Dexter's Final Cut

TWELVE

I wasn’t really stalling to avoid Robert, but I took my time, sauntering down the hall and savoring the memories of last night’s golden extravaganza. The food, the dark rum, the company-sheer perfection. And I had another evening just like it to look forward to at the end of today’s painful grind. It didn’t seem quite right that someone like me should have it so good, but happily, that didn’t stop me from enjoying it.

I stopped briefly for a cup of coffee and tried to savor that, too, but it proved to be beyond my abilities. The brew smelled like old pencil shavings mixed with burned toast, nothing at all like the ambrosial nectar I’d been sipping only an hour ago. Still, it would probably meet the narrowest legal definition of coffee, and life isn’t perfect-at least, not during the workday. I filled a cup and trudged off to fulfill my Duty.

Robert was waiting for me behind my desk again, but to his very great credit he had brought doughnuts-including a couple of Boston creams this time, and if you give one of these to Dexter, you will find that he is suddenly in a mood to forgive a great deal. We ate doughnuts and sipped the truly awful coffee, and I listened to Robert tell a long and no doubt fascinating story about a crazy British stuntman on a movie he had made many years ago. The point of the story seemed to escape us both, but might have had something to do with Robert facing him down over some obscure point of honor. Whatever it was, Robert enjoyed telling it, and luckily, he was so distracted by his own eloquence that I managed to sneak the second Boston cream out of the box and into my mouth before he noticed.

After the doughnuts were gone, we spent several hours playing with the microscope and learning how to prepare the slides properly. Oddly enough, in spite of the revulsion to blood he’d shown so far, he seemed fascinated with it in its microscopic state. “Wow,” he said. “This is actually very cool.” He looked up at me with a smile. “It’s not that bad when it’s dry and on a slide,” he said. “I mean, I could actually get to like this.”

I could have told him that I felt just the same, that I liked blood in its dried state so much that I had a rosewood box at home with fifty-seven drops of dried blood, each on its own slide, every one a small memento of a very special friend, now departed. But I have never quite believed in this newfangled notion of sharing your thoughts and feelings, especially on such a personal subject, so I just smiled and nodded and handed him a few more sample slides to play with. He went at them eagerly, and we whiled away the happy hours.

Just when I was thinking I should look in the doughnut box to see whether I had missed anything, the phone rang, and I grabbed it.

“Morgan,” I said.

“We got an ID on Jackie’s pervert,” my sister said. “Come on up.”

I looked at Robert, who was happily twiddling the fine-focus knob on my microscope. I could not very well take him along to hear about a stalker he wasn’t supposed to know about. “What about my associate?” I asked.

“Think of something,” she said, and hung up.

I put the phone down and looked at Robert. In spite of being very annoying, he was not really all that stupid, and I had to tell him something plausible. Happily for me, my stomach gurgled, providing a perfect excuse. “That coffee has gone right through me,” I said.

“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” he said without looking up.

“I may be a while,” I said, and he waved a hand at me to indicate that my intestinal issues were none of his concern and he would be fine. I slipped out and hurried away to answer my sister’s summons.

“Patrick Bergmann,” Deborah said when I stepped into her office a few minutes later. It seemed like an odd greeting, but I had to assume she meant that was our stalker’s name.

“That was fast,” I said. “How’d you do it?”

Deborah made a face and shook her head. “The letters,” she said. “He signed them. Even put his address.”

“That’s practically cheating,” I said. “So the real question is, why did it take you so long?”

“He lives in some shit-hole place in Tennessee,” Deborah said. “I couldn’t get anybody local to go check, see if he was still there.”

Jackie beamed at me. “So I checked Facebook,” she said. She gave Deborah a fondly amused glance. “Your sister didn’t know anything about it.”

“I heard of it,” Deborah said defensively. She shook her head with disbelief. “But shit. It’s fucking nutso. People put any fucking thing on there.”

Jackie nodded at Debs. “I showed her how it works, and we found him. Patrick Bergmann, Laramie, Tennessee. With pictures, and postings about where he is.” The smile dropped off her face. “Um,” she said slowly, “he’s here. In Miami.”

“Well,” I said, “but we already knew that.”

Jackie shrugged and seemed to pull herself into a smaller shape, abruptly making herself look like a lost little girl. “I know,” she said. “But it kind of … I mean, I know this is stupid, but-to see it on Facebook? That kind of makes it more real.”

