some soup, she said, and she waved the knife. With those Scotch-bonnet peppers, so I have to Just in your soup, because Cody and Astor won t eat it that way.

I hate spicy food, Astor said, coming down the hall from her room and plopping down on the couch next to Cody.

Why do we have to have soup?

You can have a hot dog instead, Rita said.

I hate hot dogs, Astor said.

Rita frowned and shook her head. A small lock of hair flopped down onto her forehead. Well, she said, rather forcefully, you can just go hungry then. And she pushed the hair off her forehead with her wrist and went back into the kitchen.

I watched Rita go, mildly surprised. She almost never lost her temper, and I could not remember the last time she had said something like that to Astor. I sneezed, and then went and stood behind the couch. You could try a little harder not to upset your mom, I said.

Astor looked up and then hunched away from me. You d better not give me your cold, she said, with very convincing menace.

I looked at the top of Astor s head. Part of me wanted to smack her on the head with a carpentry tool. But the other part of me realized that disciplining a child in such a forthright and vigorous manner was generally not encouraged in our society, a society I was trying to fit into at the moment. And in any case, I could hardly blame Astor for showing the same kind of cranky meanness I was feeling myself. Even Rita seemed to be feeling it. Perhaps some toxic chemical was falling with the summer rain and infecting all of us with a sour attitude.

So I simply took a deep breath and walked away from Astor and her towering sulk, heading into the kitchen to see if my nose might be working well enough to smell the soup brewing. I paused in the doorway; Rita was standing at the stove with her back to me. A cloud of fragrant-looking steam rose up around her. I took one step closer and sniffed experimentally.

And, of course, that made me sneeze. It was a wonderful sneeze, very loud and vigorous, with a full, beautiful tone. It apparently startled Rita, because she jumped several inches straight up and dropped a wineglass she had been holding, which shattered on the floor beside her. Damn it! she said, another surprising outburst. She looked at the puddle of wine spreading toward her shoe, and then looked at me. To my very great surprise, she blushed.

It was only she said. I just thought, while I was cooking. And then you scared me, she said.

Sorry, I said. I just wanted to smell the soup.

Well, but really, she said, and then she lurched toward the hallway and raced back clutching a broom and dustpan.

Go check on the baby, she told me as she bent to clean up the broken glass. She might need a diaper change.

I watched Rita for a moment as she swept up the mess. Her cheeks were bright red and she avoided looking at me. I had the very strong impression that something was not right, but no matter how hard I gawked and blinked I got no clue to what it was. I suppose I was hoping that by staring long enough I might get some indication of what had just happened perhaps subtitles would appear, or a man in a lab coat would hand me a pamphlet explaining things in eight languages, possibly with diagrams. But no such luck; Rita remained hunched over, blushing and sweeping shards of glass through the puddle of wine and into the dustpan, and I still had no idea why she, and everyone else, was acting so strangely today.

So I left the kitchen and went to the bedroom, where Lily Anne was lying in her crib. She was not quite awake, but she was fussing, kicking one leg and frowning, as if she, too, had caught whatever it was that had made everyone else peevish. I leaned over and felt her diaper; it was very full, pushing outward against the fabric of her little sleepy suit. I picked her up and moved her to the changing table, and she woke up almost immediately. It made changing the diaper a bit harder, but it was nice to have the company of somebody who wasn t snarling at me.

When she was changed I took her into my little study, away from the sulking and the video violence of the Wii in the living room, and I sat at my desk with Lily Anne on my lap. She played with a ballpoint pen, tapping it on the desk with commendable concentration and an excellent sense of rhythm. I pulled a tissue from a box on the desk and blotted at my nose. I told myself that my cold would go away in a day or two, and there was no reason to blow it up into anything more than a minor inconvenience. Besides, everything else was fine, lovely, happy, with metaphorical birds flocking around me and singing twenty-four/seven. My home life was close to perfect, and I was keeping it in a very nice balance with my job. Very soon I would track down the one small cloud on my horizon, and then I would get a free, extra playdate, which would be pure bonus bliss.

I took out my Honda list and laid it on the desk. Three names crossed off. At my present deliberate pace, several more weeks of searching. I wanted to get it all done immediately, cut right to the cutting, and I bent closer to study the list, as if some telltale clue might be hidden between the lines. As I leaned in Lily Anne tipped over and tapped at the paper with her pen. Na na na! she said, and of course she was right. I had to be patient, deliberate, careful, and I would find him and flense him and everything would be fine

I sneezed. Lily Anne flinched, and then picked up the paper, waved it at my face, and threw it jerkily onto the floor. She turned to me and beamed, very proud of herself, and I nodded at her wisdom. It was a very clear statement: No more daydreaming. You and I have work to do .

But before we could begin to restructure the tax code, a beautiful sound floated down the hall to us.

Dexter? Children? Rita called. Dinner is ready!

I looked at Lily Anne. Da, she said, and I agreed. We went to dinner.

The next day was Friday, which was just as well. It had not been a pleasant workweek, and I would be thoroughly glad to put it behind me and have the weekend to sit at home and murder my cold. But first, there were the last few hours of my job to suffer through.

By midday I d gone through six cold pills and half a roll of paper towels, and I was working through the second half of the roll when Deborah came into the lab. Vince and I had reached the point where there was nothing else we could think of to do with the taco wrapper, and since he refused to draw straws for the privilege of telling Deborah, I d been forced to make the call to give her the news that we d come up blank. And three minutes later, here she was, striding into our lab like avenging fury.

Goddamn it, she said before she was even all the way in the room, I need something from you!

Maybe a sedative? Vince suggested, and for once I thought he was right on the money.

Deborah looked at him, and then at me, and I wondered whether I could make it to the bomb shelter in time. But before my sister could inflict any grievous bodily harm, there was a scuffling sound at the door, and we all turned to look; Camilla Figg stood in the doorway. She stared at me, blushed, looked around the room, and said, Oh. I didn t even sorry. She cleared her throat, and then scurried away down the hall before anyone could decide what she d said or what to do about it.

I looked back at Deborah, expecting her to resume her eruption. But to my surprise she did not reach for her weapon, or even wind up to throw a blistering arm punch. Instead, she took a deep breath and visibly calmed herself down. Guys, she said, I got a really bad feeling about this guy. This psycho that smashed up Marty Klein.

Vince opened his mouth, presumably to say something he thought of as witty. Deborah looked at him, and he thought better of it and closed his mouth.

I think he s going to do it again, and soon, Debs said. The whole force thinks so, too. They think this guy is some kind of spook, like Freddy Krueger or something. Everybody is freaking out, and everybody is looking at me to find the killer. And all I got is just this one small lead a crappy little taco wrapper. She shrugged and shook her head.

I know it s not much, but it s what there is, and I Please, guys Dex isn t there something else you can do? Anything?

There was real need in her face, and it was clear that she was really and truly pleading with us. Vince looked at me with a very uncomfortable expression. He was not good at sincerity, and it obviously made him too nervous to speak, which meant it was my problem. Debs, I said, we d like to catch this guy, too. But we ve hit the wall. The wrapper is standard, from a restaurant supply place. There s not enough left of the tacos to say anything except that they were tacos, and even that I couldn t swear to on the stand. No prints, no trace evidence, nothing. We don t have any magic tricks, I said, and as I said magic tricks the image of a clown secured to a table with duct tape popped into my mind. But I pushed the happy memory firmly out of my head and tried to concentrate on Deborah. I m sorry, I said, and my sincerity was no more than half-artificial, which was pretty good for me. But we ve done everything we can think of.

Deborah looked at me for a long moment. She took another deep breath, looked at Vince, and then shook her head slowly. All right, she said. Then I guess we just wait for him to hit again, and hope we get lucky next time. And she turned away and walked out of the lab at about one-quarter the speed she d come in.

Wow, said Vince in a hushed voice when Deborah was gone. I ve never seen her like that. He shook his head. Very scary, he said.

I guess this really bothers her, I said.

Vince shook his head. No, it s her; she s changed, he said. I think motherhood has made her all mushy inside.

I could have said that she was not nearly as mushy as Detective Klein, but that might have hit the wrong note, and anyway it was true. Deborah had softened since the birth of her son, Nicholas. The child had been a parting gift from Kyle Chutsky, her live-in boyfriend of several years who had vanished in a fit of low self-esteem. Nicholas was a few months younger than Lily Anne, and a nice enough little chap, although next to Lily Anne he did seem to be a bit slow and not nearly as attractive.

But Deborah doted on him, which was natural enough, and she really had seemed to mellow around the edges since his arrival. Still, I would almost rather have seen the old Debs and suffered one of her terrifying arm punches than see her so visibly deflated. But even her new sensitivity couldn t get cheese from a stone; there truly wasn t anything we could do that we had not already done. A taco wrapper from the floor of a car is not a lot to go on; that was all we had, and wishing for more wouldn t make it appear in front of me.

I spent the rest of the day turning the problem over in my head, trying to think of some neat and clever angle to make the wrapper yield more information, but I came up empty. I am good at my job, and I do have a certain amount of professional pride. I would also prefer to see my sister happy and successful. But there was just no way to take things any further than we had done. It was frustrating, and very bad for my sense of personal worth, and it added to my general feeling that life was a mangy dog that was badly in need of a hearty kick.

By five o clock I was quite happy to slip away from the frustration and tension, and head for a relaxing and recuperative weekend at home. Traffic was worse than usual; after all, this was Friday night. All the usual violence and anger were there, but there was a festive edge to it, as if people had saved all the energy left over from the workweek and were putting it into causing as much mayhem as possible on the way home. On the Dolphin Expressway a tanker truck had rammed into the back end of a van from a retirement village. They had only been going five miles per hour, but the back of the van still crumpled a bit, and it had plowed forward into a fifteen-year-old Toyota with only one regular tire and three doughnuts on it.

I crawled past in a long, slow line of cars, most of them filled with people cheering as the tanker s driver yelled at the four men in the Toyota and a flock of terrified old people from the van huddled together on the shoulder. Traffic ground to a dead stop, then slowly started up again. I saw two more fender-benders before I got off onto Dixie Highway. But somehow, through a combination of skill, lifelong practice, and blind luck, I made it home without serious injury.

I parked my car behind a two-year-old SUV that was already in front of the house; my brother, Brian, was here for his every-week Friday-night dinner with the family. It was a custom we had gotten used to over the last year, after he had turned up and apparently wanted nothing more than to be with me, his only living relative. He had already bonded with Cody and Astor, since they knew him for what he was a cold and empty killer, like me and they wanted to be just like him. And Rita, showing the same solid good judgment about men that had led her to marry two different monsters, ate up Brian s horribly fake flattery and thought he was wonderful, too. And as for me? Well, I still had trouble believing that Brian did not have some secret motive for hanging around, but he was my brother, after all, and family is family. We don t get to pick our kin. The best we can hope for is to survive them, especially in my family.

Inside the house, Lily Anne was in her playpen next to the couch, where Brian was sitting with Rita, deep in very serious conversation. They looked up at me as I entered, and for some reason I thought Rita looked a little guilty when she saw me. It was impossible to read Brian, of course. He certainly couldn t feel guilt, and he merely gave me his large and very fake smile of greeting, like always.

Greetings, brother, he said.

Dexter, Rita said, and she jumped up and came over to greet me with a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. Brian and I were just talking, she said, probably to reassure me that they had not been performing amateur brain surgery on the neighbors.

Wonderful, I said, and before I could say more I sneezed.

Rita jumped back and managed to avoid most of the spray from my nose. Oh, she said. Here, I ll get some tissues. And she vanished down the hall toward the bathroom.

I blotted my nose with my sleeve and sat in the easy chair. I looked at my brother, and he looked back at me. Brian had recently landed a job with a large Canadian real estate conglomerate that was buying up homes in South Florida. My brother was charged with approaching people whose houses were in foreclosure and encouraging them to leave right away. In theory, this was done by offering them key money, usually around fifteen hundred dollars, to walk away and let the corporation take over and resell the property. I say in theory because Brian seemed very prosperous and happy lately, and I was almost certain that he was pocketing the key money and using less conventional means of emptying the houses. After all, if someone is running out on a mortgage, they generally want to disappear for a while and why shouldn t Brian help them do a more thorough job of it?

I had no proof, of course and it was none of my business how my brother conducted his social life, as long as he showed up at the house with clean hands and good table manners, which he always did. Still, I hoped he had abandoned his flamboyant recreational style and was being careful.

How s business? I asked him politely.

Never better, he said. They may say the market is recovering, but I haven t seen it yet. It really is a good time to be me in Miami.

I smiled politely, mostly to show him what a really good fake looked like, and Rita hustled back in with a box of tissues.

Here, she said, thrusting the box at me. Why don t you just keep the box with you, and Oh, damn it, there s the timer, she said, and she vanished again, into the kitchen this time.

Brian and I watched her go with very similar expressions of bemused wonder. A really lovely lady, Brian said to me. You are very lucky, Dexter.

Don t let her hear you say that, I said.

She might think you sound envious, and she does have single friends, you know.

Brian looked startled. Oh, he said. Silly me, I hadn t thought of that. Would she really try to, ah I think the expression is, fix me up?

In a heartbeat, I assured him. She thinks marriage is man s natural state.

And is it? he asked me.

There is much to be said for domestic bliss, I said. And I am quite sure Rita would love to see you try it.

Oh, dear, he said, and he looked at me thoughtfully, running his eyes over my entire frame. Still, he said, it seems to agree with you.

I suppose it must seem like it, I said.

Do you mean it doesn t agree with you? Brian asked, arching his eyebrows up high on his forehead.

I don t know, I said. I guess it really does. It s just that lately

Lights seem dimmer, tastes are all duller? he asked me.

Something like that, I admitted, although in truth I could not tell if he was merely mocking me.

But Brian looked at me very seriously, and for once he did not seem to be faking his expression, nor the thoughts behind his words.

Why don t you come along with me some night very soon? he said softly. We ll have a Boys Night Out. Rita couldn t possibly object.

There was absolutely no mistaking what he meant; aside from the fact that he only had one form of recreation, I knew that he had long dreamed of sharing a playtime with me, his only living relative, who had so much in common with him we were brothers of the blade as well as in blood. And truthfully the idea was almost unbearably compelling to me, too but but

Why not, brother? Brian said softly, leaning forward with genuine intensity on his face. Why shouldn t we?

For a moment I simply stared at him, frozen between lunging at his offer with both hands and thrusting him away from me, probably with one hand to my brow and a loud cry of, Retro me, Brianus! But before I could decide which choice to jump at, life intervened, as it usually does, and made the decision for me.

Dexter! Astor yelled from down the hall, with all the fury of a very cranky eleven-year-old girl. I need help with my math homework! Now!

I looked at Brian and shook my head. You ll excuse me, brother? I said.

He settled back into the sofa and smiled, the old fake smile again. Mmm, he said. Domestic bliss.

I got up and went down the hall to help Astor.

SEVEN

Astor was in the room she shared with Cody, hunched over a book at the little hutch that served them both as a desk. The expression on her face had probably started life as a frown of concentration, and then evolved into a scowl of frustration. From there it had been just a short jump to a full-blown menacing glare, which she turned on me as I came into the room. This is bullshit, she snarled at me with such ferocity that I wondered whether I should get a weapon. It doesn t make any sense at all!

You shouldn t use that word, I said, and rather mildly, too, since I was quite sure she would attack if I raised my voice.

What word, sense? she sneered.

Cause that must be a word they forgot in this stupid book. She slammed the book closed and slumped down in the chair with her arms crossed over her chest. Bunch of crap, she said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye to see whether she would get away with crap. I let it go and went to stand next to her.

Let s take a look, I said.

Astor shook her head and refused to look up at me. Useless dumb crap, she muttered.

I felt a sneeze coming on and fumbled out a tissue, and still without looking up she said, And if I get your cold, I swear. She didn t tell me what she swore, but from her tone it was clear that it wouldn t be pleasant.

I put the tissue in my pocket, leaned over the desk, and opened the book. You won t get my cold; I took a vitamin C, I said, still trying for a winning note of lighthearted and tolerant reason. What page are we on?

It s not like I ll ever have to know this stuff when I m grown up, she grumbled.

Maybe not, I said. But you have to know it now. She clamped her jaw and didn t say anything, so I pushed a little. Astor, do you want to be in sixth grade forever?

I don t wanna be in sixth grade now, she hissed.

Well, the only way you ll ever get out of it is if you get a passing grade. And to do that you have to know this stuff.

It s stupid, she said, but she seemed to be winding down a bit.

Then it should be no problem for you, because you re not stupid, I said. Come on; let s look at it.

She fought it for another minute or so, but I finally got her to the right page. It was a relatively simple problem of graphing coordinates, and once she calmed down I had no problem explaining it to her. I have always been good at math; it seems very straightforward compared to understanding human behavior. Astor did not seem to have a natural gift for it, but she caught on quickly enough. When she finally closed the book again she was a lot calmer, almost contented, and so I decided to push my luck just a bit and tackle another small item of pressing business.

Astor, I said, and I must have unconsciously used my I m-a-grown-up-here-it-comes voice, because she looked up at me with an expression of alert worry. Your mom wanted me to talk to you about braces.

She wants to ruin my life! she said, hurtling up into an impressive level of preteen outrage from a standing start.

I ll be hideous and no one will look at me!

You won t be hideous, I said.

I ll have these huge steel things all over my teeth! she wailed. It is so hideous!

Well, you can be hideous for a few months now, or hideous forever when you re grown up, I said. It s a very simple choice.

Why can t they just do an operation? she moaned. Just get it over with, and I d even get to miss school for a few days.

It doesn t work that way, I said.

Doesn t work at all, she said. They make me look like a cyborg and everybody will laugh at me.

Why do you think they ll laugh at you?

She gave me a look of amused contempt that was almost adult.

Weren t you ever in middle school? she said.

It was a good point, but not the one I wanted to make. Middle school doesn t last forever, I said, and neither will the braces. And when they come off, you ll have great teeth and a terrific smile.

What do I care; I ve got nothing to smile about, she grumbled.

Well, you will, I said. When you re a little older, and you start to go to dances and things with a really great smile. You have to think of it in a long-term kind of way

Long-term! she said angrily, as if now I was the one using bad words. The long term is that I ll look like a freak for a whole year of middle school and everybody will remember that forever and I ll always be That Girl with Huge Awful Braces even when I m forty years old!

I could feel my jaw moving, but no words were coming out; there were so many things wrong with what Astor had said that I couldn t seem to pick one to start on and in any case she had walled herself into such a high tower of miserable anger that whatever I said would just set her off again.

But luckily for my reputation as an urbane negotiator, before I could say anything and have it slammed back down my throat, Rita s raised voice came floating down the hall. Dexter? Astor? Come to dinner! And while my mouth was still hanging open, Astor was up and out the door and my little encouraging chat about braces was over.

I woke up again on Monday morning in the middle of an enormous sneeze and feeling like a Turkish weight lifter had spent the entire weekend squeezing every bone in my body. For that one confused moment between waking and sleeping I thought the psycho who had hammered Detective Klein into a limp pudding had somehow gotten into my bedroom and worked me over while I slept. But then I heard the toilet flush, and Rita hurried through the bedroom and down the hall toward the kitchen, and normal life lurched up onto its feet and stumbled on into another day.

I stretched, and the ache in my joints stretched with me. I wondered whether the pain could make me feel empathy for Klein. It didn t seem likely; I d never been cursed with that kind of weak emotion before, and even Lily Anne s transformational magic couldn t turn me into a soft-shelled empathy feeler overnight. It was probably just my subconscious playing connect-the-dots.

Still, I found myself dwelling on Klein s death as I got up and went through my morning routine, which now included sneezing every minute or so. Klein s skin had not been broken; a remarkable amount of force had been used on him, but there had been no blood spilled at all. It was my guess and the Passenger hissed its agreement that Klein had remained conscious as every bone in his body had been shattered. He d been awake and alert for every smash and crunch, every agonizing smack of the hammer, until finally, after a very impressive period of agony, the killer had done enough internal damage to allow Klein to slip away into death. It was much worse than having a cold. It didn t sound like a lot of fun especially not for Klein.

But in spite of my distaste for the method, and the Dark Passenger s contempt, I really did start to feel the limp fingers of empathy tickling at the inside of my skull empathy, yes, but not for Klein. The fellow feeling that sent small tendrils curling into my thoughts was all for Klein s executioner. It was totally stupid, of course but nonetheless I began to hear a niggling little whisper in my inner ear that my only real objection to what had been done to Klein was the use of the wrong tools. After all, hadn t I made sure that Valentine, too, stayed awake to feel every moment of my attention? Of course, Valentine had earned it with his habit of molesting and killing young boys but were any of us truly innocent? Maybe Detective Klein had been a tax cheat, or a wife beater, or perhaps he had chewed food with his mouth open. He might have deserved what the so-called psycho had done to him and really, who was to say that what I did was any better?

I knew very well that there was a great deal wrong with that unpleasant argument, but it stayed with me anyway, a discontented murmur of self-loathing in the background as I ate my breakfast, sneezed, got ready for work, sneezed, and finally took two cold pills and headed out the door, sneezing. I couldn t shake the absurd notion that I was just as guilty perhaps far more so, since Klein was the only victim of this killer so far, and I had fifty-two glass slides tucked away in my rosewood souvenir box, each with its single drop of blood representing a departed playmate. Did that make me fifty-two times as bad?

It was completely ridiculous, of course; what I had done was totally justified, sanctified by the Code of Saint Harry, and beneficial to society, aside from being a great deal of fun. But because I was so wrapped up in navel-gazing, it was not until I crawled off U.S. 1 to merge onto the Palmetto Expressway that the insistent sibilance of self-preservation finally broke through my egotistical fog. It was just a quiet hiss of warning, but it was persistent enough to get my attention, and as I finally listened to it, it solidified into a single, very definite thought.

Someone is watching me.

I don t know why I was certain, but I was. I could feel the gaze in a nearly physical way, almost as if somebody was trickling the razor-sharp point of a knife along the back of my neck. It was a sensation as definite and inarguable as the heat from the sun; someone was watching me, specifically me, and they were watching me for some reason that did not have my best interests at heart.

Reason argued that this was Miami at morning rush hour; almost anyone might stare at me with distaste, even hatred, for any reason at all maybe they didn t like my car, or my profile reminded them of their eighth-grade algebra teacher. But whatever Reason said, Caution argued back: It didn t matter why someone was watching me. It only mattered that they were. Someone was watching me with mischief in mind, and I needed to find out who.

Slowly, oh-so-casually, I looked around me. I was in the middle of an exceptionally normal crush of morning traffic, indistinguishable from what I drove through every morning. To my immediate right there were two lanes of cars: a battered Impala, and beyond it an old Ford van with a camper roof. Behind them was a line of Toyotas, Hummers, and BMWs, none of them appearing to be any more menacing than any of the others.

I looked ahead again, inched forward with the traffic, and then slowly turned to look to my left and before my head had turned more than six inches, there was a screech of tires, a chorus of blaring horns, and an old Honda accelerated off the Palmetto s on-ramp, down the shoulder, and back onto U.S. 1, where it squealed north, slid through a yellow light, and vanished down a side street, and as it went I could see the left taillight dangling at an odd angle, and then the dark birthmark stain on the trunk.

I watched it go until the drivers behind me began to lean on their horns. I tried to tell myself that it was pure coincidence. I knew very well how many old Hondas there were in Miami; I had them all on my list. And I had visited only eight of them so far, and it was very possible that this was one of the others. I told myself that this was just one more idiot changing his mind and deciding to drive to work a different way this morning; probably someone had suddenly remembered that he d left the coffeepot on, or left the disk with the PowerPoint presentation at home.

But no matter how many good and banal reasons I thought up for the Honda s behavior, that other, darker certainty kept talking back, telling me with calm and factual insistence that whoever had been driving that car, they had been staring at me and thinking bad thoughts, and when I had turned to look at them they had rocketed away as if pursued by demons, and we knew very well what that really meant.

My breakfast began to churn in my stomach and I felt my hands turn slick with sweat. Could it be? Was it remotely possible that whoever had seen me that night had found me? Somehow tracked me down and learned my license number, long before I found them and now they were following me? It was wildly, stupidly unlikely the odds against it were monumental; it was ridiculous, impossible, totally beyond the bounds of belief but was it possible?

I thought about it: There was no connection between Dexter Morgan, Boy Forensics Whiz, and the house where I had been seen with Valentine. I had gone to and from the house in Valentine s car, and I had not been followed when I fled. So hunting along my back trail was impossible: There wasn t one.

That left either magical powers or coincidence, and although I have nothing at all against Harry Potter, coincidence got my vote. And to make it a little more likely, that abandoned house had been only a little more than a mile from where the Palmetto Expressway intersects U.S. 1. I had already assumed that he lived in the same area and if he did, he would almost inevitably drive to work along U.S. 1 and quite likely up onto the Palmetto, too. Work for most people started at roughly the same time every day, and everyone in this area drove to work along the same road. That was painfully obvious; it was what caused the perpetual traffic jam at this time each morning. So it was not as wildly coincidental as it had seemed at first. In fact, it was even likely that if we both repeated the same drive at the same time long enough, sooner or later he would see my car, and even me.

And he had. Once again, he had seen me, and this time he d had an opportunity to study me at length. I tried to calculate how long he might have been staring. It was impossible; traffic had been stop-and-go, with an emphasis on stop that had lasted for almost two minutes. But it was pure guesswork to decide how long he had known it was me. Probably only a few seconds; I had to trust my alarm system.

Still, it was long enough to note the make and color of my car, write down the plate number, and who knows what else. I knew very well what I could do with only half that much information it was entirely possible that with just the plate number he could find me but would he? So far he had done nothing but flee in terror. Was he really going to look me up and then plant himself outside my door with a carving knife? If it was me, I would have but he was not me. I was exceptionally good with computers, and I had resources that weren t available to most people, and I used them to do things that no one else did. There is only one Dexter, and he was not it. Whoever this was, he could not possibly be anything like me. But it was just as true that I had no idea what he was like, or what he might do, and no matter how many different ways I told myself that there was no real danger, I couldn t shake the illogical fear that he was going to do something. The voice of calm reason was battered into silence by the screams of pure panic that had taken over my brain. He had seen me again, and this time I was in my workaday secret identity, and that made me feel more naked and helpless than I could remember.

I have no memory of driving up onto the Palmetto and continuing my morning commute, and it was pure blind chance that I was not flattened like a wandering possum by the raging traffic. By the time I got to work, I had calmed down enough to present a reasonably convincing facade, but I could not shake that steady trickle of anxiety that was once again burbling up on the floor of my brain and leaving me just on the edge of panic.

Luckily for the tattered shreds of my sanity, I didn t have long to dwell on my own petty concerns. I had not even settled into my morning routine when Deborah came steaming in to distract me, with her new partner, Duarte, trailing along behind.

All right, she said, as if she was continuing a conversation we d already been having. So the guy has to have some kind of record, right? You don t just suddenly do something like that out of nowhere, and nothing before it.

I sneezed and blinked at her, which was not a very impressive response, but since I was mired in my own worries it took me a moment to connect with hers. Are we talking about whoever killed Detective Klein? I said.

Debs blew out an impatient breath. Jesus shit, Dex, what did you think I was talking about?

NASCAR? I said. I think there was a big race this weekend.

Don t be an asshole, she said. I need to know about this.

I could have said that asshole might better describe somebody who charged into her brother s office first thing Monday morning and didn t even say gesundheit or ask how his weekend had been but I knew very well that my sister had no tolerance for suggestions on workplace etiquette, so I shrugged it off. I guess so, I said.

I mean, something like what he did, that s usually the end of a long process that started with other things, and you know. The kind of thing that gets you noticed.

What kind of thing? Duarte said.

I hesitated; for some reason, I felt a little bit uncomfortable, probably because I was talking about this stuff in front of a stranger generally speaking, I don t really like to talk about it at all, even with Debs; it seems a little too personal. I covered the pause by grabbing a paper towel and blotting at my nose, but they both kept looking at me expectantly, like two dogs waiting for a treat. I was on the spot, with no real choice but to go on.

Well, I said, tossing the paper towel into the trash, a lot of the time they start with, you know, pets. When they re young, just twelve years old or so. And they kill small dogs, cats, like that. Just, um, experimenting. Trying to find what feels right. And, you know. Somebody in the family, or in the neighborhood, finds the dead pets, and they get caught and arrested.

So there s a record, Debs said.

Well, there might be, I said. But if he follows the pattern, he s young when he does that, so he goes to Juvie. So the record is going to be sealed, and you can t just ask a judge to give you every sealed case file in the system.

Then give me something better, Deborah said urgently. Give me something to work with here.

Debs, I protested, I don t have anything. I sneezed again. Except a cold.

Well, shit, she said. Can t you think up some kind of hint?

I looked at her, and then at Duarte, and my discomfort grew and mixed with frustration. How? I said.

Duarte shrugged. She says you re like some kind of amateur profiler, he said.

I was surprised, and a bit upset, that Debs had shared that with Duarte. My so-called profiling talent was highly personal, something that grew out of my firsthand experience with sociopathic individuals like myself. But she had shared it; that probably meant she trusted him. In any case, I was on the spot. Ah, well, I said at last. M s o menos.

Duarte shook his head. What is that, yes or no? he said. I looked at Debs, and she actually smirked at me. Alex doesn t speak Spanish, she said.

Oh, I said.

Alex speaks French, she said, looking at him with hard-edged fondness.

I felt even more uncomfortable, since I had made a social blunder by assuming that anybody with a Cuban name who lived in Miami would speak Spanish but I also realized that this was one more clue to why Debs liked her new partner. For some reason, my sister had taken French in school, too, in spite of the fact that we grew up in a city where Spanish was used more widely than English, and French was no more useful than lips on a chicken it didn t even help her with the city s growing Haitian population. They all spoke Creole, which was only slightly closer to French than Mandarin.

And now she had found a kindred spirit, and clearly they had bonded. I am sure a real human being would have felt a warm glow of affectionate satisfaction at my sister s newly happy work situation, but this was me, and I didn t. All I felt was irritation and discomfort. Well, bonne chance, I said. But even speaking French to a judge won t get him to unseal a juvenile record especially since we don t even know which record.

Deborah lost her annoying fond look. Well, shit, she said. I can t just wait around and hope I get lucky.

You may not have to, I said. I m pretty sure he s going to do it again.

She just looked at me for a long moment, and then she nodded.

Yeah, she said. I m pretty sure he will. She shook her head, looked at Duarte, and walked out of the room. He followed right behind her, and I sneezed.

Gesundheit, I told myself. But it didn t make me feel any better.

EIGHT

Over the next few days I picked up the pace of my Honda hunt. I stayed out a little later each evening, trying to squeeze in just one more address, driving when it was too far to walk. I went home only when it was too dark to see any longer, trudging past the family tableau in the living room and into the shower without speaking, a little more frustrated every evening.

On the third night of my enhanced search, I walked in the front door, very sweaty, and realized that Rita was staring at me, her eyes running over me as if she was searching for a blemish, and I stopped in front of her. What? I said.

She looked up at me and blushed. Oh, she said.

It s just late, and you re so sweaty, I thought It s nothing, really.

I was jogging, I said, not sure why I felt like I was on the defensive.

You took the car, she said.

It seemed to me that she was paying far too much attention to my activities, but perhaps this was one of the little perks of marriage, so I shrugged it off. I went over to the track at the high school, I said.

She looked at me for a very long moment without saying anything, and there was clearly something going on in there, but I had no idea what it might be. Finally, she just said, That would explain it. She stood up and pushed past me into the kitchen, and I went to my hard-earned shower.

Perhaps I just hadn t noticed it before, but each evening when I came in after my exercise, she would watch me with that same mysterious intensity, and then head into the kitchen. On the fourth night of this exotic behavior, I followed her and stood silently in the kitchen doorway. I watched as she opened a cupboard, took out a bottle of wine, and poured herself a full glass, and as she raised it to her lips I backed away, unobserved.

It made no sense to me; it was almost as if there was a connection between my coming home sweaty and Rita wanting a glass of wine. I thought about it as I showered, but after a few minutes of musing I realized that I didn t know enough about the complex topics of humans and marriage, and Rita in particular, and in any case I had other worries. Finding the right Honda was far more important, and even though it was something I did know a lot about, I wasn t getting that done either. So I put the Mystery of Rita and the Wine out of my mind as just one more brick in the wall of frustration that was forming all around me.

A week later my cold was gone, and I had crossed many more names off my list, enough of them that I was beginning to wonder whether it wasn t a waste of precious time. I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck, and a growing urgency to do before I was done to, but that got me no closer to finding my Witness than anything else I tried. I was more jittery with each day, and with each dead-end name I crossed off my list, and I actually began to bite my fingernails, a habit I had dropped in high school. It was annoying, and added to my frustration, and I began to wonder whether I was starting to fall apart under the strain.

Still, at least I was in much better shape than Officer Gunther. Because just when Marty Klein s brutal murder had settled into a kind of background hum of nervousness on the force, Officer Gunther turned up dead, too. He was a uniformed cop, not a detective like Klein, but there was no doubt at all that it was the handiwork of the same killer. The body had been slowly and methodically pounded into a two-hundred-pound bruise. Every major bone had bee broken with what looked like exactly the same patient routine that had been so successful with Klein.

This time the body was not left in a police cruiser on I-95. Officer Gunther had been carefully placed in Bayfront Park, right beside the Torch of Friendship, which seemed more than a little ironic. A young Canadian couple on their honeymoon had found the corpse as they took a romantic early morning stroll: one more enduring memory of a magical time in Our Enchanted City.

There was a feeling of something very close to superstitious dread running through the small knot of cops when I got there. It was still relatively early in the day, but the air of quiet panic on-site had nothing to do with the lack of coffee. The officers on the scene were tense, even a bit wide-eyed, as if they had all seen a ghost. It was easy to see why: To dump Gunther here, so publicly, did not seem like something a human being could get away with. Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami is not the kind of private and secluded spot where your average psychotic killer might normally stroll by and drop a stiff. This was an amazingly public display, and yet somehow the body was here, and apparently it had been here for several hours before it had been discovered.

Cops are normally oversensitive to that kind of direct challenge. They take it as an insult to their manhood when someone flaunts the law with such flamboyant exhibitionism, and this really should have stirred up all the righteous wrath of an angry police force. But Miami s Finest looked like they were filled with supernatural angst instead of fury, almost as if they were ready to throw away their weapons and call the Psychic Hotline for help.

And I admit it was a bit disturbing, even to me, to see the corpse of a cop so carefully puddled on the pavement beside the Torch. It was very hard to understand how any living being could stroll through one of the city s busiest streets and deposit a body that was so clearly and spectacularly dead, without being seen. No one actually suggested out loud that there were occult forces at work at least, not that I overheard. But judging by the look of the cops in attendance, nobody was ruling it out, either.

My real area of expertise is not the Undead, though; it s blood spatter, and there was nothing in that line here. The killing had obviously happened somewhere else and the body had merely been dumped at this lovely and well-known landmark. But I was sure my sister, Deborah, would want my insight, so I hovered around the edges and tried to find some obscure and helpful clue that the other forensics wonks might have missed. There wasn t a great deal to see, aside from the gelatinous blob in the blue uniform that had once been Officer Gunther, married, father of three. I watched Angel Batista-No-Relation crawl slowly around the perimeter, searching meticulously for any small crumb of evidence and, apparently, finding none.

There was a bright flash of light behind me, and, somewhat startled, I turned around. Camilla Figg stood a few feet away, clutching a camera and blushing, with what seemed to be a guilty expression on her face. Oh, she said in her jerky mutter. I didn t mean the flash was on but I had to sorry. I blinked at her for a moment, partly from the bright blast of the flash and partly because she had made no sense at all. And then one of the people stacked up at the perimeter leaned over and took a picture of the two of us staring at each other, and Camilla jerked into motion and scuttled away to a small square of grass between the walkways, where Vince Masuoka had found a footprint. She began to refocus her camera on the footprint, and I turned away.

Nobody saw anything, Deborah said as she materialized at my elbow, and on top of the unexpected explosion from Camilla s flashbulb, my nerves responded instantly and I jumped as if there really was a ghost on the loose and Debs was it. As I settled back to earth she looked at me with mild surprise.

You startled me, I said.

I didn t know you could startle, she said. She frowned and shook her head. This thing is enough to give anybody the creeps. It s like the most crowded public area in the city, and the guy just pops up with a body, drops it by the Torch, and drives away?

They found it right around dawn, I said. So it was dark when he dumped the body.

It s never dark here, she said. Streetlights, all the buildings, Bayside Market, the arena a block away? Not to mention the goddamned Torch. It s lit up twenty-four/seven.

I looked around me. I had been here many times, day and night, and it was true that there was always a very bright spill of light from the buildings in this neighborhood. And with Bayside Marketplace right next to us and American Airlines Arena just a block away, there was even more light, more traffic, and more security. Plus the goddamned Torch, of course.

But there was also a line of trees and a relatively deserted belt of grass in the other direction, and I turned to look that way. As I did, Deborah glanced at me, frowned, and then she turned around to look, too.

Through the trees and beyond the stretch of park on the far side of the Torch, the morning sun blazed off the water of Biscayne Bay. In the middle of the near-blinding glare a large sailboat slid regally across the water toward the marina, until an even larger motor yacht powered past it and set it bobbing frantically. A half thought wobbled into my brain and I raised an arm to point; Deborah looked at me expectantly, and then, as if to signal that we really were in a cartoon, another camera flash came from the perimeter, and Deborah s eyes went wide-open as the idea blossomed.

Son of a bitch, Deborah said. The motherfucker came by boat. Of course! She clapped her hands together and swiveled her head around until she located her partner.

Hey, Duarte! she called. He looked up and she beckoned him to follow as she turned and hurried away toward the water.

Glad to help, I said as my sister raced away to the seawall. I turned to see who had taken the picture, but saw nothing except Angel with his face hovering six inches over a fascinating clump of grass, and Camilla waving to somebody standing in the crowd of gawkers who were two-deep at the yellow crime scene tape. She went over to talk to whoever it was, and I turned away and watched as my sister raced to the seawall to look for some clue that the killer had come by boat. It really did make sense; I knew very well from a great deal of happy personal experience that you can get away with almost anything on a boat, especially at night. And when I say almost anything, I mean much more than merely the surprising acts of athletic immodesty one sees couples performing out on the water from time to time. In the pursuit of my hobby I had done many things on my boat that narrow minds might find objectionable, and it was quite clear to me that nobody ever sees anything. Not even, apparently, a psychotic and semisupernatural killer lugging a completely limp but rather large dead cop around the Bay and then up over the seawall and into Bayfront Park.

But because this was Miami, it was at least possible that somebody had, in fact, seen something of the sort, and simply decided not to report it. Maybe they were afraid it would make them a target, or they didn t want the police to find out they had no green card. Modern life being what it is, it was even possible that there was a really good episode of Mythbusters on TV and they wanted to watch the end. So for the next hour or so, Debs and her team went all along the seawall looking for that Certain Special Someone.

Not surprisingly at least, not to me they didn t find him or her. Nobody knew nothin; nobody saw nothin. There was plenty of activity along the seawall, but it was morning traffic, people getting to work in one of the shops in Bayside, or on one of the tour boats tied up by the wall. None of this crowd had been keeping watch in the dark of the night. All those people had gone home to their well-earned rest, no doubt after a full night of staring anxiously into the darkness, alert for every danger or possibly just watching TV. But Deborah dutifully collected names and telephone numbers of all the night security personnel and then came back to me and scowled, as if it was all my fault because she had found nothing and I was the one who had made her look for it.

We stood on the seawall not far from the Biscayne Pearl, one of the boats that provided tours of the city by water, and Deborah squinted along the wall toward Bayside. Then she shook her head and started to walk back toward the Torch, and I tagged along.

Somebody saw something, she said, and I hoped she sounded more convincing to herself than she did to me. Had to. You can t lug a full-grown cop onto the seawall and all the way up to the Torch and nobody sees you.

Freddy Krueger could, I said.

Deborah whacked me on the upper arm, but her heart really wasn t in it this time, and it was relatively easy for me to stop myself from screaming with pain.

All I need, she said, is to have more of that supernatural bullshit going around. One of the guys actually asked Duarte if we could get a santero in here, just in case.

I nodded. It might make sense to bring in a santero, one of Santeria s priests, if you believed in that sort of thing, and a surprising number of Miami s citizens did. What did Duarte tell him? Deborah snorted. He said, What s a santero?

I looked at her to see if she was kidding; every Cuban-American knew santeros. Odds were good there was at least one in his very own family. But of course, they hadn t asked Duarte in French, and anyway, before I could pretend to get the joke and then pretend to laugh, Debs went on. I know this guy s a psycho, but he s a live human being, too, she said, and I was relatively sure she didn t mean Duarte. He isn t invisible, and he didn t teleport in and out.

She paused by a large tree and looked up at it thoughtfully, and then turned back around the way we d come. Lookit this, she said, pointing up at the tree and then back to the Pearl. If he ties up right there by the tour boat, she said, he s got cover from these trees most of the way to the Torch.

Not quite invisible, I said. But pretty close.

Right beside the fucking boat, she muttered.

They had to see something.

Unless they were asleep, I said.

She just shook her head and then looked toward the Torch along the line of trees as if she was aiming a rifle, and then shrugged and began to walk again. Somebody saw something, she repeated stubbornly. Had to.

We walked back to the Torch together in what would have been comfortable silence if my sister hadn t been so obviously distracted. The medical examiner was just finishing up with Officer Gunther s body when we got there. He shook his head at Debs to indicate that he d found nothing interesting.

Do we know where Gunther had lunch? I asked Deborah. She stared at me as if I had suggested we should strip naked and jog down Biscayne Boulevard.

Lunch, Debs, I said patiently. Like maybe Mexican food?

The light came on and she lurched over to the ME. I want stomach contents from the autopsy, I heard her say. See if he ate any tacos recently. Oddly enough, the ME looked at her without surprise, but I suppose if you have worked with corpses and cops in Miami long enough you are very hard to surprise, and a request to search for tacos in a dead officer s stomach was mere routine. The ME just nodded wearily, and Deborah stalked off to talk to Duarte, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs and think deep thoughts.

I thought them for a few minutes, but I didn t come up with anything more profound than the realization that I was hungry, and there was nothing for me to eat here. There was also nothing for me to do; no blood spatter at all, and the other geeks from Forensics had things well in hand.

I turned away from Gunther s body and looked around the perimeter. The usual crowd of casual ghouls was still there, standing in back of the tape in a jostling bunch as if they were waiting to get into a rock concert. They were staring at the body and, to their credit, one or two of them actually tried very hard to look horrified as they craned their necks to see. Of course, most of the others made up for it by leaning forward over the tape to get a better picture with their cell phones. Soon the pictures of Officer Gunther s smooshed corpse would be all over the Web, and the whole world could join together and pretend to be appalled and dismayed in perfect harmony. Isn t technology wonderful?

I hung around and made helpful suggestions for a little while longer, but as usual, no one seemed to care about my thoughtful insights; real expertise is never appreciated. People would always rather muddle along in their own dim, blundering way than have someone else point out where they were going wrong even if that other person is clearly brighter.

And so it was that at an hour depressingly far beyond lunchtime, an underappreciated and underutilized Dexter finally got bored enough to hitch a ride back to the land of real work waiting for me in my little cubbyhole. I found a friendly cop who was headed that way. He just wanted to talk about fishing, and since I do know something about that, we got along very nicely. He was even willing to make a quick stop along the way for some Chinese takeout, which was certainly a very chummy gesture, and in gratitude I paid for his order of shrimp lo mein.

By the time I said good-bye to my new BFF and sat down at my desk with my fragrant lunch, I was beginning to feel like there might be some actual point to this patchwork quilt of humiliation and suffering we call Life. The hot-and-sour soup was very good, the dumplings were tender and juicy, and the kung pao was hot enough to make me sweat. I caught myself feeling rather contented as I finished eating, and I wondered why. Could I really be so shallow that the simple act of eating a good lunch made me happy? Or was something deeper and more sinister at work here? Perhaps it was the MSG in the food, attacking the pleasure center in my brain and forcing me to feel good against my will.

Whatever it was, it was a relief to be out of the dark clouds that had been clustered around my head for the past few weeks. It was true that I had some legitimate worries, but I had been wallowing in them a little too much. Apparently, however, one meal of good Chinese food had cured me. I actually caught myself humming as I tossed the empty containers into the trash, a very surprising development for me. Was this real human happiness? From a dumpling? Perhaps I should notify some national mental health organization: Kung pao chicken works better than Zoloft. There might be a Nobel Prize waiting for me for this. Or at least a letter of thanks from China.

Whatever my lighthearted mood was really all about, it lasted almost until quitting time. I had gone down to the evidence room to return a few samples I d been working with, and when I came back to my little cubbyhole I found a large and unpleasant surprise waiting for me.

My surprise was about five feet, ten inches, two hundred pounds of African-American anger, and it looked more like an exceptionally sinister insect than a human being. He was perched on two shiny prosthetic feet, and one of the metal claws he had for hands was doing something to my computer as I walked in.

Why, Sergeant Doakes, I said, with as much pleasantness as I could fake. Do you need help logging onto Facebook?

He jerked around to face me, clearly not expecting me to catch him snooping. Nyuk ookig, he said quite clearly; the same amateur surgeon who had removed his hands and feet had taken out his tongue, too, and having a pleasant conversation with the man had become nearly impossible.

Of course, it had never been easy; he had always hated me, always suspected what I was. I had never given him any reason to doubt my carefully manufactured innocence, but doubt it he did, and always had even before I had failed to rescue him from his unfortunate surgery. I had tried, really I had: It just hadn t quite worked out. To be fair to me, which is very important, I did get most of him back safely. But now he blamed me for the amputations as well as many other unspecified acts. And here he was at my computer, and he was Nyuk ookig.

Nyuk? I repeated brightly. Really? Are you a fan of the Three Stooges, Sergeant? I never knew. Nyuk nyuk nyuk!

He glared at me with even more venom, which added up to an impressive amount, and he reached down to the desk for the small notebook-size artificial-speech device he carried around. He punched in something, and the machine called out in its cheerful baritone,

Just! Looking!

Of course you are! I said, with real synthetic good cheer, trying to match the bizarre happiness of his voice machine. And no doubt doing a wonderful job of it! But unfortunately, you are accidentally looking on my private computer, in my private space, and technically speaking, that s kind of against the rules.

He glared at me some more; really, the man had become completely one-note. Without taking his eyes off me he punched in something new on his speech machine and after a moment it called out, in its unlikely and happy voice, I will! Get! You! Someday! Maa-ther. Fucker!

I m sure you will, I said soothingly.

But you ll have to do it on your own computer. I smiled at him, just to show there were no hard feelings, and pointed in the direction of the door. So if you don t mind?

He pulled a large breath of air in through his nostrils, and then hissed it out again through his teeth, all without blinking, and then he tucked the speech machine under his arm and stomped out of my office, taking the tatters of my good mood with him.

And now I had another reason for uneasiness. Why had Sergeant Doakes been looking on my computer? Obviously, he thought there was something incriminating to find but what? And why now, on my computer, of all things? There could be absolutely no legitimate reason for him to look at my computer. I was reasonably sure he had no knowledge of or interest in IT. Since the loss of his limbs he had been given a desk job out of pity, so he could serve out his last few years and qualify for a full pension. He d been working at some kind of useless administrative thing in Human Resources; I didn t really know or care what.

So he had been here, in my space, on my computer, strictly as a part of his private program to Demolish Dexter but right here at work? Why? As far as I knew, he had always confined his attempts to get me to general surveillance, and he had never actually snooped through my things before. What had brought on this new and unwelcome escalation? Had he finally slipped over the line into a kind of hostile insanity, permanently focused on me? Or did he really have some reason to think he was onto something specific, and he had a chance to prove me guilty?

It seemed impossible, on the face of it. I mean, of course I really am guilty, of many somethings, all of them lethal and very enjoyable and technically not quite legal. But I was extremely careful, I always cleaned up nicely afterward, and I could not imagine what Doakes thought he might come up with. I was fairly sure that there was nothing there to find.

It was puzzling, and very unsettling. But at least it jolted me out of my stupid good cheer and back into general gloominess again. So much for Chinese food: Half an hour later you re grumpy again.

Deborah, however, was even grumpier when she slouched into my office as I was getting ready to go home.

You took off early, she said, from the Torch. And she made it sound like she was accusing me of stealing office supplies.

I had to go to work, I said, and I did what I could to match her surly tone.

She blinked. What the hell has gotten into you lately? she said. I took a breath, more to stall for time than because I needed air. What do you mean?

She pursed her lips, cocked her head to one side. You re jumpy all the time. You snap at people. Maybe a little distracted? I don t know. Like something s bothering you.

It was a very uncomfortable moment for me. She was right, of course, but how much could I tell her? Something was bothering me; I was convinced that someone had seen me and recognized me, and now I had caught Sergeant Doakes looking at my computer. It was nearly impossible to connect the two things in any way the idea of some anonymous witness to Me at Play teaming up with Doakes to get me was ludicrous but taken together, the two separate things had knocked me for a very uneasy loop. I was in the grip of illogical emotions, and I was not used to that at all.

But what could I say to her? Debs and I had always been close, of course, but that was partly because we didn t share our feelings with each other. We couldn t; I didn t have any, and she was too ashamed of hers to admit she had them.

Still, I had to say something, and when I thought about it, she was probably the only one in the world I could really talk to, unless I was willing to shell out a hundred dollars an hour to talk to a shrink, which seemed like a very bad idea; I would either have to tell him the truth about myself, which was unthinkable, or make up some plausible fiction, which was certainly a waste of good money that might be put toward Lily Anne s medical school tuition.

I didn t know it showed, I said at last.

Debs snorted. Dexter. This is me. We grew up together; we work together I know you better than anybody else in the world. To me, it shows. She raised an eyebrow encouragingly.

So what is it?

She was right, of course. She did know me better than anyone else better than Rita, or Brian, or anybody I had ever known, with the possible exception of Harry, our long-dead dad. Like Harry, Deborah even knew about Dark Dexter and his happy slashing, and she had come to terms with it. If ever there was a time to talk, and a person to talk to, it was now, with her. I closed my eyes for a moment, and tried to think of how to begin. I don t know, I said. It s just that, um a few weeks ago, when I was

Deborah s radio squawked, a loud and rude electronic belch, and then it said quite clearly, Sergeant Morgan, what is your twenty? She shook her head at me and held her radio up.

This is Morgan, she said. I m in Forensics.

You d better come down here, Sergeant, a voice said over the radio. I think we found something you need to see.

Deborah looked at me. Sorry, she said. She pushed the button on the radio and said, On my way. Then she got up and started for the door, hesitated, and turned back to me.

We ll talk later, Dex, okay?

Sure, I said. Don t worry about me. Apparently it didn t sound as pitiful to her as it did to me; she just nodded and hurried out the door. And I finished closing up shop for the night and then headed to my car.

NINE

The sun was still bright in the sky when I got home. It was one of the very few benefits of summer in Miami: The temperature may be ninety-seven, and the humidity well over a hundred percent, but at least when you got home at six o clock, there was still plenty of daylight left, so you could sit outside with your family and sweat for another hour and a half.

But, of course, my little family did no such thing. We were natives; tans are for tourists, and we preferred the comfort of central air-conditioning. Besides, since my brother, Brian, had given Cody and Astor a Wii, they hadn t left the house at all except by force. They both seemed unwilling to leave the room where the thing sat, for any reason. We d had to make some very strict rules about using the Wii: They had to ask first, and they had to finish their homework before they turned it on, and they could play with it no more than an hour a day.

So when I came into the house and saw Cody and Astor already standing in front of the TV with their Wii controllers clutched tightly in their hands, my first question was automatic. Homework all done? I said.

They didn t even look up; Cody just nodded, and Astor frowned. We finished it at after-school, she said.

All right, I said. Where s Lily Anne?

With Mom, Astor said, frowning deeper at my continuing interruption.

And where s Mom?

Dunno, she said, waving her controller and jerking spasmodically with whatever was happening on the screen. Cody glanced at me it was Astor s play and he shrugged slightly. He almost never said more than three words at a time, one small side effect of the abuse he d received from his biological father, and Astor did most of the talking for both of them. But at the moment she seemed uncharacteristically unwilling to talk probably a continuing miff over impending braces. So I took a breath and tried to shake off my growing irritation at both of them.

Fine, I said. Thank you for asking, yes, I did have a hard day at work. But I already feel a lot better, now that I m here nestled in the warm bosom of my family. I ve enjoyed our little chat very much.

Cody gave a funny little half smirk and said, very softly,

Bosom. Astor said nothing; she just gritted her teeth and attacked a large monster on the screen. I sighed; as comforting as it may be to some of us, sarcasm, like youth, is wasted on the young. I gave up on the kids and went to look for Rita.

She wasn t in the kitchen, which was a very large disappointment, since it meant she was not busily whipping up something wonderful for my dinner. There was nothing burbling on the stove, either. And it wasn t leftover night; this was very puzzling and a little bit troublesome. I hoped this didn t mean we were going to have to order pizza although it made the kids happy, it simply could not compete with even the most casual of Rita s efforts.

I went back through the living room and down the hall. Rita was not in the bathroom, and not in the bedroom, either. I began to wonder whether Freddy Krueger had grabbed her, too. I went to the bedroom window and looked out into the backyard.

Rita sat at the picnic table we d put up under a large banyan tree that spread its branches over nearly half our backyard. She was holding Lily Anne on her lap with her left hand and sipping from a large glass of wine with the right. Other than that, she seemed to be doing absolutely nothing except staring back at the house and slowly shaking her head. As I watched she took a gulp of wine, hugged Lily Anne a little tighter for a moment, and then appeared to sigh heavily.

This was very strange behavior, and I had no idea what to make of it. I had never seen Rita act like this before sitting alone and unhappy and drinking wine and it was disturbing to see her doing it now, whatever the reason might be. It seemed to me, however, that the most important point was that, whatever Rita was doing, she was not cooking dinner, and that was just the sort of dangerous inaction that calls for prompt and vigorous intervention. So I wound my way back through the house, past Cody and Astor still happily killing things on the TV screen and on out the back door into the yard.

Rita looked up at me as I came outside and she seemed to freeze for a moment. Then she hurriedly turned away, put her wineglass down on the picnic table s bench, and turned back around to face me. I m home, I said, with cautious good cheer.

She sniffled loudly. Yes, I know, she said.

And now you ll go get all sweaty again.

I sat next to her; Lily Anne had begun to bounce as I approached, and I held out my hands for her. She launched herself toward me and Rita passed her over to me with a tired smile. Oh, Rita said, you re such a good daddy. Why can t I just And she shook her head and snuffled again.

I looked away from Lily Anne s bright and cheerful face and into Rita s tired and unhappy one. Aside from a runny nose, she also seemed to have been crying; her cheeks were wet and her eyes looked red and a little swollen. Um, I said.

Is something wrong?

Rita blotted at her eyes with the sleeve of her blouse and then turned around and took a large sip of wine. She put the glass back down again, behind her, and faced me once more. She opened her mouth to say something, bit her lip, and looked away, shaking her head.

Even Lily Anne seemed puzzled by Rita s behavior, and she bounced vigorously for a moment, calling out, Abbab bab bab !

Rita looked at her with a small, tired smile. She needs a fresh diaper, Rita said, and before I could respond to that, Rita sobbed: just one small sob, and she strangled it off for the most part so that it might almost have been a hiccup, but I was very sure it was a sob. It seemed like overreacting to a dirty diaper.

I am not comfortable with emotions, partly because I do not have them and so I generally don t understand where they come from and what they mean. But after years of careful study and a great deal of practice I had learned to cope when others displayed them, and I usually knew the correct response when a human being was in the grip of strong feelings.

In this case, however, I admit I was helpless. Going by the book, a woman s tears generally called for comfort and reassurance, no matter how phony but how could I apply either of those things if I didn t know what was causing Rita s crying fit? I looked at her carefully, searching her face for some clue, and found nothing; red-rimmed eyes and wet cheeks, yes, but unfortunately no one had scrawled a message on her face outlining a cause and a course of treatment. And so, sounding almost as awkward as I was beginning to feel, I stuttered out, Uh, are you I mean, is something wrong?

Rita sniffled again and wiped her nose on her sleeve. Once more she seemed about to say something truly momentous. Instead, she just shook her head and touched the baby s face with a finger.

It s Lily Anne, she said. We have to move. And then you.

I heard those terrifying words, It s Lily Anne, and for just a moment the world got very bright and spun around me as my brain was filled with an endless list of terrible maladies that might be attacking my little girl. I clutched my baby tightly and tried to breathe until things steadied down again. Lily Anne helped out by swatting at the side of my head and saying,

Abah-a-bah! The clout to my ear brought me back to my senses and I looked back at Rita, who apparently had no idea that her words had sent me into a full-scale tizzy. What s wrong with Lily Anne? I demanded.

What? Rita said. What do you mean? There s nothing Oh, Dexter, you re being so I just meant, we have to move. Because of Lily Anne.

I looked at the happy little face of the child bouncing on my lap. Rita was not making sense, at least not to me. How could this perfect little person force us to move? Of course, she was my child, which raised a few terrifying possibilities. Perhaps some vagrant strand of wicked DNA had surfaced in her and the outraged neighborhood was demanding her exile. It was a horrible thought, but it was at least possible. What did she do? I said.

What did she Dexter, she s only a year old, Rita said. What could she possibly do?

I don t know, I said. But you said we have to move because of Lily Anne.

Oh, for God s sake, she said. You re being completely She fluttered a hand in the air, and then she turned around again and took another gulp of wine, bending over the glass and shielding it from me, as if she didn t want me to know what she was doing over there.

Rita, I said, and she slapped the glass down onto the bench and turned back toward me, swallowing convulsively. If nothing is wrong with Lily Anne, and she didn t do anything wrong, why do we have to move?

She blinked, and then wiped the corners of her eyes with her sleeve. That s just she said.

I mean, because look at her. Rita gestured at the baby, and it seemed to me that her motor skills were not quite what they should have been, because her hand bumped clumsily against my arm. She jerked the hand back and waved at the house. Such a little house, she said. And Lily Anne is getting so big.

