T WAS A PRETTY GOOD FIGHT, AS THESE THINGS GO, AND IT would have lasted a whole lot longer if not for the FDLE man. He was a guy I knew about by reputation, named Chambers, and he literally stepped in between Deborah and the other detective, a large man named Burris. Putting one hand out onto Burris’s chest, and the other politely in the air in front of Deborah, Chambers said, “Cut it out.” Burris shut up immediately. I saw Debs take a breath to say something, and Chambers looked at her. She looked back and held her breath, and then just let it out silently.

I was impressed, and I edged around to get a better look at the man from the FDLE. He had a shaved head and he was not tall, but as he swung around I could see his face, and I knew why Debs had buttoned her lip, even without the small warning flutter from the Passenger. The man had gunfighter’s eyes, the kind you see on the old pictures of Wild West lawmen. You did not argue with those eyes. It was like looking into two cold, blue pistol barrels.

“Lookit,” Chambers was saying. “We want to solve this thing, not fight about it.” Burris nodded, and Deborah said nothing. “So let Forensics finish up, try to get an ID on the victim. If the lab work says it’s your girl,” he said, nodding at Deborah, “it’s your case. If not”—and he tilted his head to Burris—“go crazy. It’s all yours. Until then”—he looked straight at Debs and, to her great credit, she looked back without whimpering—“you stay quiet and let Burris work. All right?”

“I get access,” Deborah said sullenly.

“Access,” Chambers said. “Not control.”

Debs looked at Burris. He shrugged and looked away. “All right,” she said.

And so the Battle of the Everglades was over, ending happily for everyone—except, of course, for Dexter the Drudge, because Debs apparently interpreted “access” to mean following me around and peppering me with questions. I was almost finished anyway, but it did not make things easier to have a shadow, especially one like Deborah, who was likely to attack me with one of her agonizing arm punches at any moment if I failed to answer her satisfactorily. I filled her in on what I knew and what I had guessed as I sprayed my Bluestar in a few final spots, looking for any last traces of blood. The spray would reveal even the tiniest hint of blood, down to the smallest droplet, and it did not affect the DNA of the sample.

“What is it?” Deborah demanded. “What did you find?”

“Nothing,” I said. “But you’re standing on a footprint.” She stepped aside guiltily and I got my camera out of my bag. I stood and turned back around, bumping squarely into Deborah. “Debs, please,” I said. “I really can’t do this with you attached to my hip.”

“Fine,” she said, and she stalked away to a spot opposite the fire pit.

I had just taken a last picture of the main blood spatter when I heard Deborah calling. “Dex,” she said. “Hey, bring your spray over here.” I looked over to where she stood. Vince Masuoka was kneeling and taking a sample of something. I got my Bluestar and joined them.

“Spray it right here,” Deborah said, and Vince shook his head.

“It’s not blood,” he said. “It’s the wrong color.”

I looked down at the spot he was examining. There was a flattened area, as if a heavy object had stood there backed up against a row of vegetation. The leaves were wilted from heat, and on them, as well as at the edge of the depression, there were a few small brown stains. Something had spilled out from some kind of container that had been there.

“Spray it,” Deborah said.

I looked at Vince, who shrugged. “I got a clean sample already,” he said. “It’s not blood.”

“All right,” I said, and I sprayed a small spot on one of the bushes.

Almost immediately a very faint blue glow was visible. “Not blood,” Debs said scornfully. “So what the fuck is that?”

“Shit,” Vince mumbled.

“It’s not much blood,” I said. “The glow is too faint.”

“But it’s some blood?” Debs demanded.

“Well, yes,” I said.

“So it’s some other kind of shit, with blood in it,” she said.

I looked at Vince. “Well,” he said. “I guess so.”

Deborah nodded and looked around. “So you got a party,” she said. She pointed at the fire pit. “And way over there you got the victim. And way over here on the other side of the party you got this.” She glared at Vince. “With blood in it.” She turned to me. “So what is it?” she demanded.

I should not have been surprised that this was suddenly my problem, but I was. “Come on, Debs,” I said.

“No, you come on,” she said. “I need one of your special hunches here.”

