T WAS VERY LATE WHEN I GOT HOME, ALMOST MIDNIGHT, AND out of pure reflexive habit I went into the kitchen and looked to see if Rita had left some food for me. But no matter how hard I looked, there were no leftovers, not even a single slice of pizza. I searched carefully, all in vain. There was no Tupperware container on the counter, nothing on the stove, no covered bowl in the refrigerator, not even a Wendy’s bag on the table. I searched the entire kitchen, but I found no sign of anything edible.

I suppose it was not really a tragedy, comparatively speaking. Worse things happen every day, and one of them had just happened to Camilla Figg, someone I had known for years. I really should have been grieving a little bit. But I was hungry, and Rita had left me nothing to eat; to me that seemed vastly more saddening, the death of a great and sustaining tradition, a violation of some unspoken but important principle that had nurtured me through my many trials. No food for Dexter; All was Utterly Lost.

I did, however, find a chair pulled out from the kitchen table at a sloppy angle, and Rita’s shoes flung haphazardly down beside it. Her work was once again piled up on the table, and her blouse hung messily from the back of the chair. Across the room I saw a yellow square stuck to the refrigerator and I went over to look; it was a Post-it note, presumably from Rita, although the scrawled words did not look like her usual neat handwriting. The note was stuck to the freezer door and it said, “Brian called—where were you!?!” It had taken her two tries to write the “B” in “Brian,” and the last word was crookedly underlined three times; the point of the pen had gone all the way through and made a small tear in the paper.

It was only a small yellow note, but something about it made me pause, and I stood there by the refrigerator for a moment, holding the Post-it and wondering why it troubled me. It was surely not the slapdash handwriting; no doubt Rita was simply tired, frazzled by rushing out of work after a long tense day of fighting her annual crisis at work, and then hustling three kids through the hot and crowded Miami evening and into a burger joint. It was enough to make anybody tense up, grow weary, and …

… and lose the ability to make the letter “B” properly?

That didn’t make any sense at all. Rita was a precise person, neurotically neat and methodical. It was one of the qualities I admired in her, and mere fatigue and frustration had never before dimmed her passion for doing things in an orderly way. She had faced many hardships in her life, like her disastrous first marriage to the physically abusive drug addict, and she had always dealt with the violent disorder of life by making it stand up straight, brush its teeth, and put its laundry in the hamper. For her to scrawl a messy note and leave her shoes and clothing scattered across the floor like this was very much out of character, and a clear indication that, um … what?

Last time it had been a spilled glass of wine—had it spilled because she’d had more than one? And done the same thing again tonight?

I went back over to the kitchen table and looked down at where Rita had sat and left her shoes, and I looked at it as a trained and highly skilled forensics technician. The angle of the left shoe showed a lack of motor control, and the sloppily hanging blouse was a definite indication of lessened inhibition. But just for the sake of scientific confirmation I walked over to the big covered trash can by the back door. Inside the can, underneath a scattering of paper towels and junk mail, was an empty bottle that had recently contained red wine.

Rita was enthusiastic about recycling—but here was an empty bottle stuffed into the trash can and covered over with paper. And I did not remember seeing the bottle when it was full, and I am usually very familiar with what is in my kitchen. This was a whole bottle of merlot, and it should have been visible almost anywhere in the kitchen. But I hadn’t seen it. That meant that either Rita had gone to some trouble to hide it—or else she bought the bottle tonight, drank it all in one sitting, and forgot to recycle.

This was not a glass of wine while she worked and I ordered pizza. This was a whole bottle—and worse, she drank it when I was out of the house, leaving the children unwatched and unprotected.

She was drinking far too much, and far too often. I had assumed that she was just sipping a little wine as a way of dealing with the temporary stress—but this was more than that. Had some other unknown factor suddenly changed Rita into an emerging lush? And if so, wasn’t I supposed to do something about it? Or should I wait until she began to miss work and neglect the children?

From down the hall, as if on cue, I heard Lily Anne begin to cry, and I hurried into the bedroom to her crib. She was kicking her feet and waving her arms around, and when I lifted her out of her little bed it was obvious why. Her diaper was bulging out against her sleepy suit, full to overflowing. I glanced at Rita; she was facedown on the bed, snoring, one arm flung up and the other pinned under her. Clearly, Lily Anne’s fussing had not penetrated the fog of her sleep, and Rita had failed to change the baby’s diaper before she went to bed. It was not at all like her—but then, neither was secret and excessive wine drinking.

