ONE

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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-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-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-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-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.