Darkly Dreaming Dexter

by Jeff Lindsay

“Wait until you see what you have here,” I said.

  “But I washed my hands,” Astor said.

  “Doesn’t matter,” I told her. I put the small specks of stuff onto another glass slide and fixed it to the microscope. “Now then,” I said.

  CLUMP.

  It really is a bit melodramatic to say that we all froze, but there it is—we did. They both looked up at me and I looked back at them and we all forgot to breathe.

  CLUMP.

  The sound was getting closer and it was very hard to remember that we were in police headquarters and perfectly safe.

  “Dexter,” Astor said in a slightly quavery voice.

  “We are in police headquarters,” I said. “We’re perfectly safe.”

  CLUMP.

  It stopped, very close. The hair went up on the back of my neck and I turned toward the door as it swung slowly open.

  Sergeant Doakes. He stood there in the doorway, glaring, which seemed to have become his permanent expression. “You,” he said, and the sound was nearly as unsettling as his appearance as it rolled out of his tongue-less mouth.

  “Why yes, it is me,” I said. “Good of you to remember.”

  He clumped one more step into the room and Astor scrambled off her stool and scurried to the windows, as far away from the door as she could get. Doakes paused and looked at her. Then his eyes swung back to Cody, who slid off his stool and stood there unblinking, facing Doakes.

  Doakes stared at Cody, Cody stared back, and Doakes made what I can only call a Darth Vader intake of breath. Then he swung his head back to me and clumped one rapid step closer, nearly losing his balance. “You,” he said again, hissing it this time. “Kigs!”

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  “Kigs?” I said, and I really was puzzled and not trying to provoke him. I mean, if he insisted on stomping around and frightening children, the least he could do is carry a notepad and pencil to communicate with.

  Apparently that thoughtful gesture was beyond him, though.

  Instead he gave another Darth Vader breath and slowly pointed his steel claw at Cody. “Kigs,” he said agian, his lips drawn back in a snarl.

  “He means me,” Cody said. I turned to him, surprised to hear him speak with Doakes right there, like a nightmare come to life.

  But of course, Cody didn’t have nightmares. He simply looked at Doakes.

  “What about you, Cody?” I said.

  “He saw my shadow,” Cody said.

  Sergeant Doakes took another wobbly step toward me. His right claw snapped, as if it had decided on its own to attack me.

  “You. Goo. Gik.”

  It was becoming apparent that he had something on his mind, but it was even clearer that he ought to stick with the silent glaring, since it was nearly impossible to understand the gooey syllables that came from his damaged mouth.

  “Wuk. You. Goo,” he hissed, and it was such a clear condemnation of all that was Dexter, I at last understood that he was accusing me of something.

  “What do you mean?” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “Goy,” he said, pointing again at Cody.

  “Why, yes,” I said. “Methodist, actually.” I admit that I deliberately misunderstood him: he was saying “boy” and it came out

  “goy” because he had no tongue, but really, one can only take so much. It should have been painfully clear to Doakes that his attempts at vocal communication were having very limited success, and yet he insisted on trying. Didn’t the man have any sense of decorum at all?

  Happily for all of us, we were interrupted by a clatter in the hallway and Deborah rushed into the room. “Dexter,” she said. She paused as she took in the wild tableau of Doakes with claw 244

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  upraised against me, Astor cringing against the window, and Cody lifting a scalpel off the bench to use against Doakes. “What the hell,” Deborah said. “Doakes?”

  He very slowly let his arm drop, but he did not take his eyes off me.

  “I’ve been looking for you, Dexter. Where were you?”

  I was grateful enough for her timely entry that I did not point out how foolish her question was. “Why, I was right here, educating the children,” I said. “Where were you?”

  “On my way to the Dinner Key,” she said. “They found Kurt Wagner’s body.”

  T H I R T Y - T H R E E

  Deborah hurled us through traffic at Evel

  Knievel–over-the-canyon speeds. I tried to think of a polite way to point out that we were going to see a dead body that would probably not escape, so could she please slow down, but I could not come up with any phrase that would not cause her to take her hands off the wheel and put them around my neck.

  Cody and Astor were too young to realize that they were in mortal danger, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly in the backseat, even getting into the spirit of things by happily returning the greetings of the other motorists by raising their own middle fingers in unison each time we cut off somebody.

  There was a three-car pileup on U.S. 1 at LeJeune which slowed traffic for a few moments and we were forced to cut our pace to a crawl. Since I no longer had to spend all my breath suppressing screams of terror, I tried to find out from Deborah exactly what we were racing to see.

  “How was he killed?” I asked her.

  “Just like the others,” she said. “Burned. And there’s no head on the body.”

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  “You’re sure this is Kurt Wagner?” I asked her.

  “Can I prove it? Not yet,” she said. “Am I sure? Shit yes.”

  “Why?”

  “They found his car nearby,” she said.

  I was quite sure that normally I would understand exactly why somebody seemed to have a fetish for the heads, and know where to find them and why. But of course, now that I was all alone on the inside there was no more normal.

  “This doesn’t make any sense, you know,” I said.

