by Jeff Lindsay
“Look out,” I said, and Debs glanced at the road just in time to steer us around a large gasoline tanker that had decided to switch lanes for no apparent reason.
“So you think this last name on the list can tell us how to find Bobby Acosta?” I said, and Deborah nodded vigorously.
“I had a gut feeling about this one, right from the start,” she said, steering into the far right lane with one finger.
“And so you saved it for last? Deborah!” I said as a pair of motorcycles cut in front of us and began to brake for the exit.
“Yeah,” she said, gliding back into the middle lane.
“Because you wanted to build the suspense?”
“It’s Deke,” Deborah said, and I was thrilled to see that she was watching the road now. “He’s just …” She hesitated for a moment, and then blurted out, “He’s bad luck.”
I have spent my life around cops so far, and I expect that the rest of my life I’ll do the same, especially if I get caught someday. So I know that superstitions can pop up at some odd times and places. Even so, I was surprised to hear them from my sister. “Bad luck?” I said. “Debs, do you want me to call a santero? Maybe he can kill a chicken, and—”
“I know how it sounds, goddamn it,” she said. “But what the hell else can it be?”
I could think of a lot of other things it could be, but it didn’t seem politic to say so, and after a moment Deborah went on.
“All right, maybe I’m full of shit,” she said. “But I need some luck on this thing. There’s a clock ticking here, and that girl …” She paused almost as if she were feeling strong emotion, and I looked at her with surprise. Emotion? Sergeant Iron Heart?
Deborah didn’t look back at me. She just shook her head. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “I shouldn’t let it get to me. It’s just …” She shrugged and looked grumpy again, which was a bit of a relief. “I guess I’ve been a little … I dunno. Weird lately.”
I thought about the last few days, and realized that it was true: My sister had been uncharacteristically vulnerable and emotional. “Yes, you have,” I said. “Why do you think that is?”
Deborah sighed heavily, another action that was very unlike her. “I think … I dunno,” she said. “Chutsky says it’s the knife wound.” She shook her head. “He says it’s like postpartum depression, that you always feel bad for a while after a major injury.”
I nodded. It made a certain amount of sense. Deborah had recently been stabbed, and had come so close to death from blood loss that the difference was a matter of a few seconds in the ambulance. And certainly Chutsky, her boyfriend, would know about that—he had been some kind of intelligence operative before being disabled, and his body was a raised-relief road map of scar tissue.
“Even so,” I said, “you can’t let this case get under your skin.” As soon as I said it I braced myself, since it was a surefire setup line for an arm punch, but once again Debs surprised me.
“I know,” she said softly, “but I can’t help it. She’s just a girl. A kid. Good grades, nice family, and these guys—cannibals …” She trickled off into a moody and reflective silence, which was a really striking contrast to the fact that we were speeding through heavy traffic. “It’s complicated, Dexter,” she said at last.
“I guess so,” I said.
“I think I empathize with the kid,” she said. “Maybe because she’s so vulnerable at the same time I am.” She stared straight ahead at the road, but didn’t really seem to see it, which was a little bit alarming. “And all this other stuff. I dunno.”
It might have been because I was hanging on for dear life in a vehicle that was careening through traffic at breakneck speed, but I didn’t quite get her point. “What other stuff?” I said.
“Ah, you know,” she said, even though I had said quite clearly that I did not know. “The family shit. I mean …” She scowled suddenly and looked at me again. “If you say one fucking word to Vince or anybody else about my bio clock ticking, I swear I’ll kill you.”
“But it is ticking?” I said, feeling mildly astonished.
Deborah glared at me for a moment and then, happily for life and limb, looked back at the road again. “Yeah,” she said. “I think it is. I really want a family, Dex.”
I suppose I could have told her something comforting based on my experience: perhaps that families were overrated and kids were really just a sinister device to make us all prematurely old and crazy. But instead, I thought of Lily Anne, and I suddenly wanted my sister to have her family so she could feel all the things I was learning to feel. “Well,” I said.
