Dexter by Design

NINETEEN

I don't really know what I WAS expecting when I GOT to the hospital, but I didn't get it. Nothing seemed to have changed. Deborah was not sitting up in bed and doing the crossword puzzle while listening to her iPod. She still lay motionless, surrounded by the clutter of machinery and Chutsky. And he sat in the same position of supplication in the same chair, although he had managed to shave and change his shirt somewhere along the way.

“Hey, man!” he called out cheerfully as I pushed in to Deborah's bedside. “We're on the mend,” he said. “She looked right at me, and she said my name. She's gonna be totally fine.”

“Great” I said, although it didn't seem clear to me that saying a one syllable name meant that my sister was rocketing back to full, unimpaired normality. “What did the doctors say?” Chutsky shrugged. “Same old shit. Not to get my hopes up too high, too soon to be sure, autonomic nervous blah blah blah.” He held up his hand in a what-the-hell gesture. “But they didn't see it when she woke up, and I did. She looked into my eyes, and I could tell. She's still in there, buddy. She's gonna be fine.” There seemed to be very little to say to that, so I muttered a few well-meaning and empty syllables, and sat down. And although I waited very patiently for two and a half hours, Debs did not leap out of bed and begin to do calisthenics; she did not even repeat her parlor trick of opening her eyes and saying Chutsky's name, and so I finally tottered home to bed without feeling any of Chutsky's magical certainty.

The next morning when I arrived at my job I was determined to get to work right away and find out all I could about Doncevic and his mysterious associate. But I barely had time to put my coffee cup down on my desk when I received a visitation from the Ghost of Christmas Gone Terribly Wrong, in the person of Israel Salguero from Internal Affairs. He came wafting silently in and sat in the folding chair across from me without a sound. There was a sense of velvet menace to his movement that I would have admired, if it had not been aimed at me. I watched him, and he watched me for a moment, before he finally nodded and said, I knew your father.” I nodded and took the very great risk of sipping my coffee —but without taking my eyes off Salguero.

“He was a good cop, and a good man” Salguero said. He spoke softly, fitting his way of moving so silently, and he had the slight trace of an accent that many Cuban-Americans of his generation had. He had, in fact, known Harry very well, and Harry had thought highly of him. But that was in the past, and Salguero was now a very respected and very feared IA Lieutenant, and no good could come of having him investigating either me or Deborah.

And so, thinking that it was probably best just to wait him out and let him get to the point, if there was one, I took another sip of my coffee. It did not taste nearly as good as it had before Salguero had come in.

I would like to be able to get this thing cleared up as quickly as possible” he said. “I'm sure that neither you or your sister have anything to worry about.”

“No, of course not” I said, wondering why I didn't feel reassured —unless of course it was because my entire life was built around the idea of escaping notice, and having a trained investigator peering in under the edges was not a terribly comforting concept.

“If there is anything you care to tell me at any time” he said, “my office door is always open to you.”

“Thank you very much” I said, and since there didn't seem to be anything else to say, I didn't say it. Salguero watched me for a moment, then nodded and slid up from his chair and out the door, leaving me wondering just how much trouble the Morgans were in.

It took me several minutes and a full cup of coffee to clear his visit from my head and concentrate on the computer.

When I did, what a wonderful surprise I got.

Just as a matter of reflex, I glanced at my email inbox as I went to work. There were two departmental memos that demanded my immediate inattention, an ad promising me several inches of unspecified additional length, and a note with no title that I almost deleted, until I saw who it was from: bweiss@aol.com It really shouldn't have, but it took a moment for the name to register, and my finger was literally poised on the mouse to delete the message when something clicked and I paused.

Bweiss. The name seemed familiar somehow. Perhaps it was “Weiss, first initial B', like most email addresses. That would make sense. And if the B stood for Brandon, that would make even more sense. Because it was the name of the person I had just sat down to investigate.

How thoughtful of him to get in touch.

I opened Weiss's email with more than usual interest, very eager to find out what he might have to say to me. But to my great disappointment, he apparently had nothing at all to say. There was merely a link to YouTube stuck in the middle of the page with no comment at all. http:””www.youtube.com”watch?v=991rj?42n How very interesting. Brandon wanted to share his videos with me. But what kind of video could it possibly be? Perhaps his favorite rock band? Or an edited montage of clips from his favorite TV show? Or even more of the kind of footage he had sent to the Tourist Board? That would be very thoughtful.

So, with a warm and fuzzy glow growing in the spot where my heart should have been, I clicked on the link and waited impatiently for the screen to open. Finally, the small box appeared and I clicked on the play button.