“I have a special hunch back at the station,” Vince said. “His name is Ivan.”

“Shut up, dickless,” Deborah said. “Come on, Dexter.”

Apparently there was nothing for it, so I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and listened.…

And almost immediately got a very amused answer from the Passenger. “Punch bowl,” I said, snapping my eyes open.

“What?” Deborah said.

“It’s the punch bowl,” I said. “For the party.”

“With human blood in it?” she said.

“Punch?” Vince said. “Jesus’ tits, Dex, you’re a sick fuck.”

“Hey,” I said innocently, “I didn’t drink any of it.”

“You’re fucking crazy,” Deborah added helpfully.

“Debs, look,” I said. “It’s away from the fire, and we got this dent in the ground.” I knelt next to Vince and pointed to the depression in the dirt. “Something heavy, stuff spilled out to the sides, lots of footprints around it—you don’t have to call it punch if that makes you nervous. But it’s the beverage.”

Deborah stared at the spot I pointed to, looked across the clearing at the fire pit, and then back to the ground at her feet. She shook her head slowly, dropped into a squat beside me, and said, “Punch bowl. Fuck.”

“You’re a sick fuck,” Vince repeated.

“Yeah,” Debs said. “But I think he’s right.” She stood up. “I bet you a dozen doughnuts you find some kind of drug traces in there, too,” she said with a very noticeable note of satisfaction.

“I’ll check it,” Vince said. “I got a good test for ecstasy.” He gave her his hideous sex leer and added, “Would you like to take the ecstasy test with me?”

“No, thanks,” she said. “You don’t have the pencil for it.” She turned away before he could try one of his awful comebacks, and I followed. It took me only three steps to realize that something about her was very wrong, and when it registered I stopped dead and turned her to face me.

I looked at my sister with surprise. “Debs,” I said. “You’re actually smiling.”

“Yeah,” she said. “Because we just proved that this is my case.”

“What do you mean?”

She punched me, hard. It may have been a happy punch for her, but it still hurt me. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Who drinks blood?”

“Ouch,” I said. “Bela Lugosi?”

“Him and all the other vampires,” she said. “You want me to spell ‘vampire’ for you?”

“So what—Oh,” I said.

“Yeah, oh,” she said. “We turn up a vampire wannabe, Bobby Acosta. And now we got a whole fucking vampire frat party. You think that’s a coincidence?”

I didn’t think so, but my arm hurt too much to say so. “We’ll see,” I said.

“Yes, we will,” she said. “Get your stuff; I’ll drive you back.”

It was definitely lunchtime when we got back to civilization, but none of the subtle hints I threw out to Debs seemed to register, and she drove straight back to headquarters without pausing, in spite of the fact that Route 41 turns into Calle Ocho, and we could easily have pulled over at a number of excellent Cuban restaurants. Just thinking about them made my stomach growl, and I imagined I could smell the plátanos sizzling in the frying pan. But as far as Deborah was concerned, the wheels of justice were already in motion, grinding their inexorable way toward a guilty verdict and a safer world, which apparently meant that Dexter could very well do without lunch for society’s sake.

And so it was a very hungry Dexter who made his weary way back to the forensics lab, chivvied every step of the way by his sister’s demands for rapid identification of the victim from the Everglades scene. I unpacked my samples and flung myself into my chair, searching for answers to the burning question: Should I drive all the way back to Calle Ocho? Or simply head to Café Relampago, which was much closer and had excellent sandwiches?

Like most important questions in life, this one had no easy answer, and I thought hard about the implications. Was it better to eat quickly, or well? If I chose instant gratification, did that make me a weaker person? And why did it have to be Cuban food today? Why not, for example, barbecue?

The moment that thought popped into my head, I began to lose my appetite. The girl in the Everglades had been barbecued, and for some reason that troubled me a great deal. I could not get the pictures out of my mind: the poor girl lashed in place, slowly bleeding out as the flames reached higher, the crowd howling, and the chef dabbing on barbecue sauce. I could almost smell the cooking flesh, and that drove all thoughts of ropa vieja and lunch completely out of my head.

