Darkly Dreaming Dexter

by Jeff Lindsay

  “Jesus!” he said. “Listen, you’re making a big mistake.”

  We said nothing; there was work to do and we prepared for it, slowly cutting away his clothing and dropping it carefully into one of the drums of acid.

  “Oh, fuck, please,” he said. “Seriously, it’s not what you think—you don’t know what you’re about to do.”

  We were ready and we held up the knife for him to see that actually we knew very well what we were doing, and we were about to do it.

  “Dude, please,” he said. The fear in him was far beyond anything he thought possible, beyond the humiliation of wetting his pants and begging, beyond anything he had ever imagined.

  And then he grew surprisingly still. He looked right into my 30

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  eyes with an uncalled-for clarity and in a voice I had not heard from him before he said, “He’ll find you.”

  We stopped for a moment to consider what this meant. But we were quite sure that it was his last hopeful bluff, and it blunted the delicious taste of his terror and made us angry and we taped his mouth shut and went to work.

  And when we were done there was nothing left except for one of his shoes. We thought about having it mounted, but of course that would be untidy, so it went into the barrel of acid with the rest of Zander.

  This was not good, the Watcher thought. They had been inside the abandoned warehouse far too long, and there could be no doubt that whatever they were doing in there, it was not a social occasion.

  Nor was the meeting he had been scheduled to have with Zander. Their meetings had always been strictly business, although Zander obviously thought of them in different terms. The awe on his face at their rare encounters spoke volumes on what the young fool thought and felt. He was so proud of the small contribution he made, so eager to be near the cold, massive power.

  The Watcher did not regret anything that might happen to Zander—he was easy enough to replace: the real concern was why this was happening tonight, and what it might mean.

  And he was glad now that he had not interfered, had simply hung back and followed. He could easily have moved in and taken the brash young man who had taken Zander, crushed him completely. Even now he felt the vast power murmuring within himself, a power that could roar out and sweep away anything that stood before it—but no.

  The Watcher also had patience, and this, too, was a strength. If this other was truly a threat, it was better to wait and to watch, and when he knew enough about the danger, he would strike—swiftly, overwhelmingly, and finally.

  So he watched. It was several hours before the other came out and got into Zander’s car. The Watcher stayed well back, with his DEXTER IN THE DARK

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  headlights off at first, tailing the blue Durango easily in the late-night traffic. And when the other parked the car in the lot at a Metrorail station and got on the train, he stepped on, too, just as the doors slid closed, and sat at the far end, studying the reflection of the face for the first time.

  Surprisingly young and even handsome. An air of innocent charm. Not the sort of face you might expect, but they never were.

  The Watcher followed when the other got off at Dadeland and walked toward one of the many parked cars. It was late and there were no people in the lot. He knew he could make it happen now, so easily, just slip up behind the other and let the power flow through him, out into his hands, and release the other into the darkness. He could feel the slow, majestic rise of the strength inside as he closed the distance, almost taste the great and silent roar of the kill—

  And then he stopped suddenly in his tracks and slowly moved away down a different aisle.

  Because the other’s car had a very noticeable placard lying on the dashboard.

  A police parking permit.

  He was very glad he had been patient. If the other was with the police . . . This could be a much bigger problem than he had expected. Not good at all. This would take some careful planning.

  And a great deal more observation.

  And so the Watcher slipped quietly back into the night to prepare, and to watch.

  F I V E

  Somebody once said that there’s no rest for the wicked, and they were almost certainly talking about me, because for several days after I sent dear little Zander on to his just reward poor Dogged Dexter was very busy indeed. Even as Rita’s frenetic planning kicked into high gear, my job followed suit.

  We seemed to have hit one of those periodic spells Miami gets every now and then in which murder just seems like a good idea, and I was up to my eyeballs in blood spatter for three days.

