WAS MORE THAN A LITTLE CURIOUS TO FIND OUT WHAT HAD actually gone on with my brother and the kids, but Rita hustled them into bed before I could speak to them. I went to sleep unsatisfied, and in the morning there was no chance to speak to them away from their mother. This was a very necessary condition, since if anything had happened other than Chinese food, I most certainly didn’t want Rita to hear about it. And the kids had probably been warned not to say anything, if I knew Brian—which I really didn’t, come to think of it. I mean, I thought I knew how he would think and act in certain matters, but beyond that—who was he? What did he want from life, beyond the occasional slash-happy play session? I had no idea, and I did not find one in spite of pondering it all the way through breakfast and the drive to work.

Happily for my self-esteem, I did not get a great deal more time to worry about my inability to figure out my brother, because when I arrived at work the second floor where Forensics was located was buzzing with the kind of whacked-out frenzy that only a really interesting crime can cause. Camilla Figg, a square forensics tech in her mid-thirties, went dashing past me clutching her kit and she barely even blushed as she brushed against my arm. And when I walked into the lab, Vince Masuoka was already jumping about stuffing things into his bag.

“Have you got a pith helmet?” he called to me.

“Thertainly not,” I said. “Thilly quethtion.”

“You may want one,” he said. “We’re going on safari.”

“Oh, Kendall again?” I said.

“Everglades,” he said. “Something really wild went down last night.”

“Ungowa,” I said. “I’ll pack the bug spray.”

And so only an hour later I climbed out of Vince’s car and stood beside Route 41 in the Everglades, just a couple of miles from Fortymile Bend. Harry had brought me camping in the area when I was a teenager, and I actually had some happy memories here involving several small animals that had contributed to my education.

Aside from the official vehicles parked by the road, there were two big vans pulled onto the small dirt parking area. A little trailer was hooked onto one of them. A flock of about fifteen teenage boys and three men in Boy Scout uniforms huddled uncertainly around the vans, and I saw two detectives talking to them, one at a time. There was a uniformed cop standing beside the road, waving the traffic to keep moving, and Vince tapped him on the shoulder.

“Hey, Rosen,” Vince said. “What’s up with the Scouts?”

“They’re the ones that found it. Got here this morning for a camping trip,” Rosen said, adding, “Keep moving,” to a car that had slowed down to look.

“Found what?” Vince asked him.

“I just wave at the fucking cars,” Rosen said sourly. “You’re the ones that get to play with the bodies. Keep moving, come on,” he said to another gawker.

“Where do we go?” Vince said.

Rosen pointed to the far side of the parking area, and turned away. I guess if I had to stand in the traffic while someone else got to play with the bodies, I would have been surly, too.

We walked toward the trailhead, past the Scouts. They must have found something awful out there, but they didn’t look terribly shocked or frightened. In fact, they were chuckling and shoving one another as if this were a special kind of holiday, and it made me sorry I had never joined the Boy Scouts. Perhaps I could have earned a merit badge for body-part recycling.

We went down the trail that led south into the trees, and then curved around to the west for about half a mile until it came out into a clearing. By the time we got there, Vince was sweating and breathing heavily, but I was almost eager, since a soft voice had been whispering to me that something worth seeing was waiting for me.

But at first glance, there seemed to be very little to see except a large trampled-down area surrounding a fire pit and, to the left of the fire, a small heap of something or other that I could not quite see past Camilla Figg’s hunched-over form. Whatever it was, it caused a leathery whir of interest from the Dark Passenger, and I moved forward with just a trace of eagerness—forgetting for the moment that I had forsworn such Dark Pleasures.

“Hi, Camilla,” I said to her as I approached, “what have we got?” She instantly blushed furiously, which was, for some reason, her usual habit when I talked to her.

“Bones,” she said softly.

“No chance they’re from a pig or a goat?” I asked.

She shook her head violently and, in one gloved hand, held up what I thought I recognized as a human humerus, which was not all that funny. “No chance,” she said.