I looked at her and waited for more, but I waited in vain. Her words did not add up to anything I could understand, but they were apparently all I was going to get. Did Rita really think that Lily Anne was growing into some kind of gigantic creature, like in Alice in Wonderland, and soon the house would be too small to contain her? Or was there some hidden message here, possibly in Aramaic, that would take me years of study to decipher? I have heard and read many suggestions about what it takes to make a marriage work, but at the moment what mine seemed to need most was a translator. Rita, you re not making any sense, I said, with all the gentle patience I could fake.

She shook her head, just a little bit sloppily, and scowled at me.

I m not drunk, she said.

One of the few eternal truths about humans is that if someone says they aren t sleeping, they re not rich, or they re not drunk, they almost certainly are. But telling them so when they deny it is thankless, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous. So I just smiled understandingly at Rita. Of course you re not, I said. So why do we have to move because Lily Anne is getting so big?

Dexter, Rita said. Our little family is all getting so big. We need a bigger house.

A small light flickered in my mighty brain and then came on.

You mean we need a house with more room? Because the kids are growing up?

Yes, she said, slapping her hand on the picnic table for emphasis. That s exactly right. She frowned. What jid you think I meaned?

I had no idea what you meaned, I said. But you re sitting out here and you re crying .

Oh, she said, and she looked away, and once more she blotted clumsily at her face with her sleeve. It doesn t seem like right now. She looked at me and quickly looked away again. I mean, you know, I m not soopit. Stooper. She frowned, and then said very carefully,

I m. Not. Stupid.

I never thought you were, I said, which was actually true: amazingly scatterbrained, yes, but not stupid. Is that why you re crying?

She looked at me very hard, and I was just beginning to get uncomfortable when her eyes glazed over a little, and she looked away.

It s just hormones, she said. I didn t want anyone to see.

I skipped over the image of anyone seeing her hormones and tried to focus on the heart of the matter. So there s nothing wrong with Lily Anne? I said, still not quite sure that everything was exactly what it should be.

No, no, of course not, Rita said. It s the house too small. Cody and Astor can t share a room forever, because you know, she said. Astor is getting to that age.

Even without really knowing what specific age she meant, I thought I understood. Astor was growing up, and she couldn t share a room with her brother forever. But even so, aside from the fact that I was used to this house and didn t really want to move away from it, I had a few practical objections. We can t afford a new house, I said. Especially not a bigger one.

Rita waggled a finger at me and squinted playfully through one eye. You have not been paying attention, she said, working very hard to make each word distinct.

I guess not.

There are lots of wonderful opportoonies, she said. Toon-a-nitties. Damn. She shook her head, and then closed her eyes tightly. Oh, she said. Oh, lord. She breathed heavily for a moment and swayed so that I wondered if she was going to fall off the bench. But then she took an extra-deep breath, rolled her head in a half circle, and opened her eyes. Foreclosures, she said carefully. Not a new house. A foreclosing houses. She smiled loopily, and then jerked around and hunched over the wineglass again; this time she drained it.

I thought about what she said or at any rate, I thought about what I thought she had said. It was true that South Florida was littered with bargain real estate right now. No matter how much the economy was officially improving everywhere else, Miami was still full of people who were in over their heads on a bad mortgage, and many of them were simply walking away, leaving the bank holding the worthless paper as well as the overpriced house. And quite often the banks, in turn, were anxiously unloading the houses for a fraction of the original price.

I knew all this very well from a general and somewhat disinterested standpoint. Lately the whole subject of foreclosure and bargain houses was on everybody s lips, much like the weather. Everyone talked about it, and the media were full of stories and discussions and panels with dire warnings. And closer to home, even my own brother, Brian, was happily employed dealing with this same phenomenon.

But to go from this theoretical awareness of foreclosure into the very real idea of taking personal advantage of it took a moment of adjustment. I liked living where we were, and I had already given up my comfy little apartment to do so. Moving again would be difficult and uncomfortable and inconvenient, and there was no guarantee at all that we would end up someplace better, especially with a house that had been abandoned in despair and anger. There might be holes kicked in the roof, and wiring ripped out and at the very least, wouldn t there be bad karma to deal with?

But once again, Lily Anne proved that she saw things a little more clearly and shrewdly than her dunderheaded father. As I wrestled with all the concepts of foreclosure and moving and personal inconvenience, she cut right to the heart of the matter with an insight that was sharp and compelling. She bounced three times on her powerful little legs and said, Da. Da da da. And for emphasis, she reached out and pulled on my earlobe.

I looked at my little girl, and I came to a decision. You re right, I told her. You deserve your own room. I turned to Rita to tell her what I had decided, but she had leaned back against the edge of the table and closed her eyes again, and her head was swaying gently, her mouth open and her hands clasped in her lap.

Rita? I said.

She jerked upright and her eyes popped open wide. Oh! she said. Oh, my God, you scared me.

I m sorry, I said. About the house?

Yes, she said, and she frowned. Brian says Oh, I hope you don t mind, she said, and she looked a little bit guilty. I talked to him first? Because, you know, his job. She fluttered a hand again and it bumped against the edge of the table. Ouch, she said.

Yes, I said, with soothing encouragement.

You talked to Brian. That s good.

It is good, she said. He Is Good. He knows really what ups. Wha s up. With houses. Right now, I mean. Yes, he does.

He s going to help us, she said. Find, find

Find a house, I said.

Rita shook her head slowly and then closed her eyes. I waited, but nothing happened. I m sorry, she said at last, very softly. I think I need to go lie down. She got up from the bench; the empty wineglass fell to the ground and the stem snapped off, but Rita didn t notice. She stood there, swayed for a moment, and then meandered back into the house.

Well, then, I said to Lily Anne. I guess we re moving.

Lily Anne bounced. Da, she said firmly.

I stood up and carried her into the house to make a telephone call; it looked like it was pizza night after all.

TEN

The next morning when I got in to work, there was a lab report from the medical examiner s office waiting on my desk. I glanced through it briefly and then, when I saw what it was, I sat down and read it with real interest. The report gave the results of the autopsy on Officer Gunther, and if you threw out all the technical jargon, it said several significant things. First, blood pooling in the tissue indicated that he had been lying facedown for several hours after death interesting, since he had been faceup when his body was found by the Torch of Friendship. It probably meant our psycho had killed Gunther in the late afternoon, then left him stashed all alone somewhere until dark. Sometime in the night he had recovered his sense of camaraderie and moved the body to the Torch of Friendship.

There were several pages detailing the massive trauma to Gunther s assorted organs and limbs, adding up to the same picture we d gotten from Klein. The report did not speculate, of course; that would have been unprofessional and possibly a little too helpful. But it did state that the damage had been caused by an object that was probably made of steel and possessed a smooth, oblong striking surface about the size of a playing card, which sounded like some kind of large hammer to me.

Once again, the condition of the internal organs confirmed what the exterior tissue indicated: The killer had worked very hard to keep Gunther alive as long as possible, while carefully breaking every conceivable bone with deliberate and vicious force. It didn t seem like a very pleasant way to die, but then, on reflection, I couldn t think of a single way to die that was pleasant certainly nothing I had ever tried. Not that I d really looked for anything of the kind; where would the fun be in a pleasant death?

I flipped through the report until I came to a page that had been highlighted with fluorescent yellow marker. It listed the contents of Gunther s stomach, and half of the list had been colored in a solid bright yellow, almost certainly by Deborah. I read it and I didn t need the highlighting to find the significant part. Among the other nasty things swimming around in his guts, Gunther had eaten something containing cornmeal, iceberg lettuce, ground beef, and several spices, chief among them chili powder and cumin.

In other words, his last meal had been a taco, just like it had been for Klein. For both their sakes, I hoped they were really good tacos.

I had barely finished reading the report when my desk telephone rang, and using my vast and all-seeing psychic powers I determined that it was probably my sister calling. I picked up the receiver anyway and said, Morgan.

Did you read the coroner s report? Deborah demanded.

Just finished it, I said.

Stay put, she said. I ll be right there.

Two minutes later she walked into my office carrying her own copy of the report. What did you think? she said, sliding into a chair and waving the pages.

I don t like his prose style, I said.

And the plot seems very familiar.

Don t be an asshole, she said. I got a briefing in a half hour, and I need to have something to say to everybody.

I looked at my sister with some little annoyance. I knew very well that even though she could face down an angry and well-armed mob of cocaine cowboys, or bully around large thuglike cops twice her size, she fell to pieces when she had to speak in front of any group containing more than two people. That was fine, even a little bit endearing, since it was rather nice to see her humbled from time to time. But somehow, her terrible stage fright had become my problem, and I always ended up writing the script for her presentations a completely thankless job, since she fell apart anyway, no matter how many great lines I wrote for her.

But here she was; she had come all the way down to my office for once, and she was asking nicely, for her, so I really had to help out, no matter how much I resented the idea. Well, I said, thinking out loud. So it fits the same pattern, all the bones broken, and the tacos.

I got that, she snapped. Come on, Dex.

The interval between kills is interesting, I said. Two weeks.

She blinked and stared at me for a moment. Does that mean something? she said.

Absolutely, I said.

What? she said eagerly.

I don t have a clue, I said, and before she could lean over and hit me I added, But the differences must mean something, too.

Yeah, I know, she said thoughtfully. Gunther s in uniform; Klein is a detective. He gets left in his vehicle; Gunther gets dumped by the goddamned Torch. By boat, for Christ s sake. Why?

More important, I said, why does the other stuff stay the same? She looked at me oddly. I mean, yeah, the MO stays the same. And they re both cops. But why these two specific cops? What is it about the two of them that fit the killer s pattern of need?

Debs shook her head impatiently. I don t really give a shit about the psychological stuff, she said. I need to catch this psycho motherfucker.

I could have said that the best way to catch a psycho motherfucker is by understanding what makes him a psycho motherfucker, but I doubted that Deborah would be very receptive to that message right now. Besides, it wasn t really true. Based on my years of experience in the business, the best way to catch a killer is by getting lucky. Of course, you don t say that out loud, especially if you re talking to the evening news. You have to look serious and mention patient and thorough detective work. So I just said, What about the boat?

We re looking, she said. But, shit, do you know how many boats there are in Miami even if you only count the legally registered ones?

It won t be his. It was probably stolen in the last week, I said helpfully.

Deborah snorted. Almost as many, she said.

Shit, Dexter, I got all the obvious stuff covered. I need an actual idea here, not more dumb-ass chatter.

It was true that I had not been in the best of moods lately, but it seemed to me that she was moving rapidly past the boundaries of how to speak when begging someone else for help. I opened my mouth to make a crushing remark and then, out of nowhere, an actual idea hit me.

Oh, I said.

What, she said.

You don t want to find a stolen boat, I said.

The fuck I don t, she said. I know he wouldn t be stupid enough to use his own boat, even if he had one. He stole one.

I looked at her and shook my head patiently. Debs, that s obvious, I said, and I admit I might have been smirking slightly. But then it s also obvious that he wouldn t hang on to that boat afterward. So you don t look for a stolen boat; you look for

A found boat! she said, and she clapped her hands together. Right! A boat that was abandoned somewhere for no reason.

It had to be somewhere he had a car stashed, I said. Or even better, someplace he could steal a car.

Goddamn it, that s more like it, Debs said. There can t be more than one place in town where a boat turned up and a car got stolen the same night.

A quick and simple computer search to cross-reference it, I said, and the moment the words were out of my mouth I wanted to jam them back in and slide under my desk, because Deborah knew almost as much about using a computer as she did about ballroom dancing. I, on the other hand, must modestly admit to something verging on expertise in that area, and so anytime the word computer came up in conversation, my sister automatically made it my problem. And sure enough, she bounced to her feet and whacked me playfully on the arm.

That s great, Dex, she said. How long will it take you?

I looked around the room quickly, but Debs was standing between me and the door, and there was no emergency exit. So I turned to my computer and went to work. Deborah jiggled around anxiously like she was jogging in place, which made it very hard to concentrate, until finally I said, Debs, please. I can t work with you vibrating like that.

Well, shit, she said, but at least she stopped hopping up and down and perched on the edge of a chair instead. But three seconds later, she started rapidly tapping her foot on the floor. Clearly there was no way to keep her still, short of flinging her out the door or finding what she wanted. Since she had a gun and I didn t, flinging was too chancy, so with a heavy and pointed sigh I went back to my search.

Less than ten minutes later, I had it. Here we go, I said, and before I got out the final syllable Deborah was at my elbow, leaning in anxiously to see the screen. The pastor of St. John s Church on Miami Beach reported his car stolen this morning. And he s got a new twenty-one-foot Sea Fox at his dock.

A fucking church? Deborah said. On the Beach, for God s sake? How did he get the boat in there?

I pulled up a map on-screen and pointed. See, the church is right here, by this canal, and the parking lot is on the water. I ran my finger along the canal from the church and out into the bay. Ten minutes across the water to Bayfront Park and the Torch.

Deborah stared for a moment, then shook her head. It doesn t make any fucking sense at all, she said.

It does to him, I said.

Well, shit, she said. I d better get Duarte and get out there. And then she straightened up and ran for the door without a single word of thanks for my arduous eight minutes of labor. I admit I was a bit surprised not that my very own sister had failed to display gratitude, of course. That would be too much to expect. But normally she would have dragged a reluctant Dexter along with her for backup, leaving her partner to count paper clips. But this time it was Dutiful Dexter left behind, and Debs had gone to find her new French-speaking partner, Duarte. I supposed that meant she liked working with him, or maybe she was just being more careful with her partners now. Her last two had been killed on the job while working a case with her, and I d heard more than one cop muttering that it was very bad luck to work with Sergeant Morgan, since she was obviously some kind of black widow or something.

Whatever the case, there was really nothing to complain about. Debs was actually doing things the way she was supposed to for once, working with her official partner instead of her unofficial brother. And that was fine with me, because it truly was dangerous to hang around with her when she was at work; I had scar tissue to prove it. And it wasn t my job to run around in the big, bad world dodging slings and arrows and, apparently, hammers. I didn t need the adrenaline; I had real work to do. So I just sat and felt unappreciated for a few minutes, and then went back to doing it.

Just after lunch, I was in the lab with Vince Masuoka when Deborah rushed in and dumped a large hammer on the counter in front of me. I guessed from the loud thump that it weighed about three pounds. It was in a big plastic evidence bag, and a film of condensation had formed on the inside surface of the bag, but I could still see that it was not an ordinary carpenter s hammer, and it did not quite look like a sledgehammer, either. The head was round and blunt at both ends, and it had a yellow, well-worn wooden handle.

All right, Vince said, peering in over Deborah s shoulder. I always wanted to get hammered with you.

Go piss up a stick, Debs said. It was not up to her usual high standards in a put-down, but she said it with considerable conviction, and Vince scuttled away quickly to the far corner of the lab, where his laptop sat on a counter. Alex found it, Deborah said, nodding at Duarte as he trickled in the door. It was lying in the parking lot at that church, St. John s.

Why would he drop his hammer? I said, poking carefully at the plastic bag to see better.

Right here, Debs said, and I could hear barely suppressed excitement in her voice. She pointed through the plastic to a spot on the handle, just above where the yellow color was partially faded away from use. Lookit, she said. It s cracked a little bit.

I bent over and looked. On the worn wooden handle, just barely visible through the misted bag, was a hairline crack. Wonderful, I said. Maybe he cut himself.

Why is that wonderful? Duarte said. I mean, I d like to see the guy hurt, but a little cut? So what?

I looked at Duarte and very briefly wondered if some malignant personnel computer always assigned to Debs a partner with the lowest possible IQ. If he cut his hand, I said, carefully choosing one-syllable words, there might be some blood. So we can get a DNA match.

Oh, yeah, sure, he said.

Come on, Dex, Deborah said. See what you can get from it.

I pulled on gloves and took the hammer out of its bag, placing it carefully on the counter. Unusual kind of hammer, isn t it? I said.

It s called a club hammer, Vince said, and I looked at him. He was still sitting on the far side of the room, hunched over his laptop. He pointed to an image on the screen.

Club hammer, he repeated.

I Googled.

Very appropriate, I said. I leaned over the handle of the hammer in question and carefully sprayed on some Bluestar. It would reveal any trace of blood, no matter how small. With any luck, there might be just enough for me to get a blood type or DNA sample.

They use it for demolition, mostly, Vince went on. You know, like knocking out walls and things?

I think I remember what demolition means, I said.

Cut the shit, Deborah said through her teeth.

Can you get anything from it or not?

Deborah s hands-on management style seemed more profoundly annoying than usual, and I thought of several stinging remarks to slap her back into her place. But just as I was about to let fly with a really good one, I saw a dim smudge on the hammer s handle, brought out by the Bluestar. Bingo, I said.

What, Deborah demanded, and she was suddenly so close to me I could hear her teeth grinding.

If you ll take your foot out of my pocket, I ll show you, I said. She hissed out a breath, but at least she did back up a half step. Look, I said, pointing at the smudge. It s a trace of blood and even better, it s also a latent fingerprint.

Pure dumb luck, Vince said from his stool across the lab.

Really? I said. Then why didn t you find it?

What about DNA? Deborah said impatiently.

I shook my head. I ll try, I said.

But it s probably too badly degraded.

Run the print, Deborah said. I want a name.

And maybe a GPS reading? Vince said.

Deborah glared at him, but instead of ripping him into small and bloody shreds she just looked back at me and said, Run the print, Dexter, and then she turned around and whirled away out of the lab.

Alex Duarte straightened up as she hustled past him. Au voir, I told him politely.

He nodded. Mange merde, he said, and he followed Deborah out the door. His French accent was much better than mine.

I looked at Vince. He closed his laptop and stood up. Let s run it, he said.

We ran it. As I had thought, the bloody smudge was too badly degraded to get any kind of usable DNA sample, but we did get a picture of the fingerprint, and after computer enhancement the image was clear enough to send to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System with some hope that we might get a match. It was a national database of felons fingerprints, and if our hammer-loving friend was in it, a name would pop out, and Deborah would get him.

We sent the print in, and then there was nothing to do but wait for the results. Vince scurried away on some other errand, and I just sat for a few minutes. Deborah seemed excited, and as close to happy as she got on the job. She was always very upbeat when she thought she was closing in on a bad guy. For just a second I almost wished I had feelings, so I could get that kind of positive surge of purpose and fulfillment. I never got any sort of glow from my work, just a kind of dull satisfaction when things went well. My only real sense of happy self-affirmation came from my hobby, and I was trying not to think about that right now. But that slender file at home in my study contained three names. Three very intriguing candidates for oblivion, Dexter style, and pursuing any one of them would almost certainly relieve my feelings of low self-worth and bring a bright synthetic smile to my face.

But this was not the time for that, not with an unknown Witness closing in on me, and the entire police force on edge over the untimely and unpleasant demise of Klein, and now Gunther. Every cop in the greater Miami area would be working each shift with extra diligence in hopes of becoming the Hero of the Day, the cop who caught the killer, and although all that extra watchfulness would make the streets temporarily a little safer for most of us, it would also make things a little too risky for a Dexter Dalliance.

No, a recreational side trip was not the answer, not in this climate of frenzied, hostile police vigilance. I had to find my Witness, and until then just resign myself to being paranoid, grumpy, unhappy, and unfulfilled.

But when you came right down to it so what? From what I could learn by watching my fellow inhabitants of this vale of tears, everybody else was just as wretched at least two-thirds of the time. Why should I be exempt merely because I had an empty heart? After all, even though Lily Anne made being human thoroughly worthwhile, there were bound to be less rewarding aspects of personhood, and it was only fair that I should have to suffer through the bad parts, too. Of course, I had never been a big believer in fairness, but I was clearly stuck with it for now.

My sister, however, was not. Just as I was concluding that everything was horrible and it truly served me right, she burst into my office like the Charge of the Light Brigade. Have you got anything yet? she said.

Debs, we just sent it off, I said. It s going to take a little time.

How long? she said.

I sighed. It s one partial print, sis, I said. It could take a few days, maybe up to a week.

That s bullshit, she said. I don t have a week.

It s a huge database, I said. And they get requests from all over the country. We have to wait our turn.

Deborah ground her teeth at me, so hard I could almost hear enamel flaking off. I need the results, she said through a clenched jaw, and I need them now.

Well, I said pleasantly, if you know a way to make a database hurry up, I m sure we d all love to hear it.

Goddamn it, you re not even trying! she said.

I will freely admit that nine times out of ten, I would have had a little more patience with Deborah s patently impossible request and rotten attitude. But with things as they were lately, I really didn t want to knuckle my forehead and leap into worshipful compliance. I took a deep breath instead and spoke with audible patience and steely control. Deborah. I am doing my job the best I can. If you think you can do it better, then please feel free to try.

She ground her teeth even harder, and for a moment I thought the canines might splinter and burst through her cheeks. But happily for her dental bill, they did not. She just glared at me instead, and then nodded her head twice, very hard. All right, she said. And then she turned around and walked rapidly away without even looking back at me to snarl one last time.

I sighed. Perhaps I should have stayed home in bed, or at least checked my horoscope. Nothing seemed to be going right. The whole world was slightly off-kilter, leaning just a bit out of its normal axis. It had a strange and mean tint to it, too, as if it had sniffed out my fragile mood and was probing for further weakness.

Ah, well. If only I d had a mother, I m sure she would have told me there would be days like this. And the kind of mother who could say that with a straight face would probably have added, An idle mind is the devil s playground. I certainly didn t want to upset Hypothetical Mom, and I didn t want to go on the swing set with Satan either, so I got out of my chair and tidied up the lab.

Vince stuck his head in a minute later and watched me with puzzled concentration as I wiped down the counter with some cleaner and paper towels. He shook his head. Such a neatnik, he said.

If I didn t know you were married, I would wonder about you.

I lifted a small stack of case files off the counter. These all need to be filed, I said.

He held up a hand and backed away. My back is acting up again, he said. No heavy lifting, doctor s orders. And he disappeared down the hall. Dexter Deserted but it fit the general trend of recent events, and I was sure I would get used to it sooner or later. In any case, I managed to finish cleaning up without bursting into tears, which was probably the best I could hope for, the way things were going.

ELEVEN

I was just sitting down to dinner that night when my cell phone began to chime. It was leftover night, which was not a bad thing at our house, since it allowed me to sample two or three of Rita s tasty concoctions at one sitting, and I stared at the phone for several seconds and thought very hard about the last piece of Rita s Tropical Chicken sitting there on the platter before I finally picked up my phone and answered.

It s me, Deborah said. I need a favor.

Of course you do, I said, looking at Cody as he pulled a large helping of Thai noodles out of the serving dish.

But does it have to be right now?

Debs made a sound somewhere between a hiss and a grunt. Ow. Yeah, it does. Can you pick up Nicholas from day care? she said. Her son, Nicholas, was enrolled at a Montessori day-care center in the Gables, although I was reasonably sure he was too young to count beads. I had wondered whether I should be doing the same for Lily Anne, but Rita had pooh-poohed the idea. She said it was a waste of money until a child was two or three years old.

For Deborah, though, nothing was too good for her little boy, so she cheerfully shelled out the hefty fee for the school. And she had never been late to pick him up, no matter how pressing her workload but here it was, almost seven o clock, and Nicholas was still waiting for Mommy. Clearly something unusual was afoot, and her voice sounded strained not angry and tense as it had been earlier, but not quite right, either.

Um, sure, I guess I can get him, I said. What s up with you?

She made the hiss-grunt sound again and said, Uhnk. Damn it, in a kind of hoarse mutter, before going on in a more normal voice, I m in the hospital.

What? I said. Why, what s wrong? I had an alarming vision of her as I had seen her in her last visit to the hospital, an ER trip that had lasted for several days as she lay near death from a knife wound.

It s no big deal, she said, and there was strain in her voice, as well as fatigue. It s just a broken arm. I just I m going to be here for a while and I can t get Nicholas in time.

How did you break your arm? I asked.

Hammer, she said. I gotta go can you pick him up, Dex? Please?

A hammer? For God s sake, Deborah, what

Dexter, I gotta go, she said. Can you get Nicholas?

I ll get him, I said. But what

Thanks. I really appreciate it. Bye, she said, and she hung up.

I put down my phone and saw that the whole family was staring at me. Set one more high chair for dinner, I said.

And save me that chicken breast.

They did save me the chicken, but it was very cold by the time I got back to the house with Nicholas, and all the Thai noodles were gone. Rita immediately grabbed Nicholas from me and took him away to the changing table, cooing at him, and Astor trailed along behind to watch. I d had no further calls from Deborah, and I still had no idea how she had managed to break her arm with a hammer. But I could only think of one hammer in the news this week, so I had a very strong suspicion that she had somehow caught our psychotic club-hammer killer.

It didn t really make sense. The ID on the fingerprint could not have come back yet there was no way it could have worked its way through all the layers of ossified bureaucracy in just a few hours but as far as I knew that was the only lead. Besides, she would never do something insanely risky without me along to take the hit for her, and cornering a homicidal psycho with a hammer certainly fit in the category of risky.

Of course, she d never had a partner she really trusted to back her up before, and she seemed to be bonding with Alex Duarte, probably in French. And she was certainly free to work with her new partner instead of with me. Nothing could be more natural it was even suggested by regulation, and it didn t bother me, not in the slightest. Let Duarte stick his neck in the noose instead of me. To be perfectly frank, I was a little bit tired of being her sidekick on every single perilous bust, and it was high time she stood up on her own two feet and stopped leaning on me.

After Rita put the children to bed, she sat beside me for a little while, until she began to yawn hugely. Very shortly afterward, she gave me a peck on the cheek and tottered off to bed herself. I stayed up with Nicholas, waiting for Deborah to come and claim him. He was not a bad baby, not at all, but he didn t seem nearly as clever as Lily Anne. His little blue eyes didn t have the same intelligent gleam in them, and it seemed to me that, from a purely objective point of view, his motor skills were not as advanced as hers had been at the same age. Maybe there was nothing to the Montessori thing after all. Or maybe he was just a slow learner and there was really nothing actually wrong with that. After all, perfection is far from universal, and there could be only one Lily Anne. Nicholas was still my nephew, and allowances must be made for children less gifted.

So I sat on the couch with Nicholas in chummy silence after everyone else went to bed. I fed him a bottle, and then shortly after that I changed his diaper. As soon as I took off the wet one, he began to pee straight up into the air, and it took all my considerable skill to dodge the stream. But I got him safely rediapered and, thinking that the soothing drone from the TV might encourage him to fall asleep, I turned on the set and sat back down on the couch with him.

And there was Deborah, all over the TV screen, accompanied by flashing lights and the urgent, ultraserious voice-over of the local news anchor. The picture showed my sister cradling her left arm as the emergency med techs helped her onto a stretcher and slapped an inflatable cast on her arm. She was talking the whole time to Duarte, clearly giving him orders on something or other, while he nodded and patted her on the uninjured shoulder.

And as the anchor finished a horrible, run-on sentence about Deborah s true grit and heroism, even pronouncing her name correctly, the picture made a jump cut to another gurney as two uniformed cops followed it into the ambulance. On this stretcher a large, square-faced man strained against his bonds. His shoulder and stomach were seeping blood, and he was shouting something that sounded obscene, even without sound. Then two studio portraits appeared on the screen, Klein and Gunther, side by side in their formal pictures. The anchor s voice got very somber, and he promised to keep me updated as the story developed. And in spite of the way I felt about TV newspeople, I had to admit that this was a lot more than my sister had done.

Of course, there was no reason she should update me. She was not her Dexter s keeper, and if she was finally beginning to realize that, so much the better. So I was completely content, not at all miffed with my sister, when she showed up at last to claim her child. It was almost midnight when she finally arrived, and Nicholas and I had watched several more news bulletins, and then the lead story on the late news itself, all pretty much repeating that first tiresome bulletin. Heroic officer injured while catching cop killer. Ho-hum. Nicholas showed no sign of recognizing his mother when she appeared on television. I was quite certain that Lily Anne would have known me, whether on TV or anywhere else, but that did not necessarily mean there was anything actually wrong with the boy.

In any case, Nicholas seemed glad enough to see Debs in person when I opened the front door and let her in. The poor child didn t know yet that he couldn t fly, and he tried to wing his way out of my arms and into hers. I fumbled and clutched and almost dropped him, and Deborah grabbed him awkwardly into a tight grip with her one good arm. The other, her left, was in a cast and hung from a sling.

Well, I said. I m surprised to see you in public without an agent.

Deborah was nose-to-nose with Nicholas and talking nonsense syllables to him in a soft voice while he chuckled and squeezed her nose. She looked up at me, still smiling. What the hell does that mean? she said.

You re all over the TV, I told her.

The network s biggest new star. Heroic detective sacrificing her limbs to catch psychotic cop killer.

She made a frustrated face. Shit, she said, apparently unconcerned about corrupting the morals of young Nicholas with potty talk. The goddamned reporters wanted interviews, and pictures, and a fucking bio they re everywhere, even in the ER.

It s pretty big news, I said. The guy was making everybody very jumpy. Are you sure you got the right psycho?

Yeah, it s him, she said happily.

Richard Kovasik. No question about it. She nuzzled Nicholas again.

How did you find him? I said.

Oh, she said without looking up. I got a match back from IAFIS. You know, on the fingerprint.

I blinked, and for a moment I couldn t think of a single thing to say. In fact, what she d said was so unlikely that I found it very hard to remember how to speak at all. That s not possible, I blurted out at last. You can t get a match on a partial in six hours.

Oh, well, she said. I pulled a few strings.

Deborah, it s a national database. There aren t any strings to pull.

She shrugged, still smiling at Nicholas. Yeah, well, I had one, she said. I called a friend of Chutsky s, inside the Beltway. He got them to hustle it through for me.

Oh, I said, which I admit was not terribly witty, but it was just about all I could come up with under the circumstances. And it added up; Chutsky, her departed boyfriend, had many connections in all the Washington organizations with three letters for their names. And, um, you re absolutely positive it s the right guy?

Oh, yeah, no question, she said. There were a couple of possible matches, you know it was just a partial print but Kovasik was the only one with a history of psychotic violence, so it was kind of a no-brainer. And he even works for a building demolition company up in Opa-locka, so the hammer s a match, too.

You took him down at his job? I said.

She smiled, half at the memory of the arrest and half at Nicholas, who was doing nothing more interesting than staring at her with adoration. Yeah, she said, touching the baby s nose with her finger. Right across the street from Benny s.

What were you doing at Benny s? I said.

Oh, she said without looking up. It s almost five o clock, and we got the match on the print, but he s listed as transient, and we got no place to look for the guy. Kovasik, she added, in case I had already forgotten the name.

Okay, I said, brilliantly concealing my impatience.

So Duarte is like, Five o clock, let s stop for a beer. She made a face. Which is a little hard-core for me, but he s the first partner I ve had that I can stand.

I noticed, I said. He seems very nice.

She snorted; Nicholas flinched a little at the sound, and she cooed at him for a second. He s not nice, she said. But I can work with him. So I say fine, and we stop for a beer at Benny s.

That explains it, I said. And it did; Benny s was one of those bars that was unofficially For Cops Only, the kind of place that would make you very uncomfortable if you wandered in without a badge. A lot of cops stopped there on their way home from work, and some of them had even been known to pop in for a quick unauthorized snort during working hours a stop that would never be logged in. If Klein and Gunther had gone to Benny s right before they were killed, it would explain why there was no record of where they had been when they were killed.

So we pull up in front, she said, and there s this taco wagon parked across the street. And I don t even think about it until I hear this kind of boom from the old office building over there. And then I look again and I see the sign, Tacos, and I think, No fucking way.

I was a little bit irritated. It was very late, and either I was too tired to follow her story, or it really wasn t making sense. Debs, is this going somewhere? I said, trying not to sound as peevish as I felt.

A boom, Dexter, she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. Like from a hammer. Hitting a wall? She raised her eyebrows at me. Because they are tearing out the insides of the building across the street from Benny s, she said. With hammers and a taco wagon out front. And at last I began to understand.

No way, I said.

She nodded her head firmly. Way, she said.

Totally way. They got a couple of guys working in there, ripping out the walls, and they are using these big hammers.

Club hammers, I said, remembering what Vince had called them.

Whatever, Deborah said. So Duarte and I go over there, just thinking it s totally impossible but we gotta check it out? And I barely get my badge out when this guy just goes nuts and comes at me with his hammer. I shoot him twice and the son of a bitch still swings the goddamned thing and gets me on the arm. She closed her eyes and leaned against the doorframe.

Two slugs in him and he would have swung it again and crushed my head if Duarte hadn t Tasered him.

Nicholas said something that sounded like, Blub-blub, and Deborah straightened and shifted her baby s weight awkwardly in her arm.

I looked at my sister, so tired and yet so happy, and I admit I felt a little envious. And the whole thing still seemed unreal and incomplete to me, and I couldn t really believe it had happened without me. It was as if I had put only one word in a crossword puzzle and someone else finished it when I turned my back. Even more embarrassing, I actually felt a little bit guilty that I hadn t been there, even though I wasn t invited. Debs had been in danger without me, and that felt wrong. Completely stupid and irrational, not at all like me, but there it was.

So is the guy going to live? I said, thinking it would be a shame if he did.

Shit, yes, they even had to sedate him, Deborah said. Unbelievably strong, doesn t feel pain if Alex hadn t gotten the cuffs on him right away he would have hit me again. And he shook off the Taser in, like, three seconds. A total psycho. And with a smile of tired fulfillment, she hugged Nicholas tighter, pushing his little face into her neck.

But he s locked up safe and sound, and it s over. It s him. I got him, she said, and she rocked the baby back and forth gently. Mommy got the bad guy, she said again, more musically this time, like it was part of a lullaby for Nicholas.

Well, I said, and I realized that it was at least the third time I d said well since Deborah arrived. Was I really so flustered that I couldn t even manage basic conversation? You caught the Hammer Killer. Congratulations, sis.

Yeah, thanks, she said, and then she frowned and shook her head. Now if I can only make it through the next couple of days.

It might have been that the painkillers were making her incoherent, but I didn t know what she meant. Is your arm painful? I said.

This? she said, holding up the cast. I ve had worse. She shrugged and then made a terrible face. No. It s Matthews, she said. Fucking reporters are making a big deal of it, and Matthews is ordering me to play along because it s fucking great PR. She sighed heavily, and Nicholas said, Blat! quite distinctly and hit his mother s nose. She nuzzled him again and said, I fucking hate that shit.

Oh. Of course, I said, and now it made sense. Deborah was totally inept with public relations, departmental politics, routine ass kissing, and any aspect of police work that didn t involve finding or shooting bad guys. If she d been even half-good at dealing with people, she d probably already be Division Chief at the least. But she wasn t, and here she was again in the middle of a situation that called for fake smiles and bullshitting, two talents that were as alien to her as a Klingon mating dance. Clearly she needed a warning from someone who knew the steps. Since Nicholas couldn t even say his own name, that left me.

Well, I said cautiously, you re probably going to be in the spotlight for a couple of days.

Yeah, I know, she said. Lucky me.

It wouldn t hurt to play the game a little, Debs, I said, and I admit that I was getting a little cranky now, too. You know the right words: The entire Miami-Dade team did outstanding work in their tireless effort to apprehend this suspect

Fuck it, Dex, she snapped. You know I can t do that kind of crap. They want me to smile at the camera and tell the whole fucking world how great I am, and I never could do that shit and you know it.

I did know it, but I also knew that she would have to try again, which meant she was probably in for a couple of rough days. But before I could think of something really smart to say on the subject, Nicholas began to bounce again and say, Ba ba ba ba! Deborah looked at him with a tired smile and then back at me. Anyway, I d better get my little buddy to bed. Thanks for picking him up, Dex.

Dexter s Day Care, I said. We never close.

I ll see you at work, she said. Thanks again. And then she turned for the door. I had to open it for her, since she only had one good arm and that was full of Nicholas. Thanks, she said again a third time in less than a minute, which was certainly a record for her.

Deborah trudged to her car, looking as tired as I had ever seen her, and I watched as Duarte climbed out from behind the wheel and opened the back door for her. She fumbled Nicholas into a car seat, and Duarte held the passenger door as she got in. Then he closed it, nodded to me, and climbed in behind the wheel.

I watched as they drove away. The whole world thought Debs was wonderful right now because they believed she had caught a dangerous killer, and all she wanted was to get on with catching the next one. I wished she could learn to exploit a moment like this, but I knew she never would. She was tough and smart and efficient, but she would never learn to lie with a straight face, which was a real killer for any career.

I also had a niggling little feeling that at some point in the next few days she would need a little PR skill, and since she didn t have any, that would make it a case for the public relations firm of Dexter and Dexter, Spin Doctors to the Stars.

Naturally it always ended up being my problem, no matter how much it actually wasn t. I sighed, watched as Deborah s car disappeared around the corner, and then I locked the door and went to bed.

TWELVE

The media frenzy that Deborah s big arrest generated was bigger than anyone had anticipated, and for the next few days Deborah was a very reluctant rock star. She was deluged with requests for interviews and photographs, and even in the relative security of police headquarters she was not safe from people stopping her to tell her how wonderful she was. Of course, being Deborah, the attention did not please her. She turned down all the invitations from the media, and she tried very hard to disengage herself from the workplace well-wishers without showing them any actual hostility. She didn t always succeed, but that was all right. It made the other cops think that, on top of being spectacular, she was modest, gruff, and impatient with bullshit which was actually true, for the most part and it added even more luster to the growing Morgan Legend.

And somehow, some of the shine even reflected onto me. I had helped Deborah solve her cases often enough, usually with my special insight into things as they really are wicked, and quite happily so and just as often I had been beaten, bullied, and battered in the process. Never once in all those times had I ever received so much as a casual pat of thanks on my bruised back but now, the one time I had done absolutely nothing, I began to get credit. I had three requests for interviews from reporters who had suddenly come to believe that blood spatter was fascinating, and I was invited to submit an article to the Forensic Examiner.

I turned down the interviews, of course I had worked very hard to keep my face out of public view and saw no reason to change now. But the attention continued; people stopped me to say nice things, shake my hand, and tell me what a good job I had done. And it was true enough; I usually do a very good job I just hadn t done it this time. But suddenly I was the target of far too much unwelcome attention. It was disconcerting, even annoying, and I found myself flinching when the phone rang, ducking as the door opened, and even chanting the classic mantra of the clueless: Why me?

Tragically, it was Vince Masuoka who finally answered that lame question. Grasshopper, he said, shaking his head wisely, on the morning when he overheard me turning down Miami Hoy for the third time. When temple bell rings, crane must fly.

Yes, and one apple every eight hours keeps three doctors away, I said. So what?

So, he said, with a sly semismile, what did you expect?

I looked at him and he smirked back; he seemed to have some actual point in mind, as much as he ever did, so I gave him a more or less serious answer. What I expect, I said, is to be ignored and unrecognized, laboring on in solitude at my unique level of unmatchable excellence.

He shook his head. Then you gotta get a new agent, he said. Because your face is all over the blogosphere.

My what is where? I said.

Lookit, Vince said. He scrabbled at the keyboard of his laptop for a moment, and then turned the screen to face me.

It s you, Dexter, he said. A superman shot. Very studly.

I looked at the screen and had a moment of almost hallucinogenic disorientation. The computer showed a Web site with a red and dripping headline that said, Miami Murder. And under that was a photo of a male model in a heroic pose in front of the Torch of Friendship at the scene where Officer Gunther s body had been discovered. The model looked commanding, brilliant, and sexy and he also looked an awful lot like me. In fact, to my astonishment, it was me, just as Vince had said. I was standing beside Deborah and pointing toward the waterfront, and she had an expression of eager compliance on her face. I had no idea how someone had managed to capture the two of us frozen in these completely uncharacteristic expressions, and somehow make me look so very studly in the process but there it was. And even worse, the caption to the picture said, Dexter Morgan the real brains in the Cop-Hammer case!

It s a really popular blog, Vince said.

I can t believe you haven t seen this, cause everybody else in the world has.

And this is why everybody suddenly thinks I m interesting? I said.

Vince nodded at me. Unless you have a hit single I didn t know about?

I blinked and looked at the picture again, hoping to find that it had gone away, but it hadn t. And as I looked I felt my stomach churn with something that was very close to fear. Because there was my face and my name and even my job all together in one convenient package, and the first thought that popped into my brain was not, Oh, boy, I look studly. Instead it instantly gave a shape to the anonymous unease I had been feeling, and it looked like this:

What if my unknown Witness saw the pictures? My name was right there with my face, along with my job practically everything but my shoe size. Even if he had not traced my license plate or tracked me before, this would give him everything he needed. This was not even a matter of putting two and two together; it was looking at four. I swallowed, which was not as easy as it should have been, since my mouth was suddenly dry, and I realized that Vince was staring at me with a strange look on his face. I searched for something witty and forceful to say and finally settled on, Oh. Um shit.

Vince shook his head and looked very serious. Too bad you re not still single, he said. This would so get you laid.

It seemed more likely that it would so get me arrested and executed. I had always been very careful to avoid publicity of any kind; it was far better for someone with my recreational tendencies to stay anonymous as much as possible, and until now I had managed to keep my face out of public view. But here it was, apparently splashed across the blogosphere, and there was nothing I could do except hope that my Witness was not a reader of the Miami Murder blog. If my picture had really spread as much as Vince said, maybe I should also hope he lived under a rock and a rock without an Internet connection at that. There was no way to cover myself; this was public nudity, pure and simple. Worse still, there was absolutely no way out; I just had to wait for all the attention to go away when things calmed down.

Things did not, in fact, calm down right away, not as far as the Cop-Hammer case was concerned but happily enough, things did move on away from me. The details of the case began to pour out into the mainstream media. A few photographs of the bodies appeared online originating at Miami Murder, of course, but the newspapers got hold of them, as well as some very graphic descriptions of what had been done to Klein and Gunther. Public interest shot up several notches, and when the exciting conclusion leaked out, the newspaper and TV talking heads found the headline just too good to ignore Working Mom Puts Psycho Killer in Time-out! and the press stampede for Deborah left me far behind in the dust, and made me wonder if my sister had actually been one of the Beatles and forgotten to mention it.

Debs really was a much better story than me, but, of course, she wanted no part of it. And, of course, the reporters assumed that meant she was holding out for money, which made her even less eager to talk to them. Captain Matthews had to order her to accept one or two requests for interviews with the national media; he considered it his primary job to maintain a positive public image, for himself and the department, and nationally televised interviews do not grow on trees. But Deborah was clearly uncomfortable, awkward, and terse on camera. So Captain Matthews quickly decided that Debs as PR maven was a bad idea, and concentrated on trying to get his own manly face on TV instead. TV was not terribly interested, however, in spite of the captain s truly impressive chin, and after a week or so the requests for Deborah died out and our happy nation moved on to the next Incredibly Fascinating Story: an eight-year-old girl who had climbed halfway up Mount Everest all by herself before getting frostbite and losing her leg. The interviews with her proud parents were particularly compelling especially the mother weeping at the expense of a new prosthetic leg every six months as the girl grew and I made a mental note to be certain not to miss their reality show in the fall.

At about the same time the press moved on, the rest of the police force got tired of telling Deborah how terrific she was, too, especially since her thank-yous were growing very close to vicious. One or two of the other detectives even began to make the kind of sarcastic remarks that a suspicious mind might assume were tinged with envy. In any case, the congratulations and praise at work dried up and the force returned to the routine brutality of life on the job as Miami s Finest. The tense, haunted-house atmosphere seeped out of the department, and things settled back into their old comfortable workday rut once more, with Debs happily back out of the spotlight and working on routine stabbings and beheadings again. Her broken arm didn t seem to slow her down too much, and Alex Duarte was always at her side on the job if she needed a hand, literal or figurative.

For my part, I crossed off a few more names on the list, but it was all happening with nightmare slowness now, and I could do nothing but plod on. I knew something terrible was about to happen, and that I would be on the receiving end. My Witness absolutely had to know who I was now. I had been identified by name, with a picture, and it seemed to me that it would have to be only a matter of time before those two hard facts crashed together, with Dexter in between. I moved through my day with the horrible uneasy feeling of being observed by hostile eyes. I couldn t see any sign that I was, no matter how hard and long I stared around me, but the feeling would not go away. No one was staring intently at me when I was out in public, although I imagined that I could feel his eyes on me everywhere. I didn t see anything out of the ordinary anywhere, not even once, but I felt it. Something was coming my way, and I knew I wouldn t like it when it got here, not at all.

The Dark Passenger was just as disturbed; it seemed to be pacing endlessly back and forth, like a tiger in a cage, but it offered no help and no suggestions, nothing but more unease. And my near-constant feeling of creeping dread stayed with me over the next few days. At home I found it almost impossible to keep up my mask of cheerful daddyhood. Rita had not mentioned hunting for a new house again, but it might have been because some kind of crisis involving euros and long-term-bond yields had come up at her job, and she was suddenly too busy to do anything about it, although she still found time to give me odd, disapproving looks, and I still had no idea what I had or hadn t done.

It also fell to me to take Astor to the dentist to get her braces, a trip that did not delight either one of us. She still considered the whole idea of braces as a kind of personal Apocalypse, designed by a vengeful world to force her into social death, and she sulked for the entire drive. She would not speak at all, all the way to the dentist, which was very unusual for her.

And on the trip home, with brand-new shiny silver bands on her teeth, she was just as silent, but more aggressively so. She glowered at the scenery, snarled at the passing cars, and none of my clumsy attempts to cheer her up got anything out of her except some very bitter glares and two simple declarative sentences: I look like a cyborg, she said. My life is over. And then she turned to look out the side window of the car and would say no more.

Astor sulked, Rita stared and crunched numbers, and Cody maintained his normal silence. Only Lily Anne knew that something was wrong. She tried very hard to bring me out of my funk, distracting me with numerous rounds of Old MacDonald and Frog Went A-Courtin, but even her great musical talent brought no more than a temporary fading of my deep disquiet.

Something was coming; I knew it, and I couldn t stop it. It was like watching a piano fall from a tall building and knowing that in just a few seconds there is going to be a huge and terrible crash and there is nothing you can do but wait for it. But even though this piano was entirely in my head, I still found myself bracing for the shattering din when it inevitably hit the pavement.

And then one morning I arrived at work to find that my piano wasn t imaginary after all.

I had just settled into my chair with a cup of toxic sludge disguised as coffee. No one else was around yet, so I turned on my computer to check my in-box. It was all junk a departmental memo advising us all that the new departmental dress code did not permit guayaberas, a note from Cody s Cub Scout leader reminding me to bring snacks next week, three offers from online Canadian pharmacies, two notes suggesting some highly improper and rather personal activities, a letter from my attorney in Nigeria urging me to claim my huge inheritance, and an invitation for me to submit a blog on blood spatter to a homicide fan site. For just a moment I allowed myself to be distracted by the idea of writing for a Web site for murder groupies. It was absurd, bewildering, and weirdly attractive, and I could not stop myself from taking a quick peek. I opened the e-mail.

My screen went briefly blank, and for two heartbeats I felt panic; had I let in some kind of virus? But then a flash-graphics file started up, and a bright red glob of animated blood went splat! across the screen. It dripped down toward the bottom edge, looking realistic enough to make me feel deeply uneasy. Dark letters began to form in the awful red mess, and as they slowly spelled out my name I felt a sick jolt of dread run through me, which did not get any better when the screen suddenly flashed a blinding blast of light and then, in huge black letters, GOTCHA!

For a moment I could only stare at the screen. The words began to fade, and I could feel my entire life fading away with them. I was Got; it was all over. Who it was, what they were going to do it didn t matter. Dexter was Done.

And then a paragraph of text appeared, and with a sick numb helplessness, I began to read it.

If you re like me, it said, you like murder!

All right, I really am like you; what s your point?

It went on:

There s nothing wrong with that you ll find lots of other people who feel the same way! And just like you, they love living here in Miami, where there s always a new case to follow! Until now it s been too hard to keep up with the latest in local homicide. But now, there s a simple way to do just that! Tropical Blood is an exciting new online magazine that offers you an insider s look at all kills on the current casebook all for just $4.99 a month! This special rate is only for our founding subscribers! You must join now, before the price goes up!

There was more, but I didn t read it. I was somewhere between relief that this was mere spam, and anger that it had put me through such a very bad moment. I deleted the e-mail, and as I did my laptop gave a muted bong! announcing one more e-mail, a note with the one-word title Identity.

I moved the mouse to delete this one, too, but I hesitated for just a moment. It made no sense at all, but the timing seemed magical one arriving as I deleted the other. Of course, it wasn t connected, but there was a kind of wondrous symmetry to it. So I opened it. I assumed it would be an advertisement for some amazing new product that would protect me from identity theft, or possibly enhance my sexuality. But that word, identity it had been on my mind as I wrestled with the question of my Witness. I had been thinking about his identity and whether he knew mine, and now this same word in the subject line had tweaked the memory. It was a stupid, almost nonexistent connection, but it was there, and I could not stop myself from taking a quick peek. I opened the e-mail.

A page of single-spaced writing appeared on my screen, under a large stylized heading that said Shadowblog. The letters of the headline were printed in a gray, semitransparent typeface, and under them was a shadowy mirror image of the letters done in faint red. There was no name below it, just a URL: http://www.blogalodeon.com/shadowblog.

Oh, joy and bliss: I had made it onto some anonymous two-bit blogger s mailing list. Was this the price of my newfound fame? To be assailed by every semiliterate twinkie with a keyboard and an opinion? I didn t need this, and once more I moved the mouse to delete the e-mail and then I saw the first sentence and everything went cold and very still.

And now I know your name, it said.

For an endless moment I just stared at that sentence. It was irrational nearly to the point of clinical brain death, but for some reason I was convinced that the sentence referred to me, and it had been written by my Witness. I stared, and I may even have blinked once or twice, but other than that I did nothing. Finally I became aware of a distant pounding, and realized it was my heart, reminding me that I needed to breathe. I did, closing my eyes and giving the oxygen a moment to get up to my brain and whip a few thoughts into action. The first thought was an order to calm down, followed by a very logical reminder that this was, after all, only a spam e-mail and it could not possibly be about me or from my Witness.

And so I took another breath, found it to be good, and opened my eyes. The sentence was still there; it still said, And now I know your name, and there was still a page of writing under it. But I was very proud to discover that I had yet another calm thought, which was that looking at this page would very quickly prove that the blog had nothing to do with me. All I had to do was read one or two sentences to see that I was being a paranoid idiot, and I could go back to sipping calmly from my cup of vile coffee.

So I moved my eyes down to the second line and began to read.

Since I saw you that night in the foreclosed house your face has been stuck in my head. I have seen it everywhere, awake and asleep, and I can t shove away that picture of you standing over a heap of raw red meat that had been a human being just a few minutes before. Even you have to know it is so fucking wrong! And I keep thinking who the fuck are you? Or maybe what the fuck are you even human? Can someone that does that really get away with walking around in the real world, buying groceries and talking about the weather?

I ran from you. I ran from just the sight of you doing what you were doing. But that picture ran with me, and I know I should have done something, but I didn t, and I could not get it out of my head.

And because I ran from you, it seems like I started seeing you everywhere. My whole life I never see you even once, and now you pop up every time I step out the door. I see you with your kids, or out there in the street with your job, and I can t stand it anymore.

I m not stupid. I know it s not an accident, because that kind of coincidence is just impossible. But I didn t want to think about what it meant, because if I did I would have to do something about it. And I kept thinking I wasn t ready for that. I mean, my divorce, on top of all the other shitty stuff that keeps happening to me. It seemed like it was all too much, and to have to deal with you, too forget it.

And then I see your picture, and it has your name and your job. Your job. I m thinking, Holy Christ, he s a fucking cop? Talk about brass balls. How does he get away with that? And I know right off, no fucking way can I do anything about a guy like you who s a cop, too.

But I can t stop thinking about it, and the more I think the more I keep shoving it away, because I ve already got way too many problems to have to deal with your kind of shit, too. And it just buzzes around and around in my head until I think I m going to totally freak and I want to run for it, but there s no place to run, and I can t avoid dealing with you anymore because now I know who you are and where you work, and I got no more excuses, and it just piles up and whirls around in my head and it s making me fucking nuts

And then all of a sudden it s almost like a switch going on in my brain. Click. And I can almost hear a voice saying, You are looking at this all wrong. Like the Priest used to say, every stumbling spot is really a stepping-stone if you look at it right. And I think, Yeah.

This is not another problem. This is an answer.

This is a way to make all the other bullshit mean something, to finally bring it all together. And I may not know exactly how to do it just yet, but I know it s right, and I know I can do this.

And I will do this. Soon.

Because now I know your name.

Somewhere down the hall I heard a door slam shut. Two voices called to each other, but I couldn t hear the words, and I wouldn t have understood them if I did, because there was only one thing in the entire world that meant anything:

He knew my name.

He had seen the pictures online, with my name on them, and he had put that together with what he had Witnessed me doing with Valentine. He knew me. He knew who I was and he knew where I worked. I sat there and tried to be calm and think of the right thing to do about this, but I could not get beyond that one wild, world-shattering thought. He knew me. He was out there and he could destroy me at any moment. I didn t have the faintest notion of who he was, but he knew me and he could expose me whenever he wanted to and there didn t seem to be a whole lot I could do about it.

And what was that about seeing me with my kids was he threatening Lily Anne? I could not allow that I had to find some way to get to him and stop him. But how could I, when I d been trying to find him for two weeks and failing?

I scanned the blog again, looking for any clue that might tell me who he was, just some tiny hint of a way out of this nightmare, but the words had not changed. Still, on second reading, I saw that he had not written anything that might reveal me to anyone else. I was at least safe from that. So what was he really threatening? A physical attack on me or my family? He wrote about dealing with me, and I had no idea what that meant, but I didn t like the sound of it. And there, at the end, he said he didn t know yet exactly what to do that could mean anything, and I couldn t rule out a single thing until I knew more about who he was.

I needed to find a clue the way a drowning man needs air, and I had nothing but this single page of blather. But wait: It wasn t technically blather; it was a blog. That implied that it was a semiregular thing, and if there were other postings, one of them might reveal something useful.

I copied the URL at the top of the page, pasted it into my browser s window, and went to the Web address. It was one of the sites that allowed anybody to post a blog for free, and Shadowblog was just one of thousands. But at least there were other entries, one every few days, and I scanned them all as quickly as I could. The very first one opened with, Why does everything always turn to shit? It was a fair question, and it showed a little more insight into life than I expected. But that still told me nothing about him.

I read on: Most of it was a rambling, unfocused whine about how nobody appreciated him, ending with his decision to start this blog to help him figure out why. It ended with, I mean, I don t get it. I walk into a room and it s like they can t even see me, like I m not real to anyone else, no more than a fucking shadow. So I m calling this the Shadowblog. Very touching and sensitive, a true existential call for human contact, and I very much wanted to make contact as quickly as possible. But first I needed to know who this was.

I read more postings. They covered a period of over a year, and they seemed increasingly angry, but they were all anonymous, even the ones that mentioned the writer s divorce from someone he referred to only as A. He wrote very bitterly about the fact that she wouldn t get off her ass and get a job and still expected him to give her alimony to pay for everything, and he couldn t afford two places so even though they were divorced now, he had to live under the same roof with her. It was a very touching portrait of lower-middle-class anguish, and I m sure it would have melted my heart, if only I had one.

A s refusal to work seemed to make him madder than anything else; he wrote passionately about responsibility and the fact that not doing your Fair Share was just plain Evil. That led him to a series of observations about Society in general and the assholes who refused to follow the rules like the rest of us have to. From there he rambled on into several tedious rants about Justice, and people getting what they deserved, and his apparent belief that the world would be a much better place if only everyone in it was more like him. Altogether, it was a portrait of someone with anger-management issues, low self-esteem, and a growing frustration with a world that refused to acknowledge his sterling qualities.

I read more. I hit a section of a half dozen entries in which he went on at great length about growing problems with A and I really did sympathize, but why couldn t he use real names? It would make things so much easier. But, of course, then he would have used my name, too, so I guess it balanced out. I worked forward through the blogs. They were all the same sort of grouchy, self-involved drivel, until I came to an entry headed,

Snap! I recognized the date at the top; it was the day after my rendezvous with Valentine. I stopped scanning and began to read.

So it was just too much with A, just one bitchy crack too many about how I couldn t even make decent money, which is a laugh since she can t make ANY. But it s like, no, you re the man, you re supposed to. And I look at her sitting there in a house where I pay the bills, and I buy the groceries, and she doesn t do shit! She won t even clean up properly! And I look at her and I don t see lazy and bitchy anymore, I see Evil with a capital E, and I know I can t take any more of this shit without doing something about it and I have to get out before I do it. So I take her Honda, just to piss her off, and I drive around for a while, just chewing on my teeth and trying to think. And after maybe an hour, I m up in the Grove and all I got is a sore jaw and a nearly empty gas tank. I really need to just sit somewhere and think what to do, like maybe Peacock Park or someplace, but it s raining, so I circle back south. The closer I get to home, the madder I get, and when I turn on Old Cutler some asshole in a new Beemer cuts me off. And I think, That s it, that fucking does it, and I can almost hear something go snap inside. And I put the pedal down and go after him, and it s like, Dude, wake up: He s in a new Beemer and you re in a beat-to-shit old Honda. And he s totally gone in about three seconds, and I m even madder. I turn down the street where I thought he went, and there s no sign. And I cruise for a few minutes, thinking, What the hell, maybe I ll get lucky. But there s nothing. He s totally gone.

And then I see this house. It s totally trashed, another foreclosed place. Some dumb asshole ripping off the bank and raising the rates for the rest of us. I slow down and look, because there s an old Chevy kind of hidden in the carport, like he s still in there, living for free, while I bust my ass making payments.

I park the car, and I go around to the side door by the carport, and I slip inside. I don t know what I was thinking or what I would have done, but I know I was pissed off. And I hear something in the next room, and I sneak to the doorway and peek

The counter. There s a hand lying there. A human hand.

But it s not attached to anything. This doesn t make sense.

And right next to it that s a foot, also not attached. And other parts, too, and oh holy shit that s the head right there on top, eyes wide-open and looking right at me and all I can do is stare back

And something moves and I see this guy standing there, totally calm, just cleaning up and looking like no big deal, another day at the office. And he starts to turn toward me and I see his face

The Priest used to try to scare us with these pictures of the Devil. Horns and red face and evil stare but this guy is scarier, because he s just so fucking ordinary-looking and real but so totally fucking evil and really, really happy about that, and about being there with this chopped-up body.