  Deborah snarled and hammered the heel of her hand on the steering wheel. “Tell me about it,” she said.

  “Kurt must have done the other victims,” I said.

  “So who killed him? His scoutmaster?” she said, leaning on the horn and pulling around the traffic snarl into the oncoming lane.

  She swerved toward a bus, stomped on the gas, and wove through traffic for fifty yards until we were past the pileup. I concentrated on remembering to breathe and reflecting that we were all certain to die someday anyway, so in the big picture what did it really matter if Deborah killed us? It was not terribly comforting, but it did keep me from screaming and diving out the car window until Deborah pulled back into the correct lane on the far side of U.S. 1.

  “That was fun,” said Astor. “Can we do that again?”

  Cody nodded enthusiastically.

  “And we could put on the siren next time,” Astor said. “How come you don’t use the siren, Sergeant Debbie?”

  “Don’t call me Debbie,” Deborah snapped. “I just don’t like the siren.”

  “Why not?” Astor insisted.

  Deborah blew out a huge breath and glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “It’s a fair question,” I said.

  “It makes too much noise,” Deborah said. “Now let me drive, okay?”

  “All right,” Astor said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

  We drove in silence all the way to Grand Avenue, and I tried to think about it by myself—clearly enough to come up with anything that might help. I didn’t, but I did think of one thing worth mentioning.

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  “What if Kurt’s murder is just a coincidence?” I said.

  “Even you can’t really believe that,” she said.

  “But if he was on the run,” I said, “maybe he tried to get a fake ID from the wrong people, or get smuggled out of the country.

  There are plenty of bad guys he could run into under the circumstances.�
��

  It didn’t really sound likely, even to me, but Deborah thought about it for a few seconds anyway, chewing on her lower lip and ab-sentmindedly blasting the horn as she pulled around a courtesy van from one of the hotels.

  “No,” she said at last. “He was cooked, Dexter. Like the first two. No way they could copy that.”

  Once again I was aware of a small stirring in the bleak emptiness inside, the area once inhabited by the Dark Passenger. I closed my eyes and tried to find some shred of my once-constant companion, but there was nothing. I opened my eyes in time to see Deborah accelerate around a bright red Ferrari.

  “People read the newspapers,” I said. “There are always copy-cat killings.”

  She thought some more, and then shook her head. “No,” she said at last. “I don’t believe in coincidence. Not with something like this. Cooked and headless both, and it’s a coincidence? No way.”

  Hope always dies hard, but even so I had to admit that she was probably right. Beheading and burning were not really standard procedures for the normal, blue-collar killer, and most people would be far more likely simply to clonk you on the head, tie an anchor to your feet, and fling you into the bay.

  So in all likelihood, we were on our way to see the body of somebody we were sure was a killer, and he had been killed the same way as his own victims. If I had been my cheerful old self, I would certainly have enjoyed the delicious irony, but in my present condition it seemed like just another annoying affront to an orderly existence.

  But Deborah gave me very little time to reflect and become grumpy; she whipped through the traffic in the center of Coconut Grove and pulled into the parking area beside Bayfront Park, where the familiar circus was already under way. Three police cruisers 248

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  were pulled up, and Camilla Figg was dusting for fingerprints on a battered red Geo parked at one of the meters—presumably Kurt Wagner’s car.

  I got out and looked around, and even without an inner voice whispering clues, I noticed right away that there was something wrong with this picture. “Where’s the body?” I asked Deborah.

  She was already walking toward the gate of the yacht club.

  “Out on the island,” she said.

  I blinked and got out of the car. For no reason I could name, the thought of the body on the island raised the hair on the back of my neck, but as I looked out over the water for the answer, all I got was the afternoon breeze that blew across the pines on the barrier islands of Dinner Key and straight through the emptiness inside me.

  Deborah jogged me with her elbow. “Come on,” she said.

  I looked in the backseat at Cody and Astor, who had just now mastered the intricacies of the seat-belt release and were trickling out of the car. “Stay here,” I said to them. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

  “Where are you going?” Astor said.

  “I have to go out to that island,” I said.

  “Is there a dead person there?” she asked me.

  “Yes,” I said.

  She glanced at Cody, then back at me. “We want to go,” she said.

  “No, absolutely not,” I said. “I got in enough trouble the last time. If I let you see another dead body your mother would turn me into one, too.”

  Cody thought that was very funny and he made a small noise and shook his head.

  I heard a shout and looked through the gate into the marina.

  Deborah was already at the dock, about to step into the police boat tied up there. She waved an arm at me and yelled, “Dexter!”

  Astor stomped her foot to get my attention, and I looked back at her. “You have to stay here,” I said, “and I have to go now.”

  “But Dexter, we want to ride on the boat,” she said.

  “Well, you can’t,” I said. “But if you behave I’ll take you on my boat this weekend.”

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  “To see a dead person?” Astor said.

  “No,” I said. “We’re not going to see any more dead bodies for a while.”

  “But you promised!” she said.

  “Dexter!” Deborah yelled again. I waved at her, which did not seem to be the response she was looking for, because she beckoned furiously at me.

