Double Dexter

EIGHT

Over the next few days I picked up the pace of my Honda hunt. I stayed out a little later each evening, trying to squeeze in just one more address, driving when it was too far to walk. I went home only when it was too dark to see any longer, trudging past the family tableau in the living room and into the shower without speaking, a little more frustrated every evening.

On the third night of my enhanced search, I walked in the front door, very sweaty, and realized that Rita was staring at me, her eyes running over me as if she was searching for a blemish, and I stopped in front of her. What? I said.

She looked up at me and blushed. Oh, she said.

It s just late, and you re so sweaty, I thought It s nothing, really.

I was jogging, I said, not sure why I felt like I was on the defensive.

You took the car, she said.

It seemed to me that she was paying far too much attention to my activities, but perhaps this was one of the little perks of marriage, so I shrugged it off. I went over to the track at the high school, I said.

She looked at me for a very long moment without saying anything, and there was clearly something going on in there, but I had no idea what it might be. Finally, she just said, That would explain it. She stood up and pushed past me into the kitchen, and I went to my hard-earned shower.

Perhaps I just hadn t noticed it before, but each evening when I came in after my exercise, she would watch me with that same mysterious intensity, and then head into the kitchen. On the fourth night of this exotic behavior, I followed her and stood silently in the kitchen doorway. I watched as she opened a cupboard, took out a bottle of wine, and poured herself a full glass, and as she raised it to her lips I backed away, unobserved.

It made no sense to me; it was almost as if there was a connection between my coming home sweaty and Rita wanting a glass of wine. I thought about it as I showered, but after a few minutes of musing I realized that I didn t know enough about the complex topics of humans and marriage, and Rita in particular, and in any case I had other worries. Finding the right Honda was far more important, and even though it was something I did know a lot about, I wasn t getting that done either. So I put the Mystery of Rita and the Wine out of my mind as just one more brick in the wall of frustration that was forming all around me.

A week later my cold was gone, and I had crossed many more names off my list, enough of them that I was beginning to wonder whether it wasn t a waste of precious time. I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck, and a growing urgency to do before I was done to, but that got me no closer to finding my Witness than anything else I tried. I was more jittery with each day, and with each dead-end name I crossed off my list, and I actually began to bite my fingernails, a habit I had dropped in high school. It was annoying, and added to my frustration, and I began to wonder whether I was starting to fall apart under the strain.

Still, at least I was in much better shape than Officer Gunther. Because just when Marty Klein s brutal murder had settled into a kind of background hum of nervousness on the force, Officer Gunther turned up dead, too. He was a uniformed cop, not a detective like Klein, but there was no doubt at all that it was the handiwork of the same killer. The body had been slowly and methodically pounded into a two-hundred-pound bruise. Every major bone had bee broken with what looked like exactly the same patient routine that had been so successful with Klein.

This time the body was not left in a police cruiser on I-95. Officer Gunther had been carefully placed in Bayfront Park, right beside the Torch of Friendship, which seemed more than a little ironic. A young Canadian couple on their honeymoon had found the corpse as they took a romantic early morning stroll: one more enduring memory of a magical time in Our Enchanted City.

There was a feeling of something very close to superstitious dread running through the small knot of cops when I got there. It was still relatively early in the day, but the air of quiet panic on-site had nothing to do with the lack of coffee. The officers on the scene were tense, even a bit wide-eyed, as if they had all seen a ghost. It was easy to see why: To dump Gunther here, so publicly, did not seem like something a human being could get away with. Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami is not the kind of private and secluded spot where your average psychotic killer might normally stroll by and drop a stiff. This was an amazingly public display, and yet somehow the body was here, and apparently it had been here for several hours before it had been discovered.

Cops are normally oversensitive to that kind of direct challenge. They take it as an insult to their manhood when someone flaunts the law with such flamboyant exhibitionism, and this really should have stirred up all the righteous wrath of an angry police force. But Miami s Finest looked like they were filled with supernatural angst instead of fury, almost as if they were ready to throw away their weapons and call the Psychic Hotline for help.

And I admit it was a bit disturbing, even to me, to see the corpse of a cop so carefully puddled on the pavement beside the Torch. It was very hard to understand how any living being could stroll through one of the city s busiest streets and deposit a body that was so clearly and spectacularly dead, without being seen. No one actually suggested out loud that there were occult forces at work at least, not that I overheard. But judging by the look of the cops in attendance, nobody was ruling it out, either.

