“Thank God,” I said, and I realized I was smiling-and why not?

Wasn't it nice? I wasn't crazy after all.

AT A LITTLE AFTER 8 AM LAGUERTA CAME OVER TO where I was sitting on the trunk of my car. She leaned her tailored haunch onto the car and slid over until our thighs were touching. I waited for her to say something, but she didn't seem to have any words for the occasion. Neither did I. So I sat there for several minutes looking back at the bridge, feeling the heat of her leg against mine and wondering where my shy friend had gone with his truck. But I was yanked out of my quiet daydream by a pressure on my thigh.

I looked down at my pants leg. LaGuerta was kneading my thigh as if it were a lump of dough. I looked up at her face. She looked back.

“They found the body,” she said. “You know. The rest of it that goes with the head.”

I stood up. “Where?”

She looked at me the way a cop looks at somebody who finds corpseless heads in the street. But she answered. “ Office Depot Center,” she said.

“Where the Panthers play?” I asked, and a little icy-fingered jolt ran through me. “On the ice?”

LaGuerta nodded, still watching me. “The hockey team,” she said. “Is that the Panthers?”

“I think that's what they're called,” I said. I couldn't help myself.

She pursed her lips. “They found it stuffed into the goalie's net.”

“Visitor's or home?” I asked.

She blinked. “Does that make a difference?”

I shook my head. “Just a joke, Detective.”

“Because I don't know how to tell the difference. I should get somebody there who knows about hockey,” she said, her eyes finally drifting away from me and across the crowd, searching for somebody carrying a puck. “I'm glad you can make a joke about it,” she added. “What's a-” she frowned, trying to remember, “-a sam-bolie?”

“A what?”

She shrugged. “Some kind of machine. They use it on the ice?”

“A Zamboni?”

“Whatever. The guy who drives it, he takes it out on the ice to get ready for practice this morning. A couple of the players, they like to get there early? And they like the ice fresh, so this guy, the-” she hesitated slightly “-the sambolie driver? He comes in early on practice days. And so he drives this thing out onto the ice? And he sees these packages stacked up. Down there in the goalie's net? So he gets down and he takes a look.” She shrugged again. “Doakes is over there now. He says they can't get the guy to calm down enough to say any more than that.”

“I know a little about hockey,” I said.

She looked at me again with somewhat heavy eyes. “So much I don't know about you, Dexter. You play hockey?”

“No, I never played,” I said modestly. “I went to a few games.” She didn't say anything and I had to bite my lip to keep from blathering on. In truth, Rita had season tickets for the Florida Panthers, and I had found to my very great surprise that I liked hockey. It was not merely the frantic, cheerfully homicidal mayhem I enjoyed. There was something about sitting in the huge, cool hall that I found relaxing, and I would happily have gone there even to watch golf. In truth, I would have said anything to make LaGuerta take me to the rink. I wanted to go to the arena very badly. I wanted to see this body stacked in the net on the ice more than anything else I could think of, wanted to undo the neat wrapping and see the clean dry flesh. I wanted to see it so much that I felt like a cartoon of a dog on point, wanted to be there with it so much that I felt self-righteous and possessive about the body.

“All right,” LaGuerta finally said, when I was about to vibrate out of my skin. And she showed a small, strange smile that was part official and part-what? Something else altogether, something human, unfortunately, putting it beyond my understanding. “Give us a chance to talk.”

“I'd like that very much,” I said, absolutely oozing charm. LaGuerta didn't respond. Maybe she didn't hear me, not that it mattered. She was totally beyond any sense of sarcasm where her self-image was concerned. It was possible to hit her with the most horrible flattery in the world and she would accept it as her due. I didn't really enjoy flattering her. There's no fun where there's no challenge. But I didn't know what else to say. What did she imagine we would talk about? She had already grilled me mercilessly when she first arrived on the scene.

We had stood beside my poor dented car and watched the sun come up. She had looked out across the causeway and asked me seven times if I had seen the driver of the truck, each time with a slightly different inflection, frowning in between questions. She'd asked me five times if I was sure it had been a refrigerated truck-I'm sure that was subtlety on her part. She wanted to ask about that one a lot more, but held back to avoid being obvious. She even forgot herself once and asked in Spanish. I told her I was seguro, and she had looked at me and touched my arm, but she did not ask again.

And three times she had looked up the incline of the bridge, shaken her head, and spat “Puta!” under her breath. Clearly, that was a reference to Officer Puta, my dear sister Deborah. In the face of an actual refrigerator truck as predicted by Deborah, a certain amount of spin control was going to be necessary, and I could tell by the way LaGuerta nibbled at her lower lip that she was hard at work on the problem. I was quite sure she would come up with something uncomfortable for Deb-it was what she did best-but for the time being I was hoping for a modest rise in my sister's stock. Not with LaGuerta, of course, but one could hope that others might notice that her brilliant bit of attempted detective work had panned out.

Oddly enough, LaGuerta did not ask me what I had been doing driving around at that hour. Of course, I'm not a detective, but it did seem like a rather obvious question. Perhaps it would be unkind to say that the oversight was typical of her, but there it is. She just didn't ask.

And yet there was more for us to talk about, apparently. So I followed her to her car, a big two-year-old light blue Chevrolet that she drove on duty. After hours she had a little BMW that nobody was supposed to know about.

“Get in,” she said. And I climbed into the neat blue front seat.

LaGuerta drove fast, in and out of traffic, and in a very few minutes we were over the causeway to the Miami side again, across Biscayne and a half mile or so to I-95. She drove onto the freeway and wove north through traffic at speeds that seemed a little much even for Miami. But we got to 595 and turned west. She looked at me sideways, out of the corner of her eye, three times before she finally spoke. “That's a nice shirt,” she said.

I glanced down at my nice shirt. I had thrown it on to chase out of my apartment and saw it now for the first time, a polyester bowling shirt with bright red dragons on it. I had worn it all day at work and it was a trifle ripe, but yes, more or less clean looking. Somewhat nice, of course, but still-

Was LaGuerta making small talk so I would relax enough to make some damaging admission? Did she suspect that I knew more than I was saying and think she could get me to drop my guard and say it?

“You always wear such nice clothes, Dexter,” she said. She looked over at me with a huge, goofy smile, unaware that she was about to ram her car into a tanker truck. She looked back in time and turned the wheel with one finger and we slid around the tanker and west on I-595.

I thought about the nice clothes that I always wore. Well of course I did. I took pride in being the best-dressed monster in Dade County. Yes, certainly, he chopped up that nice Mr. Duarte, but he was so well dressed! Proper clothing for all occasions-by the way, what did one wear to attend an early-morning decapitation? A day-old bowling shirt and slacks, naturally. I was à la mode. But aside from this morning's hasty costume, I really was careful. It was one of Harry's lessons: stay neat, dress nicely, avoid attention.