"Oh," Chutsky said through a mouthful of food. "Is this his amateur profiling thing again?" It was a small fiction; we had told him that my hobby was actually analytical, rather than hands-on. "It is," Deborah said. "And he won't tell me what he's figured out." "It might be hard to believe, Sis, but I know nothing about this. Just…" I shrugged, but she was already pouncing. "What! Come on, please?" I hesitated again. There was no good way to tell her that the Dark Passenger had reacted to these killings in a brand-new and totally unsettling way. "I just get a feeling," I said. "Something is a little off with this one." She snorted. "Two burned headless bodies, and he says something's a little off. Didn't you used to be smart?" I took a bite of my sandwich as Deborah frittered away her precious eating time by frowning. "Have you identified the bodies yet?" I asked. "Come on, Dexter. There's no heads, so we got no dental records. The bodies were burned, so there's no fingerprints. Shit, we don't even know what color their hair was. What do you want me to do?" "I could probably help, you know," Chutsky said. He speared a chunk of fried maduras and popped it into his mouth. "I have a few resources I can call on."

"I don't need your help," she said and he shrugged. "You take Dexter's help," he said. "That's different." "How is that different?" he asked, and it seemed like a reasonable question. "Because he gives me help," she said. "You want to solve it for me."

They locked eyes and didn't speak for a long moment. I'd seen them do it before, and it was eerily reminiscent of the nonverbal conversations Cody and Astor had. It was nice to see them so clearly welded together as a couple, even though it reminded me that I had a wedding of my own to worry about, complete with an apparently insane high-class caterer. Happily, just before I could begin to gnash my teeth, Debs broke the eerie silence.

"I won't be one of those women who needs help," she said. "But I can get you information that you can't get," he said, putting his good hand on her arm.

"Like what?" I asked him. I'll admit I had been curious for some time about what Chutsky was, or had been before his accidental amputations. I knew that he had worked for some government agency which he referred to as the OGA, but I still didn't know what that stood for.

He turned to face me obligingly. "I have friends and sources in a lot of places," he said. "Something like this might have left some kind of trail somewhere else, and I could call around and find out."

"You mean call your buddies at the OGA?" I said. He smiled. "Something like that," he said.