Double Dexter

SEVENTEEN

She was divorced, lived there alone. Her name was Melissa. Fuck, wait a second, said Detective Laredo. He flipped open a folder and ran a thick finger down a paper inside it. Yeah, he said. It s A-lissa. With an A. Alissa Elan. He frowned. Funny name, he said.

I could have told him that right away, since I d written that name on a Post-it only a day ago, but technically I wasn t supposed to know until he told us, so I held my tongue. And anyway, from what I knew of him, Laredo was not the kind of guy who liked to be corrected, especially not by eggheaded forensics geeks. But he was lead on the case of the chopped-up woman in the grubby little house, and we had all come together for his twenty-four, the session department policy mandated on a capital case twenty-four hours in. Since I was part of the team, I was there.

I probably would have found a reason to be there anyway, since I was desperate for any hint at all about who had done this awful thing. More than anyone else in the entire department more than anyone else in the entire world of law enforcement, all across the globe I wanted to find Alissa s killer and bring him to justice. But not the old, slow, feeble-witted whorish crone that is Miami s legal system. I wanted to find him myself and personally drag him down the steps to Dexter s Temple of Dark and Final Justice. So I sat and squirmed and listened as Laredo led us all through the sum total of what we knew, which turned out to be a little bit less than nothing.

There was no real forensic evidence, except for a few footprints from a New Balance running shoe, very common model and size. No prints, no fibers, nothing that might possibly lead to anything but my old shoes and then only if Laredo hired a very good scuba diver to find them.

I contributed my dose of nothing on the topic of blood spatter, and waited impatiently until somebody finally said, Divorced, right? and Laredo nodded.

Yeah, I put somebody on finding her ex-husband, guy named Bernard Elan, he said, and I perked up and leaned forward. But Laredo shrugged and said, No luck. The guy died two years ago.

And he may have said more, but I didn t hear it, because in my own unobtrusive way I was reeling from the shock of hearing that Alissa s ex-husband had been dead for two years. I might wish with all my heart that it was true, but I knew very well that he was far from dead and he was trying very hard to make me dead instead. But Laredo was a pretty good cop, and if he said the man was dead, he had a very good reason for thinking it was true.

I tuned out the dull drone of routine cop talk and thought about what that meant, and I came up with only two possibilities. Either my Witness was not really Alissa Elan s ex-husband or else he had somehow managed to fake his own death.

There was no reason on earth to make up an entire pretend life, complete with months of false blogs about A and his divorce from her. And he had, quite clearly, seen me there in her yard looking at the Honda it had been his angry voice inside the house, and his back I had seen going inside. So I had to believe that this much was true: He really was Alissa s ex, and he really had killed her.

That meant he had fooled the cops into thinking he was dead.

The hardest part of faking your own death was fudging the physical evidence: You had to provide a realistic scenario, a true-to-life crime scene complete with compelling evidence and a convincing corpse. Very difficult to do with no mistakes, and very few people got away with it.

But:

Once you get past the first part of being dead, after you have cried at your funeral and buried your body, it gets a lot easier. In fact, by putting his death two years in the past, Bernard had turned the job into nothing more than paperwork. Of course, this is the twenty-first century, and paperwork nowadays means computer work. There were several basic databases you would have to hack and insert your false information and one or two of them were fairly hard to get into, although I would rather not explain how I know that. But once past the various cyberdefenses, if you could just drop in one or two lines of new or altered information

It could be done. Difficult I thought I might be able to do it, but it was tricky, and my opinion of my Witness and his abilities with a computer went up several notches, which did not make me happy.

I was still unhappy when I left the meeting. I had come with a small faint hope of finding one tiny crumb that might lead to a bigger trail of bread crumbs I could follow to find my Witness. I left with even that small hope completely demolished. Once again I had absolutely nothing. Hope is always a bad idea.

Still, there was one very small lead, and I hurried to my computer to see where it went. I did a thorough search on Bernard Elan, and then Bernie Elan. Most of the official records were wiped clean, replaced with Deceased. He had done a very complete job, whatever he might be calling himself now.

I did find a number of old articles about a Bernie Elan who played third base for a minor-league ball club in Syracuse, the Chiefs. Apparently he was a power hitter but never got the hang of the curveball, and never got called up to the majors, and after a season and a half he was gone. There was even a picture. It showed a man in a baseball uniform in profile, swinging at a pitch. The photo was grainy and a bit out of focus, and although I could tell he did have a face, I could not have said what it looked like, or even how many noses he had. There were no other pictures of Bernie anywhere on the Internet.

