SPENT THE NEXT DAY IN A LATHER OF UNCERTAINTY, HOPING that the Passenger would return and somehow sure it would not. And as the day wore on, this dreary certainty got bigger and bleaker.

There was a large, brittle empty spot inside me and I had no real way to think about it or cope with the gaping hollowness that I had never felt before. I would certainly not claim to feel anguish, which has always struck me as a very self-indulgent thing to experience, but I was acutely uneasy and I lived the whole day in a thick syrup of anxious dread.

Where had my Passenger gone, and why? Would it come back? And these questions pulled me inevitably down into even more alarming speculation: What was the Passenger and why had it come to me in the first place?

It was somewhat sobering to realize just how deeply I had defined myself by something that was not actually me—or was it? Perhaps the entire persona of the Dark Passenger was no more than the sick construct of a damaged mind, a web spun to catch tiny glimmers of filtered reality and protect me from the awful truth of what I really am. It was possible. I am well aware of basic psychology, and I have assumed for quite some time that I am somewhere off the charts. That’s fine with me; I get along very well without any shred of normal humanity to my name.

Or I had until now. But suddenly I was all alone in there, and things did not seem quite so hard-edged and certain. And for the first time, I truly needed to know.

Of course, few jobs provide paid time off for introspection, even on a topic as important as missing Dark Passengers. No, Dexter must still lift that bale. Especially with Deborah cracking the whip.

Happily, it was mostly routine. I spent the morning with my fellow geeks combing through Halpern’s apartment for some concrete residue of his guilt. Even more happily, the evidence was so abundant that very little real work was necessary.

In the back of his closet we found a sock with several drops of blood on it. Under the couch was a white canvas shoe with a matching blotch on top. In a plastic bag in the bathroom was a pair of pants with a singed cuff and even more blood, small dots of spray that had been heat-hardened.

It was probably a good thing that there was so much of it out in the open, because Dexter was truly not his usual bright and eager self today. I found myself drifting in an anxious gray mist and wondering if the Passenger was coming home, only to jerk back to the present, standing there in the closet holding a dirty, blood-spattered sock. If any real investigation had been necessary, I am not sure I could have performed up to my own very high standards.

Luckily, it wasn’t needed. I had never before seen such an outpouring of clear and obvious evidence from somebody who had, after all, had several days to clean up. When I indulge in my own little hobby I am neat and tidy and forensically innocent within minutes; Halpern had let several days go by without taking even the most elementary precautions. It was almost too easy, and when we checked his car I dropped the “almost.” Clearly displayed on the central armrest of the front seat was a thumbprint of dried blood.

Of course, it was still possible that our lab work would show that it was chicken blood, and Halpern had simply been indulging in an innocent pastime, perhaps as an amateur poultry butcher. Somehow, I doubted it. It seemed overwhelmingly clear that Halpern had done something truly unkind to someone.

And yet, the small nagging thought tugged at me that it was, just as overwhelmingly so, too easy. Something was not quite right here. But since I had no Passenger to point me in the right direction, I kept it to myself. It would have been cruel, in any case, to burst Deborah’s happy balloon. She was very nearly glowing with satisfaction as the results came in and Halpern looked more and more like our demented catch of the day.

Deborah was actually humming when she dragged me along to interview Halpern, which took my unease to a new level. I watched her as we went into the room where Halpern was waiting. I could not remember the last time she had seemed so happy. She even forgot to wear her expression of perpetual disapproval. It was very unsettling, a complete violation of natural law, as if everyone on I-95 suddenly decided to drive slowly and carefully.

“Well, Jerry,” she said cheerfully as we settled into chairs facing Halpern. “Would you like to talk about those two girls?”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. He was very pale, almost greenish, but he looked a lot more determined than he had when we brought him in. “You’ve made a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t do anything.”

Deborah looked at me with a smile and shook her head. “He didn’t do anything,” she said happily.

“It’s possible,” I said. “Somebody else might have put the bloody clothes in his apartment while he was watching Letterman.”

“Is that what happened, Jerry?” she said. “Did somebody else put those bloody clothes in your place?”

If possible, he looked even greener. “What—bloody—what are you talking about?”

She smiled at him. “Jerry. We found a pair of your pants with blood on ’em. It matches the victims’ blood. We found a shoe and a sock, same story. And we found a bloody fingerprint in your car. Your fingerprint, their blood.” Deborah leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “Does that jog your memory at all, Jerry?”

