HE NEXT MORNING WHEN I GOT IN TO WORK, THERE WAS A lab report from the medical examiner’s office waiting on my desk. I glanced through it briefly and then, when I saw what it was, I sat down and read it with real interest. The report gave the results of the autopsy on Officer Gunther, and if you threw out all the technical jargon, it said several significant things. First, blood pooling in the tissue indicated that he had been lying facedown for several hours after death—interesting, since he had been faceup when his body was found by the Torch of Friendship. It probably meant our psycho had killed Gunther in the late afternoon, then left him stashed all alone somewhere until dark. Sometime in the night he had recovered his sense of camaraderie and moved the body to the Torch of Friendship.

There were several pages detailing the massive trauma to Gunther’s assorted organs and limbs, adding up to the same picture we’d gotten from Klein. The report did not speculate, of course; that would have been unprofessional and possibly a little too helpful. But it did state that the damage had been caused by an object that was probably made of steel and possessed a smooth, oblong striking surface about the size of a playing card, which sounded like some kind of large hammer to me.

Once again, the condition of the internal organs confirmed what the exterior tissue indicated: The killer had worked very hard to keep Gunther alive as long as possible, while carefully breaking every conceivable bone with deliberate and vicious force. It didn’t seem like a very pleasant way to die, but then, on reflection, I couldn’t think of a single way to die that was pleasant—certainly nothing I had ever tried. Not that I’d really looked for anything of the kind; where would the fun be in a pleasant death?

I flipped through the report until I came to a page that had been highlighted with fluorescent yellow marker. It listed the contents of Gunther’s stomach, and half of the list had been colored in a solid bright yellow, almost certainly by Deborah. I read it and I didn’t need the highlighting to find the significant part. Among the other nasty things swimming around in his guts, Gunther had eaten something containing cornmeal, iceberg lettuce, ground beef, and several spices, chief among them chili powder and cumin.

In other words, his last meal had been a taco, just like it had been for Klein. For both their sakes, I hoped they were really good tacos.

I had barely finished reading the report when my desk telephone rang, and using my vast and all-seeing psychic powers I determined that it was probably my sister calling. I picked up the receiver anyway and said, “Morgan.”

“Did you read the coroner’s report?” Deborah demanded.

“Just finished it,” I said.

“Stay put,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”

Two minutes later she walked into my office carrying her own copy of the report. “What did you think?” she said, sliding into a chair and waving the pages.

“I don’t like his prose style,” I said. “And the plot seems very familiar.”

“Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “I got a briefing in a half hour, and I need to have something to say to everybody.”

I looked at my sister with some little annoyance. I knew very well that even though she could face down an angry and well-armed mob of cocaine cowboys, or bully around large thuglike cops twice her size, she fell to pieces when she had to speak in front of any group containing more than two people. That was fine, even a little bit endearing, since it was rather nice to see her humbled from time to time. But somehow, her terrible stage fright had become my problem, and I always ended up writing the script for her presentations—a completely thankless job, since she fell apart anyway, no matter how many great lines I wrote for her.

But here she was; she had come all the way down to my office for once, and she was asking nicely, for her, so I really had to help out, no matter how much I resented the idea. “Well,” I said, thinking out loud. “So it fits the same pattern, all the bones broken, and the tacos.”

“I got that,” she snapped. “Come on, Dex.”

“The interval between kills is interesting,” I said. “Two weeks.”

She blinked and stared at me for a moment. “Does that mean something?” she said.

“Absolutely,” I said.

“What?” she said eagerly.

“I don’t have a clue,” I said, and before she could lean over and hit me I added, “But the differences must mean something, too.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said thoughtfully. “Gunther’s in uniform; Klein is a detective. He gets left in his vehicle; Gunther gets dumped by the goddamned Torch. By boat, for Christ’s sake. Why?”

“More important,” I said, “why does the other stuff stay the same?” She looked at me oddly. “I mean, yeah, the MO stays the same. And they’re both cops. But why these two specific cops? What is it about the two of them that fit the killer’s pattern of need?”

Debs shook her head impatiently. “I don’t really give a shit about the psychological stuff,” she said. “I need to catch this psycho motherfucker.”

I could have said that the best way to catch a psycho motherfucker is by understanding what makes him a psycho motherfucker, but I doubted that Deborah would be very receptive to that message right now. Besides, it wasn’t really true. Based on my years of experience in the business, the best way to catch a killer is by getting lucky. Of course, you don’t say that out loud, especially if you’re talking to the evening news. You have to look serious and mention patient and thorough detective work. So I just said, “What about the boat?”

