by Jeff Lindsay
It might have been the absolute bold uncaring disrespect of the Avalon’s behavior, and it might have been that all I really needed was the jolt of adrenaline to supplement my morning coffee. Whatever it was, it filled me with a sense of righteous indignation, and before I could even decide what to do I was already doing it, running down the driveway to my car and leaping into the driver’s seat. I jammed the key into the ignition, fired up the engine, and raced after the Avalon.
I ignored the stop sign, accelerated through the intersection, and caught sight of the car as it turned right a few blocks ahead. I went much faster than I should have and saw him turn left toward U.S. 1. I closed the gap and sped up, frantic to catch him before he got lost in the rush-hour traffic.
I was only a block or so back when he turned north on U.S. 1
and I followed, ignoring the squealing brakes and the deafening chord of horn music from the other motorists. The Avalon was about ten cars ahead of me now, and I used all my Miami driving skills to get closer, concentrating only on the road and ignoring the lines that separated the lanes, even failing to enjoy the wonderful creativity of the language that followed me from the surrounding cars. The worm had turned, and although it might not have all its teeth, it was ready for battle, however it was that worms fought. I was angry—another novelty for me. I had been drained of all my darkness and pushed into a bright drab corner where all the walls were closing in, but enough was enough. It was time for Dexter to fight back. And although I did not really know what I planned to do when I caught up with the other car, I was absolutely going to do it.
I was half a block back when the Avalon’s driver became aware of me and sped up immediately, slipping into the far left lane into a 156
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space so tight that the car behind him slammed on its brakes and spun sideways. The two cars behind it smashed into its exposed side and a great roar of horns and brakes hammered at my ears. I found just enough room to my right to squeak through around the crash and then over to the left again in the now-open far lane. The Avalon was a block ahead and picking up speed, but I put the pedal down and followed.
For several blocks the gap between us stayed about the same.
Then the Avalon caught up with the traffic that was ahead of the accident and I got a bit closer, until I was only two cars behind, close enough to see a pair of large sunglasses looking back at me in the side mirror. And as I surged up to within one car length of his bumper, he suddenly yanked his steering wheel hard to the left, bouncing his car up onto the median strip and sliding sideways down into traffic on the other side. I was past him before I could even react. I could almost hear mocking laughter drifting back at me as he trundled off toward Homestead.
But I refused to let him go. It was not that catching the other car might give me some answers, although that was probably true. And I was not thinking of justice or any other abstract concept. No, this was pure indignant anger, rising from some unused interior corner and flowing straight out of my lizard brain and down to my knuckles. What I really wanted to do was pull this guy out of his rotten little car and smack him in the face. It was an entirely new sensation, this idea of inflicting bodily harm in the heat of anger, and it was intoxicating, strong enough to shut down any logical impulses that might be left in me and it sent me across the median in pursuit.
My car made a terrible crunching noise as it bounced up onto the median and then down on the other side, and a large cement truck missed flattening me by only about four inches, but I was off again, heading after the Avalon in the lighter southbound traffic.
Far ahead of me there were several spots of moving white color, any one of which might have been my target. I stomped down on the gas and followed.
The gods of traffic were kind to me, and I zipped through the steadily moving cars for almost half a mile before I hit my first red DEXTER IN THE DARK
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light. There were several cars in each lane halted obediently at the intersection and no way around them—except to repeat my car-crunching trick of banging up onto the median strip. I did. I came down off the narrow end of the median and into the intersection just in time to cause severe inconvenience to a bright yellow Hummer that was foolishly trying to use the roads in a rational way. It gave a manic lurch to avoid me, and very nearly succeeded; there was only the lightest of thuds as I bounced neatly off its front bumper, through the intersection, and onward, followed by yet another blast of horn music and yelling.
The Avalon would be a quarter of a mile ahead if it was still on U.S. 1, and I did not wait for the distance to grow. I chugged on in my trusty, banged-up little car, and after only half a minute I was in sight of two white cars directly ahead of me—one of them a Chevy SUV and the other a minivan. My Avalon was nowhere to be seen.
I slowed just for a moment—and out of the corner of my eye I saw it again, edging around behind a grocery store in a strip mall parking lot off to the right. I slammed my foot down onto the gas pedal and slewed across two lanes of traffic and into the parking lot. The driver of the other car saw me coming; he sped up and pulled out onto the street running perpendicular to U.S. 1, racing away to the east as fast as he could go. I hurried through the parking lot and followed.
He led me through a residential area for a mile or so, then around another corner and past a park where a day-care program was in full swing. I got a little closer—just in time to see a woman holding a baby and leading two other children step into the road in front of us.
The Avalon accelerated up and onto the sidewalk and the woman continued to move slowly across the road looking at me as if I was a billboard she couldn’t read. I swerved to go behind her, but one of her children suddenly darted backward right in front of me and I stood on the brake. My car went into a skid, and for a moment it looked as if I would slide right into the whole slow, stupid cluster of them as they stood there in the road, watching me with no sign of interest. But my tires bit at last, and I managed to spin the 158
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wheel, give it a little bit of gas, and skid through a quick circle on the lawn of a house across the street from the park. Then I was back onto the road in a cloud of crabgrass, and after the Avalon, now farther ahead.