Halpern had started shaking his head while Deborah was talking, and he continued to do so, as if it was some kind of weird reflex and he didn’t know he was doing it. “No,” he said. “No. That isn’t even—No.”

“No, Jerry?” Deborah said. “What does that mean, no?”

He was still shaking his head. A drop of sweat flew off and plopped on the table and I could hear him trying very hard to breathe. “Please,” he said. “This is crazy. I didn’t do anything. Why are you—This is pure Kafka, I didn’t do anything.”

Deborah turned to me and raised an eyebrow. “Kafka?” she said.

“He thinks he’s a cockroach,” I told her.

“I’m just a dumb cop, Jerry,” she said. “I don’t know about Kafka. But I know solid evidence when I see it. And you know what, Jerry? I’m seeing it all over your apartment.”

“But I didn’t do anything,” he pleaded.

“Okay,” said Deborah with a shrug. “Then help me out here. How did all that stuff get into your place?”

“Wilkins did it,” he said, and he looked surprised, as if someone else had said it.

“Wilkins?” Deborah said, looking at me.

“The professor in the office next door?” I said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Halpern said, suddenly gathering steam and leaning forward. “It was Wilkins—it had to be.”

“Wilkins did it,” Deborah said. “He put on your clothes, killed the girls, and then put the clothes back in your apartment.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Why would he do that?”

“We’re both up for tenure,” he said. “Only one of us will get it.”

Deborah stared at him as if he had suggested dancing naked. “Tenure,” she said at last, and there was wonder in her voice.

“That’s right,” he said defensively. “It’s the most important moment in any academic career.”

“Important enough to kill somebody?” I asked.

He just stared at a spot on the table. “It was Wilkins,” he said.

Deborah stared at him for a full minute, with the expression of a fond aunt watching her favorite nephew. He looked at her for a few seconds, and then blinked, glanced down at the table, over to me, and back down to the table again. When the silence continued, he finally looked back up at Deborah. “All right, Jerry,” she said. “If that’s the best you can do, I think it might be time for you to call your lawyer.”

He goggled at her, but seemed unable to think of anything to say, so Deborah stood up and headed for the door, and I followed.

“Got him,” she said in the hallway. “That son of a bitch is cooked. Game, set, point.”

And she was so positively sunny that I couldn’t help saying, “If it was him.”

She absolutely beamed at me. “Of course it was him, Dex. Jesus, don’t knock yourself. You did some great work here, and for once we got the right guy first time out.”

“I guess so,” I said.

She cocked her head to one side and stared at me, still smirking in a completely self-satisfied way. “Whatsa matter, Dex,” she said. “Got your shorts in a knot about the wedding?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Life on earth has never before been so completely harmonious and satisfying. I just—” And here I hesitated, because I didn’t really know what I just. There was only this unshakable and unreasonable feeling that something was not right.

“I know, Dex,” she said in a kindly voice that somehow made it feel even worse. “It seems way too easy, right? But think of all the shit we go through every day, with every other case. It stands to reason that now and then we get an easy one, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This just doesn’t feel right.”

She snorted. “With the amount of hard evidence we got on this guy, nobody’s going to give a shit how it feels, Dex,” she said. “Why don’t you lighten up and enjoy a good day’s work?”

I’m sure it was excellent advice, but I could not take it. Even though I had no familiar whisper to feed me my cues, I had to say something. “He doesn’t act like he’s lying,” I said, rather feebly.

Deborah shrugged. “He’s a nut job. Not my problem. He did it.”

“But if he’s psychotic in some way, why would it just burst out all of a sudden? I mean, he’s thirty-something years old, and this is the first time he’s done anything? That doesn’t fit.”

She actually patted my shoulder and smiled again. “Good point, Dex. Why don’t you get on your computer and check his background? I bet we find something.” She glanced at her watch. “You can do that right after the press conference, okay? Come on, can’t be late.”

And I followed along dutifully, wondering how I always seemed to volunteer for extra work.

Deborah had, in fact, been granted the priceless boon of a press conference, something Captain Matthews did not give out lightly. It was her first as lead detective on a major case with its own media frenzy, and she had clearly studied up on how to look and speak for the evening news. She lost her smile and any other visible trace of emotion and spoke flat sentences of perfect cop-ese. Only someone who knew her as well as I did could tell that great and uncharacteristic happiness was burbling behind her wooden face.

