SLEPT LATE THE NEXT DAY. AFTER ALL, HADN’T I earned it? And although I arrived at work around ten o’clock, I was still there well before Vince, Camilla, or Angel-no-relation, who had apparently all called in deathly ill. One hour and forty-five minutes later Vince finally came in, looking green and very old. “Vince!” I said with great good cheer and he flinched and leaned against the wall with his eyes closed. “I want to thank you for an epic party.”

“Thank me quietly,” he croaked.

“Thank you,” I whispered.

“You’re welcome,” he whispered back, and staggered softly away to his cubicle.

It was an unusually quiet day, by which I mean that, besides the lack of new cases, the forensics area was silent as a tomb, with the occasional pale-green ghost floating by suffering silently. Luckily there was also very little work to do. By five o’clock I had caught up on my paperwork and arranged all my pencils. Rita had called at lunchtime to ask me to come for dinner. I think she might have wanted to make sure I had not been kidnapped by a stripper, so I agreed to come after work. I did not hear from Debs, but I didn’t really need to. I was quite sure she was with Chutsky in his penthouse. But I was a little bit concerned, since Dr. Danco knew where to find them and might come looking for his missing project. On the other hand, he had Sergeant Doakes to play with, which should keep him busy and happy for several days.

Still, just to be safe, I called Deborah’s cell phone number. She answered on the fourth ring. “What,” she said.

“You do remember that Dr. Danco had no trouble getting in there the first time,” I said.

“I wasn’t here the first time,” she said. And she sounded so very fierce that I had to hope she wouldn’t shoot someone from room service.

“All right,” I said. “Just keep your eyes open.”

“Don’t worry,” she said. I heard Chutsky muttering something cranky in the background, and Deborah said, “I have to go. I’ll call you later.” She hung up.

Evening rush hour was in full swing as I headed south to Rita’s house, and I found myself humming cheerfully as a red-faced man in a pickup truck cut me off and gave me the finger. It was not just the ordinary feeling of belonging I got from being surrounded by the homicidal Miami traffic, either; I felt like a great burden had been removed from my shoulders. And, of course, it had been. I could go to Rita’s and there would be no maroon Taurus parked across the street. I could go back to my apartment, free of my clinging shadow. And even more important, I could take the Dark Passenger out for a spin and we would be alone together for some badly needed quality time. Sergeant Doakes was gone, out of my life—and soon, presumably, out of his own life, too.

I felt absolutely giddy as I wheeled down South Dixie and made the turn to Rita’s house. I was free—and free of obligation, too, since one really had to believe that Chutsky and Deborah would stay put to recuperate for a while. As for Dr. Danco—it is true that I had felt a certain twinge of interest in meeting him, and even now I would gladly take a few moments out of my busy social schedule for some real quality bonding time with him. But I was quite sure that Chutsky’s mysterious Washington agency would send someone else to deal with him, and they would certainly not want me hovering around and offering advice. With that ruled out, and with Doakes out of the picture, I was back to plan A and free to assist Reiker into early retirement. Whoever would now have to deal with the problem of Dr. Danco, it would not be Delightfully Discharged Dexter.

I was so happy that I kissed Rita when she answered the door, even though no one was watching. And after dinner, while Rita cleaned up, I went out into the backyard once again, playing kick the can with the neighborhood children. This time, though, there was a special edge to it with Cody and Astor, our own small secret adding a touch more zest. It was almost fun to watch them stalking the other children, my own little predators in training.

After half an hour of stalking and pouncing, however, it became apparent that we were severely outnumbered by even stealthier predators—mosquitoes, several billion of the disgusting little vampires, all ravenously hungry. And so, weak from loss of blood, Cody, Astor, and I staggered back into the house and reconvened around the dining table for a session of hangman.

“I’ll go first,” Astor announced. “It’s my turn anyway.”

“Mine,” said Cody, frowning.

“Nuh-uh. Anyway, I got one,” she told him. “Five letters.”

“C,” said Cody.

“No! Head! Ha!” she howled in triumph, and drew the little round head.

“You should ask the vowels first,” I said to Cody.

“What,” he said softly.

“A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y,” Astor told him. “Everybody knows that.”

“Is there an E?” I asked her, and some of the wind went out of her sails.

