by Jeff Lindsay
I pulled Lily Anne out of her chair, partly to stop her crying and partly to protect her from Astor, and I held her on my lap with one hand while I sipped coffee with the other. It was several minutes before Astor stopped threatening her brother and sister and the uproar died away to the normal clangor of a weekday morning. I finished my pancakes and had a second cup of coffee; it didn’t do a whole lot to get my brain moving, but by the time I finished it I was at least alert enough to drive, so with no other plan available to me besides following everyday routine, I put my mug in the sink and headed numbly in to work.
I could feel myself loosening up a little on the drive in. It wasn’t because I had come up with any kind of Master Plan, or because I had realized that Things were not really That Bad; Things were that bad, and maybe worse. But as always, I found the vicious, backstabbing zest of Miami traffic kind of soothing, and on top of that I always take comfort in routine. By the time I arrived at work, my shoulders were no longer hunched up around my ears, and when I arrived at my desk I had actually unclenched my teeth. It didn’t really make sense, but there it was. Unconsciously, I suppose I thought of work as some kind of refuge. After all, my little office was right there in police headquarters, surrounded by hundreds of hard-eyed men and women with guns who were sworn to protect and serve. But on this morning, when of all times I needed my job to be a snug and safe shelter from the storm, it turned out to be nothing but one more nail in the lid of Dexter’s coffin.
I really should have seen it coming. I mean, I knew very well that my job involved going to crime scenes. And I knew just as well that a crime had been committed last night. It was a very simple equation of cause and effect, and it should not have been any kind of unpleasant shock to find myself standing once more in the dingy little room I had so recently fled, and looking down at the Dexter Duplicate mound of body parts.
But it was a shock, and it was very unpleasant, and it got even more so as the morning wore on through all the ordinary rituals of forensic magic. Each standard step of the process brought its own new jolt of panic. When Angel Batista began to dust for fingerprints, I sweated through several minutes of furiously trying to remember whether I had kept my gloves on the whole time. Just when I decided that I definitely had, Camilla Figg took her camera out into the yard and began to photograph footprints—my footprints! And I spent another five awful minutes stupidly reassuring myself that I was wearing different shoes this morning and I could get rid of the ones I’d worn last night as soon as I got home. And then, as if to prove that I really had descended into total idiocy, I spent several more minutes wondering if I could really afford the expense of throwing away a pair of perfectly good shoes.
I finished my own work fairly quickly; there was only a little bit of blood on the table with the body, and a few small traces on the floor underneath. I sprayed my Bluestar in a couple of likely spots in order to look diligent, but considering the funk I was in, I don’t think I would have noticed anything smaller than a two-gallon spatter. All my attention was on my fellow crime scene wonks. Each procedure they performed sent a new spasm of anxiety through my system and another trickle of sweat down my back, until I was completely frazzled and my shirt was plastered to my body.
I had never before had such intense justification for anxiety, and yet even as I sweated and fretted it all seemed slightly unreal; only a few hours ago I had been right here in this same grungy room, confronting one of the great shocks of my long and wicked life. And now here I was again, in theory part of a team that was trying to find some trace of me, while the other me stood by watching the proceedings with frantic angst in case I really did. It was a nearly surreal clash of Dark Dexter with Dexter on Duty, and for the first time I wasn’t sure I could keep the two parts of myself separate.
At one point I even caught sight of myself in the mirror in nearly the same position I’d been in last night—this time holding a bottle of Bluestar instead of a knife—and the two disconnected realities came crashing together. For a few minutes, the sounds of the surrounding forensic hustle faded completely away, and I was all alone with myself. It wasn’t terribly comforting; I just stared at my image, trying to make sense of a picture that suddenly made no sense at all.
Who was I? What was I doing here? And most important, why wasn’t I running for my life? The idiotic, pointless questions ran through my brain in a repeating loop until even the simple words seemed foreign to me and I just stood and looked at my suddenly unfamiliar image.
I probably would still be there if Vince hadn’t finally jarred me out of my fugue.
“Very nice,” he said, “and still very studly. Now get over yourself.”
His face swam into focus in the mirror, suddenly right there beside the image of my own, and the sound track of the room came back on. I realized once more where I was, although none of Vince’s words had registered. I jerked my head away from the mirror to face him.
“I’m sorry, what?” I said.
He snickered. “You’ve been staring at yourself in the mirror for, like, five minutes,” he said.
“I, um, I was thinking about something,” I said feebly.
Vince shook his head and looked very solemn. “Always a bad idea to cloud the brain, young Skywalker,” he said, and he moved away to the other side of the room. I shook myself and went back to pretending to work. I floated through the rest of the morning in my cloud of adrenaline and alienation, the whole time feeling as if I might split apart at the seams at any minute.