“We’re looking,” she said. “But, shit, do you know how many boats there are in Miami—even if you only count the legally registered ones?”

“It won’t be his. It was probably stolen in the last week,” I said helpfully.

Deborah snorted. “Almost as many,” she said. “Shit, Dexter, I got all the obvious stuff covered. I need an actual idea here, not more dumb-ass chatter.”

It was true that I had not been in the best of moods lately, but it seemed to me that she was moving rapidly past the boundaries of how to speak when begging someone else for help. I opened my mouth to make a crushing remark and then, out of nowhere, an actual idea hit me. “Oh,” I said.

“What,” she said.

“You don’t want to find a stolen boat,” I said.

“The fuck I don’t,” she said. “I know he wouldn’t be stupid enough to use his own boat, even if he had one. He stole one.”

I looked at her and shook my head patiently. “Debs, that’s obvious,” I said, and I admit I might have been smirking slightly. “But then it’s also obvious that he wouldn’t hang on to that boat afterward. So you don’t look for a stolen boat; you look for—”

“A found boat!” she said, and she clapped her hands together. “Right! A boat that was abandoned somewhere for no reason.”

“It had to be somewhere he had a car stashed,” I said. “Or even better, someplace he could steal a car.”

“Goddamn it, that’s more like it,” Debs said. “There can’t be more than one place in town where a boat turned up and a car got stolen the same night.”

“A quick and simple computer search to cross-reference it,” I said, and the moment the words were out of my mouth I wanted to jam them back in and slide under my desk, because Deborah knew almost as much about using a computer as she did about ballroom dancing. I, on the other hand, must modestly admit to something verging on expertise in that area, and so anytime the word “computer” came up in conversation, my sister automatically made it my problem. And sure enough, she bounced to her feet and whacked me playfully on the arm.

“That’s great, Dex,” she said. “How long will it take you?”

I looked around the room quickly, but Debs was standing between me and the door, and there was no emergency exit. So I turned to my computer and went to work. Deborah jiggled around anxiously like she was jogging in place, which made it very hard to concentrate, until finally I said, “Debs, please. I can’t work with you vibrating like that.”

“Well, shit,” she said, but at least she stopped hopping up and down and perched on the edge of a chair instead. But three seconds later, she started rapidly tapping her foot on the floor. Clearly there was no way to keep her still, short of flinging her out the door or finding what she wanted. Since she had a gun and I didn’t, flinging was too chancy, so with a heavy and pointed sigh I went back to my search.

Less than ten minutes later, I had it. “Here we go,” I said, and before I got out the final syllable Deborah was at my elbow, leaning in anxiously to see the screen. “The pastor of St. John’s Church on Miami Beach reported his car stolen this morning. And he’s got a new twenty-one-foot Sea Fox at his dock.”

“A fucking church?” Deborah said. “On the Beach, for God’s sake? How did he get the boat in there?”

I pulled up a map on-screen and pointed. “See, the church is right here, by this canal, and the parking lot is on the water.” I ran my finger along the canal from the church and out into the bay. “Ten minutes across the water to Bayfront Park and the Torch.”

Deborah stared for a moment, then shook her head. “It doesn’t make any fucking sense at all,” she said.

“It does to him,” I said.

“Well, shit,” she said. “I’d better get Duarte and get out there.” And then she straightened up and ran for the door without a single word of thanks for my arduous eight minutes of labor. I admit I was a bit surprised—not that my very own sister had failed to display gratitude, of course. That would be too much to expect. But normally she would have dragged a reluctant Dexter along with her for backup, leaving her partner to count paper clips. But this time it was Dutiful Dexter left behind, and Debs had gone to find her new French-speaking partner, Duarte. I supposed that meant she liked working with him, or maybe she was just being more careful with her partners now. Her last two had been killed on the job while working a case with her, and I’d heard more than one cop muttering that it was very bad luck to work with Sergeant Morgan, since she was obviously some kind of black widow or something.

Whatever the case, there was really nothing to complain about. Debs was actually doing things the way she was supposed to for once, working with her official partner instead of her unofficial brother. And that was fine with me, because it truly was dangerous to hang around with her when she was at work; I had scar tissue to prove it. And it wasn’t my job to run around in the big, bad world dodging slings and arrows and, apparently, hammers. I didn’t need the adrenaline; I had real work to do. So I just sat and felt unappreciated for a few minutes, and then went back to doing it.

