by Jeff Lindsay
I looked at Vince, who shrugged. “I got a clean sample already,” he said. “It’s not blood.”
“All right,” I said, and I sprayed a small spot on one of the bushes.
Almost immediately a very faint blue glow was visible. “Not blood,” Debs said scornfully. “So what the fuck is that?”
“Shit,” Vince mumbled.
“It’s not much blood,” I said. “The glow is too faint.”
“But it’s some blood?” Debs demanded.
“Well, yes,” I said.
“So it’s some other kind of shit, with blood in it,” she said.
I looked at Vince. “Well,” he said. “I guess so.”
Deborah nodded and looked around. “So you got a party,” she said. She pointed at the fire pit. “And way over there you got the victim. And way over here on the other side of the party you got this.” She glared at Vince. “With blood in it.” She turned to me. “So what is it?” she demanded.
I should not have been surprised that this was suddenly my problem, but I was. “Come on, Debs,” I said.
“No, you come on,” she said. “I need one of your special hunches here.”
“I have a special hunch back at the station,” Vince said. “His name is Ivan.”
“Shut up, dickless,” Deborah said. “Come on, Dexter.”
Apparently there was nothing for it, so I closed my eyes, took a deep breath, and listened.…
And almost immediately got a very amused answer from the Passenger. “Punch bowl,” I said, snapping my eyes open.
“What?” Deborah said.
“It’s the punch bowl,” I said. “For the party.”
“With human blood in it?” she said.
“Punch?” Vince said. “Jesus’ tits, Dex, you’re a sick fuck.”
“Hey,” I said innocently, “I didn’t drink any of it.”
“You’re fucking crazy,” Deborah added helpfully.
“Debs, look,” I said. “It’s away from the fire, and we got this dent in the ground.” I knelt next to Vince and pointed to the depression in the dirt. “Something heavy, stuff spilled out to the sides, lots of footprints around it—you don’t have to call it punch if that makes you nervous. But it’s the beverage.”
Deborah stared at the spot I pointed to, looked across the clearing at the fire pit, and then back to the ground at her feet. She shook her head slowly, dropped into a squat beside me, and said, “Punch bowl. Fuck.”
“You’re a sick fuck,” Vince repeated.
“Yeah,” Debs said. “But I think he’s right.” She stood up. “I bet you a dozen doughnuts you find some kind of drug traces in there, too,” she said with a very noticeable note of satisfaction.
“I’ll check it,” Vince said. “I got a good test for ecstasy.” He gave her his hideous sex leer and added, “Would you like to take the ecstasy test with me?”
“No, thanks,” she said. “You don’t have the pencil for it.” She turned away before he could try one of his awful comebacks, and I followed. It took me only three steps to realize that something about her was very wrong, and when it registered I stopped dead and turned her to face me.
I looked at my sister with surprise. “Debs,” I said. “You’re actually smiling.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Because we just proved that this is my case.”
“What do you mean?”
She punched me, hard. It may have been a happy punch for her, but it still hurt me. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Who drinks blood?”
“Ouch,” I said. “Bela Lugosi?”
“Him and all the other vampires,” she said. “You want me to spell ‘vampire’ for you?”
“So what—Oh,” I said.
“Yeah, oh,” she said. “We turn up a vampire wannabe, Bobby Acosta. And now we got a whole fucking vampire frat party. You think that’s a coincidence?”
I didn’t think so, but my arm hurt too much to say so. “We’ll see,” I said.
“Yes, we will,” she said. “Get your stuff; I’ll drive you back.”
It was definitely lunchtime when we got back to civilization, but none of the subtle hints I threw out to Debs seemed to register, and she drove straight back to headquarters without pausing, in spite of the fact that Route 41 turns into Calle Ocho, and we could easily have pulled over at a number of excellent Cuban restaurants. Just thinking about them made my stomach growl, and I imagined I could smell the plátanos sizzling in the frying pan. But as far as Deborah was concerned, the wheels of justice were already in motion, grinding their inexorable way toward a guilty verdict and a safer world, which apparently meant that Dexter could very well do without lunch for society’s sake.