That was it; there was nothing else to find. I now knew my Witness had played baseball, and he was good with a computer. That narrowed it down to no more than a few million people.

The next few days went by in a sweat-stained blur, and not just because summer had really hit and turned the heat up a notch. Dexter was in a true dither, an all-time, all-star, all-out tizzy of near panic. I was jumpy, distracted, unable to focus on anything except the thought that someone I didn t know was coming my way to do Something I couldn t possibly prepare for. I had to be watchful, ready for anything but how? What? Where would it come from, and when? How could I know what to do when I didn t know when, why, and to whom I would do it?

And yet, I had to be ready for it every moment of every day, waking and sleeping. It was an impossible task, and it had all my wheels spinning furiously without actually moving me anywhere but deeper into a funk. In my feverish paranoia, every step I heard was Him, sneaking up behind me with bad intentions and a Louisville Slugger.

Even Vince Masuoka noticed; it would have been hard not to, since I jumped like a scalded cat every time he cleared his throat. My boy, he said at last, looking at me across the lab over his laptop screen, you are seriously on edge.

I work too hard, I said.

He shook his head. Then you need to party even harder.

I am a married man with three kids and a demanding job, I said. I don t party.

Listen to the wisdom of age, he said in his Charlie Chan voice. Life is much too short not to get drunk and go naked now and then.

Sage advice, Master, I said. Perhaps I could try that tonight, at Cub Scouts.

He nodded and looked very serious. Excellent. Teach them young, and they will truly learn, he said.

That night actually was our weekly Cub Scout meeting. Cody had been going for a year now, even though he did not like it. Rita and I had agreed that it was good for him and might help to bring him out of his shell. Naturally enough, I knew that the only way to really bring him out of his shell was to give him a knife and some living creature to experiment on, but that was a subject I thought best to avoid with his mother, and Cub Scouts was the best alternative. And I really did think it would be good for him, by helping him to learn how to behave like a real human boy.

So that night I came home from work, rushed through a meal of leftover Pollo Tropical as Rita worked at the kitchen table, and hustled Cody into the car in his blue Scout uniform, which he put on every week with barely controlled hatred. He thought that the whole idea of a uniform involving short pants was not merely terrible fashion but also humiliating to anyone who was forced into wearing them. But I had persuaded him that the scouting experience was a valuable way to learn how to blend in, and I tried to make him understand that this part of his training was every bit as important as learning where to put leftover body parts, and he had gone along with the program for a whole year now without any actual open rebellion.

On this night we arrived at the elementary school where the meetings were held with a few minutes to spare, and we sat in the car quietly. Cody liked to wait until just before the meeting started before he went inside, probably because Blending In was still a very unpleasant strain for him. So most evenings we would sit together and do nothing except exchange a few words. He never said much, but his two- or three-word sentences were always worth hearing, and in spite of my great discomfort with clich s, I would have to say we had Bonded. Tonight, though, I was so busy looking for something sinister lurking in every shadow that I wouldn t have heard Cody if he d recited the entire Kama Sutra.

Luckily, he didn t seem to feel talkative, and he did no more than watch studiously as the other boys climbed out of their cars and went in, some with a parent and some alone. Of course, I was watching them all just as carefully.

Steve Binder, Cody said suddenly, and I jumped a bit reflexively. Cody looked at me with something like amusement, and nodded at a large unibrowed boy stalking past us and into the building. I looked back at Cody and raised an eyebrow; he shrugged.

Bully, he said.

Does he pick on you? I asked, and he shrugged again. But before he could answer in actual words I felt a small strange tickling on the back of my neck and a slight uncomfortable shifting of nonexistent bulk somewhere deep inside; I turned to look behind me. Several cars came into the parking lot and drove to nearby spaces. I could see nothing sinister about any of them, nothing unusual that would have caused the Passenger to stir as it had. Just a short string of minivans, and one battered Cadillac at least fifteen years old.

For one brief moment I wondered whether one of them was Him, my Shadow, somehow already moving closer because something had sent a small electric twinge up from the Basement and into my conscious mind. Impossible but I looked hard at each car as it rolled to a stop. For the most part they were generic suburban vehicles, the same ones we saw here every week. Only the Cadillac was different, and I watched as it parked and a stocky man got out, followed by a round young boy. It was a perfectly normal picture, exactly what you would expect to see. There was nothing odd or threatening about them, nothing at all, and they went inside to the meeting without throwing hand grenades or setting fire to anything. I watched them go, but the stocky man did not look at me or do anything except put a reassuring hand on the boy s shoulder and shepherd him inside.

