"You should have said something," she said.

"But I didn't," I said, quite logically, though admittedly still a bit cranky. "So can we change the channel, please?"

She looked like she had a lot more to say on the subject, but she very wisely held her tongue. She did, however, undercook my fried eggs, and so it was with a sense of real relief that I finally grabbed Cody and Astor and fled out the door. And of course, life being the unpleasant business that it is, they were stuck on the same page as their mother.

"How come you never told us about Uncle Brian, Dexter?" Astor demanded as I pushed the car into gear.

"I thought he was dead," I said, with what I really hoped was a note of finality in my voice.

"But we don't have any other uncles," she said. "Everybody else does, and we don't. Melissa has five uncles."

"Melissa sounds like a fascinating individual," I said, swerving to avoid a large SUV that had stopped in the middle of the road for no apparent reason.

"So we like having an uncle," Astor said. "And we like Uncle Brian."

"He's cool," Cody added softly.

Of course, it was very good to hear that they liked my brother, and it really should have made me happy, but it did not. It simply added to the sense of mean-spirited tension that had been rising in me ever since he had appeared. Brian was up to something-I knew it as well as I knew my own name-and until I knew what that something was I was stuck with my sense of lurking dread. It had not gone away by the time I dropped the kids at school and headed into work.

For once there were no freshly discovered headless bodies lying in the streets of Miami and frightening the tourists, and as if to underline this great mystery, Vince Masuoka had even brought in doughnuts. Considering the ragged assault my home life was making on me, this was very welcome indeed, and it seemed to me to call for some positive reinforcement. "Hail, doughnut, well brought," I said to Vince as he staggered in under the weight of the pastry box.

"Hail, Dexterus Maximus," he said. "I bring tribute from the Gauls."

"French doughnuts?" I said. "They don't put in parsley, do they?"

He flipped open the lid to reveal rows of gleaming doughnuts. "No parsley and no escargot filling, either," he said. "But they do include Bavarian cream."

"I shall ask the Senate to declare a triumph in your honor," I said, quickly grabbing one. And in a world built on the principles of love, wisdom, and compassion, that would have marked an end to the very uncomfortable course my morning had been following. But of course, we live in no such blissful world, and so the doughnut had barely had a chance to settle happily into my stomach where it belonged, when the phone on my desk began to rattle for my attention, and somehow, just from the way it sounded, I could tell it was Deborah.

"What are you doing?" she demanded without saying hello.

"Digesting a doughnut," I said.

"Do it up here in my office," she said, and hung up.

It is very difficult to argue with someone who is already off the line, as I am certain Deborah knew, so rather than go through the huge physical effort of redialing, I headed to the Homicide area and Deborah's desk. It was not, to be fair, actually an office at all but more of an area within a partition. Still, she seemed in no mood for the quibble, so I let it lie.

Deborah was in her chair at the desk clutching what looked like an official report. Her new partner, Deke, stood over by the window with a look of detached and vacuous amusement on his unreasonably handsome face. "Look at this," Deborah said, smacking the pages with the back of her hand. "Can you believe this shit?"

"No," I said. "That's because from this far away I can't even read that shit."

"Mr. Chin Dimple," she said, indicating Deke, "went to interview the Spanos family."

"Oh, hey," Deke said.

"And he found me a suspect," Debs said.

"Person of interest to the investigation," Deke said very seriously in official reportese. "He's not really a suspect."

"He's the only fucking lead we've got, and you sit on it all night," Debs snarled. "I have to read it in the goddamn report at nine-fucking-thirty the next morning."

"I had to type it," he said, sounding slightly hurt.

"With two teenage girls missing, the captain on my ass, and the press about to blow up like Three Mile Island, you type it and don't tell me first," she said.

"Hey, well, what the fuck," Deke said with a shrug.

Deborah gnashed her teeth. I mean, really; it's something I'd only read about before, mostly in fantasy stories, and I'd never believed it happened in real life, but there it was. I watched, fascinated, as she gnashed her teeth, started to say something very forceful, and instead threw the report on her desk. "Go get some coffee, Deke," she said at last.

Deke straightened up, made a clicking noise as he pointed a finger at her, and said, "Cream and two sugars," and sauntered away toward the coffeepot down the hall.

"I thought you liked your coffee black," I said as Deke disappeared.

Deborah stood up. "If that's his last fuckup, I am the happiest girl in the world," she said. "Come on."

She was already moving down the hall in the opposite direction from Deke, and so once again any protest I might have made was largely irrelevant. I sighed and followed, wondering if Deborah had learned this kind of behavior, perhaps from a book called The Management Style of Bulldozers.

I caught up with her at the elevator and said, "I suppose it would be too much to ask where we're going?"

"Tiffany Spanos," she said, hammering at the "down" button a second time, and then a third. "Tyler's older sister."

It took me a moment, but as the elevator doors slid open I remembered. "Tyler Spanos," I said, following her into the elevator. "The girl who's missing with, um, Samantha Aldovar."

"Yeah," she said. The doors slid shut and we lurched down. "Nimnut talked to Tiffany Spanos about her sister." I assumed Nimnut meant Deke, so I just nodded. "Tiffany says that Tyler has been into that Goth shit for a while, and then she met this guy at a party who was, like, Goth squared."

I suppose I lead a very innocent life, but I had thought that "Goth" was a sort of fashion statement for teenagers with bad complexions and a particularly repulsive form of angst. As far as I knew, the whole thing involved cultivating a look of black clothes and very pale skin, and perhaps listening to Euro-tech pop music while looking longingly at a DVD of Twilight. It seemed to me something that would be very hard to conceive of squared. But Deborah's imagination knew no such boundary.

"Am I allowed to ask what 'Goth squared' means?" I said humbly.

Deborah glared at me. "Guy's a vampire," she said.

"Really," I said, and I admit I was surprised. "In this day and age? In Miami?"

"Yeah," she said, and the elevator doors slid open. "Even had his teeth filed," she said, heading out the door.

I hurried after her again. "So we're going to see this guy?" I asked. "What's his name?"

"Vlad," she said. "Catchy name, huh?"

"Vlad what?" I said.

"I don't know," she said.

"But you know where he lives?" I said hopefully.

"We'll find him," she said, stalking toward the exit, and I finally decided that enough was enough. I grabbed her arm, and she turned to glare at me.

"Deborah," I said, "what the hell are we doing?"

"One more minute with that brain-dead bag of muscles and I'm going to lose it," she said. "I gotta get out of here." She tried to pull away, but I held on.

"I am as willing as anyone to flee in terror from your partner," I said. "But we are going to find somebody and we don't know his full name or where he might be. So where are we going?"

She tried again to jerk her arm away from my grip, and this time she succeeded. "Cybercafe," she said. "I'm not stupid." Apparently I was, because once again I was playing follow the leader as she stormed out the door and into the parking lot.