And so it was a very hungry Dexter who made his weary way back to the forensics lab, chivvied every step of the way by his sister’s demands for rapid identification of the victim from the Everglades scene. I unpacked my samples and flung myself into my chair, searching for answers to the burning question: Should I drive all the way back to Calle Ocho? Or simply head to Café Relampago, which was much closer and had excellent sandwiches?
Like most important questions in life, this one had no easy answer, and I thought hard about the implications. Was it better to eat quickly, or well? If I chose instant gratification, did that make me a weaker person? And why did it have to be Cuban food today? Why not, for example, barbecue?
The moment that thought popped into my head, I began to lose my appetite. The girl in the Everglades had been barbecued, and for some reason that troubled me a great deal. I could not get the pictures out of my mind: the poor girl lashed in place, slowly bleeding out as the flames reached higher, the crowd howling, and the chef dabbing on barbecue sauce. I could almost smell the cooking flesh, and that drove all thoughts of ropa vieja and lunch completely out of my head.
Was this the way life was going to be from now on? How could I do my job if I felt actual human empathy for the victims I saw every day? Worse, how could I stay in a job that came between me and lunch?
It was a terribly sad state of affairs, and I let the self-pity wash over me for a few minutes. Dexter in the Dumps, an absurd figure. I, who had sent dozens of the deserving into the afterlife, was now mourning the loss of one insignificant girl, and merely because whoever killed her had not wasted the meat.
Preposterous; and in any case, the mighty machine that was me needed some kind of fuel. So I brushed away the unhappy thoughts and trudged down the hall to the vending machines. Looking through the glass at the meager selection of snack foods brought me no joy, either. At the hospital a Snickers bar had seemed like manna from heaven. Now it looked like punishment. Nothing else called out to me and promised fulfillment, either. In spite of all the bright wrappers and gleeful slogans, all I could see was a case filled with preservatives and chemically enhanced colors. It was all artificially flavored with genuine synthetic replicas, and it seemed about as appetizing as eating a chemistry set.
But duty called, and I needed to eat something to function at the necessary high level. So I settled on the least offensive choice—crackers with a substance in the middle that claimed to be peanut butter. I fed in some money and pushed the button. The crackers dropped out into the tray, and as I bent to pick them up a small and shadowy figure in the dark basement of Castle Dexter opened a door and stuck its head out. I froze for a moment in the bent-over position and listened. I heard nothing except the silken fluttering of a tiny warning flag, that things were not what they should be, and I stood up slowly and carefully and turned around.
There was nothing at all behind me: no maniac with a knife, no semi truck careening toward me out of control, no turbaned giant with an assegai—nothing. Still, the small voice whispered at me to beware.
Clearly, the Passenger was playing with me. Perhaps it was miffed at me for failing to feed and exercise it. “Just shut up,” I told it. “Go away and leave me alone.” It continued to smirk at me, so I ignored it and stepped into the hall.
And
I walked almost directly into Sergeant Doakes—or most of him, anyway.
Doakes had always hated me, even before a crazed doctor had cut away his hands, feet, and tongue when I had failed to rescue him. I mean, I had tried—really—but things had just not worked out, and as a direct consequence Doakes had lost a few overrated body parts. But even before that, he had hated me because, out of all the cops I had ever met, he was the only one who suspected what I was. I had given him no reason and no evidence, but somehow he just knew.
And now he stood there on his artificial feet, glaring at me with all the venom of a thousand cobras. For a moment I wished that the mad doctor had taken away his eyes, too, but I quickly realized that this was an unkind thought, unsuitable for the new and human me, so I put it out of my mind and instead gave him a friendly smile. “Sergeant Doakes,” I said. “It’s good to see you, and moving around so well, too.”