And now he s turning to look at me

It s too much. Something just popped and I was in the car and hauling ass out of there before I even knew I was moving. And I m almost all the way home before I think, Why didn t I do something? Even if it was only just calling the cops? It pisses me off to think I m being a wuss, like maybe they re all right about me being nothing but a fucking shadow. I should have done something. I should still do something.

But what?

In a very strange way, it was fascinating to read a description of Dark Dexter at play. A little creepy, perhaps, and not very flattering Ordinary-looking? Moi? Surely not. But other than that, it wasn t terribly helpful in providing clues to the blogger s identity.

I moved on to the later blogs. One of them described seeing me in the grocery store the Publix nearest to my house, no less and how he had slipped out of the store like a shadow and watched from his car as I came out with my groceries. And two blogs later he described our encounter that morning on the on-ramp to the Palmetto Expressway in his usual riveting prose:

I was just crawling along in the usual bullshit morning traffic, going to my stupid fucking temp job, and driving A s car to save on gas, and I m looking at the cars around me, and boom I see that profile again. It s him, no fucking question, totally him. Just sitting there in his shitty little car like all the other wage slaves, just totally normal. And I can t make it mean anything, because everything around me is so fucking normal, like it is every day, but there s that face in a car right next to me, that same face I still see in my head surrounded by chopped-up body parts, and it s right there in traffic waiting to get up on the Palmetto.

And my brain is frozen, I can t think, and I m staring, I guess thinking, like, Is he going to do something? I mean, flames shooting out, or make a cloud of bats come out or something? And I can see it when he all of a sudden knows I am watching, and his head starts to turn toward me, just like that night in the house, and the same thing happens I totally panic and hit the gas and I am gone before I even know what I am doing. And I think about it later, really, really pissed that I ran like that again because I am not a fucking nothing and I know I should do something, but I was out of there before I could even think, which is totally not the real me.

And I think, So, okay, what is the real me? And I realize I don t know. Because I have been pushing it away for so long, trying to make people happy with a fake version the Priest, and my teachers, and A, and even the asshole boss at my stupid temp job, who doesn t know an algorithm from his asshole, and he s telling me about data mapping, the prick. Even him, all of them I try harder to make them happy than I try to be Me, and that makes me think about who I am for a long fucking time, the whole rest of the drive to work.

Okay, who am I? Make a list: First, I admit it; most people don t notice me. Second, I believe in following the rules, and it really pisses me off when nobody else does. Really good with computers. Eat healthy, stay fit. Um

Is that it?

I mean, shouldn t there be more? There s not even enough to add up to anything except another wage slave so dumb I even pay my taxes.

And I think about Him. The guy with the knife.

Because it sure looks like he knows who He is. And he s being it.

And another thought hits me, and I wonder: Am I really running from Him because I am scared of Him?

Or am I maybe more scared of what He makes me think about doing?

Fascinating stuff, all of it, but if he was half as smart as he seemed to think he was, he actually should be running from me. Because I could not remember ever wanting so badly to see someone taped to a table.

There was a great deal more, a new entry every few days. But before I could read any more I heard a clatter behind me. I reflexively brought my computer back to its home screen as Vince Masuoka came in, and the workday lurched off the blocks and onto its well-worn path of toil and drudgery. But through that whole long day I could think of nothing except that same awful, first sentence in the blog in my in-box. And now I know your name. Somebody knew who and what I was, and whoever they were they were not kind and gentle and wanting only to reward my anonymous good works with flowers and the thanks of a grateful nation. At any moment he might attack, or decide to expose me so that my entire carefully crafted, beautifully fulfilling life would crash and burn and it would be Dexter Down the Drain.

Whoever he was, he knew my name. And I had no idea who he was, or what he was going to do about it.

THIRTEEN

The thought stayed with me all day, and then all the way home. After all, it was a fairly important subject, at least to me: the impending end of all that was Me, and Me completely helpless to stop it. I was barely aware of the rush-hour traffic and hardly noticed that I had made it home somehow, apparently on automatic pilot. And I am sure that many things happened when I arrived there was probably some kind of interaction with the family, and a meal of some sort, and then an hour or so of sitting on the couch watching television. But I have no memory of any of it, not even of Lily Anne. My entire mind was focused on that one terrible thought: Dexter was Doomed, and there was no wiggle room.

I went to bed, my brain still churning, and somehow I managed a few hours of sleep. But at work the next day, it was even harder to maintain my disguise of cheerful and geeky competence. Nothing actually went wrong; no one shot at me or tried to put me in leg irons, but I felt cold breath on the back of my neck. At any moment my Shadowy Friend might decide it was time to stop dithering and Drop the Dime on Dexter, and here I was at work in the lion s den, the one place that would make it as easy as possible to slip the cuffs on my wrists and lead me away to Old Sparky.

But the day dragged on and nobody came for me. And then the next day followed, just like it was supposed to do, and still there was no howling of hounds in the distance, no heavy knock on my door, no jangle of chains in the hall. Everything around me stayed perfectly, maddeningly normal, no matter how hard I stared around me in complete ditherhood.

It would have been natural to expect that any move to take me down would be led by an enthusiastic Sergeant Doakes, but even he showed no sign of closing in, and there had been no repeat of the ominous encounter when I found him at my computer. I saw him glaring at me from a distance once or twice, and I had moments of paranoia when I was sure he knew but he did nothing except watch me with his normal venom, just like always, which was no more than background radiation. Even Camilla Figg refrained from spilling more coffee on me. In fact, for several long and weary days, I didn t bump into Camilla at all. I overheard Vince teasing her about a new boyfriend, and the bright scarlet of her blush when it was mentioned seemed to indicate that it was true. Not all that interesting to me, but at least she was no longer sneaking up on me with dangerous beverages.

But somebody actually was sneaking up on me, and I could feel him circling around out there, staying downwind but moving closer all the time. And yet, I saw nothing, I heard nothing, I found no evidence that there was even anything to see or hear, no sign that anybody at work or at home had any sinister interest in me at all. Everyone else continued to treat me with the same casual disregard they always had, totally oblivious to my profound anxiety. All my coworkers and family members seemed remarkably, annoyingly contented. In fact, happiness blossomed all around me like flowers in the spring; but there was no joy in Mudville, for Mighty Dexter was about to strike out, and I knew it. The heavy feet of Armageddon were tiptoeing up behind me and at any moment they would crash into my spine and it would all be over.

But it is a truism of life that no matter how much we are suffering, nobody else cares generally speaking, nobody even notices. And so even though I was spending all my time waiting for the abrupt end to absolutely everything, life went on around me; and as if to rub my nose in my own misery, life seemed to turn strangely jolly for everybody but me. Everyone else in Miami suddenly and mysteriously filled up with offensive good cheer. Even my brother, Brian, seemed infected by the dreadful light-headed jolliness that plagued the rest of the city. I knew this because when I got home on the third night after reading Shadowblog, Brian s car was parked in front of the house, and he himself was waiting for me inside, on the couch.

Hello, brother, he said, flashing me his terrible fake smile.

For a moment, Brian s presence made no sense, because his routine was to come to our house for dinner every Friday night, and here he was on my couch on a Thursday night. And my badly damaged mental process was so completely occupied with my Shadow that I could not quite accept that Brian was really here, and I just blinked at him stupidly for several seconds.

It s not Friday, I finally blurted, which seemed almost logical to me, but apparently he found it amusing, because his smile grew two sizes.

That s quite true, he said, and before he could go on Rita rushed in with Lily Anne in one hand and a grocery bag clutched in the other.

Oh, you re home, she said, which in my opinion topped my remark to Brian for obviousness. She dropped the grocery bag beside the couch, and to my great disappointment I saw that it contained a heap of papers instead of dinner. Brian has a list, she said, smiling fondly at my brother.

But before I could learn what kind of list and why I should care, Astor s voice came down the hall, loud enough to crack glass.

Mom! she yelled. I can t find my shoes!

Don t be ridiculous You just had them on Here, Dexter, Rita said, thrusting Lily Anne at me and hurrying down the hall, presumably to keep Astor from yelling again and cracking the house s foundation.

I settled into the easy chair with Lily Anne and looked inquiringly at Brian. Of course, it s always good to see you, I said, and he nodded, but why are you here today? Instead of Friday.

Oh, I ll be here Friday, too, I m sure, he said.

Wonderful news, I said. But why?

Your lovely wife, he said, tilting his head down the hall toward Rita, probably to make sure I knew he meant Rita and not one of my other lovely wives, Rita, has enlisted me to help you search for a new house.

Oh, I said, and I remembered that she had said something about this recently but, of course, it had slipped my mind, since I was dwelling so selfishly on my one little problem of being on the verge of death and dishonor. Well, I said, more to fill the silence than anything else, and Brian agreed.

Yes, he said. No time like the present.

Before I could come up with a matching clich, Rita stormed back into the room, still talking to Astor over her shoulder. The sneakers are perfectly fine; just put them on; Cody, come on! she said, picking up her purse from the coffee table.

Let s go, everybody!

And so, swept along in the wake of Hurricane Rita, we went.

I really and truly did not want to go house hunting, not now, not when my entire world was creaking in preparation for falling apart. The only thing I wanted to hunt was my Witness, and I could not do that from the backseat of Brian s SUV. But I didn t see any choice. I had to go along and pretend to be interested in comparative lanais and relative shrubbery, while the whole time I could think of nothing but the vastly unpleasant fate that was certain to be circling closer and closer with every four-bedroom, two-and-a-half-bath ranch house we crawled through.

And we spent the next evening after work, and that whole long weekend, and then the first half of the following week riding around in Brian s SUV and looking at foreclosed houses in our area. My frustration and anxiety grew and ate away at me, and the houses we looked at seemed to be ominous symbols of my coming desolation. Every one of them was abandoned, with ragged shrubbery and lawns gone to weeds. They were all dark, too, their power shut off, and they seemed to loom over their forsaken yards like a bad memory. But they were all available cheap through Brian s connections from his new job, and Rita tore into each one of them with a savage intensity that my brother seemed to find soothing. And in truth, even though I kept looking over my shoulder, physically as well as mentally, Rita made the process so frantic and all-consuming that I began to experience long periods of time when I forgot about my Shadow sometimes five or six minutes at a stretch.

Even Cody and Astor got into the spirit of things. They would wander wide-eyed through the desolation of each abandoned house, staring into the empty rooms and marveling that such opulent emptiness might soon be all theirs. Astor would stand in the center of some pale blue bedroom with holes kicked in the walls, and she would stare up at the ceiling and murmur, My room. My room. And then Rita would hustle in and herd everyone back out to the car, spewing out staccato monologues about this being the wrong school district, and the tax base is way too high the neighborhood has a zoning change on appeal, and the whole house needs to be rewired and repiped, and Brian would smile with genuine synthetic delight and drive us to the next house on his list.

And as Rita found brand-new and increasingly absurd objections to each house we looked at, the novelty wore off. Brian s smile grew thinner and more patently phony, and I began to get very annoyed every time we climbed into his car to see one more house. Cody and Astor, too, seemed to feel that the whole thing was keeping them away from their Wii far too long, and why couldn t we just pick a nice big house with a pool and be done with it?

But Rita was relentless. For her, there was always one more house to look at, and every single Next One was going to be the One, the ideal location for Total Domestic Felicity, and so we would all race grumpily on to another perfectly serviceable home, only to discover that a leak in the sprinkler system in the backyard was almost certainly causing a sinkhole under the turf, or there was a lien on the second mortgage, or killer bees had been seen nesting only two blocks away. It was always something, and Rita seemed unaware that she had spun off alone into a deep neurotic fugue of perpetual rejection.

And even more tragically, since our evenings, and all day Saturday and Sunday, were spent on this endless quest, they were not spent at home eating Rita s cooking. I had thought I could put up with the house search as long as her roast pork turned up now and then, but that was now no more than a distant memory, along with her Thai noodles, mango paella, grilled chicken, and all else that was good in the world. My dinner hour became a hellish maze of burgers and pizzas, gobbled down in a grease-stained frenzy in between rushing through unsuitable houses, and when I finally put my foot down and demanded real food, the only relief I got was a box of chicken from Pollo Tropical. And then we were off into the endless cycle of negativity again, flinging away the chance to own another wonderful bargain, merely because the third bathroom had vinyl paneling instead of tile, and anyway the hot tub didn t leave any room for a swing set.

And although Rita seemed to be generating real bliss for herself with her constant rejection of everything that had four walls and a roof, the endless quest did nothing for me except add to my feeling that I was watching helplessly as impending disaster roared down at me. I went home from our house hunting hungry and numb, and I went to work the same way. I managed to cross off only three addresses on my Honda list, and although that was not nearly enough, I could do nothing but grind my teeth and carry on with my disguise as it all spiraled upward into dizzy heights of aggravated frustration.

It was first thing in the morning on Wednesday when the great pimple that was Dexter s Current Life finally came to a head. I had just settled in at my desk and begun to brace myself for another eight hours of wonder and bliss in the world of blood spatter, and I was actually feeling mildly grateful to be away from Rita s frenetic search for the perfect home. Why did everything seem to go wrong all at once? It may have been sheer self-flattery, but I thought I was pretty good at handling a crisis as long as they came at me one at a time. But to have to deal with finding a house and living on awful fast food and Astor s braces and everything else while waiting for my unknown Shadow to strike in some unspecified way it was starting to look like I would unravel long before I could handle anything at all. I had done so well for so long why was it suddenly so hard to be me?

Still, I was apparently stuck with being myself, since nobody was offering me any better choices. So in a pitiful attempt to stop fretting and soldier on, I took two deep breaths and tried to put things in their proper perspective. All right: I was in a little bit of a bind, maybe several of them. But I had always found a way out of trouble before, hadn t I? Of course I had. And didn t that mean that I would somehow find a way out of the mess I was in now? Absolutely! That was who I was a true champion who always came out on top. Every time!

And so even though I felt like a cheerleader for a team that wasn t even in the game, I pasted a horrible fake cheerful grin on my face and got right to work by opening my e-mail.

But of course, that was exactly the wrong thing to do if I wanted to maintain my artificial optimism. Because naturally enough, the very first e-mail waiting for my attention was titled, Crunch. And there was absolutely no doubt in my mind who had sent it.

I have to say that my hand was not really trembling as I clicked it open, but that may have been only because of nervous exhaustion. And the e-mail was, in fact, exactly what I had thought: another note from my favorite correspondent. But this time it was brief and personal, rather than one of his long and rambling Shadowblogs. Just a few lines, but quite enough:

I have finally figured out that we are more alike than you might want to think, and that is not good news for you. I know what I am going to do, and I am going to do it your way, and that is even worse news for you. Because now you can guess what s coming but you can t guess when.

It s crunch time.

I stared at those few lines long enough to make my eyes ache, but the only thought that came to me was that I was still wearing my fake smile. I dropped it off my face and deleted the e-mail.

I don t know how I got through that day, and I have no idea what I did on the job until five o clock, when I found myself sitting in my car once more and crawling through traffic toward home. And my blankness lasted through the first long stretch of homecoming and house hunting, until finally, after Rita had already rejected three very nice houses, I found myself looking out the window of Brian s car and realizing with growing horror that we were heading down a street that seemed vaguely familiar. And just as quickly I realized why: We were driving down the street toward the house where I had disposed of Valentine, and been caught in the act, the very place where all my misery and peril had begun and just to make sure I collected my full share of unhappiness, Brian pulled the car over and parked it right in front of that exact house.

I suppose it made a certain sick sense. After all, I had chosen the house because it was foreclosed, and it was in the general area where we already lived, and in any case it was already clear that the Hand of Fate was working overtime to heap agony on poor undeserving Dexter. So I really should have expected it; but I hadn t, and here it was anyway, and once again I was reduced to doing nothing but blinking stupidly because what, after all, could I say? That I didn t like this place because I had chopped up a clown here?

So I said nothing, and merely climbed out of the car and mutely followed the herd into that house of horror. And shortly I found myself standing in the kitchen right beside the counter that had been the very stage for Valentine s final performance. But instead of holding a knife I was clutching Lily Anne and listening to Rita babble on about the high cost of getting mold out of the crawl space under the roof, while Cody and Astor slumped to the floor with their backs against the butcher-block counter. Brian s eyes glazed over and his fake smile slid down his face and off the end of his chin; my stomach cleared its throat and growled a protest at the harsh treatment it had been getting lately, and all I could think about was that here I was in the one place I really and truly didn t want to be. I would soon be dead or in jail, and because I was standing in the very kitchen where things had started to go wrong, I couldn t think straight about anything at all. My stomach rumbled again, reminding me that I wasn t even getting a decent last meal before my certain demise. Life was no longer even a cruel mockery; it had turned into an endless, pointless piling on of petty torments. And just to ratchet things up one more unnecessary notch, Rita began to tap her toe on the floor, and, as I glanced reflexively at her foot, I saw what seemed to be a small dark stain was it possible? Had I missed a spot of vile sticky clown blood in my frenzied hurried cleanup? Was Rita really tip-tapping her toe in a dried blotch of something I had overlooked?

The world shrank down to that one small spot and the metronomic beat of Rita s toe and for a long moment nothing else existed as I stared, and felt the sweat start, and heard my teeth begin to grind and suddenly it was all too much and I could not stand another moment of this eternally repeating melodramatic loop and something deep inside me stood up, flexed its wings, and began to bellow.

And as this wild roar rattled the glass of my inner windows the mild and patient acceptance that had been my disguise for the last few nights shattered and crashed to the ground in a heap of flimsy shards. The real me kicked through the rubble to center stage and I stood there liberated, Dexter Unbound. All right, I said, and my voice cut through the blather of Rita s never-ending objections. She paused in midwhine and looked at me, surprised. Cody and Astor sat up straight as they recognized the tone of Dark Command that had come into my voice. Lily Anne shifted uneasily in my arms, but I patted her back without taking my eyes off Rita. Let s go home, I said, with the sharp-edged firmness I felt growing in the depths of my shadow self. The old not-big-enough home.

Rita blinked. But Brian has one more place for us to see tonight, she said.

There s no point, I said. The roof needs to be repiped and the kitchen clashes with the zoning. We re going home. And without pausing to enjoy her blank astonishment I turned from the room and headed for Brian s car. Behind me I heard Cody and Astor scuffle to their feet and charge after me, and as I reached the car they had already caught up and started to argue about which game they were going to play on the Wii when we got home. Moments later Rita trickled out, with Brian at her elbow urging her along with soothing phoniness and real eagerness.

A very puzzled-looking Rita climbed into the front seat, and before she was even buckled in, Brian got behind the wheel, started the engine, and took us home.

FOURTEEN

Rita was uncharacteristically quiet on the drive back to our old too-small house. And when Brian dumped us at the curb and roared happily away into the sunset, she trudged slowly up to the front door behind the rest of us with an expression of puzzled concern on her face. As I put Lily Anne into her playpen and Cody and Astor settled down in front of the Wii, Rita disappeared into the kitchen. In my ignorance, I thought this might be a good thing perhaps she would whip up a late dinner to wash away the accumulated grease of all our fast-food meals? But when I followed her a moment later I found that, instead of leaping into action at the stove, she had once again poured herself a large glass of wine.

As I came into the room, she sat at the table and slumped over. She glanced up at me quickly and then looked away and took a very healthy gulp of wine. Each of her cheeks sprouted a dull red spot, and I watched her throat muscles work as she took a second large sip before putting down the half-empty wineglass. I looked at her and knew I had to say something about what had just happened, but I had no idea what obviously I could not tell her the real truth. She gulped more wine, and I tried to focus on how to tell her that her house hunting had lost a wheel and she was spinning in tight crazy circles in the ditch. But instead I felt another flush of deep irritation, and I heard once more the slow and careful rustling of hidden wings wings quivering with an eagerness to unfold and hurl us up and into a warm dark sky

It has to be right, Rita said, frowning and still looking away from me.

Yes. I nodded, not sure what I was agreeing to.

It can t just be some dump, where somebody crapped in the tub and the crappy wiring will burn the house down.

Of course not, I said, on much firmer ground now; we were talking about our vastly hypothetical new house. But sooner or later we have to choose one, don t we?

How? she said. Because it s just I mean the kids, and She stared at me and her eyes filled with moisture. And you, she said, looking away from me. I don t even know if

Rita shook her head and took another large sip of wine and gulped it down. She put the glass on the table and pushed back a strand of hair that had flopped onto her forehead. Why is the whole thing so And why is everybody fighting me? she said.

I took a breath and felt satisfaction gleam inside. At last the chance had come, and I could tell her, simply and clearly, without the distraction of her maniacal full-bore scattershot jumping around, that she was driving us all off the edge of the map and into the tangled scenery of frustration and madness. I could feel the words forming on my tongue: cool and reasonable syllables that would lead her cheerfully away from her fugue of eternally berserk rejection and into a calm, enlightened place where we could all relax into a rational, methodical approach something that included eating real food again until we found an acceptable house. And as I opened my mouth to lay out my careful, compelling words in front of her, a terrible screeching sound came from the living room.

Mom! Astor shrilled in a tone of angry panic.

Lily Anne threw up on my controller!

Shit, Rita said, a very uncharacteristic word for her. She gulped the rest of her wine and lurched up out of her chair, grabbing a handful of paper towels as she hurried away to clean up. I heard her telling Astor in a scolding voice that Lily Anne should not have had the controller in the first place, and Astor saying firmly that her sister was more than a year old and they wanted to see if she could kill the dragon yet, and anyway they were sharing and what was wrong with that? Cody said, Yuck, quite distinctly, Rita began muttering short and jerky instructions mixed with, Oh, for God s sake, and, Really, Astor, how can you even? and Astor s voice slid up the scale into a rising whine of excuses combined with blame for everyone else.

And as the whole thing climbed the conversational stairs into absurd and pointless confrontation I let out my cool and careful breath and felt a new one rush in, hot and tight and full of dim red highlights; this was my alternative to exposure and prison? Squealing, squabbling, screaming, and the sour-milk vomit of endless emotional violence? This was the good side of life? The part that I was supposed to miss when the end came, at any minute now, to trundle me off into the dark forever? It was beyond endurance; just listening to it in the next room made me want to bellow, spit fire, crush heads but, of course, that kind of honest expression of real emotion would only guarantee my reservation in prison. And so rather than steaming into the living room and laying about me with a club, as I so desperately wanted to do, I took a deep breath, stalked out through the turmoil of the living room, and went into my office.

My Honda list lay in its folder, practically growing cobwebs from the last few days of neglect. There was still time tonight to see a couple of addresses; I copied the next two entries from the list onto a Post-it and closed the folder. I went to the bedroom, changed into my running clothes, and headed for the front door. Once again I had to pass through the hideous bedlam at the front of the house, which had devolved into Astor and Rita grumbling at each other as they wiped almost everything around them with paper towels.

I had thought I might slip past them and out into the night without comment, but like all my other thoughts lately, that one was wrong, too. Rita s head snapped up as I hurried by, and even out of the corner of my eye I could see her face grow tighter, meaner-looking, and she stood up as I put a hand on the front door.

Where are you going? she said, and the tone of her voice still carried the edge she had used on Astor.

Out, I said. I need exercise.

Is that what you call it now? she said, and although her words might as well have been in Estonian, for all the sense they made, her tone was very clear, and it did not hold even the memory of anything pleasant.

I turned all the way around and looked at Rita. She stood beside the couch with her fists knotted at her sides one of them held a clutch of soiled paper towel and her face was so pale it was almost green, except for matching bright red patches on her cheeks. The sight of her was so odd, so completely different from the Rita I knew, that I just looked at her for a long moment. Apparently, that didn t soothe her; she narrowed her eyes at me even more and began to tap her toe, and I realized that I had not answered her question.

What should I call it? I said.

Rita hissed at me. It was so startling that I could do nothing but gawp, and then she threw the balled-up paper towels at me. They opened up in midair and fluttered to the floor a few feet away from me, and Rita said, I don t give a damn what you call it. And she turned around and stomped into the kitchen, returning a moment later with more paper towels, and very pointedly ignoring me.

I watched a little longer, hoping for some clue, but Rita only ignored me even more thoroughly. I like a good puzzle as much as anybody else, but this one seemed much too abstract for me, and in any case I had more important answers to find. So I decided it was just one more thing I didn t understand about human behavior, and I opened the door and trotted out into the late afternoon heat.

I turned to the left at the end of my front walk and started jogging. The first name I had copied from the list was Alissa Elan: a strange name, but I took it as a good omen. Elan, as in zest, zeal, panache. It was exactly what I had been missing lately: Dexter s Deadly Dash. Perhaps I would rekindle it tonight when I saw Ms. Alissa s Honda. And as if there really was some kind of magic in that first name, Alissa, I suddenly felt like I had been smacked on the head with something large, heavy, and wet, and I stopped dead in the middle of the

street, and if there had been any traffic at all I wouldn t have noticed if it ran right over me because I had just realized that Alissa began with the letter A.

My Shadow had blogged endlessly about the Evil Bitch known only as A, and yet until now I had not checked the list for A s. I had obviously been watching too much TV far too many gray cells had gone off-line and my once-mighty brain was in a sad state of decrepitude. But I did not linger and indulge myself in an appreciation of my own stupidity. Better late than never, and I had found it. This was it, I was sure of it, the one I had been looking for, and I let that surge of unreasonable glee push me into a trot, down the street and away into late-afternoon certainty.

The house was a little more than a mile away, but on the far side of U.S. 1. So far I had seen only the houses on my side of the highway, since crossing on foot in the evening was hazardous. But if I could get across safely, I could loop past it, turn north to see the second entry, and be home in less than an hour.

I ran for about fifteen minutes on the west side of U.S. 1, jogging slowly through an area that had never quite recovered from Hurricane Andrew. The houses were small and looked neglected, even the ones that were occupied, and on most of them it was very hard to see the address. The numbers were worn off, or covered with vegetation, or missing altogether. There were a number of older, battered cars lining the street, and many of them were abandoned wrecks. A dozen dirty kids were playing in and around them. More kids were kicking a soccer ball back and forth in the parking lot of a battered two-story apartment building. I watched the children as I jogged, wondering whether they might hurt themselves climbing all over the old and rusty cars, and I almost missed it.

I had just heard the thump of a well-kicked ball and turned my head to look as the soccer ball soared through the parking lot to the cries of, Julio! Aqu! But as I mentally applauded Julio s skill, the ball sailed past the front of the building and I saw the address above the door: 8834. The number I was looking for was 8837; I had let myself get distracted and almost gone right past.

I slowed my jog to a walk and then came to a stop in front of the apartment building, putting my foot up on a crumbling concrete block wall as if I was tying my shoelace. As I fiddled with the lace I glanced across the street and there it was. Wedged in beside a huge and untrimmed hedge in front of the house across the street, there it really was.

The house itself was small, almost a cottage, and so overgrown that I couldn t even see the windows. A huge, knotted vine spread over the top of the house, as if it was holding the roof down so it wouldn t crumble and fall off. There was barely enough yard in front to park the Honda, and a rusted chain-link fence closed off the backyard. The nearest streetlight was half a block away, and with the row of untended trees along the street, anything that happened at the little house after dark would be almost invisible, which made me truly hope this really was it. The car was pulled in behind a large bougainvillea that took up half the yard and poured down across the roof of the house, and I could see only one small chunk of the rear section that stuck out from the shrubbery. But the certainty grew as I looked at the car.

It had probably started life as a neat little Honda with a metallic blue finish and bright chrome strips on the side. Now it was a mess: faded, dented, sagging slightly to one side, most of the chrome pulled off, the color battered away into a kind of uncertain medley of gray, blue, and primer.

And spread across that small section of the trunk there is a large rust stain, like a metallic birthmark, and my pulse bumps up a couple of notches as dark interior wings begin to flutter.

But far too many cars have rusty patches; I need to be sure, and so I push down the anticipation that is rising up inside. I straighten slowly and put my hands on my back, stretching as if I had run a little too hard, and I look casually at the tail end of the car. I can t see, can t be sure; the bougainvillea hides too much.

I have to get closer. I need some stupid excuse to move into the yard and peer behind the leaves and see if the taillight on the far side is the telltale dangling light I remember so well, but I can think of nothing. Very often in the past I have been The Man With The Clipboard, or The Guy With The Tool Belt, and this has gotten me as close as I ever needed to be. But tonight I am already Dude Jogging By; I can t change costumes now, and I am running out of excuses for lingering here. I put my foot up on the wall again and stretch the leg muscles, furiously rejecting a series of truly stupid ideas for going into the yard and peeking behind that horrible giant bougainvillea, until I have almost decided to risk the stupidest and most obvious just step into the yard and look, and then jog away. Ridiculous, dangerous, and totally contrary to the picture I cherish of a somewhat more than clever Me, but I am out of time and have no better ideas

Somewhere far away, sitting on a cloud perhaps, there must be some whimsical dark deity that really likes me, because just before I let frustration push me into stupidity, I dimly hear the voices of the soccer players, calling out in three languages to look out, mister! And before I can even realize that I am the only mister in the area, the soccer ball thumps into my head, bounces up into the air, and then rolls across the street.

I watch the ball roll, just a little dazed, not so much from the thump on the head, but from the sheer happy, improbable, stupidly lucky coincidence of it. And the ball rolls across the street, into the yard of the grubby little house, and comes to rest against the Honda s rear tire.

Sorry, mister, I hear one of the kids say.

I look into the parking lot at where they stand in an uncertain knot, watching carefully to see if I will take the ball and run away, or perhaps even start shooting at them. So I give them a reassuring smile and say, No problem. I ll get it.

I walk across the street and step into the yard where that wonderful, beautiful prince of all soccer balls has rolled to a stop. I loop to the left ever so slightly as I approach the Honda, trying not to look like I am staring at the car with feverish greed. Three steps into the yard, five, six and there it is.

For a few long and delightful seconds I pause and just look at it and let the adrenaline flood into me. There it is, that telltale dangling left taillight, the same one I saw when I was seen, the same one that blinked at me as it raced away on the Palmetto on-ramp. There is no more doubt. This is the Honda I have been looking for. Deep inside the Dark Tower of Dexter there is a rumbling hiss of satisfaction, and I feel a shadowy tickle at the base of my spine that moves slowly up my back to my neck, and then settles across my face like a mask.

We have found our Witness.

And now he becomes our prey.

From inside the moldering, vine-covered house I hear voices rising in a very nasty argument, and then the front door slams. I tear my eyes away from that gorgeous dangling light and turn to look, just in time to see a man s back as he spins away and hurries back inside again to finish the fight. I feel a flutter of apprehension; he must have seen me but the front door slams behind him; my luck has held, and his voice rises inside, hers answers, and I have found him and he doesn t know it and now it truly begins to end for my Witness. So I walk quickly the rest of the way across the grass to the Honda, pat it affectionately, and pick up the ball.

The soccer players are still standing in their insecure cluster, and I hold up the ball to them and smile. They look at it like it might be an improvised explosive device; they don t move. They watch me with great care as I throw the ball back to them. And then it bounces twice, one of the boys grabs it, and they all race away to the far end of the parking lot, and the game picks right back up where it left off.

I look fondly at the dirty little cottage and marvel at my luck. The overgrown yard, the street without lights the setting is perfect, almost as if we have designed it ourselves as the ideal spot for an evening of dark-hearted fun. It is shrouded, tucked away in the shadows the fussiest monster could not ask for a better playground.

A shiver of anticipation trembles the flagpoles of Castle Dexter. We have searched, we have found it, and there is suddenly a great deal to do, and very little time to do it. Everything has to be just right, exactly the way it should be, the way it always is, always has to be, so we can slide back here tonight tonight! back through the comfy dark to slice our way to blissful release and the promise of safety as we trim away this small and ugly blister that has been rubbing up against the heel of our comfort. And now the chafing unwanted threat was in our sights and as good as taped to a table, and soon all would be gleaming happiness once more. One, two, three, snicker-snee, and Dexter s life would return to its bright plastic case, all happy fake normal and human. But first a program of careful but rapid preparation, and then a very sharp word from Our Sponsor.

A deep breath to beat down the rising tide of need and let shadowy balance back in; it must be done, but it must be done right. And slowly, carefully, casually, we turn our face away from the house and the Honda in its yard, and we jog back the way we had come. Home for now, but we would be back, very soon, as soon as it was dark.

And Dark is coming, with a capital D.

It was a sweaty but very contented Dexter who jogged onto his street, slowed to a walk, and sauntered into his house. And that contentment surged to a level that might almost have been happiness when I went in the front door and saw my children gathered on the sofa, blissfully killing things with their Wii, because Astor looked up it was Cody s turn in the game and said,

Mom wants to see you. She s in the kitchen.

That s wonderful, I said, and it really was. I had found my Witness, had an hour of healthful exercise, and now Rita was in the kitchen it could be stir-fry, or roast pork again at last. Could life get any better?

But, of course, happiness is fleeting at best, and usually it s a hint that you haven t understood what s really happening. In this case it fled the moment I stepped into the kitchen, because Rita was not cooking at all. She was hunched over a large pile of papers and ledgers that spread over most of the kitchen table, and scribbling on a legal pad. She looked up as I came to a disappointed halt in the doorway. You re all sweaty, she said.

I ve been running, I told her. There was still some tint of something in the way she looked at me that I didn t recognize, but she looked a little relieved, too, which was almost as strange.

Oh, she said. Really running.

I wiped a hand across my face and held it up to show her the sweat. Really, I said. What did you think?

She shook her head and fluttered one hand at the heap on the table. It doesn t I have to work, she said. This thing at work is completely And now I have to She pursed her lips and then frowned at me.

My God, you re covered with Don t sit down anywhere until Damn, she said, as her cell phone started to chirp beside her on the table. She grabbed at it and said to me, Could you order pizza? Yes, it s me, she said, turning away from me and speaking into her phone.

I watched her for just a moment as she rattled off a string of numbers to someone on the phone, and then I turned away and took my crushed hopes of a real meal down the hall and into the bathroom. When my mouth had been watering for a home-cooked meal, pizza was a bitter pill to swallow. But as I took a shower it began to seem like mere grumpiness. After all, I had Things to do tonight, Things that made even Rita s roast pork seem a trivial pleasure. I ran the water very hot, and scrubbed off the sweat from my run, and then I turned the shower to cold. I let the cool water run on the back of my neck for a minute, and felt icy glee return. I was going out tonight for a rare combination of necessity and true pleasure, and to make that happen I would gladly eat roadkill for a week.

And so I toweled off cheerfully, got dressed, and ordered a pizza. While I waited for it to arrive, I went to my office and prepared for my evening activities. Everything I needed fit easily into a small nylon shoulder bag, and I had packed it, then repacked it, just to be sure, by the time the pizza arrived a half hour later. Rita was completely occupied with her work, and the kitchen table was covered with her papers. So to the delight of the children, I served the pizza on the coffee table in front of the TV. Cody and Astor actually liked the stuff, of course, and Lily Anne seemed to catch their mood. She bounced happily up and down in her high chair and flung her mashed carrots at the walls with great skill and vigor.

I chewed on a slice of pizza, and luckily for me I barely tasted it, because in the dark corners of my mind I was already far away in a little house on a dingy street, placing the knife s tip here and the blade there, working slowly and carefully up to a blissful climax as my witness thrashes in his bonds, and I watch as the hope dies in his eyes and the thrashing grows slower and weaker and finally, at long loving last

I could see it, almost taste it, practically hear the crackle of the duct tape. And suddenly hunger rolled away and the pizza was nothing but cardboard in my mouth, and the happy chomping of the children was an irritating artificial din and I could wait no longer to return to the reality waiting for me in the little house. I stood up and dropped the last third of my pizza slice back into the box.

I have to go out, we said, and the chilly coiled sound of our voice jerked Cody s head around to face us and froze Astor open-mouthed in midchomp.

Where are you going? Astor said softly, and her eyes were wide and eager, because she did not know the where but she knew the why from the ice-cold edge of my voice.

We showed her my teeth and she blinked. Tell your mother I had some work to take care of, we said. She and her brother goggled at us, moon-eyed with their own longing, and Lily Anne gave a short and sharp Da! that jerked at the corners of my dark cape for just a moment. But the music was swelling up in the distance and calling for its conductor, and we had no choice but to lift our baton and take the podium now.

Take care of your sister, I said, and Astor nodded.

All right, she said. But, Dexter

I ll be back, we said, and we grabbed our small bag of toys and were away out the door and into the warm and welcoming night.

FIFTEEN

It was full dark out now and the first rush of the free night air roared into my lungs and out through my veins, calling my name with a thundering whisper of welcome and urging me on into the purring darkness, and we hurried to the car to ride away to happiness. But as we opened the car door and put one foot in, some small acid niggle twitched at our coattails and we paused; something was not right, and the frigid glee of our purpose slid off our back and onto the pavement like old snakeskin.

Something was not right.

I looked around me in the hot and humid Miami night. The neighborhood was just as it had always been; no sudden threat had sprung from the row of one-story houses with their toy-littered yards. There was nothing moving on our street, no one lurking in the shadows of the hedge, no rogue helicopter swooping down to strafe me nothing. But still I heard that nagging trill of doubt.

I took in a slow lungful of air through my nose. There was nothing to smell beyond the mingled odors of cooking, the tang of distant rainfall, the whiff of rotting vegetation that always lurked in the South Florida night.

So what was wrong? What had set the tinny little alarm bells to clattering when I was finally out the door and free? I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing, felt nothing but I had learned to trust the pesky whisper of warning, and I stood there unmoving, unbreathing, straining for an answer.

And then a low row of dark clouds rumbled open overhead and revealed a small slice of silvery moon a tiny, inadequate moon, a moon of no consequence at all, and we breathed out all the doubt. Of course we were used to riding out into the wicked gleam of a full and bloated moon, slicing and slashing to the open-throated sound track of a big round choir in the sky. There was no such beacon overhead tonight, and it didn t seem right somehow to gallop off into glee without it. But tonight was a special session, an impromptu raid into a mostly moonless evening, and in any case it must be done, would be done but done as a solo cantata this time, a cascade of single notes without a backup singer. This small and wimpish quarter-moon was far too young to warble, but we could do very well without it, just this once.

And we felt the bright and chilly purpose close back around us; there was no lurking danger, only an absence of moon. There was no reason to pause, no reason to wait, and every reason to ride away into the velvet dark of a Bonus Evening.

We climb into the driver s seat of the car and start the engine. It is no more than a five-minute drive back to the neighborhood of the moldering apartment building and the small crummy house. We drive past it slowly and carefully, looking for any sign that things are not as they should be, and we find none. The street is empty now. The one streetlight half a block away flickers off and on, casting a dim blue glow rather than any real brightness. Other than that the only light in this tiny-mooned night comes from the windows of the apartment building, a matching purple halo from each window, a dozen televisions all tuned to the pointless, empty, idiotic unreality of the same reality show, everyone watching in vacuous lockstep as true reality cruises slowly past outside licking its chops.

The dirty little house shows one faint light in a front window half-covered with vines, and the old Honda is still there, tucked into the shadows. We drive past and circle halfway around the block and park in the darkness beneath a huge banyan tree. We get out, lock the car, and stand for just a moment, sniffing the breeze of this very dark and suddenly wonderful night. A light wind moves the leaves in the tree overhead, and far off on the horizon, lightning flickers in a huge black pillow of clouds. A siren wails in the distance, and a little closer a dog barks. But near at hand nothing stirs and we take a deep and cooling breath of the shadowy night air and let our awareness slide out and around us, feeling the stillness and the lack of any lurking danger. All is right, all is ready, all is just what it should be, and we can wait no longer.

It is time.

Slowly, carefully, casually, we slip our small gym bag over one shoulder and walk back to the crumbling house, just an ordinary guy coming home from the bus stop.

Halfway down the block, a large old car lurches around the corner and for just a second its headlights light us up. It seems to hesitate for half a second, leaving us uncomfortably illuminated, and we pause, blinking in the unwanted light. Then there is the sudden bang of a backfire from the car, accompanied by a strange rattling sound as a piston knocks in unison with a loose bumper, and the car speeds up and rolls past us harmlessly and disappears around the corner up ahead. It is quiet once more and there is no other sign of life in this fine dark night.

We stroll on and no one sees our perfect imitation of normal strolling, no one anywhere close is watching anything but the TV, and each step brings us closer to joy. We can feel the rising tide of wanting it, needing it, knowing it will be soon, and we very carefully keep our steps from showing our eagerness as we approach the house and stroll past it and into the darkness of the giant hedge that hides the Honda and now hides us.

And here we pause, looking out from our near-invisible spot beside the rusting car, and we think. We have wanted this so very much and now we are here and we will do it and nothing can stop that but this is different. It is not just the lack of a moon that makes us hesitate and stand in the shadows and stare thoughtfully at the awful little cottage. And it is no sudden change of heart or twinge of conscience or any kind of doubt in the heartless, conscience-less darkness of our purpose. No. It is this: There are two people inside and we want only one. We need to, we must, we will, take and tape our Witness and do to him all the many wonderful things that we have waited too long to do to him but

That second person. A. The ex-wife.

What do we do with her?

We cannot leave her to watch and then tell. But to tumble her away, too, into the long forever night is against the Code of Harry, against all the very reasonable well-deserved Wickedness we have always done and hope to always do. This is unearned, unsanctioned, messy, collateral damage. It is wrong, we cannot but we must. But we can t We take a deep relaxing breath. Of course we must. There is no other way. We will tell her we are very sorry, and we will make it quick for her, but we must, just this one very naughty and regrettable time, we absolutely must.

And so we will. We look carefully at the house, making sure that all is right. One minute, then two, we do nothing at all except stand and wait and watch, trickling all our senses out into the street around us, the small yard of this dingy little house, watching and waiting for any slight sign that we are being watched, and there is nothing. We are alone in a world of dark longing that will very soon burst out into bliss and carry us along to the happy and necessary ending of this oh-so-lovely night.

Three minutes, five there is no sign of danger, and we can wait no more. And we take one more cool and steadying breath and then we slide deeper into the shadows of the hedge, stalking back toward the fence that blocks the backyard. A quick and silent vault over the fence, a momentary pause to be absolutely sure that we are unobserved, and then we are cat-footing along the side of the house. Nothing can possibly see us except from the two small windows, one of them up high on the wall and made of pebbled glass, a bathroom. The other window is small and cranked open six inches and we stop a few feet away from it and look inside.

There is a faint glow of light showing in this window, coming from some interior room, but there is no sound and no sign of any living thing. We open our bag, take out our gloves, and pull them on. We are ready, and we move on past the window and into the backyard.

The back edge of the yard is completely blocked by a fence that is overgrown with young bamboo. The shoots are slim, but already ten feet tall, and we cannot be seen from this side either and we breathe easier. On the back side of the house a little brick patio nudges up against a sliding glass door. Grass grows up shin-high between the bricks, and a rusted round grill is pushed to one edge, missing one wheel and tilting drunkenly over. Again we pause, staring into the house through the glass of the sliding door. Nothing moves inside, and a first gray finger of doubt pokes into our ribs; is anyone home? Have we come so far and been so very ready, all for nothing?

Slowly, carefully, we move closer onto the bricks and then up to the sliding glass door, where we wait, looking and listening and sniffing the air for anything at all and there is nothing.

We put a hand on the metal rim of the door and push with carefully increasing pressure; the door moves. We slide it open an inch, six inches, two feet, taking half a minute to make sure there is no sound and no reaction from inside. Three feet open and we stop and wait one more cautious moment and again there is nothing and so we slip in through the door and tug it closed behind us.

We stand in a kitchen: a rusted refrigerator in the corner next to an old stove, a cracked Formica counter with a cupboard above it, a stained and dirty sink with a dripping faucet. The room is unlit, but through a doorway in the far wall we can see a faint gleam of light in the next room. A whispered tickle of warning begins to prickle up our spine and we know there is something there, something in that room in the light. And now all of our focus is forward, into that next room, and the nylon noose is in our hand as we glide slowly across the floor toward the light with a near-drool of anticipation and the glee surges up inside at the thought of what now must come as we stalk silently to the doorway and look carefully around the doorframe and into the next room at what is waiting in that one small halo of light and we pause and peek into the room and

Everything stops.

No breath, no thought, no movement. Nothing but stunned and automatic denial.

This can t be. It just can t. No way, not here, not now, not this we are not seeing this, not at all, we can t be seeing any such thing; it s impossible, wrong, not in the script

But there it is. It does not move and it does not change and it is what it certainly is:

It is a table under a single dim hanging bulb. An old and unremarkable metal table from some thrift shop, with a chipped white finish. And spread across the tabletop in neat bundles is something that used to be a human being. The body has been carefully sliced and sectioned and stacked into orderly piles and it is all so very perfect and exactly as it should be and it spins me into an unreal moment of totally familiar and totally impossible comfort because I know just what it is but it cannot possibly be that and I look and I look and it still is that, exactly that.

It is a body prepared for disposal after a long and lovely session with a knife and a need and it is familiar and comforting for the simplest of all possible reasons because this is precisely the way I do it myself. And that is not possible because I did not do it and there is no one else in the world who does it exactly the same way, not even my brother, Brian, but it is there and I blink at it and look again and it is still there and it has not changed.

And it is so impossible and so nightmare perfectly just what I was going to do that I cannot stop myself from stepping toward it through the doorway, pulled closer as if it was a giant magnet too strong to resist, and I move in without breath and without seeing anything else, step toward the thing that cannot be there even though it so clearly is: one step, two steps

And on the far side of the table something steps toward me out of shadow and without a thought I whip out my knife and I jump forward at this new menace

And it jumps forward at me with a knife in its hand.

And I crouch and freeze with my blade raised high

And it crouches and freezes with its blade raised high.

And in an endless moment of total disoriented teeth-bared panic I look and I blink and I see it blink back.

I slowly uncoil myself and stand up straight and stare and it does exactly as I do.

It cannot do anything else because it is my reflection in a large, full-length mirror. It is me standing there looking back at me standing there looking back

Once more I am frozen, unable to think or blink or do anything but stare at the image in the mirror, because this cannot be an accident, any more than the perfectly arranged body on the table is an accident. The mirror has been set up in this precise spot to do exactly what it has done and now here I am looking at me looking back at me over a body that only I could have done like that and I am almost certain I did not do it but there it is and I do not know what to do or what to think.

So I stand there in a dim tiny cone of unfeeling impossibility and I stare at something that someone has set up just for me just so I will find it and do exactly what I am doing, which is nothing but looking at it and trying not to believe that it can be at all what it truly is.

And slowly, finally, one skittery little thought nudges up through the dumb muck that has poured all through my brain and it squeals at me just loud enough for me to hear it and I blink, take one shaky breath, and let the thought speak to me.

Who did this?

It is a good start, this tiny little thought, good enough to get one more thought to follow it up through the mist. Only my brother, Brian, knows my technique well enough to do this. For one flickering moment I wonder if he did; he still wanted to have some brotherly playtime with me. Could this be a small nudge in Dexter s ribs to encourage me?

But even as I think it I know that it is not possible. Brian would ask, he would urge, he would wheedle but he would never do this. And other than Brian, there is no one else in the world who has seen my work and lived except my Witness, of course. That one unknown Shadow who had seen me with Valentine and blogged his way to the head of my list, the self-same maddening blatherer I had come here to turn into an exact match of what I was looking at now. And as much as it made no sense, it had to be him that had done this. He had arranged this body in my pattern and placed a mirror on the far side of it, and there could be no other explanation, but that led to one more very urgent question:

Why?

I have no answer. I can still only think that this is impossible and yet it is out of the hypothetical and into the here and now and I am looking at it and it is as real as the knife in my hand. And I take one more slow and helpless step toward it, as if I could make it all go away if I could just get close enough and on the far side of the table, the other me takes a step forward and I jerk to a stop again and look at me looking back at me.

There I am; I, Dexter. I raise a hand to touch my face, but it is the hand with the knife and I stop halfway as the wicked blade comes near my dumbly gaping face and I just look at me. Still life with knife and numbskull. The two faces of me, Dexter the Demon and Dexter the Dope. The face looks strange to me, like it belongs to somebody else but it is my face, the one I have been wearing all these years. I stare for a long moment, frozen by the sight of me as I really am, both of me, as if I could stare hard enough to make the two faces come together into one real person.

I can t, of course. I let the hand with the knife drop to my side once more and look down at the table, stupidly hoping that the impossible thing there would be gone. But it is still there, still real, and still impossible. One more robot step forward and I am standing over it and looking down at what I have come to do and found already done. I stare at the disjointed leftovers, and for one idiot moment a tiny hope flutters up: Was it possible that this heap of flesh was not done by but instead done to my Shadow? Could someone else have somehow done the happy chore for me?

I look for some clue, and from this close I can see that there are small flaws that I would never have been guilty of. And then I see a breast and I realize this is female, my Shadow is male, and the small spider-footed hope scurries away and dies. This is not my Shadow; this is someone else, and most likely his ex-wife. I move closer. Up close I can see that this is not real quality work; right there, the left hand, so messy at the wrist, hurried, chopped instead of cut with Dexter-neat skill. I reach toward it with the point of my knife and poke it to test its reality and as I do I pause.

I have been hearing a familiar sound this last minute and it is getting louder, and I can no longer ignore it, because it is a sound I know very well and one that I do not want to hear right now.

It is the sound of a siren and it is absolutely coming closer.

Once again I freeze into stupid unmoving thoughtlessness. A siren. Coming closer. To me. Here, now. To this dingy little house. Where I am standing above a chopped-up body. With a knife in my hand.

And finally a great sick air-raid siren of alarm begins to shriek from the ramparts of Castle Dexter, rumbling up from its lowest, earth-trembling note of warning and rising to a shattering scream of panic, and we spin away from the impossibly sliced and stacked trash on the table and in one rabbit-blink of an eye we are out the sliding door and into the night. Without a pause for thought we slam into and over the back fence and windmill our arms at the bamboo, tunneling frantically through the springy shoots and falling out face-first, into the backyard of the house on the far side. And we bounce up instantly and run at the full speed of complete panic, slashing through the yard and into the street beyond just as an outside light comes on in the yard where we were lying only seconds ago.

But we are gone now, safely away and out into the street, along a sidewalk that is just as dark and overgrown as we could wish, and we stroke down the screaming chorus of alarm and fear and force our legs to listen to the cool and soothing voice that says, Slow down; act normal. We have escaped.

We do slow down, we do try to act normal, but the approaching siren is right there on the next street now, in front of the cottage, and its high-pitched call is winding down again to say that it has arrived, and so in spite of the wise interior words of advice to go slow, we walk a little faster than we should until we turn the corner and come back to our car where it waits beneath the banyan tree.

And we slide gratefully into the driver s seat and start the engine and drive slowly away from the small and crumbling house of horrors, slowly and carefully back toward the refuge of normal life. We don t head straight home, though; we must try to think, and we must let the tremble leave the hands and the dry terror peel off from the mouth as the adrenaline fades away and we slowly morph back into something resembling a human shape before we head back to the company of real humans, and this takes much longer than it should. We drive south on U.S. 1, all the way down to Old Card Sound Road, trying to think and understand and make sense out of this surreal catastrophe of an evening trying, and failing. Slowly the sick wet panic drains away, but the answers don t flow in to take its place, and all the way home there is only one single thought repeating endlessly through my numb and shattered brain, one thought that tumbles and echoes through the dark stone halls of Dexter s Dome. And no answer rises up to greet this thought and so it ricochets around in brittle confusion and repeats itself endlessly and as I finally park my car in front of my house I find that my lips are moving and repeating this same stupid single thought:

What just happened?

SIXTEEN

It should not have been much of a surprise, but I did not sleep very much that night. Eyes open or eyes shut, all I could see or think about was that body in the small house, so very nearly Dexter-right, and Dexter himself standing above it gaping at his reflection, both of us drooling stupidly as the siren races closer and closer

It had all been a setup, a trap, flawlessly designed to catch nobody but me, and it had so nearly worked. It had been perfectly baited, drawing me in and then stunning me stupid with the body arranged just as I might have done I had seen so many bodies just like it, and they had always brought me comfort, and it did not seem fair that this one should steal my sleep, fill me with fear, slam nearly human dread into all my thoughts. Was this what it was like to have a conscience? To roll around in bed all night with the thought that you had done something terribly wrong and at any minute it was going to rear up and crush you? I didn t like the feeling at all, and I liked even less the thought that my Shadow had set me up so neatly and very nearly got me.

But what could I do? What could I possibly come up with to find and finish this awful lurking menace? Tracing the Honda had been my best shot, my only shot, and I had fired it perfectly, only to find my Witness three steps ahead of me and looking back with a mocking grin. What was left for me now except to wait for his next move? Because there would be a next move; I did not doubt that for a moment. And I had no way to know what it would be, where it would come from all I could know was that this first try had been very good, and the next one was bound to be better.

And so I rolled across the sheets all night, fretting and gnashing my teeth in helpless frustrated anxiety, finally dropping into blank and empty sleep around five thirty, and jerked right back out of it by the alarm clock at seven o clock. I lay there for several stiff and numb minutes, trying to convince myself that it had all been a bad dream, but I was not nearly persuasive enough. It had happened. It was real and I did not have even a tiny hint of what to do about it.

I stumbled into the shower and then into my clothes, and somehow I made it all the way to the table for breakfast, hoping to find some small relief there. And Rita rose to the occasion. She had filled the tabletop with the congenial clutter of blueberry pancakes and bacon. I collapsed into my chair and she thumped a steaming mug of coffee in front of me, and then she paused, hovering over me with that strange expression of half disapproval on her face until I looked up at her.

You were out late, she said, a little more grimly than I was used to from her, and I wondered why.

Yeah, sorry, I said. I had some, um, tests to run. At the lab.

Oh, tests, she said, at the lab . And then Astor came in and slammed herself into a chair.

Why do we have to have pancakes? she said.

Because they re bad for you and I want you to suffer, Rita snapped at her, and turned away to the stove. Astor watched her with an almost comical expression of surprise on her face, which vanished right away when she saw me looking at her.

The blueberries get stuck in my braces, she mumbled grumpily at me, and then Cody came in and Lily Anne threw her spoon in a perfect arc to the back of Astor s head. Astor said, Ow, Cody laughed, and then all pretense of calm and dignified behavior fled from the room as Astor jumped up, knocking her plate onto the floor, where it broke into three large pieces and a scattered pile of food. She ignored the mess and erupted into self-pitying rage while Rita cleaned up, gave her another plate, and scolded her. Lily Anne started to wail, and Cody simply sat and smirked and, when he thought no one was looking, took a piece of Astor s bacon.

I pulled Lily Anne out of her chair, partly to stop her crying and partly to protect her from Astor, and I held her on my lap with one hand while I sipped coffee with the other. It was several minutes before Astor stopped threatening her brother and sister and the uproar died away to the normal clangor of a weekday morning. I finished my pancakes and had a second cup of coffee; it didn t do a whole lot to get my brain moving, but by the time I finished it I was at least alert enough to drive, so with no other plan available to me besides following everyday routine, I put my mug in the sink and headed numbly in to work.

I could feel myself loosening up a little on the drive in. It wasn t because I had come up with any kind of Master Plan, or because I had realized that Things were not really That Bad; Things were that bad, and maybe worse. But as always, I found the vicious, backstabbing zest of Miami traffic kind of soothing, and on top of that I always take comfort in routine. By the time I arrived at work, my shoulders were no longer hunched up around my ears, and when I arrived at my desk I had actually unclenched my teeth. It didn t really make sense, but there it was. Unconsciously, I suppose I thought of work as some kind of refuge. After all, my little office was right there in police headquarters, surrounded by hundreds of hard-eyed men and women with guns who were sworn to protect and serve. But on this morning, when of all times I needed my job to be a snug and safe shelter from the storm, it turned out to be nothing but one more nail in the lid of Dexter s coffin.

I really should have seen it coming. I mean, I knew very well that my job involved going to crime scenes. And I knew just as well that a crime had been committed last night. It was a very simple equation of cause and effect, and it should not have been any kind of unpleasant shock to find myself standing once more in the dingy little room I had so recently fled, and looking down at the Dexter Duplicate mound of body parts.

But it was a shock, and it was very unpleasant, and it got even more so as the morning wore on through all the ordinary rituals of forensic magic. Each standard step of the process brought its own new jolt of panic. When Angel Batista began to dust for fingerprints, I sweated through several minutes of furiously trying to remember whether I had kept my gloves on the whole time. Just when I decided that I definitely had, Camilla Figg took her camera out into the yard and began to photograph footprints my footprints! And I spent another five awful minutes stupidly reassuring myself that I was wearing different shoes this morning and I could get rid of the ones I d worn last night as soon as I got home. And then, as if to prove that I really had descended into total idiocy, I spent several more minutes wondering if I could really afford the expense of throwing away a pair of perfectly good shoes.

I finished my own work fairly quickly; there was only a little bit of blood on the table with the body, and a few small traces on the floor underneath. I sprayed my Bluestar in a couple of likely spots in order to look diligent, but considering the funk I was in, I don t think I would have noticed anything smaller than a two-gallon spatter. All my attention was on my fellow crime scene wonks. Each procedure they performed sent a new spasm of anxiety through my system and another trickle of sweat down my back, until I was completely frazzled and my shirt was plastered to my body.

I had never before had such intense justification for anxiety, and yet even as I sweated and fretted it all seemed slightly unreal; only a few hours ago I had been right here in this same grungy room, confronting one of the great shocks of my long and wicked life. And now here I was again, in theory part of a team that was trying to find some trace of me, while the other me stood by watching the proceedings with frantic angst in case I really did. It was a nearly surreal clash of Dark Dexter with Dexter on Duty, and for the first time I wasn t sure I could keep the two parts of myself separate.

At one point I even caught sight of myself in the mirror in nearly the same position I d been in last night this time holding a bottle of Bluestar instead of a knife and the two disconnected realities came crashing together. For a few minutes, the sounds of the surrounding forensic hustle faded completely away, and I was all alone with myself. It wasn t terribly comforting; I just stared at my image, trying to make sense of a picture that suddenly made no sense at all.

Who was I? What was I doing here? And most important, why wasn t I running for my life? The idiotic, pointless questions ran through my brain in a repeating loop until even the simple words seemed foreign to me and I just stood and looked at my suddenly unfamiliar image.

I probably would still be there if Vince hadn t finally jarred me out of my fugue.

Very nice, he said, and still very studly. Now get over yourself.

