“This is the police,” a stern masculine voice said. “We have a report of a possible break-in.” It sounded authentic, but just to be sure, I left the chain on as I opened the door and looked out. Sure enough, there were two uniformed cops standing there, one looking at the door and one turned away, looking out into the yard and the street.

I closed the door, took the chain off, and reopened it. “Come in, Officer,” I said. His name tag said Ramirez, and I realized I knew him slightly. But he made no move to enter the house; he simply stared down at my hand.

“What kind of emergency is this, chief?” he said, nodding at my hand. I looked and realized I was still holding the toilet plunger.

“Oh,” I said. I put the plunger behind the door in the umbrella stand. “Sorry. That was for self-defense.”

“Uh-huh,” Ramirez said. “Guess it would depend what the other guy had.” He stepped forward into the house, calling over his shoulder to his partner, “Take a look around the yard, Williams.”

“Yo,” said Williams, a wiry black man of about forty. He walked down into the yard and disappeared around the corner of the house.

Ramirez stood in the center of the room, looking at Rita and the kids. “So, what’s the story here?” he asked, and before I could answer he squinted at me. “I know you from somewhere?” he said.

“Dexter Morgan,” I said. “I work in forensics.”

“Right,” he said. “So what happened here, Dexter?”

I told him.

T HE COPS STAYED WITH US FOR ABOUT FORTY MINUTES. They looked around the yard and the surrounding neighborhood and found nothing, which did not seem to surprise them, and which truthfully was not a great shock to me, either. When they were done looking Rita made them coffee and fed them some oatmeal cookies she had made.

Ramirez was certain it had been a couple of kids trying to get some kind of reaction from us, and if so they had certainly succeeded. Williams tried very hard to be reassuring, telling us it was just a prank and now it was over, and as they were leaving Ramirez added that they would drive by a few times the rest of the night. But even with these soothing words still fresh, Rita sat in the kitchen with a cup of coffee for the rest of the night, unable to get back to sleep. For my part, I tossed and turned for more than three minutes before I drifted back to slumberland.

And as I flew down the long black mountain into sleep, the music started up again. And there was a great feeling of gladness and then heat on my face…

And somehow I was in the hallway, with Rita shaking me and calling my name. “Dexter, wake up,” she said. “Dexter.”

“What happened?” I said.

“You were sleepwalking,” she said. “And singing. Singing in your sleep.”

And so rosy-fingered dawn found both of us sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. When the alarm finally went off in the bedroom, she got up to turn it off and came back and looked at me. I looked back, but there didn’t seem to be anything to say, and then Cody and Astor came into the kitchen, and there was nothing more we could do except stumble through the morning routine and head for work, automatically pretending that everything was exactly the way it should be.

But of course it wasn’t. Someone was trying to get into my head, and they were succeeding far too well. And now they were trying to get into my house, and I didn’t even know who it was, or what they wanted. I had to assume that somehow it was all connected to Moloch, and the absence of my Presence.

The bottom line was that somebody was trying to do something to me, and they were getting closer and closer to doing it.

I found myself unwilling to consider the idea that a real live ancient god was trying to kill me. To begin with, they don’t exist. And even if they did, why would one bother with me? Clearly some human being was using the whole Moloch thing as a costume in order to feel more powerful and important, and to make his victims believe he had special magical powers.

Like the ability to invade my sleep and make me hear music, for instance? A human predator couldn’t do that. And it couldn’t scare away the Dark Passenger, either.

The only possible answers were impossible. Maybe it was just the crippling fatigue, but I couldn’t think of any others that weren’t.

When I arrived at work that morning, I had no chance to think of anything better, because there was an immediate call to a double homicide in a quiet marijuana house in the Grove. Two teenagers had been tied up, cut up, and then shot several times each, just for good measure. And although I am certain that I should have considered this a terrible thing, I was actually very grateful for the opportunity to view dead bodies that were not cooked and beheaded. It made things seem normal, even peaceful, for just a little while. I sprayed my luminol hither and yon, almost happy to perform a task that made the hideous music recede for a little while.

But it also gave me time to ponder, and this I did. I saw scenes like this every day, and nine times out of ten the killers said things like “I just snapped” or “By the time I knew what I was doing it was too late.” All grand excuses, and it had seemed a bit amusing to me, since I always knew what I was doing, which was why I did it.

And at last a thought wandered in-I had found myself unable to do anything at all to Starzak without my Dark Passenger. This meant that my talent was in the Passenger, not in me by myself. Which could mean that all these others who “snapped” were temporarily playing host to something similar, couldn’t it?

Until now, mine had never left me; it was permanently at home with me, not wandering around in the streets hitchhiking with the first bad-tempered wretch that wandered by.

All right, put that aside for the time being. Let’s just assume that some Passengers wander and some of them nest. Could this account for what Halpern had described as a dream? Could something go into him, make him kill two girls, and then take him home and tuck him into bed before leaving?

I didn’t know. But I did know that if that idea held water, I was in a lot deeper than I had imagined.

By the time I got back to my office it was past time for lunch, and there was a call waiting from Rita to remind me that I had a 2:30 appointment with her minister. And by “minister” I don’t mean the kind with a position in the cabinet of a foreign government. As unlikely as it seems, I mean the kind of minister you will find in a church, if you are ever compelled to visit one for some reason. For my part, I have always assumed that if there is any kind of God at all He would never let something like me flourish. And if I am wrong, the altar might crack and fall if I went inside a church.

But my sensible avoidance of religious buildings was at an end now, since Rita wanted her very own minister to perform our wedding ceremony, and apparently he needed to check my human credentials before agreeing to the assignment. Of course, he hadn’t done a very good job of it the first time, since Rita’s first husband had been a crack addict who regularly beat her, and the reverend had somehow failed to detect that. And if the minister had missed something that obvious before, the odds of him doing better with me were not very good at all.

Still, Rita set great store by the man, so away we went to an ancient coral-rock church on an overgrown lot in the Grove, only half a mile from the homicide scene I had worked that morning. Rita had been confirmed there, she told me, and had known the minister for a very long time. Apparently that was important, and I supposed it should be, considering what I knew about several men of God who had come to my attention through my hobby. My former hobby, that is.