HOMICIDE SCENE WITH NO BLOOD SPLATTERED SHOULD have been a real holiday outing for me, but somehow I couldn’t get into the lighthearted frame of mind to enjoy it. I lurked around for a while, going in and out of the taped-off area, but there was very little for me to do. And Deborah seemed to have said all she had to say to me, which left me somewhat alone and unoccupied.

A reasonable being might very well be pardoned for sulking just a tiny bit, but I had never claimed to be reasonable, and that left me with very few options. Perhaps the best thing to do would be to get on with life and think about the many important things that demanded my attention—the kids, the caterer, Paris, lunch…Considering my laundry list of things to worry about, it was no wonder the Passenger was proving a wee bit shy.

I looked at the two overcooked bodies again. They were not doing anything sinister. They were still dead. But the Dark Passenger was still silent.

I wandered back over to where Deborah stood, talking to Angel-no-relation. They both looked at me expectantly, but I had no readily available wit to offer, which was very much out of character. Happily for my world-famous reputation for permanently cheerful stoicism, before I could really turn gloomy, Deborah looked over my shoulder and snorted. “About fucking time.”

I followed her gaze to a patrol car that had just pulled up and watched a man dressed all in white climb out.

The official City of Miami babalao had arrived.

Our fair city exists in a permanent blinding haze of cronyism and corruption that would make Boss Tweed jealous, and every year millions of dollars are thrown away on imaginary consulting jobs, cost overruns on projects that haven’t begun because they were awarded to someone’s mother-in-law, and other special items of great civic importance, like new luxury cars for political supporters. So it should be no surprise at all that the city pays a Santeria priest a salary and benefits.

The surprise is that he earns his money.

Every morning at sunrise, the babalao arrives at the courthouse, where he usually finds one or two small animal sacrifices left by people with important legal cases pending. No Miami citizen in his right mind would touch these things, but of course it would be very bad form to leave dead animals littered about Miami’s great temple of justice. So the babalao removes the sacrifices, cowrie shells, feathers, beads, charms, and pictures in a way that will not offend the orishas, the guiding spirits of Santeria.

He is also called upon from time to time to cast spells for other important civic items, like blessing a new overpass built by a low-bid contractor or putting a curse on the New York Jets. And he had apparently been called upon this time by my sister, Deborah.

The official city babalao was a black man of about fifty, six feet tall with very long fingernails and a considerable paunch. He was dressed in white pants, a white guayabera, and sandals. He came plodding over from the patrol car that had brought him, with the cranky expression of a minor bureaucrat whose important filing work had been interrupted. As he walked he polished a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses on the tail of his shirt. He put them on as he approached the bodies and, when he did, what he saw stopped him dead.

For a long moment he just stared. Then, with his eyes still glued to the bodies, he backed away. At about thirty feet away, he turned around and walked back to the patrol car and climbed in.

“What the fuck,” Deborah said, and I agreed that she had summed things up nicely. The babalao slammed the car door and sat there in the front seat, staring straight ahead through the windshield without moving. After a moment Deborah muttered, “Shit,” and went over to the car. And because like all inquiring minds I want to know, I followed.

When I got to the car Deborah was tapping on the glass of the passenger-side window and the babalao was still staring straight ahead, jaw clenched, grimly pretending not to see her. Debs knocked harder; he shook his head. “Open the door,” she said in her best police-issue put-down-the-gun voice. He shook his head harder. She knocked on the window harder. “Open it!” she said.

Finally he rolled down the window. “This is nothing to do with me,” he said.

“Then what is it?” Deborah asked him.

He just shook his head. “I need to get back to work,” he said.

“Is it Palo Mayombe?” I asked him, and Debs glared at me for interrupting, but it seemed like a fair question. Palo Mayombe was a somewhat darker offshoot of Santeria, and although I knew almost nothing about it, there had been rumors of some very wicked rituals that had piqued my interest.

But the babalao shook his head. “Listen,” he said. “There’s stuff out there, you guys got no idea, and you don’t wanna know.”

“Is this one of those things?” I asked.

“I dunno,” he said. “Might be.”

“What can you tell us about it?” Deborah demanded.