The distance stayed about the same for several more blocks before I got my lucky break. Ahead of me the Avalon roared through another stop sign, but this time a police cruiser pulled out after it, turned on the siren, and gave chase. I wasn’t sure if I should be glad of the company or jealous of the competition, but in any case it was much easier to follow the flashing lights and siren, so I continued to slog along in the rear.
The two other cars went through a quick series of turns, and I thought I might be getting a little closer, when suddenly the Avalon disappeared and the cop car slid to a halt. In just a few seconds I was up beside the cruiser and getting out of my car.
In front of me the cop was running across a close-cropped lawn marked with tire tracks that led around behind a house and into a canal. The Avalon was settling down into the water by the far side and, as I watched, a man climbed out of the car through the window and swam the few yards to the opposite bank of the canal. The cop hesitated on our side and then jumped in and swam to the half-sunk car. As he did, I heard the sound of heavy tires braking fast behind me. I turned to look.
A yellow Hummer rocked to a stop behind my car and a red-faced man with sandy hair jumped out and started to yell at me.
“You cocksucker son of a bitch!” he hollered. “You dinged up my car! What the hell you think you’re doing?”
Before I could answer, my cell phone rang. “Excuse me,” I said, and oddly enough the sandy-haired man stood there quietly as I answered the phone.
“Where the hell are you?” Deborah demanded.
“Cutler Ridge, looking at a canal,” I said.
It gave her pause for a full second before she said, “Well, dry off and get your ass over to the campus. We got another body.”
T W E N T Y - O N E
It took me a few minutes to disengage myself from the driver of the yellow Hummer, and I might have been there still if not for the cop who had jumped into the canal. He finally climbed out of the water and came over to where I stood listening to a nonstop stream of threats and obscenities, none very original. I tried to be polite about it—the man obviously had a great deal to get off his chest, and I certainly didn’t want him to sustain psychological damage by repressing it—but I did have some urgent police business to attend to, after all. I tried to point that out, but apparently he was one of those individuals who could not yell and listen to reason at the same time.
So the appearance of an unhappy and extremely wet cop was a welcome interruption to a conversation that was verging on tedious and one-sided. “I would really like to know what you find out about the driver of that car,” I said to the cop.
“I bet you would,” he said. “Can I see some ID, please?”
“I have to get to a crime scene,” I said.
“You’re at one,” he told me. So I showed him my credentials and he looked at them very carefully, dripping canal water onto the 160
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laminated picture. Finally he nodded and said, “Okay, Morgan, you’re out of here.”
From the Hummer driver’s reaction you might have thought the cop had suggested setting the Pope on fire. “You can’t let that son of a bitch just go like that!” he screeched. “That goddamn asshole dinged up my car!”
And the cop, bless him, simply stared at the man, dripped a little more water, and said, “May I see your license and registration, sir?” It seemed like a wonderful exit line, and I took advantage of it.
My poor battered car was making very unhappy noises, but I put it on the road to the university anyway—there really was no other choice. No matter how badly damaged it was, it would have to get me there. And it made me feel a certain kinship with my car.
Here we were, two splendidly built pieces of machinery, hammered out of our original beautiful condition by circumstances beyond our control. It was a wonderful theme for self-pity, and I indulged it for several minutes. The anger I had felt only a few minutes ago had leeched away, dripped onto the lawn like canal water off the cop.
Watching the Avalon’s driver swim to the far side, climb out, and walk away had been in the same spirit as everything else lately; get a little bit close and then have the rug pulled out from under your feet.
And now there was a new body, and we hadn’t even figured out what to do about the others yet. It was making us look like the grey-hounds at a dog track, chasing after a fake rabbit that is always just a little bit too far ahead, jerked tantalizingly away every time the poor dog thinks he’s about to get it in his teeth.
There were two squad cars at the university ahead of me, and the four officers had already cordoned off the area around the Lowe Art Museum and pushed back the growing crowd. A squat, powerful-looking cop with a shaved head came over to meet me, and pointed toward the back of the building.
The body was in a clump of vegetation behind the gallery. Deborah was talking to someone who looked like a student, and Vince Masuoka was squatting beside the left leg of the body and poking DEXTER IN THE DARK
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carefully with a ballpoint pen at something on the ankle. The body could not be seen from the road, but even so you could not really say it had been hidden. It had obviously been roasted like the others, and it was laid out just like the first two, in a stiff formal position, with the head replaced by a ceramic bull’s head. And once again, as I looked at it I waited by reflex for some reaction from within. But I heard nothing except the gentle tropical wind blowing through my brain. I was still alone.
As I stood in huffish thought, Deborah came roaring over to me at full volume. “Took you long enough,” she snarled. “Where have you been?”
“Macramé class,” I said. “It’s just like the others?”
