HE NEXT MORNING I WOKE UP FEELING BETTER THAN I had in days. My decision to take a proactive path had released all the unwanted anger I’d been wallowing in, and I jumped out of bed with a smile on my lips and a song in my heart. Of course, it was not the kind of song I could share with Lily Anne, since the lyrics were a little too sharp for her, but it made me happy. And why not? I was no longer simply waiting for something bad to happen; I was going to leap into action and make it happen—even better, happen to someone else. That was much more to the point; I was meant to be a stalker, not a stalkee, and accepting that this was my lot in life was bound to make me more content. I hurried through breakfast and managed to get to work a little early in order to get right at my new research project.

The lab area was empty when I got there, and I sat down at my computer and called up the DMV database. I had spent my morning drive thinking about how to construct a search for the phantom Honda, so there was no need to ponder and dither. I called up a list of all Honda sedans more than eight years old and sorted them by the owner’s age and location. I was quite certain that my Shadow had been under the age of fifty, so I quickly discarded anyone older. Next, I sorted for vehicle color. I could only say with certainty that the car was a darkish color; one very quick look at it racing away was not enough to be more specific. In any case, age, sunlight and the salty Miami air had done their work on the car and it would probably be impossible to say what color it was even if I looked at it under a microscope.

But I knew it was not light colored, so I pulled up all the dark-painted cars from the first search and tossed out the rest. Then I did one final sort for location, throwing away anything on the list registered to an address more than five miles away from the house where I had been seen. I would start with the assumption that my Witness lived somewhere nearby, in the South Miami area; otherwise, why would he be there, instead of Coral Gables or South Beach? It was a guess, but I thought it was a good one, and it immediately cut two-thirds of the entries from my list. All I needed was one quick glance at each car, and when I saw one with the dangling taillight and distinctive rusty birthmark on its trunk, I would have my Witness.

By the time my coworkers began to wander into the lab, I had compiled a list of forty-three old, dark-colored Hondas registered to under-fifty owners in my target area. It was a little daunting; I clearly had my work cut out for me. But at least it was my work, on my terms, and I was confident that I could get this done quickly and efficiently. I put the list into an encrypted file labeled “Honda,” which sounded innocent enough, and e-mailed it to myself. I could call it up on my laptop when I got home and go right to work.

And as if to prove that I was finally moving in the right direction, a mere two seconds after I sent myself the list and brought my computer back to its official home screen, Vince Masuoka came in carrying a white cardboard box that could only be pastry of some kind.

“Ah, Young One,” he said, holding up the box. “I have brought you a riddle: What is the essence of the moment but as fleeting as the wind?”

“All that lives, Master,” I said. “Plus, whatever is in the box.”

He beamed at me and opened the lid. “Snatch the cannoli, Grasshopper,” he said, and I did.

Over the next few days I slowly, carefully, began to check the names on the list after work. I started with the ones closest to my house; these I could check on foot. I told Rita I needed exercise, and I jogged through the area in ever-widening circles, just another Normal Guy out for a run without a care in the world. And in truth, I began to feel as if I might really be back on the path to a worry-free life. The simple decision to take action had halted my fretting, stilled my churning bosom, and smoothed my furrowed brow, and the thrill of the hunt put the spring back in my step and brought a very good fake smile to my face. I fell back into the rhythms of Normal Life.

Of course, normal life for a forensics geek in Miami is not always what most people think of as normal. There are workdays when the hours are very long and filled with dead bodies, some of them killed in startling ways. I have never lost my sense of wonder at the endless ingenuity of human beings when it comes to inflicting fatal wounds on their fellow creatures. And as I stood in the rain one night almost two weeks after Valentine’s Night, on the shoulder of I-95 at rush hour, I marveled again at this infinite creativity, because I had never before seen anything like what had been done to Detective Marty Klein. And in my small and innocent way, I was very glad that there was something new and noteworthy about Klein’s exit, because Dexter was Drenched.

It was the dark of the moon, and I stood in the rain, in a cluster of people blinking at the lights of rush-hour traffic and the huddled police cars. I was soaked and hungry, with frigid water dripping from my nose, my ears, my hands, rolling down the neck of my useless nylon windbreaker, into the back of my pants, soaking into my socks. Dexter was very, very wet. But Dexter was at work, too, and so he must simply stand and wait and endure the endless babble of the police officers—officers who can comfortably take all the time they want to repeat the same pointless details, because they have been thoughtfully provided with bright yellow rain suits. And Dexter is not actually a police officer. Dexter is a forensics geek, and forensics geeks don’t get bright yellow rain suits. They must make do with whatever they might have flung in the trunk of their car—in this case a flimsy nylon jacket that couldn’t protect me from a sneeze, let alone a tropical downpour.

And so I stand in the rain and soak up cold water like a semihuman sponge while Officer Grumpy tells Officer Dopey one more time how he saw the Crown Vic pulled off onto the shoulder and went through all the standard procedures, which he repeats out loud again as if reading them from the manual.

