by Jeff Lindsay
I shook my head, which caused a small waterfall to roll down the back of my neck. “We’re waiting for you,” I said. “In the rain.”
“Had to get the sitter,” she said, and shook her head. “You should have worn a poncho or something.”
“Gosh, I wish I’d thought of that,” I said pleasantly, and Debs turned back to look at the leftovers of Marty Klein.
“Who found it?” she said, still staring through the Crown Vic’s window.
One of the officers, a thick African-American man with a Fu Manchu mustache, cleared his throat and stepped forward. “I did,” he said.
Deborah glanced at him. “Cochrane, right?”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“I was on routine patrol,” Cochrane said. “I spotted the vehicle in its present location, apparently abandoned on the shoulder of Interstate 95, and recognizing that it was an official vehicle, I parked my patrol unit behind it and called in the tag. Receiving confirmation that it was indeed a police vehicle signed out to Detective Martin Klein, I exited my patrol vehicle and approached Detective Klein’s vehicle.” Cochrane paused for a moment, possibly confused by the number of times he had said “vehicle.” But he just cleared his throat and plowed on. “Upon arriving at a point where I could make a visual surveillance of the interior of Detective Klein’s vehicle I, uh—”
Cochrane stumbled to a stop, as if he wasn’t sure what the correct word might be in report-ese, but the cop beside him snorted and supplied the missing word. “He hurled,” the other cop said. “Totally lost his lunch.”
Cochrane glared at the other cop, and harsh words might have been spoken if Deborah had not called the men back to their purpose. “That’s it?” she said. “You looked inside, threw up, and called it in?”
“I came, I saw, I blew chunks,” Vince Masuoka muttered beside me, but happily for his health Deborah didn’t hear him.
“That’s it,” Cochrane said.
“You saw nothing else?” Debs said. “No suspicious vehicle, nothing?”
Cochrane blinked, apparently still fighting the urge to punch his buddy. “It’s rush hour,” he said, and he sounded a little testy. “What’s a suspicious vehicle in this mess?”
“If I have to tell you that,” Debs said, “maybe you should transfer to code enforcement.”
Vince said, “Boom,” very softly, and the cop beside Cochrane made a choking sound as he tried not to laugh.
For some reason, Cochrane didn’t find it quite so amusing, and he cleared his throat again. “Lookit,” he said. “There’s ten thousand cars going by, and they’re all slowing down for a look. And it’s raining, so you can’t see anything. You tell me what to look for and I’ll start looking, all right?”
Debs stared at him without expression. “It’s too late now,” she said, and she turned away, back to the blob in the Crown Vic. “Dexter,” she called over her shoulder.
I suppose I should have known it was coming. My sister always assumed that I would have some kind of mystical insight into a crime scene. She was convinced that I would know instantly all about the sick and murderous freaks we encountered after one quick glance at their handiwork, merely because I was a sick and murderous freak myself. And so every time she was faced with an impossibly grotesque killing, she expected me to provide the name, location, and social security number of the killer. Quite often I did, guided by the soft voice of my Dark Passenger and a thorough understanding of my craft. But this time I had nothing for her.
Somewhat reluctantly, I sloshed over to stand beside Deborah. I hated to disappoint my only sister, but I had nothing to say about this. It was so savage, brutal, and unpleasant that even the Passenger had pursed its glove-leather lips with disapproval.
“What do you think?” Deborah said to me, lowering her voice to encourage me to speak frankly.
“Well,” I said, “whoever did this is off-the-charts insane.”
She stared at me as if waiting for more, and when it was clear that no more was coming, she shook her head. “No shit,” she said. “You figured that out by yourself?”
“Yes,” I said, thoroughly annoyed. “And after only one quick glance through the window. In the rain. Come on, Debs, we don’t even know yet if that’s really Klein.”
Deborah stared inside the car. “It’s him,” she said.
I wiped a small tributary of the Mississippi River off my forehead and looked into the car. I could not even say for sure that the thing inside had ever been a human being, but my sister sounded quite positive that this amorphous glob was Detective Klein. I shrugged, which naturally sent a sheet of water down my neck. “How can you be sure?”
