T WAS A FIFTEEN-MINUTE DRIVE TO DEBORAH’S HOUSE from where I lived in the Grove. For once, I did not see Sergeant Doakes following me, but perhaps he was using a Klingon cloaking device. In any case, the traffic was very sparse and I even made the light at U.S. 1. Deborah lived in a small house on Medina in Coral Gables, overgrown with some neglected fruit trees and a crumbling coral-rock wall. I nosed my car in next to hers in the short driveway and was only two steps away when Deborah opened her front door. “Where have you been?” she said.

“I went to yoga class, and then out to the mall to buy shoes,” I said. In truth, I had actually hurried over, getting there less than twenty minutes after her call, and I was a little miffed at the tone she was taking.

“Get in here,” she said, peering around into the darkness and holding on to the door as if she thought it might fly away.

“Yes, O Mighty One,” I said, and I got in.

Deborah’s little house was lavishly decorated in I-have-no-life modern. Her living area generally looked like a cheap hotel room that had been occupied by a rock band and looted of everything except a TV and VCR. There was a chair and a small table by French doors that led out to a patio that was almost lost in a tangle of bushes. She had found another chair somewhere, though, a rickety folding chair, and she pulled it over to the table for me. I was so touched by her hospitable gesture that I risked life and limb by sitting in the flimsy thing. “Well,” I said. “How long has he been gone?”

“Shit,” she said. “About three and a half hours. I think.” She shook her head and slumped into the other chair. “We were supposed to meet here, and—he didn’t show up. I went to his hotel, and he wasn’t there.”

“Isn’t it possible he just went away somewhere?” I asked—and I’m not proud of it, but I admit I sounded a little hopeful.

Deborah shook her head. “His wallet and keys were still on the dresser. The guy has him, Dex. We gotta find him before—” She bit her lip and looked away.

I was not at all sure what I could do to find Kyle. As I said, this was not the kind of thing I generally had any insight into, and I had already given it my best shot tracking down the real estate. But since Deborah was already saying “we” it seemed that I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Family ties and all that. Still, I tried to make a little bit of wiggle room. “I’m sorry if this sounds stupid, Debs, but did you report this?”

She looked up with a half snarl. “Yeah, I did. I called Captain Matthews. He sounded relieved. He told me not to get hysterical, like I’m some kind of old lady with the vapors.” She shook her head. “I asked him to put out an APB, and he said, ‘For what?’” She hissed out her breath. “For what... Goddamn it, Dexter, I wanted to strangle him, but...” She shrugged.

“But he was right,” I said.

“Yeah. Kyle is the only one who knows what the guy looks like,” she said. “We don’t know what he’s driving or what his real name is or— Shit, Dexter. All I know is he’s got Kyle.” She took a ragged breath. “Anyway, Matthews called Kyle’s people in Washington. Said that was all he could do.” She shook her head and looked very bleak. “They’re sending somebody Tuesday morning.”

“Well then,” I said hopefully. “I mean, we know that this guy works very slowly.”

“Tuesday morning,” she said. “Almost two days. Where do you think he starts, Dex? Does he take a leg off first? Or an arm? Will he do them both at the same time?”

“No,” I said. “One at a time.” She looked at me hard. “Well, it just makes sense, doesn’t it?”

“Not to me,” she said. “Nothing about this makes sense.”

“Deborah, cutting off the arms and legs is not what this guy wants to do. It’s just how he does it.”

“Goddamn it, Dexter, talk English.”

“What he wants to do is totally destroy his victims. Break them inside and out, way beyond repair. Turn them into musical beanbags that will never again have a moment of anything except total endless insane horror. Cutting off limbs and lips is just the way he— What?”

“Oh, Jesus, Dexter,” Deborah said. Her face had screwed up into something I hadn’t seen since our mom died. She turned away, and her shoulders began to shake. It made me just a little uneasy. I mean, I do not feel emotions, and I know Deborah quite often does. But she was not the kind of person who showed them, unless irritation is an emotion. And now she was making wet snuffly sounds, and I knew that I should probably pat her shoulder and say, “There there,” or something equally profound and human, but I couldn’t quite make myself do it. This was Deb, my sister. She would know I was faking it and—

And what? Cut off my arms and legs? The worst she would do would be to tell me to stop it, and go back to being Sergeant Sourpuss again. Even that would be a great improvement over her wilting-lily act. In any case, this was clearly one of those times where some human response was called for, and since I knew from long study what a human would do, I did it. I stood up and stepped over to her. I put my arm on her shoulder, patted her, and said, “All right, Deb. There there.” It sounded even stupider than I had feared, but she leaned against me and snuffled, so I suppose it was the right thing to do after all.

“Can you really fall in love with somebody in a week?” she asked me.

“I don’t think I can do it at all,” I said.

“I can’t take this, Dexter,” she said. “If Kyle gets killed, or turned into— Oh, God, I don’t know what I’ll do.” And she collapsed against me again and cried.

“There there,” I said.

She gave a long hard snuffle, and then blew her nose on a paper towel from the table beside her. “I wish you’d stop saying that,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”

“Tell me what this guy is up to. Tell me how to find him.”