I’m sure that Jackie was actually making sense-just not to me. Facebook made it more real? More real than the tattered body of the young woman in the Dumpster? Of course, I am not, and never will be, a fan of Facebook. It can be a very helpful way to track people I am interested in interviewing in connection with my hobby, but the idea of a Dexter page seems a little bit counterintuitive. Attended University of Miami. Friends: None, really. Interests: Human vivisection. I’m sure I would get plenty of friend requests, especially locally, but …

Still, I suppose the important point was that it was, in fact, more real for Jackie. It was hard work to guard somebody from a determined psychotic killer, and if the guardee didn’t believe in the reality of the threat, it was even harder.

So for once, Facebook proved to be practical. Better, it also gave us a photo of our new friend Patrick. Like I said, it was practically cheating.

“Could I see his picture?” I said.

Deborah’s mouth twitched into a slight smile, and she handed me a sheet of paper from her desk. It was a printout of a picture from Facebook and it showed a guy in his twenties, squatting down beside a deer. The deer looked very, very dead, and the guy looked just a little too happy about it. I have seen enough Hunting Trophy pictures to know what they are supposed to look like: Noble Beast settling into Eternal Rest while the Mighty Hunter stands beside it, clutching his rifle and looking solemnly proud.

This picture was nothing like that. To begin with, the deer was not merely dead; it was eviscerated. The body cavity had been opened up and emptied out, and the Mighty Hunter’s arms were covered with its blood almost up to his shoulders. He held up what looked like a bowie knife and smirked at the camera, a coil of intestines at his feet.

I tried to focus on his face, and as I studied his features the Passenger muttered sibilant encouragement. Patrick Bergmann was not an awful-looking person-wiry, athletic build, dirty-blond hair in a shaggy cut, regular features-but something about him was not quite right. Beyond his obvious enjoyment of the horrible blood-soaked mess he wallowed in, his eyes were open just a little too wide, and his smirk had an unsettling feeling to it, as if he was posing naked for the first time and liking it. His face was saying, just as clearly as possible, that this was a portrait of the real Him, his Secret Self. This was who he was, somebody who lived to feel the blood run down his blade and crouch in the viscera piled at his feet. I did not need to hear the Passenger chanting, One of Us, One of Us, to know what he was.

I tuned back in to the conversation as Deborah said, “Which means we gotta tell Anderson about this, too. I mean, we got an ID, an actual fucking photo.…” She held up both hands, palms up: portrait of a helpless detective. “I can’t sit on that,” she said.

Jackie looked dismayed, and then she actually wrung her hands. I had always thought “wringing your hands” was only an expression, or at most something actors did in old movies-but Jackie did it. She lifted both hands chest-high and shook them from the wrist, and I very clearly thought, Wow. She’s wringing her hands.

“Isn’t that kind of, oh, you know,” Jackie said, “pushing our luck?”

“You gave Anderson your file already?” I said.

Deborah nodded. “First thing this morning,” she said.

“And what happened?”

She made a face and then added, rather grudgingly, “Just like you said. He stuck it in a drawer-didn’t even wait for me to leave the room.”

“Well, then,” I said. “This shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Yes, but, I mean,” Jackie said, and she looked very worried, “it’s his name, and picture, and everything. Even Anderson can’t ignore that.”

Deborah snorted. “Man could lose his own ass in a chair,” she said.

“It’s just, the rest of the cast gets here today and tomorrow, and then we start shooting and-I mean, it’s my career,” Jackie said.

Debs looked dubious. “It’s your life, too,” she said. “That counts for something.”

“My career is my life,” Jackie said. “I’ve given up everything for this, and if I lose this show, too …” She took a ragged breath and grabbed her left hand with her right, squeezing them together. “I’m just worried, I guess.”

“I got no choice,” Deborah said. “I got to pass it on to him.”

“But he’ll ignore it,” I said. “And in the meantime, we will find Patrick and keep you safe.”

Jackie gave me a smile of gratitude that made me feel four inches taller.

“Thank you,” she said. “And, Dexter-”

She raised a hand and took a step toward me, and I believe she was going to say something exceptionally nice, but I never got to hear it. Somebody cleared their throat, and as I realized it was not Jackie, Debs, nor even me, I turned as a man stepped forward into Deborah’s cubicle. He was maybe forty-five, about five-ten, and in decent physical shape, except for some extra bulk around the waist. He had dark hair and eyes, and wore something that was almost certainly supposed to be a suit, except that it looked like it had been made out of a slipcover taken from the couch in an old disco lounge. And even though I did not recognize him, he also wore that indefinable look that said he was a cop.

