Things were certainly getting interesting, weren't they?

All right; that was me. Obviously there was a camera hidden somewhere above the tub. Weiss and Doncevic had used it for their decorative projects, and it was still there when I showed up. Which meant that Weiss was still somewhere in the area.

But no, it didn't mean that at all. It was ridiculously easy to connect a camera to the Internet and monitor from a computer. Weiss could be anywhere, collecting the video and sending it on to me. To precious anonymous me. Dexter the mostly modest, who toiled in the shadows and never ever looked for publicity of any kind for his good works. But of course, in the hideous clamor of media attention that had surrounded this whole thing, including the attack on Deborah, my name had almost certainly been mentioned somewhere.

Dexter Morgan, unassuming forensic whiz, brother of the nearly slain. One picture, one frame of evening news footage, and he would have me.

A cold and awful lump began to grow in my stomach. It was just that easy. So simple for a deranged decorator to figure out who and what I was. I had been too clever for too long and grown accustomed to being the only tiger in the forest. And I had forgotten that when there is only one tiger it's awfully easy for the hunter to follow the tracks.

And he had. He had followed me to my den and taken pictures of Dexter at play, and there it was.

My finger twitched almost unwillingly on the mouse and I watched the video again.

It was still me. Right there on the video. It was me.

Happily for all concerned —by which I mean me —I did eventually begin to listen to the cool small voice in the back of my once-useful brain that had spent the last few minutes repeating, Steady, Dexter. All right then; steady. I took a deep breath and let the oxygen work its magic on my thought process, or what was left of it.

This was a problem, to be sure, but it had a solution like every other problem, and it was in the area of two things that Dexter is very good at: finding people and things with a computer and then making them go away. So it was all to the good. The video was on the Internet? Wonderful —less work for me. It couldn't be better.

I was almost feeling something, either fake happiness or something like it.

Time to apply logic, turn the full power of Dexter's icy biocomputer on the problem. First: what did he want? Why had he done this? Obviously he wanted some reaction from me —but which one? The most obvious would be that he was looking for revenge. I had killed his friend —partner? Lover? It didn't matter.

He wanted me to know that he knew what I had done, and, and ...

And he had sent the clip to me, not to someone who would presumably do something about it, like Detective Coulter. Which meant that this was a personal challenge, something that he was not going to make public, at least not yet.

Except that it was public —it was on YouTube, and it was only a matter of time before someone else stumbled upon it. And that meant that there was a time element. So what was he saying? Find me before they find you?

Okay so far. But then what? An Old West showdown —power saws at ten paces? Or was the idea just to torture me, keep me chasing until I made a mistake, or until he grew bored and sent the whole thing on to the evening news?

It was enough to create at least the idea of panic in a lesser being.

But Dexter is made of far sterner stuff. He wanted me to try to find him —but he could not know that I had my varsity letter in finding.

If I was even half as good as modesty let me admit I was, I would find him a great deal quicker than he thought I could. Fine. If Weiss wanted to play, I would play.

But we were going to play by Dexter's rules, not his.

FIRST THINGS FIRST” HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY MOTTO, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense —after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn't be first things, would they? Still, cliches exist to comfort the feeble-minded, not to provide any actual meaning. Since I was feeling somewhat weak between the ears at the moment, I took a little bit of consolation from the thought as I pulled up the police records on Brandon Weiss.

It wasn't much; there was a parking ticket that he had paid, and the complaint filed against him by the Tourist Board. He had no outstanding warrants, no special permits beyond a driver's license, no permit to carry a concealed firearm —or a concealed power saw, for that matter. His address was the one I knew, where Deborah had been stabbed. With a little digging, I found one previous address, in Syracuse, New York. Before that he had lived in Montreal, Canada.

A quick check showed that he was still a Canadian citizen.

No real leads there; nothing that qualified as a clue of any kind.

I hadn't really expected anything, but my job and my adoptive father had taught me well that due diligence paid off from time to time.

This was just the beginning.

The next step, Weiss's email address, was a little harder. With a certain amount of slightly illegal maneuvering, I got into AOL's subscriber list and found out just a little more. The same address in the Design District was given as his home address, but there was also a cell phone number. I wrote it down to pursue later, in case I needed it. Other than that, there was nothing helpful here. Surprising, really, that an organization like AOL fails to ask simple and vital questions, like, “Where would you hide if Dexter was after you?”

Still, nothing worth doing is ever easy —another fascinatingly stupid cliche. After all, breathing is fairly easy for the most part, and I think many scholars would agree it pays handsome dividends. The cell phone company's records would tell me much the same thing as AOL's, but there was a chance I could track down the location of the phone itself, a trick I had done once before when I very nearly saved Sergeant Doakes from being surgically modified.

For no particular reason I went back to YouTube. Perhaps I just wanted to see myself one more time, relaxing and being myself. It was, after all, something I had never seen before, and never expected to see. Dexter in action, as only he can do it. I watched the video one more time, marveling at how graceful and natural I looked. What a wonderful sense of style I showed as I swung the saw up toward the camera. Beautiful. A true artist. I should do more film work.

And with that, another thought popped into my slowly awakening brain. Beside the screen, the email address was highlighted.

I really didn't know much about YouTube, but I knew that if an email address was highlighted, it led somewhere. So I clicked on it and almost immediately an orange background came up on screen and I was on a YouTube personal page. In large fiery letters across the top of the page, it said: THE NEW MIAMI. I scrolled part-way down to a box that said, VIDEOS (5), with a row of thumbnail stills of each video. The one showing my back was number four.

In an effort to be methodical and not simply watch my riveting performance again, I clicked on the first one, which showed a man's face twisted into a grimace of disgust. The video began, and again the title appeared on the screen in fiery letters: THE NEW MIAMI #1.

Then there was a very nice sunset shot of lush tropical vegetation; a row of lovely orchids, a line of birds landing on a small lake, and then the camera pulled back to show the body we had found at Fairchild Gardens. There was a terrible groan off camera and a somewhat strangled voice said, “Oh, Jesus” and then the camera followed his back as a piercing scream ripped out of the speaker. It sounded strangely familiar, and for a moment that puzzled me, and I paused the video, rewound, and played the scream again. Then I had it; it was the same scream that had been on the first video, the one we had seen at the Tourist Board. For whatever strange reason, Weiss had used the same scream here.