“I can’t tell you nothing ’cause I don’t know nothing,” he said. “But I don’t like it and I don’t want anything to do with it. I got important stuff to do today—tell the cop I gotta go.” And he rolled the window up again.

“Shit,” Deborah said, and she looked at me accusingly.

“Well I didn’t do anything,” I said.

“Shit,” she said again. “What the hell does that mean?”

“I am completely in the dark,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” she said, and she looked entirely unconvinced, which was a little ironic. I mean, people believe me all the time when I’m being somewhat less than perfectly truthful—and yet here was my own foster flesh and blood, refusing to believe that I was, in fact, completely in the dark. Aside from the fact that the babalao seemed to be having the same reaction as the Passenger—and what should I make of that?

Before I could pursue that fascinating line of thought, I realized that Deborah was still staring at me with an exceedingly unpleasant expression on her face.

“Did you find the heads?” I asked, quite helpfully I thought. “We might get a feel for the ritual if we saw what he did to the heads.”

“No, we haven’t found the heads. I haven’t found anything except a brother who’s holding out on me.”

“Deborah, really, this permanent air of nasty suspicion is not good for your face muscles. You’ll get frown lines.”

“Maybe I’ll get a killer, too,” she said, and walked back to the two charred bodies.

Since my usefulness was apparently at an end, at least as far as my sister was concerned, there was really not a great deal more for me to do on-site. I finished up with my blood kit, taking small samples of the dried black stuff caked around the two necks, and headed back to the lab in plenty of time for a late lunch.

But alas, poor Dauntless Dexter obviously had a target painted on his back, because my troubles had barely begun. Just as I was tidying up my desk and getting ready to take part in the cheerfully homicidal rush-hour traffic, Vince Masuoka came skipping into my office. “I just talked to Manny,” he said. “He can see us tomorrow morning at ten.”

“That’s wonderful news,” I said. “The only thing that could possibly make it any better would be to know who Manny is and why he wants to see us.”

Vince actually looked a little hurt, one of the few genuine expressions I had ever seen on his face. “Manny Borque,” he said. “The caterer.”

“The one from MTV?”

“Yeah, that’s right,” Vince said. “The guy that’s won all the awards, and he’s been written up in Gourmet magazine.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, stalling for time in the hope that some brilliant flash of inspiration would hit to help me dodge this terrible fate. “The award-winning caterer.”

“Dexter, this guy is big. He could make your whole wedding.”

“Well, Vince, I think that’s terrific, but—”

“Listen,” he said, with an air of firm command that I had never heard from him before, “you said you would talk to Rita about this and let her decide.”

“I said that?”

“Yes, you did. And I am not going to let you throw away a wonderful opportunity like this, not when it’s something that I know Rita would really love to have.”

I wasn’t sure how he could be so positive about that. After all, I was actually engaged to the woman, and I had no idea what sort of caterer might fill her with shock and awe. But I didn’t think this was the time to ask him how he knew what Rita would and would not love. Then again, a man who dressed up as Carmen Miranda for Halloween might very well have a keener insight than mine into my fiancée’s innermost culinary desires.

“Well,” I said, at last deciding that procrastinating long enough to escape was the best answer, “in that case, I’ll go home and talk to Rita about it.”

“Do that,” he said. And he did not storm out, but if there had been a door to slam, he might have slammed it.

I finished tidying up and trundled on out into the evening traffic. On the way home a middle-aged man in a Toyota SUV got right behind me and started honking the horn for some reason. After five or six blocks he pulled around me and, as he flipped me off, juked his steering wheel slightly to frighten me into running up on the sidewalk. Although I admired his spirit and would have loved to oblige him, I stayed on the road. There is never any point in trying to make sense of the way Miami drivers go about getting from one place to another. You just have to relax and enjoy the violence—and of course, that part was never a problem for me. So I smiled and waved, and he stomped on his accelerator and disappeared into traffic at about sixty miles per hour over the speed limit.

Normally I find the chaotic mayhem of the evening drive home to be the perfect way to end the day. Seeing all the anger and lust to kill relaxes me, makes me feel at one with my hometown and its spritely inhabitants. But tonight I found it difficult to summon up any good cheer at all. I never for a moment thought it could ever happen, but I was worried.