But I didn’t fall apart or burst into flames. Somehow, I survived. I know only too well just how fragile a human body is, but Dexter must be made of truly stern stuff, because I lived through that whole dreadful morning without suffering a stroke or a fatal heart attack, or even running out into the street with a shattered mind, yammering confessions and pleas for clemency. And in spite of their diligent and very practiced efforts, all the mighty labor of the forensics team failed to turn up even the faintest sign that I had been there the night before. Dexter had survived, against all the odds, and somehow he made it back to the office in one whole but badly jangled piece.
I slumped into my chair with real relief, and tried to concentrate on breathing normally for a little while, and it actually seemed to work. It does not speak well for my intelligence, but even with all the mounting evidence to the contrary, I still felt safe sitting at my desk. I closed my eyes and tried to make myself relax just a bit, trying to think things through in a calm and rational way. All right: I had been forced into the position of trying to catch myself. And I had almost been caught, but I’d gotten away. It had not been fun to return to the nightmarish scene in my role as Daytime Dexter, but I’d lived through that, too, and it didn’t seem likely that anyone would find any evidence to connect me to the body on the table.
I slowly began to persuade myself that Things were really not as bad as they seemed, and through sheer pigheaded persistence, I very nearly convinced myself. And then I made the very grave mistake of taking one last deep breath, plastering a horrible fake smile on my face, and returning to the workday by dutifully checking my e-mail.
And when I did, all the carefully constructed artificial tranquillity flushed out of me like it had never existed at all as I saw that anonymous e-mail with the one-word title:
Closer.
I did not know what that word was supposed to mean, but I knew instantly who had written it and sent it to me and in that endless frozen moment of reading and rereading that one word I felt once more the awful churning panic and it crashed up higher and higher until I thought I would scream.…
I took a deep breath and tried to wrestle down the panic, but it had me pinned to the mat, and my hand was shaking as I clicked the mouse to open the e-mail. And as I read, a wild hissing rose up inside me and all calmness drained out of the world.
Like the others, this one started with the heading:
Shadowblog
But this time there was one startling difference. The shadow
of the title, which had previously been a faint red, had grown to an enormous pool of what was absolutely meant to be blood. And now a small trail of blood-red footprints led from the heading down to the blog’s one-word title, Closer. With a truly sick feeling of dread, I looked under the title and began to read.
I am learning so much about myself—and even more about you. For instance, I didn’t know you were so fast on your feet. But you must be, because you got away somehow. You must have been quite a sight, racing through the night with your tail between your legs. Wish I’d been there with my camera.
I’ve learned a lot of other stuff about you, too. I’ve been watching you when you have no idea you’re being watched—you, with your bags of groceries and your car seat, and on the job with that stupid spray bottle, trying to pretend you’re just like everybody else. It’s a pretty good act, and I ought to know. I’ve been acting my whole life, too. And when I said I am learning about myself? Guess what I can do now?
I know you’ve read my blogs. It’s simple for me to know who comes to my page. I have to say I’m pretty good with computer stuff. You’re finding that out. So you read my blog and you know I am just divorced and I don’t like it. I was raised that divorce is not an option, and my wife? Let’s just say she didn’t think that way, or maybe at all. And I tried to reconcile, and I tried to show her divorce was wrong, and she just got bitchier and bitchier, and worse than that I began to realize that it wasn’t just bitchy, it wasn’t just lazy—she was amoral, evil, just as evil as if she’d killed somebody. And she is incurable, because she is a psychopath who sucks the life out of other people and contributes nothing but pain and misery, and she can’t change so she had to be stopped.
Some people just don’t have a sense of Right and Wrong. Born that way. Like you, for instance. And like my ex-wife. And when she is screaming at me to get the fuck out and never come back and fucking mail the alimony check from now on—and I step outside and see you standing there in the yard …
Hey, I’m pretty quick on my feet, too. You didn’t see me, except maybe my back. And as I went back inside, and looked at her standing there with her mouth open, and thought about you standing outside and I know you’re thinking about coming back to get me—I guess I would say it just all came together and I knew who I am supposed to be now and what I am supposed to do. Old Me would have run for his life at the sight of you. But New Me saw how perfect this was, because it really is all about taking responsibility and suddenly I really understand for the first time just how far that goes and what I am supposed to do about it, which is … Get rid of her and you at the same time. Take out two Bad People with one stroke. It all adds up now. That’s who I am. I was put here to deal with the rule breakers, the ones who have gone too far and can’t come back. You. My very-ex-wife. And who knows who else? There’s lots of ’em. I see ’em every day.
So in a way I am becoming like you, right? The big difference is, I do it to stop people like you. I do it for Good. But hey, thanks for being a great role model. Maybe I should even thank you for my new girlfriend, except I don’t think she’s going to last too long.
I hope you don’t think you are safe. I hope you don’t think it’s over. Because I know who you are and where you are and you don’t know a thing about me. And think about this:
I am learning from you.
I am learning to do just exactly what you do, and I am going to do it to you. You will never know when or where. You can’t know anything at all except that I am here and I am moving even closer.
Do you hear something behind you?
