T WAS PAST TEN WHEN I FINISHED, AND I FELT AS IF I HAD been standing underwater for the last four hours. Even so, it seemed like a shame to head for home without checking some of the names on my list. So I cruised slowly past two of the more distant addresses that were more or less on my way. The first car was parked right in front of the house; its trunk was unblemished and I drove past.

The second car was under a carport, hidden by shadows, and I could not see the trunk. I slowed to a crawl, and then nosed into the driveway as if I was lost and merely turning around. There was something on the trunk—but as my lights hit it, it moved, and the fattest cat I had ever seen raced away into the night. I turned the car around and drove home.

It was past eleven when I parked in front of my house. The light was on over the front door, and I got out of my car and stood just outside the small circle of light it cast. The rain had finally stopped, but there was still a low bank of dark clouds filling the sky, and it reminded me of the night almost two weeks ago when I had been seen, and an echo of unease clattered through me. I stared up at the clouds, but they did not seem intimidated. We made you wet, they sneered, and you’re standing there like a schmuck while your whole body puckers.

It was true. I locked my car and went inside.

The house was relatively quiet, since it was a school night. Cody and Astor were asleep, and the late news muttered softly from the TV. Rita dozed on the couch with Lily Anne tucked onto her lap. Rita did not wake up when I came in, but Lily Anne looked up at me with bright and wide-awake eyes. “Da,” she said. “Da da da!”

She recognized me right away, a brilliant girl. I felt a few of the interior clouds roll away as I looked at her happy little face. “Lily-willy,” I replied with all the great seriousness required for the occasion, and she chortled back.

“Oh!” Rita said, jerking awake and blinking at me. “Dexter—are you home? I didn’t,” she said. “I mean, you’re out so late. Again.”

“Sorry,” I said. “All part of the job.”

She looked at me for a long moment, doing no more than blinking, and then she shook her head. “You’re soaking wet,” she said.

“It was raining,” I told her.

She blinked a few more times. “It stopped raining an hour ago,” she said.

I couldn’t see why that mattered, but I am full of polite clichés, so I just said, “Well, it just goes to show.”

“Oh,” Rita said. She looked at me thoughtfully again and I began to feel a little self-conscious. But she finally sighed and shook her head. “Well,” she said, “you must be very— Oh. Your dinner. It was getting so— Are you hungry?”

“Starving,” I said.

“You’re dripping on the floor,” Rita said. “You’d better change into some dry clothes. And if you get a cold …” She waved a hand in front of her face. “Oh, Lily Anne—she’s wide-awake.” She smiled at the baby, that same mother-to-child smile Leonardo tried so hard to capture.

“I’ll get changed,” I said, and I went down the hall to the bathroom, where I put my wet clothes in the hamper, toweled off, and put on some dry pajamas.

When I came back, Rita was crooning and Lily Anne was gurgling, and although I didn’t really want to interrupt, I had some important things on my mind. “You said something about dinner?” I said.

“It was getting very— Oh, I hope it didn’t get all dried out, because— Anyway, it’s in a Tupperware, and— I’ll just microwave the here, take the baby.” She jumped up off the couch and held Lily Anne toward me, and I stepped in quickly and grabbed my baby, just in case I had not heard Rita correctly and she really did mean to microwave the child. Rita was already moving in the direction of the kitchen as Lily Anne and I sat back down on the couch.

I looked down at her: Lily Anne, the small and bright-faced doorway into Dexter’s newfound world of emotions and normal life. She was the miracle that had brought me halfway into humanity, just by the pink and wonderful fact of her existence. She had made me feel for the first time, and as I sat and held her, I felt all the fuzzy sunrise thoughts that any mere mortal would feel. She was almost one year old, and already it was clear that she was a remarkable child.

“Can you spell ‘hyperbole’?” I asked Lily Anne.

“Da,” she said happily.

“Very good,” I said, and she reached up and squeezed my nose to show me that the word had been too easy for a highly intelligent person such as herself. She gave my forehead an openhanded smack and bounced a few times, her way of asking politely for something a little more challenging, perhaps involving movement and a good sound track, and I obliged.