His face swam into focus in the mirror, suddenly right there beside the image of my own, and the sound track of the room came back on. I realized once more where I was, although none of Vince s words had registered. I jerked my head away from the mirror to face him.

I m sorry, what? I said.

He snickered. You ve been staring at yourself in the mirror for, like, five minutes, he said.

I, um, I was thinking about something, I said feebly.

Vince shook his head and looked very solemn. Always a bad idea to cloud the brain, young Skywalker, he said, and he moved away to the other side of the room. I shook myself and went back to pretending to work. I floated through the rest of the morning in my cloud of adrenaline and alienation, the whole time feeling as if I might split apart at the seams at any minute.

But I didn t fall apart or burst into flames. Somehow, I survived. I know only too well just how fragile a human body is, but Dexter must be made of truly stern stuff, because I lived through that whole dreadful morning without suffering a stroke or a fatal heart attack, or even running out into the street with a shattered mind, yammering confessions and pleas for clemency. And in spite of their diligent and very practiced efforts, all the mighty labor of the forensics team failed to turn up even the faintest sign that I had been there the night before. Dexter had survived, against all the odds, and somehow he made it back to the office in one whole but badly jangled piece.

I slumped into my chair with real relief, and tried to concentrate on breathing normally for a little while, and it actually seemed to work. It does not speak well for my intelligence, but even with all the mounting evidence to the contrary, I still felt safe sitting at my desk. I closed my eyes and tried to make myself relax just a bit, trying to think things through in a calm and rational way. All right: I had been forced into the position of trying to catch myself. And I had almost been caught, but I d gotten away. It had not been fun to return to the nightmarish scene in my role as Daytime Dexter, but I d lived through that, too, and it didn t seem likely that anyone would find any evidence to connect me to the body on the table.

I slowly began to persuade myself that Things were really not as bad as they seemed, and through sheer pigheaded persistence, I very nearly convinced myself. And then I made the very grave mistake of taking one last deep breath, plastering a horrible fake smile on my face, and returning to the workday by dutifully checking my e-mail.

And when I did, all the carefully constructed artificial tranquillity flushed out of me like it had never existed at all as I saw that anonymous e-mail with the one-word title:

Closer.

I did not know what that word was supposed to mean, but I knew instantly who had written it and sent it to me and in that endless frozen moment of reading and rereading that one word I felt once more the awful churning panic and it crashed up higher and higher until I thought I would scream.

I took a deep breath and tried to wrestle down the panic, but it had me pinned to the mat, and my hand was shaking as I clicked the mouse to open the e-mail. And as I read, a wild hissing rose up inside me and all calmness drained out of the world.

Like the others, this one started with the heading:

Shadowblog

But this time there was one startling difference. The shadow of the title, which had previously been a faint red, had grown to an enormous pool of what was absolutely meant to be blood. And now a small trail of blood-red footprints led from the heading down to the blog s one-word title, Closer. With a truly sick feeling of dread, I looked under the title and began to read.

I am learning so much about myself and even more about you. For instance, I didn t know you were so fast on your feet. But you must be, because you got away somehow. You must have been quite a sight, racing through the night with your tail between your legs. Wish I d been there with my camera.

I ve learned a lot of other stuff about you, too. I ve been watching you when you have no idea you re being watched you, with your bags of groceries and your car seat, and on the job with that stupid spray bottle, trying to pretend you re just like everybody else. It s a pretty good act, and I ought to know. I ve been acting my whole life, too. And when I said I am learning about myself? Guess what I can do now?

I know you ve read my blogs. It s simple for me to know who comes to my page. I have to say I m pretty good with computer stuff. You re finding that out. So you read my blog and you know I am just divorced and I don t like it. I was raised that divorce is not an option, and my wife? Let s just say she didn t think that way, or maybe at all. And I tried to reconcile, and I tried to show her divorce was wrong, and she just got bitchier and bitchier, and worse than that I began to realize that it wasn t just bitchy, it wasn t just lazy she was amoral, evil, just as evil as if she d killed somebody. And she is incurable, because she is a psychopath who sucks the life out of other people and contributes nothing but pain and misery, and she can t change so she had to be stopped.

Some people just don t have a sense of Right and Wrong. Born that way. Like you, for instance. And like my ex-wife. And when she is screaming at me to get the fuck out and never come back and fucking mail the alimony check from now on and I step outside and see you standing there in the yard

Hey, I m pretty quick on my feet, too. You didn t see me, except maybe my back. And as I went back inside, and looked at her standing there with her mouth open, and thought about you standing outside and I know you re thinking about coming back to get me I guess I would say it just all came together and I knew who I am supposed to be now and what I am supposed to do. Old Me would have run for his life at the sight of you. But New Me saw how perfect this was, because it really is all about taking responsibility and suddenly I really understand for the first time just how far that goes and what I am supposed to do about it, which is Get rid of her and you at the same time. Take out two Bad People with one stroke. It all adds up now. That s who I am. I was put here to deal with the rule breakers, the ones who have gone too far and can t come back. You. My very-ex-wife. And who knows who else? There s lots of em. I see em every day.

So in a way I am becoming like you, right? The big difference is, I do it to stop people like you. I do it for Good. But hey, thanks for being a great role model. Maybe I should even thank you for my new girlfriend, except I don t think she s going to last too long.

I hope you don t think you are safe. I hope you don t think it s over. Because I know who you are and where you are and you don t know a thing about me. And think about this:

I am learning from you.

I am learning to do just exactly what you do, and I am going to do it to you. You will never know when or where. You can t know anything at all except that I am here and I am moving even closer.

Do you hear something behind you?

Boo. It s me.

Closer than you think

I don t know how long I sat there without moving, thinking, or breathing. It probably wasn t as long as it felt, because the building where I sat had not crumbled into dust, and the sun had not turned cold and fallen from the sky. But it was still a very long time before a single jagged thought managed to penetrate the cold and empty vault between my ears, and when it finally did register I still couldn t do any more than take a large and sharp breath and let that thought echo around all alone.

Closer?

I read through the terrible thing again, desperately searching for some small clue that it was all a bad joke, some telltale word or phrase I might have overlooked the first time to show me I had misunderstood. But no matter how many times I read the lumpy, self-indulgent prose, it stayed the same. I found no hidden meaning, no invisible-ink message with a phone number and a Facebook page. Just the same wacky, annoying phrases, over and over, all adding up to the same vague and sinister conclusion.

He was moving closer and he thought he was just like me, and I knew very well what that meant, what he would try to do. He was circling around downwind and polishing his fangs and blending with the scenery of my life. At any moment now, tomorrow, next week he might spring out at me from anywhere at all, and there was not a single thing in the world I could do about it. I was fighting a shadow in a dark room. But this shadow had real hands, holding real weapons. He could see in this darkness, and I could not, and he was coming, whether from the front or from behind, from above or below; all I could know was that he wanted to do what I do just the way I do it and he wanted to do it to me and he was coming.

Closer

SEVENTEEN

She was divorced, lived there alone. Her name was Melissa. Fuck, wait a second, said Detective Laredo. He flipped open a folder and ran a thick finger down a paper inside it. Yeah, he said. It s A-lissa. With an A. Alissa Elan. He frowned. Funny name, he said.

I could have told him that right away, since I d written that name on a Post-it only a day ago, but technically I wasn t supposed to know until he told us, so I held my tongue. And anyway, from what I knew of him, Laredo was not the kind of guy who liked to be corrected, especially not by eggheaded forensics geeks. But he was lead on the case of the chopped-up woman in the grubby little house, and we had all come together for his twenty-four, the session department policy mandated on a capital case twenty-four hours in. Since I was part of the team, I was there.

I probably would have found a reason to be there anyway, since I was desperate for any hint at all about who had done this awful thing. More than anyone else in the entire department more than anyone else in the entire world of law enforcement, all across the globe I wanted to find Alissa s killer and bring him to justice. But not the old, slow, feeble-witted whorish crone that is Miami s legal system. I wanted to find him myself and personally drag him down the steps to Dexter s Temple of Dark and Final Justice. So I sat and squirmed and listened as Laredo led us all through the sum total of what we knew, which turned out to be a little bit less than nothing.

There was no real forensic evidence, except for a few footprints from a New Balance running shoe, very common model and size. No prints, no fibers, nothing that might possibly lead to anything but my old shoes and then only if Laredo hired a very good scuba diver to find them.

I contributed my dose of nothing on the topic of blood spatter, and waited impatiently until somebody finally said, Divorced, right? and Laredo nodded.

Yeah, I put somebody on finding her ex-husband, guy named Bernard Elan, he said, and I perked up and leaned forward. But Laredo shrugged and said, No luck. The guy died two years ago.

And he may have said more, but I didn t hear it, because in my own unobtrusive way I was reeling from the shock of hearing that Alissa s ex-husband had been dead for two years. I might wish with all my heart that it was true, but I knew very well that he was far from dead and he was trying very hard to make me dead instead. But Laredo was a pretty good cop, and if he said the man was dead, he had a very good reason for thinking it was true.

I tuned out the dull drone of routine cop talk and thought about what that meant, and I came up with only two possibilities. Either my Witness was not really Alissa Elan s ex-husband or else he had somehow managed to fake his own death.

There was no reason on earth to make up an entire pretend life, complete with months of false blogs about A and his divorce from her. And he had, quite clearly, seen me there in her yard looking at the Honda it had been his angry voice inside the house, and his back I had seen going inside. So I had to believe that this much was true: He really was Alissa s ex, and he really had killed her.

That meant he had fooled the cops into thinking he was dead.

The hardest part of faking your own death was fudging the physical evidence: You had to provide a realistic scenario, a true-to-life crime scene complete with compelling evidence and a convincing corpse. Very difficult to do with no mistakes, and very few people got away with it.

But:

Once you get past the first part of being dead, after you have cried at your funeral and buried your body, it gets a lot easier. In fact, by putting his death two years in the past, Bernard had turned the job into nothing more than paperwork. Of course, this is the twenty-first century, and paperwork nowadays means computer work. There were several basic databases you would have to hack and insert your false information and one or two of them were fairly hard to get into, although I would rather not explain how I know that. But once past the various cyberdefenses, if you could just drop in one or two lines of new or altered information

It could be done. Difficult I thought I might be able to do it, but it was tricky, and my opinion of my Witness and his abilities with a computer went up several notches, which did not make me happy.

I was still unhappy when I left the meeting. I had come with a small faint hope of finding one tiny crumb that might lead to a bigger trail of bread crumbs I could follow to find my Witness. I left with even that small hope completely demolished. Once again I had absolutely nothing. Hope is always a bad idea.

Still, there was one very small lead, and I hurried to my computer to see where it went. I did a thorough search on Bernard Elan, and then Bernie Elan. Most of the official records were wiped clean, replaced with Deceased. He had done a very complete job, whatever he might be calling himself now.

I did find a number of old articles about a Bernie Elan who played third base for a minor-league ball club in Syracuse, the Chiefs. Apparently he was a power hitter but never got the hang of the curveball, and never got called up to the majors, and after a season and a half he was gone. There was even a picture. It showed a man in a baseball uniform in profile, swinging at a pitch. The photo was grainy and a bit out of focus, and although I could tell he did have a face, I could not have said what it looked like, or even how many noses he had. There were no other pictures of Bernie anywhere on the Internet.

That was it; there was nothing else to find. I now knew my Witness had played baseball, and he was good with a computer. That narrowed it down to no more than a few million people.

The next few days went by in a sweat-stained blur, and not just because summer had really hit and turned the heat up a notch. Dexter was in a true dither, an all-time, all-star, all-out tizzy of near panic. I was jumpy, distracted, unable to focus on anything except the thought that someone I didn t know was coming my way to do Something I couldn t possibly prepare for. I had to be watchful, ready for anything but how? What? Where would it come from, and when? How could I know what to do when I didn t know when, why, and to whom I would do it?

And yet, I had to be ready for it every moment of every day, waking and sleeping. It was an impossible task, and it had all my wheels spinning furiously without actually moving me anywhere but deeper into a funk. In my feverish paranoia, every step I heard was Him, sneaking up behind me with bad intentions and a Louisville Slugger.

Even Vince Masuoka noticed; it would have been hard not to, since I jumped like a scalded cat every time he cleared his throat. My boy, he said at last, looking at me across the lab over his laptop screen, you are seriously on edge.

I work too hard, I said.

He shook his head. Then you need to party even harder.

I am a married man with three kids and a demanding job, I said. I don t party.

Listen to the wisdom of age, he said in his Charlie Chan voice. Life is much too short not to get drunk and go naked now and then.

Sage advice, Master, I said. Perhaps I could try that tonight, at Cub Scouts.

He nodded and looked very serious. Excellent. Teach them young, and they will truly learn, he said.

That night actually was our weekly Cub Scout meeting. Cody had been going for a year now, even though he did not like it. Rita and I had agreed that it was good for him and might help to bring him out of his shell. Naturally enough, I knew that the only way to really bring him out of his shell was to give him a knife and some living creature to experiment on, but that was a subject I thought best to avoid with his mother, and Cub Scouts was the best alternative. And I really did think it would be good for him, by helping him to learn how to behave like a real human boy.

So that night I came home from work, rushed through a meal of leftover Pollo Tropical as Rita worked at the kitchen table, and hustled Cody into the car in his blue Scout uniform, which he put on every week with barely controlled hatred. He thought that the whole idea of a uniform involving short pants was not merely terrible fashion but also humiliating to anyone who was forced into wearing them. But I had persuaded him that the scouting experience was a valuable way to learn how to blend in, and I tried to make him understand that this part of his training was every bit as important as learning where to put leftover body parts, and he had gone along with the program for a whole year now without any actual open rebellion.

On this night we arrived at the elementary school where the meetings were held with a few minutes to spare, and we sat in the car quietly. Cody liked to wait until just before the meeting started before he went inside, probably because Blending In was still a very unpleasant strain for him. So most evenings we would sit together and do nothing except exchange a few words. He never said much, but his two- or three-word sentences were always worth hearing, and in spite of my great discomfort with clich s, I would have to say we had Bonded. Tonight, though, I was so busy looking for something sinister lurking in every shadow that I wouldn t have heard Cody if he d recited the entire Kama Sutra.

Luckily, he didn t seem to feel talkative, and he did no more than watch studiously as the other boys climbed out of their cars and went in, some with a parent and some alone. Of course, I was watching them all just as carefully.

Steve Binder, Cody said suddenly, and I jumped a bit reflexively. Cody looked at me with something like amusement, and nodded at a large unibrowed boy stalking past us and into the building. I looked back at Cody and raised an eyebrow; he shrugged.

Bully, he said.

Does he pick on you? I asked, and he shrugged again. But before he could answer in actual words I felt a small strange tickling on the back of my neck and a slight uncomfortable shifting of nonexistent bulk somewhere deep inside; I turned to look behind me. Several cars came into the parking lot and drove to nearby spaces. I could see nothing sinister about any of them, nothing unusual that would have caused the Passenger to stir as it had. Just a short string of minivans, and one battered Cadillac at least fifteen years old.

For one brief moment I wondered whether one of them was Him, my Shadow, somehow already moving closer because something had sent a small electric twinge up from the Basement and into my conscious mind. Impossible but I looked hard at each car as it rolled to a stop. For the most part they were generic suburban vehicles, the same ones we saw here every week. Only the Cadillac was different, and I watched as it parked and a stocky man got out, followed by a round young boy. It was a perfectly normal picture, exactly what you would expect to see. There was nothing odd or threatening about them, nothing at all, and they went inside to the meeting without throwing hand grenades or setting fire to anything. I watched them go, but the stocky man did not look at me or do anything except put a reassuring hand on the boy s shoulder and shepherd him inside.

Not him, not possibly anything at all except what it seemed to be, a man taking a kid in to Scouts. It would be lunacy to think that my Shadow could somehow know I would be here tonight, and then round up a boy on short notice, just to get close to me. I took a deep breath and tried to clear the Stupid out. It wouldn t happen here, whatever it was. Not tonight.

And so I resolutely pushed away the small and nagging warning flag that flapped in my face, and turned back to Cody only to see that he was staring at me.

What? he said.

Nothing, I said. And almost certainly it really was nothing, just a passing twitch of the radar, perhaps caused by sensing someone s anger at their favorite parking spot being taken.

But Cody didn t think so; he turned and stared around the parking lot, just as I had. Something, he said positively. And I looked at him with interest.

Shadow Guy? I asked him. That was his name for his very own small Dark Passenger, planted in him courtesy of the repeated traumas he had received from his now-imprisoned biological father. If Cody and Shadow Guy had heard the same soft alarm bell ringing, it was worth paying attention.

But Cody just shrugged. Not sure, he said, which very closely matched my feelings. We both looked around us at the parking lot for a moment, our heads swiveling in near unison. Neither of us saw anything out of the ordinary. And then the Cub Scout den leader, a large and enthusiastic man named Frank, stuck his head out the door and began to holler that it was time to start, and so Cody and I got out of the car and headed in with the other stragglers. I glanced over my shoulder one last time, noticing with something close to paternal pride that Cody did exactly the same thing at the same time. Neither of us saw anything more alarming than more boys in blue uniform shorts, so I shrugged it off and we went into the meeting.

This evening s den meeting was like most of the others: uneventful and even a little tedious. The only thing that broke the routine was the introduction of a new assistant leader, the stocky man I had seen getting out of the old Cadillac. His name was Doug Crowley. I watched him carefully, still feeling a little twitchy from my false alarm in the parking lot, but there was absolutely nothing about him that was even interesting, let alone threatening. He was about thirty-five years old and seemed dull, bland, and earnest. The round young boy he had brought in was a ten-year-old Dominican kid named Fidel. He wasn t Crowley s child; Crowley was a volunteer for the Big Brothers program, and he had offered to assist Frank. Frank welcomed him, thanked him, and then began some discussion of our upcoming camping trip to the Everglades. There was a report on the ecology of the area from two boys who were working on a badge project on the subject, and then Frank talked about how to practice fire safety when you were camping. Cody endured the whole tedious program with grim patience, and did not quite sprint for the door when it was over. And home we went, to our not-big-enough house with its table full of Rita s papers instead of food, with no sign along the way of anything more threatening than a bright yellow Hummer with a too-loud sound system.

The next day at work was endless. I kept waiting for some terrible something to hit me from any possible angle, and it kept not happening. And the day after that was no different, and the day after that. Nothing happened; no sinister stranger loomed up out of the shadows; no fiendish traps were sprung upon me. There was no deadly serpent hidden in my desk drawer, no assegais hurtling at my neck from a passing car, nothing. Even Deborah and her blistering arm punches were taking a holiday. I saw her and even spoke to her, of course. Her arm was still in a cast, and I would have expected her to call on me quite often for help, but she did not. Duarte was apparently picking up the slack, and Debs seemed content to live on a much lower dose of Dexter.

So life seemed to be slipping back into the ordinary rhythm of Dexter s Dull Days, hour plodding calmly into boring hour with no threat of any kind, no variation in routine, no sign of change at all, at work or at home. Nothing but more of the same. I knew it was coming, but every day that it did not come seemed to make it less likely that it would come at all. Very stupid, I know, but it was dare I say it? entirely human of me. No one can stay on high alert around the clock, endlessly, day after day. Not even the Ever-vigilant Dark Scout, Dexter. Not when ordinary synthetic reality was so seductive.

And so I relaxed, ever so slightly. Normal life: It s comforting exactly because it is dull and often pointless, and it slowly lulls us all into a state of waking slumber. It makes us fixate on stupid, meaningless things like running out of toothpaste or breaking a shoelace, as if these things were overwhelmingly significant and all the while the truly important stuff we are ignoring is sharpening its fangs and slinking up behind us. In the one or two brief moments of real insight we get in our lives, we may realize that we are being hypnotized by irrelevant trivia, and we may even wish for something exciting and different to come along to help us focus and drive these stupid niggling trifles out of our minds. Because staying constantly alert is impossible, even for me. The more nothing happens, the more unlikely it all seems, until finally, I actually found myself wishing that whatever it was, it would just happen so it would all be over.

And, of course, one of the few great truths of Western thought is this: Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.

And I did.

EIGHTEEN

It was a hot and humid afternoon at around three o clock, and I had just gotten back to my office from a routine appearance at a rather dull crime scene. A man had shot his neighbor s dog, and the neighbor had shot him. The results were typical of the unfortunate mess that results so often nowadays from our modern obsession with large-caliber weapons. I tried to maintain a professional interest in separating the dog s blood from the man s, but there was so much of both I gave up. We had a confession, so it was clear who our killer was, and there didn t seem like much point in getting terribly worked up about it. Nobody else on the scene was having much luck staying focused, either. We had all seen this sort of thing many times before, cops and forensics wonks alike, and after all the recent hammer excitement, a normal garden-variety shooting homicide seemed irrelevant and a little bit dull.

So I wrapped up my part of the work rather quickly, and as I strolled into my office and slumped into my chair I was not thinking about the outraged dog owner who was now sitting in a cell at the detention center, nor even about the poor disemboweled pit bull he had avenged. Idiotically enough, I even stopped thinking about my Shadow, since I was in the safety of my own little nook, surrounded by the might of Miami-Dade s fearless police force. Instead, I was pondering a vastly more important question: how to persuade Rita to take one small evening off from working at home and cook us a real dinner. It was a touchy problem, and it would call for a rare and difficult combination of flattery and firmness, mixed with just the right touch of compassionate understanding, and I was certain it would be a real challenge to my skill as a Human Impersonator.

I practiced a couple of facial expressions that blended all the right things into a believable mask until I thought I had them right, and in one of those weird moments of self-awareness, I suddenly saw myself from the outside, and I had to stop. I mean, here I was, with a relentless invisible enemy laying siege to Castle Dexter, and instead of sharpening my sword and piling boulders on the battlements I was playing with my face in the hopes of getting Rita to make me a decent last meal. And I had to ask myself did that really make sense? Was it truly the best way to prepare for what was certainly coming at me? And I had to admit that the answer was a very definite, Probably not.

But what actually was the best way to get ready? I thought about what I knew, which was almost nothing, and realized that once again I had let the uncertainty push me away from what I do best. I needed to drop my passive waiting and get back to being proactive. I had to circle back downwind, find something that told me more about my Shadow, and somehow track him back to his lair and let Dark Nature take its course once more. Thinking coldly, rationally, realistically, I knew that he was no match for me. I had been hunting people like him my entire adult life, and he was no more than a wannabe, a sheep in wolf s clothing, a poor sad clown trying to turn himself into a knockoff of the Very Real Deal that was Me. And I could oh-so-easily make that overwhelming truth very clear to him all I had to do was find him.

But how? I no longer knew what kind of car he drove. I couldn t even be sure he was still living in the same area, down in South Miami near my house. It was very likely that he had gone somewhere else where? I didn t know enough about him to guess where he might go to ground, and that was a problem. The first rule of being a successful hunter is to understand your prey, and I did not. I needed to get a better sense of how he thought, what made him tick, even if it was only background and not actually an address or a passport number. And the only window into his world I knew about was Shadowblog. I had read and reread that tedious, self-involved drivel a dozen times already, and I had not learned anything worth repeating. But I read through it once more anyway, and this time I tried to build a profile of the person behind the rant.

The biggest building block, of course, was his anger. At the moment it seemed to be directed mostly at me, but there was more than enough to go around. It started with the unfairness of the game of baseball that never gave him a fair shot at the majors, even though he did everything they asked and always played by the rules. It rambled on endlessly about Assholes who cut corners, cheated, committed crimes without punishment, and even more Assholes who thought hacking a Web site was funny. He certainly wasn t happy with his ex-wife,

A, either, or with the typical Miami drivers he encountered.

The anger clearly came from a rigid and overdeveloped sense of morality, and it had been there for a long time, burbling under the surface and waiting for some reason to boil over and become about something specific. He raged against everybody who didn t follow the rules as he saw them, and spoke longingly of the Priest and his teachings. Wonderful news, a real clue: I was looking for an angry Catholic, which narrowed it down to only about seventy-five percent of Miami s population. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, but it was no good. All I could think of was how badly I wanted to tape him down and teach him about True Penance, the kind that comes in the Dark Confession Booth at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Dexter s Knife. I could almost see him squirming, fighting helplessly against the duct tape that held him down, and I had just begun to savor the picture when Vince Masuoka stumbled into the room in a complete dither.

Holy shit, he said. Oh, my God, holy shit.

Vince, I said, irritated because he had interrupted the first happy thoughts I d had in days. In traditional Western culture, we like to separate deity and feces.

He lurched to a halt and blinked at me and then, with truly annoying single-mindedness, he said, Holy shit, again.

All right, fine, holy shit, I said. Can we move on to the next syllable, please?

It s Camilla, he said. Camilla Figg?

I know who Camilla is, I said, still peeved and then I heard a distant rustle of dark wings and I realized I was sitting up straighter in my chair and feeling a soft tendril of interest from the Passenger slide up my spine.

She s dead, Vince said, and he gulped and shook his head. Camilla is dead, and it s Jesus it s the same thing, with the hammer.

I felt my head move in an involuntary twitch of denial. Um, I said. Didn t everybody agree that Deborah caught the hammer guy?

Wrong, Vince said. Your sister fucked up big-time and got the wrong guy, cause it happened again, the exact same, and now they won t let her near this one. He shook his head. She fucked up huge, cause what happened to Camilla is the same damn thing that happened to the others. He blinked and swallowed, and looked at me with the most solemn and frightened expression I had ever seen from him.

She was hammered to death, Dexter. Just like the other guys.

My mouth went dry and a small tickle of electricity ran from the back of my neck straight down my spine, and although it is not terribly flattering to me, I was not thinking of Deborah and her apparent fall from grace. Instead, I was simply sitting, hardly breathing, as several waves of hot intangible wind fluttered across my face and sent dry leaves scuttering through the gutters of Castle Dexter. The Dark Passenger was up on point, hissing with more than casual concern, and I barely heard Vince as he stuttered on stupidly about what an awful thing this was and how terrible everybody felt.

I am sure that if I could feel at all I would have felt terrible, too, since Camilla was a coworker and I had labored beside her for many years. We had not really been close, and she had often behaved in ways that I found puzzling, but I was quite well aware that when Death visits a colleague, one must display the proper feelings of shock and awfulness. That was elementary, clearly stated in one of the first chapters of The Olde Booke of Human Behavioure, and I was sure that eventually I would work my way around to playing the part with my usual dramatic excellence. But not now, not yet. Right now I had far too many things to think about.

My first thought was that somehow, this was the work of my Shadow; he had written in his blog that he was going to do something, and now Camilla turned up dead, battered into jelly. But how did that affect me? Aside from forcing me to make grieving faces and mouth clich s about Tragic Loss, it didn t touch me at all.

So this was something else, something unconnected to my own personal conflict and yet, something about it had caught the Passenger s attention, and that meant more than all the fake standardized emotions in the world. It meant that something was very off center here, wrong in a way that a Certain Shadowy Someone found extremely provocative, and that meant that whatever had happened to Camilla was far from being what it seemed to be which in turn was an indication that, for some reason that was not at all clear at the moment, Dexter needed to pay attention.

But why? Aside from the fact that Camilla was a coworker and Deborah was in disgrace, why should this cause more than a mild flutter of passing interest from the Passenger?

I tried to shut out the blather of Vince and his annoying outpouring of emotion, and concentrate for just a moment on the facts. Deborah had been certain that she caught the right man. Deborah was very good at what she did. Therefore, either Deborah had made a huge and uncharacteristic mistake, or else

It s a copycat, I said, interrupting the flow of meaningless sound that was pouring out of Vince.

He blinked at me with eyes that seemed suddenly much too large and wet. Dexter, he said. There s never in history been anybody who did something like this hammer thing, not once ever before and now you think there re two of them?

Yes, I said. Has to be.

He shook his head vigorously. No. No way. Can t be it just can t. I mean, I know it s your sister; you gotta stick up for her, but hey, he said.

But once again his pointless drivel was contradicted by the far more compelling purr of reptile logic slithering out from the deep and shadowed stronghold of the Passenger s certainty, and I knew I was right. I still did not know why that should make the alarm bells ring where was the threat to precious irreplaceable me? But the Passenger was almost never wrong, and the warning was clear. Someone had duplicated the Hammer Killer s technique, and aside from petty moral questions and copyright issues, something about that was wrong; some new threat was marching in too close for comfort, right up to the battlements of the Dark Lair, and I was suddenly deeply uneasy over what should have been no more than a routine opportunity to give another solid performance of Artificial Human Grief. Was the whole world out to get me? Was this really the new Model of how Things were going to be?

Nothing that happened in the next few hours made me feel any easier. Camilla s body had been found in a car parked in the far corner of the lot at a giant superstore located very close to headquarters. A lot of cops stopped at the store on their way home from work, and quite probably Camilla had, too. There were three plastic shopping bags with the store s logo scattered across the floor in the backseat of the car, and Camilla s body had been poured onto the seat above them. Just like the other two victims, she had been savagely hammered on every bone and joint until her body had lost its original shape.

But the car was not an official police vehicle, and apparently it was not even Camilla s, either. It was a five-year-old Chevy Impala, registered to a store employee named Natalie Bromberg. Ms. Bromberg had not had a great deal to say to the detectives so far, possibly because, since finding Camilla in her car, her time had been filled with screaming, crying, and finally accepting a large syringe filled with sedative.

Vince and I worked slowly through the area around the Impala, and inside it as well, and my sense that this was the work of a different hand grew steadily. Camilla s body was slumped half-on, half-off the seat, while the other two had been arranged a little more carefully. A small thing, but once again, it didn t fit the previous pattern, and it made me look a little closer.

I am not really an expert on blunt-force trauma, but the places on Camilla s body where she had been hit looked different from what I had seen in the two previous cases; Gunther s and Klein s impact points had visibly been made by the flat surface on the end of the hammer. These had a slight curve to them, a faint concave contour, as if the weapon had been rounded rather than flat, something like a pole, or a dowel, or or maybe a baseball bat? The kind a former minor-league baseball player with anger-management problems might have lying around?

I thought about it hard, and it seemed like it fit except for one small thing: Why would Bernie Elan want to kill Camilla Figg? And if for some reason he did want to kill her, why choose this difficult and repulsive method? It didn t add up, not at all. I was leaping to paranoid conclusions. Merely because somebody was after me, that didn t mean he would do this. Ridiculous.

I worked around the outside of the car, spraying Bluestar in the hopes of finding some telltale blood spatter. I found a very faint bloody impression from the toe of a running shoe on the white line separating the Impala s parking spot from the one next to it. And there were no taco wrappers inside the car, either, which was hardly conclusive. But there was a large patch of blood on the seat under the body that had leaked out from a savage wound on the left side of Camilla s head. Head wounds are notorious gushers but this one had merely trickled onto the seat, meaning that she had been killed somewhere else and then dumped here soon after. The killer had probably parked close to the Impala and quickly slid the body out of his vehicle and into the Chevy s backseat, and it was my guess that blood from the head injury had made the partial footprint.

There was another smaller wound on Camilla s arm, where the bone of the forearm was actually poking up through the skin. It had not leaked nearly as much as the head wound, but to me it was significant. Neither of the other victims bodies had bled at all, and this one had been thumped open twice. It was not quite enough evidence to swear out a warrant and arrest somebody, but to me it was a very important point, and in keeping with my position as a responsible adult in the law enforcement community, I immediately brought it to the attention of the detective in charge, a man named Hood.

Detective Hood was a large guy with a low forehead and a lower IQ. He had a permanent leer and he liked put-downs, sexual innuendo, and hitting suspects to encourage them to speak. I found him standing a few feet away from the Impala s owner, waiting impatiently for the sedative to kick in a little so she could understand his questions without shrieking. He was watching her with his arms crossed and a very intimidating expression on his face, and Ms. Bromberg would probably need a second shot if she glanced up and saw him staring.

I knew Hood slightly from working with him in the past, so I approached him with chummy directness. Hey, Richard, I said; his head jerked around toward me and his expression darkened a notch.

What do you want? he said, and he made no attempt to match my cordial tone. In fact, he sounded almost hostile.

Every now and then I find that I have misjudged a situation and used an incorrect phrase or expression; clearly I had done so now. It always takes a moment to adjust and pick a new one, particularly if I am not sure what I did wrong. But a blank stare and a long pause seemed unsuitable, so I filled the gap as best I could. Um, I said. Just, you know

You know? he said, with a mean mimicking tone. You wanna hear what I know, dickless?

I didn t want to hear, of course; Hood couldn t possibly know anything beyond the third-grade level, except possibly about pornography, and that sort of thing is not really interesting to me. But it didn t seem politic to say so, and in any case he didn t wait for me to answer.

What I know is, your half-ass Hollywood sister shit the bed, he said, and, completely untroubled by the fact that this image did not really make sense, he repeated it. She shit the fucking bed, he said again.

Well, maybe, I said, trying to sound meek yet confident, but there s actually some evidence that this might be a copycat killer.

He glared at me, and his jaw bulged out on the sides. It was a very big jaw, and it looked quite able and willing to bite a large chunk of flesh out of me if it had to. Evidence, Hood said, as if the word tasted bad. Like what.

The, um, wounds, I said. The body is bleeding from two places, and on the other two the skin wasn t even broken at all.

Hood turned his head a quarter of an inch to the side and spit.

You re fulla shit, he said, and he turned away from me, back to facing Ms. Bromberg. He recrossed his arms, and his upper lip twitched. Just like your half-ass sister.

I looked down at my feet, just to be sure his glob of spit had really missed my shoe, and was very happy to see that it had. But it was clear that I would get nothing from Detective Hood except saliva and scatology, so I decided to leave him to his lowbrow musings and go back to looking at all that was left of Camilla Figg.

But as I began to turn away from Hood, I felt a dry, seismic rumble pushing up from a deep and shadowy corner inside, a sharp and urgent shock of warning from the Passenger that Dexter stood in the crosshairs of some hostile scope. Time slowed to a crawl as I froze midturn and searched around me for the threat, and as I looked to the side, off by the yellow tape guarding our perimeter, a bright flash went off and the Passenger hissed.

I blinked, bracing for a bullet, but none came. It was nothing but some gawker taking a photograph. I squinted through lingering blindness from the flash, and saw only the blur of a thick man in a gray T-shirt lowering a camera and turning away to blend back into the crowd. He was gone before I could see his face, or anything else about him, and there wasn t any visible reason why he had set off my silent alarm. He was not a sniper, not a terrorist with an exploding bicycle. He couldn t possibly be any real danger at all, nothing but another one of the many unwashed feeding a queasy curiosity about death. Now I was truly being stupid; I was seeing Shadows everywhere, even where they made no sense. Was I slipping completely out of the world of reason and into kaleidoscopic paranoia?

I watched the spot where the photographer had disappeared for a few more moments. He didn t come back, and nothing came roaring out to kill me. It was just nerves, nothing more, and not my Witness, and I had work to do.

I went back to the Impala, where Camilla s battered body lay in its final untidy heap. She was still dead, and I couldn t lose the feeling that somewhere, somebody was watching me, licking his lips, and planning to make me dead, too.

NINETEEN

It was very late when I got home, almost midnight, and out of pure reflexive habit I went into the kitchen and looked to see if Rita had left some food for me. But no matter how hard I looked, there were no leftovers, not even a single slice of pizza. I searched carefully, all in vain. There was no Tupperware container on the counter, nothing on the stove, no covered bowl in the refrigerator, not even a Wendy s bag on the table. I searched the entire kitchen, but I found no sign of anything edible.

I suppose it was not really a tragedy, comparatively speaking. Worse things happen every day, and one of them had just happened to Camilla Figg, someone I had known for years. I really should have been grieving a little bit. But I was hungry, and Rita had left me nothing to eat; to me that seemed vastly more saddening, the death of a great and sustaining tradition, a violation of some unspoken but important principle that had nurtured me through my many trials. No food for Dexter; All was Utterly Lost.

I did, however, find a chair pulled out from the kitchen table at a sloppy angle, and Rita s shoes flung haphazardly down beside it. Her work was once again piled up on the table, and her blouse hung messily from the back of the chair. Across the room I saw a yellow square stuck to the refrigerator and I went over to look; it was a Post-it note, presumably from Rita, although the scrawled words did not look like her usual neat handwriting. The note was stuck to the freezer door and it said, Brian called where were you!?! It had taken her two tries to write the B in Brian, and the last word was crookedly underlined three times; the point of the pen had gone all the way through and made a small tear in the paper.

It was only a small yellow note, but something about it made me pause, and I stood there by the refrigerator for a moment, holding the Post-it and wondering why it troubled me. It was surely not the slapdash handwriting; no doubt Rita was simply tired, frazzled by rushing out of work after a long tense day of fighting her annual crisis at work, and then hustling three kids through the hot and crowded Miami evening and into a burger joint. It was enough to make anybody tense up, grow weary, and and lose the ability to make the letter

B properly?

That didn t make any sense at all. Rita was a precise person, neurotically neat and methodical. It was one of the qualities I admired in her, and mere fatigue and frustration had never before dimmed her passion for doing things in an orderly way. She had faced many hardships in her life, like her disastrous first marriage to the physically abusive drug addict, and she had always dealt with the violent disorder of life by making it stand up straight, brush its teeth, and put its laundry in the hamper. For her to scrawl a messy note and leave her shoes and clothing scattered across the floor like this was very much out of character, and a clear indication that, um what?

Last time it had been a spilled glass of wine had it spilled because she d had more than one? And done the same thing again tonight?

I went back over to the kitchen table and looked down at where Rita had sat and left her shoes, and I looked at it as a trained and highly skilled forensics technician. The angle of the left shoe showed a lack of motor control, and the sloppily hanging blouse was a definite indication of lessened inhibition. But just for the sake of scientific confirmation I walked over to the big covered trash can by the back door. Inside the can, underneath a scattering of paper towels and junk mail, was an empty bottle that had recently contained red wine.

Rita was enthusiastic about recycling but here was an empty bottle stuffed into the trash can and covered over with paper. And I did not remember seeing the bottle when it was full, and I am usually very familiar with what is in my kitchen. This was a whole bottle of merlot, and it should have been visible almost anywhere in the kitchen. But I hadn t seen it. That meant that either Rita had gone to some trouble to hide it or else she bought the bottle tonight, drank it all in one sitting, and forgot to recycle.

This was not a glass of wine while she worked and I ordered pizza. This was a whole bottle and worse, she drank it when I was out of the house, leaving the children unwatched and unprotected.

She was drinking far too much, and far too often. I had assumed that she was just sipping a little wine as a way of dealing with the temporary stress but this was more than that. Had some other unknown factor suddenly changed Rita into an emerging lush? And if so, wasn t I supposed to do something about it? Or should I wait until she began to miss work and neglect the children?

From down the hall, as if on cue, I heard Lily Anne begin to cry, and I hurried into the bedroom to her crib. She was kicking her feet and waving her arms around, and when I lifted her out of her little bed it was obvious why. Her diaper was bulging out against her sleepy suit, full to overflowing. I glanced at Rita; she was facedown on the bed, snoring, one arm flung up and the other pinned under her. Clearly, Lily Anne s fussing had not penetrated the fog of her sleep, and Rita had failed to change the baby s diaper before she went to bed. It was not at all like her but then, neither was secret and excessive wine drinking.

Lily Anne kicked her feet harder and moved the volume of her crying up a few notches, and I took her over to the changing table. Her problem was clear and immediate and it was something I could deal with simply. Rita would take some thought, and it was too late at night for thinking. I got the baby changed into a dry diaper and rocked her until she stopped fussing and went back to sleep. I put her back in the crib, and went over to my bed.

Rita lay there in the exact same position, sprawled unmoving across two-thirds of the bed. She might have been dead, except for the snoring. I looked down at her and wondered what was going on in that pleasant-looking blond head. She had always been totally reliable, completely predictable and dependable, never deviating even one small step from her basic pattern of behavior. It was one of the reasons I had decided it was a good idea to marry her I almost always knew exactly what she would do. She was like a perfect little toy railroad set, whirring around the same track, past the same scenery, day after day without change.

Until now clearly she had gone off the tracks for some reason, and I had the unpleasant idea that I was supposed to deal with it in some way. Should I stage an intervention? Force her to go to an AA meeting? Threaten to divorce her and make her keep the kids? This was all foreign turf to me, ideas that were in the syllabus for Advanced Marriage, a postgraduate course in the area of human studies, and I knew almost nothing about it.

But whatever the answer might be, I was not going to figure it out tonight. After the long workday, dealing with Shadowblog and whimpering coworkers and Detective Knucklehead, I was bone-tired. A thick and stupid cloud of fatigue had spread over my brain and I had to sleep before I did anything else.

I rolled Rita s limp body over to her side of the bed and climbed under the sheet. I needed sleep, as much as possible, and right now, and almost as soon as my head hit the pillow I was unconscious.

The alarm woke me up at seven, and as I slapped it off, I had the entirely unreasonable feeling that everything was going to be all right. I had gone to bed with the worry bin full: Rita and Shadowblog and Camilla Figg and during the night something had come along and swept away all my fretting. Yes, there were problems. But I would deal with them; I always had before, and I would this time. It was entirely illogical, I know, but I was filled with relaxed confidence instead of the bone-tired anxiety of last night. I have no idea why the change had happened; maybe it was the effect of deep and dreamless sleep. In any case, I woke up into a world where unreasonable optimism seemed like common sense. I am not saying I heard birds singing in the golden sunlight of a perfect dawn, but I did smell coffee and bacon coming from the kitchen, which was a far better thing than any singing bird I have ever heard. I showered and dressed, and when I got to the kitchen table there was a plate of sunny-side-up eggs waiting for me, with three crisp strips of bacon on the side, and a mug of hot and strong coffee on the table next to it.

You were out awfully late, Rita said as she cracked an egg into the skillet. For some reason, it sounded almost like she was accusing me of something, but since that made no sense, I decided it was just the residual effect of too much wine.

Camilla Figg was killed last night, I said.

The woman I work with?

Rita turned from the stove, spatula in her hand, and looked at me.

So you were working? she said, and once again that too-much-wine-last-night edge was in her voice.

Yes, I said. They didn t find her until late in the day.

She watched me for a few seconds, and then finally shook her head.

That would explain it, wouldn t it, she said, but she kept looking at me as if it didn t explain anything.

It made me a bit uneasy; why was she staring like that? I glanced down to make sure I was wearing pants, and I was. When I looked up again, she was still staring.

Is something wrong? I said.

Rita shook her head. Wrong? she said. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. Is something wrong, he wants to know? She looked at me with her hands on her hips and tapped one toe impatiently. Why don t you tell me if something s wrong, Dexter?

I looked back at her with surprise. Um, I said, wondering what the right answer was, as far as I know, nothing is wrong. I mean, nothing out of the ordinary ? It seemed like a sadly inadequate answer, even to me, and Rita clearly agreed.

Oh, good, nothing s wrong, she said. And she just kept looking at me, raising one eyebrow and tapping her toe like she was expecting more, even though what I had already said was so very feeble.

I glanced behind her to the stove; smoke was rising from the pan, where fragrant steam should have been. Um, Rita? I said carefully. I think something s burning?

She blinked at me, and then, as she understood what I had said, she whipped around to the stove. Oh, shit, look at that, she said, leaping forward with the spatula raised.

No, shit, look at the time, she added in a voice that was rising with what must have been frustration. Damn it, why can t it There s just never any Cody? Astor? Come get your breakfast! Now! She scraped two eggs out of the pan, threw in a pat of butter, and broke two more eggs into the pan in a series of motions so rapid that it seemed like one move. Kids? Now! Come on! she said. She glanced at me again and then hesitated for just a moment, looking down at me. I just We need to She shook her head, as if she couldn t think what the words might be in English. I didn t hear you come in last night, she said, the end of the sentence trickling off weakly.

And I might have said that last night she wouldn t have heard the Queen s Own Highland Regiment marching through the house with bagpipes skirling, but I had no idea what she wanted me to say, and why ruin a lovely morning trying to find out? Besides, my mouth was full of egg yolk, and it would have been rude to talk through the food. So I just smiled and made a dismissive sound and ate my breakfast. She looked at me expectantly for a moment more, but then Cody and Astor trudged in, and Rita turned away to hurry their breakfast onto the table. The morning went on in its perfectly normal way, and I was once more feeling the feebleminded glimmer of unfounded hope I woke up with as I drove in to work through the crawling traffic.

Even in the early morning, Miami traffic has an edge to it that you don t find in other cities. Miami drivers seem to wake up faster and meaner than others. Maybe it s because the bright and relentless sunlight makes everyone realize that they could be out fishing, or at the beach, instead of crawling along the highway to a boring, soul-crushing, dead-end job that doesn t pay them anything near what they are really worth. Or maybe it s just the added jolt we get from our extra-strong Miami coffee.

Whatever the reason, I have never seen a morning drive without a full edge of homicidal mania, and this morning was no exception. People honked, yelled threats, and waved middle fingers, and at the interchange for the Palmetto Expressway an old Buick had rear-ended a new BMW. A fistfight had broken out on the shoulder, and everyone else slowed down to watch, or to shout at the fighters, and it took an extra ten minutes for me to get past the mess and in to work. That was just as well, considering what was waiting for me when I got there.

Since I was still feeling stupidly bright and chipper, I did not stop for a cup of the lethal coffee that might, after all, kill the buzz or even me. Instead I went directly to my desk, where I found Deborah waiting for me, slumped into my chair and looking like the poster girl for the National Brooding Outrage Foundation. Her left arm was still in a sling, but her cast had lost its clean and bright patina, and she had leaned it against my desk blotter and knocked over my pencil holder. But nobody is perfect, and it was such a happy morning, so I let it go.

Good morning, sis, I said cheerfully, which seemed to offend her more than it should have. She made a face and shook her head dismissively, as if the goodness or badness of the morning was irritating and irrelevant.

What happened last night? she said, in a voice that was harsher than usual. Was it the same as the others?

You mean Camilla Figg? I said, and now she very nearly snarled.

What the fuck else would I mean? she said.

Goddamn it, Dex, I need to know was it the same?

I sat down in the folding chair opposite my desk, which I thought was quite noble of me, considering that Debs was in my very own chair and this other one was not terribly comfortable. I don t think so, I said, and Deborah hissed out a very long breath.

Fuck it; I knew it, she said, and she straightened up and looked at me with an eager gleam in her eye.

What s different?

I raised a hand to slow her down. It s nothing really compelling, I said. At least, Detective Hood didn t think so.

That stupid asshole couldn t find the floor using both feet, she snapped. What did you get?

Well, I said, just that the skin was broken in two places. So there was some blood at the scene. Uh, the body wasn t arranged quite right, either. She looked at me expectantly, so I said, The, um, I think the trauma wounds were different.

Different how? she said.

I think they were made with something else, I said. Like, not a hammer.

With what, she said. With a golf club? A Buick? What?

I couldn t tell, I said. But probably something with a round surface. Maybe I hesitated for a half-second; even saying it out loud made me feel like I was being paranoid. But Debs was looking at me with an expression of eagerness-ready-to-turn-cranky, so I said it. Maybe a baseball bat.

Okay, she said, and she kept that same expression focused on me.

Um, the body wasn t really arranged the same, I said. Deborah kept staring, and when I didn t say anything else she frowned. That s it? she said.

Almost, I said. We ll have to wait for the autopsy, to be sure, but one of the wounds was on her head, and I think Camilla was unconscious or even dead when the wounds were made.

That doesn t mean shit, she said.

Deborah, there was no blood at all with the others. And the first two times the killer was incredibly careful to keep them awake the whole time he never even broke the skin.

You ll never sell that to the captain, she said. The whole fucking department wants my head on a stick, and if I can t prove I got the right guy locked up, he s going to give it to them.

I can t prove anything, I said. But I know I m right. She cocked her head to one side and looked at me quizzically. One of your voices? she said carefully. Can you make it tell you anything more?

When Deborah had finally found out what I really am, I had tried to explain the Dark Passenger to her. I had told her that the many times I d had hunches about a killer were actually hints from a kindred spirit inside me. Apparently I d made a clumsy mess of it, because she still seemed to think I went into some kind of trance and chatted long-distance with somebody in the Great Beyond.

It s not really like a Ouija board, I said.

I don t care if it s talking tea leaves, she said. Get it to tell us something I can use.

Before I could open my mouth and let out the cranky comeback that was lurking there, a massive foot clomped at the doorway, and a large dark shadow fell over the shreds of my pleasant morning. I looked around, and there, in person, was the end of all happy thoughts.

Detective Hood leaned against the doorframe and gave us his very best mean smile. Looka this, he said. Wall-to-wall loser.

Looka that, Debs snapped back at him. Talking asshole.

Hood didn t seem terribly hurt. Asshole in charge to you, darling, he said. Asshole who will find the real cop killer, instead of fucking around on Good Morning America .

Deborah blushed; it was a very unfair remark, but it hit home anyway. To her very great credit, though, she came right back with a zinger of her own. You couldn t find your own dick with a search party, she said.

And it would be a pretty small party anyway, I added cheerfully; after all, family has to stick together.

Hood glared at me, and his smile got bigger and meaner. You, he said, are off this thing altogether as of right now. Just like your Hollywood sister.

Really, I said. Because I can prove you re wrong?

Nope, he said. Because you are now Hood paused to taste the words, and then let them out in a slow, obviously delicious trickle a person of interest to the investigation.

I had been all set to whip another witty and stinging remark at him, no matter what he said, but this took me totally by surprise.

Person of interest was police code for, We think you re guilty and we re going to prove it. And as I stared at him in numb horror I realized that there was no clever response to being told that you re under investigation for murder especially when you didn t even get to commit one first. I felt my mouth open and close a couple of times in what must have looked like a really good imitation of a grouper pulled up out of deep water, but no sound came out. Luckily, Deborah jumped right in for me.

What kind of brain-dead bullshit are you pulling, Richard? she said. You can t chase him for this just because he knows you re a moron.

Oh, don t worry about that, he said.

I have a really good reason. And as he spoke you would have thought he was the happiest man in the world until you saw the next man who came into my office.

And that next man came in like he d been waiting his whole life for just the right cue line to his dramatic entrance. I heard a stiff and rhythmic clumping in the hall as Hood s last two words still hung in the air, and then the real happiest man in the world came in.

I say man, but in truth it was really no more than three-fourths of a flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens. The prosthetic clatter of his steps revealed that the living feet were gone, and twin metal pincers gleamed where his hands should have been. But the teeth were still human, and every single one of them was showing as he stumped in and gave a large manila envelope to Hood.

Thanks, Hood said, and Sergeant Doakes just nodded and kept his eyes fixed on me, his supernaturally happy smile stretching across his face and filling me with dread.

What the fuck is this? Deborah said, but Hood just shook his head and opened the envelope. He pulled out what looked like an eight-by-ten glossy picture and twirled it onto my desk.

Can you tell me what this is? he said to me.

I reached over and picked up the photo. I did not recognize it, but as I looked at it I had a brief and unsettling moment of feeling that I had lost my mind as I thought, But that looks like me! And then I took a steadying breath, looked again, and thought, It is me! Which made absolutely no sense, no matter how reassuring it was.

It was me. It was a picture of Dexter: shirtless, half turned away from the camera, and stepping away from a body sprawled on the pavement. My first thought was, But I don t remember leaving a body there. And it doesn t really say good things about me to admit it, but my second thought, as I looked at my bared torso, was, I look good! Muscle tone excellent, abs in good shape no sign of the very slight spare tire that had been settling around my waist lately. So the picture was probably a year or two old which did not explain why Doakes was so pleased with it.

I pushed away my narcissistic thoughts and tried to focus on the picture itself, since it apparently represented a very real threat to me. Nothing occurred, no hint of where it had been taken or who had taken it, and I looked up at Hood. Where did you get this? I asked.

Do you recognize the picture? Hood said.

I ve never seen it before, I said.

But I think that s me.

Doakes made a kind of gurgling sound that might have been laughter, and Hood nodded as if a thought was actually forming in his bony head. You think, he said.

Yes, I do, I said. And it really doesn t hurt; you should try it sometime.

Hood pulled another photo out of the envelope and flipped it onto the desk. What about this one? he said. You think that s you, too?

I looked at the picture. This one showed the same setting as the first, but now I was a bit farther away from the body and pulling on a shirt. Something new had come into the field of focus, and after a moment of study I recognized it as the back of Angel Batista s head. He was bending over the body on the ground, and the little lightbulb over my head finally went on.

Oh, I said, and relief flooded in. This was not a picture of Dexter caught in the act of shuffling off somebody s mortal coil; it was Dexter on Duty, a mere workaday nothing. I could explain it simply, even prove it, and I was off the hook. Now I remember. This was like two years ago, a crime scene in Liberty City. Drive-by shooting three victims, very messy. I got blood on my shirt.

Uh-huh, Hood said, and Doakes shook his head, still smiling fondly.

Well, I said, it happens sometimes. I keep a clean shirt in my bag just in case. Hood kept staring at me; I shrugged. So I changed into the clean shirt, I said, hoping he would understand at last.

Good idea, he said, nodding as if he approved of my solid common sense, and he threw one more picture onto the desk.

What about this one?

I picked it up. It was me again, very obviously me. It was a close-up shot of my face, in profile. I was looking off into the distance with an expression of noble longing that probably meant it was time for lunch. There was a slight dusting of beard stubble on my face, which hadn t been there in the first pictures, so this one had been taken at a different time. But because it was so very tightly focused on my face, I couldn t make out anything at all that would tell me more about the picture, or when it had been taken. On the plus side, that meant there was no way it could be used to prove anything against me, either.

So I shook my head and flipped the picture back onto my desk.

Very nice picture, I said. Tell me, Detective, do you think a man can be too handsome?

Yeah, said Hood. I think he can be too fucking funny, too. And he flipped one last photo onto the desk. Laugh this one off, funny boy.

I picked up the picture. It showed me again, but this time standing face-to-face with Camilla Figg. There was an expression of startled adoration on her face, a look of such fond longing that even a dolt like Hood could read it without help. I stared, scanning for clues, and finally recognized the background. This had been taken at the Torch, where Officer Gunther had been found. But so what? Why was this large and stupid thug showing me pictures of me, nice as they were?

I flipped the photo back onto the desk with the others. I had no idea I was so photogenic, I said. Do I get to keep them?

No, Hood said. He leaned over me to the desk and the odor of unwashed detective overlaid with cheap cologne almost made me gag. Hood scooped up the photos and straightened as he stuffed them back into the envelope.

With Hood a few feet away from me once more, I managed to breathe again, and since my curiosity was coming to a boil, I used the breath for something practical. They re all very nice pictures, I said. But so what?

So what? Hood said, and Doakes made another one of his tongueless but joyful sounds; there were no actual words to it, but the garbled syllables had a distinct overtone of gotcha that I did not like at all. Is that all you got to say about your girlfriend s photo collection?

I m married, I said. I don t have a girlfriend.

Not anymore you don t, Hood said.

She s dead. And as if they were wired together and controlled from offstage, Hood and Doakes showed all their teeth in unison in a blinding display of enamel and carnivorous happiness. These were in Camilla Figg s apartment, Hood said. And there s hundreds more of em.

He pointed a finger the size of a banana right between my eyes.

All of you, he said.

TWENTY

Somewhere in this world it is quite possible that children laughed without a care and played with unworried joy. Somewhere, gentle breezes probably blew across a field of grass as innocent young lovers held hands and strolled through the sunlight. And somewhere on this grubby little globe it is even remotely possible that peace, love, and happiness were abounding in the hearts and minds of the righteous. But right now, in the present location, Dexter was Deep in the Doo-doo, and happiness of any kind was a bitter, mocking fable unless your name was Hood or Doakes, in which case you were in the best of all possible worlds. See the funny Dexter? See him squirm? See the sweat pop out on his forehead? Ha, ha, ha. What a funny, funny guy. Oh, look his mouth is moving, but nothing is coming out except meaningless vowels. Sweat, Dexter. Stutter and sweat. Ha, ha, ha. Dexter is funny.

I was still struggling to find a consonant when my sister spoke up. What the fuck are you trying to pull here, shithead? she said, and I realized that those were the exact words I had been searching for, so I closed my mouth and nodded.

Hood raised his eyebrows, and his forehead was so low they almost merged with his hair. Pull? he said with exaggerated innocence. I m not pulling nothing. I m investigating a murder.

With a couple of bullshit pictures? Deborah said with heartwarming scorn.

Hood leaned toward her and said, Couple? He snorted. Like I said, there s hundreds of em. He shoved his gigantic finger toward my head again.

Every one of em a picture of laughing boy here, he said.

That doesn t mean shit, Deborah said.

Framed and hanging on the walls, Hood said relentlessly. Taped to the refrigerator. Stacked on the bedside table. In boxes in the closet. In a binder on the back of the toilet, he said with a leer. Hundreds of pictures of your brother, sweetheart. He took a half step toward Debs and winked. And I may not get to go on the Today show to talk about it, like some losers who arrest the wrong guy? he said.

But I am in charge of this investigation now, and I think all those pictures do mean shit, and maybe a lot more than shit. I think they mean he was banging Camilla, and I think she was going to tell his pretty little wifey, and he didn t want her to. So lemme ask this one more time real polite and official, he said, stepping back from Debs. He leaned over me now, and as he spoke the smell of his unwashed armpits mingled with his rotten breath and made my eyes water. You got anything you want to tell me about these pictures, Dexter? he said. And maybe about your relationship with Camilla Figg?

I don t know anything about the pictures, I said. And I didn t have any relationship with Camilla except that I worked with her. I barely knew her.

Uh-huh, Hood said, still bent over and in my face. That all you got to say?

Well, I said, I d also like to say that you really need to brush your teeth.

He didn t move at all for a few long seconds, made even longer by the fact that he exhaled again. But finally he nodded, straightened up slowly, and said, This is going to be fun. He nodded at me, and his nasty smile got bigger. As of five o clock today, you are suspended, pending the results of this investigation. If you wish to appeal this decision, you may contact the administrative coordinator for personnel. He turned to Sergeant Doakes and nodded cheerfully, and I felt a cold knot form in my stomach even before he added the inevitable clincher.

That would be Sergeant Doakes, he said.

Of course it would, I said. Nothing could be more perfect. The two of them smiled at me with genuine, heartfelt happiness, and when Hood had done all the smiling his system could stand without melting, he turned away and stepped to the door. He spun around there, and pointed his finger at Deborah, making a clicking sound as he dropped his thumb like he was shooting her. See you later, loser, he told her, and he sauntered out, smiling like he was going to his own birthday party.