Lily Anne kicked her feet harder and moved the volume of her crying up a few notches, and I took her over to the changing table. Her problem was clear and immediate and it was something I could deal with simply. Rita would take some thought, and it was too late at night for thinking. I got the baby changed into a dry diaper and rocked her until she stopped fussing and went back to sleep. I put her back in the crib, and went over to my bed.

Rita lay there in the exact same position, sprawled unmoving across two-thirds of the bed. She might have been dead, except for the snoring. I looked down at her and wondered what was going on in that pleasant-looking blond head. She had always been totally reliable, completely predictable and dependable, never deviating even one small step from her basic pattern of behavior. It was one of the reasons I had decided it was a good idea to marry her—I almost always knew exactly what she would do. She was like a perfect little toy railroad set, whirring around the same track, past the same scenery, day after day without change.

Until now—clearly she had gone off the tracks for some reason, and I had the unpleasant idea that I was supposed to deal with it in some way. Should I stage an intervention? Force her to go to an AA meeting? Threaten to divorce her and make her keep the kids? This was all foreign turf to me, ideas that were in the syllabus for Advanced Marriage, a postgraduate course in the area of human studies, and I knew almost nothing about it.

But whatever the answer might be, I was not going to figure it out tonight. After the long workday, dealing with Shadowblog and whimpering coworkers and Detective Knucklehead, I was bone-tired. A thick and stupid cloud of fatigue had spread over my brain and I had to sleep before I did anything else.

I rolled Rita’s limp body over to her side of the bed and climbed under the sheet. I needed sleep, as much as possible, and right now, and almost as soon as my head hit the pillow I was unconscious.

The alarm woke me up at seven, and as I slapped it off, I had the entirely unreasonable feeling that everything was going to be all right. I had gone to bed with the worry bin full: Rita and Shadowblog and Camilla Figg—and during the night something had come along and swept away all my fretting. Yes, there were problems. But I would deal with them; I always had before, and I would this time. It was entirely illogical, I know, but I was filled with relaxed confidence instead of the bone-tired anxiety of last night. I have no idea why the change had happened; maybe it was the effect of deep and dreamless sleep. In any case, I woke up into a world where unreasonable optimism seemed like common sense. I am not saying I heard birds singing in the golden sunlight of a perfect dawn, but I did smell coffee and bacon coming from the kitchen, which was a far better thing than any singing bird I have ever heard. I showered and dressed, and when I got to the kitchen table there was a plate of sunny-side-up eggs waiting for me, with three crisp strips of bacon on the side, and a mug of hot and strong coffee on the table next to it.

“You were out awfully late,” Rita said as she cracked an egg into the skillet. For some reason, it sounded almost like she was accusing me of something, but since that made no sense, I decided it was just the residual effect of too much wine.

“Camilla Figg was killed last night,” I said. “The woman I work with?”

Rita turned from the stove, spatula in her hand, and looked at me. “So you were working?” she said, and once again that too-much-wine-last-night edge was in her voice.

“Yes,” I said. “They didn’t find her until late in the day.”

She watched me for a few seconds, and then finally shook her head. “That would explain it, wouldn’t it,” she said, but she kept looking at me as if it didn’t explain anything.

It made me a bit uneasy; why was she staring like that? I glanced down to make sure I was wearing pants, and I was. When I looked up again, she was still staring.

“Is something wrong?” I said.

Rita shook her head. “Wrong?” she said. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Is something wrong, he wants to know?” She looked at me with her hands on her hips and tapped one toe impatiently. “Why don’t you tell me if something’s wrong, Dexter?”

I looked back at her with surprise. “Um,” I said, wondering what the right answer was, “as far as I know, nothing is wrong. I mean, nothing out of the ordinary …?” It seemed like a sadly inadequate answer, even to me, and Rita clearly agreed.

“Oh, good, nothing’s wrong,” she said. And she just kept looking at me, raising one eyebrow and tapping her toe like she was expecting more, even though what I had already said was so very feeble.

I glanced behind her to the stove; smoke was rising from the pan, where fragrant steam should have been. “Um, Rita?” I said carefully. “I think something’s burning?”