I sat back down in the wobbly little chair. “I don’t think I can, Debs. I don’t really have much of a feel for what he’s doing.”

“Bullshit,” she said.

“Seriously. I mean, technically speaking, he hasn’t actually killed anybody, you know.”

“Dexter,” she said, “you already understand more about this guy than Kyle did, and he knows who it is. We’ve got to find him. We’ve GOT to.” She bit her lower lip, and I was afraid she would start blubbering again, which would have left me totally helpless since she had already told me I couldn’t say “There there” again. But she pulled it together like the tough sergeant sister she was and merely blew her nose again.

“I’ll try, Deb. Can I assume that you and Kyle have done all the basic work? Talked to witnesses and so on?”

She shook her head. “We didn’t need to. Kyle knew—” She paused at that past tense, and then went on, very determined. “Kyle KNOWS who did it, and he KNOWS who should be next.”

“Excuse me. He knows who’s next?”

Deborah frowned. “Don’t sound like that. Kyle said there are four guys in Miami who are on the list. One of them is missing, Kyle figured he was already taken, but that gave us a little time to set up surveillance on the other three.”

“Who are these four guys, Deborah? And how does Kyle know them?”

She sighed. “Kyle didn’t tell me their names. But they were all part of a team of some kind. In El Salvador. Along with this... Dr. Danco guy. So—” She spread her hands and looked helpless, a new look for her. And although it gave her a certain little-girl charm, the only thing it did for me was to make me feel even more put-upon. The whole world goes spinning merrily along, getting itself into the most God-awful trouble, and then it’s all up to Dashing Dexter to tidy things up again. It didn’t seem fair, but what can you do?

More to the point—what could I do now? I didn’t see any way to find Kyle before it was too late. And although I am fairly sure I didn’t say that out loud, Deborah reacted as if I had. She slapped one hand on the table and said, “We have to find him before he starts on Kyle. Before he even STARTS, Dexter. Because—I mean, am I supposed to hope Kyle will only lose an arm before we get there? Or a leg? Either way, Kyle is...” She turned away without finishing, looking out into the darkness through the French doors by the little table.

She was right, of course. It looked like there was very little we could do to get Kyle back intact. Because with all the luck in the world, even my dazzling intellect couldn’t possibly lead us to him before the work started. And then—how long could Kyle hold out? Presumably he’d had some sort of training in dealing with this sort of thing, and he knew what was coming, so—

But wait a moment. I closed my eyes and tried to think about it. Dr. Danco would know that Kyle was a pro. And as I had already told Deborah, the whole purpose was to shatter the victim into screaming unfixable pieces. Therefore...

I opened my eyes. “Deb,” I said. She looked at me. “I am in the rare position of having some hope to offer.”

“Spill it,” she said.

“This is only a guess,” I said. “But I think Dr. Demented will probably keep Kyle around for a while, without working on him.”

She frowned. “Why would he do that?”

“To make it last longer, and to soften him up. Kyle knows what’s coming. He’s braced for it. But now, imagine he’s just left lying in the dark, tied up, so his imagination goes to work. And so I think maybe,” I added as it occurred to me, “there’s another victim ahead of him. The guy who’s missing. So Kyle hears it—the saws and scalpels, the moans and whispers. He even smells it, knows it’s coming but doesn’t know when. He’ll be half crazy before he even loses a toenail.”

“Jesus,” she said. “That’s your version of hope?”

“Absolutely. It gives us a little extra time to find him.”

“Jesus,” she said again.

“I could be wrong,” I said.

She looked back out the window. “Don’t be wrong, Dex. Not this time,” she said.

I shook my head. This was going to be pure drudgery, no fun at all. I could only think of two things to try, and neither of them were possible until the morning. I glanced around for a clock. According to the VCR, it was 12:00. 12:00. 12:00. “Do you have a clock?” I asked.

Deborah frowned. “What do you want a clock for?”

“To find out what time it is,” I said. “I think that’s the usual purpose.”

“What the hell difference does that make?” she demanded.

“Deborah. There is very little to go on here. We will have to go back and do all the routine stuff that Chutsky pulled the department away from. Luckily, we can use your badge to barge around and ask questions. But we will have to wait until morning.”

“Shit,” she said. “I hate waiting.”

“There there,” I said. Deborah gave me a very sour look, but didn’t say anything.

I didn’t like waiting either, but I had done so much of it lately that perhaps it came easier to me. In any case, wait we did, dozing in our chairs until the sun came up. And then, since I was the domestic one lately, I made coffee for the two of us—one cup at a time, since Deborah’s coffeemaker was one of those single-cup things for people who don’t expect to be entertaining a great deal and don’t actually have a life. There was nothing in the refrigerator remotely worth eating, unless you were a feral dog. Very disappointing: Dexter is a healthy boy with a high metabolism, and facing what was sure to be a difficult day on an empty stomach was not a happy thought. I know family comes first, but shouldn’t that mean after breakfast?

Ah, well. Dauntless Dexter would make the sacrifice once again. Pure nobility of spirit, and I could expect no thanks, but one does what one must.