Double Dexter

by Jeff Lindsay

  And there was Deborah, all over the TV screen, accompanied by flashing lights and the urgent, ultraserious voice-over of the local news anchor. The picture showed my sister cradling her left arm as the emergency med techs helped her onto a stretcher and slapped an inflatable cast on her arm. She was talking the whole time to Duarte, clearly giving him orders on something or other, while he nodded and patted her on the uninjured shoulder.

  And as the anchor finished a horrible, run-on sentence about Deborah’s true grit and heroism, even pronouncing her name correctly, the picture made a jump cut to another gurney as two uniformed cops followed it into the ambulance. On this stretcher a large, square-faced man strained against his bonds. His shoulder and stomach were seeping blood, and he was shouting something that sounded obscene, even without sound. Then two studio portraits appeared on the screen, Klein and Gunther, side by side in their formal pictures. The anchor’s voice got very somber, and he promised to keep me updated as the story developed. And in spite of the way I felt about TV newspeople, I had to admit that this was a lot more than my sister had done.

  Of course, there was no reason she should update me. She was not her Dexter’s keeper, and if she was finally beginning to realize that, so much the better. So I was completely content, not at all miffed with my sister, when she showed up at last to claim her child. It was almost midnight when she finally arrived, and Nicholas and I had watched several more news bulletins, and then the lead story on the late news itself, all pretty much repeating that first tiresome bulletin. Heroic officer injured while catching cop killer. Ho-hum. Nicholas showed no sign of recognizing his mother when she appeared on television. I was quite certain that Lily Anne would have known me, whether on TV or anywhere else, but that did not necessarily mean there was anything actually wrong with the boy.

  In any case, Nicholas seemed glad enough to see Debs in person when I opened the front door and let her in. The poor child didn’t know yet that he couldn’t fly, and he tried to wing his way out of my arms and into hers. I fumbled and clutched and almost dropped him, and Deborah grabbed him awkwardly into a tight grip with her one good arm. The other, her left, was in a cast and hung from a sling.

  “Well,” I said. “I’m surprised to see you in public without an agent.”

  Deborah was nose-to-nose with Nicholas and talking nonsense syllables to him in a soft voice while he chuckled and squeezed her nose. She looked up at me, still smiling. “What the hell does that mean?” she said.

  “You’re all over the TV,” I told her. “The network’s biggest new star. ‘Heroic detective sacrificing her limbs to catch psychotic cop killer.’ ”

  She made a frustrated face. “Shit,” she said, apparently unconcerned about corrupting the morals of young Nicholas with potty talk. “The goddamned reporters wanted interviews, and pictures, and a fucking bio—they’re everywhere, even in the ER.”

  “It’s pretty big news,” I said. “The guy was making everybody very jumpy. Are you sure you got the right psycho?”

  “Yeah, it’s him,” she said happily. “Richard Kovasik. No question about it.” She nuzzled Nicholas again.

  “How did you find him?” I said.

  “Oh,” she said without looking up. “I got a match back from IAFIS. You know, on the fingerprint.”

  I blinked, and for a moment I couldn’t think of a single thing to say. In fact, what she’d said was so unlikely that I found it very hard to remember how to speak at all. “That’s not possible,” I blurted out at last. “You can’t get a match on a partial in six hours.”

  “Oh, well,” she said. “I pulled a few strings.”

  “Deborah, it’s a national database. There aren’t any strings to pull.”

  She shrugged, still smiling at Nicholas. “Yeah, well, I had one,” she said. “I called a friend of Chutsky’s, inside the Beltway. He got them to hustle it through for me.”

  “Oh,” I said, which I admit was not terribly witty, but it was just about all I could come up with under the circumstances. And it added up; Chutsky, her departed boyfriend, had many connections in all the Washington organizations with three letters for their names. “And, um, you’re absolutely positive it’s the right guy?”

  “Oh, yeah, no question,” she said. “There were a couple of possible matches, you know—it was just a partial print—but Kovasik was the only one with a history of psychotic violence, so it was kind of a no-brainer. And he even works for a building demolition company up in Opa-locka, so the hammer’s a match, too.”

