And this brought a brand-new thought that was most unwelcome: If this hypothetical something had scared away the Passenger, had it followed it into exile? Or was it still sniffing at my trail? Was I in danger with no way left to protect myself-with no way of knowing whether some lethal threat was right behind me until its drool actually fell on my neck?

I have always heard that new experiences are a good thing, but this one was pure torture. The more I thought about it, the less I understood what was happening to me, and the more it hurt.

Well, there was one sure remedy for misery, and that was good hard work on something completely pointless. I swiveled around to face my computer and got busy.

In only a few minutes I had opened up the entire life and history of Dr. Gerald Halpern, Ph.D. Of course, it was a little trickier than simply searching Halpern’s name on Google. There was, for example, the matter of the sealed court records, which took me almost five full minutes to open. But when I did, it was certainly worth the effort, and I found myself thinking, Well, well, well… And because at the moment I was tragically alone on the inside, with no one to hear my pensive remarks, I said it aloud, too. “Well, well, well,” I said.

The foster-care records would have been interesting enough-not because I felt any bond with Halpern from my own parentless past. I had been more than adequately provided with a home and family by Harry, Doris, and Deborah, unlike Halpern, who had flitted from foster home to foster home until finally landing at Syracuse University.

Far more interesting, however, was the file that no one was supposed to open without a warrant, a court order, and a stone tablet direct from the hand of God. And when I had read through it a second time, my reaction was even more profound. “Well, well, well, well,” I said, mildly unsettled at the way the words bounced off the walls of my empty little office. And since profound revelations are always more dramatic with an audience, I reached for the phone and called my sister.

In just a few minutes she pushed into my cubicle and sat on the folding chair. “What did you find?” she said.

“Dr. Gerald Halpern has A Past,” I said, carefully pronouncing the capital letters so she wouldn’t leap across the desk and hug me.

“I knew it,” she said. “What did he do?”

“It’s not so much what he did,” I said. “At this point, it’s more like what was done to him.”

“Quit screwing around,” she said. “What is it?”

“To begin with, he’s apparently an orphan.”

“Come on, Dex, cut to the chase.”

I held up a hand to try to calm her down, but it clearly didn’t work very well, because she started tapping her knuckles on the desktop. “I am trying to paint a subtle canvas here, Sis,” I said.

“Paint faster,” she said.

“All right. Halpern went into the foster-care system in upstate New York when they found him living in a box under the freeway. They found his parents, who were unfortunately dead of recent and unpleasant violence. It seems to have been very well-deserved violence.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“His parents were pimping him out to pedophiles,” I said.

“Jesus,” Deborah said, and she was clearly a little shocked. Even by Miami standards, this was a bit much.

“And Halpern doesn’t remember any of that part. He gets blackouts under stress, the file says. It makes sense. The blackouts were probably a conditioned response to the repeated trauma,” I said. “That can happen.”

“Well, fuck,” Deborah said, and I inwardly applauded her elegance. “So he forgets shit. You have to admit that fits. The girl tries to frame him for rape, and he’s already worried about tenure-so he gets stressed and kills her without knowing it.”

“A couple of other things,” I said, and I admit that I enjoyed the drama of the moment perhaps a little more than was necessary. “To begin with, the death of his parents.”

“What about it?” she said, quite clearly lacking any theatrical pleasure at all.

“Their heads were cut off,” I said. “And then the house was torched.”

Deborah straightened up. “Shit,” she said.

“I thought so, too.”

“Goddamn, that’s great, Dex,” she said. “We have his ass.”

“Well,” I said, “it certainly fits the pattern.”

“It sure as hell does,” she said. “So did he kill his parents?”

I shrugged. “They couldn’t prove anything. If they could, Halpern would have been committed. It was so violent that nobody could believe a kid had done it. But they’re pretty sure that he was there, and at least saw what happened.”

She looked at me hard. “So what’s wrong with that? You still think he didn’t do it? I mean, you’re having one of your hunches here?”

It stung a lot more than it should have, and I closed my eyes for a moment. There was still nothing there except dark and empty. My famous hunches were, of course, based on things whispered to me by the Dark Passenger, and in its absence I had nothing to go on. “I’m not having hunches lately,” I admitted. “There’s just something that bothers me about this. It just-”

I opened my eyes and Deborah was staring at me. For the first time today there was something in her expression beyond bubbly happiness, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask me what that meant and was I all right. I had no idea what I would say if she did, since the Dark Passenger was not something I had ever talked about, and the idea of sharing something that intimate was very unsettling.

“I don’t know,” I said weakly. “It doesn’t seem right.”

Deborah smiled gently. I would have felt more at ease if she had snarled and told me to fuck off, but she smiled and reached a hand across the desk to pat mine. “Dex,” she said softly, “the hard evidence is more than enough. The background fits. The motive is good. You admit you’re not having one of your…hunches.” She cocked her head to the side, still smiling, which made me even more uneasy. “This one is righteous, Bro. Whatever is bothering you, don’t pin it on this. He did it, we got him, that’s it.” She let go of my hand before either one of us could burst into tears. “But I’m a little worried about you.”

“I’m fine,” I said, and it sounded false even to me.

Deborah looked at me for a long moment, and then stood up. “All right,” she said. “But I’m here for you if you need me.” And she turned and walked away.

Somehow I slogged through the gray soup of the rest of the day and made it all the way home to Rita’s at the end of the day, where the soup gelled into an aspic of sensory deprivation. I don’t know what we had for dinner, or what anyone might have said. The only thing I could bring myself to listen for was the sound of the Passenger rushing back in, and this sound did not come. And so I swam through the evening on automatic pilot and finally went to bed, still completely wrapped up in Dull Empty Dexter.

It surprised me a great deal to learn it, but sleep is not automatic for humans, not even for the semi-human I was becoming. The old me, Dexter of the Darkness, had slept perfectly, with great ease, simply lying down, closing his eyes, and thinking, “One two three GO.” Presto, sleep-o.

But the New Model Dexter had no such luck.

I tossed, I turned, I commanded my pitiful self to go immediately to sleep with no further dithering, and all to no avail. I could not sleep. I could only lie there wide-eyed and wonder why.

And as the night dragged on, so did the terrible, dreary introspection. Had I been misleading myself my entire life? What if I was not Dashing Slashing Dexter and his Canny Sidekick the Passenger? What if I was, in fact, actually only a Dark Chauffeur, allowed to live in a small room at the big house in exchange for driving the master on his appointed rounds? And if my services were no longer required, what could I possibly be now that the boss had moved away? Who was I if I was no longer me?