Dexter by Design

TWENTY

FIRST THINGS FIRST” HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY MOTTO, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense —after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn't be first things, would they? Still, cliches exist to comfort the feeble-minded, not to provide any actual meaning. Since I was feeling somewhat weak between the ears at the moment, I took a little bit of consolation from the thought as I pulled up the police records on Brandon Weiss.

It wasn't much; there was a parking ticket that he had paid, and the complaint filed against him by the Tourist Board. He had no outstanding warrants, no special permits beyond a driver's license, no permit to carry a concealed firearm —or a concealed power saw, for that matter. His address was the one I knew, where Deborah had been stabbed. With a little digging, I found one previous address, in Syracuse, New York. Before that he had lived in Montreal, Canada.

A quick check showed that he was still a Canadian citizen.

No real leads there; nothing that qualified as a clue of any kind.

I hadn't really expected anything, but my job and my adoptive father had taught me well that due diligence paid off from time to time.

This was just the beginning.

The next step, Weiss's email address, was a little harder. With a certain amount of slightly illegal maneuvering, I got into AOL's subscriber list and found out just a little more. The same address in the Design District was given as his home address, but there was also a cell phone number. I wrote it down to pursue later, in case I needed it. Other than that, there was nothing helpful here. Surprising, really, that an organization like AOL fails to ask simple and vital questions, like, “Where would you hide if Dexter was after you?”

Still, nothing worth doing is ever easy —another fascinatingly stupid cliche. After all, breathing is fairly easy for the most part, and I think many scholars would agree it pays handsome dividends. The cell phone company's records would tell me much the same thing as AOL's, but there was a chance I could track down the location of the phone itself, a trick I had done once before when I very nearly saved Sergeant Doakes from being surgically modified.

For no particular reason I went back to YouTube. Perhaps I just wanted to see myself one more time, relaxing and being myself. It was, after all, something I had never seen before, and never expected to see. Dexter in action, as only he can do it. I watched the video one more time, marveling at how graceful and natural I looked. What a wonderful sense of style I showed as I swung the saw up toward the camera. Beautiful. A true artist. I should do more film work.

And with that, another thought popped into my slowly awakening brain. Beside the screen, the email address was highlighted.

I really didn't know much about YouTube, but I knew that if an email address was highlighted, it led somewhere. So I clicked on it and almost immediately an orange background came up on screen and I was on a YouTube personal page. In large fiery letters across the top of the page, it said: THE NEW MIAMI. I scrolled part-way down to a box that said, VIDEOS (5), with a row of thumbnail stills of each video. The one showing my back was number four.

In an effort to be methodical and not simply watch my riveting performance again, I clicked on the first one, which showed a man's face twisted into a grimace of disgust. The video began, and again the title appeared on the screen in fiery letters: THE NEW MIAMI #1.

Then there was a very nice sunset shot of lush tropical vegetation; a row of lovely orchids, a line of birds landing on a small lake, and then the camera pulled back to show the body we had found at Fairchild Gardens. There was a terrible groan off camera and a somewhat strangled voice said, “Oh, Jesus” and then the camera followed his back as a piercing scream ripped out of the speaker. It sounded strangely familiar, and for a moment that puzzled me, and I paused the video, rewound, and played the scream again. Then I had it; it was the same scream that had been on the first video, the one we had seen at the Tourist Board. For whatever strange reason, Weiss had used the same scream here.

Possibly it was just brand continuity, like McDonald's using the same clown.

I started up the video again; the camera was moving through the crowd in the Fairchild parking lot picking out faces that looked shocked, disgusted, or merely curious. Again the screen whirled and lined up the expressive faces in a row of boxes against a background of the sunset vegetation shot, and the letters supered in on top: THE NEW MIAMI: PERFECTLY NATURAL.

If nothing else, it removed any lingering doubt I might have had about Weiss's guilt. I was quite sure the other videos would show the other victims, complete with reaction shots of the crowd. But just to be thorough, I decided to watch them all in order, all five of them.

But wait a second: there should only be three spots, one for each of the sites we had found. One more for Dexter's great performance and that would be four —what was the other one?

There was a loud clatter in the lab, and Vince Masuoka called out, “Yo, Dexter!” and I quickly clicked the browser off. It wasn't just false modesty that made me reluctant to share my wonderful acting work with Vince. Explaining the performance would be far too difficult. And just as my monitor went blank, Vince pushed into my little cubby, carrying his forensic kit.

“You don't answer your phone any more?” he said.

I must have been in the restroom” I said.

“No rest for the wicked” he said. “Come on, we gotta go to work.”

“Oh” I said. “What's up?” I don't know, but it's got the uniforms on site almost hysterical” Vince said. “Something down in Kendall.” Of course, awful things happen in Kendall all the time, but very few of them require my professional attention. In retrospect I suppose I should have been more curious, but I was still distracted by the discovery of my unwilling stardom on YouTube, and I really wanted to see the other videos. What would the last one show? Since there was no new body on display that I knew of, I had a small and nibbling thought that it might be something revealing, some small something that might get me closer to Weiss —and I very much needed to get as close as possible, knife-blade close, before anyone else saw my movie and recognized me.

So my mind was not truly focused on my job, and I rode along with Vince exchanging half-conscious pleasantries and wondering what Weiss might have revealed in that last, unseen video. Therefore, it was with a very real sense of shock that I recognized our destination when Vince pulled into the parking lot, turned off the engine, and said, “Let's go.” We were parked at a large public building I had seen before. In fact, I had seen it only a day ago, when I had taken Cody to his Cub Scout meeting.

We had just parked at Golden Lakes Elementary School.

Of course, it had to be mere happenstance. People get killed all the time, even at elementary schools, and to assume this was any more than one of those funny coincidences that make life so interesting was to believe that the entire world revolved around Dexter which was true in a rather limited way, of course, but I was not deranged enough to believe it in a literal way.

So a bemused and slightly unsettled Dexter trudged after Vince, under the yellow crime scene tape, and over to the side door of the building, where the body had been discovered. As I approached the carefully guarded spot where it lay in all its glory, I heard a strange and near-idiot whistling sound, and realized it was me. Because in spite of the see-through plastic mask glued to the face, in spite of the yawning body cavity which was filled with what appeared to be Cub Scout uniform items and paraphernalia, and in spite of the fact that it was completely impossible that I was right, I recognized the body from ten feet away.

It was Roger Deutsch, Cody's Scout master.