My real area of expertise is not the Undead, though; it s blood spatter, and there was nothing in that line here. The killing had obviously happened somewhere else and the body had merely been dumped at this lovely and well-known landmark. But I was sure my sister, Deborah, would want my insight, so I hovered around the edges and tried to find some obscure and helpful clue that the other forensics wonks might have missed. There wasn t a great deal to see, aside from the gelatinous blob in the blue uniform that had once been Officer Gunther, married, father of three. I watched Angel Batista-No-Relation crawl slowly around the perimeter, searching meticulously for any small crumb of evidence and, apparently, finding none.

There was a bright flash of light behind me, and, somewhat startled, I turned around. Camilla Figg stood a few feet away, clutching a camera and blushing, with what seemed to be a guilty expression on her face. Oh, she said in her jerky mutter. I didn t mean the flash was on but I had to sorry. I blinked at her for a moment, partly from the bright blast of the flash and partly because she had made no sense at all. And then one of the people stacked up at the perimeter leaned over and took a picture of the two of us staring at each other, and Camilla jerked into motion and scuttled away to a small square of grass between the walkways, where Vince Masuoka had found a footprint. She began to refocus her camera on the footprint, and I turned away.

Nobody saw anything, Deborah said as she materialized at my elbow, and on top of the unexpected explosion from Camilla s flashbulb, my nerves responded instantly and I jumped as if there really was a ghost on the loose and Debs was it. As I settled back to earth she looked at me with mild surprise.

You startled me, I said.

I didn t know you could startle, she said. She frowned and shook her head. This thing is enough to give anybody the creeps. It s like the most crowded public area in the city, and the guy just pops up with a body, drops it by the Torch, and drives away?

They found it right around dawn, I said. So it was dark when he dumped the body.

It s never dark here, she said. Streetlights, all the buildings, Bayside Market, the arena a block away? Not to mention the goddamned Torch. It s lit up twenty-four/seven.

I looked around me. I had been here many times, day and night, and it was true that there was always a very bright spill of light from the buildings in this neighborhood. And with Bayside Marketplace right next to us and American Airlines Arena just a block away, there was even more light, more traffic, and more security. Plus the goddamned Torch, of course.

But there was also a line of trees and a relatively deserted belt of grass in the other direction, and I turned to look that way. As I did, Deborah glanced at me, frowned, and then she turned around to look, too.

Through the trees and beyond the stretch of park on the far side of the Torch, the morning sun blazed off the water of Biscayne Bay. In the middle of the near-blinding glare a large sailboat slid regally across the water toward the marina, until an even larger motor yacht powered past it and set it bobbing frantically. A half thought wobbled into my brain and I raised an arm to point; Deborah looked at me expectantly, and then, as if to signal that we really were in a cartoon, another camera flash came from the perimeter, and Deborah s eyes went wide-open as the idea blossomed.

Son of a bitch, Deborah said. The motherfucker came by boat. Of course! She clapped her hands together and swiveled her head around until she located her partner.

Hey, Duarte! she called. He looked up and she beckoned him to follow as she turned and hurried away toward the water.

Glad to help, I said as my sister raced away to the seawall. I turned to see who had taken the picture, but saw nothing except Angel with his face hovering six inches over a fascinating clump of grass, and Camilla waving to somebody standing in the crowd of gawkers who were two-deep at the yellow crime scene tape. She went over to talk to whoever it was, and I turned away and watched as my sister raced to the seawall to look for some clue that the killer had come by boat. It really did make sense; I knew very well from a great deal of happy personal experience that you can get away with almost anything on a boat, especially at night. And when I say almost anything, I mean much more than merely the surprising acts of athletic immodesty one sees couples performing out on the water from time to time. In the pursuit of my hobby I had done many things on my boat that narrow minds might find objectionable, and it was quite clear to me that nobody ever sees anything. Not even, apparently, a psychotic and semisupernatural killer lugging a completely limp but rather large dead cop around the Bay and then up over the seawall and into Bayfront Park.