  “You took him down at his job?” I said.

  She smiled, half at the memory of the arrest and half at Nicholas, who was doing nothing more interesting than staring at her with adoration. “Yeah,” she said, touching the baby’s nose with her finger. “Right across the street from Benny’s.”

  “What were you doing at Benny’s?” I said.

  “Oh,” she said without looking up. “It’s almost five o’clock, and we got the match on the print, but he’s listed as transient, and we got no place to look for the guy. Kovasik,” she added, in case I had already forgotten the name.

  “Okay,” I said, brilliantly concealing my impatience.

  “So Duarte is like, ‘Five o’clock, let’s stop for a beer.’ ” She made a face. “Which is a little hard-core for me, but he’s the first partner I’ve had that I can stand.”

  “I noticed,” I said. “He seems very nice.”

  She snorted; Nicholas flinched a little at the sound, and she cooed at him for a second. “He’s not nice,” she said. “But I can work with him. So I say fine, and we stop for a beer at Benny’s.”

  “That explains it,” I said. And it did; Benny’s was one of those bars that was unofficially For Cops Only, the kind of place that would make you very uncomfortable if you wandered in without a badge. A lot of cops stopped there on their way home from work, and some of them had even been known to pop in for a quick unauthorized snort during working hours—a stop that would never be logged in. If Klein and Gunther had gone to Benny’s right before they were killed, it would explain why there was no record of where they had been when they were killed. “So we pull up in front,” she said, “and there’s this taco wagon parked across the street. And I don’t even think about it until I hear this kind of boom from the old office building over there. And then I look again and I see the sign, ‘Tacos,’ and I think, No fucking way.”

  I was a little bit irritated. It was very late, and either I was too tired to follow her story, or it really wasn’t making sense. “Debs, is this going somewhere?” I said, trying not to sound as peevish as I felt.

  “A boom, Dexter,” she said, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Like from a hammer. Hitting a wall?” She raised her eyebrows at me. “Because they are tearing out the insides of the building across the street from Benny’s,” she said. “With hammers and a taco wagon out front.” And at last I began to understand.

  “No way,” I said.

  She nodded her head firmly. “Way,” she said. “Totally way. They got a couple of guys working in there, ripping out the walls, and they are using these big hammers.”

  “Club hammers,” I said, remembering what Vince had called them.

  “Whatever,” Deborah said. “So Duarte and I go over there, just thinking it’s totally impossible but we gotta check it out? And I barely get my badge out when this guy just goes nuts and comes at me with his hammer. I shoot him twice and the son of a bitch still swings the goddamned thing and gets me on the arm.” She closed her eyes and leaned against the doorframe. “Two slugs in him and he would have swung it again and crushed my head if Duarte hadn’t Tasered him.”

  Nicholas said something that sounded like, “Blub-blub,” and Deborah straightened and shifted her baby’s weight awkwardly in her arm.

  I looked at my sister, so tired and yet so happy, and I admit I felt a little envious. And the whole thing still seemed unreal and incomplete to me, and I couldn’t really believe it had ha
ppened without me. It was as if I had put only one word in a crossword puzzle and someone else finished it when I turned my back. Even more embarrassing, I actually felt a little bit guilty that I hadn’t been there, even though I wasn’t invited. Debs had been in danger without me, and that felt wrong. Completely stupid and irrational, not at all like me, but there it was.

  “So is the guy going to live?” I said, thinking it would be a shame if he did.

  “Shit, yes, they even had to sedate him,” Deborah said. “Unbelievably strong, doesn’t feel pain—if Alex hadn’t gotten the cuffs on him right away he would have hit me again. And he shook off the Taser in, like, three seconds. A total psycho.” And with a smile of tired fulfillment, she hugged Nicholas tighter, pushing his little face into her neck. “But he’s locked up safe and sound, and it’s over. It’s him. I got him,” she said, and she rocked the baby back and forth gently. “Mommy got the bad guy,” she said again, more musically this time, like it was part of a lullaby for Nicholas.