Sergeant Doakes hadn t taken his eyes off me the whole time, and he didn t now. He just smiled at me, clearly having more fun than he d had in a very long while, and then finally, just as I was thinking about throwing a chair at his head, he made his horrible, gargling, tongueless-laughing sound, and followed Hood out into the hall.

There was silence in my office for what seemed like a very long time. It was not by any means a peaceful, contemplative silence. It was, instead, the kind of quiet that comes right after an explosion, when the survivors are looking around at all the dead bodies and wondering if another bomb is going to go off, and the eerie silence did not end until Deborah finally shook her head and said, Jesus Christ. That seemed to sum things up pretty well, so I didn t say anything, and Deborah said it again and then added,

Dexter I have to know.

I looked at her with surprise. She seemed to be very serious, but I couldn t imagine what she was thinking. Know what, Debs? I said.

Did you sleep with Camilla? she said.

And now it was my turn to say it. Jesus Christ, Debs, I said, and I was genuinely shocked. Do you think I killed her, too?

She hesitated half a second too long. No-o, she said, and it was not very convincing. But you gotta see how it looks.

To me it looks like you re playing Pile On Dexter, I said. This is crazy I barely spoke twenty words to Camilla in my entire life.

Yeah, but come on, Deborah said. All those fucking pictures.

What about them? I said. I didn t take them, and I don t see what you think they mean.

I m just saying they mean a lot to a brainless shit-bag like Hood and he s going to run with it, and he might even make it stick, she went on, recklessly mixing her metaphors. It s perfect for him married guy bangs chick at work, then kills her to keep his wife from finding out.

That s what you think? I said.

I m just saying, she said. I mean, you gotta see how it would look like that. It s totally believable.

It s totally unbelievable to anybody who knows me, I said. That s just completely How can you even think that for a second? And I was actually feeling authentic human emotions of hurt, betrayal, and outrage. Because for once, I was totally innocent but even my very own sister didn t seem to believe that I was.

All right, Jesus, she said. I m just saying, you know.

You re just saying I m up Shit Creek and you won t hand me a paddle? I said.

Come on, she said, and to her great credit she squirmed uncomfortably.

You re saying you want to know if it s all right if they arrest your brother, I said, because I can be relentless, too. Because you know he s secretly the kind of guy who smashes his coworkers with a hammer?

Dexter, for fuck s sake! she said.

I m sorry, okay?

I looked at her another second, but she actually did seem sorry, and she wasn t reaching for her cuffs, so I just said,

Okay.

Deborah cleared her throat, looked away for a moment, then looked back at me. So you never banged Camilla, she said, and with a little more conviction she added, And you totally never beat anybody to death with a hammer.

Not yet, I said, with just a touch of warning.

Fine, she said, holding up her good hand, as if she wanted to make sure she was ready if I really did try to smack her with a hammer.

And seriously, I said. Why would anybody want even one picture of me?

Deborah opened her mouth, closed it again, and then looked like she d thought of something funny, although I certainly didn t see anything to laugh about. You really don t know? she said.

Know what, Debs? I said. Come on.

She still seemed to think something was comical. But she shook her head and said, All right. You don t know. Shit. She smiled and said, I shouldn t be the one to tell you, your sister, but hey. She shrugged. You re a good-looking guy, Dexter.

Thank you, you re not so bad yourself, I said. What s that got to do with anything?

Dexter, for Christ s sake, don t be dense, she said. Camilla had a crush on you, asshole.

On me? I said. A crush? Like, a romantic infatuation crush?

Shit, yeah, for years. Everybody knew about it, Deborah said.

Everybody but me.

Yeah, well, she said, shrugging. But all those pictures, it looks more like a total obsession.

I shook my head, as if I could make the idea go away. I mean, I don t pretend to understand the clinically insane human race, but this was a bit much. That s crazy, I said. I m married.

Apparently that was a funny thing to say. In any case, it was funny to Deborah; she snorted with amusement. Yeah, well, getting married didn t make you ugly, she said.

Not yet, anyway.

I thought about Camilla and how she had behaved toward me over the years. Just recently, while we were working on the site where Officer Gunther s body had been dumped, she had taken a picture of me, and then stammered out something lame and incoherent about the flash when I looked at her. Maybe her inability to speak in complete sentences only happened when she was in my presence. And it was true that she had blushed every time she saw me and come to think of it, she had tried to kiss me in a drunken stupor at my bachelor party, instead only managing to pass out at my feet. Did all this add up to a secret obsession with little old me? And if so, how did a crush get her crushed?

I have always prided myself on my ability to see things as they really are, without any of the hundreds of emotional filters humans put between themselves and the facts. So I made a conscious effort to clear away the bad air, real and metaphorical, that Hood had left behind. Fact one: Camilla was dead. Two: She had been killed in a very unusual way and that was actually more important than fact one, because it was an imitation of what had been done to Gunther and Klein. Why would somebody do that?

First, it made Deborah look bad. There were people who would want that, but they were either in jail or busy running a murder investigation. But it also made me look bad and that was more to the point. My Witness had made the threat, and then Camilla turned up dead and I was the main suspect.

But how could he have known that Camilla had all those pictures? A stray wisp of memory wafted by, some snippet of office gossip.

I looked at Deborah. She was watching me with one eyebrow raised, as if she thought I might fall off my chair. Did you hear that Camilla had a boyfriend? I asked her.

Yeah, she said. You think he did it?

Yes, I said.

Why?

Because he saw her photo gallery of me, I said.

Debs looked dubious and shook her head. So, what? she said. He killed her because he was jealous?

No, I said. He killed her to frame me.

Deborah stared at me for several seconds, with a look on her face that said she couldn t decide whether to smack me or call for medical assistance. She finally blinked, took a deep breath, and said, with obviously artificial calm, All right, Dexter. Camilla s new boyfriend killed her to frame you. Sure, why not. Just because it s totally fucking crazy

Of course it s crazy, Debs. That s why it makes sense.

Uh-huh, she said. Very logical, Dex. So what kind of psycho asshole would kill Camilla just to drop you in the shit?

It was an awkward question. I knew what psycho asshole had done it. My Witness had said he was moving closer, and he had; that had been him watching me at the crime scene and taking pictures. And he had killed Camilla Figg, purely as a way to get at me. It really was remarkably wicked, killing an innocent person merely to cause me inconvenience, and it would have been very tempting to pause and ponder the absolute depths of callous perfidy that this act revealed. But there really wasn t a lot of time to ponder at present, and in any case worrying about moral turpitude is best left to those with morals.

The real question at this point, and it was an awkward one, was how to tell Deborah that all this was happening because somebody had seen me in flagrante delicto. Debs had accepted me for the monster I am, but that was not at all the same thing as sitting in police headquarters and hearing about an actual example of my hobby. Aside from that, I really find it a bit uncomfortable to talk about my Dark Dabbling, even to Debs. Still, it was the only way to explain things.

So without giving her too many embarrassing details, I told her how I had been seen at play by an unhinged blogger who was now taking it all personally. As I stumbled awkwardly through my tale of woe, Deborah took on her stonefaced I-am-a-cop expression, and she said nothing at all until I finished. Then she sat quietly a little longer and looked at me as if she was waiting for more.

Who was it, she said at last a statement rather than a question, and it didn t quite make sense to me.

I don t know who it is, Debs, I said.

If I did we could go get him.

She shook her head impatiently. Your victim, she said. The guy he saw you doing. Who was it.

For a moment I just blinked at her; I couldn t imagine why she would focus on such an unimportant detail when my precious neck was halfway into the noose. And she made it sound so tawdry, just saying it right out like that. Victim and doing, in that flat cop tone of voice, and I didn t really like thinking about it that way. But she kept staring, and I realized that explaining to her that it really wasn t like that would be a great deal harder than simply answering her question.

Steven Valentine, I told her. A pedophile. He raped and strangled little boys. She just stared, so I added, Um, at least three of them.

Deborah nodded. I remember him, she said.

We pulled him in twice, couldn t make it stick. About half the frown lines vanished from her forehead, and I realized with surprise why she had wanted to know who my playmate had been. She had to be sure that I had followed the rules set down by Harry, her demigod father, and she was now satisfied that I had. She knew Valentine fit the bill, and she accepted the justice of his unorthodox end with satisfaction. I looked at my sister with a real fondness. She had certainly come a long way from when she first found out what I am, and had needed to fight down the desire to lock me up.

All right, she said, jolting me out of my doting reverie before I could sing Hearts and Flowers.

So he saw you, and now he wants to take you down.

That s it, I said. Deborah nodded and continued to study me, pursing her lips and shaking her head as if I was a repair problem beyond her ability to fix.

Well, I said at last, when I had gotten tired of being stared at. So what do we do about it?

There s not a whole shitload we can do, at least officially, she said. Anything I try is going to get me suspended and I can t even ask somebody off the record, because it s my brother under investigation

It s not actually my fault, I said, mildly peeved that she made it sound like it was.

Yeah, well, so lookit, she said, waving that off.

If you really are innocent

Deborah!

Yeah, sorry, I mean, because you re really innocent, she said. And Hood is a brain-dead bag of shit who couldn t find anything even if you were guilty, right?

Is this going somewhere? I said. Maybe someplace far away from me?

Listen, she said. I m just saying, in a couple of days, when they got nothing at all, we can start looking for this guy. For now, just don t get too worked up about Hood and his bullshit. Nothing to worry about. They got nothing.

Really, I said.

Just stay cool for a couple of days, my sister said with complete conviction. It can t get any worse.

TWENTY-ONE

If we are capable of learning anything at all in this life, we very quickly discover that anytime somebody is absolutely certain about something, they are almost always absolutely wrong, too. And the present case was no exception. My sister is a very good detective and an excellent pistol shot, and I m sure she has several other praiseworthy qualities but if she ever has to make a living as a fortune-teller, she will starve to death. Because her words of reassurance, It can t get any worse, were still echoing in my ears when I discovered that actually, things could get worse by a great deal, and they already had.

Things were not great to start with: I had crawled through the entire rest of the day at work with everyone avoiding me, which is much more difficult than it sounds, and it resulted in several moments of classic comedy, as people scrambled to escape my presence while pretending that they hadn t seen me. For some reason, however, I had a bit of difficulty in appreciating the comic effect, and by six minutes of five o clock I was feeling more worn-down than I should have as I slumped into my chair to watch the clock tick away the last few minutes of my career, and possibly my liberty.

I heard a noise in the lab and turned to watch as Vince Masuoka came in, saw me, and stopped dead. Oh, he said.

I forgot, um. And he spun around and raced out the door. Clearly, what he forgot was that I might still be there and he would have to say something to a coworker under investigation for the murder of another coworker, and for someone like Vince that would have been too uncomfortable.

I heard myself sigh heavily, and I wondered if this was really how it all ended; framed by a brainless thug, shunned by my colleagues, stalked by a whining computer nerd who couldn t even make it in minor-league baseball. It was well beyond ignoble, and very sad I d shown such tremendous early progress, too.

The clock ticked; two minutes of five. I might as well get my things together and head for home. I reached for my laptop, but as I put my hand on the screen to close it up a small and ugly thought crawled across the floor of my brain and I clicked on my in-box instead. It was really not even definite enough to call a hunch, but a soft and leathery voice was whispering that after I found the Dexter-ized body in the grubby little house he had sent an e-mail and now Camilla was dead and maybe, just maybe

And as I opened my in-box, maybe turned to certainly as I read the subject line of my most recent e-mail. It said, If you can read this, you re not in jail!

With no doubt at all in my mind about who had sent this, I clicked it open.

At least, not yet. But don t worry if your luck stays this good, you ll be there soon, which is anyway better than what I have in mind for you. It s not enough for me just to put you in the ground. I want people to know what you are first. And then Well, you ve seen what I can do now. And I am totally getting better at it, just in time for your turn.

She really liked you I mean, all those pictures? They were everywhere! It was really sick, an obsession. And she let me in to her apartment on like the second date, which you have to say, she wouldn t do if she was a Good person. And when I saw your face plastered all over the place, I knew what I was supposed to do about it, and I did it.

Maybe I was a little hasty? Or maybe I m just getting to like doing this, I don t know. Ironic, huh? That trying to get rid of you, I m becoming more and more like you. Anyway, it was too perfect to be an accident, so I did it, and I am not sorry, and I am just getting started. And if you think you can stop me, think again. Because you don t know anything about me except that I can do exactly what you do and I am coming to do it to you and you don t even know when except it s soon.

Have a nice day!

On the plus side, it was nice to see that I was not having paranoid delusions. My Shadow really had killed Camilla to get at me. On the minus side, Camilla was dead and I was in deeper trouble than I had ever been.

And of course, things got even worse, all because Deborah said they couldn t.

I headed home in a state of numb misery, wanting only a little bit of quiet comfort from my loving family. And when I arrived, Rita was waiting for me by the front door but not in a spirit of tender welcome. You son of a bitch, I knew it, she hissed at me in greeting; it was as shocking as if she had flung the couch at my head. And she wasn t done yet. God damn you, Dexter, how could you? she said, and she glared at me, with her fists clenched and a look of righteous fury on her face. I know very well that I am guilty of a great many things that might make many people unhappy with me even Rita but lately it seemed like everyone was finding me guilty of all the wrong things: things that I hadn t done and couldn t even guess at. So my normally rapid wit did not respond with the kind of clever, brainy comeback for which I am so justly famous. Instead, I just goggled at Rita and stammered, I could How What do I?

It was almost unforgivably feeble, and Rita took advantage of it. She socked me on the arm, right smack in the middle of the tender bull s-eye that was Deborah s favorite target, and said, You fucking bastard! I knew it!

I glanced past her to the couch; Cody and Astor were completely hypnotized by the game they were playing on the Wii, and Lily Anne was in her playpen next to them, happily watching them slay monsters. They hadn t heard any of Rita s naughty words, not yet, but if it went on much longer, even mesmerized children would wake up and notice. I grabbed Rita s hand before she could hit me again and said, Rita, for God s sake, what did I do?

She yanked her hand away. Bastard, she repeated.

You know goddamned well what you did. You fucked that pasty-faced bitch, god damn you!

Every now and then we find ourselves living through moments that make no sense at all. It s almost as if some omnipotent film editor has snipped us out of our familiar everyday movie and spliced us into something completely random, from a different time and genre and even from a foreign country and partially animated, because suddenly you look around you and the language is unknown and nothing that happens has any relationship to what you think of as reality.

This was clearly one of those moments. Mild-mannered, Dexter-Devoted Rita, who never lost her temper and never, never said bad words, was doing both at the same time and directing it all at her innocent-just-this-once husband.

But even though I didn t know what movie I was in, I knew it was my line, and I knew I had to take control of the scene quickly.

Rita, I said as soothingly as I could. You re not making any sense

Fuck making sense and fuck you! she said, stamping her foot and raising her fist to hit me again. Astor s head came up and she looked at us it was Cody s turn in the game and so once more I took Rita s hand and pulled her away from the front door.

Come on, I said. Let s take this into the kitchen.

I m not going to she started to say, and I raised my voice over hers.

Away from the kids, I said. She glanced at them guiltily, and then followed along as I led her through the living room and into the kitchen. All right, I said, pulling out my chair and sitting at the familiar table. Using words that are simple, clear, and not outlawed in Kentucky, will you please tell me what the hell you re talking about?

Rita stood on the far side of the table and glared down at me with an unchanging look of righteous fury on her face and her arms crossed.

You are so fucking smooth, she said through her teeth. Even now, I almost believe you. Bastard.

I actually am smooth, in fact; Dexter is almost all smooth, icy control, and it has always served him well to be just that way. But right now I could feel the cool and the smooth melting away into a warm pudding of frustration, and I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in an effort to get things back to a more comfortable temperature. Rita, I said, opening my eyes and giving her a very authentic look of patient long suffering. Let s pretend for just a minute that I don t have any idea what you re talking about.

You bastard, don t you try

I held up a hand. You don t need to remind me that I m a bastard; I remember that part, I said.

It s the other part I m having trouble with why I m a bastard. Okay?

She glared a little more, and I heard her toe tapping the floor, and then she uncrossed her arms and took a deep breath. All right, she said. I ll play your little game, you son of a bitch. She pointed at me, and if her finger had been loaded I would have died right then and there. You had an affair with that bitch from work a detective called me! she said, as if a detective calling her proved everything beyond a doubt. And he said did I know anything about her and the affair you had and were there any more pictures! And then it was on the news that she s dead, and Jesus Christ, Dexter, did you kill her, too, so I wouldn t find out?

I am pretty sure that some level of my brain was still working, because apparently it reminded me to breathe. But all the higher mental functions seemed to be completely shut down; little fragments of thought scuttled past but none of them seemed able to pull themselves together into anything I could actually think or say. I felt another breath come in and then go out and I was dimly aware that a certain amount of time had passed and that the silence was getting uncomfortably long but I really couldn t bring together enough of the scurrying pieces of thought to make up a real sentence. Slowly, painfully, the wheels turned, and finally single words came back to me bastard kill detective and at last, with that third word, a picture floated up out of the scampering neurons and rose to the top of my swirling nonthoughts a glowering, knuckleheaded portrait of a human ape with a low brow and a mean smile, and at last I had one entire syllable that made sense. Hood, I said. He called you?

I think I have a right to know my husband killed somebody, Rita said. And he s cheating on me? she added, as if killing might be overlooked, but cheating was something truly despicable. It was not quite the proper order of our society s priorities as I had come to understand them, but this was not the time to debate contemporary ethical concepts.

Rita, I said, with all the calm authority I could muster. I barely knew this woman. Camilla.

Bullshit, she said. Richard said the detective said there were pictures of you everywhere!

Yes, and Astor has pictures of the Jonas Brothers, I said; and I thought it was a pretty good point, but for some reason Rita didn t agree.

Astor is eleven years old, Rita said venomously, as if I was totally vile even to try this argument and she would never let me get away with something that low. And she doesn t stay out all night with the Jonas Brothers.

Camilla and I worked together, I said, trying to break through the cloud of unreason. And sometimes we have to work late. In public. With lots of cops all around us.

And did all of the cops have pictures of you? she demanded. In a binder? On the back of the toilet?! Please. Don t insult my intelligence.

I very badly wanted to say that I had to find it before I could insult it, but sometimes we have to sacrifice a very good line for the larger purpose at hand, and this was almost certainly one of those times. Rita, I said. Camilla took pictures of me. I put the palms of my hands up to show that I was man enough to admit an awkward fact. Lots of them, apparently. Deborah says she had a crush on me. I can t control any of that. I sighed and shook my head, to let her see that the full weight of an unjust world lay comfortably on my broad shoulders.

But I have never, ever cheated on you. Not with Camilla, not with anyone else.

I saw a first small flicker of doubt on her face I really am very good at portraying a real human being, and this time I had the advantage of telling something that was very close to the truth. It was a genuine Method Acting Moment, and Rita could see that I was being sincere.

Bullshit, she said, but with less conviction.

All those nights when you just leave the house? With some stupid excuse about work? As if I was supposed to believe She shook her head and gathered steam again. Goddamn it, I knew it was something like this. I just knew it, because And now you killed her?

It was a very uncomfortable moment, even more so than when she had first accused me. All those nights in question, I actually had been up to something: not quite an affair, and certainly nothing involving Camilla just the quiet pursuit of my hobby, which was relatively innocent, at least in the present context. But I couldn t tell her that, and of course, there was no proof of this innocence at least, I hoped not; I mean, I was sure I d always cleaned up quite thoroughly. Worst of all, though, was realizing that I had just assumed she hadn t really noticed when I slipped casually out of the house, which made me look incredibly stupid, even to me.

But surviving in this life almost always means making the best of bad situations, and if a small moment of creativity is called for, I am usually up to the task especially since I am not burdened by any compulsion to tell the truth. And so I took a breath and let my giant brain lead me out of the woods. Rita, I said.

My work is important to me. I help to catch some really bad people not even people. They re animals. The kind of animal that s a real threat to all of us even And I paused shamelessly for dramatic effect. Especially the kids. Even Lily Anne.

And so you leave the house at night? she said.

To do what?

I, um, I said, as if I was a little bit embarrassed. Sometimes I get an idea. About something that, you know. Might help break the case.

Oh, come on, Rita said. That s incredibly I mean, I m not naive enough, for God s sake

Rita, damn it, you re the same way obsessed with your job, I said. You ve been working nights lately, and I mean, I thought you understood when I did, too.

I don t slink out of the house at night to go to the office, she said.

But you don t have to, I said, and I felt myself gaining a little bit of momentum. You can do your work in your head, or on a piece of paper. I need the equipment in the lab.

Well, but, I mean, she said, and I could see the doubt creeping into her eyes. I just assumed that I mean, it makes more sense that, you know.

It makes more sense that I would cheat on someone as beautiful as you? I said. With somebody as drab and shapeless as Camilla Figg? I know it isn t considered proper to speak ill of the dead, and doing so puts you at risk of some kind of divine retribution. But as if to prove that God does not really exist, I bad-mouthed dear dead Camilla and yet no bolt of lightning crashed through the ceiling to turn Dexter into chitlins, and Rita s expression even softened a bit.

But that s not she said, and to my great relief she was slipping back into her normal speech pattern of partial sentences. I mean, Richard said And you never even, all those late nights. She blinked and fluttered one hand in the air. How can it just with all those pictures?

I know it looks bad, I said, and then I had one of those wonderfully happy inspirations that only a totally empty, wicked, hollow mockery of a person could ever have the gall to actually use which, of course, made it just perfect for me.

It s looks bad to Detective Hood Richard,

I said, and gave her a bitter shake of the head to show I had noticed she was on a first-name basis with the enemy. So bad that I m in a lot of trouble, I said. And to be honest, I thought you were the one person I could count on to stand by me. When I really need somebody in my corner.

It was a perfect punch, a true body blow, and it took the wind out of her so completely that she collapsed into a chair as if she was an inflatable doll and somebody had just punctured her. But that s only she said. I didn t even And he said, she said. I mean, he s a detective.

A really bad detective, I said. He likes to beat up suspects to make them talk. And he doesn t like me.

But if you didn t do anything she said, trying one last time to convince herself that I actually did.

People have been framed before, I said wearily.

This is Miami.

She shook her head slowly. But he was so sure How could he even? I mean, if you didn t.

There comes a time when repeating your arguments starts to sound like you re only making excuses. I knew this very well from the hours of daytime drama I had watched over the years, and I was pretty sure I was at that point now. Luckily, I had seen this exact situation so many times on TV that I knew precisely what to do to. I put both hands on the table, pushed upward, and stood. Rita, I said, with truly impressive dignity, I am your husband, and there has never been anybody else but you. If you can t believe me now, when I really need you then I might as well let Detective Hood take me away to jail. I said it very sincerely, and with such conviction and pathos that it nearly persuaded even me.

It was my last round of ammunition but it was a bull s-eye. Rita bit her lip, shook her head, and said,

But all those nights when you And the pictures

And then she s dead. For just a second a last small doubt flickered across her face and I thought I had failed; and then she closed her eyes tightly and bit her lip and I knew I had won. Oh, Dexter, what if they believe him? She opened her eyes and a tear rolled out of the corner and down across one cheek, but Rita brushed it away with a finger and pursed her lips. That bastard, she said, and I realized with great relief that she no longer meant me. And he s supposed to But he can t just And she slapped a hand on the table.

Well, we won t let him, she said, and then she stood up and ran around the table and grabbed me. Oh, Dexter, she said into my shoulder. I m so sorry if I You must be so

She snuffled, and then pushed herself away to arm s length. But you have to understand, she said.

And it wasn t just It s for a while now. And then lately, you ve been so kind of She shook her head slowly. I mean, you know, she said, but in fact I didn t know, or even have a guess. It just all made sense, because sometimes it seems lately like I don t know And it isn t just the house, she said. The foreclosures? It s everything, all of it. She kept shaking her head, faster now. So many nights, when you I mean, that s how men act. When they re doing that And I have to, with the kids here, and all I can do about it is just

She turned half away from me and crossed her arms again, placing the knuckle of one finger between her teeth. She bit down and a tear rolled down her cheek. Jesus, Dexter, I feel so

It may be that I really am becoming more human, slowly but surely, but I had a sudden moment of insight of my own as I watched Rita hunch her shoulders and drip tears onto the floor. That s why you ve been drinking so much wine, I said. Her head jerked back around toward me and I could see the muscles of her jaw tighten down even more on her poor helpless finger. You thought I was sneaking out to have an affair.

I couldn t even she said, and then she realized she was still chewing her finger and dropped it from her mouth. I wanted to just Because what else can I do? When you are just so I mean, sometimes She took a deep breath and then stepped closer. I didn t know what else to do and I felt so helpless. Which is a feeling I really And then I thought it was probably me because right after a new baby? And you never seem to She shook her head vigorously. I ve been such an idiot. Oh, Dexter, I m so sorry.

Rita leaned her forehead against my chest and snuffled, and I realized it was my line again. I m sorry, too, I said, and I put an arm around her.

She raised her head and looked deep into my eyes. I m an idiot, she said again. I should have known that Because it s you and me, Dexter, she said. That s what matters. I mean, I thought so. Until just suddenly, it seemed like She straightened suddenly and gripped my upper arms. And you didn t sleep with her? Really?

Really and truly, I said, greatly relieved to have a sentence fragment with a complete thought behind it that I could react to at last.

Oh, my God, she said, and she put her face down onto my shoulder and made wet noises for a minute or two. And from what I know about people, it s possible that I should have felt a little guilt about the way I had manipulated Rita so completely. Or even better, maybe I should have turned to the camera to show my true villainy with a leer of wicked satisfaction. But there was no camera, as far as I knew, and I had, after all, manipulated Rita with the truth, for the most part. So I just held on to her and let her soak my shirt with tears, mucus, and who knows what else.

Oh, God, she said at last, raising her head.

I can be so stupid sometimes. I did not rush in to disagree, and she shook her head and then wiped at her face with a sleeve. I never should have doubted you, she said, looking at me closely. I feel like such a And you must be so totally Oh, my God, I can t even begin to Dexter, I am so sorry, and it isn t just Oh, that bastard. And we need to get you a lawyer, too.

What? I said, trying to switch gears rapidly from following her mental leaps with bemusement to dealing with an alarming new idea. Why do I need a lawyer?

Don t be simple, Dexter, she said with a shake of her head. She sniffled, and began to brush absentmindedly at my shoulder where she had leaked all over it. If this man Rich Detective Hood, she went on, pausing just a second to blush. If he s trying to prove you killed her, you need to get the best possible legal advice and I think Carlene, at work? She said her brother-in-law And anyway the first consultation is almost always free, so we don t have to Not that money is any So I ll ask her tomorrow, she said, and clearly that was settled, because she stopped talking and looked at me searchingly again, her eyes jerking from left to right. Apparently she didn t find what she was looking for on either side, and after a moment she just said, Dexter

I m right here, I said.

We really have to talk more.

I blinked, which must have been startling to her at such close range, and she blinked back at me. Well, sure, I mean talk about what? I said.

She put her hand on my cheek and for just a second she pressed so tightly that I wondered if she was trying to stop a leak in my face. Then she sighed and smiled and took her hand away and said, You can be such a guy sometimes, and it was difficult to disagree with that, since I had no idea what it meant.

Thank you? I tried, and she shook her head.

We just need to talk, she said. It doesn t have to be about Because that s where this whole thing has gone so completely And it s probably my fault, she said. Again, it was very tough to argue with the conclusion, since I hadn t understood anything leading up to it.

Well, I said, feeling remarkably awkward,

I m always happy to talk with you.

If I had only said, she told me sadly. Because I should know you wouldn t I should have said something weeks ago.

Um, I said, we didn t know any of this until today.

She gave her head one brief, irritated shake. That isn t the point, she said, which was a relief, even though I still didn t know what the point was. I just mean, I should have She took a deep breath and shook my shoulders slightly. You have been very, very

I mean, I should have known that you were just busy and working too hard, she said. But you have to see how it looked to me, because And then when he called it all seemed to make sense? So if we only just talk more often

All right, I said; agreeing seemed a little easier than understanding.

It was clearly the right thing to say, because Rita smiled fondly and then leaned forward to give me a big hug. We ll get through this, she said. I promise you. And then, maybe oddest of all, she leaned back slightly from our embrace and said, You didn t forget that this weekend is the big summer camping trip? With Cody and the Cub Scouts?

I hadn t actually forgotten but I also hadn t remembered it in the context of playing out a dramatic scene of domestic anguish, and I had to pause for just a second to catch up with her. No, I said at last. I didn t forget.

Good, she said, putting her head back down onto my chest. Because I think he s really looking forward And you could use some time away, too, she said.

And as I patted Rita s back with absentminded little thumps, I tried very hard to feel good about that thought because, thanks to a Neanderthal detective and a copycat murder, I was going to get some time away whether I wanted it or not.

TWENTY-TWO

The next day was Friday, and out of nothing more than pure reflex I lurched upright in bed at seven o clock. But as consciousness flooded in to my brain, unpleasant reality came back in with it, and I remembered that I had nowhere to go and no reason to get up: I was suspended from work while a man who didn t like me investigated me for the murder of somebody I hadn t had sex with and hadn t even killed, and my only appeal lay through someone who absolutely hated me Sergeant Doakes. It was the kind of near-perfect trap we would all love to see a comic book villain wedged into, but I could not see the justice of cramming Dashing Dexter into it. I mean, I know I am not without my little flaws, but really; why me?

I tried to look at the bright side: At least Hood had not persuaded the powers-that-be to suspend my pay, too. That might be important if Rita really did find us a new house; I would need every penny. And here I was at home, saving even more money by not using gas, or buying lunch; lucky me! In fact, if I thought about it the right way, it was almost like having an extra vacation except for the possibility that this little holiday might end with me in jail, or dead. Or even both.

Still, here I was, suspended, and at the moment there seemed to be very little I could do about it, so there was no reason for me to leap out of bed and fret. And if I had been the logical and rational creature that I often like to think I am, I would have seen that even this unhappy situation had a very real upside I didn t have to get up! and I would have gone right back to sleep. But for some reason, I found that I could not; at my first memory of what had happened yesterday, sleep had run screaming from the room, and in spite of the fact that I lay there frowning and threatening it for several minutes, it would not come back.

So I lay stubbornly in bed and listened to the sounds of morning at Dexter s house. The sounds had not changed, even though it was summer and school was out. The kids were enrolled in a day-care program at the park where they went for after-school care during the school year, and Rita still had to be at work at the regular time, so the morning program had not changed. I could hear Rita in the kitchen; the smells wafting down the hall told me she was making scrambled eggs with cheese, and cinnamon toast on the side. She called Cody and Astor to come and get it twice before I finally admitted that I was not going back to sleep, and I slumped into my place at the kitchen table just as Cody was finishing his breakfast. Lily Anne was in her high chair, creating a magnificent apple-sauce mural across its tray and her face. Astor sat with her arms crossed, apparently more interested in scowling than eating.

Good morning, Dexter, Rita said, thumping a cup of coffee down in front of me. Cody had seconds, so I have to make Astor, honey, you have to eat something. She went briskly back to the stove and began cracking eggs into the pan.

I can t eat, Astor hissed. It gets stuck on my braces. She said the word with enough venom to drop an elephant, and she bared the bright silver bands so we could all share her horror at the hideous disfigurement.

Well, you still have to eat, Rita said, stirring the eggs. I ll get you some yogurt, or you can

I hate yogurt, Astor said.

You liked it yesterday, Rita said.

Ooohhhh, Astor said through clenched teeth. She slammed her elbows onto the table and leaned angrily onto them.

I ll eat the eggs, she said, as if she was nobly agreeing to do something vile and dangerous.

Wonderful, Rita said, and Lily Anne tapped her spoon on the tray with sisterly encouragement.

Breakfast ended and led to the shouting, slamming, foot-stomping ritual of teeth-and-hair brushing, dressing, and finding socks, changing Lily Anne and packing her bag for the day, and finally, with five separate slams of the front door, they got all the way out to the car, Rita and Astor still arguing about whether pink socks went with a red shirt. Astor s voice faded into the distance, I heard the car doors thunk shut, and suddenly the house was unnaturally quiet.

I got up and turned off the coffee machine, pouring the last of the brew into my cup. I sat back down and sipped it, wondering why I bothered; there was no reason for me to be awake and alert. I had all the leisure time a man could want I was suspended from work, and being stalked by somebody who thought he was turning himself into me. And if he somehow missed me, I was still under investigation for a murder I hadn t committed. Considering how many I had gotten away with, that was probably very ironic. I tried a hollow, mocking laugh at myself, but it sounded too spooky in the sudden silence of the empty house. So I slurped coffee and concentrated on self-pity for a while. It came surprisingly easily; I really was the victim of a gross miscarriage of justice, and it was a simple matter for me to feel wounded, martyred, betrayed by the very system I had served so long and well.

Luckily, my native wit trickled back in before I began to sing country songs, and I turned my thoughts toward finding a way out of my predicament. But in spite of the fact that I finished the coffee my third cup of the morning, too I couldn t seem to kick my brain out of the glutinous sludge of misery it had fallen into. I was reasonably sure that Hood could not find anything and make it stick to me; there was nothing there to find. But I also knew that he was very anxious to solve Camilla s murder both so that he would look good to the department and the press and, just as importantly, so he could make Deborah look bad. And if I added in the uncomfortable fact that he was obviously aided and abetted by Sergeant Doakes and his toxic tunnel vision, I had to conclude that the outlook was far from rosy. I didn t really believe they would manufacture evidence merely in order to frame me, but on the other hand why wouldn t they? It had happened before, even with an investigating officer who had a whole lot less on the line.

The more I thought about it, the more worried I got. Hood had his own agenda, and I was tailor-made for the starring role. And Doakes had been looking for a way to make me legally guilty of something for a very long time almost anything would do, as long as it ended with Dexter in the Dumpster. There was no reason for either of them to discard a perfectly good opportunity to put me in the slammer just because it was fiction. I could even see the path their reasoning would take: Dexter was guilty of something; we can t prove it but we are certain of it. But if we cut a few corners here and there, we can make this thing fit him, and put him where he really belongs anyway in the pokey for a very long time. No real harm is done, and society is much better for it why, indeed, not?

It was perfect Bent-cop Logic, and the only question was whether Hood and Doakes were bent enough to follow it and make up a few small details that would convince a jury of my guilt. Were they both so twisted and so determined to get me that they would go through with it? I thought about the synchronized display of dental work they had shown in my office, the truly vicious glee they so clearly felt at having me in their clutches, and a cold and acrid lump grew in my stomach and murmured, Of course they would.

So I spent the first half of the day slouching around the house, trying out nearly every chair in the place, to see if perhaps a glimmer of hope might flare up if only I could find the right piece of furniture. None of them seemed to work better than any other. The chairs in the kitchen didn t do a thing to stimulate my cerebral process, and neither did the easy chair by the TV. Even the couch was a mental dead zone. I could not drive away the image of Hood and Doakes pronouncing my doom with such joy, their teeth gleaming with identical feral smiles, which matched perfectly the tone of my Shadow s last note. Everyone seemed to be showing me their teeth, and I could not come up with a single thought that might help me shut their jaws or wiggle off their hooks. I was trapped, and there was not a piece of furniture in the world that could get me out of it.

I spent the rest of the day fretting, wondering what I would say to Rita and Debs when Hood and Doakes finally came for me. It would be hard on Rita, of course but what about Deborah? She knew what I was, and knew I deserved whatever punishment I got. Would that make it easier for her to accept? And how would my arrest affect her career? It can t be easy for a homicide cop to have a brother in the slammer for murder. People would certainly talk, and the things they said would not be kind.

And what about Lily Anne? What terrible damage would it do to such a bright and sensitive child, growing up with a famous monster for a father? What if it pushed her off the edge and into a life on the Dark Side, along with Cody and Astor? How could I live with the knowledge that I had destroyed such a potentially beautiful life?

It was far too much for any human being to bear, and I was very glad that I wasn t one. It was hard enough dealing with my own colossal irritation and frustration I am sure that if I d had normal emotions I would have torn my hair, wailed, and gnashed my teeth, all of which were probably counterproductive.

Not that a single thing I did that day produced anything of value, either. I couldn t even come up with a decent farewell speech to give in the courtroom, after the jury pronounced me Guilty on All Counts, as they certainly would. What could I possibly say? It is a far, far darker thing I have done and loved every minute of it.

I made a sandwich for lunch. There were no leftovers in the refrigerator, and no cold cuts. There was also no bread left, except for two half-stale heels, so I ended up with the perfect meal to fit this day: a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich on stale bread crusts. And because it is so important to match the beverage to the meal, I washed it down with tap water, relishing the succulent chlorine bouquet.

After lunch I tried to watch television, but I found that even with two-thirds of my brain focused on fretting about my coming demise, the remaining third of my intellect was a little too smart to put up with the bright and brainless daytime drivel on all the channels. I turned off the set and just sat on the couch, letting one tense and miserable thought chase another, until finally, at half past five, the front door burst open and Astor stormed in, flung her backpack on the floor, and rushed to her room. She was followed by Cody, who actually noticed me and nodded, and then Rita, carrying Lily Anne.

Oh, Rita said, I m so glad you didn t Could you take the baby, please? She needs a fresh diaper.

I took Lily Anne away from Rita and held her, wondering again if this was the last time. Lily Anne seemed to sense my mood, and tried very hard to cheer me up by poking me in the eye and then gurgling with amusement. I had to admit it was very clever, and I very nearly smiled as I took her down the hall to the changing table with one eye half-closed and leaking tears.

But even Lily Anne s sly wit and cheerful antics were not enough to make me forget that my head was in the noose, and some very eager hands were pulling it closed around my throat.

TWENTY-THREE

Half-bright and much too early the next morning, Cody and I stood in the parking lot of the elementary school where the Cub Scouts met. Frank, the pack s leader, was already there with an old van that had a trailer hitch on the back. With him was his new assistant, Doug Crowley, along with Fidel, the boy Crowley sponsored through the Big Brothers program. As Cody and I arrived they were pushing the den s trailer toward the hitch. I parked my car as three other boys were dropped off by mothers in several different stages of Saturday-morning undress and unawake. We all climbed out of our cars into the heavy humid heat of the early summer morning and watched as more boys arrived, shoved from their cars with their gear, and shuffling from one foot to the other as they watched their moms drive quickly and gratefully away for a weekend of boyless bliss.

Cody and I stood together, waiting as the other Scouts trickled in. I had a large helping of Rita s coffee in a travel mug, and I sipped it and wondered why I ever bothered to go anywhere on time. It was clear that I was the only one in Miami who actually understood what those numbers on the face of the clock really meant, and I spent far too much of my dwindling liberty waiting for people who couldn t quite grasp the notion of time. It should have stopped bothering me long ago after all, I grew up here, and I was very familiar with Cuban Time, an immutable law of nature stating that any given hour for a rendezvous actually means, plus forty-five minutes.

But this morning I was finding the tardiness particularly irritating. I could feel Dexter s Doom closing in, and I felt that I should be exploding into focused action, doing something clever and dynamically proactive, and not just standing in an elementary school s parking lot sipping coffee and watching Cuban Time unfold. I hoped that whoever came to arrest me would be working on Cuban Time or even Double Cuban. I could probably make my getaway while they finished a cafecita, played a game of dominoes, and finally strolled around to get me.

I sipped. I glanced down at Cody. He was staring thoughtfully across the parking lot, his lower lip twitching slightly, at where Frank and Doug were pushing at the trailer. Cody never seemed to get bored or impatient, and I wondered what he was thinking that kept him occupied so contentedly. Since I knew very well that he was like me inside, with his Shadow Guy and its Dark Longings, I could guess which direction his thoughts were moving. I just had to hope I could be half as good at steering him away from acting on them as Harry had been with me. Otherwise, Cody would probably celebrate his fifteenth birthday in jail.

As if he could feel my thoughts, Cody looked up at me and frowned.

Something wrong? I asked him. But he just shook his head, still frowning, and went back to watching Frank and Doug play with the trailer. I slurped coffee and watched, too, which turned out to be the closest thing to real entertainment the day had offered so far. Frank was winding down the jack stand on the trailer, and as it took on the full weight of the trailer, it snapped and the trailer s yoke thumped hard onto the pavement.

I could think of several very choice words that might have been appropriate, but of course, Frank knew he was surrounded by innocent ears, so he merely put both hands over his face and shook his head. Crowley, though, bent over and grabbed the yoke with both hands and, with a grunt that was audible all the way across the parking lot, he straightened, lifting the trailer up with him. He took two small steps toward the van, dropped the yoke onto the trailer hitch, and dusted off his hands.

It was impressive as well as entertaining. From the way it had dropped when the jack stand broke, it was clear that the trailer was quite heavy. Yet Crowley had lifted it and pulled it all by himself. Maybe that was why Frank had made him assistant leader.

Unfortunately, that was the last act of entertainment on the morning s program, and forty minutes after our scheduled departure time we were still waiting for three final Cubs to arrive. Two of them arrived together as I finished my coffee, and then finally, with a cheerful and unconcerned wave from his father, the last boy climbed out of a new Jaguar and sauntered over to where Frank was standing. Frank waved his arm at the rest of us and we all gathered around for orientation.

All right, Frank said. Drivers? He looked around at the entire group with raised eyebrows, perhaps thinking that one or two of the boys might be driving. But none of them seemed to be holding car keys; maybe that was asking a bit much of a Cub Scout, even in Miami. Instead, I raised my hand, as did Doug Crowley and two other men I didn t know.

Okay, Frank said. We are going to Fakahatchee State Park. One of the boys snickered and repeated the name, and Frank looked at him wearily. It s a Native American name, he said ominously, looking at the smirking boy for a long moment until the kid felt the full weight and power of confronting something Native American while wearing a Cub Scout uniform. Frank cleared his throat and went on. So, uh Fakahatchee State Park. We ll meet at the ranger station, in case, you know. If we get separated or whatever. Now, he said, raising his eyes up above the boys to adult level, we re gonna leave the cars, and the trailer, right there at the ranger station. It s perfectly safe; the rangers are right there. And then we hike in two miles to the campsite. He smiled, looking like a large and eager dog.

It s gonna be a great hike, just the right distance, and we ll have lots of time to get those pack straps right so they don t chafe, okay? And the rangers will give us all a book that tells us all the cool things to look for along the path. Because if you keep your eyes open you will definitely see some great stuff. And if we re really lucky, we might even see Frank paused very dramatically and looked around the circle, his eyes gleaming with excitement a ghost orchid.

The boy who had been last to arrive said, What s that? Like a flower that s a ghost?

The boy next to him shoved him and murmured, Idiot, and Frank shook his head.

It s one of the rarest flowers in the world, Frank said. And if we see one you have to be very careful not to touch it. Don t even breathe on it. It is so delicate, and so rare, that hurting one would be a true crime. Frank let this sink in, and then gave them a small smile and went on. Now remember. Besides the orchids. We are going into an area that has been kept just the way the Calusas left it.

He lowered his eyes to the boys level and nodded at them.

We talked about this, guys. This is a primitive area, and we need to respect its purity. Leave nothing behind except footprints, right? He glanced at each boy to make sure they were properly serious; they were, so he nodded and smiled again. Okay. We re gonna have a great time. Let s get going.

Frank assigned each boy to one of the cars. Along with me and Cody, I had room for two; one of them turned out to be Steve Binder, the boy Cody had said was a bully. He was a big kid with a single eyebrow and a low hairline he might have been Detective Hood s child, if you could only believe that any woman alive would have the poor taste to submit to Hood, and then keep the result.

My other passenger was a cheerful kid named Mario, who seemed to know every scouting song ever written, and by the time we got halfway to the park he had sung all of them at least twice. Because I had to keep both hands on the steering wheel, I couldn t really turn around and strangle him, but I didn t interfere when Steve Binder, at the point in the song when there were still eighty-two bottles of pop left on the wall, finally gave Mario a hard elbow and said, Cut it out, stoopit.

Mario sulked for a full three minutes, and then started babbling happily about Calusa shell mounds and how you could make watertight shelters with palmetto palm fronds and the best way to start a fire in the swamp. Cody stared straight ahead through the windshield from his place of honor in the front seat, and Steve Binder glowered and twitched in the backseat and every now and then glared at Mario. But Mario babbled on, apparently without noticing that everyone else in the car wanted him dead. He was bright and cheerful and well-informed and almost everything a Cub Scout should be, and I would not have objected too much if Steve Binder threw him out the window of the car.

By the time we got to the ranger station at the park I was gritting my teeth and clutching at the steering wheel so hard my knuckles showed white. I pulled in and parked next to one of the other dads who had gotten there first, and we all got out and released Mario into the unsuspecting wild. Steve Binder stomped away to find something to break, and once again Cody and I found ourselves standing in a parking lot and waiting for people to show up.

Since I no longer had any coffee to sip while I waited, I used the time to pull our gear out of the trunk and make sure it was all carefully packed into our backpacks. My pack held our tent and most of our food, and it was already starting to look much bigger and heavier than it had when I first packed it at home.

It was a good half hour before the last car arrived at the ranger station the battered old Cadillac filled with Doug Crowley and his group. They had stopped for a pee break and to buy some MoonPies. But ten minutes after that we were all on the trail and hiking off to our Wonderful Adventure in the Wild.

We didn t see a ghost orchid along the trail. Most of the boys were able to hide their bitter disappointment, and I kept my mind off my shattered hopes of seeing the rare flower by adjusting Cody s pack straps until he could stand up straight enough to walk. The trick, as we had learned in one of our den meetings, was to get the weight onto the hip strap, and then keep the shoulder straps tight, but not so tight that they cut off circulation and made your arms go numb. It took a couple of tries to get it just right as we hiked along the trail, and by the time Cody nodded at me that he was comfortable, I realized that my arms had gone numb, and we had to start all over again. Once the feeling came back into my arms and we could walk normally, I began to feel a burning pain on my heel, and before we were even halfway to the campsite I had a wonderful new blister on my left heel.

Still, we staggered in to the campsite in good shape and relatively high spirits, and in no time at all Cody and I had our tent set up under a shady tree all snug and comfy. Frank organized the boys for a nature walk, and I made Cody tag along. He wanted me to go, too, but I refused. After all, the whole purpose of getting him involved in scouting was to help him learn how to act like a real boy, and he could not study that hanging out with me. He had to get out there on his own and figure out how to cope, and this was as good a time as any to start. Besides, my blister hurt, and I wanted to take off my shoes and sit in the shade for a while, doing nothing more than rubbing my feet and exercising my self-pity.

And so I sat there, back against a tree trunk and bare feet stretched out in front of me, as the voices faded into the distance; Frank s eager baritone calling out fascinating nature facts over the higher-pitched sound of the boys joking around, and the overriding noise of Mario singing There s a Hole in the Bucket. I wondered whether anyone would think to feed him to an alligator.

It got very quiet, and for a few minutes I sat there and enjoyed it. A cool breeze blew through the trees and over my face. A lizard ran by me and up the tree at my back; halfway up he turned to face me and puffed out his throat, the crimson skin rolling out as if he was daring me to stand and fight. Overhead a large heron flew past, muttering to himself. He was a little awkward-looking, but perhaps that was deliberate, a kind of camouflage to lull his prey into underestimating him. I had seen his kind on the job in the water, and they were lethal and lightning-fast when they went to work on the fish. They would stand very still, looking cute and fluffy, and then slash down into the water and come up with a fish impaled on their beak. It was a great routine, and I felt a certain kinship with herons. Like me, they were predators in disguise.

The heron disappeared into the swamp, and a flock of cattle egrets went by in its place, wings rattling. Almost as if it was caused by the birds passage, the wind riffled through the trees and blew over me again, and it felt very good on my face and my feet. The blister on my heel stopped throbbing, I started to relax, and even all my troubles with Hood and Doakes and my Shadow faded into the background just a little. After all, it was a beautiful day in the primeval forest, in the middle of wonderful, eternal nature, complete with birds. This had not changed in thousands of years, and it might very well stay just like this for another five or six years, until somebody wanted to build condos. Beautiful wild things were killing each other all around me, and there was something soothing about sitting here and feeling like I was a part of a process that went on practically forever. Maybe there really was something to this whole Nature business after all.

It was relaxing and wonderful and lasted almost five whole minutes, and then the nagging worries began to seep back in and batter at me until all the lush feathered scenery might as well have been painted on a ratty old postcard. What did it matter if the forest was timeless? Dexter was not. My time was ticking away, draining off forever into the Long Dark Night what good was a tree if it grew in a world with no Dexter? Even as I sat here admiring birds in the wild, my Goose was being Cooked back in the real world. With luck and skill, I might just survive the attack by Hood and Doakes but without luck and some inspired cleverness, it was all over for me. So unless I could find a way to defuse them, I was going to end my days in a cell.

And even if I dodged their bullet, my Shadow was still lurking with unknown menace. I tried to recapture the sense of quiet confidence I d woken up with the other day. So much had happened since, and instead of handling it with the sure-footed competence I used to display routinely, I was sitting under a tree in the swamp and watching birds, without a single thought about what to do. I didn t have a plan. To be honest, I didn t even have a glimmer of real thought that might turn into a plan. But there should have been some small comfort in knowing I was out here in Nature, where predators are respected, which really ought to count for something.

Sadly, there wasn t any comfort, none at all. I could see nothing ahead of me except pain and suffering, and far too much of it was going to be mine.

Hey, you didn t go either, huh? said a cheerful voice behind me, and it startled me so badly I almost threw a shoe. Instead, I merely turned around to see who had so rudely interrupted my reverie.

Doug Crowley leaned against my tree, looking a little too casual, as if he was trying to learn this position but wasn t quite sure he d gotten it right yet, and his eyes behind his wire-rimmed glasses seemed a little too wide to be really nonchalant. He was a man of about my age, with a square, slightly soft-looking body, and the stubble of a trimmed-short beard on his face that was probably supposed to hide a weak chin, but didn t quite. And somehow, in spite of his size, he had snuck up behind me silently and I had not heard him, and I found that almost as irritating as his chummy good cheer.

On the walk, he said hopefully. You didn t go on the nature walk. Either. A poor fake smile flickered on and off his mouth. Neither did I, he added, quite unnecessarily.

Yes, I can see that, I said. It was probably not very gracious of me, but I was not feeling particularly chummy, and his efforts at being friendly were so clearly artificial that he offended my sense of craft; I had put a great deal of time and work into learning to fake everything. Why couldn t he?

He stared down at me for a long and awkward moment, forcing me to crane my neck up to stare back. His eyes were very blue and seemed a little too small, and something was going on behind them, but I couldn t tell what, and frankly, I didn t really care.

Well, he said. I just wanted to, you know. Say hi. Introduce myself. He pushed off the tree, and then lurched down at me with his hand held out. Doug Crowley, he said, and I reluctantly took his hand.

Pleased to meet you, I lied. Dexter Morgan.

Yes, I know, he said. I mean, Frank said. Nice to meet you, too. And then he straightened up and just looked at me for what seemed like several long minutes. Well, he said at last. This your first time in the

Glades?

No, I used to go camping a lot, I said.

Oh, uh-huh. Camping, he said, in a very odd tone of voice that seemed to indicate he thought I might be lying.

So I added, And hunting, with just a little bit of emphasis.

Crowley shuffled backward a half step and blinked, and then finally nodded. Sure, he said. I guess you would. He looked at his feet, and then looked uncertainly around, as if he thought someone might be hunting him. You didn t bring any I mean, you weren t planning to you know. This trip? he said. I mean, with all the kids around.

It came to me that he was asking if I was planning on hunting right now, in the middle of a flock of wild Cub Scouts, and the thought was so stupid that for a moment I could do no more than cock my head to one side and look at him. Noooo, I said at last. I wasn t actually planning on it. And just because he was being so irritatingly dumb, I shrugged and added,

But you never know when the urge may strike, do you? And I gave him a happy smile, just so he could see what a really good fake looked like.

Crowley blinked again, nodded slowly, and shifted from one foot to the other. Riiiight, he said, and his cheap artificial smile flickered on and off again. I know what you mean.

I m sure you do, I said, but I was really only sure that I wanted to see him burst into flames. And after all, putting him out would be a great exercise for the boys.

Uh-huh, he said. He shifted his weight back onto his other foot and looked around him again. There was no help coming, so he looked back at me. Well, he said. I ll see you later.

Almost certainly, I said, and he gave me a slightly startled look, freezing where he stood for just a moment. And then he nodded his head, flashed me one more brief and unconvincing smile, and turned away to wander back to the far side of the camp. I watched him go; it had been an incredibly awkward performance, and it made me wonder how he hoped to be assistant den leader without having the Cub Scouts beat him up and take his lunch money. He seemed so awkward and helpless, I couldn t see how he had reached such an advanced age without being pecked to death by angry pigeons.

I knew very well that there are far more lambs in the world than wolves but why was I always the one they came bleating to? It seemed terribly unfair that way out here, in the middle of the savage woods, I could still be assailed by twinkies like Crowley. Shouldn t there be a park regulation against them? Or even an open season? They certainly weren t an endangered species.

I tried to shake off the irritation at this uncalled-for interruption, but my focus had fled. How could I concentrate on wiggling out of a trap when I was constantly tormented by pointless interruptions? Not that I d come up with any thoughts on creative wiggling anyway. I d pounded away at the mental rock pile for two full days and was still totally clueless. I sighed and closed my eyes, and as if to confirm that I really was stupid, the blister on my heel began to throb again.

I tried to think soothing thoughts, picturing the heron spearing a large fish, or pecking at Crowley, but the picture wouldn t stick. I couldn t see anything but the painfully happy faces of Hood and Doakes. Dull gray despair curdled in my guts, gurgling a mean and scornful laugh at my blockheaded attempts to get out of the trap. There was no escape, not this time. I was besieged by two very determined and dangerous cops who really and truly wanted to arrest me for something anything and they needed only a little fake evidence to put me away forever, and on top of that a completely unknown person with an obscure but probably very dangerous threat was circling closer. And I thought I could fight them all off by sitting in a Cub Scout tent and admiring herons? I was like a little boy playing war, yelling, Bang, bang! Gotcha!, and looking up to see a real Sherman tank rolling right at me.

It was pointless and hopeless, and I was still clueless.

Dexter was Doomed, and sitting barefoot underneath a tree and being rude to a ninny was not going to change that.

I closed my eyes, overwhelmed, and as the full-throated chorus of Pity Me echoed across the emptiness inside me, I apparently fell asleep.

TWENTY-FOUR

I woke up from a grumpy doze to the sounds of the Nature Hike stomping back into the camp, with two or three boys voices calling out to each other, Frank yelling something about lunch, and Mario s voice rising above it all with a very instructive lecture on what alligators do with their prey and why it was a bad idea to give them anything to eat, even that awful Mystery-Meat stuff they serve in the school cafeteria, which would probably make even an alligator throw up.

It was a very strange way to come back to consciousness from the totally dead and dopey sleep I d been lying in, and at first the sounds didn t make sense to me. I blinked my eyes open and tried to force the noise to add up to something approaching consensus reality, but the leaden stupidity of my nap would not leave me, so I just lay there in a blank stupor at the base of my tree, frowning and clearing my throat and trying to rub the sand out of my eyes, until at last a small shadow moved into my line of sight and I looked up to see Cody. He stared down at me very seriously until I finally pulled myself up to a sitting position, cleared my throat one last time, and somehow remembered how to make real words come out of my mouth.

Well, I said, and to my heavy-headed ears even that one syllable sounded stupid, but I plowed on. How was the nature hike?

Cody frowned and shook his head. Okay, he said.

What kind of nature did you see?

For a moment I thought he might actually smile, and then he said,

Alligator, and there was a slight edge in his voice that could almost have been excitement.

You saw an alligator? I asked, and he nodded.

What did it do?

Looked at me, he said. Something about the way he said it added up to a whole lot more than three small words.

And what happened then? I asked him.

Cody glanced around and then lowered his already soft voice to make sure no one else could hear him. Shadow Guy laughed, he said. At the alligator. It was a very long speech for him, and to make it even more notable, he really did smile then, just a brief flicker across his small and serious face, but there was no mistaking it. Shadow Guy, Cody s Dark Passenger, had made an emotional connection with the honest and savage spirit of a real live predator, and Cody was delighted.

So was I. Isn t nature wonderful? I said, and he nodded happily. Well, what now?

Hungry, he said, which actually made sense, so I unzipped the fly of our tent and got our lunch. It was in Cody s pack, because I had wanted him to carry less weight coming home, in case the ordeal of camping made him tired.

We did not have to do a great deal of preparation for this meal; Rita had packed us a premade lunch consisting of bologna salad sandwiches and a baggie full of carrot spears and grapes, followed by a final course of a medley of cookies from the grocery store s bakery. Hiking and fresh air are said to make food taste better, and it may be true. In any case, there were no leftovers.

After lunch, Frank called everybody together again, and then organized us into teams, each with an Important Job. Cody and I were assigned to the firewood-collecting group, and we stood by the fire circle and listened dutifully as Frank lectured us thoroughly about making sure we gathered only deadwood, and remember that sometimes it could look dead but it wasn t, and that to injure a living tree in this area was not only bad for the planet but an actual crime; and don t forget to be very careful about poison oak, poison ivy, and something called manchineel.

I realized that it was very hard to be careful about something if you had no idea what it was, so I made the mistake of asking about manchineel. Unfortunately, this was just the excuse Frank needed to launch himself into a full-blown Nature Lecture. He gave me a very happy nod. You have to watch out for that one, he said brightly. Because it is deadly. Even just touching it will burn your skin. I mean, blisters and everything, and you will definitely require medical attention. So watch for it it s a tree, and the leaves are kind of oval and waxy, and it s got, um the fruit looks kinda like apples? But Do Not Eat It! It will absolutely kill you, and even touching it is dangerous, so

This was obviously a subject close to Frank s heart, and I wondered if I had misjudged him. Anyone with such a passion for lethal vegetation couldn t be all bad. He had a lecture five full minutes long just on the manchineel tree, and that was only the start.

It was very instructive: Manchineel, apparently, had been used by the Aboriginal Peoples of the Caribbean for poison, torture, and several other worthwhile purposes. Even sitting under the tree during a rainstorm could be deadly. In fact, the Carib Indians had actually tied their prisoners to the trunk of the tree when it rained, because the water dripping off the leaves made an acid bath strong enough to eat through human flesh. And arrows dipped in the sap could cause painful death; clearly it was wonderful stuff. But Frank s main point avoid the manchineel! was very plain long before he wound up his lecture with a few halfhearted warnings about poison oak. And then, just when I thought we could make our getaway, one of the boys said, What about snakes?

