But in this case, I had nothing whatsoever to tell Deborah. I had, in fact, been hoping she might have some small crumb of information to give to me, something that might explain the Dark Passenger's peculiar and uncharacteristic shrinking act. That, of course, was not the sort of thing I really felt comfortable telling Deborah about. But no matter what I said about this burned double offering, she wouldn't believe me. She would be sure I had information and some kind of angle that made me want to keep it all to myself. The only thing more suspicious than a sibling is a sibling who happens to be a cop.

Sure enough, she was convinced I was holding out on her. "Come on, Dexter," she said. "Out with it. Tell me what you know about this."

"Dear Sis, I am at a total loss," I said.
"Bullshit," she said, apparently unaware of the irony. "You're holding something back."
"Never in life," I said. "Would I lie to my only sister?"
She glared at me. "So it isn't Santeria?"
"I have no idea," I said, as soothingly as possible. "It seems like a really good place to start. But-" "I knew it," she snapped. "But what?"
"Well," I started. And truly it had just occurred to me, and probably it meant nothing at all, but here I was in

mid-sentence already, so I went on with it. "Have you ever heard of a santero using ceramics? And bulls-don't they have a thing for goat heads?"

She looked at me very hard for a minute, then shook her head. "That's it? That's what you got?" "I told you, Debs, I don't got anything. It was only a thought, something that just now came to me." "Well," she said. "If you're telling me the truth-" "Of course I am," I protested.

"Then, you've got doodly-squat," she said and looked away, back to where Captain Matthews was answering questions with his solemn, manly jaw jutting out. "Which is only slightly less than the horsepucky I got," she said.

I had never before grasped that doodly-squat was less than horsepucky, but it's always nice to learn something new. And yet even this startling revelation did very little to answer the real question here: Why had the Dark Passenger pulled a duck and cover? In the course of my job and my hobby I have seen some things that most people can't even imagine, unless they have watched several of those movies they show at traffic school for driving drunk. And in every case I had ever encountered, no matter how grisly, my shadow companion had some kind of pithy comment on the proceedings, even if it was only a yawn.