She blinked at me, and then, as she understood what I had said, she whipped around to the stove. “Oh, shit, look at that,” she said, leaping forward with the spatula raised. “No, shit, look at the time,” she added in a voice that was rising with what must have been frustration. “Damn it, why can’t it— There’s just never any— Cody? Astor? Come get your breakfast! Now!” She scraped two eggs out of the pan, threw in a pat of butter, and broke two more eggs into the pan in a series of motions so rapid that it seemed like one move. “Kids? Now! Come on!” she said. She glanced at me again—and then hesitated for just a moment, looking down at me. “I just— We need to …” She shook her head, as if she couldn’t think what the words might be in English. “I didn’t hear you come in last night,” she said, the end of the sentence trickling off weakly.

And I might have said that last night she wouldn’t have heard the Queen’s Own Highland Regiment marching through the house with bagpipes skirling, but I had no idea what she wanted me to say, and why ruin a lovely morning trying to find out? Besides, my mouth was full of egg yolk, and it would have been rude to talk through the food. So I just smiled and made a dismissive sound and ate my breakfast. She looked at me expectantly for a moment more, but then Cody and Astor trudged in, and Rita turned away to hurry their breakfast onto the table. The morning went on in its perfectly normal way, and I was once more feeling the feebleminded glimmer of unfounded hope I woke up with as I drove in to work through the crawling traffic.

Even in the early morning, Miami traffic has an edge to it that you don’t find in other cities. Miami drivers seem to wake up faster and meaner than others. Maybe it’s because the bright and relentless sunlight makes everyone realize that they could be out fishing, or at the beach, instead of crawling along the highway to a boring, soul-crushing, dead-end job that doesn’t pay them anything near what they are really worth. Or maybe it’s just the added jolt we get from our extra-strong Miami coffee.

Whatever the reason, I have never seen a morning drive without a full edge of homicidal mania, and this morning was no exception. People honked, yelled threats, and waved middle fingers, and at the interchange for the Palmetto Expressway an old Buick had rear-ended a new BMW. A fistfight had broken out on the shoulder, and everyone else slowed down to watch, or to shout at the fighters, and it took an extra ten minutes for me to get past the mess and in to work. That was just as well, considering what was waiting for me when I got there.

Since I was still feeling stupidly bright and chipper, I did not stop for a cup of the lethal coffee that might, after all, kill the buzz—or even me. Instead I went directly to my desk, where I found Deborah waiting for me, slumped into my chair and looking like the poster girl for the National Brooding Outrage Foundation. Her left arm was still in a sling, but her cast had lost its clean and bright patina, and she had leaned it against my desk blotter and knocked over my pencil holder. But nobody is perfect, and it was such a happy morning, so I let it go.

“Good morning, sis,” I said cheerfully, which seemed to offend her more than it should have. She made a face and shook her head dismissively, as if the goodness or badness of the morning was irritating and irrelevant.

“What happened last night?” she said, in a voice that was harsher than usual. “Was it the same as the others?”

“You mean Camilla Figg?” I said, and now she very nearly snarled.

“What the fuck else would I mean?” she said. “Goddamn it, Dex, I need to know—was it the same?”

I sat down in the folding chair opposite my desk, which I thought was quite noble of me, considering that Debs was in my very own chair and this other one was not terribly comfortable. “I don’t think so,” I said, and Deborah hissed out a very long breath.

“Fuck it; I knew it,” she said, and she straightened up and looked at me with an eager gleam in her eye. “What’s different?”

I raised a hand to slow her down. “It’s nothing really compelling,” I said. “At least, Detective Hood didn’t think so.”

“That stupid asshole couldn’t find the floor using both feet,” she snapped. “What did you get?”

“Well,” I said, “just that the skin was broken in two places. So there was some blood at the scene. Uh, the body wasn’t arranged quite right, either.” She looked at me expectantly, so I said, “The, um, I think the trauma wounds were different.”

“Different how?” she said.

“I think they were made with something else,” I said. “Like, not a hammer.”

“With what,” she said. “With a golf club? A Buick? What?”

“I couldn’t tell,” I said. “But probably something with a round surface. Maybe …” I hesitated for a half-second; even saying it out loud made me feel like I was being paranoid. But Debs was looking at me with an expression of eagerness-ready-to-turn-cranky, so I said it. “Maybe a baseball bat.”

“Okay,” she said, and she kept that same expression focused on me.

“Um, the body wasn’t really arranged the same,” I said. Deborah kept staring, and when I didn’t say anything else she frowned. “That’s it?” she said.