Doakes did nothing at all, just kept looking at me, and I looked down at the silvery metallic claws that had replaced his hands. He was not carrying the small notebook-size speech box he used to talk—possibly he wanted both claws free to strangle me, or more likely, he planned to use the vending machines, too. And since he no longer had a tongue, his attempts at speech without the synthesizer were so embarrassing, filled with “ngah” sounds and so on, that he probably didn’t want to risk looking silly. So he just stared at me for a moment, until finally the anticipation of a sprightly encounter withered away within me.
“Well,” I said, “it’s been very nice speaking with you. Have a lovely day.” I walked away toward my lab, turning back to look only once. Doakes was still watching me with his poisonous stare.
I told you so, gloated the soft voice of the Passenger, but I just waved at Doakes and went back to the lab.
When Vince and the others got back around three, the taste of the crackers was still lingering unpleasantly in the back of my mouth.
“Wow,” Vince said as he came in and dropped his bag on the floor. “I think I got a sunburn.”
“What did you do about lunch?” I asked him.
He blinked as if I’d asked a crazy question, and maybe I had. “One of the cops drove back to a Burger King,” he said. “Why?”
“You didn’t lose your appetite thinking about that girl being roasted and eaten right there?”
Vince looked even more astonished. “No,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “I had a double Whopper with cheese, and fries. Are you okay?”
“I’m just hungry,” I said, and he looked at me a moment longer, so rather than sit through a staring contest, I turned away and went back to work.
SIXTEEN
THE TELEPHONE WOKE ME UP WHILE IT WAS STILL DARK, and I rolled over to look at the clock radio beside the bed. It said 4:47 in obnoxiously cheerful digits. I’d had just over twenty minutes of real sleep since the last time Lily Anne had cried, and I did not appreciate the wake-up call. But hoping against hope that the ringing would not reawaken her, I grabbed at the telephone. “Hello,” I said.
“I need you here early,” declared the voice of my sister. She did not sound at all tired, in spite of the hour, and I found that just as annoying as being wakened at this dreadful time of night.
“Deborah,” I said, the hoarseness of sleep still in my throat, “it’s another two and a half hours until early.”
“We matched up your DNA sample,” she said, ignoring what was really a pretty clever remark, considering the hour. “It’s Tyler Spanos.”
I blinked rapidly a few times, trying to bring my brain into some kind of state that approached wakefulness. “The girl in the Everglades?” I said. “That was Tyler Spanos? Not Samantha Aldovar?”
“Yeah,” she said. “So this morning they’re setting up a task force. Chambers is coordinating, but I got lead investigator.” And I could hear the excitement in her voice as she said it.
“That’s great,” I said, “but why do you need me early?”
She dropped her voice as if she was afraid someone would hear her. “I need your help, Dex,” she said. “This is turning into a huge thing and I can’t fuck it up. And it’s getting, you know. Political.” She cleared her throat slightly, sounding a little bit like Captain Matthews. “So I got you down to lead Forensics on the task force.”
“I have to take the kids to school,” I protested, and beside me I heard a soft rustling.
Rita’s hand came down on my arm, and she said, “I can take the kids.”
“You shouldn’t drive yet,” I protested. “Lily Anne is too small.”
“She’ll be fine,” Rita said. “And so will I. Dexter, I’ve done this before, and without help the first two times.”
We never talked about Rita’s ex, the bio dad of Cody and Astor, but I knew enough about him to know that he could not have been terribly helpful. Clearly, she really had done this before. And in truth, Rita looked fine, not at all unhealthy—but naturally enough, it was Lily Anne I was worried about. “But the car seat,” I said.
“It’s fine, Dexter, really,” Rita said. “Go do your job.”
I heard something that might have been a snort from Deborah. “Tell Rita I said thanks,” Debs said. “See you soon.” And she hung up.
“But,” I said into the phone, even though the line was dead.
“Get dressed,” Rita said, and she repeated, “Really, we’ll be fine.”
Our society has many laws and customs to protect women from the brute force of men, but when two women make up their minds about something and gang up on a man there is absolutely nothing he can do but go along. Perhaps someday we will elect a compassionate woman as president, and she will pass new laws on the subject; until then, I was a helpless victim. I got up and showered, and by the time I was dressed Rita had a fried-egg sandwich ready for me to eat in the car, and a cup of coffee in a shiny metal travel mug.