So I stood at the back of the room and watched as my sister made a series of radiantly mechanical statements adding up to her belief that she had arrested a suspect in the heinous murders at the university, and as soon as she knew if he was guilty her dear friends in the media would be among the first to know it. She was clearly proud and happy and it had been pure meanness on my part even to hint that something was not quite righteous with Halpern’s guilt, especially since I did not know what that might be—or even if.

She was almost certainly right—Halpern was guilty and I was being stupid and grumpy, thrown off the trolley of pure reason by my missing Passenger. It was the echo of its absence that made me uneasy, and not any kind of doubt about the suspect in a case that really meant absolutely nothing to me anyway. Almost certainly—

And there was that almost again. I had lived my life until now in absolutes—I had no experience with “almost,” and it was unsettling, deeply disturbing not to have that voice of certainty to tell me what was what with no dithering and no doubt. I began to realize just how helpless I was without the Dark Passenger. Even in my day job, nothing was simple anymore.

Back in my cubicle I sat in my chair and leaned back with my eyes closed. Anybody there? I asked hopefully. Nobody was. Just an empty spot that was beginning to hurt as the numb wonder wore off. With the distraction of work over, there was nothing to keep me from self-absorbed self-pity. I was alone in a dark, mean world full of terrible things like me. Or at least, the me I used to be.

Where had the Passenger gone, and why had it gone there? If something had truly scared it away, what could that something be? What could frighten a thing that lived for darkness, that really came to life only when the knives were out?

And this brought a brand-new thought that was most unwelcome: If this hypothetical something had scared away the Passenger, had it followed it into exile? Or was it still sniffing at my trail? Was I in danger with no way left to protect myself—with no way of knowing whether some lethal threat was right behind me until its drool actually fell on my neck?

I have always heard that new experiences are a good thing, but this one was pure torture. The more I thought about it, the less I understood what was happening to me, and the more it hurt.

Well, there was one sure remedy for misery, and that was good hard work on something completely pointless. I swiveled around to face my computer and got busy.

In only a few minutes I had opened up the entire life and history of Dr. Gerald Halpern, Ph.D. Of course, it was a little trickier than simply searching Halpern’s name on Google. There was, for example, the matter of the sealed court records, which took me almost five full minutes to open. But when I did, it was certainly worth the effort, and I found myself thinking, Well, well, well… And because at the moment I was tragically alone on the inside, with no one to hear my pensive remarks, I said it aloud, too. “Well, well, well,” I said.

The foster-care records would have been interesting enough—not because I felt any bond with Halpern from my own parentless past. I had been more than adequately provided with a home and family by Harry, Doris, and Deborah, unlike Halpern, who had flitted from foster home to foster home until finally landing at Syracuse University.

Far more interesting, however, was the file that no one was supposed to open without a warrant, a court order, and a stone tablet direct from the hand of God. And when I had read through it a second time, my reaction was even more profound. “Well, well, well, well,” I said, mildly unsettled at the way the words bounced off the walls of my empty little office. And since profound revelations are always more dramatic with an audience, I reached for the phone and called my sister.

In just a few minutes she pushed into my cubicle and sat on the folding chair. “What did you find?” she said.

“Dr. Gerald Halpern has A Past,” I said, carefully pronouncing the capital letters so she wouldn’t leap across the desk and hug me.

“I knew it,” she said. “What did he do?”

“It’s not so much what he did,” I said. “At this point, it’s more like what was done to him.”

“Quit screwing around,” she said. “What is it?”

“To begin with, he’s apparently an orphan.”

“Come on, Dex, cut to the chase.”

I held up a hand to try to calm her down, but it clearly didn’t work very well, because she started tapping her knuckles on the desktop. “I am trying to paint a subtle canvas here, Sis,” I said.

“Paint faster,” she said.

“All right. Halpern went into the foster-care system in upstate New York when they found him living in a box under the freeway. They found his parents, who were unfortunately dead of recent and unpleasant violence. It seems to have been very well-deserved violence.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“His parents were pimping him out to pedophiles,” I said.

“Jesus,” Deborah said, and she was clearly a little shocked. Even by Miami standards, this was a bit much.

“And Halpern doesn’t remember any of that part. He gets blackouts under stress, the file says. It makes sense. The blackouts were probably a conditioned response to the repeated trauma,” I said. “That can happen.”

“Well, fuck,” Deborah said, and I inwardly applauded her elegance. “So he forgets shit. You have to admit that fits. The girl tries to frame him for rape, and he’s already worried about tenure—so he gets stressed and kills her without knowing it.”

