So off I went to lunch, since in the first place she was my sister, and in the second, the mighty machine that is my body needs almost constant fuel.

The fuel it craves most often is a medianoche sandwich, usually with a side of fried plátanos and a mamey milk shake. I don’t know why this simple, hearty meal plays such a transcendent chord on the strings of my being, but there is nothing else like it. Prepared properly, it takes me as close to ecstasy as I can get. And no one prepares it quite as properly as Café Relampago, a storefront place not far from police HQ, where the Morgans have been eating since time out of mind. It was so good even Deborah’s perpetual grumpiness couldn’t spoil it.

“Goddamn it!” she said to me through a mouthful of sandwich. It was certainly far from a novel phrase coming from her, but she said it with a viciousness that left me lightly spattered with bread crumbs. I took a sip of my excellent batido de mamey and waited for her to expand on her argument, but instead she simply said it again. “Goddamn it!”

“You’re covering up your feelings again,” I said. “But because I am your brother, I can tell something is bothering you.”

Chutsky snorted as he sawed at his Cuban steak. “No shit,” he said. He was about to say more, but the fork clamped in his prosthetic left hand slipped sideways. “Goddamn it,” he said, and I realized that they had a great deal more in common than I had thought. Deborah leaned over and helped him straighten the fork. “Thanks,” he said, and shoveled in a large bite of the pounded-flat meat.

“There, you see?” I said brightly. “All you needed was something to take your mind off your own problems.”

We were sitting at a table where we had probably eaten a hundred times. But Deborah was rarely troubled by sentiment; she straightened up and slapped the battered Formica tabletop hard enough to make the sugar bowl jump.

“I want to know who talked to that asshole Rick Sangre!” she said. Sangre was a local TV reporter who believed that the gorier a story was, the more vital it was for people to have a free press that could fill them in on as many gruesome details as possible. From the tone of her voice, Deborah was apparently convinced that Rick was my new best friend.

“Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. “And I don’t think it was Doakes.”

“Ouch,” said Chutsky.

“And,” she said, “I want to find those fucking heads!”

“I don’t have them, either,” I said. “Did you check lost and found?”

“You know something, Dexter,” she said. “Come on, why are you holding out on me?”

Chutsky looked up and swallowed. “Why should he know something you don’t?” he asked. “Was there a lot of spatter?”

“No spatter at all,” I said. “The bodies were cooked, nice and dry.”

Chutsky nodded and managed to scoop some rice and beans onto his fork. “You’re a sick bastard, aren’t you?”

“He’s worse than sick,” Deborah said. “He’s holding out something.”

“Oh,” Chutsky said through a mouthful of food. “Is this his amateur profiling thing again?” It was a small fiction; we had told him that my hobby was actually analytical, rather than hands-on.

“It is,” Deborah said. “And he won’t tell me what he’s figured out.”

“It might be hard to believe, Sis, but I know nothing about this. Just…” I shrugged, but she was already pouncing.

“What! Come on, please?”

I hesitated again. There was no good way to tell her that the Dark Passenger had reacted to these killings in a brand-new and totally unsettling way. “I just get a feeling,” I said. “Something is a little off with this one.”

She snorted. “Two burned headless bodies, and he says something’s a little off. Didn’t you used to be smart?”

I took a bite of my sandwich as Deborah frittered away her precious eating time by frowning. “Have you identified the bodies yet?” I asked.

“Come on, Dexter. There’s no heads, so we got no dental records. The bodies were burned, so there’s no fingerprints. Shit, we don’t even know what color their hair was. What do you want me to do?”

“I could probably help, you know,” Chutsky said. He speared a chunk of fried maduras and popped it into his mouth. “I have a few resources I can call on.”

“I don’t need your help,” she said and he shrugged.

“You take Dexter’s help,” he said.

“That’s different.”

“How is that different?” he asked, and it seemed like a reasonable question.

“Because he gives me help,” she said. “You want to solve it for me.”

They locked eyes and didn’t speak for a long moment. I’d seen them do it before, and it was eerily reminiscent of the nonverbal conversations Cody and Astor had. It was nice to see them so clearly welded together as a couple, even though it reminded me that I had a wedding of my own to worry about, complete with an apparently insane high-class caterer. Happily, just before I could begin to gnash my teeth, Debs broke the eerie silence.

“I won’t be one of those women who needs help,” she said.

“But I can get you information that you can’t get,” he said, putting his good hand on her arm.

“Like what?” I asked him. I’ll admit I had been curious for some time about what Chutsky was, or had been before his accidental amputations. I knew that he had worked for some government agency which he referred to as the OGA, but I still didn’t know what that stood for.

He turned to face me obligingly. “I have friends and sources in a lot of places,” he said. “Something like this might have left some kind of trail somewhere else, and I could call around and find out.”

“You mean call your buddies at the OGA?” I said.

He smiled. “Something like that,” he said.

“For Christ’s sake, Dexter,” Deborah said. “OGA just means other government agency. There’s no such agency, it’s an in-joke.”

“Nice to be in at last,” I said. “And you can still get access to their files?”

He shrugged. “Technically I’m on convalescent leave,” he said.

“From doing what?” I asked.

He gave me a mechanical smile. “You don’t really want to know,” he said. “The point is, they haven’t decided yet whether I’m any fucking good anymore.” He looked at the fork clamped in his steel hand, turning his arm over to see it move. “Shit,” he said.

And because I could feel that one of those awkward moments was upon us, I did what I could to move things back onto a sociable footing. “Didn’t you find anything at the kiln?” I asked. “Some kind of jewelry or something?”

“What the fuck is that?” she said.

“The kiln,” I said. “Where the bodies were burned.”

“Haven’t you been paying attention? We haven’t found where the bodies were burned.”

“Oh,” I said. “I assumed it was done right there on campus, in the ceramic studio.”

By the suddenly frozen look on her face, I realized that either she was experiencing massive indigestion or she did not know about the ceramic studio. “It’s just half a mile from the lake where the bodies were found,” I said. “You know, the kiln. Where they make pottery?”

Deborah stared at me for a moment longer, and then jumped up from the table. I thought it was a wonderfully creative and dramatic way to end a conversation, and it took a moment before I could do more than blink after her.

“I guess she didn’t know about that,” Chutsky said.

“That’s my first guess,” I said. “Shall we follow?”

He shrugged and speared the last chunk of his steak. “I’m gonna have some flan, and a cafecita. Then I’ll get a cab, since I’m not allowed to help,” he said. He scooped up some rice and beans and nodded at me. “You go ahead, unless you want to walk back to work.”

I did not, in fact, have any desire to walk back to work. On the other hand, I still had almost half a milk shake and I did not want to leave that, either. I stood up and followed, but I softened the blow by grabbing the uneaten half of Deborah’s sandwich and taking it with me as I lurched out the door after her.