by Jeff Lindsay
Less than ten minutes later, I had it. “Here we go,” I said, and before I got out the final syllable Deborah was at my elbow, leaning in anxiously to see the screen. “The pastor of St. John’s Church on Miami Beach reported his car stolen this morning. And he’s got a new twenty-one-foot Sea Fox at his dock.”
“A fucking church?” Deborah said. “On the Beach, for God’s sake? How did he get the boat in there?”
I pulled up a map on-screen and pointed. “See, the church is right here, by this canal, and the parking lot is on the water.” I ran my finger along the canal from the church and out into the bay. “Ten minutes across the water to Bayfront Park and the Torch.”
Deborah stared for a moment, then shook her head. “It doesn’t make any fucking sense at all,” she said.
“It does to him,” I said.
“Well, shit,” she said. “I’d better get Duarte and get out there.” And then she straightened up and ran for the door without a single word of thanks for my arduous eight minutes of labor. I admit I was a bit surprised—not that my very own sister had failed to display gratitude, of course. That would be too much to expect. But normally she would have dragged a reluctant Dexter along with her for backup, leaving her partner to count paper clips. But this time it was Dutiful Dexter left behind, and Debs had gone to find her new French-speaking partner, Duarte. I supposed that meant she liked working with him, or maybe she was just being more careful with her partners now. Her last two had been killed on the job while working a case with her, and I’d heard more than one cop muttering that it was very bad luck to work with Sergeant Morgan, since she was obviously some kind of black widow or something.
Whatever the case, there was really nothing to complain about. Debs was actually doing things the way she was supposed to for once, working with her official partner instead of her unofficial brother. And that was fine with me, because it truly was dangerous to hang around with her when she was at work; I had scar tissue to prove it. And it wasn’t my job to run around in the big, bad world dodging slings and arrows and, apparently, hammers. I didn’t need the adrenaline; I had real work to do. So I just sat and felt unappreciated for a few minutes, and then went back to doing it.
Just after lunch, I was in the lab with Vince Masuoka when Deborah rushed in and dumped a large hammer on the counter in front of me. I guessed from the loud thump that it weighed about three pounds. It was in a big plastic evidence bag, and a film of condensation had formed on the inside surface of the bag, but I could still see that it was not an ordinary carpenter’s hammer, and it did not quite look like a sledgehammer, either. The head was round and blunt at both ends, and it had a yellow, well-worn wooden handle.
“All right,” Vince said, peering in over Deborah’s shoulder. “I always wanted to get hammered with you.”
“Go piss up a stick,” Debs said. It was not up to her usual high standards in a put-down, but she said it with considerable conviction, and Vince scuttled away quickly to the far corner of the lab, where his laptop sat on a counter. “Alex found it,” Deborah said, nodding at Duarte as he trickled in the door. “It was lying in the parking lot at that church, St. John’s.”
“Why would he drop his hammer?” I said, poking carefully at the plastic bag to see better.
“Right here,” Debs said, and I could hear barely suppressed excitement in her voice. She pointed through the plastic to a spot on the handle, just above where the yellow color was partially faded away from use. “Lookit,” she said. “It’s cracked a little bit.”
I bent over and looked. On the worn wooden handle, just barely visible through the misted bag, was a hairline crack. “Wonderful,” I said. “Maybe he cut himself.”
“Why is that wonderful?” Duarte said. “I mean, I’d like to see the guy hurt, but a little cut? So what?”
I looked at Duarte and very briefly wondered if some malignant personnel computer always assigned to Debs a partner with the lowest possible IQ. “If he cut his hand,” I said, carefully choosing one-syllable words, “there might be some blood. So we can get a DNA match.”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” he said.
“Come on, Dex,” Deborah said. “See what you can get from it.”
I pulled on gloves and took the hammer out of its bag, placing it carefully on the counter. “Unusual kind of hammer, isn’t it?” I said.