“A couple of other things,” I said, and I admit that I enjoyed the drama of the moment perhaps a little more than was necessary. “To begin with, the death of his parents.”

“What about it?” she said, quite clearly lacking any theatrical pleasure at all.

“Their heads were cut off,” I said. “And then the house was torched.”

Deborah straightened up. “Shit,” she said.

“I thought so, too.”

“Goddamn, that’s great, Dex,” she said. “We have his ass.”

“Well,” I said, “it certainly fits the pattern.”

“It sure as hell does,” she said. “So did he kill his parents?”

I shrugged. “They couldn’t prove anything. If they could, Halpern would have been committed. It was so violent that nobody could believe a kid had done it. But they’re pretty sure that he was there, and at least saw what happened.”

She looked at me hard. “So what’s wrong with that? You still think he didn’t do it? I mean, you’re having one of your hunches here?”

It stung a lot more than it should have, and I closed my eyes for a moment. There was still nothing there except dark and empty. My famous hunches were, of course, based on things whispered to me by the Dark Passenger, and in its absence I had nothing to go on. “I’m not having hunches lately,” I admitted. “There’s just something that bothers me about this. It just—”

I opened my eyes and Deborah was staring at me. For the first time today there was something in her expression beyond bubbly happiness, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask me what that meant and was I all right. I had no idea what I would say if she did, since the Dark Passenger was not something I had ever talked about, and the idea of sharing something that intimate was very unsettling.

“I don’t know,” I said weakly. “It doesn’t seem right.”

Deborah smiled gently. I would have felt more at ease if she had snarled and told me to fuck off, but she smiled and reached a hand across the desk to pat mine. “Dex,” she said softly, “the hard evidence is more than enough. The background fits. The motive is good. You admit you’re not having one of your…hunches.” She cocked her head to the side, still smiling, which made me even more uneasy. “This one is righteous, Bro. Whatever is bothering you, don’t pin it on this. He did it, we got him, that’s it.” She let go of my hand before either one of us could burst into tears. “But I’m a little worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” I said, and it sounded false even to me.

Deborah looked at me for a long moment, and then stood up. “All right,” she said. “But I’m here for you if you need me.” And she turned and walked away.

Somehow I slogged through the gray soup of the rest of the day and made it all the way home to Rita’s at the end of the day, where the soup gelled into an aspic of sensory deprivation. I don’t know what we had for dinner, or what anyone might have said. The only thing I could bring myself to listen for was the sound of the Passenger rushing back in, and this sound did not come. And so I swam through the evening on automatic pilot and finally went to bed, still completely wrapped up in Dull Empty Dexter.

It surprised me a great deal to learn it, but sleep is not automatic for humans, not even for the semi-human I was becoming. The old me, Dexter of the Darkness, had slept perfectly, with great ease, simply lying down, closing his eyes, and thinking, “One two three GO.” Presto, sleep-o.

But the New Model Dexter had no such luck.

I tossed, I turned, I commanded my pitiful self to go immediately to sleep with no further dithering, and all to no avail. I could not sleep. I could only lie there wide-eyed and wonder why.

And as the night dragged on, so did the terrible, dreary introspection. Had I been misleading myself my entire life? What if I was not Dashing Slashing Dexter and his Canny Sidekick the Passenger? What if I was, in fact, actually only a Dark Chauffeur, allowed to live in a small room at the big house in exchange for driving the master on his appointed rounds? And if my services were no longer required, what could I possibly be now that the boss had moved away? Who was I if I was no longer me?

It was not a happy thought, and it did not make me happy. It also did not help me sleep. Since I had already tossed and turned exhaustively, without getting exhausted, I now concentrated on rolling and pitching, with much the same result. But finally, at around 3:30 A.M., I must have hit on the right combination of pointless movement and I dropped off at last into a shallow uncomfortable sleep.

The sound and smell of bacon cooking woke me up. I glanced at the clock—it was 8:32, later than I ever sleep. But of course it was Saturday morning. Rita had allowed me to doze on in my miserable unconsciousness. And now she would reward my return to the land of the waking with a bountiful breakfast. Yahoo.

Breakfast did, in fact, take some of the sourness out of me. It is very hard to maintain a really good feeling of utter depression and total personal worthlessness when you are full of food, and I gave up trying halfway through an excellent omelet.

