He nodded and poked at the head with a pen. “Your sister says, prolly the girl from the Lowe Museum,” he said. “They put it here because this guy is such a bugero.”

I looked down at the two cuts, one just above the shoulders, the other just below the chin. The one on the head matched what we had seen before, done with neatness and care. But the one on the body that was presumably Manny was much rougher, as if it had been hurried. The edges of the two cuts were pushed together carefully, but of course they did not quite mesh. Even on my own, with no dark interior muttering, I could tell that this was different somehow, and one small cold finger crawling across the back of my neck suggested that the difference might be very important-maybe even to my current troubles-but beyond that vague and unsatisfying ghost of a hint, there was nothing for me here but uneasiness.

“Is there another body?” I asked him, remembering poor bullied Franky.

Angel shrugged without looking up. “In the bedroom,” he said. “Just with a butcher knife stuck in him. They left his head.” He sounded a little offended that someone would go to all that trouble and leave the head, but other than that he seemed to have nothing to tell me, so I walked away, over to where my sister was now squatting beside Camilla.

“Good morning, Debs,” I said, with a cheerfulness I did not feel at all, and I was not the only one, because she didn’t even look up at me.

“Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said. “Unless you have something really good for me, stay the fuck away.”

“It isn’t all that good,” I said. “But the guy in the bedroom is named Franky. This one here is Manny Borque, who has been in a number of magazines.”

“How the fuck would you know that?” she said.

“Well, it’s a little awkward,” I said, “but I may have been one of the last people to see this guy alive.”

She straightened up. “When,” she said.

“Saturday morning. Around ten thirty. Right here.” And I pointed to the coffee cup that was still on top of the table. “Those are my prints.”

Deborah was looking at me with disbelief and shaking her head. “You knew this guy,” she said. “He was a friend of yours?”

“I hired him to cater my wedding,” I said. “He was supposed to be very good at it.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “So what were you doing here on a Saturday morning?”

“He raised the price on me,” I said. “I wanted to talk him down.”

She looked around the apartment and glanced out the window at the million-dollar view. “What was he charging?” she said.

“Five hundred dollars a plate,” I said.

Her head snapped around to face me again. “Jesus fuck,” she said. “For what?”

I shrugged. “He wouldn’t tell me, and he wouldn’t lower the price.”

“Five hundred dollars a plate?” she said.

“It is a little high, isn’t it? Or should I say, it was.”

Deborah chewed on her lip for a long moment without blinking, and then she grabbed me by the arm and pulled me away from Camilla. I could still see one small foot sticking out of the kitchen door where the dear departed had met his untimely end, but Deborah led me away from it and over to the far end of the room.

“Dexter,” she said, “promise me you didn’t kill this guy.”

As I have mentioned before, I do not have real emotions. I have practiced long and hard to react the way human beings would react in almost every possible situation-but this one caught me by surprise. What is the correct facial expression for being accused of murder by your sister? Shock? Anger? Disbelief? As far as I knew, this wasn’t covered in any of the textbooks.

“Deborah,” I said. Not tremendously clever, but it was all I could think of.

“Because you don’t get a free pass with me,” she said. “Not for something like this.”

“I would never,” I said. “This is not…” I shook my head, and it really seemed so unfair. First the Dark Passenger left me, and now my sister and my wits had apparently fled, too. All the rats were swimming away as the good ship Dexter slid slowly under the waves.

I took a deep breath and tried to organize the crew to bail out a little. Deborah was the only person on earth who knew what I really was, and even though she was still getting used to the idea, I had thought she understood the very careful boundaries set up by Harry, and understood, too, that I would never cross them. Apparently I was wrong. “Deborah,” I said. “Why would I-”

“Cut the crap,” she snapped. “We both know you could have done it. You were here at the right time. And you have a pretty good motive, to get out of paying him like fifty grand. It’s either that or I believe some guy in jail did it.”

Because I am an artificial human, I am also extremely clearheaded most of the time, uncluttered by emotions. But I felt as if I was trying to see through quicksand. On the one hand, I was surprised and a little disappointed that she thought I might have done something this sloppy. On the other hand, I wanted to reassure her that I hadn’t. And I wanted to say that if I had done this, she would never have found out about it, but that didn’t seem quite diplomatic. So I took another deep breath and settled for, “I promise.”

My sister looked at me long and hard. “Really,” I said.

She finally nodded. “All right,” she said. “You better be telling me the truth.”

“I am,” I said. “I didn’t do this.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Then who did?”

It really isn’t fair, is it? I mean, this whole life thing. Here I was, still defending myself from an accusation of murder-from my own foster flesh and blood!-and at the same time being asked to solve the crime. I had to admire the mental agility that allowed Deborah to perform that kind of cerebral tumbling act, but I also had to wish she would direct her creative thinking at somebody else.

“I don’t know who did this,” I said. “And I don’t-I’m not getting any, um, ideas about it.”

She stared at me very hard indeed. “Why should I believe that, either?” she said.

“Deborah,” I said, and I hesitated. Was this the time to tell her about the Dark Passenger and its present absence? There was a very uncomfortable series of sensations sloshing through me, somewhat like the onset of the flu. Could these be emotions, pounding at the defenseless coastline of Dexter, like huge tidal waves of toxic sludge? If so, it was no wonder humans were such miserable creatures. This was an awful experience.

“Listen, Deborah,” I said again, trying to think of a way to start.

“I am listening, for Christ’s sake,” she said. “But you’re not saying anything.”

“It’s hard to say,” I said. “I’ve never said it before.”

“This would be a great time to start.”

“I, uh-I have this thing inside me,” I said, aware that I sounded like a complete idiot and feeling a strange heat rising into my cheeks.

“What do you mean,” she demanded. “You’ve got cancer?”

“No, no, it’s-I hear, um-It tells me things,” I said. For some reason I had to look away from Deborah. There was a photograph of a naked man’s torso on the wall; I looked back to Deborah.

“Jesus,” she said. “You mean you hear voices? Jesus Christ, Dex.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not like hearing voices. Not exactly.”

“Well then what the fuck?” she said.

I had to look at the naked torso again, and then blow out a large breath before I could look back at Deborah. “When I get one of my hunches about, you know. At a crime scene,” I said. “It’s because this…thing is telling me.” Deborah’s face was frozen over, completely immobile, as if she was listening to a confession of terrible deeds; which she was, of course.

“So it tells you, what?” she said. “Hey, somebody who thinks he’s Batman did this.”

“Kind of,” I said. “Just, you know. The little hints I used to get.”

“Used to get,” she said.

I really had to look away again. “It’s gone, Deborah,” I said. “Something about all this Moloch stuff scared it away. That’s never happened before.”