Still, it was not the sort of thing I could say in the ICU without causing a certain amount of negative feeling to be directed toward me, so I mumbled something appropriate and we went back to sit at Deborah's bedside. Wilkins was still at the door, and there had been no change in Deborah that I could see, and no matter how long we sat or how hard we looked at her nothing happened, except for the hum, click, ping of the machinery.

Chutsky stared at her, as if he could make her sit up and speak by the power of his gaze. It didn't work. After a time he switched his stare to me. “The guy who did this” he said. “They got him, right?”

“He's locked up” I said. “At the detention center.” Chutsky nodded and looked like he was going to say something else. He looked toward the window, sighed, and then went back to staring at Deborah.

Dexter is known far and wide for the depth and sharpness of his intellect, but it was nearly midnight before it occurred to me that there was no point in sitting and staring at Deborah's unmoving form. She had not leapt to her feet from the Uri Geller intensity of Chutsky's gaze, and if the doctors were to be believed she was not going to do anything at all for some time. In which case, instead of sitting here and slowly sagging into the floor and morphing into a hunched, red-eyed lump, it made more sense for Dexter to totter off to bed for a few squalid hours of slumber.

Chutsky offered no objection; he just waved his hand and muttered something about holding down the fort, and I staggered out of the ICU into the warm and wet Miami night. It was a pleasant change after the mechanical chill of the hospital, and I paused to breathe in the flavor of vegetation and exhaust fumes. There was a large chunk of evil yellow moon floating in the sky and chuckling to itself, but I did not really feel its pull. I could not concentrate at all on the joyous matching gleam a knife blade would give off or the wild night-time dance of shadowy delight I should be longing for.

Not with Deborah lying unmoving inside. Not that it would be wrong -1 just didn't feel it. I didn't feel anything at all except tired, dull and empty.

Well, I couldn't cure the dull and empty, and I couldn't cure Deborah, but at least I could do something about the tired part.

I went home.

I woke up early, with a bad taste in my mouth. Rita was already in the kitchen and she had a cup of coffee in front of me before I could even settle into a chair. “How is she?” she said.

“It's too soon to tell” I said, and she nodded.

“They always say that” she said.

I took a large slug of the coffee and stood back up. “I'd better check and see how she is this morning” I said. I grabbed my cell phone from the table by the front door and called Chutsky.