She nodded at one end of the lump. “The bald spot,” she said. “That’s Marty’s bald spot.”
I looked again. The body lay across the car’s seat like a cold pudding, neatly arranged and apparently intact, unpunctured. There were no visible breaks in the skin and no apparent blood spill, and yet the pounding Klein had taken was total, terrible. The top of the skull was perhaps the only part of the body that had not been shattered, probably to avoid ending Klein’s life too quickly. And sure enough, the fringe of greasy hair around the bright pink circle of bare skin did look a lot like what I remembered about Klein’s bald spot. I would not have sworn an oath that it truly was, but I was not a real detective like my sister. “Is this a girl thing?” I asked her, and I admit I said it only because I was wet, hungry, and annoyed. “You can tell people apart by their hair?”
She glanced at me, and for one terrifying moment I thought I had gone too far and she was going to attack my biceps with one of her ferocious arm punches. But instead, she looked over to the rest of the group from Forensics, pointed at the car, and said, “Open it up.”
I stood in the rain and watched as they did. A shudder seemed to go through the whole group of watchers as the car door swung open; this was a cop who had died this way, one of us, so terribly hammered into oblivion, and all of the watching cops took this as a very personal affront. But worse than that, somehow we were all quite sure it would happen again, to another one of us. Sometime soon, this frightful pounding would fall once more on one of our small tribe, and we could not know who, or when, only that it was coming—
It was the dark of the moon, and a dark time for Dexter; there was dread spreading through the ranks of all Miami cops, and in spite of all this fearsome unease Dexter stood dripping and thinking only one dark thought:
I missed my dinner.
FOUR
IT WAS PAST TEN WHEN I FINISHED, AND I FELT AS IF I HAD been standing underwater for the last four hours. Even so, it seemed like a shame to head for home without checking some of the names on my list. So I cruised slowly past two of the more distant addresses that were more or less on my way. The first car was parked right in front of the house; its trunk was unblemished and I drove past.
The second car was under a carport, hidden by shadows, and I could not see the trunk. I slowed to a crawl, and then nosed into the driveway as if I was lost and merely turning around. There was something on the trunk—but as my lights hit it, it moved, and the fattest cat I had ever seen raced away into the night. I turned the car around and drove home.
It was past eleven when I parked in front of my house. The light was on over the front door, and I got out of my car and stood just outside the small circle of light it cast. The rain had finally stopped, but there was still a low bank of dark clouds filling the sky, and it reminded me of the night almost two weeks ago when I had been seen, and an echo of unease clattered through me. I stared up at the clouds, but they did not seem intimidated. We made you wet, they sneered, and you’re standing there like a schmuck while your whole body puckers.
It was true. I locked my car and went inside.
The house was relatively quiet, since it was a school night. Cody and Astor were asleep, and the late news muttered softly from the TV. Rita dozed on the couch with Lily Anne tucked o
nto her lap. Rita did not wake up when I came in, but Lily Anne looked up at me with bright and wide-awake eyes. “Da,” she said. “Da da da!”
She recognized me right away, a brilliant girl. I felt a few of the interior clouds roll away as I looked at her happy little face. “Lily-willy,” I replied with all the great seriousness required for the occasion, and she chortled back.
“Oh!” Rita said, jerking awake and blinking at me. “Dexter—are you home? I didn’t,” she said. “I mean, you’re out so late. Again.”
“Sorry,” I said. “All part of the job.”
She looked at me for a long moment, doing no more than blinking, and then she shook her head. “You’re soaking wet,” she said.
“It was raining,” I told her.
She blinked a few more times. “It stopped raining an hour ago,” she said.
I couldn’t see why that mattered, but I am full of polite clichés, so I just said, “Well, it just goes to show.”
“Oh,” Rita said. She looked at me thoughtfully again and I began to feel a little self-conscious. But she finally sighed and shook her head. “Well,” she said, “you must be very— Oh. Your dinner. It was getting so— Are you hungry?”
