There are few things in the world that make me feel more clueless than a woman's tears. I know that I am supposed to do something comforting and then go slay whatever dragon caused the crying fit, but it has been my experience, in my limited dealings with women, that the tears never come when they should, and they are never about what you might think, and consequently you are reduced to truly stupid options like patting her head and saying, “There there” in the hopes that at some point she will let you in on what the display is actually about.

But Dexter is nothing if not a team player, and so I slid my arm up across her back, put the palm of my hand on her head and patted.

“It's okay” I said, and no matter how stupid that sounded I thought it was a tremendous improvement over “there there'.

True to form, Rita's reply came out of absolutely nowhere that I could hope to predict. I can't lose you” she said.

I certainly had no plans to be lost, and I would gladly have told her so, but she was just hitting her stride now, and the silent sobs were jerking her body and sending a small rivulet of salt water rolling down my chest.

“Oh, Dexter” she sobbed, “what would I do if I lost you, too?” And now, with that word “too', I had somehow joined a completely unexpected and unknown company, presumably of people Rita had carelessly left lying around where they had been easily lost, and she had given me no clue how I had managed to get a seat with that group, or even who they were. Did she mean her first husband, the addict who had beaten and tormented her, Cody and Astor, until they were traumatized into becoming my ideal family? He was in prison now, and I certainly agreed that being lost that way was a bad idea. Or was there some other string of misplaced persons who had slipped through the cracks of Rita's life and been washed away by the rains of mischance?

Then, as if I needed further proof that her thoughts were being beamed to her from a mother ship in orbit beyond Pluto, Rita began to slide her face down my chest, across my stomach —still sobbing, you understand, and leaving a trail of tears that quickly turned cool.

“Just lie still” she sniffled. “You shouldn't exert yourself with a concussion.”

As I said, you never really know what the program is going to be when a woman switches on the tears.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT I WOKE UP AND THOUGHT, BUT what does he want? I don't know why I hadn't asked that question before, and I don't know why it came to me now, lying in my comfy bed next to a gently snoring Rita. But there it was —it was bobbling around on the surface of Lake Dexter now, and I had to do something with it. The inside of my head still felt stiff, as if it was packed with wet sand, and for several minutes I lay there unable to do anything with my thought except to repeat it: what does he want?

What did Weiss want? He was not simply feeding a Passenger of his own, I was reasonably sure of that. I had felt no sympathy twinges from my own anywhere near either Weiss or his handiwork, which ordinarily I would, in the presence of another Presence.

And the way he went about it, starting with already dead bodies instead of creating his own —until he had killed Deutsch —argued that he was after something altogether different.

But what? He made videos of the bodies. He made videos of people looking at the bodies. And he had made a video of me at play —unique footage, yes, but it all added up to nothing that made any sense to me. Where was the fun in all that? I saw none and that made it impossible for me to get inside Weiss's head and figure him out. With normal, well-adjusted psychopaths who killed because they must and took a simple, honest pleasure from their work, I never had that problem. I understood them all too well, since I was one. But with Weiss, there was no point of contact, no place to feel empathy, and because of that I had no idea of where he would go or what he would do next. I had a very bad feeling that whatever it was, I would not like it —but I had no feeling at all of what it would be, and I didn't like that at all.

I lay there in bed for a while thinking about it —or trying to think about it, since the good ship Dexter was clearly not yet ready to raise full steam. Nothing came to me. I didn't know what he wanted.

I didn't know what he would do next. Coulter was out to get me. So was Salguero, and of course, Doakes had never given up. Debs was still in a coma.

On the plus side, Rita had made me some very good soup. She was really very good to me —she deserved better, even though she clearly didn't know that. She thought she had everything, apparently, between me, the children, and our recent trip to Paris. And although she did, in fact, have these things, none of them remotely resembled what she thought they were. She was like a mother lamb in a wolf pack, and she only saw white fluffy wool all around her when in fact the pack was licking its lips and waiting for her to turn her back. Dexter, Cody and Astor were monsters. And Paris —well, they did actually speak French there, just as she had hoped. But Paris had proved to have its own unique kind of monster, too, as our wonderful interval at the art gallery had proved. What was it called? “Jennifer's Leg.” Very interesting; after all my years of toiling in the fields it was still possible for me to see something that surprised me, and for that reason I felt a certain warmth for Paris nowadays.

Between Jennifer and her leg, and Rita's eccentric performance, and whatever it was that Weiss was doing, life was just full of surprises lately, and they all boiled down to one thing: people really deserve whatever happens to them, don't they?

It may not do me very much credit, but I found this thought very comforting, and I drifted back to sleep soon after.

The next morning my head had cleared a great deal; whether it was from Rita's attentions or just my naturally chipper metabolism, I couldn't say. In any case, I jumped out of bed with a fully functioning and powerfully effective brain at my service once again, which was all to the good.

The down side to that, however, was that any effective brain, realizing it was in the situation in which I found myself, would also find itself fighting down a very strong urge to panic, pack a bag, and run for the border. But even with my mental powers in high gear, I could not think of a border that would protect me from the mess I was in.

Still, life gives us very few real choices, and most of them are awful, so I headed for work, determined to track down Weiss, and not to rest until I had him. I still did not understand him, or what he was doing, but that did not mean I couldn't find him. No, indeed; Dexter was part bloodhound and part bulldog, and when he is on your trail you might as well give up and save us all time and bother.

I wondered if there was a way to get that message to Weiss.

I got to work a little bit early and so managed to grab a cup of coffee that almost tasted like coffee. I took it to my desk, sat at the computer, and got down to work. Or to be perfectly accurate, I got down to staring at my computer screen and trying to think of the right way to go to work. I had used up most of my clues already and felt like I was at something of a dead end —and not the kind I usually enjoy, either. Weiss had stayed one step ahead of me, and I had to admit that he could be anywhere now; holed up somewhere nearby or even back in Canada, there was no way to know. And although I had thought my brain was fully functional once again, it was offering me no way to find out.

I tried to organize what I knew, and found that I did not know enough to organize. Where could he be? I don't know, anywhere, I guess. What would he do next? I don't know, almost anything.