HAD BARELY SETTLED BACK INTO MY CHAIR WHEN DEBORAH came into my little cubicle and sat in the folding chair across from my desk.

“Kurt Wagner is missing,” she said.

I waited for more, but nothing came, so I just nodded. “I accept your apology,” I said.

“Nobody’s seen him since Saturday afternoon,” she said. “His roommate says he came in acting all freaked out, but wouldn’t say anything. He just changed his shoes, and left, and that’s it.” She hesitated, and then added, “He left his backpack.”

I admit I perked up a little at that. “What was in it?” I asked.

“Traces of blood,” she said, as if she was admitting she had taken the last cookie. “It matches Tammy Connor’s.”

“Well then,” I said. It didn’t seem right to say anything about the fact that she’d had somebody else do the blood work. “That’s a pretty good clue.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s him. It has to be him. So he did Tammy, took the head in his backpack and did Manny Borque.”

“It does look like that,” I said. “That’s a shame—I was just getting used to the idea that I was guilty.”

“It makes no fucking sense,” Deborah complained. “The kid’s a good student, on the swimming team, good family—all of that.”

“He was such a nice guy,” I said. “I can’t believe he did all those horrible things.”

“All right,” Deborah said. “I know it, goddamn it. Total cliché. But what the hell—the guy kills his own girlfriend, sure. Maybe even her roommate, because she saw it. But why everybody else? And all that crap with burning them, and the bulls’ heads, what is it, Mollusk?”

“Moloch,” I said. “Mollusk is a clam.”

“Whatever,” she said. “But it makes no sense, Dex. I mean…” She looked away, and for a moment I thought she was going to apologize after all. But I was wrong. “If it does make sense,” she said, “it’s your kind of sense. The kind of thing you know about.” She looked back at me, but she still seemed to be embarrassed. “That’s, you know—I mean, is it, um—did it come back? Your, uh…”

“No,” I said. “It didn’t come back.”

“Well,” she said, “shit.”

“Did you put out a BOLO on Kurt Wagner?” I asked.

“I know how to do my job, Dex,” she said. “If he’s in the Miami-Dade area, we’ll get him, and FDLE has it, too. If he’s in Florida, somebody’ll find him.”

“And if he’s not in Florida?”

She looked hard at me, and I saw the beginnings of the way Harry had looked before he got sick, after so many years as a cop: tired, and getting used to the idea of routine defeat. “Then he’ll probably get away with it,” she said. “And I’ll have to arrest you to save my job.”

“Well, then,” I said, trying hard for cheerfulness in the face of overwhelming grim grayness, “let’s hope he drives a very recognizable car.”

She snorted. “It’s a red Geo, one of those mini-Jeep things.”

I closed my eyes. It was a very odd sensation, but I felt all the blood in my body suddenly relocating to my feet. “Did you say red?” I heard myself ask in a remarkably calm voice.

There was no answer, and I opened my eyes. Deborah was staring at me with a look of suspicion so strong I could almost touch it.

“What the hell is that,” she said. “One of your voices?”

“A red Geo followed me home the other night,” I said. “And then somebody tried to break into my house.”

“Goddamn it,” she snarled at me, “when the fuck were you going to tell me all this?”

“Just as soon as you decided you were speaking to me again,” I said.

Deborah turned a very gratifying shade of crimson and looked down at her shoes. “I was busy,” she said, not very convincingly.

“So was Kurt Wagner,” I said.

“All right, Jesus,” she said, and I knew that was all the apology I would ever get. “Yeah, it’s red. But shit,” she said, still looking down, “I think that old man was right. The bad guys are winning.”

I didn’t like seeing my sister this depressed. I felt that some cheery remark was called for, something that would lift the gloom and bring a song back to her heart, but alas, I came up empty. “Well,” I said at last, “if the bad guys really are winning, at least there’s plenty of work for you.”

She looked up at last, but not with anything resembling a smile. “Yeah,” she said. “Some guy in Kendall shot his wife and two kids last night. I get to go work on that.” She stood up, straightening slowly into something that at least resembled her normal posture. “Hooray for our side,” she said, and walked out of my office.

o O o!!!From the very beginning it was an ideal partnership. The new things had self-awareness, and that made manipulating them much easier—and much more rewarding for IT. They killed one another much more readily, too, and IT did not have to wait long at all for a new host—nor to try again to reproduce. IT eagerly drove IT’s host to a killing, and IT waited, longing to feel the strange and wonderful swelling.!!!But when the feeling came, it simply stirred slowly, tickled IT with a tendril of sensation, and then vanished without blossoming and producing offspring.!!!IT was puzzled. Why didn’t reproduction work this time? There had to be a reason, and IT was orderly and efficient in IT’s search for the answer. Over many years, as the new things changed and grew, IT experimented. And gradually IT found the conditions that made reproduction work. It took quite a few kills before IT was satisfied that IT had found the answer, but each time IT duplicated the final formula, a new awareness came into being and fled into the world in pain and terror, and IT was satisfied.!!!The thing worked best when the hosts were off-balance a bit, either from the drinks they had begun to brew or from some kind of trance state. The victim had to know what was coming, and if there was an audience of some kind, their emotions fed into the experience and made it even more powerful.!!!Then there was fire—fire was a very good way to kill the victims. It seemed to release their essence all at once in a great shrieking jolt of spectacular energy.!!!And finally, the whole thing worked better with the young ones. The emotions all around were so much stronger, especially in the parents. It was wonderful beyond anything else IT could imagine.!!!Fire, trance, young victims. A simple formula.!!!IT began to push the new hosts to create a way to establish these conditions permanently. And the hosts were surprisingly willing to go along with IT.