“Shit, that’s the exit,” Deborah said, swerving hard for the off-ramp and effectively killing the mood, as well as guaranteeing that I lost all sense of what I had been about to say. The sign that flashed by, seemingly just a few inches from my head, told me we were heading for North Miami Beach, into an area of modest houses and shops that had changed very little in the last twenty years. It seemed like a very odd neighborhood for a cannibal.
Deborah slowed down and nosed into traffic at the end of the off-ramp, still moving too fast. She took us several blocks east, then a few more north, and then steered into six or seven blocks of houses where the residents had planted rows of hedges to seal off all the roads leading in, except one main entry street. It was a practice that had become common in this part of town, and was supposed to cut down crime. Nobody had told me whether it worked.
We went through the entrance to the minicommunity and two blocks over, and then Debs pulled up onto the grass in front of a modest, pastel yellow house and the car rocked to a stop. “That’s it,” Deborah said, glancing at the paper on the seat beside her. “Guy’s name is Victor Chapin. He’s twenty-two. House is owned by Mrs. Arthur Chapin, age sixty-three. She works downtown.”
I looked at the little house. It was slightly faded and very ordinary. There were no skulls stacked outside, no hex signs painted on the yellow walls, nothing at all to say that evil lived here. A ten-year-old Mustang squatted in the driveway, and everything about the place was still and suburban.
“He lives with his mom?” I said. “Are cannibals allowed to do that?”
She shook her head. “This one does,” she said, opening her door. “Let’s go.”
Deborah got out of the car and marched briskly toward the front door, and I could not help remembering that I had been sitting in the car and watching when she had gone alone to another door and been stabbed—so I got out quickly and joined her just as she pushed the doorbell. From inside the house we heard an elaborate chime playing, something that sounded very dramatic, although I couldn’t quite place it. “Very nice,” I said. “I think it’s Wagner.”
Deborah just shook her head and tapped her foot impatiently on the cement stoop.
“Maybe they’re both at work,” I suggested.
“Can’t be. Victor works at a late-night club,” Debs said. “Place on South Beach called Fang. They don’t even open until eleven.”
For a moment I felt a small twitch somewhere on the ground floor of my deepest and darkest dungeon. Fang. I had heard of that before, but where? In the New Times? In one of Vince Masuoka’s tales of late-night clubbing? I couldn’t quite remember, and it went out of my head when Deborah snarled and slapped the doorbell again.
Inside, the music swelled up a second time, but this time, over the top of the most dazzling chord, we heard somebody shout, “Fuck! All right!” and a few seconds later the door swung open. A person who was presumably Victor Chapin stood there holding the door and glaring out at us. He was thin, about five inches short of six feet tall, with dark hair and several days of stubble on his cheeks, and he was wearing a pair of pajama bottoms and a wife-beater undershirt. “Yeah, what!” he said belligerently. “I’m tryna sleep!”
“Victor Chapin?” Deborah asked, and the official cop tone of her voice must have penetrated his sulkiness, because he stiffened suddenly and looked at us a bit more warily. His tongue darted out and mo
istened his lips, and I could see one of his Dr. Lonoff-capped fangs for a second as his eyes moved from Debs to me and back again.
“Whuddya—Why?” he said.
“Are you Victor Chapin?” Deborah repeated.
“Who are you?” he demanded.
Deborah reached for her badge. As soon as it was obvious that it was, in fact, a badge, and even before she flipped it open, Chapin said, “Fuck!” and tried to slam the door. Purely out of reflex, I got my foot in the way, and as the door bounced back open and swung toward Chapin, he turned and ran for the rear of the house.
“Back door!” Deborah said, already running for the corner of the house. “Stay here!” And then she was gone around the side. In the distance I heard a door slam, and then Deborah yelling at Chapin to stop, and then nothing. I started thinking again of the time so recently when my sister had been stabbed, and the bleak helplessness I had felt watching her life drain out onto the sidewalk. Debs had no way of knowing Chapin had actually run for a back door—he could just as easily have gone for a flamethrower. He could be attacking her right now. I peeked into the dimness of the house, but there was nothing to see, and no sound of any kind except for the rush of a central air conditioner.