Just after lunch, I was in the lab with Vince Masuoka when Deborah rushed in and dumped a large hammer on the counter in front of me. I guessed from the loud thump that it weighed about three pounds. It was in a big plastic evidence bag, and a film of condensation had formed on the inside surface of the bag, but I could still see that it was not an ordinary carpenter’s hammer, and it did not quite look like a sledgehammer, either. The head was round and blunt at both ends, and it had a yellow, well-worn wooden handle.

“All right,” Vince said, peering in over Deborah’s shoulder. “I always wanted to get hammered with you.”

“Go piss up a stick,” Debs said. It was not up to her usual high standards in a put-down, but she said it with considerable conviction, and Vince scuttled away quickly to the far corner of the lab, where his laptop sat on a counter. “Alex found it,” Deborah said, nodding at Duarte as he trickled in the door. “It was lying in the parking lot at that church, St. John’s.”

“Why would he drop his hammer?” I said, poking carefully at the plastic bag to see better.

“Right here,” Debs said, and I could hear barely suppressed excitement in her voice. She pointed through the plastic to a spot on the handle, just above where the yellow color was partially faded away from use. “Lookit,” she said. “It’s cracked a little bit.”

I bent over and looked. On the worn wooden handle, just barely visible through the misted bag, was a hairline crack. “Wonderful,” I said. “Maybe he cut himself.”

“Why is that wonderful?” Duarte said. “I mean, I’d like to see the guy hurt, but a little cut? So what?”

I looked at Duarte and very briefly wondered if some malignant personnel computer always assigned to Debs a partner with the lowest possible IQ. “If he cut his hand,” I said, carefully choosing one-syllable words, “there might be some blood. So we can get a DNA match.”

“Oh, yeah, sure,” he said.

“Come on, Dex,” Deborah said. “See what you can get from it.”

I pulled on gloves and took the hammer out of its bag, placing it carefully on the counter. “Unusual kind of hammer, isn’t it?” I said.

“It’s called a club hammer,” Vince said, and I looked at him. He was still sitting on the far side of the room, hunched over his laptop. He pointed to an image on the screen. “Club hammer,” he repeated.

“I Googled.”

“Very appropriate,” I said. I leaned over the handle of the hammer in question and carefully sprayed on some Bluestar. It would reveal any trace of blood, no matter how small. With any luck, there might be just enough for me to get a blood type or DNA sample.

“They use it for demolition, mostly,” Vince went on. “You know, like knocking out walls and things?”

“I think I remember what demolition means,” I said.

“Cut the shit,” Deborah said through her teeth. “Can you get anything from it or not?”

Deborah’s hands-on management style seemed more profoundly annoying than usual, and I thought of several stinging remarks to slap her back into her place. But just as I was about to let fly with a really good one, I saw a dim smudge on the hammer’s handle, brought out by the Bluestar. “Bingo,” I said.

“What,” Deborah demanded, and she was suddenly so close to me I could hear her teeth grinding.

“If you’ll take your foot out of my pocket, I’ll show you,” I said. She hissed out a breath, but at least she did back up a half step. “Look,” I said, pointing at the smudge. “It’s a trace of blood—and even better, it’s also a latent fingerprint.”

“Pure dumb luck,” Vince said from his stool across the lab.

“Really?” I said. “Then why didn’t you find it?”

“What about DNA?” Deborah said impatiently.

I shook my head. “I’ll try,” I said. “But it’s probably too badly degraded.”

“Run the print,” Deborah said. “I want a name.”

“And maybe a GPS reading?” Vince said.

Deborah glared at him, but instead of ripping him into small and bloody shreds she just looked back at me and said, “Run the print, Dexter,” and then she turned around and whirled away out of the lab.

Alex Duarte straightened up as she hustled past him. “Au ’voir,” I told him politely.

He nodded. “Mange merde,” he said, and he followed Deborah out the door. His French accent was much better than mine.

I looked at Vince. He closed his laptop and stood up. “Let’s run it,” he said.

We ran it. As I had thought, the bloody smudge was too badly degraded to get any kind of usable DNA sample, but we did get a picture of the fingerprint, and after computer enhancement the image was clear enough to send to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System with some hope that we might get a match. It was a national database of felons’ fingerprints, and if our hammer-loving friend was in it, a name would pop out, and Deborah would get him.

