Chutsky snorted as he sawed at his Cuban steak. "No shit," he said. He was about to say more, but the fork clamped in his prosthetic left hand slipped sideways. "Goddamn it," he said, and I realized that they had a great deal more in common than I had thought. Deborah leaned over and helped him straighten the fork. "Thanks," he said, and shoveled in a large bite of the pounded-flat meat.

"There, you see?" I said brightly. "All you needed was something to take your mind off your own problems."

We were sitting at a table where we had probably eaten a hundred times. But Deborah was rarely troubled by sentiment; she straightened up and slapped the battered Formica tabletop hard enough to make the sugar bowl jump.

"I want to know who talked to that asshole Rick Sangre!" she said. Sangre was a local TV reporter who believed that the gorier a story was, the more vital it was for people to have a free press that could fill them in on as many gruesome details as possible. From the tone of her voice, Deborah was apparently convinced that Rick was my new best friend.

"Well, it wasn't me," I said. "And I don't think it was Doakes."
"Ouch," said Chutsky.
"And," she said, "I want to find those fucking heads!"
"I don't have them, either," I said. "Did you check lost and found?"
"You know something, Dexter," she said. "Come on, why are you holding out on me?"

Chutsky looked up and swallowed. "Why should he know something you don't?" he asked. "Was there a lot of spatter?"

"No spatter at all," I said. "The bodies were cooked, nice and dry." Chutsky nodded and managed to scoop some rice and beans onto his fork. "You're a sick bastard, aren't you?" "He's worse than sick," Deborah said. "He's holding out something."