Frank smiled happily; on to lethal animals! He took a deep breath, and he was off again. Oh, it s not just snakes, he said. I mean, we talked about the rattlesnakes diamondback and pygmy and coral snakes! They are Absolute Killers! Don t confuse them with the corn snake Remember? Red touches yellow?

He raised his eyebrows, and the whole group dutifully finished the rhyme, chanting, You re a dead fellow. Frank smiled and nodded at them.

That s right, he said. Only coral snakes have red bands that touch their yellow bands. So keep clear of those. And don t forget the cottonmouth, too, by the water. Not as deadly as coral snakes, but they ll come after you. One bite probably wouldn t kill you, but there s usually a whole bunch of them all together, and they come at you like bees, and you get five or six bites, that s more than enough to kill you. Okay?

I really thought that might be it, and I actually had one foot raised to make my getaway when Mario cheerfully called out, Hey, the guidebook says there s bears, too!

Frank nodded and pointed a finger at him and we were off again.

That s right, Mario. Good point. We have black bears in Florida, which are not as aggressive as the brown ones, and they re not as big, either. Kind of puny next to a grizzly, only around four hundred pounds.

If he was hoping we would all heave a sigh of relief at the petite size of the black bear, he was disappointed; a four-hundred-pound bear seemed plenty big enough to play jai alai with my head, and judging by the wide eyes of the boys all around me, I was not the only one who thought so.

Just remember, they may be small, but they can be very cranky if they have a cub? They run very fast, and they can climb trees. Oh! So can panthers which are very rare, an endangered species. So we probably won t see one, but if we do remember this, guys: They are basically like lions, and you know. We talk about how cool they are, and how we need to help protect panthers and their habitat but they are still very dangerous animals. I mean, most of the animals out here. Let s remember they are wild. So give them room; respect their habitat, because you are in their space, and it s Even raccoons, okay? I mean, they get into everything, and they look awful cute. They might even come right up to you. But they can have rabies, which you can get from them just from a little scratch, so stay away.

Once again, I made some small movement in the direction of escaping, and just as if he was a prison guard nailing a fleeing prisoner with his sniper s rifle, Frank whipped up his finger, pointed right at me, and said, And don t forget the insects, because there are so many venomous insects. Not just fire ants, which you all know about? The boys nodded solemnly; we all knew about fire ants. Well, out here you got wasp mounds, too, and Africanized bees are possible and scorpions? The black scorpion can really sting you good and there are some spiders to watch out for, too, the brown recluse, the black widow, the brown widow.

I had always thought that Miami was a dangerous place, but as Frank rambled on through his recital of the countless forms of hideous death awaiting us in the woods, Miami began to pale in comparison to the rapacious bloodlust of Nature. There was an endless list of things that could kill us, or at least make us very unhappy, and while the thought of murderous ravening Nature truly did have its charms, I began to think it might not have been such a good idea to come to a place that was so crammed full of lethal plants and animals. I also wondered if we would escape Frank before nightfall, since his list of the Terrors of the Wild was still unfolding after fifteen minutes, and he seemed quite capable of talking at length on each and every one of them. I looked around me for a way to escape, but it seemed that every single direction was blocked by lurking terror. Apparently almost everything in the park was just waiting for a chance to murder us, or at least cause fits of bloody vomiting.

Frank finally wound down with a few words of caution about alligators and don t forget the American crocodile! Which has a pointier nose and is much more aggressive! He finished with a final reminder that Nature was Our Friend, which seemed a little delusional, considering the long and deadly census of the park he had just completed. At any rate, Cody was impressed enough that he insisted on going back to the tent and getting his pocketknife. I stood at the head of the trail and waited for him, watching as the other work parties got busy with their jobs. Doug Crowley was leading a trio of boys around the camp in a quest for litter, and I watched them for a moment, until he abruptly stood up with a crushed and faded Dr Pepper can in his hand and turned to look back at me.

For a long moment Crowley just stared, his mouth hanging slightly open. I stared back, although my mouth was closed. The moment stretched on and I wondered why we didn t both simply look away. But then one of Crowley s crew shouted something about an indigo snake, and he turned quickly away. I watched his back for a few more seconds, and then I turned away, too. On top of being a total nonentity, Crowley was quite clearly far more socially inept than I had ever been; he had no idea how to relate to other people, and his awkwardness made me a little uncomfortable. But it would be easy enough to avoid him once this expedition into deadly horror was over, assuming I survived. A minute later, Cody came back with his pocketknife and he and I finally managed to tiptoe off into the venomous forest in search of a few combustible twigs that would not kill us.

We moved slowly and carefully; Frank had done a wonderful job of convincing us that we would only survive by a miracle of random chance, and I could tell that Cody felt danger and violent death breathing down his neck with every cautious step he took. He crept along the path with his pocketknife open in his hand, approaching each leaf and twig as if it might leap up and sever his jugular. Still, after an hour or so we had managed to collect a decent pile of deadwood, and miraculously enough, we were still alive. We took our wood back to the fire circle at the campsite, and then slunk back to the relative safety of our tent.

The tent s flap was open, although I had definitely closed it. Clearly Cody had left it open when he went back for his pocketknife. This was doubly annoying, since we now knew that the whole area was swarming with terrifying creatures that were absolutely trembling with eagerness for a chance to slip into our tent to poison, torture, and devour us. But the whole purpose of the trip was to have quality time with Cody, and scolding him for his carelessness would probably not be a bonding experience in the best sense of the words, so I just sighed and crawled watchfully into the tent.

Dinner that night was a communal affair, with everyone gathered around the fire circle and happily eating traditional wilderness food, just like the Calusas ate beans and wieners. Afterward, Frank pulled out a small and battered guitar and launched into a program of campfire songs, and by the end of the second song he had worn down the boys resistance enough that they began to sing along. Cody stared around him with a look of appalled disbelief on his face, which grew even bigger when I finally joined in on There s a Hole in the Bottom of the Sea. I nudged him to get him to sing, too after all, we were trying to teach him to fit in. But this was too much for his finer nature, and he just shook his head and watched with disapproval.

I had to set an example, of course, and show him how simple and painless it could be to pretend to be human. So I plowed on grimly through Be Kind to Your Web-footed Friends, Davy Crockett, Cannibal King, the Cubs version of Battle Hymn of the Republic, and dozens of other touching and funny reminders that America is a nation with a song in its heart and a hole in its head.

Cody sat and looked around him as if the world had gone mad and exploded into a hideous caterwauling din, and he was the only one left with a clear head and a sense of decency. Even when Frank finally put down his guitar the fun was not over. The magical evening wound on through a series of terrifying ghost stories. Frank seemed to get real enjoyment out of telling them, and he had a knack for horrific detail that made his listeners slack-jawed with fear. We listened with growing dread to The Hook, The Terrible Smell, The Quiet Thump in the Next Room,

The Dark Sucker, The Viper, and many more, until the fire died down to a red glow, and Frank finally released us to stagger away and crawl stunned and trembling into our snug little sleeping bags, with visions of supernatural terror now mingling with our thoughts of snakes and spiders and bears and rabid raccoons.

And as I finally drifted off into sleep, I vowed to myself that if I lived through the night, I would never go camping again without a flamethrower, a bag of dynamite, and some holy water.

Ah, wilderness.

TWENTY-FIVE

It may be that I will have to rethink the possibility of a kind and caring Deity, because I did live through the night. This did not come without a price, however. Frank s nearly endless list of the terrors of the wild had included dozens of lethal insects, and yet he had left out one of the most common the mosquito. Perhaps upset at being left off the list, the mosquito hordes had gathered their vast army inside our tent, and they spent the night making sure that I would never forget them again. When I woke up, much too early, my face and hands, which had been exposed all night, were covered with bites, and as I sat up I was actually a little bit dizzy from the loss of blood.

Cody was in slightly better shape, since he had been so worried about rabid alligators and zombies with metal hooks that he had wiggled all the way down inside his sleeping bag and left only his nose sticking out. But the tip of his nose was crowded with red dots, as if the insects had held a competition to see how many bites they could fit onto the smallest area of exposed skin.

We crawled weakly out of the tent, scratching ourselves vigorously, and somehow staggered over to the fire circle without fainting. Frank already had a cooking fire going, and I perked up a little when I saw he had some water boiling in a kettle. But because the Universe was clearly set on punishing Dexter for all his real and imagined sins, no one had brought any kind of coffee, not even instant, and the boiling water was all used to make hot chocolate.

The morning crawled on through breakfast and into Organized Activities. Frank started the boys on a snipe hunt, which was mostly intended to humiliate the new Cubs who had not been camping with the pack before. Each of these Newbies was given a large paper bag and a stick and told to beat the bushes with the stick and yodel until the snipes ran out and jumped into the bag. Luckily, Cody was too suspicious to fall for this hoax, and he stood beside me and watched the hilarity with a puzzled frown, until a giggling Frank finally called off the game.

After that, everyone got out their nature booklets, and we all wandered into the Lethal Forest again to see how many different things from the booklet we could identify before one of them killed us. Cody and I did very well, finding many of the birds, and almost all the plants. I even discovered some poison ivy. Unfortunately, I found it in a very direct way. I saw what I thought was a black scorpion crawling away, and when I carefully pushed aside some foliage to show it to Cody, he pointed at the plant I was holding and held up his booklet.

Poison ivy, he said. He pointed to the illustration, and I nodded; it was a perfect match. I was actually holding poison ivy in my unprotected hands. Since they were already covered with mosquito bites, it seemed redundant, but clearly I was in for an epic itch. Now if only an endangered species of eagle would attack me and claw out my eyeballs, my Wilderness Adventure would be complete. I scrubbed with soap and water and even took an antihistamine, but my already itchy hands were throbbing and swelling up by the time we hiked back to our cars for the drive home.

Other campers who had not had such wonderful luck encountering Our Lethal Forest Friends milled around and called to each other happily, while I cradled my hands and waited for everyone to arrive in the parking lot and find their assigned vehicle. For some reason, possibly just one more mean trick on me by a positively cranky Fate, Doug Crowley s group all arrived together, got into the beat-up old Cadillac, and drove away for home while Cody and I were still waiting for Mario. I watched the old car cruise past and head out of the parking lot and then turn right onto the highway. The car gave a funny lurch and backfired once, causing a strange rattling sound as the piston knocked at the same time the loose front bumper shook. Then the old Caddy accelerated and was gone down the road, and I turned away and leaned on my car, watching the trailhead for any sign of Mario.

Mario did not appear. A fly began to circle my head obsessively, searching for whatever it is that flies always want. I didn t know what it was, but I was evidently full of it, because the fly found me overwhelmingly attractive. It circled, darted in toward my face, and circled some more, and it would not give up and go away. I swatted at the fly, but I couldn t touch it, and my flailing didn t seem to discourage it. I wondered whether the fly was poisonous, too. If not, I would certainly be allergic to it. I swatted again with no luck, maybe because my hands were swollen from the poison ivy and mosquito bites. Or maybe I was just getting old and slow. I probably was, just when I needed all my reflexes at peak ability to deal with the threats coming at me, known and unknown.

I thought about Hood and Doakes, and wondered what they had been doing to frame me while I was busy infecting myself with plant and insect venom. I hoped that the lawyer Rita was arranging would help, but I had a very bad feeling that he wouldn t. I have been in and around the law my whole life, and it s always seemed to me that when you need a lawyer it s already too late.

Then I thought about my Shadow, and I wondered how and when he would come at me. It sounded so melodramatic, right out of an ancient comic book. The Shadow is coming. Mooo-hahaha. Goofy rather than dangerous, as far as the sound was concerned, but then sounds can be misleading. Like the sound of Crowley s car backfiring it sounded like the car was about to fall apart, but obviously the old thing made it here safely. And I had heard that sound before.

I blinked. Where had that thought come from?

I swatted at the fly again and missed. I was certain I had heard that distinctive clattering backfire not too long ago, but I couldn t remember when. But so what? Not important. Just more clutter in my overloaded mental works. Funny sound, though, very singular, and I was sure I d heard it before. Bang, rattle-rattle. But my brain stayed blank; perhaps the poor ravaged thing was collapsing into premature senility. Quite likely an inevitable side effect of the recent combination of peril and frustration and loss of blood from the mosquitoes. Even the one time I had slipped out for a little amusement had gone wrong; I played that evening back mentally, once again remembering the horrible surprise in the grubby little house. And it had started out with such a promising feel to it, from the dark and deserted street outside when I felt so eager, ready, unstoppable even, when I had been unexpectedly lit up by a passing car

Without realizing what I was doing I found myself standing up straight and staring out at the highway. It was a stupid thing to do; Crowley s car was long gone. I stared after it anyway, for a very long time, until I finally became aware that Cody was jerking on my arm and saying my name.

Dexter. Dexter. Mario s here. Dexter, let s go, he said, and I became aware that he had said it more than once, but it didn t matter, because I was also aware of something much more important.

I knew when I had heard that backfire before.

Bang. Double rattle.

Dexter stands there bathed in the light of an old car s high beams, holding his gym bag filled with party favors and blinking at the light. Just standing on the sidewalk, wrapped in the cool cocoon of my Need-filled disguise, and as the car turns the corner I am suddenly lit up like I am on center stage and singing the title song of a Broadway show and whoever is in that car can see me as clearly as if it is a bright summer afternoon.

Just that one frozen moment of perfect illumination; then the car speeds up:

Bang. Double rattle.

And it hurries away, around the next corner and into the night and away from the grubby little house on the dark street, away from the neighborhood where Dexter has found his Witness s Honda.

And Dexter thinks no more about it and goes on into the house, and is still staring at the Almost-familiar Thing on the table when the sirens begin to wind closer because someone had known exactly when I went in, and timed their call to 911 perfectly because he had seen me outside, lit up in his high beams, and when he was sure it was me he had put his foot down hard on the accelerator to get away and make his call

Bang. Double rattle.

Away into the night while Dexter slipped inside for his gaping and drooling lesson.

And now he has told me he is coming Closer, to mock me, to punish me, to become me

And he has come closer, all the way up to my face.

Doug Crowley is Bernie Elan; my Shadow.

I had thought it was self-indulgent nonsense, blather from a deranged doofus, and I would be more than a match for whatever he could come up with. But then Camilla turned up dead and I was blamed for it.

And just like he had promised, I looked very bad all of a sudden.

He had gotten into Camilla s apartment and seen all the pictures of me, and even left one of his own Camilla and me face-to-face, the final clinching shot in his collage, the ideal way to set me up and take me down. And he had killed Camilla to push all the suspicion on to me. It was very neat; whether I was ever actually arrested or not didn t matter. I was pinned in the spotlight, under constant scrutiny, and therefore completely helpless to do anything. One small part of me actually paused and admired the way he had worked it. But it was a very small part, and I crushed it quickly and felt myself begin to smolder. Closer than you think, he had said, and he had done exactly that. His stupid, awkward attempt at conversation that I had found so irritating; I had wondered why he wouldn t go away and leave me alone. And now I knew why. He had been riding up into my face and touching me to say, This could have been your death, and you are too slow and stupid to stop me.

Boo.

And he was right. He had proved it. I hadn t suspected anything, felt nothing but irritation as he had goggled down at me and blathered nonsense and then walked away, no doubt lit up inside like the Fourth of July sky. And I didn t even know it until right now.

Bang. Double rattle.

Gotcha.

Dexter? Cody said one more time, and he sounded a little worried. I looked at him frowning at me and tugging at my arm. Mario and Steve Binder stood behind him, watching me and looking uncomfortable.

Sorry, guys, I said. I was just thinking about something. And it is a tribute to my long years of diligent training that even though my brain was screaming at me to run to action stations and open fire with all guns, I still managed to maintain my cheerful disguise and get all three boys into the car and start driving, and I even remembered the right direction to take us all home.

Happily for us all, Mario was much quieter on the long ride back. He had stumbled onto a wasp mound and gotten three or four stings before he escaped, which just proves that insects are a lot smarter than we give them credit for. The other boy, Steve Binder, just sat silently beside him in the backseat, frowning. Every now and then he would turn and stare at Mario s wasp stings, poke one with a finger, and smirk when Mario jumped. Even in my profound mental funk, I began to warm up to Steve Binder just a little.

Other than those few interruptions, the drive home was quiet, and I used the relative silence to think, which was something I desperately needed to do right now. With a few minutes of reflection I pulled myself off high alert and began to sort through things calmly and rationally. All right: The Caddy s sound was distinctive, but that was not conclusive proof of anything. Sounds like that might come from any old car. And to think of Crowley as being dangerous in any way took some hard work. He was so completely soft, inept, his presence almost intangible which the writer of Shadowblog had made a point of saying about himself. It was where the name Shadowblog came from. I walk into a room and it s like they can t even see me, like I m no more than a fucking shadow. A perfect description of Crowley, if shadows could be annoying.

But to think of it as a disguise, the same kind as mine? Ridiculous it was too good, maybe even better than mine, which I did not want to admit at all. And it was impossible that it could be good enough to fool me and fool the Passenger, too. Nobody was that good especially nobody who had so much trouble faking a real-looking smile. To think that anything with an appearance that soft and insubstantial could hammer Camilla Figg to death it was absurd. It made no sense at all.

I remembered my admiration of the heron back in the swamp: so cute and fuzzy, and so very deadly. Was it possible that Crowley was not a bland doofus at all, but was actually another of Nature s great achievements, something like the heron, which looked so tame and pleasant that it got right on top of you and got its beak into you while you were still admiring the plumage?

It was possible. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought it was likely, too.

Crowley was my Shadow.

He had stalked me, framed me, and then come right up to me to gloat about it. And now he was going to push me out of my life and into the Dark Forever, where I had sent so many deserving friends. And then what would he do, take my place? Become the new Dark Avenger? Turn himself into Dexter Mark II, a double with a new look, softer and more harmless-looking? Lure his victims in with the appearance of bland and annoying Normality and then bang! Speared and swallowed, just like the heron s prey.

Maybe it should have been comforting to think that someone wanted to continue my Good Works after I was gone, but I was not comforted, not at all. I liked being me and doing what I did, and I was not done yet, not by a long shot. I planned to go on being Dexter for a very long time, finding the wicked and sending them on their way, and I had one very immediate candidate in mind. It had become personal. I knew that was a bad thing, against the Harry Code and everything I knew to be right and true, but I wanted Doug Crowley, or Bernie Elan, or whoever he wanted to be. More than I had ever wanted anything, I wanted to get my hands on him and tape him to a table and watch him squirm and see his eyes bulge out with terror and smell the fear sweat as it broke out all over him and then slowly, very slowly, raise up a small and very sharp blade and as his eyes go red with knowing that the agony is coming I will smile and I will begin his very own end.

He thought he was so clever, coming right up to my face and mumbling stupidly, while all the while he was playing his game, touching me lightly instead of killing me. He had been counting coup on me, that ancient game of the Plains Indians. It was the ultimate insult if you were a Lakota, a failure of manhood so shameful it could actually end a warrior s life when it happened, to be touched by an enemy while you stood helpless but I was not a Native American. I was Dexter, the One, the Only, and Crowley had overlooked one important thing:

The Lakota lost.

They rode off into the history books with their honor intact, but they lost the war and everything else because they came up against people who preferred to kill and didn t even know that they had been insulted and that was also a very good description of me. I did not play those kindergarten games. I came, I duct-taped, I conquered. That was who I am.

And he dared to think he could be me? And start off with such a lousy job of it? He had no idea what being Me really meant he had missed the point completely. But he was about to find out that Dexter s Point is on the end of a knife, and Dexter has no equal and no competition, and no one was ever going to take his place, least of all a chinless geek who had to steal my methods because he didn t even have his own personality. Crowley was going to learn firsthand why there could never be a Dexter Double, and that lesson would be his very last and his most painful, and he would take it with him into the red darkness and as he spun away into All Over Forever he would know he had been taught the Ultimate Lesson by the Old Master.

Doug Crowley was going to go the way of all flesh, and as quickly as possible I would find him and flense him and send him off to the ocean s floor in four neat and separate garbage bags, and I would do it before he could write another taunting drivel-filled blog bragging about his insult to me. I would tape him and teach him what it truly meant to be Me, and I would make him wish he had chosen someone else to fill out his shadow, and the only question at all was a very simple one-word query:

How?

TWENTY-SIX

It was a long drive home, but not long enough for me to come up with any answers. I had to find my Shadow, and quickly, but how? The only hint I had was the name he was using now, Doug Crowley. From the skill with computers he had shown already faking his own death had been impressive I was certain he would not use a name that did not have documentation and a convincing background. It wasn t much, but I had access to several search engines that left Google far behind in the dust, and I could certainly find a few hints about him and where he might be. It was a starting point, and I felt a little bit better about things by the time I dropped off Mario and Steve Binder and headed for home.

The female section of my little family was sitting on the couch when we arrived. Rita had a cup of coffee in one hand and was sipping it as she watched TV. She looked up at us, frowned, and then did a double take and leapt to her feet and slapped the coffee cup down onto the table. Oh, my God, look at you! she said, hurrying over to us and looking from Cody s large red nose to my large speckled hands and face. What on earth happened to Cody, your nose is completely Dexter, for God s sake, didn t you take any bug spray?

I took some, I admitted. I just didn t use it.

She gave me an appalled shake of her head. I don t know what you were thinking, but that s Oh, just look at the two of you! Cody, stop scratching.

It s itchy, he said.

Well, if you scratch it, it s just going to get worse Oh, for the love of Dexter, your hands, too?

No, I said. That s mostly poison ivy.

Honestly, she said, with obvious disgust at my bungling. It s a wonder you weren t eaten by a bear.

There was very little I could say to that, especially since I agreed, and in any case Rita gave me no chance to say anything. She immediately jumped into action and began bustling around us, applying calamine lotion to my face and hands and pushing Cody into a hot bath. Lily Anne started crying, and Astor sat on the couch smirking at me.

What s so funny? I asked her.

Your face, she said. You look like you got leprosy.

I took a step toward her. Poison ivy is contagious, I said, raising my hands at her.

Astor flinched away and grabbed at Lily Anne, lifting her up and holding her between us like a protective shield. Stay away; I m holding the baby. There, there, Lily Anne, she said, slinging her sister onto one shoulder and patting her back with a series of rapid thumps. Lily Anne stopped crying almost at once, possibly stunned by the force of Astor s patting, and I left them there and went to take a shower.

The hot water running over my swollen hands was an amazing sensation, unlike anything I had ever felt before, and truthfully, not something I was eager to experience ever again. It was somewhere between an immensely powerful itch and searing agony, and I almost yelled out loud. I got out of the shower and put more calamine on my hands, and the throbbing died down to a kind of background torment. My hands felt numb and clumsy, and I had some trouble using them to get dressed. But rather than ask for help with the zipper and my shirt s buttons, I fumbled my clean clothes on all by myself, and soon I was seated at the kitchen table with a very welcome cup of coffee of my very own.

I held the coffee cup between the palms of my swollen and throbbing hands. The backs of my hands pulsed with the warmth of the cup, and I wondered what I could possibly hope to do with two such useless appendages. I felt like I needed all the help I could get, and not just because my hands were out of commission. For some reason, I had been two steps behind the whole way, almost as if Crowley was reading my mind. Knowing what I now knew about him, I couldn t believe it was because he was so amazingly clever he wasn t. It had to be me. I was off my game, sliding into the muck of mediocrity, all the way down the long slope from my usual lofty perch of supreme excellence, and I wondered why that was.

Maybe I was just not as sharp and gleefully wicked as I used to be. It might well be, I realized, that Crowley really was a match for the Me I was nowadays. I had gotten too soft, allowed my new role as Daddy Dexter to make me a bit too human. One little problem had turned me all mushy and helpless. Although to be accurate, it was two problems, and neither of them was all that little, but the point was the same.

I thought of the other Me, the one that matched the picture of myself I had hanging on the back wall of my self-esteem: Dexter the Dominant. Clever, sharp, fit, and ready for anything, eager to be off on the hunt and always alert and able to sniff out the potential perils that might lie along any small fork in the game trail. And comparing that hallowed portrait to what actually stared back at me from the mirror of this present moment, I felt a sense of loss and of shame. How had I lost this other me, the ideal Dexter of my dreams? Had I let easy living bring me so far down?

Clearly I had. I had even thrown it away cheerfully, eager to become something I could never really be. And now, when I needed to be Me more than ever before, I had gone all squishy at the edges. My own fault things had been too comfortable for me lately and I had come to like it that way. The placid ease of married life, the softening influence of having Lily Anne to care for, the routine of home and hearth and homicide it had all become too comfortable. I had turned soft, smug, self-satisfied, lulled to sleep by my cushy lifestyle and the easy availability of the game in these pastures of plenty I had been hunting in for so long. And the first time a real challenge came along I had behaved like all the other sheep in the pen. I had bleated and dithered, unable to believe that any real threat could actually be aimed at me, and I was still simply sitting here, waiting for it to swoop down and get me, and doing no more to stop it than hoping it would go away.

Was this really who I had turned into? Had I truly lost my edge? Had common Humanity snuck into the very fiber of my being and turned me into a marshmallow-souled hobbyist, a part-time monster too bone-idle, sluggish, and dumb to do anything but gawp at the ax as it fell on my neck and cry, Alas, poor Dexter?

I sipped the coffee and felt my hands throb. This was getting me nowhere. I was simply digging myself deeper into the Pit of Despair, and I was in quite far enough already. It was time to claw my way out, stand up straight, and climb back up the mountain to my rightful position as King of the Heap. I was a tiger, but for some reason I had been acting like a house cat. This had to stop, and right now, and I finally had a small handle on how to stop it. I had a name to search and a computer to search it with, and all I had to do was to get busy and do it.

So I finished my coffee, stood up, and went down the hall to the little room that Rita calls Dexter s Study. I sat and fired up my laptop, and as it started up I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and tried to get back in touch with my Inner Tiger. Almost immediately I felt it stretch and purr and rise up to rub against my hand. Nice kitty, I thought with gratitude, and it showed me its fangs in a happily wicked smile. I smiled back, opened my eyes, and we went to work.

First I checked the credit card records, and to my infinite joy I got immediate results. Doug Crowley had used his Visa card to buy gasoline at a station on the Tamiami Trail, between Miami and the Fakahatchee Park, Saturday morning, the day we all drove down there for the camping trip.

If there was a working credit card, there was a billing address. However he had managed it, he had become Doug Crowley, a solid citizen with a good credit record and a home, and if he was using the credit card, he was confident that its owner wouldn t complain. That probably meant that the house was available, too, since I knew very well now how my Shadow liked to solve his personnel problems. The real Doug Crowley was dead, so his house was available, and my Doug Crowley would almost certainly be there. And wonder of wonders, it was even convenient; the address was on 148th Terrace, only about two miles from where I was sitting.

I stared suspiciously at the computer; could it really be this easy? After everything that had happened, was it really going to be so simple? Just find the address, saunter over, and spend some quality bonding time with my formerly anonymous admirer? It didn t seem nearly complicated enough, and for a moment or two I glared at the address as if it had done something very wrong.

But the Passenger stirred impatiently, and I nodded; of course it was this simple. I had not known what name Crowley was using before now, and he had tried to keep me from learning it. Now that I knew, there was no reason to doubt that I had found his lair. I was merely being cynical and paranoid and after all, who had a better right? I absentmindedly rubbed my swollen hands and thought about it, and felt certainty flow slowly back in. This was him; it had to be. And as if to add the Seal of Dread Approval, the Passenger gave a contented purr of agreement.

Splendid: I had found him. Now all I had to do was think of a way to take care of him without using my hands.

But I could muddle through with poison ivy, and in any case I couldn t wait. The end was in sight, and speed was essential; Crowley had been far too slippery so far, and I couldn t give him any time to prepare. I would do it tonight, as soon as it was dark, swollen hands or not. The mere thought of it made me feel better than I had for a very long time, and I wallowed in the excited anticipation I felt burbling up in the darkest corners of Dexter s Basement. I was going to go once more into that good night, and I was not going gentle.

The rest of the day passed pleasantly enough. And why shouldn t it? Here I was, a man with a plan, nestled in the bosom of my happy family. I sat with Lily Anne on my lap and watched as Cody and Astor slaughtered their animated friends on the Wii.

Rita had vanished into the kitchen; I assumed she was working through another grocery bag full of mind-numbing charts and figures from her job. But gradually I became aware that the aroma seeping out of the kitchen was not ink and calculator tape but something far more succulent. And lo and behold, at six o clock the kitchen door swung open, releasing an overwhelming gush of delicious steam that had me drooling. I turned to look, and there stood a radiant Rita, clad in apron and oven mitts, face flushed with her righteous efforts.

Dinner, she told us. Even the children looked up at her, and she blushed just a little more. I just thought she said, looking at me. I mean, I know that lately it hasn t really And you ve been so She shook her head.

Anyway, she said. So I made something And it s ready now. Mango paella, she added with a smile, and happier words were never spoken.

Mango paella was one of Rita s better recipes, and it had been a very long time since Rita had cooked at all. But the time off had not diminished her skill, and she had done it proud. I plowed into the steaming, fragrant mass with a will. For a good twenty minutes I had no thoughts at all more complicated than, Yum!, and to be brutally frank, I ate too much. So did Cody and even Astor lost her grumpiness as she tucked into her dinner, and when we were all blissfully bloated and pushed our chairs back from the table there were no leftovers.

Rita looked around at her food-numbed family with an expression of true contentment. Well, she said, I hope that was I mean, it wasn t as good as usual.

Astor rolled her eyes and said, Mo-om, you always say that. It was o -kay.

Cody looked at his sister, shook his head, and then turned to Rita. It was good.

Rita beamed at him, and, knowing a cue when I heard one, I added my part. It was a work of art, I said, stifling a contented belch. Very great art.

Well, said Rita. That s very Thank you. And I just wanted to I ll get the dishes, she said, blushing again and bouncing up to begin clearing the table.

And wrapped in a cloud of complete contentment, I staggered off to Dexter s Study and made my modest preparations for dessert: duct tape, filet knife, nylon noose just a few simple accessories to round off a lovely evening with my favorite confection. When everything was checked and rechecked and then zipped carefully into my gym bag, I rejoined the children in front of the Wii. I sat on the couch and watched the happy mayhem, and I could actually feel some of the tension of recent events seeping out of me. And why not? I had a gym bag full of toys and a friend picked out to share them with; Normal Life was finally returning, and Rita had made it wonderfully official with a memorable meal.

So I sat and waited for it to get dark outside, thinking smugly of the Thing I would do just a little later, and content to do nothing else for the moment except digest the unreasonable amount of paella I had eaten. It was pleasant labor, relatively undemanding, and I believe I was doing a very good job of it when somehow, I fell asleep.

I woke up unsure of where I was and what time it was, blinking stupidly around me in a semidark room. I am not ordinarily given to naps, and this one had snuck up and sandbagged me and left me feeling slow and dopey. It was a full minute before I remembered that I was on the couch in my living room and there was a clock beside the TV. Summoning all my superhuman strength, I rolled my eyeballs in the right direction and stared at the clock; it was ten forty-seven. This was more than a nap; it was hibernation.

I blinked and breathed for another minute, trying to climb back into a state of eager readiness for what I had planned for the rest of this night. But the fat-headed feeling stayed with me. I wondered what Rita had put into the paella: some kind of sleep-inducing herb? Kryptonite? Whatever it was, it had knocked me out as efficiently as if it had been roofies. I actually spent a good two minutes thinking that it might be a good idea to go back to sleep and let Crowley wait for tomorrow. It was late, I was tired, and surely there was nothing so urgent that it couldn t wait one more day.

Just in time a small dash of common sense trickled in and reminded me that no, in fact, it couldn t wait, not at all. The danger was immediate; the solution was at hand and probably even therapeutic. I had to act now, right away, without delay. I repeated that to myself a few times; it was not enough to bring back my complete and eager edge, but at least it got me moving. I stretched and stood up, waiting for full consciousness to return. It didn t, so I went down the hall anyway and got the gym bag I had packed after dinner.

Before I left, I peeked into my bedroom; Rita was asleep, snoring softly, and Lily Anne was peacefully at rest in her crib. All quiet on the home front, and time for Dexter to steal away into the night.

But as I slipped out the front door of the house, a huge yawn creaked out of me, instead of the icy awareness I was used to. I shook my head in a vain effort to get the blood flowing again. What was wrong with me? Why couldn t I seem to get going? I had a pleasant and rewarding chore to take care of, and there was no point in doing it if I was going to sleepwalk through it on automatic pilot. I gave myself a stern pep talk: Focus, Dexter. Get your head back in the game.

By the time I slid behind the wheel of my car and cranked it up, I was starting to feel a little more alert. I put the car in gear and eased out onto the street, thinking that a slow drive through Miami traffic would almost certainly get the adrenaline flowing again. And it worked even better than I had hoped because before I had gone even a hundred feet my entire allowance of adrenaline for the month came roaring into my system when I glanced casually into the rearview mirror. Behind me, at the vacant lot half a block from my house, a pair of headlights clicked on and another car nosed out into the street to follow me.

I stared into the mirror, trying to make the following headlights into a hallucination. But they kept coming, sliding up the street behind me, and I nearly ran into a tree before I remembered I had to watch the street ahead, too. And I tried to do that, but my eyes kept flicking back to the mirror and the headlights bobbing along in my wake.

This is nothing, a mere coincidence, I told myself firmly, fighting down the alarm that began to clang in my brain. Of course I was not being followed; some neighbor had merely parked randomly at the vacant lot for some reason and was now randomly taking off on a random late-night jaunt. Or perhaps a drunk had pulled over to sleep off too many Cuba Libres. There were many sane and sober explanations, and just because somebody started up their car at the exact time I did and then drove along right behind me, it didn t mean I was being followed. Reason said it was pure chance and nothing more.

I turned right at the stop sign and motored along slowly, and, a moment later, so did my unwanted companion, and my interior alarm clanged a little louder. I tried to muffle it by thinking logical thoughts: Of course he turned right, too. That was the way out of the neighborhood, the shortest route to Dixie Highway and its convenience marts and the Farm Store for a midnight quart of milk. Everything that might take somebody out onto the streets at this hour was at the end of this road. It was the only way to go, and the fact that somebody was going there right behind me was complete happenstance, and nothing more. Just to prove it, I turned right at the next stop sign, away from brightly lit Dixie Highway and all its commercial pleasures, back into the darker streets lined with houses, and I watched in the mirror for the car behind me to turn left.

It didn t.

It turned right, the same way I had gone, and it followed along behind me like an unwanted shadow.

And as that word trickled into my brain, a jolt of near panic jerked me up straight in my seat: shadow? Was it possible? Could Crowley have gotten the drop on me once again?

It took almost no thought at all to figure that out. Of course it was possible; more than possible, it was likely, since he had been outthinking me every step of the way. He knew where I lived. He knew what my car looked like. He knew everything about me. He had already told me that he d been watching, and he d said that he was coming for me. And now here he was, snuffling along my trail like a hellhound.

Unconsciously I sped up; the car behind me matched my pace and then began to close the gap between us. I turned right, left, right, on random streets. The other car stayed with me, edging ever closer, while I fought furiously against the impulse to mash down the gas pedal and roar away into the night. But through all my twists and turns he stayed with me, slowly gaining on me until he was only about thirty feet back.

I turned left again, and he followed. It was useless. I had to outrun him or confront him. My battered little car was not going to outrun anything faster than a three-speed bicycle, so clearly confrontation was the option.

But not here, not on these semidark residential streets, where he could do whatever he had in mind with no worry that he would be seen. If there was going to be a face-off, I wanted it to happen under the bright glare of the lights along Dixie Highway, someplace where security cameras and convenience store clerks would see everything.

I turned the car back the way I had come, back toward Dixie Highway, and a moment later the other car swung in behind me, once more moving a little closer. And he edged even nearer as I hurried up to the highway, turned right into traffic, and then pulled into the first open gas station. I parked in the brightest area of light, right in front of the window, clearly in view of the clerk and the security camera. I put the car in park and waited, engine idling. A moment later the car that had followed me all the way from my house slid to a stop next to me.

It was not the battered old Cadillac Crowley had been driving before. Instead, it was a newish Ford Taurus. It looked like a car I had seen before a car I had seen frequently, even daily, and as its driver opened up his door and stepped out into the bright orange glare of the security lights, I realized why that was.

And so instead of exploding out of my car to bludgeon Crowley with my swollen hands, I simply sat behind the wheel and rolled down the window as the other driver approached. He came right up to my car, looked down at me, and smiled: a beautiful, blissful smile that revealed hundreds of shiny, sharp teeth, and in the face of such complete happiness there was only one thing I could say.

Sergeant Doakes, I said, with a very good imitation of mild surprise. What on earth are you doing here at this hour?

TWENTY-SEVEN

For A Long And Uneasy Moment, Sergeant Doakes did not answer. He just looked down at me and smiled his bright predator s smile until I began to feel like the lack of conversation was turning a bit uncomfortable. Even more disquieting than the sergeant s toothy silence, I remembered the gym bag on the floor of the backseat, right behind me. The contents of that bag would be difficult to explain to someone with a nasty, suspicious mind someone, in other words, exactly like Doakes and if he were to open the bag and see my collection of innocent toys it could well make for a few very awkward moments, since I was under Official Suspicion for using just such items.

But Dexter was raised on danger and bred on bluff, and this was exactly the kind of crisis that brought out the very best in me. So I took the initiative and broke the ice.

This is an amazing coincidence, I said brightly.

I was just out for some antihistamines. I showed him my swollen hands, but he didn t seem interested. Do you live around here somewhere? I paused for his reply; he didn t give me one, and as the silence grew I had to fight down the impulse to ask whether the cat had his tongue, before I realized that he was not carrying his speech synthesizer. Oh, I m sorry, I said. You don t have your talking machine, do you? Well, then, I ll cut this short. Nothing worse than a one-sided conversation. And, reaching to roll up the window, I added a cheery, Good night, Sergeant!

Doakes leaned forward and put both his shiny prosthetic claws on the top of my window and pushed down. He was not smiling now, and the muscles in his cheeks flexed visibly as he leaned down and kept my window from closing. I wondered briefly what would happen if his pressure broke the glass: Was it possible that a shard of broken window would spear up past his silver claws and slice his wrists open? The thought of Doakes bleeding out in the parking lot beside my car was very appealing but of course, there was also the possibility that the horrible wet blood would spurt out of him, into the car, and cover me in awful sticky red mess, which was an image that made my skin crawl. Not just the nasty appalling blood, but Doakes s vile blood; it was a thought so revolting that for a moment I couldn t breathe.

But car windows are made of safety glass. They do not shatter into shards. They explode into a pile of small pebbles, and it would take a great deal of ingenuity to use them to kill Doakes, unless I could persuade him to eat them. That didn t seem likely, so with a philosophical shrug, I stopped cranking the window and returned the good sergeant s stare. Was there something else? I asked politely.

Sergeant Doakes had never been known for his skill as a conversationalist, and having his tongue removed had done nothing to add to his talent in that area. And so while it was clear that there was a great deal on his mind, he did not share it with me. He just stared, and his cheek muscles continued to bulge out even though he was no longer pushing down on the window. Finally, when a lesser man than Dexter would have cracked under the strain, Doakes leaned in even closer to me. I looked back at him. It was very awkward, but at least he didn t smell as bad as Hood, and I managed to endure it without collapsing into tears and confessing.

And finally Doakes must have realized that, in the first place, there was quite literally nothing he could say and, in the second, I was not going to break down and admit that I was exactly what he thought I was, and out on a mission to do precisely what he suspected. He straightened up slowly, never taking his eyes off me, nodded a couple of times, as if to say, All righty then. Then he showed just the front row of his impressive set of teeth, a feral half grin that was much more troubling than the full smile, and he made that clich d macho gesture we have all seen in so many movies: two fingers pointed at his own eyes, and then one pointed directly at me. Of course, since he had no fingers, he had to point with his bright and shiny prosthetic claw, and it took a little extra imagination on my part to decipher the signal. But the message was very clear: I m watching you. He let that sink in for a moment, just pointing the claw and glaring at me without blinking. Then he turned abruptly away, strolled back around to the driver s side of his car, opened the door, and got in.

I waited for a moment, but Doakes did not put his car in gear. He just sat there, half turned to watch me, even though I was doing nothing more interesting than sweating. Clearly, he was going to be very literal-minded in carrying out his threat. He would watch me, no matter what I did or did not do. He was watching me now, and I remembered that I was supposed to be buying some antihistamine, and he was very intently watching me not buy it. And so, after a few more awkward moments, I got out of my car and went inside the convenience mart. I grabbed a box of something I had seen a commercial for, paid for it, and went back to my car.

Doakes was still watching. I put my own car in gear, backed out of the parking spot, and began the drive back to my house. I didn t need to look in the rearview mirror to know that Doakes was following along right behind.

I drove slowly home, and the headlights of Doakes s car stayed in the exact center of my rearview mirror the whole way, never wavering and never dropping back more than thirty feet. It was a wonderful textbook example of following somebody with what is called an open tail, and I really wished that Doakes was off at Detective College teaching the technique, instead of bedeviling me with it. Just a few minutes ago I had been so very nearly happy, filled with paella and purpose, and now I was right back on the horns of my dilemma. I absolutely had to take care of Crowley, and as soon as possible but soon and possible were both far, far out of reach as long as Sergeant Doakes stayed welded to my bumper.

And even worse than the teeth-grinding frustration was the growing awareness of my own inept stupidity. It wasn t just Crowley who was running rings around me; Sergeant Doakes was, too. I should have known. Of course he would be watching me. He had waited for years to have me in this exact predicament. It was what he lived for, and he would not need to eat or sleep or polish his prosthetics as long as he had Dexter squirming in his crosshairs.

I was trapped, well and truly snookered, and there was no way out. If I didn t get Crowley, he would get me. If I tried to get him, Doakes would get me instead. Either way, Dexter was Got.

I turned it every way I could, but it always came out the same. I had to do something and I couldn t do anything the perfect puzzle, and Miss Marple was nowhere around to help me solve it. By the time I parked the car in front of my house I had ground a layer of enamel off my teeth, smacked my swollen hands on the steering wheel with surprisingly painful results, and almost chewed through my lower lip. None of those things had provided an answer.

I sat behind the wheel with the engine off for a minute, too completely frustrated to move. Doakes drove slowly past, turned around, and parked where he had before, with a perfect view of me and my house. He switched off his engine and his headlights and he sat and watched me. I sat and ground my teeth some more, until they began to hurt almost as much as my hands. It was no good; I could sit here until I found a way to injure all my body parts, or I could accept the fact that I was stuck, go in the house, and snatch a few hours of troubled sleep. Maybe an answer would blossom in my subconscious mind while I slept. Just as likely, maybe a meteor shower would fall in the night and crush both Doakes and Crowley.

I decided on sleep anyway. At least I would be well rested when the end came. I got out of my car, locked it, and went in to bed.

And to my very great surprise, strangely, amazingly, wonderfully, an answer actually did come to me while I slept. It did not appear to me in a dream; I almost never have dreams, and on the rare occasions when I do they are shameful little things, full of obvious and embarrassing symbolism, and I would never listen to any word of advice they might offer.

Instead, when I opened my eyes to the early morning sounds of Rita in the bathroom, a single clear image was floating in my forebrain: the cheerful, synthetically smiling face of Brian, my brother. I closed my eyes again and wondered why I should wake up thinking of him, and why the mental picture of his artificial grin should make me feel so happy. Of course, he was family, and having family should naturally be a source of bliss for us all. But there was a great deal more to it than that. Beyond sharing my DNA, Brian was also the one and only person in the whole wide world who could play the music for Dexter s Dark Dance nearly as well as I did. And even better, he was also the one and only person in the world who might play a request.

I lay in bed with a nearly real smile growing on my own face, and I thought about it as Rita bustled back into the bedroom, got dressed, and hurried away into the kitchen. I tried to frown the idea away, thinking of all that might be wrong with it. I told myself I was merely clutching at straws, lying in a sleep-induced cloud of dunderheaded hope. It couldn t possibly work; it was too simple, too effective, and ten seconds of clear and alert consciousness would almost certainly prove to me that this was no more than a stupidly optimistic pipe dream.

But alertness grew, and no negative epiphany grew with it, and the smile kept returning to push away my great frown of logic. It just might work.

Give Crowley s address to Brian, explain the problem to him, and let nature take its course.

It was an elegant solution, and the only real problem with it was that I would not get to do away with Crowley in person. I wouldn t even get to watch, and that seemed terribly unfair. I had really, really wanted to do this myself: to watch the miserable self-inflated creature sweat and squirm and try to twist away as I slowly, carefully, fondly, took him farther and farther away from any taste of hope and closer to the dark circle at the end of his bright quick moment of light

But a large part of learning to be an adult is admitting to yourself that nothing is ever perfect. We all have to sacrifice small indulgences from time to time in order to achieve our larger goals, and I would just have to behave like a grown-up and accept that the results were more important than my petty personal gratification. The essential thing here was to send Crowley off on his merry way into deep dark eternity, and it didn t really matter whether he got there without my help, just as long as he actually got there, and quickly.

I got out of bed, showered, dressed, and sat at the table in the kitchen, and I could find nothing wrong with my idea. Certainty grew as I ate a very good breakfast of waffles and Canadian bacon, and by the time I pushed away the empty plate and poured myself a second cup of coffee, it had grown into a full-size plan. Brian would help me; he was my brother. And it was exactly his kind of problem, something that played to his strengths and at the same time gave him a chance to enjoy himself and even help his only sibling. It was neat and efficient and satisfying and I actually found myself ruminating on how good it was to have a big brother. It s true what they say: Family really is the most important thing in life.

By the time Rita cleared away the breakfast dishes, I was filled with smug good cheer and a truly annoying fondness for life as well as waffles, as I now found it was nudging me close to singing out loud. The problem was as good as solved, and I could get back to dealing with the other blip on my radar: Doakes and Hood and their attempt to rain on my parade. But I felt so very good about the solution to my Shadow, some of the optimism spilled over, and I began to believe that I would find a way out of that problem, too. Perhaps I could go back to sleep and simply wait for another idea to burble out of my unconscious mind.

My family s morning preparations clattered around me, rose to a climax, and then, just before the part where I knew from experience that the front door would begin to slam and go on slamming at least four times, Rita came in and gave me a kiss on the cheek.

Two thirty, she said. I forgot to tell you last night because you fell asleep? And before that I just wanted, you know because the paella really takes time?

Once more I had the sensation of being in the middle of a conversation that had started a few minutes ago without me. But on a morning so full of bright hope, I could be patient. It was very good paella, I said. What did you forget to tell me?

Oh, she said. Just that at two thirty. I mean, today? And I ll meet you there. Because I made the appointment while you and Cody? And then when you both came home so completely Anyway, it went right out of my head.

Several brilliantly funny remarks crowded into my mouth and fought for space on my tongue, but once again I somehow made myself stay focused on the larger point, which was that I still had no idea what Rita was talking about. I ll be there at two thirty, I said. If you promise to tell me where it is and why I m going there.

Astor yelled, Mom! and the front door slammed once and Rita frowned and shook her head. Oh, she said. Didn t I? But Carlene at work, like I said. Her brother-in-law? He s the lawyer, she said, and turning her head toward the front door she yelled, Just a minute, Astor!

It might be only that I was getting used to her disjointed conversations, but I actually understood what Rita was saying after only a few seconds of struggling to put the pieces together. We have an appointment with a lawyer? I said.

Today at two thirty, Rita said, and she leaned down and kissed me again. The address is on the refrigerator, on the blue Post-it. She straightened up and said, Don t forget, and then she vanished into the living room calling for Astor. Their voices rose together into a complicated and pointless squabble about the dress code, which didn t apply because it was summer, and anyway the skirt wasn t that short, so why should she have to wear shorts under it, and after only a few minutes of hysteria the front door slammed three more times and a sudden quiet descended. I sighed with relief, and I believe I could almost feel the whole house do the same.

And even though I do not like having someone else manipulate my schedule, and I don t like dealing with lawyers even more, I got up and took the blue Post-it from the fridge. It said, Fleischman, 2:30, and below that was an address on Brickell Avenue. That didn t tell me much about how good a lawyer he might be, but at least the address meant he would be expensive, which really ought to be some consolation. It wouldn t hurt to go see him and find out if he could help me out of my trouble with Hood and Doakes. It was time for me to think about getting the full weight of the law off my back especially since my other problem was one quick phone call away from being solved.

So I tucked the Post-it into my pocket and went to get my phone, and as I punched in Brian s number it occurred to me that this was not the sort of lighthearted chitchat that was truly appropriate for a cell phone. I had heard enough taped conversations to know better. Even the standard evasions, like, Did you see the guy with the thing about the stuff? sounded highly suspicious when played back to a jury. Cell phones are wonderful devices, but they are not actually a secure form of communication, and if Doakes was going to all the trouble of tailing me, he might very well have access, legal or not, to anything I said on the phone. And so, thinking that

Better safe than sorry was an excellent motto for the day, I arranged to meet Brian for lunch at Caf Relampago, my favorite Cuban restaurant.

I spent the morning puttering around the house and tidying up things that were really at least half-tidy already, but it was better than sitting on the couch again and trying to convince myself that watching daytime TV was better for me than slamming my head against a brick wall. I unpacked my gym bag and put everything away with loving care. Soon, I told my toys.

At twelve thirty I locked up the house and got into my car. As I nosed it into the street, Sergeant Doakes pulled out behind me and followed along; all the way across the city on the Palmetto Expressway he stayed right behind me, and when I got off by the airport and wound my way to the strip mall that held Caf Relampago, he was still on my tail. I parked in front of the caf and Doakes parked a few spots to my left, between me and the parking lot s only exit. Happily for me, he did not follow me inside. He simply sat in his car, motor idling, staring at me through the windshield. So I gave him a cheery wave and went in to meet my brother.

Brian was sitting in a booth at the back, facing the door, and he raised his hand in greeting when I came in. I slid onto the seat facing him. Thank you for meeting me, I said.

He raised his eyebrows in pretend surprise. Of course, he said. What s family for?

I m still not sure, I said. But I do have a suggestion.

Do tell, he said.

But before I could, in fact, tell him, the waitress rushed over and slapped two plastic menus onto the table in front of us. The Morgan family had been coming to Caf Relampago my whole life, and this waitress, Rose, had served us hundreds of times. But there was no flicker of recognition in her face as she dropped the menus in front of me and, as Brian opened his mouth to speak to her, hurried away again.

Charming woman, Brian said, watching Rose disappear back into the kitchen.

You haven t seen anything yet, I told him. Wait till you see how she puts a plate on the table.

I can hardly wait, he said.

I could have made small talk, or told Brian the secret Morgan family technique for getting Rose to bring the bill in under five minutes, but I felt events pressing in on me, so I cut right to the chase. I need a little favor, I said.

Brian raised his eyebrows. Of course, I grew up in foster care, he said, and he began to play with a sugar packet on the tabletop. But in my experience, when a family member asks for a little favor, that always means it s huge, and probably painful. He flipped the sugar from one hand to the other.

I hope it will be very painful, I said. But not for you.

He stopped flipping the sugar packet and looked up at me with a faint gleam of something dark stirring at the back of his eyes.

Tell me, he said.

I told him. I stumbled through a rather clumsy explanation of how Crowley had seen me at play. I m not sure why I felt so awkward telling it. It is true that I never really like to talk about Those Things; but beyond that, I think I was embarrassed to admit to my brother that I had been so childishly careless and allowed myself to be seen. I felt my cheeks get hot, and I had trouble meeting his eyes, which had locked onto me as I began to talk, and stayed locked on me until I faltered to a finish.

Brian did not say anything at first, and I thought about reaching over and grabbing a sugar packet of my own to play with. In the silence, Rose appeared suddenly and slammed two glasses of water in front of us, scooped up the menus, and vanished again before either of us could speak.

Very interesting, Brian said at last.

I glanced at him; he was still looking at me, and the faint shadow was still there in his eyes. Do you mean the waitress? I asked.

He showed me his teeth. I do not, he said.

Although her performance has certainly been diverting so far. He finally looked away from me, glancing over his shoulder at the kitchen door, where Rose had disappeared. So you find yourself with this little problem, he said. And naturally you come to your brother for help?

Um, yes

He picked up the sugar packet again and frowned at it. Why me?

I stared at Brian, wondering if I had heard him wrong. Well, I said, I don t really know too many people who can do this kind of thing.

Uh-huh, he said, still frowning at the sugar, as if he was trying to read the tiny print on the packet.

And like I said, I m being watched, I said. Sergeant Doakes is out in the parking lot right now.

Yes, I see, he said, although he wasn t actually seeing anything but the sugar packet in his hands.

And you re my brother? I added hopefully, wondering why he had suddenly gone all vague. I mean, the whole family thing?

Yeeeesss Brian said doubtfully.

And, ah that s really all of it? An inconsequential favor from your favorite family member? A small gift-wrapped project for big brother, Brian, because little Dexie is in time-out?

I had no idea why Brian was acting so strangely, and I really was counting on his help, but he was getting more annoying with each syllable and I d had enough. Brian, for God s sake, I said. I need your help. Why are you being so weird?

He dropped the sugar packet onto the table, and the small sound it made seemed much louder than it really was. Forgive me, brother, he said, and he looked up at me at last. As I said, I grew up in foster care. It s given me a rather nasty, suspicious turn of mind. He showed me his teeth again.

I m sure you have no ulterior motives at all here.

Like what? I said, genuinely puzzled.

Oh, I don t know, he said. I can t help thinking that it might be some kind of setup?

What?

Or that you might want to use me as a kind of cat s paw, just to see what happens?

Brian, I said.

It s the sort of thing that naturally occurs to one, isn t it? he said.

Not to me, I said, and because I could think of nothing more compelling, I added, You re my brother.

Yes, he said. On the other side, there is that. He frowned, and for a moment I was terrified that he would pick up the sugar packet again. But instead, he shook his head, as if overcoming a large temptation, and looked me in the eye. For a long moment he simply stared, and I stared back. Then his face lit up with his terrible fake smile. I would be delighted to help you, he said.

I exhaled a very large cloud of anxiety, and inhaled even more relief. Thank you, I said.

TWENTY-EIGHT

The law offices of Figueroa, Whitley and Fleischman were on the fourteenth floor of a high-rise building on Brickell Avenue, just on the edge of the area where office space starts to get pricey. The lobby was deserted when I walked in at two fifteen, and as I stood next to the elevator and scanned the building s directory, I noticed that very few of the floors had any tenants at all. Like many of the newer buildings in Miami s cluttered skyline, this one had apparently been built during the wild optimism of the last real estate boom, when everyone was certain prices would keep going up forever. Instead, prices had collapsed like a punctured balloon, and half of the glittering new buildings in downtown Miami had turned into shiny and very overpriced ghost towns.

Rita was not in the waiting room when I stepped off the elevator, so I sat down and thumbed through a copy of GOLF magazine. There were several articles on improving my short game that would have been much more interesting if only I played golf. The large golden clock on the wall said it was exactly two thirty-six when the elevator doors slid open and Rita stepped out. Oh, Dexter, you re here already, she said.

I never really know what to say to that kind of painfully obvious remark, even though it seems to be very popular, so I just admitted that I was, in fact, right here in front of her, and she nodded and hustled over to the receptionist. We have an appointment with Larry Fleischman? she announced breathily.

The receptionist, a cool, stylish woman of around thirty, cocked her head at the appointment book and nodded. Mrs. Morgan?

Yes, that s right, Rita said, and the receptionist smiled and dialed a number on the phone on her desk.

Mr. and Mrs. Morgan, she said into the phone, and a few moments later we were ushered into an office halfway down the hall, where a serious-looking man of about fifty with badly dyed black hair sat behind a large wooden desk. He looked up as we entered, and then stood and held out his hand.

Larry Fleischman you must be Rita, he said, taking her hand and staring deep into her eyes with well-practiced and totally fake sincerity. Carlene has told me so much about you. His eyes flicked down to the front of her blouse and Rita blushed and gently tried to disengage her hand. Larry looked up at her face and reluctantly dropped her hand at last, and then he turned to me. And, uh Derrick? he said to me, holding out his hand just far enough away that I had to lean over to shake it.

Dexter, I said. With an X.

Huh, he said thoughtfully. Unusual name.

Almost bizarre, I said, and then, just to keep things on an even footing, I added, And you must be Leroy Fleischman?

He blinked and dropped my hand. Larry, he said.

It s Larry Fleischman.

Sorry, I said, and for a moment we just looked at each other.

Finally, Larry cleared his throat and looked back at Rita.

Well, he said, frowning. Sit down, won t you?

We sat facing the desk in matching chairs, battered wooden things with worn fabric seats, and Larry sat back down behind his desk and opened a manila folder. It had only one sheet of paper in it, and he picked that up and frowned at it. Well, he said.

What seems to be the problem?

Our problem was apparently not written on the paper, and I wondered whether there was anything written on it at all, or if it was just a prop for Larry s I-am-a-real-lawyer act, and the folder was as phony as his hair color. To be honest, I was beginning to wonder whether Larry could possibly be any help at all. If I was going to fight off a determined and dishonest attack by Hood and Doakes, I needed an attack dog, a lawyer who was sharp and eager and very aggressive and ready to snap the leash and maul that vile old whore, Justice. Instead I was looking at a middle-aged poser who clearly didn t like me, and would probably decide to help them throw me in the slammer so he could hit on my wife.

But we were here, after all, and Rita seemed to be impressed. So I sat and let her burble her way through our tale of woe. Larry stared at her and nodded, occasionally tearing his eyes off her cleavage and looking over at me with an expression of dull surprise.

When Rita finally finished, Larry leaned back in his chair and pursed his lips. Well, he said. First of all, I want to reassure you that you ve done exactly the right thing by coming here to consult me. He smiled at Rita.

Too many people wait to consult an attorney until things have gone too far for me to be really helpful. Which you haven t done, in this case. He seemed to like the sound of that, and he nodded a few times in the direction of Rita s breasts.