  But on the fourth day, things actually got a little bit worse. I had brought in doughnuts, as is my habit from time to time—especially in the days following my playdates. For some reason, not only do I feel more relaxed for several days after the Passenger and I have a night encounter, but I also feel quite hungry. I’m sure that fact is filled with deep psychological significance, but I am far more interested in making sure I get one or two of the jelly doughnuts before the savage predators in Forensics shred them all to pieces. Significance can wait when doughnuts are on the line.

  But this morning I barely managed to grab one raspberry-filled doughnut—and I was lucky not to lose a finger in the process. The DEXTER IN THE DARK

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  whole floor was buzzing with preparation for a trip to a crime scene, and the tone of the buzz let me know that it was a particularly heinous one, which did not please me. That meant longer hours, stuck somewhere far from civilization and Cuban sand-wiches. Who knew what I would end up with for lunch? Considering that I had been short-changed on the doughnuts, lunch could prove to be a very important meal, and for all I knew I would be forced to work right through it.

  I grabbed my handy blood-spatter kit and headed out the door with Vince Masuoka, who despite his small size had somehow grabbed two of the very valuable filled doughnuts—including the Bavarian cream with the chocolate frosting. “You have done a little too well, Mighty Hunter,” I told him with a nod at his plun-dered loot.

  “The gods of the forest have been good,” he said, and took a large bite. “My people will not starve this season.”

  “No, but I will,” I said.

  He gave me his terrible phony smile, which looked like something he had learned to do by studying a government manual on facial expressions. “The ways of the jungle are hard, Grasshopper,”

  he said.

  “Yes, I know,” I said. “First you must learn to think like a doughnut.”

  “Ha,” Vince said. His laugh was even phonier than his smile, sounding like he was reading aloud from a phonetic spelling of laughter. “Ah, ha ha ha!” he said. The poor guy seemed to be faking everything about being human, just like me. But wasn’t as good at it as I was. No wonder I was comfortable with him. That and the fact that he quite often took a turn bringing the doughnuts.

  “You need better camouflage,” he said, nodding at my shirt, a bright pink-and-green Hawaiian pattern complete with hula girls.

  “Or at least better taste.”

  “It was on sale,” I said.

  “Ha,” he said again. “Well, pretty soon Rita will be picking your clothes.” And then abruptly dropping his terrible artificial jollity, he said, “Listen, I think I have found the perfect caterer.”

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  “Does he do jelly doughnuts?” I said, truthfully hoping that the whole subject of my impending matrimonial bliss would simply go away. But I had asked Vince to be my best man, and he was taking the job seriously.

  “The guy is very big,” Vince said. “He did the MTV Awards, and all those showbiz parties and stuff.”

  “He sounds delightfully expensive,” I said.

  “Well, he owes me a favor,” Vince said. “I think we can get him down on the price. Maybe like a hundred and fifty bucks a plate.”

  “Actually, Vince, I had hoped we could afford more than one plate.”

&nb
sp; “He was in that South Beach magazine,” he said, sounding a little hurt. “You should at least talk to him.”

  “To be honest,” I said, which of course meant I was lying, “I think Rita wants something simple. Like a buffet.”

  Vince was definitely sulking now. “At least talk to him,” he repeated.

  “I’ll talk to Rita about it,” I said, wishing that would make the whole thing go away. And during the trip to the crime scene Vince said no more about it, so maybe it had.

  The scene turned out to be a lot easier for me than I had anticipated, and I cheered up quite a bit when I got there. In the first place, it was on the University of Miami campus, which was my dear old alma mater, and in keeping with my lifelong attempt to appear human, I always tried to remember to pretend I felt a warm, fuzzy fondness for the place when I was there. Secondly, there was apparently very little raw blood to deal with, which might mean that I could be done with it in a reasonable amount of time. It also meant freedom from the nasty wet red stuff—I really don’t like blood, which may seem odd, but there it is. I do, however, find great satisfaction in organizing it at a crime scene, forcing it to fit a decent pattern and behave itself. In this case, from what I learned on the way there, that would hardly be a challenge.