“Starving,” I said.
“You’re dripping on the floor,” Rita said. “You’d better change into some dry clothes. And if you get a cold …” She waved a hand in front of her face. “Oh, Lily Anne—she’s wide-awake.” She smiled at the baby, that same mother-to-child smile Leonardo tried so hard to capture.
“I’ll get changed,” I said, and I went down the hall to the bathroom, where I put my wet clothes in the hamper, toweled off, and put on some dry pajamas.
When I came back, Rita was crooning and Lily Anne was gurgling, and although I didn’t really want to interrupt, I had some important things on my mind. “You said something about dinner?” I said.
“It was getting very— Oh, I hope it didn’t get all dried out, because— Anyway, it’s in a Tupperware, and— I’ll just microwave the here, take the baby.” She jumped up off the couch and held Lily Anne toward me, and I stepped in quickly and grabbed my baby, just in case I had not heard Rita correctly and she really did mean to microwave the child. Rita was already moving in the direction of the kitchen as Lily Anne and I sat back down on the couch.
I looked down at her: Lily Anne, the small and bright-faced doorway into Dexter’s newfound world of emotions and normal life. She was the miracle that had brought me halfway into humanity, just by the pink and wonderful fact of her existence. She had made me feel for the first time, and as I sat and held her, I felt all the fuzzy sunrise thoughts that any mere mortal would feel. She was almost one year old, and already it was clear that she was a remarkable child.
“Can you spell ‘hyperbole’?” I asked Lily Anne.
“Da,” she said happily.
“Very good,” I said, and she reached up and squeezed my nose to show me that the word had been too easy for a highly intelligent person such as herself. She gave my forehead an openhanded smack and bounced a few times, her way of asking politely for something a little more challenging, perhaps involving movement and a good sound track, and I obliged.
A few minutes later, Lily Anne and I had finished bouncing through two verses of “Frog Went A-Courtin’ ” and were already working out the final details to a unified field theory of physics when Rita came bustling back into the room with a fragrant and steaming plate in her hand. “It’s a pork chop,” she said. “I did the Dutch oven thing, with mushrooms? Except the mushrooms at the store were not very— So anyway, I sliced in some tomatoes and a few capers? Of course, Cody didn’t like it— Oh! And I forgot to tell you,” she said, putting the plate down in front of me on the coffee table. “I’m sorry if the yellow rice is a little—but the dentist said? Astor is going to need braces, and she’s completely …” She fluttered one hand in the air and started to sit. “She said that she would rather— Damn, I forgot the fork, just a minute,” she said, and raced back into the kitchen.
Lily Anne watched her go, and then turned to look at me. I shook my head. “She always talks like that,” I told her. “You get used to it.”
Lily Anne looked a little unsure. “Da da da,” she told me.
I kissed the top of her head. It smelled wonderful, a combination of baby shampoo and whatever intoxicating pheromone it is that babies rub into their scalps. “You’re probably right,” I said, and then Rita was back in the room, putting a fork and a napkin down beside the plate, lifting Lily Anne up out of my arms, and settling down beside me to continue the saga of Astor and the Dentist.
“Anyway,” she said. “I told her it’s just for a year, and a lot of other girls— But she has this … Has she told you about Anthony?”
“Anthony the asshole?” I said.
“Oh,” Rita said. “He’s not really an— I mean, she says that and she shouldn’t. But it’s different for a girl, and Astor is at the age— It’s not too dry, is it?” she said, frowning at my plate.
“It’s perfect,” I said.
“It is dry; I’m sorry. So I thought maybe if you would talk to her,” Rita finished. I truly hoped she meant talk to Astor and not the pork chop.
“What do you want me to say?” I asked her around a mouthful of very tasty but slightly dry pork chop.
“That it’s perfectly all right,” Rita said.
“What, braces?”
“Yes, of course,” she said. “What did you think we were talking about?”
