Worse still, I didn't know what I was actually worried about, only that the Dark Passenger had used the silent treatment on me at a scene of creative homicide. This had never happened, and I could only believe that something unusual and possibly Dexter-threatening had caused it now. But what? And how could I be sure, when I didn't really know the first thing about the Passenger itself, except that it had always been there to offer happy insight and commentary. We had seen burned bodies before, and pottery aplenty, with never a twitch or a tweet. Was it the combination? Or something specific to these two bodies? Or was it entirely coincidental and had nothing whatever to do with what we had seen?

The more I thought about it, the less I knew, but the traffic swirled around me in its soothing homicidal patterns, and by the time I got to Rita's house I had almost convinced myself that there was really nothing to worry about. Rita, Cody, and Astor were already home when I got there. Rita worked much closer to the house than I did, and the kids were in an after-school program at a nearby park, so they had all been waiting for at least half an hour for the opportunity to torment me out of my hard-won peace of mind. "It was on the news," Astor whispered as I opened the door, and Cody nodded and said, "Gross," in his soft, hoarse voice. "What was on the news?" I said, struggling to get past them and into the house without trampling on them. "You burned them!" Astor hissed at me, and Cody looked at me with a complete lack of expression that somehow conveyed disapproval. "I what? Who did I-" "Those two people they found at the college," she said. "We don't want to learn that," she added emphatically, and Cody nodded again. "At the-you mean at the university? I didn't-" "A university is a college," Astor said with the underlined certainty of a ten-year-old girl. "And we think burning is just gross."

It began to dawn on me what they had seen on the news-a report from the scene where I had spent my morning collecting dry-roasted blood samples from two charred bodies. And somehow, merely because they knew I had been out to play the other night, they had decided that this was how I had spent my time. Even without the Dark Passenger's strange retreat, I agreed that it was completely gross, and I found it highly annoying that they thought I was capable of something like that. "Listen," I said sternly, "that was not-"

"Dexter? Is that you?" Rita yodeled from the kitchen.
"I'm not sure," I called back. "Let me check my wallet."