A few minutes later, Lily Anne and I had finished bouncing through two verses of “Frog Went A-Courtin’ ” and were already working out the final details to a unified field theory of physics when Rita came bustling back into the room with a fragrant and steaming plate in her hand. “It’s a pork chop,” she said. “I did the Dutch oven thing, with mushrooms? Except the mushrooms at the store were not very— So anyway, I sliced in some tomatoes and a few capers? Of course, Cody didn’t like it— Oh! And I forgot to tell you,” she said, putting the plate down in front of me on the coffee table. “I’m sorry if the yellow rice is a little—but the dentist said? Astor is going to need braces, and she’s completely …” She fluttered one hand in the air and started to sit. “She said that she would rather— Damn, I forgot the fork, just a minute,” she said, and raced back into the kitchen.

Lily Anne watched her go, and then turned to look at me. I shook my head. “She always talks like that,” I told her. “You get used to it.”

Lily Anne looked a little unsure. “Da da da,” she told me.

I kissed the top of her head. It smelled wonderful, a combination of baby shampoo and whatever intoxicating pheromone it is that babies rub into their scalps. “You’re probably right,” I said, and then Rita was back in the room, putting a fork and a napkin down beside the plate, lifting Lily Anne up out of my arms, and settling down beside me to continue the saga of Astor and the Dentist.

“Anyway,” she said. “I told her it’s just for a year, and a lot of other girls— But she has this … Has she told you about Anthony?”

“Anthony the asshole?” I said.

“Oh,” Rita said. “He’s not really an— I mean, she says that and she shouldn’t. But it’s different for a girl, and Astor is at the age— It’s not too dry, is it?” she said, frowning at my plate.

“It’s perfect,” I said.

“It is dry; I’m sorry. So I thought maybe if you would talk to her,” Rita finished. I truly hoped she meant talk to Astor and not the pork chop.

“What do you want me to say?” I asked her around a mouthful of very tasty but slightly dry pork chop.

“That it’s perfectly all right,” Rita said.

“What, braces?”

“Yes, of course,” she said. “What did you think we were talking about?”

Truthfully, I was often not quite sure what we were talking about, since Rita usually managed to combine at least three simultaneous subjects when she spoke. Perhaps it came from her job; even after several years with her, I only knew that it involved juggling large numbers, converting them to different foreign currencies, and applying the results to the real estate market. It was one of life’s wonderful puzzles that a woman smart enough to do that could be so completely stupid when it came to men, because first she had married a man addicted to drugs who beat her savagely, beat Cody and Astor just as badly, and finally committed enough unpleasant and illegal acts that he had been tucked away in prison. And Rita, free at last from the long nightmare of marriage to a drug-addled demon, had danced happily into marriage with an even worse monster: Me.

Of course, Rita would never know what I really was, not if I could help it. I had worked very hard to keep her blissfully ignorant of the true me, Dexter the Dark, the cheerful vivisectionist who lived for the purr of duct tape, the gleam of the knife, and the smell of fear rising up from a truly deserving playmate who had earned his ticket to Dexterland by slaughtering the innocent and somehow slipping through the gaping cracks in the justice system.…

Rita would never know that side of me, and neither would Lily Anne. My moments with new friends like Valentine were private—or they had been, until the terrible accident of the Witness. For a moment I thought about that, and the remaining names on my Honda list. One of those names would be the right one, had to be, and when I knew which one … I could almost taste the excitement of taking and taping him, almost hear the muffled squeals of pain and fear.…

And because my mind had wandered onto my hobby, I committed the dreadful felony of chewing Rita’s pork chop without tasting it. But happily for my taste buds, as I pictured the Witness thrashing against his binds, I bit down on the fork, which jolted me out of my pleasant reverie and back to dinner. I scooped the last mouthful of yellow rice and one caper onto my fork and put it in my mouth as Rita said, “And anyway, it isn’t covered by the insurance, so— But I should have a nice bonus this year, and braces are very— Astor doesn’t smile very much, does she? But maybe if her teeth …” She paused suddenly, waved a hand, and made a face. “Oh, Lily Anne,” she said. “You really do need a diaper change.” Rita got up and took the baby away down the hall to the changing table, trailing an aroma that was definitely not pork chop, and I put down my empty plate and settled back onto the couch with a sigh: Dexter Digesting.

For some strange and very irritating reason, instead of letting the cares of the day slip away into a fog of well-fed contentment, I slid headfirst back into work and thought about Marty Klein and the dreadful mess that was his corpse. I hadn’t really known him well, and even if I had I am not capable of any kind of emotional bonding, not even the rough and manly kind so popular at my job. And dead bodies don’t bother me; even if I had not been occasionally involved in producing them, looking at them and touching them is part of my job. And although I would rather not have my coworkers know it, a dead cop is no more disturbing to me than a dead lawyer. But a corpse like this one, so completely hammered out of human shape … it was very different, almost supernatural.