Truthfully, I was often not quite sure what we were talking about, since Rita usually managed to combine at least three simultaneous subjects when she spoke. Perhaps it came from her job; even after several years with her, I only knew that it involved juggling large numbers, converting them to different foreign currencies, and applying the results to the real estate market. It was one of life’s wonderful puzzles that a woman smart enough to do that could be so completely stupid when it came to men, because first she had married a man addicted to drugs who beat her savagely, beat Cody and Astor just as badly, and finally committed enough unpleasant and illegal acts that he had been tucked away in prison. And Rita, free at last from the long nightmare of marriage to a drug-addled demon, had danced happily into marriage with an even worse monster: Me.
Of course, Rita would never know what I really was, not if I could help it. I had worked very hard to keep her blissfully ignorant of the true me, Dexter the Dark, the cheerful vivisectionist who lived for the purr of duct tape, the gleam of the knife, and the smell of fear rising up from a truly deserving playmate who had earned his ticket to Dexterland by slaughtering the innocent and somehow slipping through the gaping cracks in the justice system.…
Rita would never know that side of me, and neither would Lily Anne. My moments with new friends like Valentine were private—or they had been, until the terrible accident of the Witness. For a moment I thought about that, and the remaining names on my Honda list. One of those names would be the right one, had to be, and when I knew which one … I could almost taste the excitement of taking and taping him, almost hear the muffled squeals of pain and fear.…
And because my mind had wandered onto my hobby, I committed the dreadful felony of chewing Rita’s pork chop without tasting it. But happily for my taste buds, as I pictured the Witness thrashing against his binds, I bit down on the fork, which jolted me out of my pleasant reverie and back to dinner. I scooped the last mouthful of yellow rice and one caper onto my fork and put it in my mouth as Rita said, “And anyway, it isn’t covered by the insurance, so— But I should have a nice bonus this year, and braces are very— Astor doesn’t smile very much, does she? But maybe if her teeth …” She paused suddenly, waved a hand, and made a face. “Oh, Lily Anne,” she said. “You really do need a diaper change.” Rita got up and took the baby away down the hall to the changing table, trailing an aroma that was definitely not pork chop, and I put down my empty plate and settled back onto the couch with a sigh: Dexter Digesting.
For some strange and very irritating reason, instead of letting the cares of the day slip away into a fog of well-fed contentment, I slid headfirst back into work and thought about Marty Klein and the dreadful mess that was his corpse. I hadn’t really known him well, and even if I had I am not capable of any kind of emotional bonding, not even the rough and manly kind so popular at my job. And dead bodies don’t bother me; even if I had not been occasionally involved in producing them, looking at them and touching them is part of my job. And although I would rather not have my coworkers know it, a dead cop is no more disturbing to me than a dead lawyer. But a corpse like this one, so completely hammered out of human shape … it was very different, almost supernatural.
The fury of the pounding that had killed Klein was completely psychotic, of course—but the fact that it had been so thorough, and had taken such a very long time, was far beyond normal, comfortable, homicidal insanity, and I found it very disturbing. It had required remarkable strength, endurance, and, most frightening by far, a cool control during the whole wild process so as not to go too far and cause death too soon, before all the bones were broken.
And for some reason, I had the very strong conviction that it was not a simple and relatively harmless single episode in which somebody had slipped over the line and gone postal for a few hours. This seemed like a pattern, a way of being, a state that was permanent. Insane strength and fury, combined with a clinical control—I could not imagine what kind of creature was capable of that, and I didn’t really want to. But once again I had the feeling we would find more squashed cops in the near future.
“Dexter?” Rita called softly from the bedroom. “Aren’t you coming to bed?”
I glanced at the clock by the TV: almost midnight. Just seeing the numbers made me realize how tired I was. “Coming,” I said. I got up from the couch and stretched, feeling a very welcome drowsiness come over me. It was clearly sleepy time, and I would worry about Marty Klein and his awful end tomorrow. Sufficient unto each day is the evil thereof; at least, on the very good days. I put my plate in the sink and went to bed.
