R. MARK SPIELMAN WAS A LARGE MAN WHO LOOKED more like a retired linebacker than an ER physician. But he had been the physician on duty when the ambulance delivered The Thing to Jackson Memorial Hospital, and he was not at all happy about it. “If I ever have to see something like that again,” he told us, “I will retire and raise dachshunds.” He shook his head. “You know what the ER at Jackson is like. One of the busiest. All the crazy stuff comes here, from one of the craziest cities in the world. But this—” Spielman knocked twice on the table in the mild green staff lounge where we sat with him. “Something else,” he said.

“What’s the prognosis?” Deborah asked him, and he looked at her sharply.

“Is that a joke?” he said. “There’s no prognosis, and there’s not going to be one. Physically, there’s not enough left to do anything but sustain life, if you want to call it that. Mentally?” He put both hands palm up and then dropped them on the table. “I’m not a shrink, but there’s nothing left in there and no way that he’ll ever have a single lucid moment, ever again. The only hope he has is that we keep him so doped up he doesn’t know who he is, until he dies. Which for his sake we should all hope is soon.” He looked at his watch, a very nice Rolex. “Is this going to take long? I am on duty, you know.”

“Were there traces of any drugs in the blood?” Deborah asked.

Spielman snorted. “Traces, hell. The guy’s blood is a cocktail sauce. I’ve never seen such a mix before. All designed to keep him awake, but deaden the physical pain so the shock of the multiple amputations didn’t kill him.”

“Was there anything unusual about the cuts?” I asked him.

“The guy’s had training,” Spielman said. “They were all done with very good surgical technique. But any medical school in the world could have taught him that.” He blew out a breath and an apologetic smile flickered quickly across his face. “Some of them were already healed.”

“What kind of time frame does that give us?” Deborah asked him.

Spielman shrugged. “Four to six weeks, start to finish,” he said. “He took at least a month to surgically dismember this guy, one small piece at a time. I can’t imagine anything more horrible.”

“He did it in front of a mirror,” I said, ever-helpful. “So the victim had to watch.”

Spielman looked appalled. “My God,” he said. He just sat there for a minute, and then said, “Oh, my God.” Then he shook his head and looked at his Rolex again. “Listen, I’d like to help out here, but this is...” He spread his hands and then dropped them on the table again. “I don’t think there’s really anything I can tell you that’s going to do any good. So let me save you some time here. That Mister, uh—Chesney?”

“Chutsky,” Deborah said.

“Yes, that was it. He called in and suggested I might get an ID with a retinal scan at, um, a certain database in Virginia.” He raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Anyway. I got a fax yesterday, with a positive identification of the victim. I’ll get it for you.” He stood up and disappeared into the hall. A moment later he returned with a sheet of paper. “Here it is. Name is Manuel Borges. A native of El Salvador, in the import business.” He put the paper down in front of Deborah. “I know it’s not much, but believe me, that’s it. The shape he’s in...” He shrugged. “I didn’t think we’d get this much.”

A small intercom speaker in the ceiling muttered something that might have come from a TV show. Spielman cocked his head, frowned, and said, “Gotta go. Hope you catch him.” And he was out the door and down the hall so quickly that the fax paper he had dropped on the table fluttered.

I looked at Deborah. She did not seem particularly encouraged that we had found the victim’s name. “Well,” I said. “I know it isn’t much.”

She shook her head. “Not much would be a big improvement. This is nothing.” She looked at the fax, read it through one time. “El Salvador. Connected to something called FLANGE.”

“That was our side,” I said. She looked up at me. “The side the United States supported. I looked it up on the Internet.”

“Swell. So we just found out something we already knew.” She got up and headed for the door, not quite as quickly as Dr. Spielman but fast enough that I had to hurry and I didn’t catch up until she was at the door to the parking lot.

Deborah drove rapidly and silently, with her jaw clenched, all the way to the little house on N.W. 4th Street where it had all started. The yellow tape was gone, of course, but Deborah parked haphazardly anyway, cop fashion, and got out of the car. I followed her up the short walkway to the house next door to the one where we had found the human doorstop. Deborah rang the bell, still without speaking, and a moment later it swung open. A middle-aged man wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a tan guayabera shirt looked out at us inquiringly.