The fury of the pounding that had killed Klein was completely psychotic, of course—but the fact that it had been so thorough, and had taken such a very long time, was far beyond normal, comfortable, homicidal insanity, and I found it very disturbing. It had required remarkable strength, endurance, and, most frightening by far, a cool control during the whole wild process so as not to go too far and cause death too soon, before all the bones were broken.

And for some reason, I had the very strong conviction that it was not a simple and relatively harmless single episode in which somebody had slipped over the line and gone postal for a few hours. This seemed like a pattern, a way of being, a state that was permanent. Insane strength and fury, combined with a clinical control—I could not imagine what kind of creature was capable of that, and I didn’t really want to. But once again I had the feeling we would find more squashed cops in the near future.

“Dexter?” Rita called softly from the bedroom. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”

I glanced at the clock by the TV: almost midnight. Just seeing the numbers made me realize how tired I was. “Coming,” I said. I got up from the couch and stretched, feeling a very welcome drowsiness come over me. It was clearly sleepy time, and I would worry about Marty Klein and his awful end tomorrow. Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof; at least, on the very good days. I put my plate in the sink and went to bed.

From far away in the dim, wool-packed world of sleep I felt an uneasy sensation elbowing its way into my head and, as if in answer to a vague but demanding question, I heard a loud and explosive roaring sound—and I was awake, my nose dripping from a powerful sneeze. “Oh, lord,” Rita said, sitting up beside me. “You caught a cold from all that— I knew you were going to— Here, here’s a tissue.”

“Tanks,” I said, and I sat up in bed and took the tissue from her hand and applied it to my nose. I sneezed again, this time into the tissue, and felt it disintegrate in my hand. “Ohggg,” I said, as the slime dripped onto my fingers and a dull ache rolled into my bones.

“Oh, for heaven’s— Here, take another tissue,” Rita said. “And go wash your hands, because— Look at the time, it’s time to get up anyway.” And before I could do more than raise the new tissue to my face, she was up and out of the bed, leaving me to sit there dripping and wondering why wicked fate had inflicted this misery on poor undeserving me. My head hurt, and I felt like it was stuffed with wet sand, and it was leaking all over my hand—and on top of everything else, I had to get up and go to work, and with the way my head was rolling sluggishly through the fog I wasn’t sure I could even figure out how.

But one of the things Dexter is truly good at is learning and following patterns of behavior. I have lived my life among humans, and they all think and feel and act in ways that are completely alien to me—but my survival depends on presenting a perfect imitation of the way they behave. Happily for me, ninety-nine percent of all human life is spent simply repeating the same old actions, speaking the same tired clichés, moving like a zombie through the same steps of the dance we plodded through yesterday and the day before and the day before. It seems horribly dull and pointless—but it really makes a great deal of sense. After all, if you only have to follow the same path every day, you don’t need to think at all. Considering how good humans are at any mental process more complicated than chewing, isn’t that best for everybody?

So I learned very young to watch people stumbling through their one or two basic rituals, and then perform the same steps myself with flawless mimicry. This morning that talent served me well, because as I staggered out of bed and into the bathroom, there was absolutely nothing in my head except phlegm, and if I had not learned by rote what I was supposed to do each morning I don’t think I could have done it. The dull ache of a major cold had seeped into my bones and pushed all capacity for thinking out of my brain.

But the pattern of what I do in the morning remained: shower, shave, brush teeth, and stumble to the kitchen table, where Rita had a cup of coffee waiting for me. As I sipped it and felt a small spark of life flicker in response, she slid a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me. It might have been the effect of the coffee, but I remembered what to do with the eggs, and I did it very well, too. And as I finished the eggs, Rita dropped a pair of cold pills in front of me.

“Take these,” she said. “You’ll feel much better when they start to— Oh, look at the time. Cody? Astor? You’re going to be late!” She refilled my coffee cup and hustled off down the hall, where I heard her rousting two very unwilling children out of their beds. A minute later Cody and Astor thumped into their chairs at the table, and Rita pushed plates in front of them. Cody mechanically began to eat right away, but Astor slumped on her elbow and stared at the eggs with disgust.

“They’re all runny,” she said. “I want cereal.”

All part of the morning ritual: Astor never wanted anything Rita gave her to eat. And I found it oddly comforting that I knew what would happen next, as Rita and the kids followed the every-morning script and I waited for the cold pills to kick in and return to me the power of independent thought. Until then, no need to worry; I didn’t have to do anything but follow the pattern.