F COURSE IT COULDN’T LAST. I SHOULD HAVE KNOWN that such an unnatural state of affairs had to give way, yield to the natural order of things. After all, I lived in a city where mayhem was like the sunshine, always right behind the next cloud. Three weeks after my first unsettling encounter with Sergeant Doakes, the clouds finally broke.

It was just a piece of luck, really—not quite the falling piano I had been hoping for, but still a happy coincidence. I was having lunch with my sister, Deborah. Excuse me; I should have said, SERGEANT Deborah. Like her father, Harry, Debs was a cop. Owing to the happy outcome of recent events, she had been promoted, pulled out of the prostitute costume she had been forced to wear by her assignment with vice, whisked off the street corner at last and into her very own set of sergeant’s stripes.

It should have made her happy. After all, this was what she thought she wanted; an end to her tenure as a pretend hooker. Any young and reasonably attractive female officer assigned to vice would sooner or later find herself in a prostitution sting operation, and Deborah was very attractive. But her lush figure and healthy good looks had never done anything for my poor sister except embarrass her. She hated to wear anything that even hinted at her physical charms, and standing on the street in hot pants and a tube top had been sheer torture for her. She had been in danger of growing permanent frown lines.

Because I am an inhuman monster, I tend to be logical, and I had thought that her new assignment would end her martyrdom as Our Lady of Perpetual Grumpiness. Alas, even her transfer to homicide had failed to bring a smile to her face. Somewhere along the way she had decided that serious law enforcement personnel must reshape their faces until they look like large, mean-spirited fish, and she was still working very hard to accomplish this.

We had come to lunch together in her new motor-pool car, another of the perks of her promotion that really should have brought a small ray of sunshine into her life. It didn’t seem to. I wondered if I should worry about her. I watched her as I slid into a booth at Café Relampago, our favorite Cuban restaurant. She called in her location and status and then sat across from me with a frown.

“Well, Sergeant Grouper,” I said as we picked up our menus.

“Is that funny, Dexter?”

“Yes,” I said. “Very funny. And a little sad, too. Like life itself. Especially your life, Deborah.”

“Fuck you, Charlie,” she said. “My life is fine.” And to prove it, she ordered a medianoche sandwich, the best in Miami, and a batido de mamey, a milk shake made from a unique tropical fruit that tastes something like a combination of peach and watermelon.

My life was every bit as fine as hers, so I ordered the same thing. Because we were regulars here, and had been coming here most of our lives, the aging, unshaven waiter snatched away our menus with a face that might have been the role model for Deborah’s, and stomped off to the kitchen like Godzilla on his way to Tokyo.

“Everyone is so cheerful and happy,” I said.

“This isn’t Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, Dex. It’s Miami. Only the bad guys are happy.” She looked at me without expression, a perfect cop stare. “How come you’re not laughing and singing?”

“Unkind, Deb. Very unkind. I’ve been good for months.”

She took a sip of water. “Uh-huh. And it’s making you crazy.”

“Much worse than that,” I said with a shudder. “I think it’s making me normal.”

“Coulda fooled me,” she said.

“Sad but true. I’ve become a couch potato.” I hesitated, then blurted it out. After all, if a boy can’t share his problems with his family, who can he confide in? “It’s Sergeant Doakes,” I said.

She nodded. “He’s got a real hard-on for you,” she said. “You better keep away from him.”

“I would love to,” I said. “But HE won’t keep away from ME.”

Her cop stare got harder. “What do you plan to do about it?”

I opened my mouth to deny all the things I had been thinking, but happily for the good of my immortal soul, before I could lie to her we were interrupted by the sound of Deb’s radio. She cocked her head to one side, snatched up the radio, and said she was on her way. “Come on,” she snapped, heading for the door. I followed meekly behind, pausing only to throw some money on the table.

Deborah was already backing out her car by the time I came out of Relampago’s. I hurried over and lunged for the door. She was moving forward and out of the parking lot before I even got both feet in. “Really, Deb,” I said. “I almost lost a shoe. What’s so important?”