“Looks like it,” she said. “What about it, Masuoka?”
“I think we got a break this time,” Vince said.
“About fucking time,” Deborah said.
“There’s an ankle bracelet,” Vince said. “It’s made of platinum, so it didn’t melt off.” He looked up at Deborah and gave her his terribly phony smile. “It says Tammy on it.”
Deborah frowned and looked over to the side door of the gallery. A tall man in a seersucker jacket and bow tie stood there with one of the cops, looking anxiously at Deborah. “Who’s that guy?” she asked Vince.
“Professor Keller,” he told her. “Art history teacher. He found the body.”
Still frowning, Deborah stood up and beckoned the uniformed cop to bring the professor over.
“Professor . . . ?” Deborah said.
“Keller. Gus Keller,” the professor said. He was a good-looking man in his sixties with what looked like a dueling scar on his left cheek. He didn’t appear to be about to faint at the sight of the body.
“So you found the body here,” Deb said.
“That’s right,” he said. “I was coming over to check on a new exhibit—Mesopotamian art, actually, which is interesting—and I saw it here in the shrubbery.” He frowned. “About an hour ago, I guess.”
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Mesopotamian part, which was a standard cop trick designed to make people eager to add new details, especially if they might be a little bit guilty. It didn’t appear to work on Keller. He simply stood and waited for another question, and Deborah stood and tried to think of one. I am justly proud of my hard-earned artificial social skills, and I didn’t want the silence to turn awkward, so I cleared my throat, and Keller looked at me.
“What can you tell us about the ceramic head?” I asked him.
“From the artistic point of view.” Deborah glared at me, but she may have been jealous that I thought of the question instead of her.
“From the artistic point of view? Not much,” Keller said, looking down at the bull’s head by the body. “It looks like it was done in a mold, and then baked in a fairly primitive kiln. Maybe even just a big oven. But historically, it’s much more interesting.”
“What do you mean interesting?” Deborah snapped at him, and he shrugged.
“Well, it’s not perfect,” Keller said. “But somebody tried to re-create a very old stylized design.”
“How old?” Deborah said. Keller raised an eyebrow and shrugged, as if to say she had asked the wrong question, but he answered.
“Three or four thousand years old,” he said.
“That’s very old,” I offered helpfully, and they both looked at me, which made me think I ought to add something halfway clever, so I said, “And what part of the world would it be from?”
Keller nodded. I was clever again. “Middle East,” he said. “We see a similar motif in Babylonia, and even earlier around Jerusalem.
The bull head appears to be attached to the worship of one of the elder gods. A particularly nasty one, really.”
“Moloch,” I said, and it hurt my throat to say that name.
Deborah glared at me, absolutely certain now that I had been holding out on her, but she looked back at Keller as he continued to talk.
“Yes, that’s right,” he said. “Moloch liked human sacrifice.
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and he would guarantee a good harvest, or victory over your enemies.”
“Well, then, I think we can look forward to a very good harvest this year,” I said, but neither one of them appeared to think that was worth even a tiny smile. Ah well, you do what you can to bring a little cheer into this dreary world, and if people refuse to respond to your efforts it’s their loss.
“What’s the point of burning the bodies?” Deborah demanded.
Keller smiled briefly, kind of a professorial thanks-for-aski
ng smile. “That’s the whole key to the ritual,” he said. “There was a huge bull-headed statue of Moloch that was actually a furnace.”
I thought of Halpern and his “dream.” Had he known about Moloch beforehand, or had it come to him the way the music came to me? Or was Deborah right all along and he had actually been to the statue and killed the girls—as unlikely as that seemed now?
“A furnace,” said Deborah, and Keller nodded. “And they toss the bodies in there?” she said, with an expression that indicated she was having trouble believing it, and it was all his fault.
“Oh, it gets much better than that,” Keller said. “They delivered the miracle in the ritual. Very sophisticated flummery, in fact. But that’s why Moloch had such lasting popularity—it was convincing, and it was exciting. The statue had arms that stretched out to the congregation. When you placed the sacrifice in his arms, Moloch would appear to come to life and eat the sacrifice—the arms would slowly raise up the victim and place it in his mouth.”
“And into the furnace,” I said, not wanting to be left out any longer, “while the music played.”
Deborah looked at me strangely, and I realized that no one else had mentioned music, but Keller shrugged it off and answered.
“Yes, that’s right. Trumpets and drums, singing, all very hyp-notic. Climaxing as the god lifted the body up to its mouth and dropped it. Into the mouth and you fall down into the furnace.
Alive. It can’t have been much fun for the victim.”
I believed what Keller said—I heard the soft throb of the drums in the distance, and it wasn’t much fun for me, either.
“Does anybody still worship this guy?” Deborah asked.
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Keller shook his head. “Not for two thousand years, as far as I know,” he said.
“Well then, what the hell,” Deborah said. “Who’s doing this?”
“It isn’t any kind of secret,” Keller said. “It’s a pretty well-documented part of history. Anybody could have done a little research and found out enough to do something like this.”