“It’s called a club hammer,” Vince said, and I looked at him. He was still sitting on the far side of the room, hunched over his laptop. He pointed to an image on the screen. “Club hammer,” he repeated.
“I Googled.”
“Very appropriate,” I said. I leaned over the handle of the hammer in question and carefully sprayed on some Bluestar. It would reveal any trace of blood, no matter how small. With any luck, there might be just enough for me to get a blood type or DNA sample.
“They use it for demolition, mostly,” Vince went on. “You know, like knocking out walls and things?”
“I think I remember what demolition means,” I said.
“Cut the shit,” Deborah said through her teeth. “Can you get anything from it or not?”
Deborah’s hands-on management style seemed more profoundly annoying than usual, and I thought of several stinging remarks to slap her back into her place. But just as I was about to let fly with a really good one, I saw a dim smudge on the hammer’s handle, brought out by the Bluestar. “Bingo,” I said.
“What,” Deborah demanded, and she was suddenly so close to me I could hear her teeth grinding.
“If you’ll take your foot out of my pocket, I’ll show you,” I said. She hissed out a breath, but at least she did back up a half step. “Look,” I said, pointing at the smudge. “It’s a trace of blood—and even better, it’s also a latent fingerprint.”
“Pure dumb luck,” Vince said from his stool across the lab.
“Really?” I said. “Then why didn’t you find it?”
“What about DNA?” Deborah said impatiently.
I shook my head. “I’ll try,” I said. “But it’s probably too badly degraded.”
“Run the print,” Deborah said. “I want a name.”
“And maybe a GPS reading?” Vince said.
Deborah glared at him, but instead of ripping him into small and bloody shreds she just looked back at me and said, “Run the print, Dexter,” and then she turned around and whirled away out of the lab.
Alex Duarte straightened up as she hustled past him. “Au ’voir,” I told him politely.
He nodded. “Mange merde,” he said, and he followed Deborah out the door. His French accent was much better than mine.
I looked at Vince. He closed his laptop and stood up. “Let’s run it,” he said.
We ran it. As I had thought, the bloody smudge was too badly degraded to get any kind of usable DNA sample, but we did get a picture of the fingerprint, and after computer enhancement the image was clear enough to send to the Integrated Automated Fingerprint Identification System with some hope that we might get a match. It was a national database of felons’ fingerprints, and if our hammer-loving friend was in it, a name would pop out, and Deborah would get him.
We sent the print in, and then there was nothing to do but wait for the results. Vince scurried away on some other errand, and I just sat for a few minutes. Deborah seemed excited, and as close to happy as she got on the job. She was always very upbeat when she thought she was closing in on a bad guy. For just a second I almost wished I had feelings, so I could get that kind of positive surge of purpose and fulfillment. I never got any sort of glow from my work, just a kind of dull satisfaction when things went well. My only real sense of happy self-affirmation came from my hobby, and I was trying not to think about that right now. But that slender file at home in my study contained three names. Three very intriguing candidates for oblivion, Dexter style, and pursuing any one of them would almost certainly relieve my feelings of low self-worth and bring a bright synthetic smile to my face.
But this was not
the time for that, not with an unknown Witness closing in on me, and the entire police force on edge over the untimely and unpleasant demise of Klein, and now Gunther. Every cop in the greater Miami area would be working each shift with extra diligence in hopes of becoming the Hero of the Day, the cop who caught the killer, and although all that extra watchfulness would make the streets temporarily a little safer for most of us, it would also make things a little too risky for a Dexter Dalliance.
No, a recreational side trip was not the answer, not in this climate of frenzied, hostile police vigilance. I had to find my Witness, and until then just resign myself to being paranoid, grumpy, unhappy, and unfulfilled.
