Deborah snorted. “That wouldn’t be too hard,” she said. “I’ll call you when he gets in.” She hung up, and I got ready for work.

AT 12:30 DEB STALKED INTO MY MODEST RETREAT OFF the forensics lab and threw a cassette tape on my desk. I looked up at her; she didn’t seem happy, but that really wasn’t much of a novelty. “From my answering machine at home,” she said. “Listen to it.”

I lifted the hatch on my boom box and put in the tape Deb had flung at me. I pushed play: the tape beeped loudly, and then an unfamiliar voice said, “Sergeant, um, Morgan. Right? This is Dan Burdett, from uh- Kyle Chutsky said I should call you. I’m on the ground at the airport, and I’ll call you about getting together when I get to my hotel, which is-” There was a rustling sound and he obviously moved the cell phone away from his mouth, since his voice got fainter. “What? Oh, hey, that’s nice. All right, thanks.” His voice got louder again. “I just met your driver. Thanks for sending somebody. All right, I’ll call from the hotel.”

Deborah reached across my desk and switched off the machine. “I didn’t send anybody to the fucking airport,” she said. “And Captain Matthews damn sure didn’t either. Did you send somebody to the fucking airport, Dexter?”

“My limo was out of gas,” I said.

“Well then GODDAMN it!” she said, and I had to agree with her analysis.

“Anyway,” I said, “at least we found out how good Kyle’s replacement is.”

Deborah slumped into the folding chair by my desk. “Square fucking one,” she said. “And Kyle is…” She bit her lip and didn’t finish the sentence.

“Did you tell Captain Matthews about this yet?” I asked her. She shook her head. “Well, he has to call them. They’ll send somebody else.”

“Sure, great. They send somebody else, who might make it all the way to baggage claim this time. Shit, Dexter.”

“We have to tell them, Debs,” I said. “By the way, who are them? Did Kyle ever tell you exactly who he works for?”

She sighed. “No. He joked about working for the OGA, but he never said why that was funny.”

“Well, whoever they are, they need to know,” I said. I pried the cassette out of my boom box and put it on the desk in front of her. “There has to be something they can do.”

Deborah didn’t move for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling they’ve already done it, and Burdett was it?” she said. Then she scooped up the tape and trudged out of my office.

I was sipping coffee and digesting my lunch with the help of a jumbo chocolate-chip cookie when the call came to report to the scene of a homicide in the Miami Shores area. Angel-no-relation and I drove over to where a body had been found in the shell of a small house on a canal that was being ripped apart and rebuilt. Construction had been temporarily halted while the owner and the contractor sued each other. Two teenaged boys skipping school had snuck into the house and found the body. It was laid out on heavy plastic on top of a sheet of plywood which had been placed over two sawhorses. Someone had taken a power saw and neatly lopped off the head, legs, and arms. The whole thing had been left like that, with the trunk in the middle and the pieces simply trimmed off and moved a few inches away.

And although the Dark Passenger had chuckled and whispered little dark nothings in my ear, I put it down to pure envy and went on with my work. There was certainly plenty of blood spatter for me to work with, still very fresh, and I probably would have spent a cheerfully efficient day finding and analyzing it if I hadn’t happened to overhear the uniformed officer who had been first on the scene talking with a detective.

“The wallet was right there by the body,” Officer Snyder was saying. “Got a Virginia driver’s license in the name of Daniel Chester Burdett.”

Oh, well then, I said to the happy chattering voice in the backseat of my brain. That would certainly explain a lot, wouldn’t it? I looked again at the body. Although the removal of the head and limbs had been fast and savage, there was a neatness to the arrangement that I could now recognize as slightly familiar, and the Dark Passenger chuckled happily in agreement. Between the trunk and each part, the gap was as precise as if it had been measured, and the whole presentation was arranged almost like an anatomy lesson. The hip bone disconnected from the leg bone.

“Got the two boys who found it in the squad car,” Snyder said to the detective. I glanced back at the two of them, wondering how to tell them my news. Of course, it was possible that I was wrong, but-

“Sonamabeech,” I heard someone mutter. I looked back to where Angel-no-relation was squatting on the far side of the body. Once again he was using his tweezers to hold up a small piece of paper. I stepped behind him and looked over his shoulder.

In a clear and spidery hand, someone had written “POGUE,” and crossed it out with a single line. “Whassa pogue?” Angel asked. “His name?”

“It’s somebody who sits behind a desk and orders around the real troops,” I told him.

He looked at me. “How you know all this shit?” he asked.

“I see a lot of movies,” I said.

Angel glanced back down at the paper. “I think the handwriting is the same,” he said.

“Like the other one,” I said.

“The one that never happened,” he said. “I know, I was there.”

I straightened up and took a breath, thinking how nice it was to be right. “This one never happened, either,” I said, and walked over to where Officer Snyder was chatting with the detective.

The detective in question was a pear-shaped man named Coulter. He was sipping from a large plastic bottle of Mountain Dew and looking out at the canal that ran by the backyard. “What do you think a place like this goes for?” he asked Snyder. “On a canal like that. Less than a mile from the bay, huh? Figure maybe what. Half a million? More?”

“Excuse me, Detective,” I said. “I think we have a situation here.” I’d always wanted to say that, but it didn’t seem to impress Coulter.

“A situation. You been watching CSI or something?”

“Burdett is a federal agent,” I said. “You have to call Captain Matthews right away and tell him.”

“I have to,” Coulter said.

“This is connected to something we’re not supposed to touch,” I said. “They came down from Washington and told the captain to back off.”

Coulter took a swig from his bottle. “And did the captain back off?”

“Like a rabbit in reverse,” I said.

Coulter turned and looked at Burdett’s body. “A fed,” he said. He took one more swig as he stared at the severed head and limbs. Then he shook his head. “Those guys always come apart under pressure.” He looked back out the window and pulled out his cell phone.

Deborah got to the scene just as Angel-no-relation was putting his kit back in the van, which was three minutes before Captain Matthews. I don’t mean to seem critical of the captain. To be perfectly fair, Debs didn’t have to put on a fresh spray of Aramis, and he did, and redoing the knot in his tie must have taken some time, too. Just moments behind Matthews came a car I had come to know as well as my own; a maroon Ford Taurus, piloted by Sergeant Doakes. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” I said cheerfully. Officer Snyder looked at me like I had suggested we dance naked, but Coulter just pushed his index finger into the mouth of his soda bottle and let it dangle as he walked away to meet the captain.

Deborah had been looking the scene over from the outside and directing Snyder’s partner to move the perimeter tape back a little. By the time she finally walked over to talk to me, I had reached a startling conclusion. It had started as an exercise in ironic whimsy, but it grew into something that I couldn’t argue with, as much as I tried. I stepped over to Coulter’s expensive window and stared out, leaning on the wall and looking hard at the idea. For some reason, the Dark Passenger found the notion hugely amusing and began whispering frightful counterpoint. And finally, feeling like I was selling nuclear secrets to the Taliban, I realized it was all we could do. “Deborah,” I said as she stalked over to where I stood by the window, “the cavalry isn’t coming this time.”