“Yes,” Astor said, sulkily, and she wrote the E on the middle blank line.

“Ha,” said Cody.

We played for almost an hour before their bedtime. All too soon my magical evening drew to a close and I was once again on the couch with Rita. But this time, free as I was from spying eyes, it was an easy matter for me to disengage myself from her tentacles and head for home, and my own little bed, with well-meaning excuses of having partied too hard at Vince’s and a big day of work tomorrow. And then I was off, all alone in the night, just my echo, my shadow, and me. It was two nights until the full moon, and I would make this one well worth my wait. This full moon I would spend not with Miller Lite but with Reiker Photography, Inc. In two nights I would turn loose the Passenger at last, slide into my true self, and fling the sweat-stained costume of Dearly Devoted Dexter into the garbage heap.

Of course I needed to find proof first, but somehow I was quite confident that I would. After all, I had a whole day for that, and when the Dark Passenger and I work together everything seems to fall right into place.

And filled with such cheerful thoughts of dark delights I motored back to my comfy apartment, and climbed into bed to sleep the deep and dreamless sleep of the just.

The next morning my offensively cheerful mood continued. When I stopped for doughnuts on the way to work I gave in to impulse and bought a full dozen, including several of the cream-filled ones with chocolate icing, a truly extravagant gesture that was not lost on Vince, who had finally recovered. “Oh, my,” he said with raised eyebrows. “You have done well, O mighty hunter.”

“The gods of the forest have smiled upon us,” I said. “Cream-filled or raspberry jelly?”

“Cream-filled, of course,” he said.

The day passed quickly, with only one trip out to a homicide scene, a routine dismemberment with garden equipment. It was strictly amateur work; the idiot had tried to use an electric hedge clipper and succeeded only in making a great deal of extra work for me, before finishing off his wife with the pruning shears. A truly nasty mess, and it served him right that they caught him at the airport. A well-done dismemberment is neat, above all, or so I always say. None of this puddled blood and caked flesh on the walls. It shows a real lack of class.

I finished up at the scene just in time to get back to my little cubbyhole off the forensics lab and leave my notes on my desk. I would type them up and finish the report on Monday, no hurry. Neither the killer nor the victim was going anywhere.

And so there I was, out the door to the parking lot and into my car, free to roam the land as I pleased. No one to follow me or feed me beer or force me to do things I would rather avoid. No one to shine the unwanted light into Dexter’s shadows. I could be me again, Dexter Unchained, and the thought was far more intoxicating than all Rita’s beer and sympathy. It had been too long since I felt this way, and I promised myself I would never again take it for granted.

A car was on fire at the corner of Douglas and Grand, and a small but enthusiastic crowd had gathered to watch. I shared their good cheer as I eased through the traffic jam caused by the emergency vehicles and headed for home.

At home I sent out for a pizza and made some careful notes on Reiker; where to look for proof, what sort of thing would be enough—a pair of red cowboy boots would certainly be a good start. I was very nearly certain that he was the one; pedophile predators tend to find ways to combine business and pleasure, and child photography was a perfect example. But “very nearly” was not certain enough. And so I organized my thoughts into a neat little file—nothing incriminating, of course, and it would all be carefully destroyed before showtime. By Monday morning there would be no hint at all of what I had done except a new glass slide in the box on my shelf. I spent a happy hour planning and eating a large pizza with anchovies and then, as the nearly full moon began to mutter through the window, I got restless. I could feel the icy fingers of moonlight stroking me, tickling at my spine, urging me into the night to stretch the predator’s muscles that had been dormant for too long.

And why not? It would do no harm to slide out into the chuckling evening and steal a look or two. To stalk, to watch unseen, to cat-foot down Reiker’s game trails and sniff the wind—it would be prudent as well as fun. Dark Scout Dexter must Be Prepared. Besides, it was Friday night. Reiker might very well leave the house for some social activity—a visit to the toy store, for instance. If he was out, I could slip into his house and look around.

And so I dressed in my best dark nightstalker clothes and took the short drive from my apartment, up Main Highway and through the Grove to Tigertail Avenue and down to the modest house where Reiker lived. It was in a neighborhood of small concrete-block houses and his seemed no different from all the others, set back from the road just far enough for a short driveway. His car was parked there, a little red Kia, which gave me a surge of hope. Red, like the boots; it was his color, a sign that I was on track.