But when you came right down to it—so what? From what I could learn by watching my fellow inhabitants of this vale of tears, everybody else was just as wretched at least two-thirds of the time. Why should I be exempt merely because I had an empty heart? After all, even though Lily Anne made being human thoroughly worthwhile, there were bound to be less rewarding aspects of personhood, and it was only fair that I should have to suffer through the bad parts, too. Of course, I had never been a big believer in fairness, but I was clearly stuck with it for now.
My sister, however, was not. Just as I was concluding that everything was horrible and it truly served me right, she burst into my office like the Charge of the Light Brigade. “Have you got anything yet?” she said.
“Debs, we just sent it off,” I said. “It’s going to take a little time.”
“How long?” she said.
I sighed. “It’s one partial print, sis,” I said. “It could take a few days, maybe up to a week.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said. “I don’t have a week.”
“It’s a huge database,” I said. “And they get requests from all over the country. We have to wait our turn.”
Deborah ground her teeth at me, so hard I could almost hear enamel flaking off. “I need the results,” she said through a clenched jaw, “and I need them now.”
“Well,” I said pleasantly, “if you know a way to make a database hurry up, I’m sure we’d all love to hear it.”
“Goddamn it, you’re not even trying!” she said.
I will freely admit that nine times out of ten, I would have had a little more patience with Deborah’s patently impossible request and rotten attitude. But with things as they were lately, I really didn’t want to knuckle my forehead and leap into worshipful compliance. I took a deep breath instead and spoke with audible patience and steely control. “Deborah. I am doing my job the best I can. If you think you can do it better, then please feel free to try.”
She ground her teeth even harder, and for a moment I thought the canines might splinter and burst through her cheeks. But happily for her dental bill, they did not. She just glared at me instead, and then nodded her head twice, very hard. “All right,” she said. And then she turned around and walked rapidly away without even looking back at me to snarl one last time.
I sighed. Perhaps I should have stayed home in bed, or at least checked my horoscope. Nothing seemed to be going right. The whole world was slightly off-kilter, leaning just a bit out of its normal axis. It had a strange and mean tint to it, too, as if it had sniffed out my fragile mood and was probing for further weakness.
Ah, well. If only I’d had a mother, I’m sure she would have told me there would be days like this. And the kind of mother who could say that with a straight face would probably have added, An idle mind is the devil’s playground. I certainly didn’t want to upset Hypothetical Mom, and I didn’t want to go on the swing set with Satan either, so I got out of my chair and tidied up the lab.
Vince stuck his head in a minute later and watched me with puzzled concentration as I wiped down the counter with some cleaner and paper towels. He shook his head. “Such a neatnik,” he said. “If I didn’t know you were married, I would wonder about you.”
I lifted a small stack of case files off the counter. “These all need to be filed,” I said.
He held up a hand and backed away. “My back is acting up again,” he said. “No heavy lifting, doctor’s orders.” And he disappeared down the hall. Dexter Deserted—but it fit the general trend of recent events, and I was sure I would get used to it sooner or later. In any case, I managed to finish cleaning up without bursting into tears, which was probably the best I could hope for, the way things were going.
ELEVEN
I WAS JUST SITTING DOWN TO DINNER THAT NIGHT WHEN MY cell phone began to chime. It was leftover night, which was not a bad thing at our house, since it allowed me to sample two or three of Rita’s tasty concoctions at one sitting, and I stared at the phone for several seconds and thought very hard about the last piece of Rita’s Tropical Chicken sitting there on the platter before I finally picked up my phone and answered.
“It’s me,” Deborah said. “I need a favor.”
“Of course you do,” I said, looking at Cody as he pulled a large helping of Thai noodles out of the serving dish. “But does it have to be right now?”
Debs made a sound somewhere between a hiss and a grunt. “Ow. Yeah, it does. Can you pick up Nicholas from day care?” she said. Her son, Nicholas, was enrolled at a Montessori day-care center in the Gables, although I was reasonably sure he was too young to count beads. I had wondered whether I should be doing the same for Lily Anne, but Rita had pooh-poohed the idea. She said it was a waste of money until a child was two or three years old.