  “Astor, I have to go,” I said. “Stay here. We’ll talk about this later.”

  “It’s always later,” she muttered.

  On the way through the gate I paused and spoke to the uniformed cop there, a large heavy man with black hair and a very low forehead. “Could you keep one eye on my kids there?” I asked him.

  He stared at me. “What am I, day-care patrol?”

  “Just for a few minutes,” I said. “They’re very well behaved.”

  “Lookit, sport,” he said, but before he could finish his sentence there was a rustle of movement and Deborah was beside us.

  “God damn it, Dexter!” she said. “Get your ass on the boat!”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to find somebody to watch the kids.”

  Deborah ground her teeth together. Then she glanced at the big cop and read his name tag. “Suchinsky,” she said. “Watch the fucking kids.”

  “Aw, come on, Sarge,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

  “Stick with the kids, goddamn it,” she said. “You might learn something. Dexter—get on the goddamn boat, now!”

  I turned meekly and hurried for the goddamn boat. Deborah strode past me and was already seated when I jumped on, and the cop driving the boat headed for one of the smaller islands, weaving between the anchored sailboats.

  There are several small islands on the outside of Dinner Key Marina that provide protection from wind and wave, one of the things that makes it such a good anchorage. Of course, it’s only good under ordinary circumstances, as the islands themselves proved. They were littered with broken boats and other maritime junk deposited by the many recent hurricanes, and every now and then a squatter would set up housekeeping, building a shack from shattered boat parts.

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  The island we headed for was one of the smaller ones. Half of a forty-foot sports fisherman lay on the beach at a crazy angle, and the pine trees inland of the beach were hung with chunks of Styro-foam, tattered cloth, and wispy shreds of plastic sheeting and garbage bags. Other than that, it was just the way the Native Americans had left it, a peaceful little chunk of land covered with Aus-tralian pines, condoms, and beer cans.

  Except, of course, for Kurt Wagner’s body, which had most likely been left by someone other than Native Americans. It was lying in the center of the island in a small clearing, and like the others, it had been arranged in a formal pose, with the arms folded across the chest and the legs pressed together. The body was headless and unclothed, charred from being burned, very much like the others—except that this time there had been a small addition. Around the neck was a leather string holding a pewter medallion about the size of an egg. I leaned closer to look; it was a bull’s head.

  Once again I felt a strange twinge in the emptiness, as if some part of me were recognizing that this was significant, but didn’t know why or how to express it—not alone, not without the Passenger.

  Vince Masuoka was squatting next to the body examining a cig-arette butt and Deborah knelt down beside him. I circled them one time, looking at it from all angles: Still Life with Cops. I was hoping, I suppose, that I would find a small but significant clue. Perhaps the killer’s driver’s license, or a signed confession. But there was nothing of the kind, nothing but sand, pockmarked from countless feet and the wind.

  I went down on one knee beside Deborah. “You looked for the tattoo, right?” I asked her.

  “First thing,” Vince said. He extended a rubber-gloved hand and lifted the body slightly. There it was, half covered with sand but still visible, only the upper edge of it cut off and left, presumably, with the missing head.

  “It’s him,” Deborah said. “The tattoo, his car is at the
marina—it’s him, Dexter. And I wish I knew what the hell that tattoo meant.”

  “It’s Aramaic,” I said.

  “How the fuck would you know that?” Deborah said.

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  “My research,” I said, and I squatted down next to the body.

  “Look.” I picked a small pine twig out of the sand and pointed with it. Part of the first letter was missing, cut off along with the head, but the rest was plainly visible and matched my language lesson.

  “There’s the M, what’s left of it. And the L, and the K.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Deborah demanded.

  “Moloch,” I said, feeling a small irrational chill just saying the word here in the bright sunshine. I tried to shake it off, but a feeling of uneasiness stayed behind. “Aramaic has no vowels. So MLK

  spells Moloch.”

  “Or milk,” Deborah said.

  “Really, Debs, if you think our killer would tattoo milk on his neck, you need a nap.”

  “But if Wagner is Moloch, who killed him?”

  “Wagner kills the others,” I said, trying very hard to sound thoughtful and confident at the same time, a difficult task. “And then, um . . .”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I already figured out ‘um.’ ”

  “And you’re watching Wilkins.”

  “We’re watching Wilkins, for Christ’s sake.”

  I looked at the body again, but there was nothing else on it to tell me more than I knew, which was almost nothing. I could not stop my brain from going in a circle; if Wagner had been Moloch, and now Wagner was dead, and killed by Moloch . . .

  I stood up. For a moment I felt dizzy, as if bright lights were crashing in on me, and in the distance I heard that awful music beginning to swell up into the afternoon and for just that moment I could not doubt that somewhere nearby the god was calling me—the real god himself and not some psychotic prankster.

  I shook my head to silence it and nearly fell over. I felt a hand grabbing my arm to steady me, but whether it was Debs, Vince, or Moloch himself, I couldn’t tell. From far away a voice was calling my name, but it was singing it, the cadence rising up to the far-too-familiar rhythm of that music. I closed my eyes and felt heat on my face and the music got louder. Something shook me and I opened my eyes.