“Work hard,” she said with a tired smile. “I hope you catch these people.” I looked at her with surprise. “It was on the news,” she said. “They said it was—That poor girl was eaten.” She shuddered and took a sip of coffee. “In Miami. In this day and age. I don’t—I mean, cannibals? A whole group of them? How can you …” She shook her head, took another sip of coffee, and put the cup down—and to my surprise I saw a tear form in one corner of her eye.
“Rita,” I said.
“I know,” she said, knuckling away the tear. “It’s just hormones, I’m sure, because—And I don’t really …” She sniffled. “It’s just the baby,” she said. “And now somebody else’s little girl—Go on, Dexter. This is important.”
I went. I was not really awake yet, and still suffering from psychological whiplash from my treatment at the hands of Rita and Debs, but I went. And oddly enough, I was surprised as much by what Rita had said as by her tears. Cannibals. It seems very stupid to say so, but I had not really thought of that word yet. I mean, Dexter is not dull: I knew the poor girl had been eaten by people, and I knew that people who ate other people were called cannibals. But to put those thoughts together and say cannibals had eaten Tyler Spanos—it brought the whole thing onto a level of everyday, toe-stubbing reality that was somehow a little bit strange and scary. I know that the world is full of bad people: After all, I am one of them. But a whole group of partygoers eating a young girl at an outdoor barbecue? That made them real cannibals—contemporary, modern-day, right-here-in-Miami cannibals—and it felt like the level of badness had just gone up a few notches.
And there was an additional tinge of quaintness to the whole thing, too, as if a book of frightening fairy tales had come to life: first vampires and now cannibals. What a very interesting place Miami had suddenly become. Perhaps next I would meet a centaur or a dragon, or even an honest man.
I drove to work in darkness and light traffic. A large chunk of moon hung in the sky, scolding me for my sloth. Get to work, Dexter, it whispered. Slice something up. I gave it the finger and drove on.
One of the conference rooms on the second floor had b
een set aside to make a command center for Deborah’s task force, and it was already buzzing with activity when I strolled in. Chambers, the shaven-headed man from FDLE, sat at a large table that was already heaped with folders, lab reports, maps, and coffee cups. He had a pile of six or seven cell phones beside him, and he was talking into another one.
And, unfortunately for all concerned—except possibly the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover, who must have been hovering protectively in a spectral house frock—sitting next to Chambers was Special Agent Brenda Recht. She had a pair of very chic reading glasses on the end of her nose that she pushed down even farther in order to look at me with disapproval. I smiled back at her and looked to the far end of the room, where a man in a state trooper uniform was standing next to the giant black man I had seen at the crime scene. He turned to stare at me, so I just nodded and moved on.
Deborah was briefing two Miami-Dade detectives, with her partner, Deke, sitting beside her, flossing his teeth. She looked up at me and beckoned for me to join her. I pulled a chair over next to her group and sat as one of the detectives, a guy named Ray Alvarez, interrupted her.
“Yeah, hey, listen,” he said. “I don’t like it at all. I mean, the guy is fucking city hall—you been called off once already.”
“It’s different now,” Deborah told him. “We got a murder like nobody’s ever seen, and the press is going nuts.”
“Yeah, sure,” Alvarez said, “but you know fucking well Acosta is just waiting to bust somebody’s balls.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Deborah said.
“Easy for you,” Alvarez said. “No balls to bust.”
“That’s what you think,” said Hood, the other detective, a hulking brute I knew a little. “She got twice your balls, Ray.”
“Fuck you,” Alvarez said. Deke snorted, either a laugh, or perhaps some small particle of food had gotten flossed out and become lodged in his nose.
“You just find Bobby Acosta,” Debs said sharply, “or you won’t have any balls to worry about.” She glared at him, and he shrugged, looking up at the ceiling as if to ask why God was picking on him. “Start with the motorcycle,” she said. She glanced at a folder in her lap. “It’s a red Suzuki Hayabusa, one year old.”