“Well, then,” I said, noticing the charred marks on the bones and listening to the happy sibilant chuckle from within. I could not tell if they had been burned after death, as a way to get rid of the evidence, or—

I looked around the clearing. The ground had been stamped flat; there were hundreds of footprints, indicating a large party, and I didn’t think it could have been the Scouts. They had arrived only this morning, and hadn’t had time to do something like this. The clearing looked like a lot of people had been very active for several hours. Not just standing here, but moving around, jumping up and down, getting rowdy. And all centered around the fire pit, where the bones were, as if—

I closed my eyes, and I could almost see it as I listened to the rising tide of reptilian sound from my soft and deadly inner voice. Look, it said, and in the small window it showed me I saw a large, festive group. A solitary victim tied up by the fire. Not torture, but execution, done by one person—while all the others watched and partied? Was that possible?

And the Passenger chuckled and answered. Yes, it said. Oh, absolutely. Dancing, singing, carrying on. Plenty of beer, plenty of food. A good old-fashioned barbecue.

“Hey,” I said to Camilla, opening my eyes. “Is there anything on the bones that looks like teeth marks?”

Camilla flinched and looked around at me with an expression that was very close to fear. “How did you know?” she said.

“Oh, just a lucky hunch,” I said, but she did not look convinced, so I added, “Any guess at the gender?”

She stared at me for a moment longer, and then appeared to hear my question at last. “Um,” she said, turning back to the bones with a jerk. She raised a gloved finger and pointed it at one of the larger bones. “Pelvic girdle indicates a female. Probably young,” she said.

A little something clicked inside the mighty supercomputer that was Dexter’s brain and a card slid into the out-tray. Young female, the card read. “Oh, um, thanks,” I said to Camilla, backing away to look at this small and interesting idea. Camilla just nodded and bent over the bones.

I looked around the clearing. Over where the trail disappeared deeper into the swamp I saw Lieutenant Keane, chatting with a man I recognized from FDLE, the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which is sort of a state-level version of the FBI; they have jurisdiction everywhere in Florida. And standing with them was one of the largest men I have ever seen. He was black, about six and a half feet tall, and at least five hundred pounds, which on him did not look particularly fat somehow—possibly because of the focused ferocity of his stare. But since the FDLE guy was talking to him and not calling for backup, I had to assume he belonged here, too, although I had no idea why. If he was representing either the Sheriff’s Department or Broward County I was sure I would have seen him before, or at least heard rumors about someone that large.

But as interesting as it was to see a real giant, it was not enough to hold my attention, and I looked to the other side of the clearing. Across from the small clot of cops there was a clean area of the clearing, where several detectives were standing around. I went there and set my kit down, thinking hard. I knew of a young female who was missing, and I knew someone looking for a young female who would be very interested in making this connection. But what was the right way to do this? I am not really a political animal, although I understand it well enough—politics is just a way to indulge in my former hobby using metaphorical knives instead of real ones. But it seemed like no fun at all to me. All the careful maneuvering and backstabbing were so obvious and pointless and didn’t really lead to anything all that exciting. Still, I knew it was important in a structured environment like the Miami-Dade Police Department. And Deborah was not very good at it, although she usually managed to bull her way through with a combination of toughness and good results.

But Deborah had been so very unlike herself of late, with her pouting and self-pity, and I didn’t know if she was up to a confrontation that was likely to prove extremely political—a different detective was leading on this, and for her to try to yank it away would be difficult, even when she was at her best. Still, maybe a good challenge was just what she needed to bring her back to herself. So perhaps the best thing to do was simply to call her and tell her—let loose the dogs of war and let the chips fall where they may. It was a wonderfully mangled metaphor, which made it seem even more convincing, so I stepped away from the group of cops and reached for my cell phone.

Deborah let it ring several times; again, this was very unlike her. Just when I was ready to give up, she answered. “What,” she said.

“I’m in the Everglades at a crime scene,” I said.

