In Dexter's office, Deb has just gotten confirmation that there had to be someone else in the hotel room, and sighs at the dilemma this information presents. She then asks for a pen to sign the blood report, and when Dexter can't produce one, she digs in his bag and finds one -- from the hotel he stayed at in Nebraska.

I mean, this alone should be enough to warrant an F for the episode. We're to believe that Dexter, whom the show presents as amazingly meticulous, kept a pen from a hotel at which he killed the proprietor? I mean, forget Dexter's compulsively private nature -- what if Deb does a casual check of any criminal activity up there? Not to mention, she knows exactly where the Mitchell family was living -- does he want her asking awkward questions about that? It's just another example of how unforgivably lazy the writers have become in the wake of the show's success. Finding a credible reason, one that doesn't fly in the face of everything we know about Dexter's character, for her to discover the pen (or something else linking him to Nebraska) is a story obstacle. Good shows succeed in overcoming them; bad shows fail and hope you don't notice. The latter happens all the time on this show, but this is a particularly maddening and egregious example.

Anyway, Deb at least rather quickly makes the Trinity connection and asks if Dexter talked to Jonah, and Dexter doesn't have to go far to come up with a reasonably believable lie, saying that they both lost loved ones to Trinity, so he felt a connection with him and needed someone to talk to. Might have been better advised to put a slightly different spin on it and say that he felt the need to offer Jonah some support, because then Deb might not be going on to make this all about her, whining that he could have come to her, and she "burdens him with shit all the time," then gagging as an aftereffect of the mouthful she just spat out. Deb does make the point that she's in a position to understand, as she lost Keith Carradine because of Trinity, which, okay, never quite thought about it that way but I'll give that to her, especially because Keith Carradine was awesome and I still miss him myself. Dexter, as is his wont, sits there and says nothing, but he's spared any further braying on Deb's part when Masuka enters and tells them DDK has struck again...