  And so it was with my usual cheerful good spirits that I sauntered over toward the yellow crime-scene tape, certain of a charming interlude in a hectic workday—

  And came to a dead stop with one foot just inside the tape.

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  For a moment the world turned bright yellow and there was a sickening sensation of lurching weightless through space. I could see nothing except the knife-edged glare. There was a silent sound from the dark backseat, the feeling of subliminal nausea mixed with the blind panic of a butcher knife squealing across a chalkboard. A skittering, a nervousness, a wild certainty that something was very badly wrong, and no hint of what or where it was.

  My sight came back and I looked around me. I saw nothing I didn’t expect to see at a crime scene: a small crowd gathered at the yellow tape, some uniforms guarding the perimeter, a few cheap-suited detectives, and my team, the forensic geeks, scrabbling through the bushes on their hands and knees. All perfectly normal to the naked eye. And so I turned to my infallible fully clothed interior eye for an answer.

  What is it? I asked silently, closing my eyes again and searching for some answer from the Passenger to this unprecedented display of discomfort. I was accustomed to commentary from my Dark Associate, and quite often my first sight of a crime scene would be punctuated by sly whispers of admiration or amusement, but this—it was clearly a sound of distress, and I did not know what to make of it.

  What? I asked again. But there was no answer beyond the uneasy rustle of invisible wings, so I shook it off and walked over to the site.

  The two bodies had clearly been burned somewhere else, since there was no sign of any barbecue large enough to bake two medium-size females quite so thoroughly. They had been dumped beside the lake that runs through the UM campus, just off the path that ran around it, and discovered by a pair of early-morning jog-gers. It was my opinion from the state of the small amount of blood evidence I found that the heads had been removed after the two had burned to death.

  One small detail gave me pause. The bodies were laid out neatly, almost reverently, with the charred arms folded across the chests. And in place of the severed heads, a ceramic bull’s head had been carefully placed at the top of each torso.

  This is exactly the kind of loving touch that always brings some 36

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  type of comment from the Dark Passenger—generally speaking, an amused whisper, a small chuckle, even a twinge of jealousy. But this time, as Dexter said to himself, Aha, a bull’s head! What do we think about that? , the Passenger responded immediately and forcefully with—

  Nothing?

  Not a whisper, not a sigh?

  I sent an irritated demand for answers, and got no more than a worried scuttling, as if the Passenger were ducking down behind anything that might provide cover, and hoping to ride out the storm without being noticed.

  I opened my eyes, as much from startlement as anything else. I could not remember any time when the Passenger had nothing to say on some example of our favorite subject, and yet here he was, not merely subdued but hiding.

  I looked back at the two charred bodies with new respect. I had no clue as to what this might mean, but since it had never happened before, it seemed like a good idea to find out.

  Angel Batista-no-relation was on his hands and knees on the far side of the path, very carefully examining things I couldn’t see and didn’t really care about. “Did you find it yet?” I asked him.

  He didn’t look up. “Find what?” he said.

  “I don’t have any idea,” I said. “But it must be here somewhere.”

  He reached out with a pair of tweezers and plucked a single blade of grass, staring hard at it and then stuffing it into a plastic baggie as he spoke. “Why,” he said, “would somebody put a ceramic bull head?”

  “Because chocolate would melt,” I said.

  He nodded without looking up. “Your sister thinks it’s a Santeria thing.”

  “Really,” I said. That possibility had not occurred to me, and I felt a little miffed that it hadn’t. After all, this was Miami; anytime we encountered something that looked like a ritual and involved animal heads, Santeria should have been the first thing all of us thought. An Afro-Cuban religion that combined Yoruba animism DEXTER IN THE DARK

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  with Catholicism, Santeria was widespread in Miami. Animal sacrifice and symbolism were common for its devotees, which would explain the bull heads. And although a relatively small number of people actually practiced Santeria, most homes in the city had one or two small saint candles or cowrie-shell necklaces bought at a botanica. The prevailing attitude around town was that even if you didn’t believe in it, it didn’t hurt to pay it some respect.