Deborah frowned, accelerating through a small gap in traffic that only a Miami driver would have attempted. “I don’t know,” she said as she turned on the siren.

I blinked and raised my voice over the noise. “Didn’t the dispatcher tell you?”

“Have you ever heard the dispatcher stutter, Dexter?”

“Why no, Deb, I haven’t. Did this one do that?”

Deb swerved around a school bus and roared up onto 836. “Yeah,” she said. She turned hard to avoid a BMW full of young men, who all flipped her off. “I think it’s a homicide.”

“You think,” I said.

“Yeah,” she answered, and then she concentrated on driving and I let her. High speeds always remind me of my own mortality, especially on Miami’s roads. And as for the Case of the Stuttering Dispatcher—well, Sergeant Nancy Drew and I would find out soon enough, particularly at this speed, and a little excitement is always welcome.

In a very few minutes Deb managed to get us over near the Orange Bowl without causing major loss of life, and we came down onto the surface roads and made a few quick turns before sliding into the curb at a small house on N.W. 4th Street. The street was lined with similar houses, all small and close together and each one with its own wall or chain-link fence. Many of them were brightly colored and had paved yards.

Two patrol cars had already pulled up in front of the house, their lights flashing. A pair of uniformed cops were rolling out the yellow crime-scene tape around the place, and as we got out, I saw a third cop sitting in the front seat of one of the cars, his head in his hands. On the porch of the house a fourth cop stood beside an elderly lady. There were two small steps leading up to the porch and she sat on the top one. She seemed to be alternating weeping with throwing up. Somewhere nearby a dog was howling, the same note over and over.

Deborah marched up to the nearest uniform. He was a square, middle-aged guy with dark hair and a look on his face that said he wished he was sitting in his car with his head in his hands, too. “What have we got?” Deb asked him, holding up her badge.

The cop shook his head without looking at us and blurted out, “I’m not going in there again, not if it costs me my pension.” And he turned away, almost walking into the side of a patrol car, rolling out the yellow tape like it could protect him from whatever was in the house.

Deborah stared after the cop, then looked at me. Quite frankly, I could think of nothing really useful or clever to say, and for a moment we just stood there looking at each other. The wind rattled the crime-scene tape, and the dog continued to howl, a kind of weird yodeling sound that did nothing to increase my affection for the canine species. Deborah shook her head. “Somebody should shut that fucking dog up,” she said, and she ducked under the yellow tape and started up the walk to the house. I followed. After a few steps I realized that the dog sound was getting closer; it was in the house, probably the victim’s pet. Quite often an animal reacts badly to its owner’s death.

We stopped at the steps and Deborah looked up at the cop, reading his name tag. “Coronel. Is this lady a witness?”

The cop didn’t look at us. “Yeah,” he said. “Mrs. Medina. She called it in,” and the old woman leaned over and retched.

Deborah frowned. “What’s with that dog?” she asked him.

Coronel made a sort of barking noise halfway between laughing and gagging, but he didn’t answer and he didn’t look at us.

I suppose Deborah had had enough, and it’s hard to blame her. “What the fuck is going on here?” she demanded.

Coronel turned his head to look at us. There was no expression at all on his face. “See for yourself,” he said, and then he turned away again. Deborah thought she was going to say something, but changed her mind. She looked at me instead and shrugged.

“We might as well take a look,” I told her, and I hoped I didn’t sound too eager. In truth, I was anxious to see anything that could create this kind of reaction in Miami cops. Sergeant Doakes might very well prevent me from doing anything of my own, but he couldn’t stop me from admiring someone else’s creativity. After all, it was my job, and shouldn’t we enjoy our work?

Deborah, on the other hand, showed uncharacteristic reluctance. She glanced back at the patrol car where the cop still sat unmoving, head in hands. Then she looked back to Coronel and the old lady, then at the front door of the little house. She took a deep breath, blew it out hard, and said, “All right. Let’s have a look.” But she still didn’t move, so I slipped past her and pushed open the door.

