EBORAH WAS WAITING AT A MODEST $2 MILLION HOUSE on a private cul-de-sac in Coconut Grove. The street was sealed off from just inside the guard booth to the house itself, about halfway down on the left, and a crowd of indignant residents stood around on their carefully manicured lawns and walkways, fuming at the swarm of low-rent social undesirables from the police department who had invaded their little paradise. Deborah was in the street instructing a videographer in what to shoot and from what angles. I hurried over to join her, with Cody and Astor trailing along right behind.

“What the hell is that?” Deborah demanded, glaring from the kids to me.

“They are known as children,” I told her. “They are often a byproduct of marriage, which may be why you are unfamiliar with them.”

“Are you off your fucking nut bringing them here?” she snapped.

“You’re not supposed to say that word,” Astor told Deborah with a glare. “You owe me fifty cents for saying it.”

Deborah opened her mouth, turned bright red, and closed it again. “You gotta get them outta here,” she finally said. “They shouldn’t see this.”

“We want to see it,” Astor said.

“Hush,” I told them. “Both of you.”

“Jesus Christ, Dexter,” Deborah said.

“You told me to come right away,” I said. “I came.”

“I can’t play nursemaid to a couple of kids,” Deborah said.

“You don’t have to,” I said. “They’ll be fine.”

Deborah stared at the two of them; they stared back. Nobody blinked, and for a moment I thought my dear sister would chew off her lower lip. Then she shook herself. “Screw it,” she said. “I don’t have time for a hassle. You two wait over there.” She pointed to her car, which was parked across the street, and grabbed me by the arm. She dragged me toward the house where all the activity was humming. “Lookit,” she said, and pointed at the front of the house.

On the phone, Deborah had told me they found the heads, but in truth it would have taken a major effort to miss them. In front of the house, the short driveway curled through a pair of coral-rock gateposts before puddling into a small courtyard with a fountain in the middle. On top of each gatepost was an ornate lamp. Chalked on the driveway between the posts was something that looked like the letters MLK, except that it was in a strange script that I did not recognize. And to make sure that no one spent too long puzzling out the message, on top of each gatepost—

Well. Although I had to admit the display had a certain primitive vigor and an undeniable dramatic impact, it was really far too crude for my taste. Even though the heads apparently had been carefully cleaned, the eyelids were gone and the mouths had been forced into a strange smile by the heat, and it was not pleasant. Certainly no one on-site asked my opinion, but I have always felt that there should be no leftovers. It’s untidy, and it shows a lack of a real workmanlike spirit. And for these heads to be left so conspicuously—this was mere showing off, and demonstrated an unrefined approach to the problem. Still, there’s no accounting for taste. I’m always willing to admit that my technique is not the only way. And as always in aesthetic matters, I waited for some small sibilant whisper of agreement from the Dark Passenger—but of course, there was nothing.

Not a murmur, not a twitch of the wing, not a peep. My compass was gone, leaving me in the very unsettling position of needing to hold my own hand.

Of course, I was not completely alone. There was Deborah beside me, and I became aware that as I was pondering the matter of my shadow companion’s disappearance, she was speaking to me.

“They were at the funeral this morning,” she said. “Came back and this was waiting for them.”

“Who are they?” I asked, nodding at the house.

Deborah jabbed me in the ribs with her elbow. It hurt. “The family, asshole. The Ortega family. What did I just say?”

“So this happened in daylight?” For some reason, that made it seem a little more disturbing.

“Most of the neighbors were at the funeral, too,” she said. “But we’re still looking for somebody who might have seen something.” She shrugged. “We might get lucky. Who knows.”

I did not know, but for some reason I did not think that anything connected to this would bring us luck. “I guess this creates a little doubt about Halpern’s guilt,” I said.

“It damned well does not,” she said. “That asshole is guilty.”

“Ah,” I said. “So you think that somebody else found the heads, and, uh…”

“Fucking hell, I don’t know,” she said. “Somebody must be working with him.”

I just shook my head. That didn’t make any sense at all, and we both knew it. Somebody capable of conceiving and performing the elaborate ritual of the two murders would almost have to do it alone. Such acts were so highly personal, each small step the acting out of some unique inner need, that the idea of two people sharing the same vision was almost pure nonsense. In a weird way, the ceremonial display of the heads fit in with the way the bodies had been left—two pieces of the same ritual.

“That doesn’t seem right,” I said.

“Well then, what does?”

I looked at the heads, perched so carefully atop the lamps. They had of course been burned in the fire that had toasted the bodies, and there were no traces of blood visible. The necks appeared to have been cut very neatly. Other than that, I had no keen insight into anything at all—and yet there was Deborah, staring at me expectantly. It’s difficult to have a reputation for being able to see into the still heart of the mystery when all that notoriety rests on the shadowy guidance of an interior voice that was, at the moment, somewhere else altogether. I felt like a ventriloquist’s dummy, suddenly called upon to perform the whole act alone.

