Dearly Devoted Dexter

CHAPTER 11

AND SO I WAS PATIENT. IT WAS NOT AN EASY THING, but it was the Harry thing. Let the bright steely spring inside stay coiled and quiet and wait, watch, hold the hot sweet release locked tight in its cold box until it was Harry-right to let it skitter out and cartwheel through the night. Sooner or later some small opening would show and we could vault through it. Sooner or later I would find a way to make Doakes blink.

I waited.

Some of us, of course, find that harder to do than others, and it was several days later, a Saturday morning, that my telephone rang.

“Goddamn it,” said Deborah without any preamble. It was almost a relief to hear that she was her recognizable cranky self again.

“Fine, thanks, and you?” I said.

“Kyle is making me nuts,” she said. “He says there’s nothing we can do but wait, but he won’t tell me what we’re waiting for. He disappears for ten or twelve hours and won’t tell me where he was. And then we just wait some more. I am so fucking tired of waiting my teeth hurt.”

“Patience is a virtue,” I said.

“I’m tired of being virtuous, too,” she said. “And I am sick to death of Kyle’s patronizing smile when I ask him what we can do to find this guy.”

“Well, Debs, I don’t know what I can do except offer my sympathy,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“I think you can do a whole hell of a lot more than that, Bro,” she said.

I sighed heavily, mostly for her benefit. Sighs register so nicely on the telephone. “This is the trouble with having a reputation as a gunslinger, Debs,” I said. “Everybody thinks I can shoot the eye out of a jack at thirty paces, every single time.”

“I still think it,” she said.

“Your confidence warms my heart, but I don’t understand a thing about this kind of adventure, Deborah. It leaves me completely cold.”

“I have to find this guy, Dexter. And I want to rub Kyle’s nose in it,” she said.

“I thought you liked him.”

She snorted. “Jesus, Dexter. You don’t know anything about women, do you? Of course I like him. That’s why I want to rub his nose in it.”

“Oh, good, now it makes sense,” I said.

She paused, and then very casually said, “Kyle said some interesting things about Doakes.”

I felt my long-fanged friend inside stretch just a little and absolutely purr. “You’re getting very subtle all of a sudden, Deborah,” I said. “All you had to do was ask me.”

“I just asked, and you gave me all that crap about how you can’t help,” she said, suddenly good old plain-speaking Debs again. “So how about it. What have you got?”

“Nothing at the moment,” I said.

“Shit,” said Deborah.

“But I might be able to find something.”

“How soon?”

I admit that I was feeling irked by Kyle’s attitude toward me. What had he said? I would be “in the shit and you will get flushed”? Seriously-who wrote his dialogue? And Deborah’s sudden onset of subtlety, which had been my traditional bailiwick, had done nothing to calm me down. So I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. “How about by lunchtime?” I said. “Let’s say I’ll have something by one o’clock. Baleen, since Kyle can pick up the check.”

“This I gotta see,” she said, and then added, “The stuff about Doakes? It’s pretty good.” She hung up.

Well, well, I said to myself. Suddenly, I did not mind the thought of working a little bit on a Saturday. After all, the only alternative was to hang out at Rita’s and watch moss grow on Sergeant Doakes. But if I found something for Debs, I might at long last have the small opening I had hoped for. I merely had to be the clever boy we all believed I was.

But where to start? There was precious little to go on, since Kyle had pulled the department away from the crime scene before we had done much more than dust for prints. Many times in the past I had earned a few modest brownie points with my police colleagues by helping them track down the sick and twisted demons who lived only to kill. But that was because I understood them, since I am a sick and twisted demon myself. This time, I could not rely on getting any hints from the Dark Passenger, who had been lulled into an uneasy sleep, poor fellow. I had to depend on my own bare-naked native wit, which was also being alarmingly silent at the moment.

Perhaps if I gave my brain some fuel, it would kick into high gear. I went to the kitchen and found a banana. It was very nice, but for some reason it did not launch any mental rockets.

I threw the peel in the garbage and looked at the clock. Well, dear boy, that was five whole minutes gone by. Excellent. And you have already managed to figure out that you can’t figure anything out. Bravo, Dexter.

There really were very few places to start. In fact, all I had was the victim and the house. And since I was fairly certain that the victim would not have a lot to say, even if we gave him back his tongue, that left the house. Of course it was possible that the house belonged to the victim. But the decor had such a temporary look to it, I was sure it did not.

Strange to simply walk away from an entire house like that. But he had done so, and with no one breathing down his neck and forcing a hasty and panicked retreat-which meant that he had done it deliberately, as part of his plan.

And that should imply that he had somewhere else to go. Presumably still in the Miami area, since Kyle was here looking for him. It was a starting point, and I thought of it all by myself. Welcome home, Mr. Brain.

Real estate leaves fairly large footprints, even when you try to cover them up. Within fifteen minutes of sitting down at my computer I had found something-not actually a whole footprint, but certainly enough to make out the shape of a couple of toes.

The house on N.W. 4th Street was registered to Ramon Puntia. How he expected to get away with that in Miami, I don’t know, but Ramon Puntia was a Cuban joke name, like “Joe Blow” in English. But the house was paid for and no taxes were due, a sound arrangement for someone who valued privacy as much as I assumed our new friend did. The house had been bought with a single cash payment, a wire transfer from a bank in Guatemala. This seemed a bit odd; with our trail starting in El Salvador and leading through the murky depths of a mysterious government agency in Washington, why take a left turn into Guatemala? But a quick online study of contemporary money laundering showed that it fit very well. Apparently Switzerland and the Cayman Islands were no longer à la mode, and if one wished for discreet banking in the Spanish-speaking world, Guatemala was all the rage.