“We need to speak to Ariel Medina,” Deborah said, holding up her badge.

“My mother is resting now,” he said.

“It’s urgent,” Deborah said.

The man looked at her, then at me. “Just a moment,” he said. He closed the door. Deborah stared straight ahead at the door, and I watched her jaw muscles working for a couple of minutes before the man opened the door again and held it wide. “Come in,” he said.

We followed him into a small dark room crowded with dozens of end tables, each one festooned with religious articles and framed photographs. Ariel, the old lady who had discovered the thing next door and cried on Deb’s shoulder, sat on a large overstuffed sofa with doilies on the arms and across the back. When she saw Deborah she said, “Aaahhh,” and stood up to give her a hug. Deborah, who really should have been expecting an abrazo from an elderly Cuban lady, stood stiffly for a moment before awkwardly returning the embrace with a few pats on the woman’s back. Deborah backed off as soon as she decently could. Ariel sat back down on the couch and patted the cushion beside her. Deborah sat.

The old lady immediately launched into a very rapid stream of Spanish. I speak some Spanish, and often I can even understand Cuban, but I was getting only one word in ten of Ariel’s harangue. Deborah looked at me helplessly; for whatever quixotic reasons, she had chosen to study French in school, and as far as she was concerned the woman might as well have been speaking ancient Etruscan.

“Por favor, Señora,” I said. “Mi hermana no habla español.”

“Ah?” Ariel looked at Deborah with a little less enthusiasm and shook her head. “Lázaro!” Her son stepped forward, and as she resumed her monologue with barely a pause, he began to translate for her. “I came here from Santiago de Cuba in 1962,” Lázaro said for his mother. “Under Batista I saw some terrible things. People disappeared. Then Castro came and for a while I had hope.” She shook her head and spread her hands. “Believe it or not, but this is what we thought at the time. Things would be different. But soon it was the same thing again. Worse. So I came here. To the United States. Because here, people don’t disappear. People are not shot in the street or tortured. That’s what I thought. And now this.” She waved an arm toward the house next door.

“I need to ask you a few questions,” Deborah said, and Lázaro translated.

Ariel simply nodded and went right on with her riveting tale. “Even with Castro, they would never do a thing like that,” she said. “Yes, they kill people. Or they put you in the Isle of Pines. But never a thing like this. Not in Cuba. Only in America,” she said.

“Did you ever see the man next door?” Deborah interrupted. “The man who did this?” Ariel studied Deborah for a moment. “I need to know,” Deb said. “There’s going to be another one if we can’t find him.”

“Why is it you who asks me?” Ariel said through her son. “This is no job for you. A pretty woman like you, you should have a husband. A family.”

“El victimo proximo es el novio de mi hermana,” I said. The next victim is my sister’s sweetheart. Deborah glared at me, but Ariel said, “Aaahhh,” clucked her tongue, and nodded her head. “Well, I don’t know what I can tell you. I did see the man, maybe two times.” She shrugged and Deborah leaned forward impatiently. “Always at night, never very close. I can say, the man was small, very short. And skinny as well. With big glasses. More than this, I don’t know. He never came out, he was very quiet. Sometimes we would hear music.” She smiled just a little and added, “Tito Puente.” And Lázaro echoed unnecessarily, “Tito Puente.”

“Ah,” I said, and they all looked at me. “It would hide the noise,” I said, a little embarrassed at all the attention.

“Did he have a car?” Deborah asked, and Ariel frowned.

“A van,” she said. “He drove an old white van with no windows. It was very clean, but had many rust spots and dents. I saw it a few times, but he usually kept it in his garage.”

“I don’t suppose you saw the license plate?” I asked her, and she looked at me.

“But I did,” she said through her son, and held up one hand, palm outward. “Not to get the number, that only happens in the old movies. But I know it was a Florida license plate. The yellow one with the cartoon of a child,” she said, and she stopped talking and glared at me, because I was giggling. It’s not at all dignified, and certainly not something I practice on a regular basis, but I was actually giggling and I could not help myself.