The important thing, he told them, is to have some good legal advice at the very beginning of this thing. Even if you are innocent, he said, turning to look at me with an expression that said he didn t really think I was. Then he turned back to Rita and gave her a condescending smile. The American legal system is the finest in the world, he told her, which didn t seem remotely possible, since he was part of it. But he said it with a straight face and went on. However, it is an adversary system, which means that it s the prosecutor s job to get a conviction any way he can, and it s my job to stop him and keep your husband out of jail. He looked at me again, as if he was wondering whether that was such a good idea after all.

Yes, I know, Rita said, and Larry snapped his head back around and looked at her attentively. I mean, that s exactly And I don t even know Have you had, you know. A lot of experience? With, um, this kind of I mean, we understand that criminal law and corporate law are very much And Carlene said, your sister-in-law? So it might be important.

Larry nodded at Rita as if everything she d said made sense, which was one more clue that he wasn t actually listening. Yes, he said, that s an important consideration. And I want you to know that I will leave no stone unturned and do absolutely everything in my power to help you beat this thing. But, he said, showing her the palms of his hands and smiling confidently, that will take some work. And you need to know that it may turn out to be expensive. He glanced at me again, then back to Rita. Not that you can really put a price on freedom.

I was pretty sure that, in fact, Larry could and would put a price on freedom, and it would turn out to be exactly ten dollars more than we had in the bank. But before I could think of a diplomatic way to tell him that I would rather spend twenty years in the penitentiary than ten more minutes in his company, Rita began to reassure him that she understood completely and money was no object, because Dexter, that is, her husband, and anyway, so that was fine and we were very grateful. And Larry smiled and nodded thoughtfully at Rita s breasts until she finally ran out of oxygen and blathered to a gasping halt. And as she paused to inhale he stood up behind his desk and held out his hand.

Terrific, he said. And let me reassure you that I will do everything I can, so I want you to stop worrying. He beamed at her, and I have to say that it was a far shoddier effort than even Brian s fake smile. And I want you to call me if I can help with anything. He nodded slowly. Anything at all, he said, with a little too much emphasis.

Thank you, that s really very We will, and thank you, Rita said, and a few moments later we were in the waiting room again and the receptionist was handing us a stack of forms and telling us that if we could please just fill these all out for Mr. Fleischman he would appreciate it very much.

I looked back down the hallway to the door of Fleischman s office. He was standing there, looking around the half-closed door. I was pleased to see that at least he was no longer looking at the front of Rita s blouse; instead, he was staring at the seat of her skirt.

I turned back to the receptionist and took the forms from her.

We ll mail them in, I said. My parking meter is about to expire. And as Rita frowned at me and opened her mouth to say something, I took her firmly by the arm and led her into the elevator. The doors slid mercifully closed, shutting out the nightmare world of Figueroa, Whitley and Fleischman for what I devoutly hoped would be the very last time.

You could have parked in the building and they validate? Rita said. Because I don t even see Dexter, I didn t know there were any parking meters at all in this part of

Rita, I said, pleasantly but very firmly, if I have a choice between watching Larry stare at your cleavage and going to prison, I think Raiford looks like a good idea.

Rita blushed. But that isn t even I mean, I know, my God, he must think I m blind or else But, Dexter, if he can help at all? Because this is still very serious.

Too serious to trust it to Larry, I said, and the elevator gave a muffled ding! and the doors slid open and spilled us out onto the ground floor.

I walked Rita to her car. Following her own excellent advice, she had parked it in the building s garage, although she had failed to get her ticket validated because I had rushed her out before she could ask the receptionist.

I reassured her that the extra ten dollars would not really send us plummeting into bankruptcy, promised her I would ask around for another lawyer, and watched her drive away into the traffic on Brickell Avenue. Rush hour was already starting, and I wondered how Rita ever managed to survive Miami traffic. She was not a good driver; she drove the way she talked, with lots of stops and starts and sudden changes, but she made up for that by being the luckiest driver I had ever seen, and she d never had even a small fender-bender.

I got into my car and started the tedious drive home, south again on Brickell for a few blocks, and then west and up onto I-95 until it ended and dumped me down onto Dixie Highway. I found myself pondering as I drove, which is never a great idea in Miami s rush-hour traffic, and at the intersection of Le Jeune I very nearly plowed into a Jaguar whose driver had made the perfectly reasonable decision to turn left from the center lane. I swerved around it at the last second, earning myself a loud and operatic chorus of horns and bad words in three languages. I supposed it served me right for criticizing Rita s driving.

Somehow I made it home without smashing into a tanker truck and being consumed by a giant fireball, and I had just enough time to make a pot of coffee and pour myself a cup when Rita burst into the house, with Lily Anne in her arms and the other two children following along in her wake.

You re home! she said as she rushed through the front door. Because I have some wonderful news, and I have to Cody, don t just throw your jacket there; hang it up on the Astor, for God s sake, don t slam the door like that. Here, take the baby, she said to me, thrusting Lily Anne in my direction and turning away again so rapidly that I had to lurch forward to grab the baby, spilling a quarter of a cup of coffee as I did.

Rita put her keys into her purse and the purse on the table by the front door as she continued. Brian just called me, your brother? she said, in case I had forgotten who Brian was.

And anyway, he told me What, dear? she said, turning to Cody, who was at her elbow asking her something in his soft voice. Yes, you can play the Wii for an hour now So, Brian? When he called? And she came back over to me where I stood juggling Lily Anne and my cup, with one foot in a pool of spilled coffee. Oh, she said, frowning at the small puddle on the floor. Dexter, you spilled your coffee. I ll get it, she said, and rushed into the kitchen, hurrying back out again almost instantly with a wad of paper towels. She squatted down and began to blot up the coffee.

What did Brian say? I asked the top of Rita s head, and she glanced up at me with a radiant smile.

We have to go to Key West, she said, and before I could ask her why we had to go, or why Brian could order us around like that, and why that made her so happy, Rita leaped to her feet and ran for the kitchen with the wet paper towels clutched in her hand.

Honestly, she said over one shoulder, nobody else around here ever even And she was gone through the kitchen door, leaving me to marvel at the fact that I somehow managed to survive in this house without ever knowing what was going on around me, or even what I was talking about.

But Lily Anne reminded me of the futility of trying to understand the harsh conditions of our bleak existence; she gave me a clout on the nose that brought tears to my eyes, topped it with a hearty chuckle as I blinked at her through the haze of pain, and then Rita whisked back into the room and snatched the baby from my arms.

She needs a change, Rita said, and hurried away toward the changing table before I could add that I did, too. But I followed along behind her, hoping for some kind of clarity.

Why did Brian say we have to go to Key West? I asked her back.

Oh, Rita said. It s about the house? Brian said that they re all going to be there Stop fussing now, silly Lily, she told the baby as she began to change the diaper. And so if we go there, too? It s a very good opportunity for And with Brian s connections? We could get a really good deal, too. There you go, little sweetie, she said as she put the fresh diaper on Lily Anne. So if you promise to call around about the lawyer? Tonight? Because we would have to leave tomorrow morning.

Rita turned to me with Lily Anne in her arms, and I had to believe that the expression of excited pleasure on her face had nothing to do with the amazingly rapid diaper change she had performed. It s just a chance, she said, but it s a wonderful chance. And Key West! It s going to be so much fun!

In every man s life there comes a time when he must stand up, assert himself, and be a man. For me, that time had come.

Rita, I said firmly, I want you to take a deep breath, and then slowly, carefully, and clearly tell me what the hell you are talking about. And to underline just how serious I was, Lily Anne smacked her mother s cheek and told her,

Blap! in a clear and commanding voice.

Rita blinked, possibly from pain. Oh, she said.

But I said

You said Brian is forcing us to go to Key West, whether we want to or not, I said. And you said all the houses will be there. Other than that, you might as well be speaking Etruscan.

Rita opened her mouth, and then closed it again. She shook her head and said, I m sorry. I thought I said Because sometimes it seems so clear to me.

I m sure it is, I said.

I was in the car, picking up the kids? she said.

And Brian called me. On the phone, she added. The thought of her talking on the phone in the course of her already erratic driving made me very glad I was off the roads already.

And he said He told me that, you know. The real estate company he works for? They re about to file Chapter Eleven and they need to raise as much cash as they can. She gave me another very warm smile. Which is wonderful news, she said.

I am not really a financial maven, but even I had heard of Chapter 11 before, and I was reasonably sure it had something to do with bankruptcy. But if that was true I couldn t see why that would be wonderful news, except for any business rivals Brian s employers might have. Rita, I said.

But don t you see? she said. That means they have to sell off all their houses for whatever they can get, so they re having an auction! she said triumphantly. This weekend! And it s in Key West, because you can get a convention rate? And anyway more people will come to the auction if they have it there. Which is why we have to go down there and try? I mean, to get one of them the houses? At the auction? And so Brian is bringing us a complete list, so this is really a great chance for us to get the new house! Dexter, this could really, really be exactly Oh, I m so excited! she said, and she lurched forward and tried to give me a hug. But since she was still holding Lily Anne it was more of a lean against my chest, which sandwiched the baby in between us. Lily Anne was never one to waste an opportunity, and she began to kick at my stomach vigorously.

I took a step back from the onslaught and put my hands on Rita s shoulders. An auction in Key West? I said. Of all the foreclosed houses in our area?

Rita nodded, still beaming. In Key West, she said. Which we haven t even been to together before.

For a moment I tried very hard to think of something to say, and I failed. Events seemed to be spinning away from me. I felt like I was being pushed off my feet and rolled along the floor toward something wildly irrelevant, weird, and foreign. I know that in theory I am not actually the center of the universe, but I had some very important and immediate concerns right here in Miami, and to go rushing off to Key West to buy a house that was right here in South Miami, and at a time like this? It seemed just a little bit frivolous, and, well not at all about Me, which didn t seem quite right.

But aside from my petty desire to stay home and save my own hide, I couldn t think of any real reason not to go especially in the face of Rita s near-hysterical enthusiasm. And so five minutes later I found myself sitting down in front of my trusty laptop to make hotel reservations for a three-night stay in Key West. I turned it on and waited. It seemed to start up a bit slower lately. I was usually pretty good about keeping the hard drive clean, but I had been a little distracted. In any case, computer cookies and spyware get more sophisticated every day, and I was not absolutely up-to-date. I made a mental note to spend a little time catching up when things settled down again.

The computer finally finished turning itself on, and I went online to find a hotel room for our visit to the Southernmost City. Travel arrangements for the family was my job in part because I was much better at navigating the Internet, and in part because in her excitement, Rita had sprinted away for the kitchen to make some kind of celebratory meal, and even in my completely understandable grouchiness I didn t want to interfere with that.

I flipped through the usual Web sites that offered travel bargains. My mood did not improve as I learned that hotel rooms were difficult to come by this weekend because this was the climactic weekend of Hemingway Days, an ancient festival featuring bearded fat guys celebrating all possible forms of human excess. I could not find a reasonably priced hotel room, but I did get a very good deal at the Surfside Hotel for a suite. It had enough room for all of us at a price we could easily pay off in ten years or so, which wasn t too bad, considering that it was in Key West and the town was founded by rapacious pirates. I gave them a credit card number and registered the Morgan family for three nights in room 1229, starting tomorrow night, and turned off my computer.

I spent a good five minutes staring at the laptop s darkened screen and thinking even darker thoughts. I tried to tell myself that everything was going to be fine I could trust Brian to do a thorough job of taking care of Crowley, even if I didn t get to watch. And Hood s noncase against me would almost certainly collapse. It had to; there was no trace of evidence against me, not anywhere in the world, and after all, I had Deborah watching my back. She would be watching him and Doakes closely, and she would stop them from cutting corners. It was all no more than the proverbial tempest in a teapot.

And best of all, taking a quick trip to the Keys would completely derail Doakes. He would either have to drop tailing me, or spend an exorbitant amount of his own money on gasoline to follow me all the way down to Key West.

Thinking about that made me feel a little better. The image of Doakes standing at a gas pump and watching the dollar total spin higher and higher while he gnashed his teeth was very pleasing, and for a little while I was satisfied with that. Costing Doakes some cash was not really payback on the epic scale I preferred, but it would have to do for now. Life is hard and uncertain, and sometimes a small victory has to be enough.

TWENTY-NINE

The rest of the evening went by in a mad frenzy of activity. My last calm moment came when I called Deborah and asked her to recommend a lawyer. She said she had a buddy in Professional Compliance and would get me the name of the guy they all hated most to come up against. And then Rita called out, Dinner! and the doorbell rang, and at the same time Astor started yelling at Cody to stop cheating and Lily Anne began to cry.

I went to the front door and opened it. Brian stood there, dressed in dark clothing, and for once, the smile he gave me did not seem completely synthetic. Hello, brother, he said happily, and the tone of his voice made the hair rise on the back of my neck, and in the Deep Downstairs the Dark Passenger hissed and uncurled in uneasy anticipation.

Brian s voice seemed deeper, colder than normal, and there was a smoldering Something flickering in his eyes, and I knew very well what all that added up to.

Brian, I said. Are you Did you?

He shook his head and his smile got wider. Not yet, he said. On my way now. I watched him with something very like jealousy while his smile grew bigger and even more real. Here, he said, and he held out several pages of paper stapled together and completely covered with closely written entries that seemed to be mostly numbers.

For one wild second I thought the paper was somehow connected to what we both knew he was about to do, and I took the paper from him without really looking at it. What is it? I asked him.

It s your list, he said, and when I didn t answer he added, The list of houses. For the auction. I told your lovely wife I would bring it by.

Oh. Right, I said, and I finally looked at the top sheet. One glance was enough to see that it was indeed a list of Miami addresses, with columns for square footage, number of rooms, and so on. Well, I said. Thank you. Um have you had dinner? I held the door open wider to invite him in.

I have other plans for the evening, he said, and there was no mistaking the edge in his voice. As you know, he added softly.

Yes, I said. I guess I just I looked at him in his dark clothes and darker purpose and now it truly was envy that roiled through me, but there was in truth only one thing I could say and so I said it.

Good luck, brother.

Thank you, brother, he said, and he nodded at the list in my hands. You, too. And his smile might have had just a touch of mockery to it as he added, With your houses. Then he turned and hurried away to his car and drove off into the growing darkness as I could only watch and wish I was going along with him.

Dexter? Rita called from the kitchen, snapping me out of my wistful funk. It s getting cold!

I closed the door and went to the table, where the meal was already in full and frantic swing. And things did not calm down all through dinner. It seemed like a near felony to rush through Rita s stir-fried pork, but we did. I tried to eat calmly and actually taste things, but the kids were totally wound up about the sudden trip to Key West, and Rita was far above us all and cranked to the pitch of a hummingbird s hyperrhythmic fluttering. In between each mouthful of food, she would snap out a list of things that each of us absolutely had to do right after we finished eating, and by the time the dishes were all in the sink I found that I had caught the frantic rhythm, too.

I left the table and hurried through packing my clothes. There really wasn t a great deal to the job, in spite of the fact that Rita spent several all-consuming hours at it. For my part, I grabbed a swimsuit and a few complete changes of clothing and chucked them into a gym bag, while Rita sprinted back and forth between the closet and the bed, where her enormous suitcase sat gaping open and empty. When I was finished I took my bag and put it beside the front door, and then went to check on Cody and Astor.

Cody was sitting on the bed with a full backpack beside him, watching his sister as she stared menacingly into her closet. She took out a shirt, held it up, made a horrible face, and put it back. I watched, fascinated, as she repeated the procedure twice. Cody looked at me and shook his head.

Are you all packed, Cody? I asked him.

He nodded, and I looked at Astor. She jiggled in place, chewed on her lip, and stomped her foot, but other than that she seemed to be making very little progress. And so, thinking that it was the correct fatherly thing to do, I took the very great risk of trying to speak to her. Astor? I said.

Leave me alone! she snarled over her shoulder.

I am trying to pack! And I have no clothes at all! And she flung a handful of objectionable stuff that was apparently not really clothing off the hangers and onto the floor and kicked it.

Cody raised an eyebrow at me. Girls, he said.

He was probably right that it was a gender thing, because Astor s high-strung performance was almost identical to the one Rita gave me a few moments later when I went back into the bedroom. Rita was holding a sundress in her hand and staring at it like it had killed Kennedy, and there was a pile of dresses and blouses on the floor beside the bed slightly neater than Astor s furiously flung heap, but very much the same kind of thing. How are you doing? I asked Rita cheerfully.

She snapped her head around and looked at me with the expression of a startled and rather angry deer, as if I had interrupted her in the middle of some intense and private meditation. What? she said, and gave me a shake of her head and a very cranky frown. Oh, Dexter, please not now, she said.

Honestly, you don t even Can t you go put gas in the car or something? I have to This is repulsive ! she said, flinging the sundress onto the pile beside the bed.

I left Rita to her high-octane dithering, and put my suitcase and Cody s backpack in the car. I checked the gas gauge and saw that it was nearly full. And then I stood beside the car and thought about what my brother was doing right now, as I did no more than shuffle around carrying luggage. If everything had gone well he would have started by now. It didn t seem fair that he got to have all the fun, when I was the one who d had to put up with Crowley all this time. But at least that was over. By the time I went to sleep tonight, Crowley would have gone the way of the dodo and the balanced budget. My troubles were winding down to a wicked ending, and that was all good, even if every cell of my body was pleading with me to follow Brian off to Playtime.

But I would have to content myself with standing in the moonlight and trying to picture my brother s happy activities. And just in case I needed a reminder of why that was, one glance up the street to the vacant lot was enough. The Ford Taurus containing the ever-vigilant Sergeant Doakes was still parked there, and I imagined I could see his teeth gleaming at me through the windshield. I sighed, waved at him, and went inside.

Rita was still flinging clothing around and muttering rapidly under her breath when I went to bed. I closed my eyes and tried very hard to sleep, but it s a very difficult thing to do when you are in the middle of a minor cyclone. Time and again I would drift into slumber, only to be jerked awake by the sound of coat hangers clashing angrily, or hundreds of shoes cascading onto the closet floor. Occasionally Rita would say some very surprising things under her breath, or rush out of the room altogether and then hurtle back in again a moment later clutching some arcane object that she would then cram into the bulging suitcase.

Altogether, it made wooing Morpheus a great deal more difficult than usual. I napped and woke up, napped and woke up, until finally, around two thirty, Rita closed her suitcase, thumped it onto the floor, and crawled in beside me, and I dropped off into deep, wonderful sleep at last.

In the morning, we raced through breakfast at high speed, and actually got the car loaded and ready at a very reasonable hour. Everyone climbed in as I folded up Lily Anne s stroller and threw it into the back and we were good to go. But as I started the car and put it in gear, a Ford Taurus pulled in and blocked us.

There was no great mystery about who might be driving the other car. I got out and, as I did, the Ford s passenger door opened and Detective Hood stepped out and gave me a good-morning sneer.

Sergeant Doakes said you were packing your car, he said.

I looked past him to the Ford; Doakes s happy face was just visible behind the glare on the windshield. Did he? I said.

Hood leaned in toward me until his face was only a few inches from mine. I don t want you thinking you can run away from this, sport, he said, and his breath smelled like low tide at the fish cannery.

I am a very good imitation, but I am not really a good person. I have done many very bad things, and I hope to live long enough to do many more. And to be completely objective, I almost certainly deserve all the things Hood and Doakes wanted to do to me. But while I wait for the long arm of the law to grab me by the neck, I also deserve to breathe air that is not fouled with the stench of unwashed and rotting dental apocalypse.

I put a stiff index finger into Hood s sternum and pushed him away. For a moment he thought he was going to tough it out but I had chosen my spot well, and he had to back off.

You can arrest me, I told Hood, or you can follow me. Otherwise, get out of my way. I pushed a little harder and he had to take another step back. And for God s sake, brush your teeth.

Hood slapped my hand away and glared at me. I glared back; it takes very little energy, and I could do it all day if that was what he wanted. But he got tired of our staring match first. He looked over his shoulder at Doakes, then back at me. All right, sport. I ll be seeing you. He stared a moment longer, but when I didn t melt he just turned away, climbed back in beside Doakes, and the car backed away about fifty feet down the street.

I watched them for a moment to see if they would do anything, but they were apparently happy just to watch me. So I got back in our car and began the long drive south.

Doakes stayed right behind us almost all the way to Key Largo. But when it became clear even to his limited reasoning faculties that I was not going to leap out of my car and onto a seaplane and escape to Cuba, he pulled off, turned around, and then drove back toward Miami. After all, there was only one road in and out of the Keys, and I was on it. A few phone calls and they would probably even turn up my reservation in Key West if they wanted to. Fine, I wasn t doing anything I wouldn t do in front of them. I put them out of my mind and concentrated on the traffic, which was already getting worse.

The drive from Miami down to Key West has never been a pleasant one if you are interested in actually getting there. On the other hand, if what you really want to get out of the trip is a nice, slow, meandering crawl through an endless column of bumper-to-bumper traffic that winds through a garish wonderland of T-shirt stores and fast-food joints, and you like to stop in the middle of the road now and then so you can gape at some roadside sign and memorize the words to tell all your friends back in Ohio, while everyone in all the cars behind you swelters in the July sun that no air-conditioning can ever overcome, and all the drivers of those other cars stare anxiously at the needle on the temperature gauge of their car as it climbs steadily into the red and they snarl at you through the blinding glare of the windshield and wish you would simply burst into flames and disappear from the face of the earth even though there are a thousand cars filled with people just like you on the road ahead waiting to take your place and start the whole hideously slow crawl all over again if that is your idea of a dream vacation in the Promised Land, come to the Keys! Paradise awaits!

It really should be a two- or three-hour drive. I have never made it in less than six, and this time it was seven and a half hours of sweltering road rage before we finally pulled into the parking lot of the Surfside Hotel in downtown Key West.

A remarkably skinny black man in a dark uniform leaped in front of our car and opened the door for me, then raced around to the other side of the car and held the door for Rita as she clambered out, and we all stood there for a moment, dazed and blinded by the merciless heat of July in Key West. The guy in the uniform trotted back to stand in front of me. Apparently he didn t feel the heat or perhaps he was so thin he simply had nothing in his system that could make sweat. In any case, his face was bone-dry, and he was jumping around in a dark jacket without showing any sign at all that the very air we were all breathing was so hot and humid you could hold an egg in your hand and watch it boil.

Checking in, sir? the man said, with the heavy lilt of some Caribbean island in his voice.

I hope so, I said. Especially if you have air-conditioning.

The man nodded his head as if he heard this all the time. Every room, sir. May I help you with your bags?

It seemed like a very reasonable request, and we all watched as the man piled our bags onto a cart except for Cody, who would not let go of his backpack. I don t know whether he was suspicious of the uniformed man, or he had something in the pack he didn t want anyone else to see; with Cody, either was possible. But it didn t seem as important as getting into the cool, dark lobby of the hotel as quickly as possible, before the soles of our shoes melted and we stuck to the pavement and sagged helplessly in place while all the flesh melted off our bones.

We followed Captain Skinny inside, and as we stepped into the lobby the cool air hit me with a force that numbed my lips and made time slow down. But we all made it over to reception somehow without slipping into hypothermic shock. The man at the desk inclined his head at us with great gravity and said, Good afternoon, sir. Do you have a reservation?

I nodded back and said we had, in fact, reserved a room and Rita leaned in front of me and blurted out, Not a room, it s a suite? Because it s supposed to be, I mean, and anyway when we got it online? And Dexter said my husband. I mean, Morgan.

Very good, ma am, the clerk said. He turned to his computer, and I left Rita to go through all the little rituals of registration while I took Lily Anne and followed Cody and Astor over to a large rack holding pamphlets for all the many charming and glamorous attractions this Magic Isle held for even the most jaded traveler. Apparently, one could do almost anything in Key West as long as one had a couple of major credit cards and an overwhelming urge to buy T-shirts. The kids stared at the dozens of brightly colored brochures. Cody would frown and point to one, and Astor would pull it from its slot. Then their two heads came together over the pictures as they studied the page, Astor whispering to her brother and Cody nodding and frowning back at her, and then their eyes would snap up and they d go back to the rack to pick another one. By the time Rita had us registered and came to join us, Astor held at least fifteen brochures.

Well, Rita said, as breathlessly as if she d just run all the way from Miami. We re all set! Shall we go up to our room? I mean our suite because we re here and it s Oh, this hotel is just so This is going to be so much fun!

Perhaps I was just tired from grinding my teeth in traffic for seven and a half hours, but I found it hard to match Rita s high-spirited enthusiasm. Still, we were here, and more or less intact. So I followed along behind her as she led us to the elevator and up to our room I mean our suite.

The suite consisted of a large bedroom, a living area with a kitchenette and a foldout couch, and a tiled bathroom with a shower and a Jacuzzi. The entire suite had a faint smell to it, as if somebody had deep-fried a bag of lemons in a vat of toxic cleaning fluids. Rita rushed in and opened the curtains, revealing a beautiful view of the back side of the neighboring hotel. Oh, she gushed, this is just so Dexter, get the door; it s the man with our bags Look at this, Cody, Astor! We re in Key West!

I opened the door. As advertised, it was the man with our bags. He put them in the bedroom and then smiled at me so aggressively that I almost felt guilty giving him a mere five-dollar bill. But he accepted it without any kind of tantrum and vanished out the door. I barely had time to sit down before a second knock came on the door this time another uniformed man, who wheeled in a crib, set it up for us, and gravely accepted another five dollars for his labors.

When he was gone I sat again, with Lily Anne bouncing in my lap. She and I watched as the other members of our little family scuttled through the suite and explored it, opening doors and cupboards and calling to each other with each new discovery. It all felt a little bit unreal. Of course, Key West always does, but it seemed a bit more so this time. After all, I really shouldn t have been here at all, and it made no sense to me that I was yet here I sat in this bright and shiny tourist mecca, in an expensive hotel room I mean suite while only a few hours away some very serious and very bent cops were working overtime to frame me for murder. And on the other side of Miami, my brother was lounging around in the afterglow of a playdate that should have been mine. Those two things were immediate, important, and tangible to me in a way that our trip to this surreal oasis of greed never could be, and it was difficult to believe that I was trapped in a glitzy time-out while real life whirled away without me just a few hours north.

Rita finally finished opening all the cupboards and closets, and came to sit beside me. She reached over and took Lily Anne from my lap and sighed heavily. Well, she said, sounding utterly content. Here we are.

And as unlikely as it seemed to me, she was right. Here we were, and for the next few days, whatever happened in Real Life would have to happen without me.

THIRTY

Since our real estate auction did not take place until tomorrow, we had a long afternoon and evening of what Rita called free time, which seemed like a very misleading thing to call something that cost so much. We all followed Rita through the streets of Old Key West buying bottled water at airport prices and then ice cream and a five-dollar cookie and sunglasses and sunscreen and hats and T-shirts and genuine Key West sandals. I began to feel like a portable ATM. At the rate I was tossing away cash, we would be dead broke by bedtime.

But there was no slowing down Rita. She was obviously set on forcing us all into a delirium of high-priced bankruptcy, and just to make sure I lost my last inhibitions about saving enough money to buy gas for the trip home, she even dragged us all to a very loud bar that opened onto the sidewalk. She ordered two mai tais and two virgin pi a coladas, and when the bill came it was really no more than dinner for eight at a good restaurant. I sipped from the plastic cup, nearly poking out my eye with the little paper umbrella that was shoved into the bright pink slush, while Rita gave Astor her cell phone and made her snap a picture of the two of us standing in front of a large plastic shark with our mai tais raised.

I finished my drink without discovering any actual alcohol in it, and got a brief but blinding headache from slurping the frozen slop too fast. We trudged on up Duval Street, finding ever more ingenious ways to throw away money. Then we hurried back down the other side of Duval Street to Mallory Square and got there just in time to participate in a more free-form style of wasting money, the legendary sunset celebration. Rita handed dollar bills to Cody and Astor and urged them to fling them at the vast collection of jugglers, fire-eaters, acrobats, and other freeloaders all climaxing when Rita herself dropped a ten-dollar bill into the outstretched hands of the man who forced a collection of domestic cats to leap through flaming hoops by screeching at them in a high-pitched voice with a strange foreign accent.

We had dinner at a charming place that claimed to serve the freshest seafood in town. It was not air-conditioned, so I hoped it really was fresh. Even with the ceiling fans whirling it was stiflingly hot, and after sitting at the large picnic-style table for five minutes I found that I was stuck to the bench. But the food came after only forty-five minutes, and the grease it had been cooked in was only a few days old, so I couldn t really object when the bill came and the total was no more than the down payment on a new Mercedes.

Through it all the heat never let up, the crowd noise grew louder, and my wallet got much lighter. By the time we staggered back to the hotel I was soaked with sweat, half-deaf, and I had three new blisters on my feet. It was altogether a great deal more fun than I d had in a long time, and as I slumped into a chair in our hotel room suite I remembered again why I really don t like having fun.

I took a shower and when I came out, clean but very tired, Cody and Astor had settled down in front of the TV to watch a movie. Lily Anne was sound asleep in the crib, and Rita was sitting at the desk with the list of houses for tomorrow s auction, frowning and scribbling in the margins. I went to bed and slid immediately into sleep, visions of dollar bills dancing in my head. They were all waving good-bye.

It was still half-dark when I opened my eyes the next morning. Rita sat at the desk, again or still flipping through the list of houses and scribbling on a legal pad. I looked at the clock on the bedside table. It said five forty-eight.

Rita, I said, in a voice that was somewhere between a croak and a gargle.

She didn t look up. I have to figure them all at the thirty-year fixed rate, she said. But if we finance it through Ernesto s brother it s a lower rate? But we pay closing.

It was a little too much information for me in my barely awake state and I closed my eyes again. But I had just started to slide back into sleep when Lily Anne started to fuss. I opened one eye and looked at Rita; she was pretending she didn t hear Lily Anne, which is Married Person Code for, You do it, dear. So I bade a fond farewell to the whole idea of slumber and got up. I changed Lily Anne s diaper and made her a bottle of formula, and by the time I was done she had made it clear that she was awake and that was all there was to it.

The sign in the hotel s lobby had said that breakfast was served starting at six a.m. If I was going to be awake, I decided I should do it right and have some coffee and an assembly-line Danish. I got dressed and, with Lily Anne under one arm, headed for the door.

But two steps into the living room a small blond head popped up from the tangle of blankets on the foldout couch. Where are you going, Dexter? Astor said.

Breakfast.

We wanna come, too, she said, and she and Cody both exploded up out of the bedding and onto the floor as if they had been loaded into a torpedo tube and waiting for me to swim by.

By the time they were dressed, Rita had come out to see what all the fuss was about, and decided to come with us. So ten minutes after I had taken my tentative step toward the door and coffee, the entire troupe was on the march for the dining room.

There were only two other people there: a couple of middle-aged men who looked like they were on their way out to go fishing. We sat down as far from the TV as possible and tore into a surprisingly good buffet, considering it was just $19.95 per person.

I sipped a cup of coffee that tasted like it had been made at my office last year, frozen, and shipped down to Key West in a barrel of bait. Still, it definitely got my eyes open. I found myself thinking of Brian and what he had almost certainly finished by now. I was a little jealous; I hoped he d taken his time and had a little fun.

I thought about Hood and Doakes and wondered whether they had followed me down here after all. I was sure they d want to but technically that would be a little bit outside the rules, wouldn t it? Still, Doakes had never let regulations dampen his zeal. And I didn t think Hood could actually understand the rules, since many of them had words in them with more than one syllable. I was pretty sure they d turn up sooner or later.

My train of thought was derailed when Rita slapped the list onto the table and spoke very definitely. Five, she said, frowning heavily and tapping one of the entries with a pencil.

Excuse me? I said politely.

She looked up at me blankly. Five, she said again. Five houses. The others are all She vigorously shook her hand, the one with the pencil, and went on in a brittle and rapid voice. Too big. Too small. Wrong area. Bad zoning. High tax base. Old roof and maybe

So there are five possible houses to bid on that might work for us? I said, because I have always believed that both people in a conversation should know what they are talking about.

Yes, of course, Rita said, frowning again, and then smacking the paper with her pencil. This one, on a Hundred and Forty-second Terrace, this would be the best, and it s not that far from the house we re in now, but

Do we have to talk about all that boring house stuff? Astor interrupted. Can t we go to the aquarium, and then just buy a house later?

Astor, no, we can t don t interrupt, Rita said. This is extremely important and I You have no idea how much we still have to do, just to be ready by three o clock.

But we don t all have to do it, Astor said in her very best reasonable whine. We wanna go to the aquarium. She looked at Cody, and he nodded at her, and then at his mother.

That s impossible, Rita said. This is one of the most important decisions And your future! Because you will be living there for a very long time.

Aquarium, Cody said softly. Feed the sharks.

What? Feed the Cody, you can t feed the sharks, Rita said.

You can so feed the sharks, Astor said. It says in the brochure.

That s crazy; they re sharks, Rita said with emphasis, as if Astor had used the word wrong. And the auction is only Oh, look at the time. She began to flutter in place on her chair, stuffing the pencil into her purse and waving the list of houses to summon the waiter. And I, sensing that there are certain forms of tedium that are best endured without me, looked at Cody and Astor, and then turned to Rita.

I ll take the kids to the aquarium, I said.

Rita looked up at me, startled. What? Dexter, no, don t be We have to go through this whole list, let alone the five and then register with the No, there s too much, she said.

Once again, my extensive background watching daytime drama told me the right move to make, and I reached across to put my hand on top of hers not an easy thing to do, since the hand was in constant motion. But I snared it and pinned it to the table and then, leaning over as close to her as I could get, I said, Rita. This is something you know more about than the rest of us combined. More important, we trust you to do it right.

Cody and Astor are not slow, and they knew a dramatic cue when they heard one. Cody nodded rapidly and Astor said, Totally, Mom, really.

Besides, I said, they re kids. They re in a strange new place, and they want to see new and exciting things. Feed the sharks, Cody said stubbornly.

And it s educational! Astor almost shouted, which I thought might have been overkill.

But apparently the shot went home, because Rita no longer seemed so certain when she said, But the list, and Dexter, really, you ought to you know.

You re right, I said, which was at least possible. But, Rita look at them. I nodded at the kids, who both instantly put on beaten-puppy faces. And I really do trust you to do the right thing. Completely, I added, giving her hand a little squeeze for emphasis.

Well, but really, Rita said feebly.

Pleeeeeeeeeease? Astor said, and Cody added,

Sharks, Mom.

Rita looked from one to the other, chewing rapidly on her lip until I was afraid she would chomp it right off. Well, she said. If it s just

Yay! Astor called out, and Cody nearly smiled.

Thanks, Mom! Astor added, and she and her brother both jumped up from the table.

But you brush your teeth first! Rita said.

And, Dexter, they have to put on sunscreen it s on the desk up in our room, our suite.

All right, I said. Where will you be?

Rita frowned and looked around the room until she found the clock.

The auction office opens at seven that s ten minutes. I ll take Lily Anne over there and ask them And Brian said they have pictures, too, better than the ones But, Dexter, really

I reached across and patted her arm comfortingly.

It s going to be fine, I said again.

You re really good at this.

Rita shook her head. Don t let them get too close to the sharks? she said. Because after all.

We ll be careful, I assured her, and as I walked out to join Cody and Astor, Rita was lifting Lily Anne out of the high chair and wiping apple sauce from her face.

Astor and Cody were out in front of the hotel, watching in dumbstruck awe as several clusters of stocky bearded men headed past, hurrying down Duval Street and glaring suspiciously at each other.

Astor shook her head and said, They all look alike, Dexter. They even dress the same. Are they gay or something?

They can t all be, I said. Even in Key West.

So then what s up? she said, as if it was my fault that the men looked the same.

I was about to tell her it was a strange cosmic accident, when I remembered that it was July and this was, after all, Key West.

Oh, I said. Hemingway Days. They both looked at me blankly. The men are all Hemingway look-alikes, I told them.

Astor frowned and looked at Cody. He shook his head.

What s Hemingway? Astor said.

I watched the crowd of look-alikes milling around on the sidewalk, jostling each other and slurping beer. A man who grew a beard and drank a lot, I said.

Well, I wouldn t want to look like that, she muttered.

Come on, I said. You have to brush your teeth.

I herded them in and over to the elevator, just in time to see Rita heading out the door. She gave us a big wave and called out,

Don t get too close I ll call you when I Remember, be there at two o clock!

Bye, Mom! Astor called back, and Cody waved to her.

We rode up to our floor in silence, and trudged down the hall to our room. I put the key card into the lock on our door, pushed the door open, and held it for Cody and Astor. They hurried inside and, before I could follow them in and close the door, they stopped dead in their tracks.

Whoa, Astor said.

Cool, Cody added, and his voice seemed louder and sharper than normal.

Dex-ter, Astor called in a happy singsong tone.

You d better come look.

I pushed past them into the room for a look, and after one quick glance, looking was all I could do. My feet would not move, my mouth was dry, and all coherent thought had fled me, replaced by the single syllable but, which repeated itself in an endless loop as I just stared.

The foldout couch where Cody and Astor had slept was pulled out and neatly made up, with pillows fluffed and blanket turned down. And nestled snugly onto the bed was a rigid lump of something that had once been a human being. But it didn t look like one now; where a face should have been there was a shallow, flattened crater with a smear of crusted blood around it where some large, hard object had come in contact with flesh and bones. A few stubs of gray teeth showed in the middle, and one eyeball, popped out of its socket by the force of the blow, dangled down one side of the mess.

Somebody had hit that face with appalling force, with something like a baseball bat, crushing it out of shape and probably killing it instantly, which almost seemed too bad. Because even without a shape, and in spite of the fact that I was shocked nearly thoughtless by finding it here, I recognized the cheap suit and enough of the squashed features to know who this scabby lump had once been.

It was Detective Hood.

THIRTY-ONE

I had never liked detective Hood, and I liked him a lot less now. He had been enough of an annoyance alive; turning up dead in my hotel room was much worse, violating even the most basic standards of etiquette and decency. It was just plain wrong, and I almost wished he was still alive, so I could kill him again.

But beyond this severe breach of decorum there were other implications, infinitely more troubling. And although I would like to say that my high-powered brain immediately kicked into top gear and began to compute them all, the truth is sadly otherwise. I was so busy being angry at Hood s final offense against good taste that I did not think at all until I heard Astor say, But, Dexter, what s it doing here?

And as I opened my mouth to snap some angry dismissal at her, it hit me that this was a very important question. Not why Hood was in Key West; he had clearly followed me to make sure I didn t steal a boat and run for Cuba. I had half expected that. But someone else had followed along, too, and killed Hood in this very distinctive way, and that was far more troubling, because theoretically, it was impossible. Because unless I was willing to accept the idea that a monstrous coincidence had led a complete stranger to kill Hood for some whimsical reason, and then by miraculous happenstance chose to dump him randomly in my suite, there was only one person in the world who could have done this.

Crowley.

Of course, he was supposed to be dead, which should have kept him too busy to do anything like this. But even if he was still alive somehow how had he found me here? How had he discovered not only that I was in Key West, but that I was here, in this hotel, in this exact room? He had known every move I was going to make before I had made it, and now even my room number. How?

Cody tried to push past and get a closer look, and I pushed him firmly back toward the door. Stay back, I said, and I reached for my phone. If I couldn t figure out how Crowley had stayed ahead of me the whole time, at least I could find out if he was really dead. I dialed. There were three short rings and then a dreadfully cheerful, Hello!

Brian, I said. Sorry if this is an odd question, but, um did you take care of that thing you were going to do the other night?

Oh, yes, he said, and even through the phone I could hear the very real happiness in his voice. And a good time was had by nearly all.

You re sure? I said, staring at the lump that had been Hood.

You re right; that really is an odd question, Brian said. Of course I m sure, brother; I was there.

And there was no mistake?

There was a pause on the line, and I wondered whether the connection had dropped. Brian? I said.

Well, he said after a moment, it s just funny that you should ask that. The, um the gentleman in question? He used that word a lot. He kept saying I was making a terrible mistake. Something about identity theft, I think? I wasn t really listening.

Something nudged me from behind. Dexter, Astor said, pushing harder. We can t see.

Just a minute, I snapped at her, pushing them back again. Brian, I said into the phone. Can you describe the, um, gentleman in question?

Before or after? he said.

Before.

We-e-ellllll, he said. I would say about forty-five, maybe five-foot-ten and a hundred and sixty pounds? Blond hair, clean shaven, with little gold-rimmed glasses.

Oh, I said. Crowley was probably thirty pounds heavier than that, younger, and he had a beard.

Is everything okay, brother? You sound a little out of sorts.

I m afraid that everything is not quite okay, I said. I think the gentleman in question was right.

Oh, dear, Brian said. There was a mistake?

It sure looks like it from here, I said.

Oh, well, Brian said. Qu ser.

Astor nudged me again. Dex-ter, come on, she said.

I have to go, I told Brian.

I d love to know what I did, he said.

Call me later?

If I can, I told him. I put away the phone and turned to face Cody and Astor. Now, I said, you two go wait in the hall.

But, Dexter, Astor said, we didn t get to see anything, not really.

Too bad, I said firmly. You can t go any closer until the police are done.

Not fair, Cody said, with a major-league pout.

Tough. This is what I do for a living, I told him meaning crime scene work, of course, and not the actual crime. We have to leave the room without touching anything and go call the police.

We just wanna look; we won t touch anything, Astor said.

No, I said, pushing them toward the door.

Wait in the hall. I ll just be a minute.

They didn t like it, not at all, but they went, trying all the way to get one more look at the thing on the foldout sofa. But I hustled them into the hall and shut the door and went to take a closer look of my own.

No one would ever have called Hood a handsome man, but as he was now he was positively repulsive. His tongue stuck out between the broken teeth, and the eye that wasn t hanging out of the socket had gone red. This had clearly been the result of one tremendously powerful blow, and I didn t think Hood had suffered for very long, which didn t seem fair.

I knelt down beside the bed and looked underneath. There were no hastily dropped keys or monogrammed handkerchiefs to tell me who had done this, but they weren t needed. I knew who had done it. But I still needed to know how. On the far side of the bed I saw something, and I went around to the other side and poked it out just far enough so I could see it. It was a large souvenir pirate hat, the kind with the black rubber eye patch molded onto it so it hangs down the front. Stuffed inside was a red bandanna. Even without touching it, I could see blood on the bandanna. A disguise for Hood? Probably to cover the wounds long enough to get him into the hotel.

I stood up and, just to be thorough, I went into the bedroom to see if anything was amiss. But everything looked fine no one was lurking in the closet, Rita s suitcase seemed undisturbed, and even my laptop was still sitting on the desk, apparently untouched. When I thought about it, that seemed a little odd. After all, Crowley boasted about his mastery of computer lore; why hadn t he taken two minutes to look at my computer and learn my secrets?

And from somewhere deep inside Dexter s Dungeon there came a soft flex of wings and a gently whispered answer:

Because he didn t need to.

I blinked. It was a painfully simple answer, and it made me feel stupider than I could ever remember feeling.

He didn t need to learn my secrets.

He already knew them.

He had stayed a step ahead of me because he had already hacked into my hard drive, and every time I powered on to find his address or read my e-mail or make a hotel reservation, he was there with me. There were plenty of programs that could do that. The only question was how he had put it on my hard drive. I tried to remember if I had left my computer alone anyplace but home or work I hadn t. I never would. But, of course, you didn t need to touch a computer to hack into it. With the right worm, wi-fi would work fine. And with that thought I remembered sitting in front of my computer and opening an e-mail pitching the new Web site Tropical Blood. There had been a burst of fancy flash graphics and then a slow crawl of blood perfect for distracting me for just a moment while the program wormed onto my hard drive and started telling Crowley everything about me.

It made sense; I was sure I was right, and with two minutes on the computer I could know for sure but a rapid pounding came on the door, followed by Astor s muffled, anxious voice calling my name. I turned away from my computer. It didn t matter. Even without finding Crowley s worm, I knew it was there. Nothing else was possible.

The knocking came again, and I opened the door and went out into the hall. The two of them tried to peer around me and see Hood s body, but I pulled the door closed.

We just wanted one last look, Astor said.

No, I said. And that s another thing. You have to pretend to be grossed out and scared. So people think you re just ordinary kids.

Scared? Astor demanded. Scared of what?

Scared of a dead body, and thinking that a killer was right here in your hotel room.

It s a suite, she said.

So put on your frightened faces for the cops, I said, and I got us all into the elevator. Luckily, there was a mirror in the elevator, and all the way down to the lobby they practiced looking scared. Neither one of them was completely convincing it really does take years of practice but I hoped nobody would notice.

I have been at hundreds of crime scenes in my career, and many of them were in hotels, so I was quite well aware that the management, generally speaking, does not consider dead bodies in the rooms a major selling point. They prefer to keep such things quiet, and in the spirit of polite cooperation, I went to the front desk and asked to see the manager.

The desk clerk was a nice-looking African-American woman. She smiled with genuine sympathy and said, Of course, sir. Is there a problem?

There s a dead body in our suite, Astor said.

Hush, I told her.

The desk clerk s smile twitched and then faded as she looked from me to Astor. Are you sure about that, young lady? she asked Astor.

I put a restraining hand on Astor. I m afraid so, I told the clerk.

She just gaped for several seconds. Oh, my God, she said at last. I mean She cleared her throat and then made a very visible effort to pull her official clerk face back together. Wait right here, she said formally, and then she thought again and added, I mean please come with me?

We followed her through the doorway behind the desk and waited while she called the manager. The manager arrived, and we waited some more while he called the police. And then we waited even longer while the police and local forensics team went up to our suite. A woman arrived and stared at us while she talked to the clerk. She seemed to be about forty-five, with graying hair, and loose skin hanging from her neck like crepe paper. She looked like she had been one of the party girls who came to Key West and hung out in the bars, until one day she woke up and realized the party was over and she had to get a real job. It didn t seem to agree with her; she had a look of permanent disappointment etched onto her face, like there was a bad taste on her tongue and she couldn t get rid of it.

After a quick and quiet conversation with the desk clerk she came over and spoke to me. Mr. Morgan? she said formally, and I recognized the tone right away. Her next words proved that I was right. I m Detective Blanton, she said.

I need to ask you a few questions.

Of course, I said.

First I d like to make sure your children are okay? she said, and without waiting for an answer from me she crouched down beside Cody and Astor. Hi, she said to them, in a tone of voice usually reserved for clever puppies or human idiots. My name is Detective Shari. Can you talk about what you saw upstairs in your room?

It s a suite, Astor said. And anyway, we didn t get to see hardly anything because Dexter made us leave the room before we could really look at it.

Blanton blinked with her mouth hanging open. This was clearly not quite the reaction she d been expecting. I see, she said, and she looked up at me.

They re very frightened, I said, putting a little emphasis on the word so they would remember that they were scared.

Of course they are, Blanton said. She looked at Cody. You gonna be okay, buddy?

Fine, he said softly, and then he glanced at me and added, Really scared.

That s totally normal, Blanton said, and Cody looked very pleased. How about you, sweetheart? she continued, turning back to Astor. You doing all right?

Astor made a visible effort not to snarl at being called sweetheart and instead managed to say, Yes, I m fine, thank you, just scared.

Uh-huh, Blanton said. She looked back and forth between the two of them, apparently searching for some clue that they might be slipping into shock.

My phone rang it was Rita. Hello, dear, I said, turning half away from Blanton and the children.

Dexter, I just went past the aquarium? It doesn t open until almost And so, where are you? Because it s a couple of hours.

Well, I said. We got a little sidetracked. There s been a little incident here at the hotel

Oh, my God, I knew it, she said.

Nothing at all to worry about, I said, raising my voice over hers. We re all fine; it s just something that happened and we were witnesses, so we have to make a statement, that s all.

But they re just children, Rita said.

It isn t even legal, and they have to Are they all right?

They re both fine; they re talking to a very nice policewoman, I said, and thinking it was best to cut things short, I said, Rita, please, you go right ahead with the auction. We ll be fine.

I can t possibly Because, I mean, the police are there?

You have to do the auction; it s what we came for, I said. Get us the place on a Hundred and Forty-second Street.

It s terrace, she said. A Hundred and Forty-second Terrace.

Even better, I said. And don t worry; we ll be there in plenty of time.

Well, but, she said, I just think I should be there

You need to get ready for the auction, I said.

And don t worry about us. We ll finish up here and then go see the sharks. This is just a minor inconvenience.

Mr. Morgan? Blanton said behind me. There s somebody here who wants to talk to you.

Get that house, I said to Rita. I have to go now. And I turned to face Blanton, and saw that my minor inconvenience had just grown a few sizes.

Gliding into the room, teeth first, was Sergeant Doakes.

I have been in many police interrogation rooms, and truthfully, the one in the Key West police station was fairly standard. But it did look a little different this time, since I was on the wrong side of the table. They hadn t handcuffed me, which I thought was very nice of them, but they also didn t seem to want me to go anywhere. So I sat there at the table while first Blanton and then several other detectives came and went, snarling the same questions, and then disappearing again. And each time the door swung open, I could see Sergeant Doakes standing in the hall outside the room. He was not smiling now, although I m sure he was very happy, since I was right where he wanted me, and I knew he d think it was worth losing Hood to put me here.

I tried very hard to be patient and answer the four standard questions the Key West cops kept asking, no matter how many times they asked, and I tried just as hard to remember that this one time I really was completely innocent and I had nothing to worry about. Sooner or later they would have to let me go, no matter how many ways Doakes managed to invoke professional cooperation.

But they seemed in no hurry, and after an hour or so in which they didn t even offer me coffee, I thought perhaps I should encourage them. So when the fourth detective came in and sat down opposite me, and informed me for the third time that this was a very serious matter, I stood up and said, Yes, it is. You are holding me here for no reason, without filing a charge, when I have done absolutely nothing wrong.

Sit down, Dexter, the detective said. He was probably about fifty and looked like he d been beaten up a few times, and I felt very strongly that one more time would be a good idea, because he said my name like he thought it was funny, and although I am normally very patient with stupidity after all, there s so much of it this was the last straw.

So I put my knuckles on the table and leaned toward him, and I let fly with all the righteous indignation that I actually felt. No, I said. I will not sit down. And I will not answer the same questions over and over anymore. If you aren t going to file a charge and aren t going to let me go, I want an attorney.

Look, the guy said, with world-weary chumminess.

We know you re with the Miami-Dade department. A little professional cooperation wouldn t hurt you, would it?

It would not hurt me at all, I said. And unless you release me immediately, I plan to cooperate as much as possible with your Internal Affairs department.

The detective drummed his fingers on the table for a few seconds and looked like he thought he might tough it out. But instead he slapped the table softly, stood up, and walked out without another word.

It was only another five minutes before Blanton came back in. She didn t look happy, but maybe she didn t know how. She was holding a manila folder in one hand and smacking it against the other one, and she looked at me like she wanted to blame me for the federal budget deficit. But she didn t say anything; she just looked, smacked the folder a few times, and then shook her head.

You can go, she said.

I waited to see if there was anything else. There wasn t, so I walked through the door and into the hall. Naturally enough, Sergeant Doakes was standing there waiting for me. Better luck next time, I told him.

He didn t say anything, and he didn t even show me his teeth. He just stared at me with that hungry-jackal look of his that I knew so well, and since I have never been the sort who enjoys uncomfortable silence, I turned away from him and stuck my head back into the interrogation room that had been my home for the last ninety minutes.

Blanton, I said, rather proud of myself for remembering her name. Where are my children?

She put the folder down, sighed, and came over to the doorway.

They ve gone to be with their mother, she said.

Oh, all right, I said. Did they get to ride over in a patrol car?

No, we could get in trouble for that, she said.

We got budget problems, you know.

Well, you didn t just stick them in a taxicab all alone, did you? I said, and I admit I was getting irritated with her, and the entire Key West Police Department.

No, of course not, she said, with a little more spirit than she d shown so far. They left with an authorized adult.

I could think of only one or two people who might be considered authorized, and for a moment I felt a brief glimmer of hope; perhaps Deborah had arrived and things were looking up at last. Oh, good, I said. Was it their aunt, Sergeant Deborah Morgan?

Blanton blinked at me and shook her head. No, she said. But it s okay; your son knew him. It was his Cub Scout leader.

THIRTY-TWO

I had spent far too much time lately bemoaning the decline of my once-stunning mental powers, and so it was a great relief to realize that the gray cells were coming back online, because I did not think, even for a second, that Cub Scout leader meant Frank, the big-bellied, ghost story telling real leader of the pack. I knew instantly who had taken Cody and Astor.

It was Crowley.

He had come right into the station, a building filled with policemen who were looking for him, even though they didn t know it, and he had bluffed his way into possession of my children and walked out with them, and while a very small part of me admired the absolute brazen nerve of it, the rest of me was in no mood to hand out compliments.

He had taken my kids. Cody and Astor were mine, and he had snatched them from under my nose. It was a special, personal affront, and it filled me with a rage larger and brighter and more blinding than anything I had ever felt before. A red mist came down and covered over everything I saw, starting with Detective Blanton. She was goggling at me like some kind of awful, stupid, droopy fish, just gawking and mocking me for getting caught and for losing the children and it was all her fault. All of it she had listened to Doakes and brought me here and taken my kids away, only to give them to the one person on earth I didn t want anywhere near them and she was standing right there in front of me making stupid faces and I wanted very badly to grab her around her saggy little neck and shake her until the crepe-paper wrinkles on her neck rattled and then squeeze until her eyes popped and her tongue flopped out and her face turned purple and all the small and delicate bones in her throat crunched and splintered in my hands

Blanton must have noticed that my reaction was a little more than a polite thank-you and a carefree nod of the head. She took a step away from me, back into the interrogation room, and said, Uh, that was okay, wasn t it, Mr. Morgan? And even though it was a step up from being called by my first name, it did not pacify me, not at all. Without realizing what I was doing I took a step toward her and flexed my fingers. Your boy knew him, she said, starting to sound a little desperate. It was I mean, the Cub Scouts? They all have to pass a background check

Just before I got my hands on her throat, something very hard and metallic grabbed my elbow and jerked me back a half step. I turned toward it, ready to rip it into small pieces, too but of course, it was Sergeant Doakes, and he did not look at all rippable, even through the red mist. He had latched onto my arm with one of his prosthetic claws, and he was looking at me with an expression of amused interest, as if hoping I would really try something. The red mist dropped away from my vision.

I pried his claw from my arm, which was harder than it sounds, and I looked one more time at Detective Blanton. If anything has happened to my children, I told her, you will regret it for the rest of your short, stupid, miserable little life.

And before she could think of anything to say to that, I turned away, pushed past Doakes, and walked away down the hall.

It was not really a very long walk back to the center of town. There aren t any long walks in Key West. Everything you read about the place tells you it is a small island, no more than a few square miles tucked snugly away at the end of the Florida Keys. It s supposed to be a comfy little town stuffed full of sun and fun and relentless good times that never end. But when you step into the smothering heat of Duval Street trying to locate one specific man and two children, there is nothing small about it. And as I finally hit the center of town and stared around me in my angry panic, that came home to me with a force that nearly took the wind out of me. I was looking for the tip of a needle in a field full of haystacks. It was far past futile, beyond hopeless; there was not even a place to begin that made any sense.

Everything seemed to be stacked against me. The streets were overflowing with people of all sizes and shapes, and I couldn t even see half a block in any direction. A trio of Hemingways walked past me, and it rubbed my nose in the fact that even looking for Crowley was ridiculous. He was a stocky guy with a beard, and the streets of Key West were crammed full of stocky guys with beards. I stared wildly around, but it was useless, pointless, hopeless; they were everywhere. Several more stocky bearded men pushed past; two of them held children by the hand, kids about the size and shape of Cody and Astor, and each time I felt a sharp stab of hope, and each time the faces were wrong and the crowd closed around them and surged along Duval and left me stewing in a dark gray cloud of despair. I would never find them. Crowley had won and I might as well go home and wait for the end of all things.

The hopelessness came flooding in like a spring tide and I slumped against a building and closed my eyes. It was easier to do nothing while resting in one place than to do the same nothing galloping around with no idea where to go or what to look for. I could just stay here, leaning in the shade and wrapped in defeat. And I might have stayed there placidly for a much longer time except that one very small bright idea swam upstream through the gray tide and wiggled its tail at me.

I watched it swim in its lazy slow circles for a moment, and when at last I understood what it was saying I grabbed it by the fins and held it up to look at it. I turned it over and looked at all sides, and the more I did, the more right it seemed. I opened my eyes and stood up slowly and deliberately and looked at the wiggly little thing one more time, and I knew it was right.

Crowley had not won not yet.

I don t mean that my thought brought some flicker of idiot hope, or that it had told me where Crowley had gone with Cody and Astor. It had told me a much simpler, more compelling truth:

The game was not over.

Crowley had not yet done what he needed to do. Taking Cody and Astor was not the Endgame, because we were not playing Capture the Kids. We were playing Let s Demolish Dexter. He didn t want to hurt them his overdeveloped sense of right and wrong wouldn t let him hurt innocent children. No, he wanted to hurt me, to punish me for the wicked things I had done. So until I was dead or at the very least in leg irons, Crowley was not done playing.

Neither was I. I was just getting started.

He d had it all his way so far, kept me off balance, stepping in to deliver his nasty little jabs and then dancing away before I could react, and he thought he was winning and I was no more than a dull punching bag, a broad and simple target, easy to find and slow to react, and he had pushed me and slapped me and jabbed me into a corner until he thought he had me on the ropes and I would be easy to finish off.

He was wrong.

He hadn t faced me yet. He had no idea what it meant to try to put me down in person. He had not stood toe-to-toe with the champ, Dexter the Destroyer, facing me in the flesh with the certainty of Death in each hand and the dark wind howling around us that was my home turf, and he had not set foot on it yet, and until he did the fight had not even started.

But Crowley had rung the bell for the final round when he snatched Cody and Astor. He believed I was weakened and he was ready, and he had made his move. And he had not taken the kids to taunt me, to show me he was very clever and I was a helpless fool. No, he had taken them so I would come after them. They were the bait for his trap, and a trap can t catch anything at all unless the prey knows where it is.

He was waiting for me to find him. And that meant that somehow, some way, he would have to let me know where he was. There would be a broad and obvious hint somewhere, an actual invitation to the dance. He would not want to wait too long, and he would not leave it to chance. I knew I was right. He had slapped me with a glove, and someplace near and obvious he had dropped it for me to find.