I stepped back outside and waited. Then I waited a little bit more. Still nothing happened, and I heard nothing new. In the distance a siren warbled. A plane flew overhead. Somewhere nearby somebody strummed a guitar and began to sing “Abraham, Martin, and John.”
Just when I had decided that I couldn’t stand it any longer and I had to go take a look, I heard a petulant voice rising up in the side yard, and Victor Chapin came into view, his hands cuffed behind him and Deborah right behind, frog-marching him toward the car. There were grass stains on the knees of his pajamas, and one side of his face looked red.
“You can’t—fuck—lawyer—shit!” Chapin said. Possibly it was some kind of verbal shorthand used by cannibals, but it made no apparent impression on Debs. She simply pushed him forward and, as I hurried over to join her, she gave me a look that was as close to happy as I had seen from her in quite some time.
“What the fuck!” Chapin said, turning his eloquence on me.
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” I said agreeably.
“This is fucked!” he yelled.
“Get in the car, Victor,” Deborah said.
“You can’t—What!” he said. “Where are you taking me?!”
“We’re going to take you to the detention center,” she said.
“You can’t just fucking take me,” he said.
Deborah smiled at him. I hadn’t met very many vampires, but I thought her smile was probably scarier than anything the bloodsuckers could come up with. “Victor, you refused a lawful order and ran away from me. That means I can just fucking take you,” she said. “And I’m going to just fucking take you, and you are going to answer some fucking questions for me, or you are not going to see the outside for a long time.”
He opened his mouth and just breathed for a moment. His nice shiny fangs didn’t look so intimidating all of a sudden. “What kind of questions?” he said.
“Been to any good parties lately?” I asked him.
I have often heard or read of all the blood draining from somebody’s face, but this was the first time I had ever seen it—except, of course, in the very literal sense, in connection with my playtime activities. Victor turned paler than his shirt, and before Deborah could even glare at me for talking out of turn, he blurted out, “I swear to Christ I didn’t eat any of it!”
“Any of what, Victor?” Deborah said pleasantly.
He was trembling now, and shaking his head back and forth. “They’ll kill me,” he said. “Jesus fuck, they’ll fucking kill me.”
Deborah gave me one quick glance of absolute triumph and joy. Then she stuck her hand on Victor’s shoulder and pushed him gently toward the car. “Get in the car, Victor,” she said.
TWENTY-ONE
DEBORAH HAD VERY LITTLE TO SAY ON THE WAY TO THE detention center. She tried to call Deke to have him meet us there, but for some reason he wasn’t answering, neither his radio nor his cell phone. Debs left word with the dispatcher for him to join us, and other than that we rode in silence—if that’s the right word for it when you are forced to listen to a ten-minute disjointed monologue consisting mostly of the word “fuck.” Chapin was secured in the backseat—the motor-pool cars had rings bolted to the floor for just that reason—and he sat in his durance vile mumbling, ranting, threatening, and overusing the same naughty word. For my part, I was thrilled when we reached our destination, but Debs seemed quite happy to have it go on forever. She had a look on her face that was very nearly a smile every time she glanced at Chapin in the mirror, and she was downright cheerful when she parked the car and pulled him out.
By the time we had the paperwork done, Victor was comfortably locked up in an interrogation room, and Chambers of the FDLE had arrived to see our prize. He stood with us as we looked in at Chapin, who had placed his forearms on the table and slumped forward over them, head hanging just a few inches over his cuffs.
“All right,” Chambers said. “I know I don’t have to remind you that this goes absolutely by the book.” Deborah gave him a startled glance, and he went on without even looking at her. “You did good work, Morgan; you got a really good suspect here, and we pay attention to the rules, with just a little bit of luck we’re gonna stick this guy with a couple of felonies.”
“I don’t give a shit about a conviction,” Deborah said. “I want to get the girl back.”
“We all want that,” Chambers said. “But it would be really nice to put this guy away, too.”
“Listen,” Deborah said. “This isn’t about politics or public relations.”
“I know that,” Chambers said, but Debs rode right over him.