For Deborah, though, nothing was too good for her little boy, so she cheerfully shelled out the hefty fee for the school. And she had never been late to pick him up, no matter how pressing her workload—but here it was, almost seven o’clock, and Nicholas was still waiting for Mommy. Clearly something unusual was afoot, and her voice sounded strained—not angry and tense as it had been earlier, but not quite right, either.
“Um, sure, I guess I can get him,” I said. “What’s up with you?”
She made the hiss-grunt sound again and said, “Uhnk. Damn it,” in a kind of hoarse mutter, before going on in a more normal voice, “I’m in the hospital.”
“What?” I said. “Why, what’s wrong?” I had an alarming vision of her as I had seen her in her last visit to the hospital, an ER trip that had lasted for several days as she lay near death from a knife wound.
“It’s no big deal,” she said, and there was strain in her voice, as well as fatigue. “It’s just a broken arm. I just … I’m going to be here for a while and I can’t get Nicholas in time.”
“How did you break your arm?” I asked.
“Hammer,” she said. “I gotta go—can you pick him up, Dex? Please?”
“A hammer? For God’s sake, Deborah, what—”
“Dexter, I gotta go,” she said. “Can you get Nicholas?”
“I’ll get him,” I said. “But what—”
“Thanks. I really appreciate it. Bye,” she said, and she hung up.
I put down my phone and saw that the whole family was staring at me. “Set one more high chair for dinner,” I said. “And save me that chicken breast.”
They did save me the chicken, but it was very cold by the time I got back to the house with Nicholas, and all the Thai noodles were gone. Rita immediately grabbed Nicholas from me and took him away to the changing table, cooing at him, and Astor trailed along behind to watch. I’d had no further calls from Deborah, and I still had no idea how she had managed to break her arm with a hammer. But I could only think of one hammer in the news this week, so I had a very strong suspicion that she had somehow caught our psychotic club-hammer killer.
It didn’t really make sense. The ID on the fingerprint could not have come back yet—there was no way it could have worked its way through all the layers of ossified bureaucracy in just a few hours—but as far as I knew that was the only lead. Besides, she would never do something insanely risky without me along to take the hit for her, and cornering a homicidal psycho with a hammer certainly fit in the category of “risky.”
&nb
sp; Of course, she’d never had a partner she really trusted to back her up before, and she seemed to be bonding with Alex Duarte, probably in French. And she was certainly free to work with her new partner instead of with me. Nothing could be more natural—it was even suggested by regulation, and it didn’t bother me, not in the slightest. Let Duarte stick his neck in the noose instead of me. To be perfectly frank, I was a little bit tired of being her sidekick on every single perilous bust, and it was high time she stood up on her own two feet and stopped leaning on me.
After Rita put the children to bed, she sat beside me for a little while, until she began to yawn hugely. Very shortly afterward, she gave me a peck on the cheek and tottered off to bed herself. I stayed up with Nicholas, waiting for Deborah to come and claim him. He was not a bad baby, not at all, but he didn’t seem nearly as clever as Lily Anne. His little blue eyes didn’t have the same intelligent gleam in them, and it seemed to me that, from a purely objective point of view, his motor skills were not as advanced as hers had been at the same age. Maybe there was nothing to the Montessori thing after all. Or maybe he was just a slow learner—and there was really nothing actually wrong with that. After all, perfection is far from universal, and there could be only one Lily Anne. Nicholas was still my nephew, and allowances must be made for children less gifted.
So I sat on the couch with Nicholas in chummy silence after everyone else went to bed. I fed him a bottle, and then shortly after that I changed his diaper. As soon as I took off the wet one, he began to pee straight up into the air, and it took all my considerable skill to dodge the stream. But I got him safely rediapered and, thinking that the soothing drone from the TV might encourage him to fall asleep, I turned on the set and sat back down on the couch with him.