We sent the print in, and then there was nothing to do but wait for the results. Vince scurried away on some other errand, and I just sat for a few minutes. Deborah seemed excited, and as close to happy as she got on the job. She was always very upbeat when she thought she was closing in on a bad guy. For just a second I almost wished I had feelings, so I could get that kind of positive surge of purpose and fulfillment. I never got any sort of glow from my work, just a kind of dull satisfaction when things went well. My only real sense of happy self-affirmation came from my hobby, and I was trying not to think about that right now. But that slender file at home in my study contained three names. Three very intriguing candidates for oblivion, Dexter style, and pursuing any one of them would almost certainly relieve my feelings of low self-worth and bring a bright synthetic smile to my face.

But this was not the time for that, not with an unknown Witness closing in on me, and the entire police force on edge over the untimely and unpleasant demise of Klein, and now Gunther. Every cop in the greater Miami area would be working each shift with extra diligence in hopes of becoming the Hero of the Day, the cop who caught the killer, and although all that extra watchfulness would make the streets temporarily a little safer for most of us, it would also make things a little too risky for a Dexter Dalliance.

No, a recreational side trip was not the answer, not in this climate of frenzied, hostile police vigilance. I had to find my Witness, and until then just resign myself to being paranoid, grumpy, unhappy, and unfulfilled.

But when you came right down to it—so what? From what I could learn by watching my fellow inhabitants of this vale of tears, everybody else was just as wretched at least two-thirds of the time. Why should I be exempt merely because I had an empty heart? After all, even though Lily Anne made being human thoroughly worthwhile, there were bound to be less rewarding aspects of personhood, and it was only fair that I should have to suffer through the bad parts, too. Of course, I had never been a big believer in fairness, but I was clearly stuck with it for now.

My sister, however, was not. Just as I was concluding that everything was horrible and it truly served me right, she burst into my office like the Charge of the Light Brigade. “Have you got anything yet?” she said.

“Debs, we just sent it off,” I said. “It’s going to take a little time.”

“How long?” she said.

I sighed. “It’s one partial print, sis,” I said. “It could take a few days, maybe up to a week.”

“That’s bullshit,” she said. “I don’t have a week.”

“It’s a huge database,” I said. “And they get requests from all over the country. We have to wait our turn.”

Deborah ground her teeth at me, so hard I could almost hear enamel flaking off. “I need the results,” she said through a clenched jaw, “and I need them now.”

“Well,” I said pleasantly, “if you know a way to make a database hurry up, I’m sure we’d all love to hear it.”

“Goddamn it, you’re not even trying!” she said.

I will freely admit that nine times out of ten, I would have had a little more patience with Deborah’s patently impossible request and rotten attitude. But with things as they were lately, I really didn’t want to knuckle my forehead and leap into worshipful compliance. I took a deep breath instead and spoke with audible patience and steely control. “Deborah. I am doing my job the best I can. If you think you can do it better, then please feel free to try.”

She ground her teeth even harder, and for a moment I thought the canines might splinter and burst through her cheeks. But happily for her dental bill, they did not. She just glared at me instead, and then nodded her head twice, very hard. “All right,” she said. And then she turned around and walked rapidly away without even looking back at me to snarl one last time.

I sighed. Perhaps I should have stayed home in bed, or at least checked my horoscope. Nothing seemed to be going right. The whole world was slightly off-kilter, leaning just a bit out of its normal axis. It had a strange and mean tint to it, too, as if it had sniffed out my fragile mood and was probing for further weakness.

Ah, well. If only I’d had a mother, I’m sure she would have told me there would be days like this. And the kind of mother who could say that with a straight face would probably have added, An idle mind is the devil’s playground. I certainly didn’t want to upset Hypothetical Mom, and I didn’t want to go on the swing set with Satan either, so I got out of my chair and tidied up the lab.

Vince stuck his head in a minute later and watched me with puzzled concentration as I wiped down the counter with some cleaner and paper towels. He shook his head. “Such a neatnik,” he said. “If I didn’t know you were married, I would wonder about you.”

I lifted a small stack of case files off the counter. “These all need to be filed,” I said.

He held up a hand and backed away. “My back is acting up again,” he said. “No heavy lifting, doctor’s orders.” And he disappeared down the hall. Dexter Deserted—but it fit the general trend of recent events, and I was sure I would get used to it sooner or later. In any case, I managed to finish cleaning up without bursting into tears, which was probably the best I could hope for, the way things were going.