Darkly dreaming Dexter

was whipsawed between a memory and a dream, and I couldn't tell which was more compelling.

This was just no fun anymore. I wanted my brain back.

I dried my hands and went to bed again, but there was no sleep left in this night for dear decimated Dexter. I simply lay on my back and watched the dark pools flowing across the ceiling until the telephone rang at a quarter to six.

“You were right,” Deb said when I picked up.

“It's a wonderful feeling,” I said with a great effort at being my usual bright self. “Right about what?”

“All of it,” Deb told me. “I'm at a crime scene on Tamiami Trail. And guess what?”

“I was right?”

“It's him, Dexter. It has to be. And it's a whole hell of a lot splashier, too.”

“Splashier how, Deb?” I asked, thinking three bodies, hoping she wouldn't say it and thrilled by the certainty that she would.

“There appear to be multiple victims,” she said.

A jolt went through me, from my stomach straight up, as if I had swallowed a live battery. But I made a huge effort to rally with something typically clever. “This is wonderful, Deb. You're talking just like a homicide report.”

“Yeah, well. I'm starting to feel like I might write one someday. I'm just glad it won't be this one. It's too weird. LaGuerta doesn't know what to think.”

“Or even how. What's weird about it, Deb?”

“I gotta go,” she said abruptly. “Get out here, Dexter. You have to see this.”

By the time I got there the crowd was three deep around the barrier, and most of them were reporters.

It is always hard work to push through a crowd of reporters with the scent of blood in their nostrils.

You might not think so, since on camera they appear to be brain-damaged wimps with severe eating disorders. But put them at a police barricade and a miraculous thing happens. They become strong, aggressive, willing and able to shove anything and anyone out of the way and trample them underfoot.

It's a bit like the stories about aged mothers lifting trucks when their child is trapped underneath. The strength comes from some mysterious place—and somehow, when there is gore on the ground, these anorexic creatures can push their way through anything. Without mussing their hair, too.

Luckily for me, one of the uniforms at the barricade recognized me. “Let him through, folks,” he told the reporters. “Let him through.”

“Thanks, Julio,” I told the cop. “Seems like more reporters every year.”

He snorted. “Somebody must be cloning 'em. They all look the same to me.”

I stepped under the yellow tape and as I straightened on the far side I had the odd sensation that someone was tampering with the oxygen content of Miami's atmosphere. I stood in the broken dirt of a construction site. They were building what would probably be a three-story office building, the kind inhabited by marginal developers. And as I stepped slowly forward, following the activity around the half-built structure, I knew it was not coincidence that we had all been brought here. Nothing was coincidence with this killer. Everything was deliberate, carefully measured for aesthetic impact, explored for artistic necessity.

We were at a construction site because it was necessary. He was making his statement as I had told Deborah he would. You got the wrong guy, he was saying. You locked up a cretin because you are all cretins. You are too stupid to see it unless I rub your noses in it; so here goes.

But more than that, more than his message to the police and the public, he was talking to me; taunting me, teasing me by quoting a passage from my own hurried work. He had brought the bodies to a construction site because I had taken Jaworski at a construction site. He was playing catch with me, showing all of us just how good he was and telling one of us—me—that he was watching. I know what you did, and I can do it, too. Better.

I suppose that should have worried me a little.

It didn't.

It made me feel almost giddy, like a high-school girl watching as the captain of the football team worked up his nerve to ask for a date. You mean me? Little old me? Oh my stars, really? Pardon me while I flutter my eyelashes.

I took a deep breath and tried to remind myself that I was a good girl and I didn't do those things. But I knew he did them, and I truly wanted to go out with him. Please, Harry?

Because far beyond simply doing some interesting things with a new friend, I needed to find this killer.

I had to see him, talk to him, prove to myself that he was real and that-That what?

That he wasn't me?

That I was not the one doing such terrible, interesting things?

Why would I think that? It was beyond stupid; it was completely unworthy of the attention of my once-proud brain. Except—now that the idea was actually rattling around in there, I couldn't get the thought to sit down and behave. What if it really was me? What if I had somehow done these things without knowing it? Impossible, of course, absolutely impossible, but-I wake up at the sink, washing blood off my hands after a “dream” in which I carefully and gleefully got blood all over my hands doing things I ordinarily only dream about doing. Somehow I know things about the whole string of murders, things I couldn't possibly know unless-Unless nothing. Take a tranquilizer, Dexter. Start again. Breathe, you silly creature; in with the good air, out with the bad. It was nothing but one more symptom of my recent feeble-mindedness. I was merely going prematurely senile from the strain of all my clean living. Granted I had experienced one or two moments of human stupidity in the last few weeks. So what? It didn't necessarily prove that I was human. Or that I had been creative in my sleep.

No, of course not. Quite right; it meant nothing of the kind. So, um—what did it mean?

I had assumed I was simply going crazy, dropping several handfuls of marbles into the recycle bin.

Very comforting—but if I was ready to assume that, why not admit that it was possible I had committed a series of delightful little pranks without remembering them, except as fragmented dreams?

Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness? After all, it was just a heightened form of sleepwalking. “Sleep murder.” Probably very common. Why not? I already gave away the driver's seat of my consciousness on a regular basis when the Dark Passenger went joyriding. It really wasn't such a great leap to accept that the same thing was happening here, now, in a slightly different form. The Dark Passenger was simply borrowing the car while I slept.

How else to explain it? That I was astrally projecting while I slept and just happened to tune my vibrations to the killer's aura because of our connection in a past life? Sure, that might make sense—if this was southern California. In Miami, it seemed a bit thin. And so if I went into this half building and happened to see three bodies arranged in a way that seemed to be speaking to me, I would have to consider the possibility that I had written the message. Didn't that make more sense than believing I was on some kind of subconscious party line?

I had come to the outside stairwell of the building. I stopped there for a moment and closed my eyes, leaning against the bare concrete block of the wall. It was slightly cooler than the air, and rough. I ground my cheek against it, somewhere between pleasure and pain. No matter how much I wanted to go upstairs and see what there was to see, I wanted just as much not to see it at all.

Talk to me, I whispered to the Dark Passenger. Tell me what you have done.

But of course there was no answer, beyond the usual cool, distant chuckle. And that was no actual help. I felt a little sick, slightly dizzy, uncertain, and I did not like this feeling of having feelings. I took three long breaths, straightened up and opened my eyes.

Sergeant Doakes stared at me from three feet away, just inside the stairwell, one foot on the first step.

His face was a dark carved mask of curious hostility, like a rottweiler that wants to rip your arms off but is mildly interested in knowing first what flavor you might be. And there was something in his expression that I had never seen on anybody's face before, except in the mirror. It was a deep and abiding emptiness that had seen through the comic-strip charade of human life and read the bottom line.

“Who are you talkin' to?” he asked me with his bright hungry teeth showing. “You got somebody else in there with you?”

His words and the knowing way he said them cut right through me and turned my insides to jelly. Why