“Dexter…?” Deborah said, in a sort of hushed and strangled croak.

Yes indeed.

Just like Dexter.

I AM PRETTY SURE THAT DEBORAH TOOK YOUNG MR. Bad Hair Day back to the lounge, because when I looked up again, she was standing in front of me, alone. In spite of her blue uniform she did not look at all like a cop right now. She looked worried, like she couldn't decide whether to yell or to cry, like a mommy whose special little boy had let her down in a big way.

“Well?” she demanded, and I had to agree that she had a point.

“Not terribly,” I said. “You?”

She kicked a chair. It fell over. “Goddamn it, Dexter, don't give me that clever shit! Tell me something. Tell me that wasn't you!” I didn't say anything. “Well then, tell me it is you! Just tell me SOMETHING! Anything at all!”

I shook my head. “I-” There was really nothing to say, so I just shook my head again. “I'm pretty sure it isn't me,” I said. “I mean, I don't think so.” Even to me that sounded like I had both feet firmly planted in the land of lame answers.

“What does that mean, ‘pretty sure'?” Deb demanded. “Does that mean you're not sure? That it might be you in that picture?”

“Well,” I said, a truly brilliant riposte, considering. “Maybe. I don't know.”

“And does ‘I don't know' mean you don't know whether you're going to tell me, or does it mean that you really don't know if that's you in the picture?”

“I'm pretty sure it isn't me, Deborah,” I repeated. “But I really don't know for sure. It looks like me, doesn't it?”

“Shit,” she said, and kicked the chair where it lay. It slammed into the table. “How can you not know, goddamn it?!”

“It is a little tough to explain.”

“Try!”

I opened my mouth, but for once in my life nothing came out. As if everything else wasn't bad enough, I seemed to be all out of clever, too. “I just-I've been having these… dreams, but-Deb, I really don't know,” I said, and I may have actually mumbled it.

“Shit shit SHIT!” said Deborah. Kick kick kick.

And it was very hard to disagree with her analysis of the situation.

All my stupid, self-mutilating musings swam back at me with a bright and mocking edge. Of course it wasn't me-how could it be me? Wouldn't I know it if it was me? Apparently not, dear boy. Apparently you didn't actually know anything at all. Because our deep dark dim little brains tell us all kinds of things that swim in and out of reality, but pictures do not lie.

Deb unleashed a new volley of savage attacks on the chair, and then straightened up. Her face was flushed very red and her eyes looked more like Harry's eyes than they ever had before. “All right,” she said. “It's like this,” and she blinked and paused for a moment as it occurred to both of us that she had just said a Harry thing.

And for a second Harry was there in the room between me and Deborah, the two of us so very different, and yet still both Harry's kids, the two strange fists of his unique legacy. Some of the steel went out of Deb's back and she looked human, a thing I hadn't seen for a while. She stared at me for a long moment, and then turned away. “You're my brother, Dex,” she said. I was very sure that was not what she had originally intended to say.

“No one will blame you,” I told her.

“Goddamn you, you're my brother!” she snarled, and the ferocity of it took me completely by surprise. “I don't know what went on with you and Dad. The stuff you two never talked about. But I know what he would have done.”

“Turned me in,” I said, and Deborah nodded. Something glittered in the corner of her eye. “You're all the family I have, Dex.”

“Not such a great bargain for you, is it?”

She turned to me, and I could see tears in both eyes now. For a long moment she just looked at me. I watched the tear run from her left eye and roll down her cheek. She wiped it, straightened up, and took a deep breath, turning away to the window once again.

“That's right,” she said. “He would've turned you in. Which is what I am going to do.” She looked away from me, out the window, far out to the horizon.

“I have to finish these interviews,” she said. “I'm leaving you in charge of determining if this evidence is relevant. Take it to your computer at home and figure out whatever you have to figure out. And when I am done here, before I go back out on duty, I am coming to get it, to hear what you have to say.” She glanced at her watch. “Eight o'clock. And if I have to take you in then, I will.” She looked back at me for a very long moment. “Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said softly, and she left the room.

I moved over to the window and had a look for myself. Below me the circus of cops and reporters and gawking geeks was swirling, unchanged. Far away, beyond the parking lot, I could see the expressway, filled with cars and trucks blasting along at the Miami speed limit of ninety-five miles per hour. And beyond that in the dim distance was the high-rise skyline of Miami.

And here in the foreground stood dim dazed Dexter, staring out the window at a city that did not speak and would not have told him anything even if it did.

Goddamn it, Dexter.

I don't know how long I stared out the window, but it eventually occurred to me that there were no answers out there. There might be some, though, on Captain Pimple's computer. I turned to the desk. The machine had a CD-RW drive. In the top drawer I found a box of recordable CDs. I put one into the drive, copied the entire file of pictures, and took the CD out. I held it, glanced at it; it didn't have much to say, and I probably imagined the faint chuckling I thought I heard from the dark voice in the backseat. But just to be safe, I wiped the file from the hard drive.

On my way out, the Broward cops on duty didn't stop me, or even speak, but it did seem to me that they looked at me with a very hard and suspicious indifference.

I wondered if this was what it felt like to have a conscience. I supposed I would never really know-unlike poor Deborah, being torn apart by far too many loyalties that could not possibly live together in the same brain. I admired her solution, leaving me in charge of determining if the evidence was relevant. Very neat. It had a very Harry feel to it, like leaving a loaded gun on the table in front of a guilty friend and walking away, knowing that guilt would pull the trigger and save the city the cost of a trial. In Harry's world, a man's conscience couldn't live with that kind of shame.

But as Harry had known very well, his world was long dead-and I did not have any conscience, shame, or guilt. All I had was a CD with a few pictures on it. And of course, those pictures made even less sense than a conscience.

There had to be some explanation that did not involve Dexter driving a truck around Miami in his sleep. Of course, most of the drivers on the road seemed to manage it, but they were at least partially awake when they started out, weren't they? And here I was, all bright-eyed and cheerfully alert and not at all the kind of guy who would ever prowl the city and kill unconsciously; no, I was the kind of guy who wanted to be awake for every moment of it. And to get right down to the bottom line, there was the night on the causeway. It was physically impossible that I could have thrown the head at my own car, wasn't it?

Unless I had made myself believe that I could be in two places at once, which made a great deal of sense-considering that the only alternative I could come up with was believing that I only thought I had been sitting there in my car watching someone else throw the head, when in fact I had actually thrown the head at my own car and then-

No. Ridiculous. I could not ask the last few shreds of my brain to believe in this kind of fairy tale. There would be some very simple, logical explanation, and I would find it, and even though I sounded like a man trying to convince himself that there was nothing under the bed, I said it out loud.