And worse than the tedium, worse than the chill spreading through his bones and deep into his very center, Dexter must stand in all this dripping rain-soaked misery and maintain an expression of shocked concern on his face. This is never an easy expression to get right, and I can’t really summon the urgency tonight, wallowing as I am in my blank misery. Every two minutes I find the necessary expression slipping away, replaced by a more natural look of soaking-wet annoyed impatience. But I fight it off, rearrange my features to the appropriate mask, and soldier on in the dark, wet, and endless evening. Because in spite of my cloudy disposition, I need to get it right. We are not looking at some nasty little drug dealer who got what he deserved. This is no headless wife caught in unfaithful performance by a temperamental husband. The body in the Crown Vic is one of us, a member of the fraternal order of Miami cops. At least, it seems to be, from what we can tell by glancing casually through the car’s windows at the shapeless blob inside.

And it is shapeless, not because we cannot see it clearly through the windows—unfortunately, we can—and not because it has slumped down into a relaxed sprawl and curled up with a good book—it hasn’t. It is shapeless because it has, apparently, been hammered out of its formerly human shape, slowly, carefully, and thoroughly bludgeoned into a blob of shattered bones and bruised flesh that no longer resembles even a little bit anything that might be called a person, let alone a sworn officer of the law.

Of course, it is terrible to do such a thing, even worse to do it to a cop, a peacekeeper, a man with a badge and a gun whose only purpose in life is to stop such things from happening to everyone else. Squishing a cop like that, so slowly and deliberately, is an extra-awful affront to our well-ordered society, and it is a dreadful insult to every other brick in the thin blue wall. And we all feel outrage—or at the very least, we present a reasonable facsimile. Because this kind of death has never been seen before, and even I can’t imagine who, or what, could have done it this way.

Someone, or something, has spent a tremendous amount of time and energy smashing Detective Marty Klein into a glob of jelly—and worse still, outrageous beyond measure, they’ve done it at the end of a long day’s work, when dinner is waiting. No punishment is too severe for the kind of animal who would do this, and I truly hoped that terrible justice would be served—right after dinner and dessert, over a cup of dark coffee. Possibly with a small biscotti or two.

But it’s no good; the stomach growls, and Dexter is drooling, thinking of the sublime pleasures of Rita’s cooking that wait for him at home, and therefore not keeping his facial muscles locked into the required expression. Someone is bound to notice and wonder why Detective Klein’s dreadfully battered corpse would make anyone salivate, and so with a major effort of my iron will, I realign my face again and wait, pointing my somber scowl at the puddle of rain growing around my sopping shoes.

“Jesus,” says Vince Masuoka, suddenly materializing at my side and craning his neck to see past the yellow rain suits and into the car. He wore an army surplus poncho and looked dry and contented and I wanted to kick him even before he spoke. “It’s unbelievable.”

“Very close to it,” I said, marveling at the iron control that keeps me from attacking him for his ninny-hood.

“That’s all we need,” Vince said. “A maniac with a sledgehammer and a hard-on for cops. Jesus.”

I would not have brought Jesus into the discussion, but naturally I’d had the same thoughts as I stood there turning into a small piece of Florida’s aquifer. Even when someone was beaten to death, we had never before seen it done so savagely, so thoroughly, and with such maniacal focus. Among all the annals of Miami crime fighting this was unique, unmatched, brand-new, never seen before—until this evening, when Detective Klein’s car had appeared on the shoulder of I-95 at rush hour. But I saw no point in encouraging Vince to make any more witless and obvious remarks. All clever conversation had washed out of me in the steady flow of the rain pouring into my clothing through my flimsy jacket, so I just glanced at Vince and then returned to concentrating on maintaining my solemn face: furrow the brow, turn down the mouth—

Another car slid to a halt beside the patrol cars already parked there on the shoulder, and Deborah got out. Or to be more formally correct, Sergeant Deborah Morgan, my sister, and now lead investigator on this new and dreadful case. The uniformed cops glanced at Debs; one of them did a double take and nudged the other, and they moved aside as she stalked over to look inside the car. She was shrugging on a yellow rain jacket as she walked, and that did not endear her to me, but she was, after all, my sister, so I just nodded at her as she passed, and she nodded back. And her first word seemed carefully chosen to reveal not merely her command of the scene, but a picture of her true inner self as well. “Fuck,” she said.

Deborah looked away from the mess in the car and turned her head toward me. “You got anything yet?” she said.

I shook my head, which caused a small waterfall to roll down the back of my neck. “We’re waiting for you,” I said. “In the rain.”

“Had to get the sitter,” she said, and shook her head. “You should have worn a poncho or something.”

“Gosh, I wish I’d thought of that,” I said pleasantly, and Debs turned back to look at the leftovers of Marty Klein.

“Who found it?” she said, still staring through the Crown Vic’s window.

One of the officers, a thick African-American man with a Fu Manchu mustache, cleared his throat and stepped forward. “I did,” he said.

Deborah glanced at him. “Cochrane, right?”

He nodded. “That’s right.”

“Tell me,” she said.