But because this was Miami, it was at least possible that somebody had, in fact, seen something of the sort, and simply decided not to report it. Maybe they were afraid it would make them a target, or they didn t want the police to find out they had no green card. Modern life being what it is, it was even possible that there was a really good episode of Mythbusters on TV and they wanted to watch the end. So for the next hour or so, Debs and her team went all along the seawall looking for that Certain Special Someone.

Not surprisingly at least, not to me they didn t find him or her. Nobody knew nothin; nobody saw nothin. There was plenty of activity along the seawall, but it was morning traffic, people getting to work in one of the shops in Bayside, or on one of the tour boats tied up by the wall. None of this crowd had been keeping watch in the dark of the night. All those people had gone home to their well-earned rest, no doubt after a full night of staring anxiously into the darkness, alert for every danger or possibly just watching TV. But Deborah dutifully collected names and telephone numbers of all the night security personnel and then came back to me and scowled, as if it was all my fault because she had found nothing and I was the one who had made her look for it.

We stood on the seawall not far from the Biscayne Pearl, one of the boats that provided tours of the city by water, and Deborah squinted along the wall toward Bayside. Then she shook her head and started to walk back toward the Torch, and I tagged along.

Somebody saw something, she said, and I hoped she sounded more convincing to herself than she did to me. Had to. You can t lug a full-grown cop onto the seawall and all the way up to the Torch and nobody sees you.

Freddy Krueger could, I said.

Deborah whacked me on the upper arm, but her heart really wasn t in it this time, and it was relatively easy for me to stop myself from screaming with pain.

All I need, she said, is to have more of that supernatural bullshit going around. One of the guys actually asked Duarte if we could get a santero in here, just in case.

I nodded. It might make sense to bring in a santero, one of Santeria s priests, if you believed in that sort of thing, and a surprising number of Miami s citizens did. What did Duarte tell him? Deborah snorted. He said, What s a santero?

I looked at her to see if she was kidding; every Cuban-American knew santeros. Odds were good there was at least one in his very own family. But of course, they hadn t asked Duarte in French, and anyway, before I could pretend to get the joke and then pretend to laugh, Debs went on. I know this guy s a psycho, but he s a live human being, too, she said, and I was relatively sure she didn t mean Duarte. He isn t invisible, and he didn t teleport in and out.

She paused by a large tree and looked up at it thoughtfully, and then turned back around the way we d come. Lookit this, she said, pointing up at the tree and then back to the Pearl. If he ties up right there by the tour boat, she said, he s got cover from these trees most of the way to the Torch.

Not quite invisible, I said. But pretty close.

Right beside the fucking boat, she muttered.

They had to see something.

Unless they were asleep, I said.

She just shook her head and then looked toward the Torch along the line of trees as if she was aiming a rifle, and then shrugged and began to walk again. Somebody saw something, she repeated stubbornly. Had to.

We walked back to the Torch together in what would have been comfortable silence if my sister hadn t been so obviously distracted. The medical examiner was just finishing up with Officer Gunther s body when we got there. He shook his head at Debs to indicate that he d found nothing interesting.

Do we know where Gunther had lunch? I asked Deborah. She stared at me as if I had suggested we should strip naked and jog down Biscayne Boulevard.

Lunch, Debs, I said patiently. Like maybe Mexican food?

The light came on and she lurched over to the ME. I want stomach contents from the autopsy, I heard her say. See if he ate any tacos recently. Oddly enough, the ME looked at her without surprise, but I suppose if you have worked with corpses and cops in Miami long enough you are very hard to surprise, and a request to search for tacos in a dead officer s stomach was mere routine. The ME just nodded wearily, and Deborah stalked off to talk to Duarte, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs and think deep thoughts.

I thought them for a few minutes, but I didn t come up with anything more profound than the realization that I was hungry, and there was nothing for me to eat here. There was also nothing for me to do; no blood spatter at all, and the other geeks from Forensics had things well in hand.

I turned away from Gunther s body and looked around the perimeter. The usual crowd of casual ghouls was still there, standing in back of the tape in a jostling bunch as if they were waiting to get into a rock concert. They were staring at the body and, to their credit, one or two of them actually tried very hard to look horrified as they craned their necks to see. Of course, most of the others made up for it by leaning forward over the tape to get a better picture with their cell phones. Soon the pictures of Officer Gunther s smooshed corpse would be all over the Web, and the whole world could join together and pretend to be appalled and dismayed in perfect harmony. Isn t technology wonderful?