For a moment there was just darkness. Then a grainy picture blossomed and I was looking down at white porcelain from a fixed camera perched somewhere near the ceiling —the same shot featured in the video sent to the Tourist Board. I felt mildly disappointed he had just sent me a link to a copy of something I had already seen.

But then there was a sound of soft slithering, and movement started in the corner of the screen. A dark figure lurched into frame and dumped something onto the white porcelain.

Doncevic.

And the dark figure? Dexter, of course.

My face was not visible, but there was no doubt. That was Dexter's back, his $17 hair cut, the collar of Dexter's lovely dark shirt curled around Dexter's wonderful precious neck.

My sense of disappointment was completely gone. This was a brand new video after all, something I had never seen, and I was immediately very anxious to see it for the first time.

I watched as Dexter Past straightened up, looked around —still, happily, without showing his face to the camera. Clever boy. Dexter walked out of frame and was gone. The lump in the tub moved slightly, and then Dexter came back and picked up the saw. The blade whirred, the arm went up ...

And darkness. End of video.

I sat in a quiet and stunned stupor for several minutes. There was a clatter of some kind in the hall. Someone came into the lab and opened a drawer, closed it again, and left. The phone rang; I didn't answer it.

That was me. Right there on YouTube. In full glorious living and slightly grainy color. Dexter of the Deadly Dimples, now starring in a minor motion picture classic. Smile at the camera, Dexter. Wave to the nice audience. I had never been very fond of home movies, and this one left me even colder than ever. But there I was —not merely captured on film but posted on a website for all the world to see and admire. It was more than I could wrap my mind around; my thoughts just moved in a circle, like a film clip in a loop. That was me; it couldn't be me but it was. I had to do something, but what could I do? Don't know, but something because that was me ...

Things were certainly getting interesting, weren't they?

All right; that was me. Obviously there was a camera hidden somewhere above the tub. Weiss and Doncevic had used it for their decorative projects, and it was still there when I showed up. Which meant that Weiss was still somewhere in the area.

But no, it didn't mean that at all. It was ridiculously easy to connect a camera to the Internet and monitor from a computer. Weiss could be anywhere, collecting the video and sending it on to me. To precious anonymous me. Dexter the mostly modest, who toiled in the shadows and never ever looked for publicity of any kind for his good works. But of course, in the hideous clamor of media attention that had surrounded this whole thing, including the attack on Deborah, my name had almost certainly been mentioned somewhere.

Dexter Morgan, unassuming forensic whiz, brother of the nearly slain. One picture, one frame of evening news footage, and he would have me.

A cold and awful lump began to grow in my stomach. It was just that easy. So simple for a deranged decorator to figure out who and what I was. I had been too clever for too long and grown accustomed to being the only tiger in the forest. And I had forgotten that when there is only one tiger it's awfully easy for the hunter to follow the tracks.

And he had. He had followed me to my den and taken pictures of Dexter at play, and there it was.

My finger twitched almost unwillingly on the mouse and I watched the video again.

It was still me. Right there on the video. It was me.

Happily for all concerned —by which I mean me —I did eventually begin to listen to the cool small voice in the back of my once-useful brain that had spent the last few minutes repeating, Steady, Dexter. All right then; steady. I took a deep breath and let the oxygen work its magic on my thought process, or what was left of it.

This was a problem, to be sure, but it had a solution like every other problem, and it was in the area of two things that Dexter is very good at: finding people and things with a computer and then making them go away. So it was all to the good. The video was on the Internet? Wonderful —less work for me. It couldn't be better.

I was almost feeling something, either fake happiness or something like it.

Time to apply logic, turn the full power of Dexter's icy biocomputer on the problem. First: what did he want? Why had he done this? Obviously he wanted some reaction from me —but which one? The most obvious would be that he was looking for revenge. I had killed his friend —partner? Lover? It didn't matter.

He wanted me to know that he knew what I had done, and, and ...

And he had sent the clip to me, not to someone who would presumably do something about it, like Detective Coulter. Which meant that this was a personal challenge, something that he was not going to make public, at least not yet.

Except that it was public —it was on YouTube, and it was only a matter of time before someone else stumbled upon it. And that meant that there was a time element. So what was he saying? Find me before they find you?

Okay so far. But then what? An Old West showdown —power saws at ten paces? Or was the idea just to torture me, keep me chasing until I made a mistake, or until he grew bored and sent the whole thing on to the evening news?

It was enough to create at least the idea of panic in a lesser being.

But Dexter is made of far sterner stuff. He wanted me to try to find him —but he could not know that I had my varsity letter in finding.

If I was even half as good as modesty let me admit I was, I would find him a great deal quicker than he thought I could. Fine. If Weiss wanted to play, I would play.

But we were going to play by Dexter's rules, not his.