“Almost,” I said. “We’ll have to wait for the autopsy, to be sure, but one of the wounds was on her head, and I think Camilla was unconscious or even dead when the wounds were made.”

“That doesn’t mean shit,” she said.

“Deborah, there was no blood at all with the others. And the first two times the killer was incredibly careful to keep them awake the whole time—he never even broke the skin.”

“You’ll never sell that to the captain,” she said. “The whole fucking department wants my head on a stick, and if I can’t prove I got the right guy locked up, he’s going to give it to them.”

“I can’t prove anything,” I said. “But I know I’m right.” She cocked her head to one side and looked at me quizzically. “One of your voices?” she said carefully. “Can you make it tell you anything more?”

When Deborah had finally found out what I really am, I had tried to explain the Dark Passenger to her. I had told her that the many times I’d had “hunches” about a killer were actually hints from a kindred spirit inside me. Apparently I’d made a clumsy mess of it, because she still seemed to think I went into some kind of trance and chatted long-distance with somebody in the Great Beyond.

“It’s not really like a Ouija board,” I said.

“I don’t care if it’s talking tea leaves,” she said. “Get it to tell us something I can use.”

Before I could open my mouth and let out the cranky comeback that was lurking there, a massive foot clomped at the doorway, and a large dark shadow fell over the shreds of my pleasant morning. I looked around, and there, in person, was the end of all happy thoughts.

Detective Hood leaned against the doorframe and gave us his very best mean smile. “Looka this,” he said. “Wall-to-wall loser.”

“Looka that,” Debs snapped back at him. “Talking asshole.”

Hood didn’t seem terribly hurt. “Asshole in charge to you, darling,” he said. “Asshole who will find the real cop killer, instead of fucking around on Good Morning America.”

Deborah blushed; it was a very unfair remark, but it hit home anyway. To her very great credit, though, she came right back with a zinger of her own. “You couldn’t find your own dick with a search party,” she said.

“And it would be a pretty small party anyway,” I added cheerfully; after all, family has to stick together.

Hood glared at me, and his smile got bigger and meaner. “You,” he said, “are off this thing altogether as of right now. Just like your Hollywood sister.”

“Really,” I said. “Because I can prove you’re wrong?”

“Nope,” he said. “Because you are now”—Hood paused to taste the words, and then let them out in a slow, obviously delicious trickle—“a person of interest to the investigation.”

I had been all set to whip another witty and stinging remark at him, no matter what he said, but this took me totally by surprise. “Person of interest” was police code for, “We think you’re guilty and we’re going to prove it.” And as I stared at him in numb horror I realized that there was no clever response to being told that you’re under investigation for murder—especially when you didn’t even get to commit one first. I felt my mouth open and close a couple of times in what must have looked like a really good imitation of a grouper pulled up out of deep water, but no sound came out. Luckily, Deborah jumped right in for me.

“What kind of brain-dead bullshit are you pulling, Richard?” she said. “You can’t chase him for this just because he knows you’re a moron.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. “I have a really good reason.” And as he spoke you would have thought he was the happiest man in the world—until you saw the next man who came into my office.

And that next man came in like he’d been waiting his whole life for just the right cue line to his dramatic entrance. I heard a stiff and rhythmic clumping in the hall as Hood’s last two words still hung in the air, and then the real happiest man in the world came in.

I say “man,” but in truth it was really no more than three-fourths of a flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens. The prosthetic clatter of his steps revealed that the living feet were gone, and twin metal pincers gleamed where his hands should have been. But the teeth were still human, and every single one of them was showing as he stumped in and gave a large manila envelope to Hood.

“Thanks,” Hood said, and Sergeant Doakes just nodded and kept his eyes fixed on me, his supernaturally happy smile stretching across his face and filling me with dread.

“What the fuck is this?” Deborah said, but Hood just shook his head and opened the envelope. He pulled out what looked like an eight-by-ten glossy picture and twirled it onto my desk.

“Can you tell me what this is?” he said to me.

I reached over and picked up the photo. I did not recognize it, but as I looked at it I had a brief and unsettling moment of feeling that I had lost my mind as I thought, But that looks like me! And then I took a steadying breath, looked again, and thought, It is me! Which made absolutely no sense, no matter how reassuring it was.