Deborah glared at me, too. “What is so goddamned funny?” she demanded.

“The license plate,” I said. “I’m sorry, Debs, but my God, don’t you know what the yellow Florida plate is? And for this guy to have one and do what he does...” I swallowed hard to keep from laughing again, but it took all my self-control.

“All right, damn it, what’s so funny about the yellow license plate?”

“It’s a specialty plate, Deb,” I said. “The one that says, CHOOSE LIFE.”

And then, picturing Dr. Danco carting around his wriggling victims, filling them with chemicals and cutting so very perfectly to keep them alive through it all, I’m afraid I giggled again. “Choose life,” I said.

I really wanted to meet this guy.

We walked back to the car in silence. Deborah got in and called in the description of the van to Captain Matthews, and he agreed that he could probably put out an APB. While she talked to the captain, I looked around. Neatly manicured yards, mostly consisting of colored rocks. A few children’s bicycles chained to the front porch, and the Orange Bowl looming in the background. A nice little neighborhood to live in, work in, raise a family in—or chop off somebody’s arms and legs.

“Get in,” said Deborah, interrupting my rustic reverie. I got in and we drove off. At one point, stopped at a red light, Deb glanced at me and said, “You pick a funny time to start laughing.”

“Really, Deb,” I said. “This is the first hint of personality we’ve got from the guy. We know he has a sense of humor. I think that’s a big step forward.”

“Sure. Maybe we’ll catch him at a comedy club.”

“We will catch him, Deb,” I said, although neither one of us believed me. She just grunted; the light changed and she stomped on the gas as if she was killing a poisonous snake.

We moved through the traffic back to Deb’s house. The morning rush hour was coming to an end. At the corner of Flagler and 34th a car had run up onto the sidewalk and smacked into a light pole in front of a church. A cop stood beside the car between two men who were screaming at each other. A little girl sat on the curb crying. Ah, the enchanting rhythms of another magical day in paradise.

A few moments later we turned down Medina and Deborah parked her car beside mine in the driveway. She switched off the engine and for a moment we both just sat there listening to the ticking of the cooling motor. “Shit,” she said.

“I agree.”

“What do we do now?” she said.

“Sleep,” I said. “I’m too tired to think.”

She pounded both hands on the steering wheel. “How can I sleep, Dexter? Knowing that Kyle is...” She hit the wheel again. “Shit,” she said.

“The van will turn up, Deb. You know that. The database will spit out every white van with a CHOOSE LIFE tag, and with an APB out it’s just a matter of time.”

“Kyle doesn’t have time,” she said.

“Human beings need sleep, Debs,” I said. “And so do I.”

A courier’s van squealed around the corner and clunked to a halt in front of Deborah’s house. The driver jumped out with a small package and approached Deb’s front door. She said, “Shit,” one last time and got out of the car to collect the package.

I closed my eyes and sat for just a moment longer, pondering, which is what I do instead of thinking when I am very tired. It really seemed like wasted effort; nothing came to me except to wonder where I’d left my running shoes. With my new sense of humor apparently still idling, that seemed funny to me and, to my great surprise I heard a very faint echo from the Dark Passenger. Why is that funny? I asked. Is it because I left the shoes at Rita’s? Of course it didn’t answer. The poor thing was probably still sulking. And yet it had chuckled. Is it something else altogether that seems funny? I asked. But again there was no answer; just a faint sense of anticipation and hunger.

The courier rattled and roared away. Just as I was about to yawn, stretch, and admit that my finely tuned cerebral powers were on hiatus, I heard a kind of retching moan. I opened my eyes and looked up to see Deborah stagger forward a step and then sit down hard on her front walk. I got out of the car and hurried over to her.

“Deb?” I said. “What is it?”

She dropped the package and hid her face in her hands, making more unlikely noises. I squatted beside her and picked up the package. It was a small box, about the right size to hold a wristwatch. I pried the end up. Inside was a ziplock bag. And inside the bag was a human finger.

A finger with a big, flashy pinkie ring.