“I got a guy in there who knows something,” she said. “And I got him feeling all alone and naked and scared to death and ready to break, and I’m going to fucking break him.”
“Morgan, you’ve got to do your job right and—”
Deborah turned on Chambers as if he were personally hiding Samantha Aldovar. “My job is to find this girl,” she said, poking Chambers in the chest with her index finger. “And that little asshole in there is going to tell me how.”
Chambers very calmly grabbed Deborah’s finger and pushed it down to her side, slowly and deliberately. He put his hand on her shoulder and moved his face closer to hers, and said, “I hope he will tell us what we need to know. But if he does or if he doesn’t, you are going to play by the rules and not let your feelings take over and fly you into the hillside. All right?”
Deborah glared at him, and he looked back; neither one of them blinked, breathed, or said a word, and for several long seconds it was her anger versus his gunfighter’s cool—fire against ice. It was an absolutely fascinating face-off, and under other circumstances I could have watched it all day just to see who would win. But things being what they were, I thought it had gone on quite long enough, and I cleared my throat in a deliberately artificial way. “Ahem,” I said, and they both glanced at me. “I really hate to interrupt,” I said, and nodded through the glass at Chapin. “But tempus is kind of fugiting, isn’t it?”
They both stared at me and I felt as if one side of my face was melting and the other freezing. Then Chambers looked at Debs with one eyebrow raised, she looked back at him and finally nodded, and the spell was broken.
“Where’s your partner?” Chambers said. “He should be here for this.”
Deborah shook her head. “He’s not answering,” she said, “and I can’t wait.”
“All right,” Chambers said. “I’ll do this with you.” He turned to look at me and the impact of his cold blue eyes almost hurt. “You stay here,” he said, and I felt absolutely no impulse to argue.
I watched through the glass as the two of them went into the room with Chapin. I could hear through the speaker everything that went on, but based on what w
as said, it was hardly worth the expense of miking the room. Deborah said, “You’re in a ton of fucking trouble, Chapin,” and he didn’t even look up. So she stood about three feet behind him, crossed her arms, and said, “What did you mean when you told me you didn’t eat any of it?”
“I want a lawyer,” Chapin said.
“Kidnapping, murder, and cannibalism,” Deborah said.
“It’s Vlad; it’s all Vlad,” he said.
“Vlad made you do it? You mean Bobby Acosta?”
Chapin looked up at Deborah, mouth hanging open, and then put his head back down. “I want a lawyer,” he said.
“You give us Bobby, they’ll go easy on you. Otherwise … that’s about five hundred years in prison,” Debs said. “If they let you live.”
“I want a lawyer,” Chapin said. And he looked up again, and focused past Debs to where Chambers stood, across the table from him. “I want a lawyer,” he repeated, and then he jumped to his feet and yelled it. “I want a fucking lawyer!”
For the next two minutes there was more, but nothing really instructive. Chapin yelled louder and louder that he wanted a lawyer and, aside from a few tediously repeated naughty words, that was all he had to say. Chambers tried to calm him down and get him back into his chair and Deborah stood with her arms folded and glared. When Chambers finally got Chapin seated again, he took Debs by the arm and led her from the room.
I joined them in the hallway just in time to hear Chambers say, “… and you know damned well we have to get him one now.”
“Fuck it, Chambers!” Deborah said. “I can bend the paperwork and hold him twenty-four hours!”
“He has asked for a lawyer,” Chambers said, as if he were telling a child she can’t have a cookie before dinner.
“You’re killing me,” Deborah said. “And you’re killing that girl.”
For the first time I saw a little flash of heat run across Chambers’s face, and he took a short step in to stand right in Deborah’s face. I thought I was about to witness another attempt on my sister’s life and I tensed, ready to leap in and separate them. But Chambers took a deep breath, clamped both his hands on Deborah’s upper arms, and said very carefully, “Your suspect has asked to see an attorney, and we are required by law to provide one for him. Now.” He stared at her, she stared back, and then Chambers let go of her arms and turned away. “I’ll go get a public defender,” he said, and disappeared down the hall.
