I DON’T DREAM. I MEAN, I’M SURE THAT AT SOME POINT DURING my normal sleep, there must be images and fragments of nonsense parading through my subconscious. After all, they tell me that happens with everyone. But I never seem to remember dreams if I do have them, which they tell me happens to nobody at all. So I assume that I do not dream.

It was therefore something of a shock to discover myself late that night, cradled in Rita’s arms, shouting something I could not quite hear; just the echo of my own strangled voice coming back at me out of the cottony dark, and Rita’s cool hand on my forehead, her voice murmuring, “All right, sweetheart, I won’t leave you.”

“Thank you very much,” I said in a croaking voice. I cleared my throat and sat up.

“You had a bad dream,” she told me.

“Really? What was it?” I still didn’t remember anything but my shouting and a vague sense of danger crowding in on me, and me all alone.

“I don’t know,” Rita said. “You were shouting, ‘Come back! Don’t leave me alone.’” She cleared her throat. “Dexter-I know you’re feeling some stress about our wedding-”

“Not at all,” I said.

“But I want you to know. I will never leave you.” She reached for my hand again. “This is forever with me, big man. I am holding on to you.” She scooted over and put her head on my shoulder. “Don’t worry. I won’t ever leave you, Dexter.”

Even though I lack experience with dreams, I was fairly sure that my subconscious was not terribly worried about Rita leaving me. I mean, it hadn’t occurred to me that she would, which was not really a sign of trust on my part. I just hadn’t thought about it. Truly, I had no idea why she wanted to hang on to me in the first place, so any hypothetical leave-taking was just as mysterious.

No, this was my subconscious. If it was crying out in pain at the threat of abandonment, I knew exactly what it feared losing: the Dark Passenger. My bosom buddy, my constant companion on my journey through life’s sorrows and sharp pleasures. That was the fear behind the dream: losing the thing that had been so very much a part of me, had actually defined me, for my whole life.

When it scuttled into hiding at the university crime scene it had clearly shaken me badly, more than I had known at the time. The sudden and very scary reappearance of 65 percent of Sergeant Doakes supplied the sense of danger, and the rest was easy. My subconscious had kicked in and supplied a dream on the subject. Perfectly clear-Psych 101, a textbook case, nothing to worry about.

So why was I still worrying?

Because the Passenger had never even flinched before, and I still didn’t know why it had chosen now. Was Rita right about the stress of the approaching wedding? Or was there really something about the two headless bodies by the university lake that just plain scared the Dark out of me?

I didn’t know-and, since it seemed like Rita’s ideas about comforting me had begun to take a more active turn, it did not look like I was going to find out anytime soon.

“Come here, baby,” Rita whispered.

And after all, there really isn’t any place to run in a queen-size bed, is there?

The next morning found Deborah obsessed with finding the missing heads from the two bodies at the university. Somehow word had leaked out to the press that the department was interested in finding a couple of skulls that had wandered away. This was Miami, and I really would have thought that a missing head would get less press coverage than a traffic tie-up on I-95, but something about the fact that there were two of them, and that they apparently belonged to young women, created quite a stir. Captain Matthews was a man who knew the value of being mentioned in the press, but even he was not pleased with the note of surly hysteria that attached itself to this story.

And so pressure came down on all of us from above; from the captain to Deborah, who wasted no time passing it on down to the rest of us. Vince Masuoka became convinced that he could provide Deborah with the key to the whole matter by finding out which bizarre religious sect was responsible. This led to him sticking his head in my door that morning and, without any kind of warning, giving me his best fake smile and saying, firmly and distinctly, “Candomblé.”

“Shame on you,” I said. “This is no time for that kind of language.”

“Ha,” he said, with his terrible artificial laugh. “But it is, I’m sure of it. Candomblé is like Santeria, but it’s Brazilian.”

“Vince, I have no reason to doubt you on that. My question is, what the hell are you talking about?”

He came two steps into the room in a kind of prance, as if his body wanted to take off and he couldn’t quite fight it down. “They have a thing about animal heads in some of their rituals,” he said. “It’s on the Internet.”

“Really,” I said. “Does it say on the Internet that this Brazilian thing barbecues humans, cuts off their heads, and replaces them with ceramic bulls’ heads?”

Vince wilted just a bit. “No,” he admitted, and he raised his eyebrows hopefully. “But they use animals.”

“How do they use them, Vince?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, and he looked around my little room, possibly for another topic of conversation. “Sometimes they, you know, offer a part to the gods, and then they eat the rest.”

“Vince,” I said, “are you suggesting that somebody ate the missing heads?”

“No,” he said, turning sullen, almost like Cody and Astor might have done. “But they could have.”

“It would be very crunchy, wouldn’t it?”

“All right,” he said, exceedingly sulky now. “I’m just trying to help.” And he stalked away, without even a small fake smile.

But the chaos had only begun. As my unwanted trip to dreamland indicated, I was already under enough pressure without the added strain of a rampaging sister. But only a few minutes later, my small oasis of peace was ripped asunder once again, this time by Deborah, who came roaring into my office as if pursued by killer bees.

“Come on,” she snarled at me.

“Come on where?” I asked, quite a reasonable question, I thought, but you would have thought I had asked her to shave her head and paint her skull blue.

“Just get in gear, and come on!” she said, so I came on and followed her down to the parking lot and into her car.

“I swear to God,” she fumed as she hammered her car through the traffic, “I have never seen Matthews this pissed before. And now it’s my fault!” She banged on the horn for emphasis and swerved in front of a van that said PALMVIEW ASSISTED LIVING on the side. “All because some asshole leaked the heads to the press.”

“Well, Debs,” I said, with all the reasonable soothing I could muster, “I’m sure the heads will turn up.”

“You’re goddamned right they will,” she said, narrowly missing a fat man on a bicycle that had huge saddlebags stuffed with scrap metal. “Because I am going to find out which cult the son of a bitch belongs to, and then I’m going to nail the bastard.”

I paused in mid-soothe. Apparently my dear demented sister, just like Vince, had gotten hold of the idea that finding the appropriate alternative religion would yield a killer. “Ah, all right,” I said. “And where are we going to do that?”

She slid the car out onto Biscayne Boulevard and into a parking space at the curb without answering, and got out of the car. And so I found myself patiently following her into the Centre for Inner Enhancement, a clearinghouse for all the wonderfully useful things that have the words “holistic,” “herbal,” or “aura” in them.

The Centre was a small and shabby building in an area of Biscayne Boulevard that had apparently been designated by treaty as a kind of reservation for prostitutes and crack dealers. There were enormous bars on the storefront windows and more of them on the door, which was locked. Deborah pounded on it and after a moment it gave an annoying buzz. She pushed, and finally it clicked and swung open.