  “Well,” I said, and I realized that it was at least the third time I’d said “well” since Deborah arrived. Was I really so flustered that I couldn’t even manage basic conversation? “You caught the Hammer Killer. Congratulations, sis.”

  “Yeah, thanks,” she said, and then she frowned and shook her head. “Now if I can only make it through the next couple of days.”

  It might have been that the painkillers were making her incoherent, but I didn’t know what she meant. “Is your arm painful?” I said.

  “This?” she said, holding up the cast. “I’ve had worse.” She shrugged and then made a terrible face. “No. It’s Matthews,” she said. “Fucking reporters are making a big deal of it, and Matthews is ordering me to play along because it’s fucking great PR.” She sighed heavily, and Nicholas said, “Blat!” quite distinctly and hit his mother’s nose. She nuzzled him again and said, “I fucking hate that shit.”

  “Oh. Of course,” I said, and now it made sense. Deborah was totally inept with public relations, departmental politics, routine ass kissing, and any aspect of police work that didn’t involve finding or shooting bad guys. If she’d been even half-good at dealing with people, she’d probably already be Division Chief at the least. But she wasn’t, and here she was again in the middle of a situation that called for fake smiles and bullshitting, two talents that were as alien to her as a Klingon mating dance. Clearly she needed a warning from someone who knew the steps. Since Nicholas couldn’t even say his own name, that left me.

  “Well,” I said cautiously, “you’re probably going to be in the spotlight for a couple of days.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said. “Lucky me.”

  “It wouldn’t hurt to play the game a little, Debs,” I said, and I admit that I was getting a little cranky now, too. “You know the right words: ‘The entire Miami-Dade team did outstanding work in their tireless effort to apprehend this suspect—’ ”

  “Fuck it, Dex,” she snapped. “You know I can’t do that kind of crap. They want me to smile at the camera and tell the whole fucking world how great I am, and I never could do that shit and you know it.”

  I did know it, but I also knew that she would have to try again, which meant she was probably in for a couple of rough days. But before I could think of something really smart to say on the subject, Nicholas began to bounce again and say, “Ba ba ba ba!” Deborah looked at him with a tired smile and then back at me. “Anyway, I’d better get my little buddy to bed. Thanks for picking him up, Dex.”

  “Dexter’s Day Care,” I said. “We never close.”

  “I’ll see you at work,” she said. “Thanks again.” And then she turned for the door. I had to open it for her, since she only had one good arm and that was full of Nicholas. “Thanks,” she said again—a third time in less than a minute, which was certainly a record for her.

  Deborah trudged to her car, looking as tired as I had ever seen her, and I watched as Duarte climbed out from behind the wheel and opened the back door for her. She fumbled Nicholas into a car seat, and Duarte held the passenger door as she got in. Then he closed it, nodded to me, and climbed in behind the wheel.

  I watched as they drove away. The whole world thought Debs was wonderful right now because they believed she had caught a dangerous killer, and all she wanted was to get on with catching the next one. I wished she could learn to exploit a moment like this, but I knew she never would. She was tough and smart and efficient, but she would never learn to lie with a straight face, which was a real killer for any career.

  I also had a niggling little feeling that at some point in the next few days she would need a little PR skill, and since she didn’t have any, that would make it a case for the public relations firm of Dexter and Dexter, Spin Doctors to the Stars.

  Naturally—it always ended up being my problem, no matter how much it actually wasn’t. I sighed, watched as Deborah’s car disappeared around the corner, and then I locked the door and went to bed.

  TWELVE

  THE MEDIA FRENZY THAT DEBORAH’S BIG ARREST GENERATED was bigger than anyone had anticipated, and for the next few days Deborah was a very reluctant rock star. She was deluged with requests for interviews and photographs, and even in the relative security of police headquarters she was not safe from people stopping her to tell her how wonderful she was. Of course, being Deborah, the attention did not please her. She turned down all the invitations from the media, and she tried very hard to disengage herself from the workplace well-wishers without showing them any actual hostility. She didn’t always succeed, but that was all right. It made the other cops think that, on top of being spectacular, she was modest, gruff, and impatient with bullshit—which was actually true, for the most part—and it added even more luster to the growing Morgan Legend.