Was this the way life was going to be from now on? How could I do my job if I felt actual human empathy for the victims I saw every day? Worse, how could I stay in a job that came between me and lunch?

It was a terribly sad state of affairs, and I let the self-pity wash over me for a few minutes. Dexter in the Dumps, an absurd figure. I, who had sent dozens of the deserving into the afterlife, was now mourning the loss of one insignificant girl, and merely because whoever killed her had not wasted the meat.

Preposterous; and in any case, the mighty machine that was me needed some kind of fuel. So I brushed away the unhappy thoughts and trudged down the hall to the vending machines. Looking through the glass at the meager selection of snack foods brought me no joy, either. At the hospital a Snickers bar had seemed like manna from heaven. Now it looked like punishment. Nothing else called out to me and promised fulfillment, either. In spite of all the bright wrappers and gleeful slogans, all I could see was a case filled with preservatives and chemically enhanced colors. It was all artificially flavored with genuine synthetic replicas, and it seemed about as appetizing as eating a chemistry set.

But duty called, and I needed to eat something to function at the necessary high level. So I settled on the least offensive choice—crackers with a substance in the middle that claimed to be peanut butter. I fed in some money and pushed the button. The crackers dropped out into the tray, and as I bent to pick them up a small and shadowy figure in the dark basement of Castle Dexter opened a door and stuck its head out. I froze for a moment in the bent-over position and listened. I heard nothing except the silken fluttering of a tiny warning flag, that things were not what they should be, and I stood up slowly and carefully and turned around.

There was nothing at all behind me: no maniac with a knife, no semi truck careening toward me out of control, no turbaned giant with an assegai—nothing. Still, the small voice whispered at me to beware.

Clearly, the Passenger was playing with me. Perhaps it was miffed at me for failing to feed and exercise it. “Just shut up,” I told it. “Go away and leave me alone.” It continued to smirk at me, so I ignored it and stepped into the hall.

And I walked almost directly into Sergeant Doakes—or most of him, anyway.

Doakes had always hated me, even before a crazed doctor had cut away his hands, feet, and tongue when I had failed to rescue him. I mean, I had tried—really—but things had just not worked out, and as a direct consequence Doakes had lost a few overrated body parts. But even before that, he had hated me because, out of all the cops I had ever met, he was the only one who suspected what I was. I had given him no reason and no evidence, but somehow he just knew.

And now he stood there on his artificial feet, glaring at me with all the venom of a thousand cobras. For a moment I wished that the mad doctor had taken away his eyes, too, but I quickly realized that this was an unkind thought, unsuitable for the new and human me, so I put it out of my mind and instead gave him a friendly smile. “Sergeant Doakes,” I said. “It’s good to see you, and moving around so well, too.”

Doakes did nothing at all, just kept looking at me, and I looked down at the silvery metallic claws that had replaced his hands. He was not carrying the small notebook-size speech box he used to talk—possibly he wanted both claws free to strangle me, or more likely, he planned to use the vending machines, too. And since he no longer had a tongue, his attempts at speech without the synthesizer were so embarrassing, filled with “ngah” sounds and so on, that he probably didn’t want to risk looking silly. So he just stared at me for a moment, until finally the anticipation of a sprightly encounter withered away within me.

“Well,” I said, “it’s been very nice speaking with you. Have a lovely day.” I walked away toward my lab, turning back to look only once. Doakes was still watching me with his poisonous stare.

I told you so, gloated the soft voice of the Passenger, but I just waved at Doakes and went back to the lab.

When Vince and the others got back around three, the taste of the crackers was still lingering unpleasantly in the back of my mouth.

“Wow,” Vince said as he came in and dropped his bag on the floor. “I think I got a sunburn.”

“What did you do about lunch?” I asked him.

He blinked as if I’d asked a crazy question, and maybe I had. “One of the cops drove back to a Burger King,” he said. “Why?”

“You didn’t lose your appetite thinking about that girl being roasted and eaten right there?”

Vince looked even more astonished. “No,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “I had a double Whopper with cheese, and fries. Are you okay?”

“I’m just hungry,” I said, and he looked at me a moment longer, so rather than sit through a staring contest, I turned away and went back to work.