I hung around and made helpful suggestions for a little while longer, but as usual, no one seemed to care about my thoughtful insights; real expertise is never appreciated. People would always rather muddle along in their own dim, blundering way than have someone else point out where they were going wrong even if that other person is clearly brighter.

And so it was that at an hour depressingly far beyond lunchtime, an underappreciated and underutilized Dexter finally got bored enough to hitch a ride back to the land of real work waiting for me in my little cubbyhole. I found a friendly cop who was headed that way. He just wanted to talk about fishing, and since I do know something about that, we got along very nicely. He was even willing to make a quick stop along the way for some Chinese takeout, which was certainly a very chummy gesture, and in gratitude I paid for his order of shrimp lo mein.

By the time I said good-bye to my new BFF and sat down at my desk with my fragrant lunch, I was beginning to feel like there might be some actual point to this patchwork quilt of humiliation and suffering we call Life. The hot-and-sour soup was very good, the dumplings were tender and juicy, and the kung pao was hot enough to make me sweat. I caught myself feeling rather contented as I finished eating, and I wondered why. Could I really be so shallow that the simple act of eating a good lunch made me happy? Or was something deeper and more sinister at work here? Perhaps it was the MSG in the food, attacking the pleasure center in my brain and forcing me to feel good against my will.

Whatever it was, it was a relief to be out of the dark clouds that had been clustered around my head for the past few weeks. It was true that I had some legitimate worries, but I had been wallowing in them a little too much. Apparently, however, one meal of good Chinese food had cured me. I actually caught myself humming as I tossed the empty containers into the trash, a very surprising development for me. Was this real human happiness? From a dumpling? Perhaps I should notify some national mental health organization: Kung pao chicken works better than Zoloft. There might be a Nobel Prize waiting for me for this. Or at least a letter of thanks from China.

Whatever my lighthearted mood was really all about, it lasted almost until quitting time. I had gone down to the evidence room to return a few samples I d been working with, and when I came back to my little cubbyhole I found a large and unpleasant surprise waiting for me.

My surprise was about five feet, ten inches, two hundred pounds of African-American anger, and it looked more like an exceptionally sinister insect than a human being. He was perched on two shiny prosthetic feet, and one of the metal claws he had for hands was doing something to my computer as I walked in.

Why, Sergeant Doakes, I said, with as much pleasantness as I could fake. Do you need help logging onto Facebook?

He jerked around to face me, clearly not expecting me to catch him snooping. Nyuk ookig, he said quite clearly; the same amateur surgeon who had removed his hands and feet had taken out his tongue, too, and having a pleasant conversation with the man had become nearly impossible.

Of course, it had never been easy; he had always hated me, always suspected what I was. I had never given him any reason to doubt my carefully manufactured innocence, but doubt it he did, and always had even before I had failed to rescue him from his unfortunate surgery. I had tried, really I had: It just hadn t quite worked out. To be fair to me, which is very important, I did get most of him back safely. But now he blamed me for the amputations as well as many other unspecified acts. And here he was at my computer, and he was Nyuk ookig.

Nyuk? I repeated brightly. Really? Are you a fan of the Three Stooges, Sergeant? I never knew. Nyuk nyuk nyuk!

He glared at me with even more venom, which added up to an impressive amount, and he reached down to the desk for the small notebook-size artificial-speech device he carried around. He punched in something, and the machine called out in its cheerful baritone,

Just! Looking!

Of course you are! I said, with real synthetic good cheer, trying to match the bizarre happiness of his voice machine. And no doubt doing a wonderful job of it! But unfortunately, you are accidentally looking on my private computer, in my private space, and technically speaking, that s kind of against the rules.

He glared at me some more; really, the man had become completely one-note. Without taking his eyes off me he punched in something new on his speech machine and after a moment it called out, in its unlikely and happy voice, I will! Get! You! Someday! Maa-ther. Fucker!

I m sure you will, I said soothingly.

But you ll have to do it on your own computer. I smiled at him, just to show there were no hard feelings, and pointed in the direction of the door. So if you don t mind?