It was me. It was a picture of Dexter: shirtless, half turned away from the camera, and stepping away from a body sprawled on the pavement. My first thought was, But I don’t remember leaving a body there.… And it doesn’t really say good things about me to admit it, but my second thought, as I looked at my bared torso, was, I look good! Muscle tone excellent, abs in good shape—no sign of the very slight spare tire that had been settling around my waist lately. So the picture was probably a year or two old—which did not explain why Doakes was so pleased with it.

I pushed away my narcissistic thoughts and tried to focus on the picture itself, since it apparently represented a very real threat to me. Nothing occurred, no hint of where it had been taken or who had taken it, and I looked up at Hood. “Where did you get this?” I asked.

“Do you recognize the picture?” Hood said.

“I’ve never seen it before,” I said. “But I think that’s me.”

Doakes made a kind of gurgling sound that might have been laughter, and Hood nodded as if a thought was actually forming in his bony head. “You think,” he said.

“Yes, I do,” I said. “And it really doesn’t hurt; you should try it sometime.”

Hood pulled another photo out of the envelope and flipped it onto the desk. “What about this one?” he said. “You think that’s you, too?”

I looked at the picture. This one showed the same setting as the first, but now I was a bit farther away from the body and pulling on a shirt. Something new had come into the field of focus, and after a moment of study I recognized it as the back of Angel Batista’s head. He was bending over the body on the ground, and the little lightbulb over my head finally went on.

“Oh,” I said, and relief flooded in. This was not a picture of Dexter caught in the act of shuffling off somebody’s mortal coil; it was Dexter on Duty, a mere workaday nothing. I could explain it simply, even prove it, and I was off the hook. “Now I remember. This was like two years ago, a crime scene in Liberty City. Drive-by shooting—three victims, very messy. I got blood on my shirt.”

“Uh-huh,” Hood said, and Doakes shook his head, still smiling fondly.

“Well,” I said, “it happens sometimes. I keep a clean shirt in my bag just in case.” Hood kept staring at me; I shrugged. “So I changed into the clean shirt,” I said, hoping he would understand at last.

“Good idea,” he said, nodding as if he approved of my solid common sense, and he threw one more picture onto the desk. “What about this one?”

I picked it up. It was me again, very obviously me. It was a close-up shot of my face, in profile. I was looking off into the distance with an expression of noble longing that probably meant it was time for lunch. There was a slight dusting of beard stubble on my face, which hadn’t been there in the first pictures, so this one had been taken at a different time. But because it was so very tightly focused on my face, I couldn’t make out anything at all that would tell me more about the picture, or when it had been taken. On the plus side, that meant there was no way it could be used to prove anything against me, either.

So I shook my head and flipped the picture back onto my desk. “Very nice picture,” I said. “Tell me, Detective, do you think a man can be too handsome?”

“Yeah,” said Hood. “I think he can be too fucking funny, too.” And he flipped one last photo onto the desk. “Laugh this one off, funny boy.”

I picked up the picture. It showed me again, but this time standing face-to-face with Camilla Figg. There was an expression of startled adoration on her face, a look of such fond longing that even a dolt like Hood could read it without help. I stared, scanning for clues, and finally recognized the background. This had been taken at the Torch, where Officer Gunther had been found. But so what? Why was this large and stupid thug showing me pictures of me, nice as they were?

I flipped the photo back onto the desk with the others. “I had no idea I was so photogenic,” I said. “Do I get to keep them?”

“No,” Hood said. He leaned over me to the desk and the odor of unwashed detective overlaid with cheap cologne almost made me gag. Hood scooped up the photos and straightened as he stuffed them back into the envelope.

With Hood a few feet away from me once more, I managed to breathe again, and since my curiosity was coming to a boil, I used the breath for something practical. “They’re all very nice pictures,” I said. “But so what?”

“So what?” Hood said, and Doakes made another one of his tongueless but joyful sounds; there were no actual words to it, but the garbled syllables had a distinct overtone of gotcha that I did not like at all. “Is that all you got to say about your girlfriend’s photo collection?”

“I’m married,” I said. “I don’t have a girlfriend.”

“Not anymore you don’t,” Hood said. “She’s dead.” And as if they were wired together and controlled from offstage, Hood and Doakes showed all their teeth in unison in a blinding display of enamel and carnivorous happiness. “These were in Camilla Figg’s apartment,” Hood said. “And there’s hundreds more of ’em.”

He pointed a finger the size of a banana right between my eyes. “All of you,” he said.