"You're sure you're all right?" I asked Rita.

She opened her eyes and smiled, the ancient smile Leonardo did so well, mother with wonder child. "I've done this before, Dexter," she said. "We'll be fine."

"If you're sure," I said, with a brand-new sensitivity that I actually felt.

"I'm sure," she said, and very reluctantly, I left them there.

When I got back to the Ransom Everglades campus with Debs's car I found that she had been assigned a room in an old wooden building with a view of the bay, as a sort of temporary interrogation room. The Pagoda, as the building was called, perched on a bluff above the athletic field. It was a rickety old wooden building that didn't look like it could survive a single summer storm, and yet somehow it had stood long enough to become a historical landmark.

Deborah was talking to an exceedingly clean-cut young man when I came in, and she just glanced up at me and nodded without interrupting the boy's response. I settled into the chair next to her.

For the rest of the day, both students and faculty came into the rickety old building one at a time to tell us what they knew about Samantha Aldovar and Tyler Spanos. The students we saw were all bright, attractive, and polite, and the teachers all seemed to be smart and dedicated, and I began to appreciate the benefits of a private school education. If only I'd had the opportunity to attend a place like this, who knows what I might have become? Perhaps instead of a mere blood-spatter analyst who slunk away at night to kill without conscience, I could have become a doctor, or a physicist, or even a senator who slunk away at night to kill without conscience. It was terribly sad to think of all my wasted potential.

But private education is expensive, and it had been far beyond Harry's means-and even if he could have afforded it, I doubt that Harry would have gone for it. He had always been wary of elitism, and he believed in all of our public institutions. Even public school-or perhaps especially public school, since it taught a brand of survival skills he knew we would need.

It was clearly a set of skills the two missing girls could have used. By the time Debs and I finished the interviews, around five-thirty, we had learned some very interesting things about both of them, but nothing that suggested they could survive in the wilds of Miami without a credit card and an iPhone.

Samantha Aldovar remained a little bit of a puzzle, even to those who thought they knew her well. The students were aware that she got financial aid, but it seemed to be no big deal to anybody. They all said she was pleasant, quiet, good at math, and had no boyfriend. No one could think of any reason why she would stage her own disappearance. No one could remember ever seeing her hanging around with any kind of disreputable character-except Tyler Spanos.

Tyler was apparently a true wild child, and on the face of things, the friendship between the two girls was extremely unlikely. Where Samantha got a ride to and from school with her mother in a four-year-old Hyundai, Tyler drove her own car-a Porsche. While Samantha was quiet and shy, Tyler seemed to be the original Good Time Charlene, a perpetual loud party just looking for a place to happen. She did not have a boyfriend only because she could not limit herself to one boy at a time.

And yet a close friendship had developed over the last year or so and the two girls were almost always together at lunch, after school, and on weekends. Not only was this puzzling, it was the one thing that bothered Deborah more than any other. She had calmly listened and asked questions, put out a BOLO on Tyler's Porsche, and (with a shudder) sent her partner, Deke, to talk to the Spanos family, and none of these things had caused so much as a ripple on the face of the Sea of Deborah. But the strange friendship between the two girls had, for some reason, caused her to come up on point like a cocker spaniel sniffing steak.

"It makes no fucking sense," she said.

"They're teenagers," I reminded her. "They're not supposed to make sense."

"Wrong," Deborah said. "Some things always make sense, especially with teenagers. Nerds hang with nerds; jocks and cheerleaders hang with jocks and cheerleaders. That never changes."

"Perhaps they have some kind of secret mutual interest," I suggested, glancing casually at my watch, which told me that it was very close to time for me to go home.

"I'd bet on it," said Debs. "And I'd bet that if we find it, we find out where they are."

"Nobody else here seems to know what it might be," I said, even though I was actually trying to construct a graceful exit line.

"What the hell is wrong with you?" Deborah said abruptly.

"Excuse me?"

"You keep squirming around like you have to pee," she said.

"Oh, um, actually," I said, "it's almost time for me to go. I have to pick up Cody and Astor before six."

My sister stared at me for what seemed like a long time. "I never would have believed it," she said at last.

"Believed what?"

"That you'd be married, kids, you know. A family man, with all you got going on."

And by that I knew she meant my darker side, my former role as Dexter the Avenger, the lone blade in the moonlight. She had found out about my alter ego, and had apparently become reconciled with it-and just in time for me to abandon the persona. "Well," I said, "I don't suppose I would have believed it either. But…" I shrugged. "Here I am with a family."

"Yeah," she said, and she looked away. "And before me."

I watched her face working to rearrange itself back to her usual mask of perpetual grumpy authority, but it took several moments, and in the interval she looked shockingly vulnerable.

"Do you love her?" she said suddenly, swinging back to face me, and I blinked with surprise. Such a blunt and personal question was very unlike Deborah, which was one reason we got along so well. "Do you love Rita," she repeated, leaving me no wiggle room whatsoever.

"I… don't know," I answered carefully. "I'm, uh, used to her."

Deborah stared and then shook her head. "Used to her," she said. "Like she's an easy chair or something."

"Not that easy," I said, trying to inject a little levity into what had suddenly become a very unsettling conversation.

"Do you even feel love at all?" she demanded. "I mean, can you?"

I thought of Lily Anne. "Yes," I said. "I think so."

Deborah watched my face for several long seconds, but there was really not much to see, and she finally turned away and looked out through the old wooden window frame at the bay. "Shit," she said. "Go home. Go get your kids and hang out with your easy-chair wife."

I had not been human for very long, but even so, I knew something was not quite right in the Land of Deborah and I could not leave her on that note. "Debs," I said. "What's wrong?"

I saw her neck muscles tense, but she continued to look away, out over the water. "All this family shit," she said. "With these two girls and their fucked-up families. And your family with fucked-up you. It's never what it should be, and it's never right but everybody gets it except me." She took a deep breath and shook her head. "And I really want it." She swung back at me with ferocity. "And no goddamn jokes about the biological clock, all right?"

To be completely honest, which I am when I have to be, I was far too deeply shocked by Deborah's behavior for any jokes, whether about clocks or anything else. But joke or no, I knew I had to say something, and I cast about for the right thing and could only come up with a question about Kyle Chutsky, her live-in boyfriend of several years. I had seen the approach on a daytime drama a few years back. I liked to study them for clues on how to act in ordinary situations, and it looked like that was going to pay off here. "Is everything okay with Kyle?" I said.