Not him, not possibly anything at all except what it seemed to be, a man taking a kid in to Scouts. It would be lunacy to think that my Shadow could somehow know I would be here tonight, and then round up a boy on short notice, just to get close to me. I took a deep breath and tried to clear the Stupid out. It wouldn t happen here, whatever it was. Not tonight.

And so I resolutely pushed away the small and nagging warning flag that flapped in my face, and turned back to Cody only to see that he was staring at me.

What? he said.

Nothing, I said. And almost certainly it really was nothing, just a passing twitch of the radar, perhaps caused by sensing someone s anger at their favorite parking spot being taken.

But Cody didn t think so; he turned and stared around the parking lot, just as I had. Something, he said positively. And I looked at him with interest.

Shadow Guy? I asked him. That was his name for his very own small Dark Passenger, planted in him courtesy of the repeated traumas he had received from his now-imprisoned biological father. If Cody and Shadow Guy had heard the same soft alarm bell ringing, it was worth paying attention.

But Cody just shrugged. Not sure, he said, which very closely matched my feelings. We both looked around us at the parking lot for a moment, our heads swiveling in near unison. Neither of us saw anything out of the ordinary. And then the Cub Scout den leader, a large and enthusiastic man named Frank, stuck his head out the door and began to holler that it was time to start, and so Cody and I got out of the car and headed in with the other stragglers. I glanced over my shoulder one last time, noticing with something close to paternal pride that Cody did exactly the same thing at the same time. Neither of us saw anything more alarming than more boys in blue uniform shorts, so I shrugged it off and we went into the meeting.

This evening s den meeting was like most of the others: uneventful and even a little tedious. The only thing that broke the routine was the introduction of a new assistant leader, the stocky man I had seen getting out of the old Cadillac. His name was Doug Crowley. I watched him carefully, still feeling a little twitchy from my false alarm in the parking lot, but there was absolutely nothing about him that was even interesting, let alone threatening. He was about thirty-five years old and seemed dull, bland, and earnest. The round young boy he had brought in was a ten-year-old Dominican kid named Fidel. He wasn t Crowley s child; Crowley was a volunteer for the Big Brothers program, and he had offered to assist Frank. Frank welcomed him, thanked him, and then began some discussion of our upcoming camping trip to the Everglades. There was a report on the ecology of the area from two boys who were working on a badge project on the subject, and then Frank talked about how to practice fire safety when you were camping. Cody endured the whole tedious program with grim patience, and did not quite sprint for the door when it was over. And home we went, to our not-big-enough house with its table full of Rita s papers instead of food, with no sign along the way of anything more threatening than a bright yellow Hummer with a too-loud sound system.

The next day at work was endless. I kept waiting for some terrible something to hit me from any possible angle, and it kept not happening. And the day after that was no different, and the day after that. Nothing happened; no sinister stranger loomed up out of the shadows; no fiendish traps were sprung upon me. There was no deadly serpent hidden in my desk drawer, no assegais hurtling at my neck from a passing car, nothing. Even Deborah and her blistering arm punches were taking a holiday. I saw her and even spoke to her, of course. Her arm was still in a cast, and I would have expected her to call on me quite often for help, but she did not. Duarte was apparently picking up the slack, and Debs seemed content to live on a much lower dose of Dexter.

So life seemed to be slipping back into the ordinary rhythm of Dexter s Dull Days, hour plodding calmly into boring hour with no threat of any kind, no variation in routine, no sign of change at all, at work or at home. Nothing but more of the same. I knew it was coming, but every day that it did not come seemed to make it less likely that it would come at all. Very stupid, I know, but it was dare I say it? entirely human of me. No one can stay on high alert around the clock, endlessly, day after day. Not even the Ever-vigilant Dark Scout, Dexter. Not when ordinary synthetic reality was so seductive.

And so I relaxed, ever so slightly. Normal life: It s comforting exactly because it is dull and often pointless, and it slowly lulls us all into a state of waking slumber. It makes us fixate on stupid, meaningless things like running out of toothpaste or breaking a shoelace, as if these things were overwhelmingly significant and all the while the truly important stuff we are ignoring is sharpening its fangs and slinking up behind us. In the one or two brief moments of real insight we get in our lives, we may realize that we are being hypnotized by irrelevant trivia, and we may even wish for something exciting and different to come along to help us focus and drive these stupid niggling trifles out of our minds. Because staying constantly alert is impossible, even for me. The more nothing happens, the more unlikely it all seems, until finally, I actually found myself wishing that whatever it was, it would just happen so it would all be over.

And, of course, one of the few great truths of Western thought is this: Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.

And I did.