Cody and Astor had naturally been awake for hours—Saturday morning was their unrestricted television time, and they usually took advantage of it to watch a series of cartoon shows that would certainly have been impossible before the discovery of LSD. They did not even notice me when I staggered past them on my way to the kitchen, and they stayed glued to the image of a talking kitchen utensil while I finished my breakfast, had a final cup of coffee, and decided to give life one more day to get its act together.

“All better?” Rita asked as I put down my coffee mug.

“It was a very nice omelet,” I said. “Thank you.”

She smiled and lunged up out of her chair to give me a peck on the cheek before flinging all the dishes in the sink and starting to wash them. “Remember you said you’d take Cody and Astor somewhere this morning,” she said over the sound of running water.

“I said that?”

“Dexter, you know I have a fitting this morning. For my wedding gown. I told you that weeks ago, and you said fine, you would take care of the kids while I went over to Susan’s for the fitting, and then I really need to go to the florist’s and see about some arrangements, even Vince offered to help me with that, he says he has a friend?”

“I doubt that,” I said, thinking of Manny Borque. “Not Vince.”

“But I said no thanks. I hope that was all right?”

“Fine,” I said. “We have only one house to sell to pay for things.”

“I don’t want to hurt Vince’s feelings and I’m sure his friend is wonderful, but I have been going to Hans for flowers since forever, and he would be brokenhearted if I went somewhere else for the wedding.”

“All right,” I said. “I’ll take the kids.”

I had been hoping for a chance to devote some serious time to my own personal misery and find a way to start on the problem of the absent Passenger. Failing that, it would have been nice just to relax a little bit, perhaps even catch up on some of the precious sleep I had lost the night before, as was my sacred right.

It was, after all, a Saturday. Many well-regarded religions and labor unions have been known to recommend that Saturdays are for relaxation and personal growth; for spending time away from the hectic hurly-burly, in well-earned rest and recreation. But Dexter was more or less a family man nowadays, which changes everything, as I was learning. And with Rita spinning around making wedding preparations like a tornado with blond bangs, it was a clear imperative for me to scoop up Cody and Astor and take them away from the pandemonium to the shelter of some activity sanctioned by society as appropriate for adult-child bonding time.

After a careful study of my options, I chose the Miami Museum of Science and Planetarium. After all, it would be crowded with other family groups, which would maintain my disguise—and start them on theirs as well. Since they were planning to embark on the Dark Trail, they needed to begin right away to understand the notion that the more abnormal one is, the more important it is to appear normal.

And going to the museum with Doting Daddy Dexter was supremely normal-appearing for all three of us. It had the added cachet of being something that was officially Good for Them, a very big advantage, no matter how much that notion made them squirm.

So I loaded the three of us into my car and headed north on U.S. 1, promising the whirling Rita that we would return safely for dinner. I drove us through Coconut Grove and just before the Ricken-backer Causeway turned into the parking lot of the museum in question. We did not go gentle into that good museum, however. In the parking lot, Cody got out of the car and simply stood there. Astor looked at him for a moment, and then turned to me. “Why do we have to go in there?” she said.

“It’s educational,” I told her.

“Ick,” she said, and Cody nodded.

“It’s important for us to spend time together,” I said.

“At a museum?” Astor demanded. “That’s pathetic.”

“That’s a lovely word,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

“We’re not going in there,” she said. “We want to do something.”

“Have you ever been to this museum?”

“No,” she said, drawing the word out into three contemptuous syllables as only a ten-year-old girl can.

“Well, it might surprise you,” I said. “You might actually learn something.”

“That’s not what we want to learn,” she said. “Not at a museum.”

“What is it you think you want to learn?” I said, and even I was impressed by how very much like a patient adult I sounded.

Astor made a face. “You know,” she said. “You said you’d show us stuff.”

“How do you know I’m not?” I said.

She looked at me uncertainly for a moment, then turned to Cody. Whatever it was they said to each other, it didn’t require words. When she turned back to me a moment later, she was all business, totally self-assured. “No way,” she said.

“What do you know about the stuff I’m going to show you?”

“Dexter,” she said. “Why else did we ask you to show us?”

“Because you don’t know anything about it and I do.”

“Duh-uh.”

“Your education begins in that building,” I said with my most serious face. “Follow me and learn.” I looked at them for a moment, watched their uncertainty grow, then I turned and headed for the museum. Maybe I was just cranky from a night of lost sleep, and I was not sure they would follow, but I had to set down the ground rules right away. They had to do it my way, just as I had come to understand so long ago that I had to listen to Harry and do it his way.