My phone rang, and I glanced at it; it was Rita. I almost answered it out of mere habit but before I could push the button and speak, I heard a different, interior bell chime softly and I knew.

Of course. This whole thing had been centered around computers and Crowley s conceited belief that he was King of the Internet. He would not just leave a hint somewhere he would send it to me in an e-mail.

The phone was still ringing insistently, but now I had a much more important use for it than talking to Rita, and I hit the disconnect button. I tapped the icon to get to my e-mail and it seemed to take hours before the screen finally showed my in-box. But it did at last, and there, at the top, was a note from Shadowblog. I opened it.

Very good, it said. You finally found my real name and address.

Something bumped me and I flinched into alertness. A rowdy group of young men that looked like a fraternity party turned bad roiled past me, shouting and slopping beer from plastic cups. I pushed through them and sat down on the edge of a low wall in front of a restaurant, and went back to reading the e-mail.

You finally found my real name and address. Too bad it isn t my real name and address. Did you really think it would be that easy? But thanks anyway you solved a problem for me. The guy was my ex-boss, a real douche bag. And Doug Crowley is a lot safer to use now that there s nobody to complain. I get to use his car now, too.

You and me are just about done. You have to know that. There s just one last piece of work, and you know what that is, too.

You and me.

You have to pay for what you have done. I have to make you pay. There is no other way and you know you got it coming and you have to do this; I have your kids. I probably won t hurt them, unless you don t show up.

This time it s on my terms. I get to set up and wait for you to walk right into it. I picked the place, and I picked a good one. Really witty, in a kind of dry way. Hurry down don t be a turtle.

They seem like really nice kids.

That was it. I read it again, but there was no more.

My jaw hurt. I wondered why. Nobody had actually hit me. Had I been grinding my teeth a lot lately? It seemed like I had. I was probably wearing all the enamel off. That wasn t good. I would get cavities. I wondered if I would live long enough to get to the dentist. Or, if things went better than I thought they could possibly go, if the dental program would cover it in Raiford Prison.

Of course, if I stood here any longer thinking about my teeth, it would probably be best if I just pulled them all out myself.

Somewhere Crowley, or Bernie, or whatever name he liked, was waiting for me. But right here, in Key West? Unlikely; you didn t play this game in Party Central. He would find someplace off the beaten path, even a little isolated and he would tell me about it in some clever way, so I could figure it out eventually, but not too soon. But in his own way he was just as anxious to get it done as I was, so it had to be someplace that wasn t too far away. He wouldn t take them to Zanzibar, or even Cleveland.

I read the e-mail one more time, looking for my clue. It was all relatively straightforward except at the end, where he said witty, in a kind of dry way, and then, Don t be a turtle. That made no sense at all. It was a clunky way to say it, and it wasn t his style. And how could a location be witty? Even if it was, why didn t he just say, I think it s funny; hurry? Nothing else in the note stuck out; these lines had to be telling me where to go. Perfect; if I could only think of a funny place and hurry there, I would almost certainly find him.

Funny. There were several cabarets in town, and a comedy club, all within walking distance, so I could get there quickly. But funny wasn t really the same thing as witty and why was it so important to hurry?

I realized I was grinding my teeth again. I stopped and took a deep breath. I reminded myself that I was really very clever, much smarter than him, and anything he came up with to taunt me I could certainly decode and shove down his throat. I just had to think positive thoughts and concentrate a little.

It made me feel a lot better. I started over from the top:

Witty. It did nothing for me.

Don t be a turtle. Even worse. Nothing at all came to me. It was wonderful to see the power of positive thinking.

All right, I was missing something. Maybe it was the word witty. Perhaps some awful pun there was a White Street only a few blocks away. But that was stretching it too far. Was there a Whitt Key? I d never heard of it. What about turtle then? There was Turtle Kraals down by the water. But he said don t be a turtle, so that didn t make sense. That couldn t be it, and I was clearly not as clever as I thought I was.

A trio of men walked past, arguing in Spanish. I made out the word pendejo, and I thought it was probably appropriate. I was a pendejo, a complete dolt, and I deserved to lose everything to an even bigger pendejo, whether in Spanish or English. Crowley probably couldn t even speak Spanish. I could, and it hadn t helped me find him so far. In fact, it had never helped me do anything except order lunch. It was a useless language, as useless as I was, and I should probably move away someplace where I would never hear it spoken again. Find a small island somewhere and just

Far, far away, I heard crowd noise and music playing, and the clanging bell of the Conch Train as it rattled through the streets, and all the sounds of drunken, brainless revelry I had found so annoying only moments before. And somewhere up above me the July sun was still beating down without mercy and scorching everything under its glare. But Dexter was no longer hot and bothered; Dexter felt a cool and gentle breeze blowing, and Dexter heard only a soft and soothing melody, the delightful symphony of life as it played its stately and wonderful song. Key West really was an enchanted place, and Spanish was actually the emperor of all languages, and I blessed the day I had decided to learn it. Everything was new and marvelous and I was not a pendejo at all, because I had remembered one simple Spanish word and everything made sense.

The Spanish word for turtle is tortuga.

The cluster of islands sixty miles south of Key West was called the Tortugas in fact, the Dry Tortugas, as in Crowley s dry wit. There s a park there, and an old fort, and several ferries every day to take you there, and I knew where Crowley had taken Cody and Astor.

There was a hotel across the street from where I sat. I ran across the street and into the lobby. Right inside the door, just where it should have been, stood a wooden rack stuffed with brochures for all the attractions in Key West. I scanned them rapidly, found one with a bright blue heading that said, CONCH LINE, and plucked it from the rack.

Our superfast, ultramodern fleet of high-tech catamarans, it read, make a high-speed run to Fort Jefferson in the Dry Tortugas twice a day!

The boats left from a dock about half a mile from where I stood right now, and the second and final boat left at ten a.m. I looked around the lobby and found a clock over the desk; it was nine fifty-six. Four minutes to get there.

I sprinted out of the lobby and down Duval. The crowds were even larger and jollier now; it was always Happy Hour in Key West, and trying to run through the mobs of revelers was nearly impossible. At the corner I turned right on Caroline Street and the flock thinned out immediately. Half a block up, four bearded men sat on the curb with a bottle of something in a paper bag. They were not Hemingways; their beards were long and matted, and they watched me with dead faces and then cheered sloppily as I ran past. I hoped there would be something to cheer about.

Three more blocks. I was sure it had been more than four minutes already. I told myself that nothing ever left on time. I was soaked with sweat, but the water was in sight now on my left, between the buildings, and I picked up my pace as I galloped into the large parking area at the docks. More people now, music coming from the waterfront restaurants, and I had to dodge a couple of slow and wobbly bicycles before I came out on the old wooden pier and pounded out past the dockmaster s shack, out onto the battered planking of the wharf

And there it was, the Conch Line s superfast ultramodern high-speed catamaran, leaning away from the dock and slowly, ponderously, slipping out into the harbor. And as I crashed to a halt on the last eight inches of the dock it was not really very far away across the water, not far at all, only about fifteen feet from me just far enough to be too far.

Just far enough to see across the widening gap as Cody and Astor stood at the rail, looking anxiously back at me. And right behind them, wearing a floppy-brimmed hat and a triumphant smirk, Crowley. He put one hand on Astor s shoulder, and he raised the other to wave at me, and I could do nothing but watch as the boat pulled away from the pier, picked up speed, and vanished past Sunset Key and then south into the deep and empty blue of the Atlantic Ocean.

THIRTY-THREE

A lot of people do nothing in Key West. It s a good place for that. You can watch everyone moving along Duval Street and wonder what strange alien race they belong to. Or you can go down to the water and look at the pelicans, watch the boats bobbing at anchor or racing past in the harbor, crowded with sunburned partiers, and if you look up you can see the planes flying low overhead towing their banners.

For five minutes, that s all I did. I slumped right into the national pastime of the Conch Republic and I did nothing. I just stood on the dock and watched the water, the boats, the birds. There didn t seem to be a whole lot more I could do. The boat with Cody and Astor was gone, speeding away across the ocean. It was already more than a mile away and I couldn t call it back and I couldn t run after it across the water.

So I did nothing. And it seems a little bit ironic, but apparently there is actually one place in Key West where you can t do that, and I had found it. I became aware that people were pushing past me, briskly moving coils of rope and hoses and two-wheeled carts stuffed with baggage, food and ice, and dive gear. And judging by the irritated glances they sent me, I was in their way.

Finally one of them stopped beside me, dropping the handles of a cart filled with scuba tanks and straightening up to face me. Say there, Captain, he said in a bluff and friendly voice.

Wonder if you could move off to the side a bit? We got to load the boat for a dive trip.

I turned away from the water and looked him in the face. It was a friendly and open dark brown face, and just in case I might be a potential customer, he added, Right out to the reef, it s absolutely beautiful. Oughta see it sometime, Captain.

A tiny little gleam of hope flickered deep in the dark corners of my brain. You don t go anywhere near Fort Jefferson, do you?

The man laughed. Tortugas? No, sir, you just missed the last boat down there. Next one s tomorrow morning.

Of course as always, hope was a stupid waste of time. My one small flicker hissed out and the gray fog rolled back in. And because people always insist on talking to you when you want to be alone with your quiet despair, the man went on babbling at me with his cheerful huckster s patter.

Now, Tortugas are worth seeing, too, you know. You can t believe Fort Jefferson till you see it. Maybe the best way to see it, by air? Got a brochure over here He trotted five steps to his right and rummaged in a dock locker, then came back and handed me a glossy, brightly colored pamphlet. Here ya go, he said.

My girlfriend works for them. They fly down there four times a day? Beautiful, coming in low over the fort, and then you splash down, very cool, very exciting

He thrust the brochure into my hand and I took it. It said, ALBATROSS AIRLINES! across the top and suddenly it really was exciting, the most exciting thing in the world. It s a seaplane? I said, staring at the pictures.

Sure, has to be, no landing strip down there, he said.

It would be a lot quicker than the boat, wouldn t it? I said.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. Conch Lines boat takes a good three hours, maybe a little more. This ll have you there in like forty minutes. Great trip, too.

It didn t matter to me if the trip was great. If it got me to the Dry Tortugas before Crowley got there, before he could set his Dexter-Smashing Trap, it could be the most miserable trip of all time and I would still want to hug the pilot. Thank you, I said, and I actually meant it.

Sure thing, he said. Uh, so if you wouldn t mind? He gestured to one side of the dock and raised his eyebrows to help me find my way out of his path, but I was already gone, sprinting down the dock, past the shops and restaurants and into the parking lot, where for once luck was with me and a bright pink Key West taxi was just disgorging its load of pale overweight passengers, and I jumped in as the last of them paid the driver.

Hiya, bud, the driver said. She was about fifty, with a square face that had been savaged and turned to old worn leather by the sun, and she stretched it into a brief professional smile for me. Where to?

It was a fair question, and I realized I didn t know the answer. Luckily, I was still clutching the pamphlet, so I opened it up and scanned it rapidly. Airport, I said, as I found it on the page. And as quickly as possible.

You got it, she said, and we were off, out of the parking lot, across the island, and out on the far side on Roosevelt. My phone rang; it was Rita again. I turned my phone off.

The cab rolled past Smathers Beach. A wedding party clustered on the sand, the bride and groom standing at the edge of the water under a white canopy, the kind they use in Jewish weddings a hoopoe? No, that was a bird. Something like that. I couldn t think of the word. That didn t seem as important as the fact that we were finally turning off the beachfront road into the airport.

I jumped out of the cab and flung money at the driver without counting it or waiting for change, and as I ran into the terminal I thought, Chuppah. That was the name of the Jewish wedding canopy. Remembering the word pleased me a whole lot more than it should have, and I made a mental note to think about why that mattered some other day.

I found Albatross Airlines down at the far end of the terminal. A woman in a brown uniform stood behind the counter. She was about fifty, with a leathery face that looked like my cab driver s twin. I wondered if she was the girlfriend of my new friend on the dock. For his sake, I hoped not.

Can I help you? she said in a voice like a very butch raven.

I need to get to the Dry Tortugas as fast as possible, I told her.

She nodded at the sign on the back wall. Our next flight is at noon, she cawed.

I need to get there now, I told her.

Noon, she said.

I took a very deep breath and told myself that caving in somebody s head is not always the best solution. It s an emergency, I said.

She snorted. A seaplane emergency? she said with heavy sarcasm.

Yes, I said, and she blinked in surprise.

My kids are on the boat down to the Dry Tortugas, I said.

Nice trip, she said.

They re with somebody a man who might hurt them.

She shrugged. You can use my phone, call the cops, she said. They ll call the ranger station down there.

I can t call the cops, I said, hoping she wouldn t ask me why.

Why not? she said.

I thought quickly; clearly the truth was not an option here, but that has never been much of an obstacle for me. Um, I said, waiting for something plausible to slide into the out-box.

He s he s my brother-in-law. And, you know. It s family. And if the cops get involved it would break my sister s heart. And my mother would you know. It s a family thing, and, uh, she has a heart condition.

Uh-huh, she said dubiously.

I was clearly getting nowhere with her, in spite of my wonderful creativity. But I did not despair. I had been to Key West before, and I knew how to get things done here. I reached for my wallet.

Please, I said, counting out a hundred dollars.

Isn t there something we can do?

The money vanished before I finished my sentence. I don t know, she said. Lemme ask Leroy.

There was a door on the back wall under the schedule and she went through it. A minute later she came back out, followed by a man in a pilot s uniform. He was about fifty, with hard blue eyes and a boxer s flattened nose.

What s up, Skipper? he said.

I need to get to the Tortugas as fast as possible, I said.

He nodded. Jackie said, he told me. But our next scheduled flight is in two hours, and we have to keep the schedule. Nothing I can do. Sorry.

No matter how sorry he might have been, he didn t leave, and that meant he wasn t refusing he was negotiating.

Five hundred dollars, I said.

He shook his head and leaned on the counter. Sorry, bud, I just can t do it, he said. The company has a policy.

Seven hundred, I said, and he shook his head.

It s my children; they re young and helpless, I said.

I could lose my job, he told me.

A thousand dollars, I said, and he stopped shaking his head.

Well, he said.

Those of us who are fiscally responsible look with scorn and condemnation on profligates who max out their credit cards. But the hard-eyed buccaneer behind the counter very quickly dropped me into exactly that financial hot water. It took two of my cards, but when I had finally sated his unholy lust for my money, it took only five minutes more and I was buckling myself into the passenger seat of his aircraft. Then we lumbered down the runway, gathering speed, until we finally waddled up into the sky.

The man on the dock, and the brochure he had given me, had assured me that the flight down to the Dry Tortugas was beautiful and memorable. If it was, I don t remember it. All I saw was the hand on my watch crawling forward. It seemed to be moving much slower than normal: Tick. Long pause. Tick. Another. This was taking too long I had to get there first. How long had it been since the boat pulled away from the dock? I tried to put the numbers together in my head. It shouldn t have been hard, but for some reason all my concentration was on grinding my teeth and I couldn t think about the time.

Luckily for my teeth, I didn t have to. There she is, the pilot said, nodding out the window. It was the first thing he d said since we were airborne, and I stopped grinding my teeth for a moment and looked at him. He nodded again. The boat, he said. With your kids.

I looked out the window. Below us I could see the bright white deck of a large, fast-moving boat, trailing a long wake behind it. Even from our height I could see a few people on the deck, but I couldn t tell if any of them were Cody and Astor.

Relax, the pilot told me. We ll get in a good forty-five minutes before they do.

I didn t relax, but I felt a little better. I watched as we passed over the boat and left it behind us, and finally, just as it dropped out of sight, the pilot spoke again. Fort Jefferson, he said.

The fort began to take shape as we got closer, and it was impressive. It s big, I said.

The pilot nodded. You could fit Yankee Stadium inside with room to spare, he said. And although I couldn t think of any reason why someone might want to try that, I nodded anyway.

Very nice, I said.

I shouldn t have encouraged him; he began to ramble, a long blather about the Civil War and the assassination of Lincoln and even something about a missing hospital on a nearby sandbar, and I tuned him out and concentrated on the fort. It really was huge, and if I let Crowley get loose on the inside, I might never find him. But on the far side of the fort there was a pier jutting out, and as far as I could see it was the only one attached to the island.

The boat has to dock there, right? I said. The pilot glanced at me, with his mouth half-open. I had interrupted him in the middle of a story about a lighthouse that was just visible a mile or so across the water from the fort.

That s right, he said. But you see some of the people get off it, you wish they d just dump em out there. He nodded at the stretch of dark blue water between the fort and the lighthouse. Leave em for the Channel Hog.

The what?

He smirked at me. Channel Hog, he said. Biggest goddamned hammerhead shark known to man. Over twenty feet long, and always hungry. I truly would not recommend taking a swim out there, buddy.

I ll keep it in mind, I said. When do we, um, splash down?

He looked a little peeved that I had failed to appreciate his wit, but he shrugged it off. After all, he had enough of my money to take the sting out of such a small snub.

Right about now, he said, and he banked the plane, bringing it in low over the Channel Hog s front hall. The plane s pontoons smacked down, sending up showers of clean and fresh-looking salt water, and the noise of the engine rose up to a higher pitch for a moment as we slowed and turned toward the fort. It really was huge, and it stuck up out of the flat expanse of water around it, looking very imposing and out of place, with its enormous redbrick walls looming up over a few palm trees. Closer up I could see a row of gaping holes across the upper part of the fort, probably unfinished gun ports. They had a haunted look to them, as if they were the empty eye sockets of some gigantic skull leering down at me, and it gave the place a slightly spooky appearance.

The pilot slowed the plane a little more, and we bumped through the small waves past some pilings from a vanished jetty and turned into a very nice little harbor. A cluster of yachts was anchored at the far side, and a smaller boat with a National Park Service logo on the side was tied at the dock. We slowed, turned, and slid in next to it.

I walked off the dock and onto the brick path that led into the fort, looking for the perfect place to wait for Crowley someplace where I could see him without being seen, and take him before he knew I was anywhere near. I do love a surprise, and I wanted to give Crowley one of my best.

The sun was still hot and blindingly bright, and I didn t see any good places to lurk on the outside. The brick path led to a wooden bridge over a moat, where a few people stood. They were dressed in shorts and flip-flops and they all had earbuds crammed into their ears, each of them swaying slightly to a different beat as they stared at a sign that said:

FORT JEFFERSON DRY TORTUGAS NATIONAL PARK

It was only six words, and it shouldn t have taken very long to read, but maybe they couldn t concentrate with their music blasting directly into their skulls. Or maybe they were just slow readers. In any case, I didn t think the sign would make a good hiding place, even without the postliterate witnesses.

I moved past them and crossed the bridge. At its other end, directly underneath an American flag flying from the top rampart, a large and dark gateway led inside the walls. Even crossing the moat, I couldn t see what was inside, except for a circle of daylight on the far side. I went through the square marble arch and stepped in, and I paused, because I couldn t see anything at all in the sudden gloom. It was like stepping into midnight, and I had to blink for a moment as my eyes adjusted.

And as I stood there squinting in the darkness, a small light came on in the deeper darkness between my ears, and I actually heard myself murmur, Aha.

This was the place. This was where I would wait for Crowley. I could see out, all the way to the dock where the ferry would tie up, but he could not see me here, nestled in the shadows. And he would come off the boat, thinking that I was sixty miles behind him, and he would walk up the path, across the moat, and into this archway, where he would be temporarily blinded, as I had been. And then he would take that one last step, right into the True Darkness of Dexter s Delight. It was perfect.

Of course, it left me with the problem of what to do next. I could easily surprise Crowley, overpower him before he knew what was happening but what then? I had none of my special party favors with me: no noose, no duct tape, nothing. And I was in a very public place. It would be easy enough to knock him out but then I would have a large and unconscious body to cope with, never an easy assignment, even without the assorted tourists who might be dawdling nearby. I could drag the body somewhere, but then I would certainly be observed, which would leave me with nothing but some truly lame excuse like, My friend is drunk. Or I could finish him off quickly right here in the dark gateway and simply leave him, making a rapid but nonchalant exit with the kids. If we got most of the way to the dock before we were seen, we just might get away with it.

I bit my lip so hard I nearly broke the skin. This whole thing was all if and hope, and I hated that. There were people wandering around all over, and if only one of them saw what I did it was too many. There was going to be a dead body, and I was going to be seen with it before it died. And since I was already under police scrutiny for two murders, I didn t think they would buy the good old standby of saying it was an accident.

But there really was no choice. I had to do this, I had to do it now, and this dark archway gave me my best chance. I just had to hope I would get a small break. I d never relied on luck before, and it made me very unhappy to do so now. I didn t believe in it. It was too much like praying for a new bicycle.

A middle-aged man and woman walked into my shadowy retreat from the interior of the fort. They held hands and ambled past me, hardly seeing me, their flip-flops slapping on the hard stone floor, and then they disappeared out the other side toward the dock. I thought it through again, and it didn t get any better. But I didn t think of any other choices either. My best new thought came when I remembered that technically, Crowley had kidnapped Cody and Astor. If I was truly cornered, I could claim I had been defending them and throw myself on the mercy of the court. I was pretty sure there wasn t a lot of that in any Florida court, and I didn t think much of it would be reserved for me, but it didn t really matter. This was my only shot, and I would just have to take it and let things sort themselves out later.

In any case, I really wanted to do this. I wanted Crowley dead, and I wanted to do it myself, and nothing else was quite as important as that. If that meant a long vacation behind bars, so be it. I probably deserved it.

I looked at my watch. The boat should arrive in about half an hour. I couldn t lurk here in the shadows the whole time without somebody wondering what I was doing. So I continued on through the gateway and walked into the fort.

It seemed even bigger on the inside. The walls folded around a huge green lawn speckled with trees and crossed by a few pathways that led away to the far side, which seemed to be very far away. There were a few buildings, probably where the park rangers lived. To the right was a sign that read, VISITOR CENTER, and beyond it on the top of the wall a black lighthouse stuck up into the bright blue sky.

The top story of the high brick wall gaped in an endless chain of large openings, a series of huge doorways with no doors. The bottom floor echoed this pattern, with smaller, squatter doorways leading into blank darkness inside the walls. It was a vast arena of dark and secluded spots, so many of them over such a huge area that the 10^th Mountain Division could not have covered it all, let alone a small handful of park rangers, and I could see why Crowley had chosen it. It was the perfect setting for a recreational murder, followed by a haunting.

I went to the right, past the doorway into the Visitor Center and along the wall, peering into dark and empty rooms. Underneath the lighthouse I found a stairway leading up to the top of the wall, and I climbed it, coming out on top into the bright sunlight again. I squinted and looked around, and the intensity of the light hurt my eyes. I wished I d brought sunglasses. But I also wished I d brought a bazooka, or at least a baseball bat, so the glasses seemed a little bit trivial.

I went to the edge of the wall and looked down. Below me the moat came right up to the wall, and beyond that there was a sandy roadway between the fort and the beach. A fat man in a tiny bathing suit walked by on the sand, following a large black dog. Beyond him was a sliver of beach and several large boats moored just a few yards out from the sand. Someone on the deck of one of the yachts yelled something, and there was a brief blare of music.

I turned to my left, walking along the top of the wall in the direction the ferry would be coming from, picking my way through sand and tufts of grass, past a big black cannon where three kids were playing pirate. Beyond them I saw a chunk of loose brick lying in the sand. It had split in three pieces and fallen out of its slot in the wall. I glanced around me casually; the pirates were on the far side of their cannon, and there was no one else in sight. I stooped and picked up a piece of the brick and slid it into my pocket. It wasn t quite a bazooka, but it was better than nothing.

It was a five-minute walk across the top of the wall to the far side of the fort. When I finally got there I was soaked in sweat and I had a slight headache from the sun s sharp glare. I stood there and looked back toward Key West, squinting through the reflected gleam of light off the water. I waited for ten minutes or so, doing no more than scanning the horizon. Three more people walked past me, two middle-aged women chattering away in deep harsh voices, and one old man with a bandage on the side of his head. And then a small white speck appeared in the distance, even brighter than the blaze of sunlight off the water, and I watched as it grew bigger and brighter, and in only a few minutes it was big enough to be sure. It was the ferry, bringing me Cody and Astor and an end to the threat of Crowley. They were almost here, and it was time.

I hurried back to the staircase and went down to the gateway to wait.

THIRTY-FOUR

I stood in the shadows inside the fort s gateway, half-hidden behind the stone arch, and I watched as the large catamaran slid up to the dock and tied off. Many times in my sad short life I have waited in ambush and cuddled my wicked thoughts, but this was different. This was no deliciously private rendezvous on a carefully chosen night of silvery moonlight. This was a public execution in a crowd of strangers, a perversion forced on me by necessity, and it seemed like I was doing everything for the very first time. I felt stiff, clumsy, amateurish. I did not hear the sweet wing-rustle and whisper of encouragement from the Dark Passenger, and I did not hear the music of the Dance Macabre, and there was no delicious cool rush of power and certainty flowing out through my fingertips. My mouth was dry and my still-swollen hands were sweaty and I could hear my heart pounding rapidly in my ears and this was not wonderful wicked me lying in wait in complete control, not at all, and it made me fidgety and unhappy in a way that was almost painful.

But there was no choice, no way out, no direction but forward, and so I waited and watched as the ferry s steel ramp slammed down onto the dock, and the crowd of gawkers surged off the boat and onto Dry Tortugas National Park, home of Fort Jefferson and Dexter s Last Stand.

There were about sixty people on the boat, and most of them had come down the ramp and begun to amble around the outside of the fort before I saw Astor s unmistakable blond head through a gap in the parade. A moment later the crowd parted again and there they were, all three of them. Cody and Astor held hands and Crowley walked very close behind them, herding them forward off the dock and onto the brick path toward the fort.

I tensed and slid deeper into the shadow of the stone gate. I flexed my fingers. They felt cramped and stupid, incapable of anything but knotting up. I made and unmade a fist several times, and when my hands felt as lively as they were going to get I reached into my pocket and took out my chunk of brick. It didn t make me feel much better.

I waited. My throat was so dry that swallowing hurt, but I swallowed anyway and took a deep breath and tried to force icy calm into my veins. It didn t work. My hands were shaky and the brick felt slippery in my grip. I took half a peek around the stone arch and for a few frozen seconds I didn t see them anywhere. I eased out of the shadows a little more; there they were, standing stupidly in front of the sign, staring around them. I could see Astor s mouth moving in what was clearly a tirade of irritation, and Cody s small face was set in a scowl. Crowley had a duffel bag slung over one shoulder, and he wore an idiotic mask of pleasant anticipation, as if he really was on an enchanted holiday with two wonderful children.

But they didn t move away from the sign. I wondered what Crowley had told them to keep them docile. It must have been good. They had no reason to distrust him if he had a plausible enough lie, but these were not ordinary, well-behaved children. Behind their pleasant and youthful features, throbbing inside their delightful tousled heads, dark and wicked flowers were blooming. Crowley could not possibly suspect it, but these were Dexters-in-Training, and they were, in every sense of the word, little Monsters. I felt a surge of affection for the two of them.

A clump of tourists stomped onto the drawbridge and came between me and Crowley. I stepped all the way back inside and pretended to be examining the stonework, but they didn t even see me as they sauntered on through the gateway, chattering in Spanish and vanishing out the far side into the interior of the fort. When they were out of sight I eased my head around the arch and peeked out at the sign again.

They were gone.

Panic ripped through me and for a moment I couldn t think anything at all. I just stared at the spot where they had been and squeezed my brick until my fingers hurt. Where could they be? And if they had to go somewhere, why weren t they at least strolling over the drawbridge and into my ambush?

I leaned out farther and looked left; I saw nothing. I came a full step out of the archway and looked right there they were, sauntering away on the sandy path to the far side of the island, toward the campground and away from my trap. Irritation boiled up inside me; what pointless stupidity were they performing? Why wasn t Crowley bringing his fat head into the gateway and under my brick like he was supposed to do?

I watched as they ambled by a line of picnic tables and then past a clump of stunted trees that grew just before the beach, and then they were hidden by the branches and I couldn t see them anymore.

I heard a hissing sound and realized it was me, blowing angry breath out between my teeth, and that was even more annoying. If that was the best I could do, I might as well go home now. I pried my fingers open and put the brick chunk back in my pocket, and, thinking very dark thoughts, I stepped into the sunlight and followed.

A family of five sat at one of the picnic tables. They were eating lunch, and they looked so happy I wanted to use the brick to bash in their heads. But I left them to their sandwiches and stalked down the path to the back side of the grove of scrub trees.

I paused for a moment, uncertain. The foliage screened me from Crowley, but it also hid him from me. He could very well be lurking just beyond the branches, watching his back trail for any Dexters that might be sniffing along behind him. Elementary predator s caution would tell him to be sure no one was following. So, deciding that safe was very much better than sorry, I moved to my left, skirting along the back side of the tree line through even more picnic tables and ducking under a clothesline until I came to a break in the trees. I moved carefully around one last picnic table and into scrub. I pushed through the sand and the branches and stopped behind the last tree and slowly parted the leaves with my hand.

I should have seen them to my right, no more than thirty feet away. I didn t. I pushed the branches farther apart, and there they were, standing stupidly on the sand and staring at the swimming area. If I slipped carefully back through the trees and came out behind them But no. Crowley put one hand on each small shoulder and urged them back the way they had come, and the little trio slowly turned and trudged back into the scrub trees and headed toward the dock. It was obvious that he was scouting, making sure everything was just the way he wanted it to be, before he went to his special place to wait for me, the place where he would surprise me.

But, of course, I was already here, and I was going to surprise him first, if I could just stay close behind and watch for my chance but how? There was very little cover between the trees and the dock, no more than one white metal building close to where the ferries tied up. Other than that, nothing but the fort, the water, and the thin sandy path leading around the tall redbrick walls. If I stepped out from the trees and followed I would be extremely visible. But I couldn t let them just ramble away.

I looked in front of me on the beach. There were about half a dozen towels thrown around, with flip-flops and beach bags stacked beside them. The nearest towel was bright orange, and right beyond it there was a big white one. The towels owners were apparently all in the water.

At the far end of the beach, a large middle-aged woman sat in a fold-up canvas chair, watching a group of very loud children splashing around in the shallows. No one else was in sight, except for the people swimming farther out, toward the buoys marking the edge of the swimming area. I looked right again, and saw that Crowley and the kids were still strolling away around the fort.

A small idea popped into my head, and before I could think about how lame it was, I acted. Looking as casual as possible, I stepped out onto the beach, grabbed the white towel, and then strolled back into the cover of the trees. I took off my shirt and tied it around my waist, and then I draped the towel over my head like a bedouin headdress, clutching my half brick in one corner of the towel. I left the trees and walked through the picnic area. Look at me; I have been swimming and I have wet hair which I am now drying, and I am perfectly normal and not Dexter at all.

They were walking toward the far side of the fort now, past the dock and onto the sandy access road, and I followed. Suddenly, Cody stopped and turned around. He looked back toward the dock, then turned and looked at the fort, and then he frowned. I could see his lips move briefly, and he pointed at the drawbridge. Crowley shook his head and once more put a hand on his shoulder to urge him on, but Cody jerked away and pointed stubbornly at the drawbridge. Crowley shook his head and reached for Cody, who jumped away from him, and Astor stepped in between them and started talking.

I took advantage of their halt to get closer. I had no clear idea of how I was going to do this, but if I could get within half a brick length of Crowley I was ready to cave in his head and take my chances. Closer and when I was only ten feet away I distinctly heard Astor say that this was all a bunch of bullcrap, and where was Dexter anyway? I raised my hands up and began to towel my head vigorously. I was actually within four big steps of them when Astor broke off her tirade, stared right at me, and said, Dexter! You re really here!

I froze in place: stupid, I know, but I really was not my abnormal self. Crowley didn t have that problem, and he wasted no time trying to see under the towel to confirm my identity. He dropped his duffel bag, yanked Astor off her feet, tucked her under one arm, and ran for the dock. She immediately began to wiggle frantically and yell at the top of her lungs, but without even slowing, Crowley punched her on the side of the head, hard, and she went limp.

I dropped the towel and jumped after them, paused for one second, and looked at Cody. Go inside the fort, I said.

Find the park rangers and tell them you re lost. And without waiting to see whether he would obey, I turned and sprinted after Crowley.

He had a good head start, but he was slower because he was carrying Astor, and I was closing fast when he pounded out to the end of the dock. A forty-five-foot sportfishing boat was backing in to tie up, and Crowley jumped onto the deck, where a woman in a bikini stood gaping at him and clutching the stern line. Crowley shoved her hard, and she went backward into the water, still holding the rope. An elderly man on the flybridge yelled, Hey! in a hoarse voice as Crowley dropped Astor to the deck. She slid up against a cooler and lay motionless, and Crowley lunged up the ladder to the flybridge. The old man yelled, Help! in a strangled self-conscious way, and then Crowley punched him in the gut and took the controls. The old man bent over and fell to his knees and the boat began to move away from the dock.

I was almost close enough to leap onto the deck when Crowley shoved the throttle forward and twirled the wheel hard over. The boat spun sluggishly around and began to move out toward the channel. And for once in this whole miserable adventure I did not hesitate or pause to think and bemoan. I ran the last few feet as fast as I could, and I jumped.

It was a good jump, very athletic, a nice arc to it and a near-perfect trajectory, and it was just good enough to splash me into the water three feet behind the boat. I went under and floundered to the surface again, just in time to see the boat start to accelerate. The prop wash boiled back at me, pushing me away and filling my mouth with water. And as I swallowed water and tried without hope to swim through the wake and grab the boat, something thumped me hard in the back and shoved me underwater again.

I had a horrible moment of panic as I remembered what the pilot had said about the Channel Hog, the largest hammerhead shark known to man but the thing that had hit me felt too smooth to be a shark. I grabbed on to it and felt it pull me to the surface, and as I sucked in a breath and blinked the water out of my eyes I saw that I was holding a human leg. Even better, it was still attached to somebody the bikinied woman Crowley had dumped into the water, and she was grimly clutching the stern line and dragging along behind the boat.

The boat began to pick up speed, and the wake foamed up around us, making it nearly impossible to see, and difficult to hold on. Very shortly I was sure it would be too much for the woman whose leg I was holding. She would let go, and then Crowley would be gone, taking Astor and all my hopes with him, probably for good this time. I could not let that happen.

And so, throwing caution and good manners to the wind, I grabbed higher up. My fingers clamped on to the band of fabric at the woman s waist and I pulled myself forward and suddenly I was sliding backward again as the bikini bottom shimmied off and down her legs, taking me with it.

I grabbed again, this time clamping on to her knee and then reaching up around her waist with both hands, and pulled upward until I got a hand on her shoulder. And just as I got one hand on the rope, the woman finally let go. Her body bumped against me, hard, and she scrabbled for a grip along the whole length of my body. For a moment I didn t think I could hold on. But then she whirled away in the foamy white wake and I got my other hand on the rope and began to work my way toward the boat.

Slowly, hand over hand, fighting the turbulence every inch of the way, I jerked closer to the transom. I could see it clearly, tantalizingly close, bright blue letters spelling out its name and home port: REEL FUN, ST. JAMES CITY. And finally, after what seemed like hours but was probably no more than a minute or two, I got close enough to grab on to the boat s dive platform, a narrow wooden shelf jutting out from the transom, and I clambered onto it, shoulders aching, breathing hard.

I flexed my hands; they were stiff and knotted up and why not? After all they had been through the last few days I should have been grateful that they had not withered and fallen off. But they would have to perform one last good deed, and so I sent them ahead of me up the chrome ladder and I climbed into the cockpit of the boat.

I could just see Crowley s head and shoulders above me; he stood on the flybridge, ten feet higher than the cockpit, looking forward and steering the boat out into the channel. Good he didn t see me, had no idea I was on board, and hopefully he wouldn t until it was too late.

I hurried across the deck. The old man lay to one side, cradling his forearm and moaning softly. Crowley had clearly dumped him off the bridge and he had probably broken his arm in the fall. Very sad, but it didn t really matter to me. I stepped past him to the ladder that led up to the flybridge. Astor lay at its foot, crumpled into a small untidy heap next to a cooler. The lid had bumped open, revealing ice and cans of beer and soda. I bent down beside Astor and felt for a pulse in her neck; it was there, steady and strong, and as I put a hand on her face she frowned and made soft and grumpy sounds. She would probably be all right, but there was nothing I could do for her right now.

I left her there and slithered up the ladder, pausing when my head came up just over the top step. I was looking at the back of Crowley s legs. They looked spry, surprisingly muscular for someone I had thought of as doughy. I had misjudged him every step of the way, underestimated what he was capable of doing, and it made me hesitate now as a very un-Dexter thought came over me.

What if I couldn t do this? What if I really had met my match, and he was just too much for me to handle? What if this was it, and the Dexter Show was about to end?

It was a truly horrible moment, and it got even worse when I realized what it was real live human uncertainty. I really had fallen low. I d never before doubted myself or my ability to perform routine executions, and this was a terrible time to start.

I closed my eyes for just a second, reaching out for the Passenger in a way I never had before, pleading for one last charge of the Dark Brigade. I felt it grumble, sigh, and rustle its wings not really encouraging, but it would have to do. I opened my eyes and climbed quickly and quietly the rest of the way up the ladder onto the flybridge.

Crowley stood with one hand on the wheel, guiding the boat through the channel and away from the fort, and I hit him with my whole body as hard as I could. He slammed forward into the controls, bumping the throttle. The boat lurched forward, coming to top speed as I put my arm around Crowley s throat and choked him with all my strength.

But he really was stronger than he looked. He dug his fingers into my forearm and pivoted, lifting me off the floor and bashing me into the side of the cockpit. My head bounced off the console; I saw stars, and Crowley slipped out of my grip.

Before I could throw off the dizziness he was on me, thumping me in the stomach, and although it took my breath away, at least it cleared my head, and I dropped to one knee and then punched sideways, connecting solidly with his kneecap. He said, Oog, very distinctly, and threw an elbow at my head that would have decapitated me if it had landed. But I ducked under it and scrambled to the other side of the bridge, jumping to my feet and turning shakily to face Crowley.

He straightened and faced me and we stood for a strange frozen instant, looking at each other. Then he took a step forward, feinted with his right hand, and, as I dodged, reached out with his left and yanked the boat s throttle all the way back. The boat staggered to a stop, and I staggered with it, hitting the console with my hip and tipping toward the windscreen, struggling to regain my balance.

Crowley didn t need to struggle; he had been braced for the sudden stop, and he was on me before I could recover. He hammered a knee into my midsection, and then he put both his hands on my throat and began to squeeze. Things quickly began to grow dim around me, and everything started to slow down.

So this was how it ended. Strangled by a Cub Scout leader and not even the leader, merely an assistant. There didn t seem to be a whole lot of glory in it. I got my hands onto Crowley s wrists, but things were fading around me and it was getting very hard to stay interested.

And look there I was already hallucinating houris in Paradise. Or was that really Astor coming up the ladder? It was her, and she was holding a can of soda from the cooler in the cockpit. Very thoughtful my throat was hurting, and she had brought me a cool drink. It was unlike her to be so considerate but now she was shaking the can as hard as she could. That was more like it. She was going to prank me with a spray of soda. A last sticky bath before dying.

But Astor stepped quickly around to Crowley s side and pointed the can at his face. She screeched, Hey, asshole! And when Crowley turned to face her she pulled the tab. There was a very satisfying explosion and a great brown gout of soda shot out, right into Crowley s eyes. Then she threw the can as hard as she could. It hit him squarely in the nose, and without a pause Astor stepped in and kicked him in the crotch.

Crowley staggered sideways under this unexpected onslaught, grunting with pain and taking one hand from my throat to wipe at his eyes, and as the pressure on my throat let up, a small trickle of light seeped back into my brain. I put both hands on the fingers remaining on my throat and I pried up hard. I heard one finger snap, and Crowley made a weird gargling noise and let go of me. Astor kicked his crotch again, and he took a drunken half step away from her and slouched over the railing.

And I, never one to waste an opportunity, hurtled forward and put my shoulder into him. He went right over, and there was an ugly thud-splash as he hit the gunwale below us and then flopped into the water.

I looked over the side. Crowley was bobbing in the water facedown, drifting slowly past us as the boat moved forward at idle speed.

Astor stood beside me, looking at Crowley as he bobbed away into our wake. Asshole, she said again. Then she gave me a wonderfully fake smile and said sweetly, Is it okay to use that word, Dexter?

I put an arm around her shoulders. This time, I said, I think it s okay.

But she stiffened and lifted her arm to point. He s moving, she said, and I turned to look.

Crowley had raised his head up out of the water. He was coughing, and there was a trickle of blood running down his face, but he paddled feebly away across the channel toward a nearby sandbar. He was still alive after Astor and I beat him, kicked him, broke his hand, flung him from the bridge, drowned him, and even sprayed him with soda, he was still alive. I wondered if he was related to Rasputin.

I took the wheel of the boat and spun us around to point back to where Crowley was dog-paddling steadily toward safety and escape.

Think you can drive this thing? I asked Astor.

She gave me a look that very clearly said, Duh. Totally, she said.

Take the wheel, I told her. Steer real close to him, slow and steady, and don t run into the sandbar.

Like I would, she said. She took the wheel from me and I hurried down the ladder.

In the cockpit the old man had straightened up into a sitting position, and his moaning had gotten louder. Clearly he would be no help at all. More interesting, however, was that there was a boat hook beside him in a set of clamps. I pried it out and hefted it: about ten feet long, with a heavy metal tip. Just the thing. I could smack Crowley in the temple with the tip, then hook his shirt with it and hold his head under for a minute or two, and that really should be an end to it.

I stepped over to the railing. He was in the water right ahead of us, thirty feet away, and as I raised the boat hook in preparation, the boat s motors suddenly roared up the scale and we surged forward. I stumbled back and grabbed at the transom, regaining my balance just in time to hear something thump against the hull. The engines wound back down to idle and I looked up at Astor on the bridge. She was smiling, a real smile this time, and looking back into our wake.

Got him, she said.

I went back to the transom and looked. For a moment there was no sign of Crowley, and I could not see under the water in the foam of our wake. Then there was a slow, heavy swirl under the surface. Was it possible? Was he still alive?

And with breathtaking speed and violence, Crowley s head and shoulders broke the surface. His mouth was stretched into an enormous expression of unbelievable pain and surprise as he rocketed upward until the top half of his body was all the way out of the water. But there was an alien shape clamped around his middle and thrusting him upward, a colossal gray thing that seemed to be all teeth and malice, and it shook him with incredible force: once, twice, and then Crowley simply fell over from the waist, sliced neatly in two, and the top half of his body sank from sight and the gigantic gray thing swirled after him into the deep, leaving nothing but a small red whirlpool and the memory of unbelievably savage power.

It had all happened so fast that I couldn t be sure I had really seen it. But the image of that great gray monster was burned into my brain as if it had been etched there with acid, and the foam in our wake had a faint pink tint to it now. It had happened, and Crowley was gone.

What was that? Astor said.

That, I said, was the Channel Hog.

Sweeeet, she said, drawing out the word. Totally. Flippin. Sweeeeeeet.

THIRTY-FIVE

As it happened, the old man in the cockpit helped out a great deal after all. He had apparently broken his collarbone when Crowley rolled him off the bridge, and even better, he was an extremely rich and important old man, who did not mind making himself the center of attention and letting everyone know that he was a very influential person, and demanding that everyone in the immediate vicinity drop whatever they were doing and focus on giving him their absolute and devoted care.

He yelled in pain, and raved about the madman who had savagely attacked him and stolen his boat, threatening to sue the parks department, pausing only to point at me and say, If not for that brave, wonderful man! which I thought hit just the right note and made the whole crowd look at me with admiration. But they didn t look long, because the important old man was far from done. He hollered for morphine and an airlift and ordered the rangers to secure his boat at once and call his attorney, and he made vague threats involving the legislature or even the governor, who was a personal friend, and he made himself completely, rivetingly annoying. Altogether he turned himself into such a perfect spectacle that nobody even noticed his female companion, who was standing there wrapped in a towel to hide the fact that she was naked except for her bikini top.

And nobody noticed when that brave wonderful man, Darling Dashing Dexter, took his two wayward imps by the hand and led them away from the hurly-burly and back to the relative calm and sanity of Key West.

When we got to our hotel, we were informed that our suite was still sealed by order of the police. I should have anticipated that. I had sealed enough crime scenes myself. But as I was about to sink wearily onto the cold marble floor and weep away my life of care, the desk clerk reassured me that they had moved us to an even nicer suite, one that had an actual view of the water. And just to confirm that at last everything had turned around and living was once more worth all the trouble and mess, she went on to inform me that the manager was so deeply sorry for all the unpleasantness that he had refunded our entire deposit, thrown away our bill, and hoped we would accept a complimentary dinner in the restaurant, beverages not included, which was not meant to suggest that the hotel or its staff and management were in any way responsible for the unfortunate accident, and the manager was sure we would agree and enjoy the rest of our stay, which was extended an extra night, too, and if I would only sign one small piece of paper acknowledging that the resort had no liability?

Suddenly I was very tired. And yet, with the fatigue came an unreasonable sense of well-being, a vague suggestion burbling up around the edges that the worst really was over and everything was actually going to be all right. I had been through so much, and failed miserably at dealing with most of it, and yet I was still here, all in one piece. In spite of my terrible performance and my unquestionable iniquity, I was being rewarded with dinner and a free vacation in a luxury suite. Life really was a wicked, awful, unjust thing, and that was exactly as it should be.

So I gave the clerk my very best smile and said, Throw in banana splits for the kids and a bottle of merlot for my wife, and you ve got a deal.

Rita was waiting for us in our new improved suite. It really did have a wonderful view of the harbor, and it was much easier for me to appreciate the postcard prettiness of the water than it had been just a few hours ago, when I stood on the dock and watched the catamaran pull away. Rita had apparently been enjoying the view from the balcony for some time even more so since she d opened the minibar and mixed herself a Cuba Libre. She jumped to her feet when we came in and rushed over to us, fluttering like the absolute Avatar of Dither.

Dexter, my God, where have you been? she said, and before I could answer she blurted out, We got the house! Oh, my God, I still can t And you weren t here! But it s the one, you remember you said? On a Hundred and Forty-second Terrace, just a mile and a half from our old house! With a pool, my God, and it was only There was one other bidder, but they dropped out right before It s ours, Dexter! We have a new house! A big, wonderful house! And she sniffled and then sobbed, and one more time she said, Oh, my God.

That s wonderful, I said, although I was not completely convinced that it was. But I said it with as much reassurance as I could muster, since she was crying.

I just can t believe it, she said, sniffling again. It s just exactly perfect, and I got us a mortgage at four and a half Astor, did you get a sunburn?

Only a little, Astor said, though she d gotten quite a bit more than a sunburn. The side of her face, where Crowley had hit her, was red, and I was sure it would soon turn purple, but I was also confident we could bluff our way through Rita s questions.

Oh, look at your poor face, Rita said, laying a hand on Astor s cheek. It s swollen, and you can t even Dexter, what in the world happened?

Oh, I said, we went for a little boat ride.

But that s You said you were going to feed the sharks, she said.

I looked at Cody and Astor. Astor looked back at me and snickered.

We did that, too, I said.

Our complimentary dinner that evening was really quite nice. I have always found that free meals taste just a little bit better, and after two days of the rapacious greed of the Key West economy, this was succulent indeed.

And the flavors were just a little bit more delicious when, three minutes into the entr e, my sister, Sergeant Deborah Morgan, blew into the dining room like a category-four hurricane. She came in so fast that she was actually sitting at our table before I knew she was there, and I am quite sure I heard the sonic boom catch up to her a moment later.

Dexter, what the fu what the, um, heck have you been doing? she said, with a guilty glance at Cody and Astor.

Hi, Aunt Sergeant, Astor said, with visible hero worship. Debs got to carry a gun and boss large men around, and Astor found that intoxicating.

Debs knew it; she smiled at Astor and said, Hi, honey. How are you doing?

Great! Astor gushed. This is the best vacation ever!

Deborah raised an eyebrow at that, but just said, Well, good.

What brings you down to old Key West, sis? I said.

She looked back to me and frowned. They re all saying that Hood followed you down here and turned up dead in your room, for Christ s sake, Debs said. I mean, Jesus.

Quite true, I said calmly. Sergeant Doakes is around somewhere, too, I said.

Deborah s jaw bulged out; it was quite clear that she was grinding her teeth, and I wondered what had happened to the two of us in our childhood to turn us both into molar manglers. All right, she said. You better tell me what happened.

I looked around the table at my little family, and although I was very happy to have my sister here to share my tale of woe, I realized that there were quite a few details that might not be appropriate for sensitive ears I mean Rita s, of course. Would you join me in the lobby, sis? I said.

I followed Debs out to the lobby, where we found a soft leather couch. We sank into the low cushions together, and I told her. It was surprisingly pleasant to be able to tell it all, and it was even more gratifying to hear her reaction when I finished.

You sure he s dead? she said.

Deborah, for God s sake, I said. I saw him bitten in half by a giant shark. He s dead and digested.

She nodded. Well, she said. We just might get away with it.

It was very nice to hear her say we, but there were still some worrisome details that were more I, Dexter than plural. What about Hood? I said.

That asshole got what was coming to him, she said. It was a shock to hear her speak approvingly of a brother officer s death; perhaps she had noticed his terrible breath, too, and was relieved that it was gone forever. But it also occurred to me that his brief attack on Deborah s reputation might have done some real professional harm.

Are you okay with the department again? I asked.

She shrugged and rubbed her cast with her good hand. We got my psycho in a cell. Kovasik, she said. Once I get back on it, I know I can make it stick. He did it, and Hood can t change that. Especially now he s dead.

But don t the Key West cops still think I killed Hood? I asked.

She shook her head. I talked to Detective, um, Blanton? she said, and I nodded. That bag he dropped on the dock in the Tortugas had a baseball bat in it, among other things, she said.

What kind of things? I said; after all, if he d come up with something new, I really wanted to know about it.

Deborah made an irritated face and shook her head. I don t know, fuck, she said. Duct tape. Clothesline. Fishhooks. A carpenter s saw. Things, she said, clearly cranky now. What matters is the bat. There s some blood, tissue, and hair on it that they think will probably match up to Hood s. She shrugged and then, oddly, smacked my arm, hard, with her fist.

Ouch, I said, thinking about the fishhooks some very interesting possibilities

Which kind of lets you off the hook, Deborah said.

I rubbed my arm. So they re just going to drop it? I mean, as far as I m concerned?

Deborah snorted. Actually, they re kind of hoping you ll just go away and not make any fuss about them handing your children to a kidnapper. Right out of their own front door, too. Fucking idiots.

Oh, I said. Oddly enough, I hadn t even thought of that. It really did seem like the sort of thing they might hope would just disappear. So they re happy with Crowley, even though he s gone?

Yeah, Debs said. Blanton may not look like much, but she knows her job. She found a hotel maid who saw somebody and got a description. Thirties, stocky, short beard?

That s him, I said.

Uh-huh. So this guy was helping his drunk friend out of the service elevator on your floor. Except the maid said he looked a little too drunk like dead drunk and he had one of those pirate hats covering his face, like they found in your room?

Suite, I said reflexively.

She ignored me and shook her head. The maid didn t want to say anything; she s from Venezuela, scared to lose her green card. But she gave a good description. And two of the cooks saw them coming in from the loading dock, too. Also, the waiter at breakfast confirms that you were with your family in the dining room at the time, so

I thought about it, nursing a tiny spark of hope as it grew into a glimmer. It was unlike Crowley to be so sloppy, but I suppose he had been surprised by Hood and had to improvise. I had a quick mental picture of the two of them trying to follow me at the same time and tripping over each other; comic hijinks result, leading to the hilarious bludgeoning death of Detective Hood. Maybe Crowley had panicked, maybe he had just been riding his luck and feeling invincible. I would never know, and it didn t really matter. Somehow, he had gotten away with it. Nobody had seen him kill Hood, and nobody had stopped him when he moved the body into my room. But of course, people see only what they expect to see, and precious little of that, so the only surprise was that anybody had noticed anything at all.

But the true marvel was that I could see a real live light at the end of what had been a very long, very dark tunnel. I breathed a tentative sigh of relief and looked at my sister, and she looked back.

So I m off the hook in Key West? I said.

She nodded. It gets better, she told me. Fucking Doakes really shit the bed this time.

I hope it was his own bed, I said.

He s supposed to be in Admin, not out working a case, she said. Plus, here he is in Key West, which is way out of his jurisdiction. And, she added, raising her good hand, the one with no cast, in the air and making a very sour face, the Key West cops have made a formal complaint. Doakes tried to bully them into holding on to you, and he intimidated witnesses, and She paused and looked off into the distance for a moment. Fuck, she said at last.

He used to be a pretty good cop. She actually sighed, and it pained me to see her feeling sorry for someone who had spent so much time and effort making me miserable.

But there were, after all, more important matters at hand.

Deborah, I said. What about Doakes?

She looked up at me with an expression I couldn t quite read. Suspended, without pay, pending investigation by Professional Compliance, she said.

I really couldn t help myself, and I blurted out, That s wonderful!

Sure, Deborah said, a little sour. She continued her silent funk for a few more seconds and then shook herself out of it. What the hell, she said.

What happens back home? I said. Am I still a person of interest to the investigation?

Deborah shrugged. Officially you are, she said.

But Laredo has taken over the case, and he s not a dope. You ll probably be back at work in a few days. She looked at me. It was a hard look, and there was clearly something on her mind, but whatever it was she didn t say it. She just looked, and then finally turned away to stare at the front door.

If only, she said, there was She hesitated, cleared her throat, and went on slowly. just a little bit of evidence, so Then you d be home free. A fat man in plaid shorts came in the front door, followed by two small blond girls. Deborah seemed to find them interesting.

What kind of evidence, Debs? I said.

She shrugged and watched the fat man. Ah, I dunno, she said. Maybe something that showed that Hood was bent. You know. So we can see he was not clean, not really a good cop. And maybe why he tried to put it on you.

The fat man and his entourage disappeared down the hall, and Deborah looked at the cast on her broken arm where it lay in her lap.

If we could find something like that, she said, and keep your name out of the thing in the Tortugas, who knows. She looked up at me at last, with a small, very strange smile. We just might get away with it.

Perhaps there really is some kindly, doting Demigod of Darkness that watches over the truly wicked, because we actually did get away with it at least the first part. The Thing in the Tortugas caused a little fuss in the press, and there was some mention of the anonymous hero who had saved the old man s life. But nobody actually knew the hero s name, and witnesses descriptions of him were so vague they could have been six different randomly selected strangers. It was too bad, because it turned out that the old man really was important, and he owned several TV stations and quite a few state legislators.

There was some confusion about what had happened to the very bad man who had attacked the old guy. The woman who lost her bikini gave a good description of Crowley, and it matched up with what the Key West cops had, so it was clear that this terrible felon had killed a Miami cop and then tried to steal a boat and flee, probably to Cuba. Whether he had ended up in Havana or someplace else was not clear, but he was gone. He was listed as officially missing, wanted, and he went onto a few assorted lists. But no one really missed the missing person, and these are hard times, with dwindling budgets, so there was not a great deal of money and effort spent trying to find him. He was gone, nobody cared, and The Thing in the Tortugas was soon pushed out of the news by a triple nude decapitation involving a middle-aged man who had once been a child star on TV.

We really were getting away with it. If only one last small miracle could somehow discredit Hood, my coworkers would welcome me back to work with open arms and joyous smiles, and life would return to its wondrous banal predictable everyday boring bliss. And the day after I returned from Key West, Deborah called to inform me that a forensics team would be going to Hood s house the next morning. We just had to hope that something helpful might turn up.

And it might. It very well might. It might be something so very helpful that the entire case would vanish in a puff of malodorous smoke, and Dexter would go from a shabby felon slinking out of his office, to a real live martyr, a victim of gross injustice and wicked defamation of character.

But was it really possible that something like that might turn up?

Oh, yes, quite possibly it might. In fact, it might be a great deal of Something Like That, things that might be so very damning that they cast doubt not just on the case against me, but on Detective Hood himself, and his right to wear Our Proud Uniform, and to walk among the Just, so absolutely damning that the department would want the whole thing to disappear quickly and quietly, rather than risk a huge and stinking blemish on its proud reputation.

In fact, it might be that the forensics team will come into the vile, smelly little hovel where Hood had lived, and stare around in disgusted wonder at the heaps of garbage, dirty dishes, filthy discarded clothing, and they will marvel that a human being could actually live like this. Because the place just might be a truly nauseating mess why, I can almost picture what it might look like.

And I can almost picture my coworkers disgust as it turns slowly to shock, and then grim but total condemnation as they find kiddie porn on the hard drive of Hood s computer I mean, they might find it, along with a series of torrid love notes written to Camilla Figg and her reply that she never wanted to see him again because of his sick thing about children, and anyway his breath was so horrible. It would be easy to conclude that Hood had killed her out of rage at the breakup and then tried to cover his ass by pinning it on poor guiltless Dexter especially since he found all her pictures of me, and these hypothetical notes might reveal that he had never liked me anyway.

And at some point in this remarkable train ride into Hood s inarguable guilt and shame, someone could very well pause and say,

But isn t this all just a little too perfect? Isn t there almost too much evidence against Detective Hood, who is no longer here to defend himself? Why, it s almost as if somebody snuck into this foul shanty and planted fabricated evidence, isn t it?

But this pause will be a short one, and it will end with a disapproving shake of the head and a return to belief in the evidence, because it s all there, right before their eyes, and the thought that someone might have planted it is too wacky for words. After all, who would ever do such a thing? And even more, who could do it? Might there really be one person who has the amazing combination of talents, cunning, and moral emptiness to pull off such a complete destruction of Detective Hood s posthumous character? Was there really one person who might know enough about the case to manufacture just the right evidence, and have enough knowledge of police procedure to make it airtight? Who?

And Who might slide through the night like a darker part of the shadows and slither unseen into Hood s house to plant it? And once inside, Who might have the computer know-how to take all this evidence off a flash drive for example and put it onto Hood s little computer in such a way that it is utterly convincing? And Who, on top of all that, might do all this not merely so well but with such a truly clever, original, naughty sense of humor?

Is there really any Who anywhere who might be that good at all these dark and different things and more important, wicked enough to do them? In all the world, might there possibly be anybody so wonderfully just like that?

Yes.

There might be.

But only one.