I drove by the house twice. On my second pass the dome light in his car was on and I was just in time to catch a glimpse of his face as he climbed into the car. It was not a very impressive face: thin, nearly chinless, and partly hidden by long bangs and large-frame glasses. I could not see what he was wearing on his feet, but from what I could see of the rest of him he might well wear cowboy boots to make himself seem a little taller. He got into the car and closed the door, and I went on by and around the block.

When I came by again, his car was gone. I parked a few blocks away on a small side street and went back, slowly slipping into my night skin as I walked. The lights were all out at a neighbor’s house and I cut through the yard. There was a small guesthouse behind Reiker’s place, and the Dark Passenger whispered in my inner ear, studio. It was indeed a perfect place for a photographer to set up, and a studio was exactly the right kind of place to find incriminating photographs. Since the Passenger is seldom wrong about these things, I picked the lock and went in.

The windows were all boarded over on the inside, but in the dimness from the open door I could see the outline of darkroom equipment. The Passenger had been right. I closed the door and flipped up the light switch. A murky red light flooded the room, just enough to see by. There were the usual trays and bottles of chemicals over by a small sink, and to the left of that a very nice computer workstation with digital equipment. A four-drawer filing cabinet stood against the far wall and I decided to start there.

After ten minutes of flipping through pictures and negatives, I had found nothing more incriminating than a few dozen photos of naked babies posed on a white fur rug, pictures that would generally be regarded as “cute” even by people who think Pat Robertson is too liberal. There were no hidden compartments in the filing cabinet as far as I could tell, and no other obvious place to hide pictures.

Time was short; I could not take the chance that Reiker had simply gone to the store to buy a quart of milk. He might come back at any minute and decide to poke through his files and gaze fondly at the dozens of dear little pixies he had captured on film. I moved to the computer area.

Next to the monitor there was a tall CD rack and I went through the disks one at a time. After a handful of program disks and others hand-lettered GREENFIELD or LOPEZ, I found it.

“It” was a bright pink jewel case. Across the front of the case in very neat letters it said, NAMBLA 9/04.

It may well be that NAMBLA is a rare Hispanic name. But it also stands for North American Man/Boy Love Association, a warm and fuzzy support group that helps pedophiles maintain a positive self-image by assuring them that what they do is perfectly natural. Well, of course it is—so are cannibalism and rape, but really. One mustn’t.

I took the CD with me, turned out the light, and slid back into the night.

Back at my apartment it took only a few minutes to discover that the disk was a sales tool, presumably carried to a NAMBLA gathering of some kind and offered around to a select list of discriminating ogres. The pictures on it were arranged in what are called “thumbnail galleries,” miniature series of shots almost like the picture decks that Victorian dirty old men used to flip through. Each picture had been strategically blurred so you could imagine but not quite see the details.

And oh, yes: several of the shots were professionally cropped and edited versions of the ones I had discovered on MacGregor’s boat. So while I had not actually found the red cowboy boots, I had found quite enough to satisfy the Harry Code. Reiker had made the A-list. With a song in my heart and a smile on my lips, I trundled off to bed, thinking happy thoughts about what Reiker and I would be doing tomorrow night.

The next morning, Saturday, I got up a little late and went for a run through my neighborhood. After a shower and a hearty breakfast I went shopping for a few essentials—a new roll of duct tape, a razor-sharp fillet knife, just the basic necessities. And because the Dark Passenger was flexing and stretching to wakefulness, I stopped at a steak house for a late lunch. I ate a sixteen-ounce New York strip, well done of course, so there was absolutely no blood. Then I drove by Reiker’s one more time to see the place again in daylight. Reiker himself was mowing his lawn. I slowed for a casual look; alas, he was wearing old sneakers, not red boots. He was shirtless and on top of scrawny, he looked flabby and pale. No matter: I would put a little color into him soon enough.

It was a very satisfying and productive day, my Day Before. And I was sitting quietly back in my apartment wrapped in my virtuous thoughts when the telephone rang.

“Good afternoon,” I said into the receiver.

“Can you get over here?” Deborah said. “We have some work to finish up.”