“Both the heads are here,” I said, since I clearly had to say something. “Why not at the other girl’s house? The one with the boyfriend?”

“Her family lives in Massachusetts,” Deborah said. “This was easier.”

“And you checked him out, right?”

“Who?”

“The dead girl’s boyfriend,” I said slowly and carefully. “The guy with the tattoo on his neck.”

“Jesus Christ, Dexter, of course we’re checking him out. We’re checking out everybody who came within half a mile of these girls in their whole fucking sad little lives, and you—” She took a deep breath, but it didn’t seem to calm her down very much. “Listen, I don’t really need any help with the basic police work, okay? What I need help with is the weird creepy shit you’re supposed to know about.”

It was nice to confirm my identity as the Weird Creepy Shit King, but I did have to wonder how long it would last without my Dark Crown. Still, with my reputation on the line I had to venture some kind of insightful opinion, so I took a small bloodless stab at it.

“All right,” I said. “Then from a weird creepy point of view, it doesn’t make sense to have two different killers with the same ritual. So either Halpern killed ’em and somebody found the heads and thought, what the hell, I’ll hang ’em up—or else the wrong guy is in jail.”

“Fuck that,” she said.

“Which part?”

“All of it, goddamn it!” she said. “Neither one of those choices is any better.”

“Well, shit,” I said, surprising us both. And since I felt cranky beyond endurance with Deborah, and with myself, and with this whole burned-and-headless thing, I took the only logical, reasonable course. I kicked a coconut.

Much better. Now my foot hurt, too.

“I’m checking Goldman’s background,” she said abruptly, nodding at the house. “So far, he’s just a dentist. Owns an office building in Davie. But this—it smells like the cocaine cowboys. And that doesn’t make sense, either. Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said. “Give me something.”

I looked at Deborah with surprise. Somehow she had brought it around so it was back in my lap again, and I had absolutely nothing beyond a very strong hope that Goldman would turn out to be a drug lord who was only disguised as a dentist. “I have come up empty,” I said, which was sad but far too true.

“Aw, crap,” she said, looking past me to the edge of the gathering crowd. The first of the news vans had arrived, and even before the vehicle had come to a full stop the reporter leaped out and began poking at his cameraman, prodding him into position for a long shot. “Goddamn it,” Deborah said, and hurried over to deal with them.

“That guy is scary, Dexter,” said a small voice behind me, and I turned quickly around. Once again, Cody and Astor had snuck up on me unobserved. They stood together, and Cody inclined his head toward the small crowd that had gathered on the far side of the crime-scene tape.

“Which guy is scary?” I said, and Astor said, “There. In the orange shirt. Don’t make me point, he’s looking.”

I looked for an orange shirt in the crowd and saw only a flash of color at the far end of the cul-de-sac as someone ducked into a car. It was a small blue car, not a white Avalon—but I did notice a familiar dab of additional color dangling from the rearview mirror as the car moved out onto the main road. And although it was difficult to be sure, I was relatively confident that it was a University of Miami faculty parking pass.

I turned back to Astor. “Well, he’s gone now,” I said. “Why did you say he was scary?”

“He says so,” Astor said, pointing to Cody, and Cody nodded.

“He was,” Cody said, barely above a whisper. “He had a big shadow.”

“I’m sorry he scared you,” I said. “But he’s gone now.”

Cody nodded. “Can we look at the heads?”

Children are so interesting, aren’t they? Here Cody had been frightened by something as insubstantial as somebody’s shadow, and yet he was as eager as I’d ever seen him to get a closer look at a concrete example of murder, terror, and human mortality. Of course I didn’t blame him for wanting a peek, but I didn’t think I could openly allow it. On the other hand, I had no idea how to explain all of this to them, either. I am told that the Turkish language, for example, has subtleties far beyond what I can imagine, but English was definitely not adequate for a proper response.

Happily for me, Deborah came back just then, muttering, “I will never complain about the captain again.” That seemed highly unlikely, but it did not seem politic to say so. “He can have those bloodsucking bastards from the press.”

“Maybe you’re just not a people person,” I said.

“Those assholes aren’t people,” she said. “All they want is to get some goddamned pictures of their perfect fucking haircuts standing in front of the heads, so they can send their tape to the network. What kind of animal wants to see this?”

Actually, I knew the answer to that one, since I was shepherding two of them at the moment and, truth be told, might be considered one myself. But it did seem like I should avoid this question and try to keep our focus on the problem at hand. So I pondered whatever it was that had made Cody’s scary guy seem scary, and the fact that he’d had what looked very much like a university parking permit.

“I’ve had a thought,” I said to Deborah, and the way her head snapped around you might have thought I’d told her she was standing on a python. “It doesn’t really fit with your dentist-as-drug-lord theory,” I warned her.

“Out with it,” she said through her teeth.

“Somebody was here, and he scared the kids. He took off in a car with a faculty parking tag.”

