IT WAS THE NEXT MORNING THAT THINGS BEGAN TO unravel.

I went in to work tired but content from my happy chores and the late night they had put me through. I had just settled down with a cup of coffee to attack a heap of paperwork when Vince Masuoka poked his head in the door. “Dexter” he said.

“The one and only” I said with proper modesty.

“Did you hear?” he said with an irritating bet-you-didn't-hear smirk.

I hear so many things, Vince” I said. “Which one do you mean?”

“The autopsy report” he said. And because it was apparently important to him to stay as annoying as possible, he said nothing else, just looked at me expectantly.

“All right, Vince” I said at last. “Which autopsy report did I not hear about that will change the way I think about everything?” He frowned. “What?” he said.

I said, no, I didn't hear. Please tell me.” He shook his head. I don't think that's what you said” he said.

“But anyway, you know those wacky designer bodies, with all the fruit and stuff in them?”

“At South Beach, and Fairchild Gardens?” I said.

“Right” he said. “So they get them to the morgue for the autopsy, and the ME is like, whoa, great, they're back.” I don't know if you have noticed this, but it is quite possible for two human beings to have a conversation in which one or both parties involved has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

I seemed to be in one of those brain-puzzling chats right now, since so far the only thing I'd gotten from talking to Vince was a profound sense of irritation.

“Vince” I said. “Please use small and simple words and tell me what you're trying to say before you force me to break a chair over your head.”

“I'm just saying” he said, which at least was true and easy to understand, as far as it went. “The ME gets those four bodies and says, these were stolen from here. And now they're back.” The world seemed to tilt to one side ever so slightly and a heavy grey fog settled over everything, which made it hard to breathe. “The bodies were stolen from the morgue?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Meaning, they were already dead, and somebody took them away and then did all the weird stuff to them?” He nodded. “It's just like the craziest thing I ever heard” he said. I mean, you steal dead bodies from the morgue? And you play with “em like that?”

“But whoever did it didn't actually kill them” I said.

“No, they were all accidental deaths, just lying there on their slabs.”

Accidental is such a terrible word. It stands for all the things I have fought against my whole life: it is random, messy, unplanned and therefore dangerous. It is the word that will get me caught some day, because in spite of all the care in the world, something accidental can still happen and, in this world of ragged chaotic chance, it always does.

And it just had. I had just last night filled half a dozen garbage bags with someone who was more or less accidentally innocent.

“So it isn't murder after all” I said.

He shrugged. “It's still a felony” he said. “Stealing a corpse, desecrating the dead, something like that. Endangering public health? I mean, it's gotta be illegal.”

“So is jaywalking” I said.

“Not in New York. They do it all the time.” Learning more about the jaywalking statutes in New York did nothing at all to fill me with good cheer. The more I thought about it, the more I would have to say that I was skating perilously close to having real human emotions about this, and as the day went on I thought about it more and more. I felt a strange kind of choking sensation just below my throat, and a vague and aimless anxiety that I could not shake, and I had to wonder; is this what guilt feels like? I mean, supposing I had a conscience, would mine be troubled now? It was very unsettling, and I didn't like it at all.

And it was all so pointless —Doncevic had, after all, stuck a knife in Deborah, and if she wasn't dead, it was not from lack of trying on his part. He was guilty of something rather naughty, even if it was not the more final version of the deed.

So why should I “feel” anything? It is all very well for a human being to say, I did something that made me feel bad.” But how could cold and empty Dexter possibly say anything of the sort? To begin with, I don't feel. More importantly —even if I did feel something, the odds are very good that it would be something that most of us would agree is, after all, kind of bad.

This society does not look with fondness and approval on emotions like Need to Kill, or Enjoying Cutting, and realistically those are the most likely things to pop up in my case.

Was this one small accidental and impulsive little dismemberment really the thing to push me over the edge into the turmoil soup that is human feeling? There was nothing to regret here —applying the smooth and icy logic of Dexter's great intellect resulted in the same bottom line no matter how many times I ran through it: Doncevic was no great loss to anybody, and he had at least tried to kill Deborah. Did I have to hope she would die, simply so I could feel good about myself?

But it was bothering me, and it continued to rankle throughout the morning and on into the afternoon when I stopped at the hospital on my lunch break.

“Hey buddy” Chutsky said wearily as I came into the room. “Not much change. She's opened her eyes a couple of times. I think she's getting a little stronger.” I sat in the chair on the opposite side of the bed from Chutsky.

Deborah didn't look stronger. She looked about the same —pale, barely breathing, closer to death than life. I had seen this expression before, many times, but it did not belong on Deborah. It belonged on people I had carefully chosen to wear that look as I pushed them down the dark slope and away into emptiness as the reward for the wicked things they had done.

I had seen it just last night on Doncevic —and even though I had not carefully chosen him, I realized the look truly belonged there, on him. He had put this same look on my sister, and that was enough.

There was nothing here to stir unease in Dexter's non-existent soul.

I had done my job, taken a bad person out of the crawling frenzy of life and hurried him into a cluster of garbage bags where he belonged. If it was untidy and unplanned it was still righteous, as my law enforcement associates would say. Associates like Israel Salguero, who would now have no need to harass Deborah and damage her career just because the man with the shiny head was making noise in the press.

When I ended Doncevic, I had ended that mess, too. A small weight lifted. I had done what Dexter does, and done it well, and my little corner of the world was just a tiny bit better. I sat in the chair and chewed on a really terrible sandwich, chatting with Chutsky and actually getting to see Deborah open her eyes one time, for a full three seconds. I could not say for sure that she knew I was there, but the sight of her eyeballs was very encouraging and I began to understand Chutsky's wild optimism a little more.

I went back to work feeling a great deal better about myself and things in general. Had I been hasty? Too bad. Doncevic deserved it, and I had given it to him. And with Deborah getting better unhassled by Internal Affairs and the press, life was really going right back on track to where it belonged, so nanny-poo-poo to worrying about it.

It was a lovely and gratifying way to roll back from lunch, and the feeling lasted all the way into the building and up to my cubicle, where I found Detective Coulter waiting for me.

“Morgan” he said. “Siddown.” I thought it was very nice of him to invite me to sit in my own chair, so I sat down. He looked at me for a long moment, chewing on a toothpick that stuck out of one corner of his mouth. He was a pear-shaped guy, never terribly attractive, and at the moment even less so. He had crammed his sizeable buttocks into the extra chair by my desk and, aside from the toothpick, he was working on a giant bottle of Mountain Dew, some of which had already stained his dingy white shirt. His appearance, together with his attitude of staring silently at me as if hoping I would burst into tears and confess to something, was extremely annoying, to say the least. So, fighting off the temptation to collapse into a weeping heap, I picked up a lab report from my in-basket and began to read.