“I was on routine patrol,” Cochrane said. “I spotted the vehicle in its present location, apparently abandoned on the shoulder of Interstate 95, and recognizing that it was an official vehicle, I parked my patrol unit behind it and called in the tag. Receiving confirmation that it was indeed a police vehicle signed out to Detective Martin Klein, I exited my patrol vehicle and approached Detective Klein’s vehicle.” Cochrane paused for a moment, possibly confused by the number of times he had said “vehicle.” But he just cleared his throat and plowed on. “Upon arriving at a point where I could make a visual surveillance of the interior of Detective Klein’s vehicle I, uh—”

Cochrane stumbled to a stop, as if he wasn’t sure what the correct word might be in report-ese, but the cop beside him snorted and supplied the missing word. “He hurled,” the other cop said. “Totally lost his lunch.”

Cochrane glared at the other cop, and harsh words might have been spoken if Deborah had not called the men back to their purpose. “That’s it?” she said. “You looked inside, threw up, and called it in?”

“I came, I saw, I blew chunks,” Vince Masuoka muttered beside me, but happily for his health Deborah didn’t hear him.

“That’s it,” Cochrane said.

“You saw nothing else?” Debs said. “No suspicious vehicle, nothing?”

Cochrane blinked, apparently still fighting the urge to punch his buddy. “It’s rush hour,” he said, and he sounded a little testy. “What’s a suspicious vehicle in this mess?”

“If I have to tell you that,” Debs said, “maybe you should transfer to code enforcement.”

Vince said, “Boom,” very softly, and the cop beside Cochrane made a choking sound as he tried not to laugh.

For some reason, Cochrane didn’t find it quite so amusing, and he cleared his throat again. “Lookit,” he said. “There’s ten thousand cars going by, and they’re all slowing down for a look. And it’s raining, so you can’t see anything. You tell me what to look for and I’ll start looking, all right?”

Debs stared at him without expression. “It’s too late now,” she said, and she turned away, back to the blob in the Crown Vic. “Dexter,” she called over her shoulder.

I suppose I should have known it was coming. My sister always assumed that I would have some kind of mystical insight into a crime scene. She was convinced that I would know instantly all about the sick and murderous freaks we encountered after one quick glance at their handiwork, merely because I was a sick and murderous freak myself. And so every time she was faced with an impossibly grotesque killing, she expected me to provide the name, location, and social security number of the killer. Quite often I did, guided by the soft voice of my Dark Passenger and a thorough understanding of my craft. But this time I had nothing for her.

Somewhat reluctantly, I sloshed over to stand beside Deborah. I hated to disappoint my only sister, but I had nothing to say about this. It was so savage, brutal, and unpleasant that even the Passenger had pursed its glove-leather lips with disapproval.

“What do you think?” Deborah said to me, lowering her voice to encourage me to speak frankly.

“Well,” I said, “whoever did this is off-the-charts insane.”

She stared at me as if waiting for more, and when it was clear that no more was coming, she shook her head. “No shit,” she said. “You figured that out by yourself?”

“Yes,” I said, thoroughly annoyed. “And after only one quick glance through the window. In the rain. Come on, Debs, we don’t even know yet if that’s really Klein.”

Deborah stared inside the car. “It’s him,” she said.

I wiped a small tributary of the Mississippi River off my forehead and looked into the car. I could not even say for sure that the thing inside had ever been a human being, but my sister sounded quite positive that this amorphous glob was Detective Klein. I shrugged, which naturally sent a sheet of water down my neck. “How can you be sure?”

She nodded at one end of the lump. “The bald spot,” she said. “That’s Marty’s bald spot.”

I looked again. The body lay across the car’s seat like a cold pudding, neatly arranged and apparently intact, unpunctured. There were no visible breaks in the skin and no apparent blood spill, and yet the pounding Klein had taken was total, terrible. The top of the skull was perhaps the only part of the body that had not been shattered, probably to avoid ending Klein’s life too quickly. And sure enough, the fringe of greasy hair around the bright pink circle of bare skin did look a lot like what I remembered about Klein’s bald spot. I would not have sworn an oath that it truly was, but I was not a real detective like my sister. “Is this a girl thing?” I asked her, and I admit I said it only because I was wet, hungry, and annoyed. “You can tell people apart by their hair?”

She glanced at me, and for one terrifying moment I thought I had gone too far and she was going to attack my biceps with one of her ferocious arm punches. But instead, she looked over to the rest of the group from Forensics, pointed at the car, and said, “Open it up.”

I stood in the rain and watched as they did. A shudder seemed to go through the whole group of watchers as the car door swung open; this was a cop who had died this way, one of us, so terribly hammered into oblivion, and all of the watching cops took this as a very personal affront. But worse than that, somehow we were all quite sure it would happen again, to another one of us. Sometime soon, this frightful pounding would fall once more on one of our small tribe, and we could not know who, or when, only that it was coming—

It was the dark of the moon, and a dark time for Dexter; there was dread spreading through the ranks of all Miami cops, and in spite of all this fearsome unease Dexter stood dripping and thinking only one dark thought:!!!I missed my dinner.