Deborah stared at me, her eyes hard and opaque. “Shit,” she said softly. “The guy Halpern said, what’s his name?”

“Wilkins,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Can’t be. All because the kids say somebody scared them? No.”

“He has a motive,” I said.

“To get tenure, for Christ’s sake? Come on, Dex.”

“We don’t have to think it’s important,” I said. “They do.”

“So to get tenure,” she said, shaking her head, “he breaks into Halpern’s apartment, steals his clothes, kills two girls—”

“And then steers us to Halpern,” I said, remembering how he had stood there in the hall and suggested it.

Deborah’s head jerked around to face me. “Shit,” she said. “He did do that, didn’t he? Told us to go see Halpern.”

“And however feeble tenure might seem as a motive,” I said, “it makes more sense than Danny Rollins and Ted Bundy getting together on a little project, doesn’t it?”

Deborah smoothed down the back of her hair, a surprisingly feminine gesture for someone I had come to think of as Sergeant Rock. “It might,” she said finally. “I don’t know enough about Wilkins to say for sure.”

“Shall we go talk to him?”

She shook her head. “First I want to see Halpern again,” she said.

“Let me get the kids,” I said.

Naturally enough, they were not anywhere near where they should have been. But I found them easily enough; they had wandered over to get a better look at the two heads, and it may have been my imagination, but I thought I could see a small gleam of professional appreciation in Cody’s eyes.

“Come on,” I told them, “we have to get going.” They turned away and followed me reluctantly, but I did hear Astor muttering under her breath, “Better than a stupid museum anyway.”

image

From the far edge of the group that had gathered to see the spectacle he had watched, careful to be just one of the staring crowd, no different from all the rest of them, and unobserved in any specific way. It was a risk for the Watcher to be there at all—he could well be recognized, but he was willing to take the chance. And of course, it was gratifying to see the reaction to his work; a small vanity but one he allowed himself.

Besides, he was curious to see what they would make of the one simple clue he had left. The other was clever—but so far he had ignored it, walking right past and allowing his coworkers to photograph it and examine it. Perhaps he should have been a little more blatant—but there was time to do this right. No hurry at all, and the importance of getting the other ready, taking him when it was all just right—that outweighed everything else.

The Watcher moved a little closer, to study the other, perhaps see some sign as to how he was reacting so far. Interesting to bring those children with him. They didn’t seem particularly disturbed by the sight of the two heads. Perhaps they were used to such things, or—

No. It was not possible.

Moving with the greatest possible care, he edged closer, still trying to work his way near with the natural ebb and flow of the onlookers, until he got to the yellow tape at a point as close to the children as he could get.

And when the boy looked up and their eyes met, there was no longer any possibility of mistake.

For a moment their gaze locked and all sense of time was lost in the whir of shadowy wings. The boy simply stood there and stared at him with recognition—not of who he was but of what, and his small dark wings fluttered in panicked fury. The Watcher could not help himself; he moved closer, allowing the boy to see him and the nimbus of dark power he carried. The boy showed no fear—simply looked back at him and showed his own power. Then the boy turned away and took his sister’s hand, and the two of them trotted over to the other.

Time to leave. The children would certainly point him out, and he did not want his face seen, not yet. He hurried back to the car and drove away, but not with anything like worry. Not at all. If anything, he was more pleased than he had a right to be.

It was the children, of course. Not just that they would tell the other, and move him a few small steps further into the necessary fear. But also because he really liked children. They were wonderful to work with, they broadcast emotions that were so very powerful, and raised the whole energy of the event to a higher plane.

Children—wonderful.

This was actually starting to be enjoyable.

o O o!!!For a while, it was enough to ride in the monkey-things and help them kill. But even this grew dull with the simple repetition, and every now and then IT felt again that there had to be something more. There was that tantalizing twitch of something indefinable at the moment of the kill, the sense that something stirred toward waking and then settled back down again, and IT wanted to know what that was.!!!But no matter how many times, no matter how many different monkey-things, IT could never get any closer to that feeling, never push in far enough to find out what it was. And that made IT want to know all the more.!!!A great deal of time went by, and IT began to turn sour again. The monkey-things were just too simple, and whatever IT did with them was not enough. IT began to resent their stupid, pointless, endlessly repeating existence. IT lashed out at them once or twice, wanting to punish them for their dumb, unimaginative suffering, and IT drove IT’s host to kill entire families, whole tribes of the things. And as they all died, that wonderful hint of something else would hang there just out of reach and then settle back down again into slumber.!!!It was furiously frustrating; there had to be a way to break through, find out what that elusive something was and pull it into existence.!!!And then at last, the monkey-things began to change. It was very slow at first, so slow that IT didn’t even realize what was happening until the process was well under way. And one wonderful day, when IT went into a new host, the thing stood up on its back legs and, as IT still wondered what was happening, the thing said, “Who are you?”!!!The extreme shock of this moment was followed by an even more extreme pleasure.!!!IT was no longer alone.