Worse still, I didn’t know what I was actually worried about, only that the Dark Passenger had used the silent treatment on me at a scene of creative homicide. This had never happened, and I could only believe that something unusual and possibly Dexter-threatening had caused it now. But what? And how could I be sure, when I didn’t really know the first thing about the Passenger itself, except that it had always been there to offer happy insight and commentary. We had seen burned bodies before, and pottery aplenty, with never a twitch or a tweet. Was it the combination? Or something specific to these two bodies? Or was it entirely coincidental and had nothing whatever to do with what we had seen?

The more I thought about it, the less I knew, but the traffic swirled around me in its soothing homicidal patterns, and by the time I got to Rita’s house I had almost convinced myself that there was really nothing to worry about.

Rita, Cody, and Astor were already home when I got there. Rita worked much closer to the house than I did, and the kids were in an after-school program at a nearby park, so they had all been waiting for at least half an hour for the opportunity to torment me out of my hard-won peace of mind.

“It was on the news,” Astor whispered as I opened the door, and Cody nodded and said, “Gross,” in his soft, hoarse voice.

“What was on the news?” I said, struggling to get past them and into the house without trampling on them.

“You burned them!” Astor hissed at me, and Cody looked at me with a complete lack of expression that somehow conveyed disapproval.

“I what? Who did I—”

“Those two people they found at the college,” she said. “We don’t want to learn that,” she added emphatically, and Cody nodded again.

“At the—you mean at the university? I didn’t—”

“A university is a college,” Astor said with the underlined certainty of a ten-year-old girl. “And we think burning is just gross.”

It began to dawn on me what they had seen on the news—a report from the scene where I had spent my morning collecting dry-roasted blood samples from two charred bodies. And somehow, merely because they knew I had been out to play the other night, they had decided that this was how I had spent my time. Even without the Dark Passenger’s strange retreat, I agreed that it was completely gross, and I found it highly annoying that they thought I was capable of something like that. “Listen,” I said sternly, “that was not—”

“Dexter? Is that you?” Rita yodeled from the kitchen.

“I’m not sure,” I called back. “Let me check my wallet.”

Rita bustled in beaming and before I could protect myself she wrapped herself around me, apparently intent on squeezing hard enough to interfere with my breathing. “Hi, handsome,” she said. “How was your day?”

“Gross,” muttered Astor.

“Absolutely wonderful,” I said, fighting for breath. “Plenty of corpses for everybody today. And I got to use my cotton swabs, too.”

Rita made a face. “Ugh. That’s—I don’t know if you should talk like that around the children. What if they get bad dreams?”

If I had been a completely honest person, I would have told her that her children were far more likely to cause someone else bad dreams than to get them, but since I am not hampered by any need to tell the truth, I just patted her and said, “They hear worse than that on the cartoons every day. Isn’t that right, kids?”

“No,” said Cody softly, and I looked at him with surprise. He rarely said anything, and to have him not only speak but actually contradict me was disturbing. In fact, the whole day was turning out to be wildly askew, from the panicked flight of the Dark Passenger this morning and continuing on through Vince’s catering tirade—and now this. What in the name of all that is dark and dreadful was going on? Was my aura out of balance? Had the moons of Jupiter aligned against me in Sagittarius?

“Cody,” I said. And I do hope some hurt showed in my voice. “You’re not going to have bad dreams about this, are you?”

“He doesn’t have bad dreams,” Astor said, as if everyone who was not severely mentally challenged ought to know that. “He doesn’t have any dreams at all.”

“Good to know,” I said, since I almost never dream myself, either, and for some reason it seemed important to have as much as possible in common with Cody. But Rita was having none of it.

“Really, Astor, don’t be silly,” she said. “Of course Cody has dreams. Everybody has dreams.”

“I don’t,” Cody insisted. Now he was not only standing up to both of us, he was practically breaking his own record for chattiness at the same time. And even though I didn’t have a heart, except for circulatory purposes, I felt an affection for him and wanted to come down on his side.

“Good for you,” I said. “Stick with it. Dreams are very overrated. Interfere with getting a good night’s sleep.”

“Dexter, really,” Rita said. “I don’t think we should encourage this.”

