I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It sounded like a soothing sound the Passenger might make. “Look, Debs,” I said.

“What I'm saying is, we're not dealing with a killer —we're dealing with somebody who likes to play with dead bodies, not live ones.”

“And that makes a difference?”

“Yes.”

“Does he still kill people?” she asked.

“It sure looks like it.”

“And he'll probably do it again?”

“Probably,” I said over a cold chuckle of interior certainty that only I could hear.

“So what's the difference?” she said.

“The difference is that there won't be the same kind of pattern.

You can't know when he'll do it again, or who he'll do it to, or any of the things you can usually count on to help you catch him. All you can do is wait and hope you get lucky”

“Shit,” she said. I never was good at waiting.” There was a little bit of a commotion over where the cars were parked, and an overweight detective named Coulter come scuffling rapidly over the sand to us.

“Morgan,” he said.

“Yeah?” we both said.

“Not you,” he told me. “You. Debbie.” Deborah made a face —she hated being called Debbie. “What?”

“We're supposed to partner on this,” he said. “Captain said.”

“I'm already here,” she said. I don't need a partner.”

“Now you do,” Coulter said. He took a swig from a large soda bottle. “There's another one of these,” he said, gasping for breath.

“Over at Fairchild Gardens.”

“Lucky you,” I said to Deborah. She glared at me and I shrugged.

“Now you don't have to wait.”

Sin determinar

FOUR

ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT MIAMI HAS ALWAYS been the total willingness of its residents to pave everything.

Our fair city began as a sub-tropical garden teeming with wildlife, both animal and vegetable, and after only a very few years of hard work all the plants were gone and the animals were dead.

Of course, their memory lingers on in the condo clusters that replace them. It is an unwritten law that each new development is named after whatever was killed to build it. Destroy eagles? Eagle's Nest Gated Community. Kill off the panthers? Panther Run Planned Living. Simple and elegant, and generally very lucrative.

I don't mean to suggest by this that Fairchild Gardens was a parking lot where all the Fairchilds and their tulips had been killed.

Far from it. If anything, it represented the revenge of the plants. You had to drive past a certain number of Orchid Bays and Cypress Hollows to get there, but when you arrived, you were greeted by a vast natural-looking wilderness of trees and orchids nearly devoid of hedge-clipping humanity. Except for the busloads of tourists, of course. Still, there were actually one or two places where you could look at a genuine palm tree without seeing neon lights in the background, and on the whole I usually found it a relief to walk among the trees and vegetate far from the hurly-burly.