He pulled a large breath of air in through his nostrils, and then hissed it out again through his teeth, all without blinking, and then he tucked the speech machine under his arm and stomped out of my office, taking the tatters of my good mood with him.

And now I had another reason for uneasiness. Why had Sergeant Doakes been looking on my computer? Obviously, he thought there was something incriminating to find but what? And why now, on my computer, of all things? There could be absolutely no legitimate reason for him to look at my computer. I was reasonably sure he had no knowledge of or interest in IT. Since the loss of his limbs he had been given a desk job out of pity, so he could serve out his last few years and qualify for a full pension. He d been working at some kind of useless administrative thing in Human Resources; I didn t really know or care what.

So he had been here, in my space, on my computer, strictly as a part of his private program to Demolish Dexter but right here at work? Why? As far as I knew, he had always confined his attempts to get me to general surveillance, and he had never actually snooped through my things before. What had brought on this new and unwelcome escalation? Had he finally slipped over the line into a kind of hostile insanity, permanently focused on me? Or did he really have some reason to think he was onto something specific, and he had a chance to prove me guilty?

It seemed impossible, on the face of it. I mean, of course I really am guilty, of many somethings, all of them lethal and very enjoyable and technically not quite legal. But I was extremely careful, I always cleaned up nicely afterward, and I could not imagine what Doakes thought he might come up with. I was fairly sure that there was nothing there to find.

It was puzzling, and very unsettling. But at least it jolted me out of my stupid good cheer and back into general gloominess again. So much for Chinese food: Half an hour later you re grumpy again.

Deborah, however, was even grumpier when she slouched into my office as I was getting ready to go home.

You took off early, she said, from the Torch. And she made it sound like she was accusing me of stealing office supplies.

I had to go to work, I said, and I did what I could to match her surly tone.

She blinked. What the hell has gotten into you lately? she said. I took a breath, more to stall for time than because I needed air. What do you mean?

She pursed her lips, cocked her head to one side. You re jumpy all the time. You snap at people. Maybe a little distracted? I don t know. Like something s bothering you.

It was a very uncomfortable moment for me. She was right, of course, but how much could I tell her? Something was bothering me; I was convinced that someone had seen me and recognized me, and now I had caught Sergeant Doakes looking at my computer. It was nearly impossible to connect the two things in any way the idea of some anonymous witness to Me at Play teaming up with Doakes to get me was ludicrous but taken together, the two separate things had knocked me for a very uneasy loop. I was in the grip of illogical emotions, and I was not used to that at all.

But what could I say to her? Debs and I had always been close, of course, but that was partly because we didn t share our feelings with each other. We couldn t; I didn t have any, and she was too ashamed of hers to admit she had them.

Still, I had to say something, and when I thought about it, she was probably the only one in the world I could really talk to, unless I was willing to shell out a hundred dollars an hour to talk to a shrink, which seemed like a very bad idea; I would either have to tell him the truth about myself, which was unthinkable, or make up some plausible fiction, which was certainly a waste of good money that might be put toward Lily Anne s medical school tuition.

I didn t know it showed, I said at last.

Debs snorted. Dexter. This is me. We grew up together; we work together I know you better than anybody else in the world. To me, it shows. She raised an eyebrow encouragingly.

So what is it?

She was right, of course. She did know me better than anyone else better than Rita, or Brian, or anybody I had ever known, with the possible exception of Harry, our long-dead dad. Like Harry, Deborah even knew about Dark Dexter and his happy slashing, and she had come to terms with it. If ever there was a time to talk, and a person to talk to, it was now, with her. I closed my eyes for a moment, and tried to think of how to begin. I don t know, I said. It s just that, um a few weeks ago, when I was

Deborah s radio squawked, a loud and rude electronic belch, and then it said quite clearly, Sergeant Morgan, what is your twenty? She shook her head at me and held her radio up.

This is Morgan, she said. I m in Forensics.

You d better come down here, Sergeant, a voice said over the radio. I think we found something you need to see.

Deborah looked at me. Sorry, she said. She pushed the button on the radio and said, On my way. Then she got up and started for the door, hesitated, and turned back to me.

We ll talk later, Dex, okay?

Sure, I said. Don t worry about me. Apparently it didn t sound as pitiful to her as it did to me; she just nodded and hurried out the door. And I finished closing up shop for the night and then headed to my car.