I listened intently for a long moment, pretending to study the bodies, but I neither heard nor saw anything, except a faint and impatient clearing of the throat from the shadows inside Chateau Dexter. But Deborah was expecting some sort of pronouncement.

“It seems awfully contrived,” I managed to say.

“Nice word,” she said. “What the fuck does that mean?” I hesitated. I was drawing a blank. Even a true expert like myself has limits, and whatever trauma created the need to turn a pudgy woman into a fruit basket was beyond me and my interior helper.

Deborah looked at me expectantly. I didn't want to give her any casual chatter that she might take for genuine intuition and charge off in the wrong direction. On the other hand, my reputation required that I offer some kind of learned opinion.

“It's nothing definite,” I said. “It's just that...” And I paused for a moment, because I realized that what I was about to say actually was bona ride perception, and the small encouraging chuckle from the Passenger confirmed it.

“What, goddamn it?” Deborah said, and it was something of a relief to see her return to her own cranky normality.

“This was done with a kind of cold control you don't see normally,” I offered.

Debs snorted. “Normally?” she said. “Like, what —normal like you?”

I was surprised at the personal turn her remarks were taking, but I let it go. “Normal for somebody who could do this,” I said.

“There needs to be some passion, some sign that whoever did this was really, uh -feeling the need to do it. Not this. Not just like, what can I do after that's fun.”

“This is fun for you?” she said.

I shook my head, irritated that she was deliberately missing the point. “No, it's not, that's what I'm trying to say. The killing part is supposed to be fun, and the bodies should reveal that. Instead, the killing wasn't the point at all, it was just a means to an end. Instead of the end itself ... Why are you looking at me like that?”

“Is that what it's like for you?” she said.

I found myself somewhat taken aback, an unusual situation for Dashing Dexter, always ready with a quip. Deborah was still coming to terms with what I was, and what her father had done with me, and I could appreciate that it was difficult for her to deal with on a daily basis, especially at work —which for her, after all, involved finding people like me and sending them to Old Sparky.

On the other hand, it was truly not something I could talk about with anything approaching comfort. Even with Deborah, it felt like discussing oral sex with your mother. So I decided to side-step ever so slightly. “My point is,” I said, “that this doesn't seem to be about the killing. It's about what to do with the bodies afterwards.” She stared at me for a moment, and then shook her head. I would love to know what the fuck you think that means,” she said. “But even more, I think I would love to know what the fuck goes on in your head.”

I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It sounded like a soothing sound the Passenger might make. “Look, Debs,” I said.

“What I'm saying is, we're not dealing with a killer —we're dealing with somebody who likes to play with dead bodies, not live ones.”

“And that makes a difference?”

“Yes.”

“Does he still kill people?” she asked.

“It sure looks like it.”

“And he'll probably do it again?”

“Probably,” I said over a cold chuckle of interior certainty that only I could hear.

“So what's the difference?” she said.

“The difference is that there won't be the same kind of pattern.

You can't know when he'll do it again, or who he'll do it to, or any of the things you can usually count on to help you catch him. All you can do is wait and hope you get lucky”

“Shit,” she said. I never was good at waiting.” There was a little bit of a commotion over where the cars were parked, and an overweight detective named Coulter come scuffling rapidly over the sand to us.

“Morgan,” he said.

“Yeah?” we both said.

“Not you,” he told me. “You. Debbie.” Deborah made a face —she hated being called Debbie. “What?”

“We're supposed to partner on this,” he said. “Captain said.”

“I'm already here,” she said. I don't need a partner.”

“Now you do,” Coulter said. He took a swig from a large soda bottle. “There's another one of these,” he said, gasping for breath.

“Over at Fairchild Gardens.”

“Lucky you,” I said to Deborah. She glared at me and I shrugged.

“Now you don't have to wait.”

ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT MIAMI HAS ALWAYS been the total willingness of its residents to pave everything.

Our fair city began as a sub-tropical garden teeming with wildlife, both animal and vegetable, and after only a very few years of hard work all the plants were gone and the animals were dead.

Of course, their memory lingers on in the condo clusters that replace them. It is an unwritten law that each new development is named after whatever was killed to build it. Destroy eagles? Eagle's Nest Gated Community. Kill off the panthers? Panther Run Planned Living. Simple and elegant, and generally very lucrative.

I don't mean to suggest by this that Fairchild Gardens was a parking lot where all the Fairchilds and their tulips had been killed.

Far from it. If anything, it represented the revenge of the plants. You had to drive past a certain number of Orchid Bays and Cypress Hollows to get there, but when you arrived, you were greeted by a vast natural-looking wilderness of trees and orchids nearly devoid of hedge-clipping humanity. Except for the busloads of tourists, of course. Still, there were actually one or two places where you could look at a genuine palm tree without seeing neon lights in the background, and on the whole I usually found it a relief to walk among the trees and vegetate far from the hurly-burly.

But this morning, the parking area was overflowing when we arrived, since the gardens had been closed with the discovery of Something Awful, and the crowds of people who had scheduled a visit had backed up at the entrance, hoping to get inside so they could mark it off on their itinerary, and maybe even see something horrible so they could pretend to be shocked. A perfect vacation visit to Miami; orchids and corpses.

There were even two elfin young men with video cameras circulating through the crowd and filming, of all things, the people standing around and waiting. As they moved they called out, “Murder in the gardens!” and other encouraging remarks. Perhaps they had a good parking spot and didn't want to leave it, since there was absolutely no place left to park anything larger than a unicycle.

Deborah, of course, was a Miami native, and a Miami cop; she pushed her motor-pool Ford through the crowd and parked it right in front of the main entrance to the park, where several other official cars were already parked, and jumped right out. By the time I got out of the car she was already talking to the uniformed officer standing there, a short beefy guy named Meltzer, whom I knew slightly. He was pointing down one of the paths on the far side of the entrance, and Deborah was already headed past him along the trail he had indicated.

I followed as quickly as I could. I was used to tagging along behind Deborah and playing catch-up, since she always rushed onto a crime scene. It never seemed quite politic to point out to her that there was really no need to hurry. After all, the victim wasn't going anywhere. Still, Deborah hurried, and she expected me to be there to decipher the scene. And so, before she could get lost in the carefully tended jungle, I hurried after her.

I finally caught up to her just as she skidded to a halt in a small clearing off the main trail, an area called Rain Forest. There was a bench where the weary nature lover could pause and recuperate amid the blooms. Alas for poor panting Dexter, breathing hard now as a result of racing pell-mell after Debs, the bench was already occupied by someone who clearly needed to sit down far more than I did.