“Of course we should,” I said, winking at Cody. “He’s showing fire, spunk, and imagination.”

“Am not,” he said, and I absolutely marveled at his verbal outpouring.

“Of course you’re not,” I said to him, lowering my voice. “But we have to say stuff like that to your mom, or she gets worried.”

“For Pete’s sake,” Rita said. “I give up with you two. Run outside and play, kids.”

“We wanna play with Dexter,” Astor pouted.

“I’ll be along in a few minutes,” I said.

“You better,” she said darkly. They vanished down the hall toward the back door, and as they left I took a deep breath, happy that the vicious and unwarranted attacks against me were over for now. Of course, I should have known better.

“Come in here,” Rita said, and she led me by the hand to the sofa. “Vince called a little while ago,” she said as we settled onto the cushions.

“Did he?” I said, and a sudden thrill of danger ripped through me at the idea of what he might have said to Rita. “What did he say?”

She shook her head. “He was very mysterious. He said to let him know as soon as we had talked it over. And when I asked him talked what over he wouldn’t say. He just said you would tell me.”

I barely managed to stop myself from the unthinkable conversational blunder of saying, “Did he?” again. In my defense, I have to admit that my brain was whirling, not only with the panicked notion that I had to flee to some place of safety but also with the thought that before I fled I needed to find time to visit Vince with my little bag of toys. But before I could mentally choose the correct blade, Rita went on.

“Honestly, Dexter, you’re very lucky to have a friend like Vince. He really does take his duties as best man seriously, and he has wonderful taste.”

“Wonderfully expensive, too,” I said—and perhaps I was still recovering from my near-gaffe with almost repeating “Did he?” but I knew the moment it was out of my mouth that it was absolutely the wrong thing to say. And sure enough, Rita lit up like a Christmas tree.

“Really?” she said. “Well, I suppose he would, after all. I mean, it most often goes together, doesn’t it? You really do get what you pay for, usually.”

“Yes, but it’s a question of how much you have to pay,” I said.

“How much for what?” Rita said, and there it was. I was stuck.

“Well,” I said, “Vince has this crazy idea that we should hire this South Beach caterer, a very pricey guy who does a lot of celebrity events and things.”

Rita clapped her hands under her chin and looked radiantly happy. “Not Manny Borque!” she cried. “Vince knows Manny Borque?”

Of course it was all over right there, but Dauntless Dexter does not go down without a fight, no matter how feeble. “Did I mention that he’s very expensive?” I said hopefully.

“Oh, Dexter, you can’t worry about money at a time like this,” she said.

“I can too. I am.”

“Not if there’s a chance to get Manny Borque,” she said, and there was a surprisingly strong note in her voice that I had never heard before except when she was angry with Cody and Astor.

“Yes, but Rita,” I said, “it doesn’t make sense to spend a ton of money just for the caterer.”

“Sense has nothing to do with it,” she said, and I admit that I agreed with her there. “If we can get Manny Borque to cater our wedding, we’d be crazy not to do it.”

“But,” I said, and there I stopped, because beyond the fact that it seemed idiotic to pay a king’s ransom for crackers with endives hand-painted with rhubarb juice and sculpted to look like Jennifer Lopez, I could not think of any other objection. I mean, wasn’t that enough?

Apparently not. “Dexter,” she said. “How many times will we get married?” And to my great credit I was still alert enough to clamp down on the urge to say, “At least twice, in your case,” which I think was probably very wise.

I quickly changed course, diving straight into tactics learned from pretending to be human for so many years. “Rita,” I said, “the important part of the wedding is when I slip the ring on your finger. I don’t care what we eat afterward.”

“That’s so sweet,” she said. “Then you don’t mind if we hire Manny Borque?”

Once again I found myself losing an argument before I even knew which side I was on. I became aware of a dryness in my mouth—caused, no doubt, by the fact that my mouth was hanging open as my brain struggled to make sense of what had just happened, and then to find something clever to say to get things back onto dry land.

But it was far too late. “I’ll call Vince back,” she said, and she leaned over to give me a kiss on the cheek. “Oh, this is so exciting. Thank you, Dexter.”

Well, after all, isn’t marriage about compromise?