The poor man had taken it personally. I shared his outrage. Such brutality should not be allowed. Of course, I was also very grateful that his sense of honor had given me time to get away. And here I had always thought morality was useless.

I turned the corner into my dark little room and walked right into Detective LaGuerta. “Hah,” she said. “You don't see so good.” But she didn't move.

“I'm not a morning person,” I told her. “My biorhythms are all off until noon.”

She looked up at me from an inch away. “They look okay to me,” she said.

I slid around her to my desk. “Can I make some small contribution to the full majesty of the law this morning?” I asked her.

She stared at me. “You have a message,” she said. “On your machine.”

I looked over at my answering machine. Sure enough, the light was blinking. The woman really was a detective.

“It's some girl,” LaGuerta said. “She sounds kind of sleepy and happy. You got a girlfriend, Dexter?” There was a strange hint of challenge in her voice.

“You know how it is,” I said. “Women today are so forward, and when you are as handsome as I am they absolutely fling themselves at your head.” Perhaps an unfortunate choice of words; as I said it I couldn't help thinking of the woman's head flung at me not so long ago.

“Watch out,” LaGuerta said. “Sooner or later one of them will stick.” I had no idea what she thought that meant, but it was a very unsettling image.

“I'm sure you're right,” I said. “Until then, carpe diem.”

“What?”

“It's Latin,” I said. “It means, complain in daylight.”

“What have you got about this thing last night?” she said suddenly.

I held up the case file. “I was just looking at it,” I said.

“It's not the same,” she said, frowning. “No matter what those asshole reporters say. McHale is guilty. He confessed. This one is not the same.”

“I guess it seems like too much of a coincidence,” I said. “Two brutal killers at the same time.”

LaGuerta shrugged. “It's Miami, what do they think? Here is where these guys come on vacation. There's lots of bad guys out there. I can't catch them all.”

To be truthful, she couldn't catch any of them unless they hurled themselves off a building and into the front seat of her car, but this didn't seem like a good time to bring that up. LaGuerta stepped closer to me and flicked the folder with a dark red fingernail. “I need you to find something here, Dexter. To show it's not the same.”

A light dawned. She was getting unpleasant pressure, probably from Captain Matthews, a man who believed what he read in the papers as long as they spelled his name right. And she needed some ammunition to fight back. “Of course it's not the same,” I said. “But why come to me?”

She stared at me for a moment through half-closed eyes, a curious effect. I think I had seen the same stare in some of the movies Rita had dragged me to see, but why on earth Detective LaGuerta had turned the look on me I couldn't say. “I let you in the seventy-two-hour briefing,” she said. “Even though Doakes wants you dead, I let you stay.”

“Thank you very much.”

“Because you have a feeling for these things sometimes. The serial ones. That's what they all say. Dexter has a feeling sometimes.”

“Oh, really,” I said, “just a lucky guess once or twice.”

“And I need somebody in the lab who can find something.”

“Then why not ask Vince?”

“He's not so cute,” she said. “You find something.”

She was still uncomfortably close, so close I could smell her shampoo. “I'll find something,” I said.

She nodded at the answering machine. “You gonna call her back? You don't have time for chasing pussy.”

She still hadn't backed up, and it took me a moment to realize she was talking about the message on my machine. I gave her my very best political smile. “I think it's chasing me, Detective.”

“Hah. You got that right.” She gave me a long look, then turned and walked away.

I don't know why, but I watched her go. I really couldn't think of anything else to do. Just before she passed out of sight around the corner, she smoothed her skirt across her hips and turned to look at me. Then she was gone, off into the vague mysteries of Homicidal Politics.

And me? Poor dear dazed Dexter? What else could I do? I sank into my office chair and pushed the play button on my answering machine. “Hi, Dexter. It's me.” Of course it was. And as odd as it was, the slow, slightly raspy voice sounded like “me” was Rita. “Mm… I was thinking about last night. Call me, mister.” As LaGuerta had observed, she sounded kind of tired and happy. Apparently I had a real girlfriend now.

Where would the madness end?

CHAPTER 18

FOR A FEW MOMENTS I JUST SAT AND THOUGHT about life's cruel ironies. After so many years of solitary self-reliance, I was suddenly pursued from all directions by hungry women. Deb, Rita, LaGuerta-they were all apparently unable to exist without me. Yet the one person I wanted to spend some quality time with was being coy, leaving Barbie dolls in my freezer. Was any of this fair?

I put my hand in my pocket and felt the small glass slide, snug and secure in its ziplock. For a moment it made me feel a little better. At least I was doing something. And life's only obligation, after all, was to be interesting, which it certainly was at the moment. “Interesting” did not begin to describe it. I would trade a year off my life to find out more about this elusive will-o'-the-wisp who was teasing me so mercilessly with such elegant work. In fact, I had come far too close to trading more than a year with my little Jaworski interlude.

Yes, things were certainly interesting. And were they really saying in the department that I had a feeling for serial homicide? That was very troubling. It meant my careful disguise might be close to unraveling. I had been too good too many times. It could become a problem. But what could I do? Be stupid for a while? I wasn't sure I knew how, even after so many years of careful observation.

Ah, well. I opened the case file on Jaworski, the poor man. After an hour of study, I came to a couple of conclusions. First, and most important, I was going to get away with it, in spite of the unforgivable sloppy impulsiveness of the thing. And second-there might be a way for Deb to cash in on this. If she could prove this was the work of our original artist while LaGuerta committed herself to the copycat theory, Deb could suddenly turn from somebody they didn't trust to get their coffee into flavor of the month. Of course, it was not actually the work of the same guy, but that seemed like a very picky objection at this point. And since I knew without any possibility of doubt that there were going to be more bodies found very soon, it wasn't worth worrying about.

And naturally, at the same time, I had to provide the annoying Detective LaGuerta with enough rope to hang herself. Which might also, it occurred to me, come in handy on a more personal level. Pushed into a corner and made to look like an idiot, LaGuerta would naturally try to pin the blame on the nitwit lab tech who had given her the erroneous conclusion-dull dim Dexter. And my reputation would suffer a much-needed relapse into mediocrity. Of course, it would not jeopardize my job, since I was supposed to analyze blood spatter, not provide profiling services. That being the case, it would help to make LaGuerta look like the nitwit she was, and raise Deborah's stock even more.

Lovely when things work out so neatly. I called Deborah.

At half-past one the next day I met Deb at a small restaurant a few blocks north of the airport. It was tucked into a little strip mall, between an auto parts store and a gun shop. It was a place we both knew well, not too far from Miami-Dade Headquarters, and they made the best Cuban sandwiches in the world right there. Perhaps that seems like a small thing, but I assure you there are times when only a medianoche will do, and at such times Café Relampago was the only place to get one. The Morgans had been going there since 1974.