The front room of the little house was dark, curtains and blinds all pulled closed. There was one easy chair that looked like it had come from a thrift shop. It had a slipcover that was so dirty it was impossible to tell what color it was supposed to be. The chair sat in front of a small TV on a folding card table. Other than that the room was empty. A doorway opposite the front door showed a small patch of light, and that seemed to be where the dog was yowling, so I headed that way, toward the back of the house.

Animals do not like me, which proves they are smarter than we think. They seem to sense what I am, and they disapprove, often expressing their opinion in a very pointed way. So I was a little bit reluctant to approach a dog already so obviously upset. But I moved through the doorway, slowly, calling out hopefully, “Nice doggie!” It didn’t really sound like a very nice doggie; it sounded like a brain-damaged pit bull with rabies. But I do try to put a good face on things, even with our canine friends. With a kind and animal-loving expression on my face, I stepped to the swinging door that led to what was obviously the kitchen.

As I touched the door I heard a soft and uneasy rustling from the Dark Passenger and I paused. What? I asked, but there was no reply. I closed my eyes for just a second, but the page was blank; no secret message flashed onto the back of my eyelids. I shrugged, pushed open the door, and stepped into the kitchen.

The upper half of the room was painted a faded, greasy yellow, and the lower half was lined with old, blue pinstriped white tiles. There was a small refrigerator in one corner and a hot plate on the counter. A palmetto bug ran across the counter and dove behind the refrigerator. A sheet of plywood had been nailed across the room’s only window, and there was a single dim lightbulb hanging from the ceiling.

Under the lightbulb was a large, heavy old table, the kind with square legs and a white porcelain finish. A large mirror hung on the wall at an angle that allowed it to reflect whatever was on the table. And in that reflection, lying in the middle of the table was a... um...

Well. I assume it had started life as a human being of some kind, quite probably male and Hispanic. Very difficult to say in its present state which, I admit, left even me a bit startled. Still, in spite of being surprised, I had to admire the thoroughness of the work, and the neatness. It would have made a surgeon very jealous, although it seems likely that very few surgeons would be able to justify this kind of work to an HMO.

I would never have thought, for instance, of cutting off the lips and eyelids like that, and although I pride myself on my neat work, I could never have done so without damage to the eyes, which in this case were rolling wildly back and forth, unable to close or even blink, always returning to that mirror. Just a hunch, but I guessed that the eyelids had been done last, long after the nose and ears had been oh-so-neatly removed. I could not decide, however, if I would have done these before or after the arms, legs, genitals, etc. A difficult series of choices, but from the look of things, it had all been done properly, even expertly, by someone who’d had plenty of practice. We often speak of very neat body work as “surgical.” But this was actual surgery. There was no bleeding at all, even from the mouth, where the lips and tongue had been removed. Even the teeth; one had to admire such amazing thoroughness. Every cut had been professionally closed; a white bandage was neatly taped to each shoulder where arms had once hung, and the rest of the cuts had already healed, in a way you might hope to find in the very best of hospitals.

Everything on the body had been cut off, absolutely everything. There was nothing left of it but a bare and featureless head attached to an unencumbered body. I could not imagine how it was possible to do this without killing the thing, and it was certainly far beyond me why anyone would want to. It revealed a cruelty that really made one wonder if the universe was such a good idea after all. Pardon me if this sounds a tad hypocritical coming from Death-head Dexter, but I know very well what I am and it is nothing like this. I do what the Dark Passenger deems necessary, to someone who truly deserves it, and it always ends in death—which I am sure the thing on the table would agree was not such a bad thing.

But this—to do all this so patiently and carefully and leave it alive in front of a mirror... I could feel a sense of black wonder drifting up from deep inside, as if for the very first time my Dark Passenger was feeling just a little bit insignificant.

The thing on the table did not appear to register my presence. It just kept making that deranged doggie sound, nonstop, the same horrible wavering note over and over.

I heard Deb scuffle to a halt behind me. “Oh Jesus,” she said. “Oh God... What is it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But at least it’s not a dog.”