This raised the interesting question of how much money Dr. Dismember had, and where it came from. But it was a question that led nowhere at the moment. I had to assume that he had enough for another house when he was done with the first one, and probably in the same approximate price range.

All right then. I went back to my Dade County real estate database and looked for other properties recently purchased the same way, from the same bank. There were seven; four of them had sold for more than a million dollars, which struck me as a bit high for disposable property. They had probably been bought by nothing more sinister than run-of-the-mill drug lords and Fortune 500 CEOs on the run.

That left three properties that seemed possible. One of them was in Liberty City, a predominantly black inner-city area of Miami. But on closer inspection, it turned out to be a block of apartments.

Of the two remaining properties, one was in Homestead, within sight of the gigantic dump heap of city garbage known locally as Mount Trashmore. The other was also in the south end of town, just off Quail Roost Drive.

Two houses: I was willing to bet that someone new had just moved in to one of them, and was doing things that might startle the ladies from the welcome wagon. No guarantees, of course, but it certainly seemed likely, and it was, after all, just in time for lunch.

Baleen was a very pricey place that I would not have attempted on my own modest means. It has the kind of oak-paneled elegance that makes you feel the need for a cravat and spats. It also has one of the best views of Biscayne Bay in the city, and if one is lucky there are a handful of tables that take advantage of this.

Either Kyle was lucky or his mojo had bowled over the headwaiter, because he and Deborah were waiting outside at one of these tables working on a bottle of mineral water and a plate of what appeared to be crab cakes. I grabbed one and took a bite as I slid into a chair facing Kyle.

“Yummy,” I said. “This must be where good crabs go when they die.”

“Debbie says you have something for us,” Kyle said. I looked at my sister, who had always been Deborah or Debs but certainly never Debbie. She said nothing, however, and appeared willing to let this egregious liberty go by, so I turned my attention back to Kyle. He was wearing the designer sunglasses again, and his ridiculous pinkie ring sparkled as he brushed the hair carelessly back from his forehead.

“I hope I have something,” I said. “But I do want to be careful not to get flushed.”

Kyle looked at me for a long moment, then he shook his head and a reluctant smile moved his mouth perhaps a quarter of an inch upward. “All right,” he said. “Busted. But you’d be surprised how often that kind of line really works.”

“I’m sure I’d be flabbergasted,” I said. I passed him the printout from my computer. “While I catch my breath, you might want to look at this.”

Kyle frowned and unfolded the paper. “What’s this?”

Deborah leaned forward, looking like the eager young police hound she was. “You found something! I knew you would,” she said.

“It’s just two addresses,” said Kyle.

“One of them may very well be the hiding place of a certain unorthodox medical practitioner with a Central American past,” I said, and I told him how I found the addresses. To his credit, he looked impressed, even with the sunglasses on.

“I should have thought of this,” he said. “That’s very good.” He nodded and flicked the paper with a finger. “Follow the money. Works every time.”

“Of course I can’t be positive,” I said.

“Well, I’d bet on it,” he said. “I think you found Dr. Danco.”

I looked at Deborah. She shook her head, so I looked back at Kyle’s sunglasses. “Interesting name. Is it Polish?”

Chutsky cleared his throat and looked out over the water. “Before your time, I guess. There was a commercial back then. Danco presents the autoveggie. It slices, it dices-” He swiveled his dark lenses back to me. “That’s what we called him. Dr. Danco. He made chopped-up vegetables. It’s the kind of joke you like when you’re far from home and seeing terrible things,” he said.

“But now we’re seeing them close to home,” I said. “Why is he here?”

“Long story,” Kyle said.

“That means he doesn’t want to tell you,” Deborah said.

“In that case, I’ll have another crab cake,” I said. I leaned over and took the last one off the plate. They really were quite good.

“Come on, Chutsky,” Deborah said. “There’s a good chance we know where this guy is. Now what are you going to do about it?”

He put a hand on top of hers and smiled. “I’m going to have lunch,” he said. And he picked up a menu with his other hand.

Deborah looked at his profile for a minute. Then she pulled her hand away. “Shit,” she said.

The food actually was excellent, and Chutsky tried very hard to be chummy and pleasant, as if he had decided that when you can’t tell the truth you might as well be charming. In fairness, I couldn’t complain, since I generally get away with the same trick, but Deborah didn’t seem very happy. She sulked and poked at her food while Kyle told jokes and asked me if I liked the Dolphins’ chances to go all the way this year. I didn’t really care if the Dolphins won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but as a well-designed artificial human I had several authentic-sounding prepared remarks on the subject, which seemed to satisfy Chutsky, and he chattered on in the chummiest way possible.

We even had dessert, which seemed to me to be pushing the distract-them-with-food ploy a little far, particularly since neither Deborah nor I was at all distracted. But it was quite good food, so it would have been barbaric of me to complain.

Of course, Deborah had worked very hard her whole life to become barbaric, so when the waiter placed an enormous chocolate thing in front of Chutsky, who turned to Debs with two forks and said, “Well…” she took the opportunity to fling a spoon into the center of the table.

“No,” she said to him. “I don’t want another fucking cup of coffee, and I don’t want a fucking chocolate foo-foo. I want a fucking answer. When are we going to go get this guy?”

He looked at her with mild surprise and even a certain fondness, as though people in his line of work found spoon-throwing women quite useful and charming, but he thought her timing might be slightly off. “Can I finish my dessert first?” he said.