“Good for you,” she said.

“Debs, I think the victim was killed, cooked, and eaten in front of a crowd.”

“Wow, awful,” she said, with no real enthusiasm, which I found a little bit irritating.

“Did I mention that this victim appears to be young and female?” I said.

She didn’t say anything at all for a moment. “Debs?” I said.

“I’m on my way,” she said, with a little bit of the old fire in her voice, and I closed my phone with satisfaction. But before I could put it away and get to work, I heard someone behind me scream, “Fuuuuuck!” and then a volley of gunshots broke out. I ducked down and tried to hide behind my blood-spatter kit, rather difficult considering it was about the size of the average lunch box. But I took what cover I could get and peeked over the top toward the gunfire, half expecting to see a horde of Maori warriors charging at us with their spears raised and their tongues out. What I saw instead was almost as unlikely.

The officers who had been standing around a moment earlier were now all crouched in combat firing position and frantically shooting their weapons into a nearby bush. Contrary to the very best of established police procedure, their faces were not set in cold and grim masks, but looked wild and wide-eyed. One of the detectives was already ejecting an empty clip from his pistol and frantically trying to fumble in a spare, and the others just kept firing with berserk abandon.

And the bush they were apparently trying to kill began to thrash about spastically, and I saw the glint of something silver-yellow. It flashed in the sunlight one time, and then was gone, but the officers kept firing for several more seconds, until finally Lieutenant Keane ran over, yelling at them to hold their fire. “What the fuck is wrong with you idiots?!” Keane yelled at them.

“Lieutenant, I swear to God,” one of them said.

“A snake!” said the second guy. “Fucking huge snake!”

“A snake,” Keane said. “You want me to step on it for you?”

“You got really big feet?” the third guy said. “ ’Cause it was a Burmese python, about eighteen feet long.”

“Aw, shit,” Keane said. “Are those protected?”

I realized I was still crouched down, and I stood up as the FDLE man sauntered over. “Actually, they’re thinking about a bounty on those bad boys,” the FDLE guy said, “if any of you Wyatt Earps was lucky enough to hit it.”

“I hit it,” the third guy said sullenly.

“Bullshit,” said one of the others. “You couldn’t hit shit with a shoe.”

The giant black man wandered over to the bush and looked, then turned to the group of nonmarksmen, shaking his head, and, realizing that the excitement was over, I picked up my kit and went back to the fire pit.

There was a surprising amount of blood spatter for me, and in just a few moments I was happily at work, making sense of the nasty stuff. It was not yet completely dry, probably because of the humidity, but a great deal of it had soaked into the ground, since it had not rained for quite some time, and in spite of the moisture in the air, things on the ground were relatively parched at the moment. I got a couple of good samples to take back with me for analysis, and I also began to get a picture of what had probably happened.

The majority of the blood was in one area, right by the fire pit. I cast about in ever-widening circles, but the only traces of it I found more than six feet away appeared to have been tracked there on someone’s shoes. I marked these spots in the forlorn hope that somebody might be able to get an identifiable footprint from them and went back to the main spatter. The blood had poured out of the victim, not spurted, as it would have from a slash wound. And there were no secondary splashes anywhere nearby, which meant that there had been only one wound, like bleeding out a deer—nobody else in the crowd had jumped in and stabbed or slashed. This had been a slow, deliberate killing, a literal butchering, performed by one person, very controlled and businesslike, and I found myself reluctantly admiring the professionalism of the work. That kind of restraint was very difficult, as I well knew—and with a crowd watching, too, presumably shouting drunken encouragement, offering rude suggestions. It was impressive, and I took my time, giving it the kind of reciprocal professionalism it deserved.

I was on one knee, just finishing an examination of a last probable footprint, when I heard raised voices, threats of unpleasant and intimate dismemberment, and assorted profane expressions of anatomical impossibility. It could only mean one thing. I stood up and looked over toward the trailhead, and sure enough, I was right.

Deborah had arrived.