“What sort of work?”

“Don’t be a jerk,” she said. “Come on over,” and she hung up. This was more than a little bit irritating. In the first place, I didn’t know of any kind of unfinished work, and in the second, I was not aware of being a jerk—a monster, yes, certainly, but on the whole a very pleasant and well-mannered monster. And to top it all off, the way she hung up like that, simply assuming I had heard and would tremble and obey. The nerve of her. Sister or not, vicious arm punch or no, I trembled for no one.

I did, however, obey. The short drive to the Mutiny took longer than usual, this being Saturday afternoon, a time when the streets in the Grove flood with aimless people. I wove slowly through the crowd, wishing for once that I could simply pin the gas pedal to the floorboard and smash into the wandering horde. Deborah had spoiled my perfect mood.

She didn’t make it any better when I knocked on the penthouse door at the Mutiny and she opened it with her on-duty-in-a-crisis face, the one that made her look like a bad-tempered fish. “Get in here,” she said.

“Yes master,” I said.

Chutsky was sitting on the sofa. He still didn’t look British Colonial—maybe it was the lack of eyebrows—but he did at least look like he had decided to live, so apparently Deborah’s rebuilding project was going well. There was a metal crutch leaning against the wall beside him, and he was sipping coffee. A platter of Danish sat on the end table next to him. “Hey, buddy,” he called out, waving his stump. “Grab a chair.”

I took a British Colonial chair and sat, after snagging a couple of Danish as well. Chutsky looked at me like he was going to object, but really, it was the very least they could do for me. After all, I had waded through flesh-eating alligators and an attack peacock to rescue him, and now here I was giving up my Saturday for who-knows-what kind of awful chore. I deserved an entire cake.

“All right,” Chutsky said. “We have to figure where Henker is hiding, and we have to do it fast.”

“Who?” I asked. “You mean Dr. Danco?”

“That’s his name, yeah. Henker,” he said. “Martin Henker.”

“And we have to find him?” I asked, filled with a sense of ominous foreboding. I mean, why were they looking at me and saying “we”?

Chutsky gave a small snort as if he thought I was joking and he got it. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “So where are you thinking he might be, buddy?”

“Actually, I’m not thinking about it at all,” I said.

“Dexter,” Deborah said with a warning tone in her voice.

Chutsky frowned. It was a very strange expression without eyebrows. “What do you mean?” he said.

“I mean, I don’t see why it’s my problem anymore. I don’t see why I or even we have to find him. He got what he wanted—won’t he just finish up and go home?”

“Is he kidding?” Chutsky asked Deborah, and if he’d only had eyebrows they would have been raised.

“He doesn’t like Doakes,” Deborah said.

“Yeah, but listen, Doakes is one of our guys,” Chutsky said to me.

“Not one of mine,” I said.

Chutsky shook his head. “All right, that’s your problem,” he said. “But we still have to find this guy. There’s a political side to this whole thing, and it’s deep doo-doo if we don’t collar him.”

“Okay,” I said. “But why is it my problem?” And it seemed like a very reasonable question to me, although to see his reaction you would have thought I wanted to fire bomb an elementary school.

“Jesus Christ,” he said, and he shook his head in mock admiration. “You really are a piece of work, buddy.”

“Dexter,” Deborah said. “Look at us.” I did look, at Deb in her cast and Chutsky with his twin stumps. To be honest, they did not look terribly fierce. “We need your help,” she said.

“But Debs, really.”

“Please, Dexter,” she said, knowing full well that I found it very hard to refuse her when she used that word.

“Debs, come on,” I said. “You need an action hero, somebody who can kick down the door and storm in with guns blazing. I’m just a mild-mannered forensics geek.”

She crossed the room and stood in front of me, inches away. “I know what you are, Dexter,” she said softly. “Remember? And I know you can do this.” She put her hand on my shoulder and lowered her voice even farther, almost whispering. “Kyle needs this, Dex. Needs to catch Danco. Or he’ll never feel like a man again. That’s important to me. Please, Dexter?”

And after all, what can you do when the big guns come out? Except summon your reserves of goodwill and wave the white flag gracefully.

“All right, Debs,” I said.

Freedom is such a fragile, fleeting thing, isn’t it?