She was right, of course. It looked like there was very little we could do to get Kyle back intact. Because with all the luck in the world, even my dazzling intellect couldn’t possibly lead us to him before the work started. And then-how long could Kyle hold out? Presumably he’d had some sort of training in dealing with this sort of thing, and he knew what was coming, so-

But wait a moment. I closed my eyes and tried to think about it. Dr. Danco would know that Kyle was a pro. And as I had already told Deborah, the whole purpose was to shatter the victim into screaming unfixable pieces. Therefore…

I opened my eyes. “Deb,” I said. She looked at me. “I am in the rare position of having some hope to offer.”

“Spill it,” she said.

“This is only a guess,” I said. “But I think Dr. Demented will probably keep Kyle around for a while, without working on him.”

She frowned. “Why would he do that?”

“To make it last longer, and to soften him up. Kyle knows what’s coming. He’s braced for it. But now, imagine he’s just left lying in the dark, tied up, so his imagination goes to work. And so I think maybe,” I added as it occurred to me, “there’s another victim ahead of him. The guy who’s missing. So Kyle hears it-the saws and scalpels, the moans and whispers. He even smells it, knows it’s coming but doesn’t know when. He’ll be half crazy before he even loses a toenail.”

“Jesus,” she said. “That’s your version of hope?”

“Absolutely. It gives us a little extra time to find him.”

“Jesus,” she said again.

“I could be wrong,” I said.

She looked back out the window. “Don’t be wrong, Dex. Not this time,” she said.

I shook my head. This was going to be pure drudgery, no fun at all. I could only think of two things to try, and neither of them were possible until the morning. I glanced around for a clock. According to the VCR, it was 12:00. 12:00. 12:00. “Do you have a clock?” I asked.

Deborah frowned. “What do you want a clock for?”

“To find out what time it is,” I said. “I think that’s the usual purpose.”

“What the hell difference does that make?” she demanded.

“Deborah. There is very little to go on here. We will have to go back and do all the routine stuff that Chutsky pulled the department away from. Luckily, we can use your badge to barge around and ask questions. But we will have to wait until morning.”

“Shit,” she said. “I hate waiting.”

“There there,” I said. Deborah gave me a very sour look, but didn’t say anything.

I didn’t like waiting either, but I had done so much of it lately that perhaps it came easier to me. In any case, wait we did, dozing in our chairs until the sun came up. And then, since I was the domestic one lately, I made coffee for the two of us-one cup at a time, since Deborah’s coffeemaker was one of those single-cup things for people who don’t expect to be entertaining a great deal and don’t actually have a life. There was nothing in the refrigerator remotely worth eating, unless you were a feral dog. Very disappointing: Dexter is a healthy boy with a high metabolism, and facing what was sure to be a difficult day on an empty stomach was not a happy thought. I know family comes first, but shouldn’t that mean after breakfast?

Ah, well. Dauntless Dexter would make the sacrifice once again. Pure nobility of spirit, and I could expect no thanks, but one does what one must.

DR. MARK SPIELMAN WAS A LARGE MAN WHO LOOKED more like a retired linebacker than an ER physician. But he had been the physician on duty when the ambulance delivered The Thing to Jackson Memorial Hospital, and he was not at all happy about it. “If I ever have to see something like that again,” he told us, “I will retire and raise dachshunds.” He shook his head. “You know what the ER at Jackson is like. One of the busiest. All the crazy stuff comes here, from one of the craziest cities in the world. But this-” Spielman knocked twice on the table in the mild green staff lounge where we sat with him. “Something else,” he said.

“What’s the prognosis?” Deborah asked him, and he looked at her sharply.

“Is that a joke?” he said. “There’s no prognosis, and there’s not going to be one. Physically, there’s not enough left to do anything but sustain life, if you want to call it that. Mentally?” He put both hands palm up and then dropped them on the table. “I’m not a shrink, but there’s nothing left in there and no way that he’ll ever have a single lucid moment, ever again. The only hope he has is that we keep him so doped up he doesn’t know who he is, until he dies. Which for his sake we should all hope is soon.” He looked at his watch, a very nice Rolex. “Is this going to take long? I am on duty, you know.”

“Were there traces of any drugs in the blood?” Deborah asked.

Spielman snorted. “Traces, hell. The guy’s blood is a cocktail sauce. I’ve never seen such a mix before. All designed to keep him awake, but deaden the physical pain so the shock of the multiple amputations didn’t kill him.”

“Was there anything unusual about the cuts?” I asked him.

“The guy’s had training,” Spielman said. “They were all done with very good surgical technique. But any medical school in the world could have taught him that.” He blew out a breath and an apologetic smile flickered quickly across his face. “Some of them were already healed.”

“What kind of time frame does that give us?” Deborah asked him.

Spielman shrugged. “Four to six weeks, start to finish,” he said. “He took at least a month to surgically dismember this guy, one small piece at a time. I can’t imagine anything more horrible.”

“He did it in front of a mirror,” I said, ever-helpful. “So the victim had to watch.”

Spielman looked appalled. “My God,” he said. He just sat there for a minute, and then said, “Oh, my God.” Then he shook his head and looked at his Rolex again. “Listen, I’d like to help out here, but this is…” He spread his hands and then dropped them on the table again. “I don’t think there’s really anything I can tell you that’s going to do any good. So let me save you some time here. That Mister, uh-Chesney?”

“Chutsky,” Deborah said.

“Yes, that was it. He called in and suggested I might get an ID with a retinal scan at, um, a certain database in Virginia.” He raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Anyway. I got a fax yesterday, with a positive identification of the victim. I’ll get it for you.” He stood up and disappeared into the hall. A moment later he returned with a sheet of paper. “Here it is. Name is Manuel Borges. A native of El Salvador, in the import business.” He put the paper down in front of Deborah. “I know it’s not much, but believe me, that’s it. The shape he’s in…” He shrugged. “I didn’t think we’d get this much.”

A small intercom speaker in the ceiling muttered something that might have come from a TV show. Spielman cocked his head, frowned, and said, “Gotta go. Hope you catch him.” And he was out the door and down the hall so quickly that the fax paper he had dropped on the table fluttered.

I looked at Deborah. She did not seem particularly encouraged that we had found the victim’s name. “Well,” I said. “I know it isn’t much.”

She shook her head. “Not much would be a big improvement. This is nothing.” She looked at the fax, read it through one time. “ El Salvador. Connected to something called FLANGE.”

“That was our side,” I said. She looked up at me. “The side the United States supported. I looked it up on the Internet.”

“Swell. So we just found out something we already knew.” She got up and headed for the door, not quite as quickly as Dr. Spielman but fast enough that I had to hurry and I didn’t catch up until she was at the door to the parking lot.

Deborah drove rapidly and silently, with her jaw clenched, all the way to the little house on N.W. 4th Street where it had all started. The yellow tape was gone, of course, but Deborah parked haphazardly anyway, cop fashion, and got out of the car. I followed her up the short walkway to the house next door to the one where we had found the human doorstop. Deborah rang the bell, still without speaking, and a moment later it swung open. A middle-aged man wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a tan guayabera shirt looked out at us inquiringly.