He raised one eyebrow at Deborah. “Detective Morgan?” he said.

Deborah gave him the same look. “Yes?”

The man held up a badge, and then stepped forward and stuck out his hand. “Detective Echeverria, NYPD,” he said, and his speech very much matched what we have all come to think of as a New York Accent.

Deborah looked him over for a moment, then stuck out her hand. “Right,” she said. “I got your e-mails.”

They shook hands briefly, and then Echeverria stepped back and looked at Jackie. “Hey,” he said. “Jackie Forrest. How ’bout that.”

She gave him a small, low-wattage smile. “Detective,” she said. He looked at her without blinking for a few seconds too long, until finally Deborah cleared her throat, and Echeverria snapped his head back around to face my sister.

“What can I do for you?” Deborah said, putting a slight ironic twist on the words so he would know his ogling had been observed.

“Yeah, right,” he said. “What you can do, you can let me see what you got on this psycho you’re working on.”

Deborah gave him a very thin, Professional Courtesy smile. “Can’t do that,” she said.

Echeverria frowned and blinked twice. “Why not,” he said.

“It’s not my case,” she said.

He shook his head. “What the fuck,” he said.

“I know,” Deborah said. “But I told you not to fly down here.”

Echeverria shook his head again. His mouth twitched. “You know how many Brooks Brothers suits I got crawling up my ass on this thing?” he said.

“Yeah,” Debs said. “We got ’em here, too.”

“Except here the suits are a nice, tropical-weight fabric,” I added, always eager to be helpful.

Echeverria looked at me. Oddly enough, it was not a glance filled with warmth, camaraderie, and appreciation of my vast knowledge of sartorial standards. It was closer to the kind of look you give somebody you caught jaywalking to spit on nuns. Then he looked back at Deborah. “Okay,” he said. “So what the fuck.” He frowned and nodded at Jackie. “ ’Scuse me, Miss Forrest.” She showed him five or six teeth, and he looked back at Deborah. Apparently it was all right to say “fuck” without apologizing to my sister, because he said it to her again. “What’s the fucking deal here, Morgan?”

Deborah, of course, is no slouch in the dirty-words department, and she rose to the occasion with her customary flair. “The fucking deal is the same old shit,” she said.

“Which is what,” he said.

Deborah’s face twitched into a very small and angry smile. “Does it ever happen in New York that the captain gives a big case to some limp-dick asshole who couldn’t find a shit heap if he was wearing it for a hat, and everybody else has to stand around and watch him fuck up another one?” she said.

“Never happens,” he said with a matching smile that said even he didn’t believe what he was saying.

“Course not,” Deborah said. “Doesn’t happen here, either. Our whole department is made up of highly skilled professionals.”

Echeverria nodded. “Right,” he said. “So who’s the limp-dick asshole?”

“If you mean, who is the officer in charge of the investigation,” Debs said, “that would be Detective Anderson.”

Echeverria looked surprised. “Billy Anderson?” he said, and Debs nodded. “I’m s’posed to look him up for drinks. I was told he’s a good guy.”

Deborah managed not to give a wild hoot of laughter, but her mouth twitched several times, which is the same thing for her. “Who told you that?” she said. “Somebody you’d want watching your back?”

“Uh,” Echeverria said, frowning, “maybe not.”

“He might be able to find drinks,” I offered. “But that’s about it.”

Echeverria looked at me again, and then decided he’d rather look at Jackie. He did, and then he frowned and turned back to face Debs. “Okay, I get it,” he said. “But, uh-what’s the deal with you? What are you doing working on it if it’s not your case?”

Deborah’s face froze into her official Talking to the Captain Face. “I am on detached duty as a technical adviser to the Big Ticket Network, which is shooting a pilot here. Starring,” she said with a nod at Jackie, “Miss Forrest.”

Echeverria looked at Jackie again.

“And so,” Debs said, and Echeverria tore his eyes off Jackie and looked back at my sister, “Miss Forrest and I are conducting a parallel mock investigation of our own in order to teach her proper police investigative technique and procedure.”

Echeverria looked at Deborah with new respect. “Fucking brilliant,” he said.

Deborah just nodded.

“So, what,” Echeverria said. “I gotta go talk to Anderson, ask him if I can see the case file?”

“I’m afraid so,” Deborah said.

“And he really is a total fucking dope?”

“Or worse,” she said. “But I never said that.”

“Well, shit,” he said.

“Pretty much,” Deborah said.