  And somehow, some of the shine even reflected onto me. I had helped Deborah solve her cases often enough, usually with my special insight into things as they really are—wicked, and quite happily so—and just as often I had been beaten, bullied, and battered in the process. Never once in all those times had I ever received so much as a casual pat of thanks on my bruised back—but now, the one time I had done absolutely nothing, I began to get credit. I had three requests for interviews from reporters who had suddenly come to believe that blood spatter was fascinating, and I was invited to submit an article to the Forensic Examiner.

  I turned down the interviews, of course—I had worked very hard to keep my face out of public view and saw no reason to change now. But the attention continued; people stopped me to say nice things, shake my hand, and tell me what a good job I had done. And it was true enough; I usually do a very good job—I just hadn’t done it this time. But suddenly I was the target of far too much unwelcome attention. It was disconcerting, even annoying, and I found myself flinching when the phone rang, ducking as the door opened, and even chanting the classic mantra of the clueless: Why me?

  Tragically, it was Vince Masuoka who finally answered that lame question. “Grasshopper,” he said, shaking his head wisely, on the morning when he overheard me turning down Miami Hoy for the third time. “When temple bell rings, crane must fly.”

  “Yes, and one apple every eight hours keeps three doctors away,” I said. “So what?”

  “So,” he said, with a sly semismile, “what did you expect?”

  I looked at him and he smirked back; he seemed to have some actual point in mind, as much as he ever did, so I gave him a more or less serious answer. “What I expect,” I said, “is to be ignored and unrecognized, laboring on in solitude at my unique level of unmatchable excellence.”

  He shook his head. “Then you gotta get a new agent,” he said. “Because your face is all over the blogosphere.”

  “My what is where?” I said.

  “Lookit,” Vince said. He scrabbled at the keyboard of his laptop for a moment, and then turned the screen to face me. “It’s you, Dexter,” he said. “A superman shot. Very studly.”

  I looked at the screen and
had a moment of almost hallucinogenic disorientation. The computer showed a Web site with a red and dripping headline that said, “Miami Murder.” And under that was a photo of a male model in a heroic pose in front of the Torch of Friendship—at the scene where Officer Gunther’s body had been discovered. The model looked commanding, brilliant, and sexy—and he also looked an awful lot like me. In fact, to my astonishment, it was me, just as Vince had said. I was standing beside Deborah and pointing toward the waterfront, and she had an expression of eager compliance on her face. I had no idea how someone had managed to capture the two of us frozen in these completely uncharacteristic expressions, and somehow make me look so very studly in the process—but there it was. And even worse, the caption to the picture said, “Dexter Morgan—the real brains in the Cop-Hammer case!”

  “It’s a really popular blog,” Vince said. “I can’t believe you haven’t seen this, ’cause everybody else in the world has.”

  “And this is why everybody suddenly thinks I’m interesting?” I said.

  Vince nodded at me. “Unless you have a hit single I didn’t know about?”

  I blinked and looked at the picture again, hoping to find that it had gone away, but it hadn’t. And as I looked I felt my stomach churn with something that was very close to fear. Because there was my face and my name and even my job all together in one convenient package, and the first thought that popped into my brain was not, Oh, boy, I look studly. Instead it instantly gave a shape to the anonymous unease I had been feeling, and it looked like this:

  What if my unknown Witness saw the pictures? My name was right there with my face, along with my job—practically everything but my shoe size. Even if he had not traced my license plate or tracked me before, this would give him everything he needed. This was not even a matter of putting two and two together; it was looking at four. I swallowed, which was not as easy as it should have been, since my mouth was suddenly dry, and I realized that Vince was staring at me with a strange look on his face. I searched for something witty and forceful to say and finally settled on, “Oh. Um—shit.”