  As I said, it should have occurred to me at once. But my foster sister, now a full sergeant in homicide, had thought of it first, even though I was supposed to be the clever one.

  I had been relieved to learn that Deborah was assigned to the case, since it meant that there would be a minimum of bone-numbing stupidity. It would also, I hoped, give her something better to do with her time than she had appeared to have lately. She had been spending all hours of the day and night hovering around her damaged boyfriend, Kyle Chutsky, who had lost one or two minor limbs in his recent encounter with a deranged freelance surgeon who specialized in turning human beings into squealing potatoes—the same villain who had artfully trimmed away so many unnecessary parts from Sergeant Doakes. He had not had the time to finish with Kyle, but Debs had taken the whole thing rather personally and, after fatally shooting the good doctor, she had devoted herself to nursing Chutsky back to vigorous manhood.

  I’m sure she had racked up numberless points on the ethical scoreboard, no matter who was keeping track, but in truth all the time off had done her no good with the department, and even worse, poor lonely Dexter had felt keenly the uncalled-for neglect from his only living relative.

  So it was very good news all around to have Deborah assigned to the case, and on the far side of the path she was talking to her boss, Captain Matthews, no doubt giving him a little ammunition for his ongoing war with the press, who simply refused to take his picture from his good side.

  The press vans were, in fact, already rolling up and spewing out crews to tape background shots of the area. A couple of the local bloodhounds were standing there, solemnly clutching their 38

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  microphones and intoning mournful sentences about the tragedy of two lives so brutally ended. As always, I felt reverently grateful to live in a free society, where the press had a sacred right to show footage of dead people on the evening news.

  Captain Matthews carefully brushed his alread
y perfect hair with the heel of his hand, clapped Deborah on the shoulder, and marched over to talk to the press. And I marched over to my sister.

  She stood where Matthews had left her, watching his back as he began to speak to Rick Sangre, one of the true gurus of if-it-bleeds-it-leads reporting. “Well, Sis,” I said. “Welcome back to the real world.”

  She shook her head. “Hip hooray,” she said.

  “How is Kyle doing?” I asked her, since my training told me that was the right thing to ask about.

  “Physically?” she said. “He’s fine. But he just feels useless all the time. And those assholes in Washington won’t let him go back to work.”

  It was difficult for me to judge Chutsky’s ability to get back to work, since no one had ever said exactly what work he did. I knew it was vaguely connected to some part of the government and was also something clandestine, but beyond that I didn’t know. “Well,”

  I said, searching for the proper cliché, “I’m sure it just needs some time.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’m sure.” She looked back at the place where the two charred bodies lay. “Anyhow, this is a great way to get my mind off it.”

  “The rumor mill tells me you think it’s Santeria,” I said, and her head swiveled rapidly around to face me.

  “You think it’s not?” she demanded.

  “Oh, no, it might well be,” I said.

  “But?” she said sharply.

  “No buts at all,” I said.

  “Damn it, Dexter,” she said. “What do you know about this?”

  And it was probably a fair question. I had been known on occasion to offer a pretty fair guess about some of the more gruesome murders we worked on. I had gained a small reputation for my insight DEXTER IN THE DARK

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  into the way the twisted homicidal sickos thought and operated—natural enough, since, unknown to everyone but Deborah, I was a twisted homicidal sicko myself.

  But even though Deborah had only recently become aware of my true nature, she had not been shy about taking advantage of it to help her in her work. I didn’t mind; glad to help. What else is family for? And I didn’t really care if my fellow monsters paid their debt to society in Old Sparky—unless, of course, it was somebody I was saving for my own innocent pleasure.