Boo. It’s me.
Closer than you think …
I don’t know how long I sat there without moving, thinking, or breathing. It probably wasn’t as long as it felt, because the building where I sat had not crumbled into dust, and the sun had not turned cold and fallen from the sky. But it was still a very long time before a single jagged thought managed to penetrate the cold and empty vault between my ears, and when it finally did register I still couldn’t do any more than take a large and sharp breath and let that thought echo around all alone.
Closer …?
I read through the terrible thing again, desperately searching for some small clue that it was all a bad joke, some telltale word or phrase I might have overlooked the first time to show me I had misunderstood. But no matter how many times I read the lumpy, self-indulgent prose, it stayed the same. I found no hidden meaning, no invisible-ink message with a phone number and a Facebook page. Just the same wacky, annoying phrases, over and over, all adding up to the same vague and sinister conclusion.
He was moving closer and he thought he was just like me, and I knew very well what that meant, what he would try to do. He was circling around downwind and polishing his fangs and blending with the scenery of my life. At any moment—now, tomorrow, next week—he might spring out at me from anywhere at all, and there was not a single thing in the world I could do about it. I was fighting a shadow in a dark room. But this shadow had real hands, holding real weapons. He could see in this darkness, and I could not, and he was coming, whether from the front or from behind, from above or below; all I could know was that he wanted to do what I do just the way I do it and he wanted to do it to me and he was coming.
Closer …
SEVENTEEN
SHE WAS DIVORCED, LIVED THERE ALONE. HER NAME WAS Melissa. Fuck, wait a second,” said Detective Laredo. He flipped open a folder and ran a thick finger down a paper inside it. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s A-lissa. With an ‘A.’ Alissa Elan.” He frowned. “Funny name,” he said.
I could have told him that right away, since I’d written that name on a Post-it only a day ago, but technically I wasn’t supposed to know until he told us, so I held my tongue. And anyway, from what I knew of him, Laredo was not the kind of guy who liked to be corrected, especially not by eggheaded forensics geeks. But he was lead on the case of the chopped-up woman in the grubby little house, and we had all come together for his twenty-four, the session department policy mandated on a capital case twenty-four hours in. Since I was part of the team, I was there.
I probably would have found a reason to be there anyway, since I was desperate for any hint at all about who had done this awful thing. More than anyone else in the entire department—more than anyone else in the entire world of law enforcement, all across the globe—I wanted to find Alissa’s killer and bring him to justice. But not the old, slow, feeble-witted whorish crone that is Miami’s legal system. I wanted to find him myself and personally drag him down the steps to Dexter’s Temple of Dark and Final Justice. So I sat and squirmed and listened as Laredo led us all through the sum total of what we knew, which turned out to be a little bit less than nothing.
There was no real forensic evidence, except for a few footprints from a New Balance running shoe, very common model and size. No prints, no fibers, nothing that might possibly lead to anything but my old shoes—and then only if Laredo hired a very good scuba diver to find them.
I contributed my dose of nothing on the topic of blood spatter, and waited impatiently until somebody finally said, “Divorced, right?” and Laredo nodded.
“Yeah, I put somebody on finding her ex-husband, guy named Bernard Elan,” he said, and I perked up and leaned forward. But Laredo shrugged and said, “No luck. The guy died two years ago.”
And he may have said more, but I didn’t hear it, because in my own unobtrusive way I was reeling from the shock of hearing that Alissa’s ex-husband had been dead for two years. I might wish with all my heart that it was true, but I knew very well that he was far from dead and he was trying very hard to make me dead instead. But Laredo was a pretty good cop, and if he said the man was dead, he had a very good reason for thinking it was true.
I tuned out the dull drone of routine cop talk and thought about what that meant, and I came up with only two possibilities. Either my Witness was not really Alissa Elan’s ex-husband—or else he had somehow managed to fake his own death.
/>
There was no reason on earth to make up an entire pretend life, complete with months of false blogs about “A” and his divorce from her. And he had, quite clearly, seen me there in her yard looking at the Honda—it had been his angry voice inside the house, and his back I had seen going inside. So I had to believe that this much was true: He really was Alissa’s ex, and he really had killed her.
That meant he had fooled the cops into thinking he was dead.
The hardest part of faking your own death was fudging the physical evidence: You had to provide a realistic scenario, a true-to-life crime scene complete with compelling evidence and a convincing corpse. Very difficult to do with no mistakes, and very few people got away with it.
But:
Once you get past the first part of being dead, after you have cried at your funeral and buried your body, it gets a lot easier. In fact, by putting his death two years in the past, Bernard had turned the job into nothing more than paperwork. Of course, this is the twenty-first century, and paperwork nowadays means computer work. There were several basic databases you would have to hack and insert your false information—and one or two of them were fairly hard to get into, although I would rather not explain how I know that. But once past the various cyberdefenses, if you could just drop in one or two lines of new or altered information …
It could be done. Difficult—I thought I might be able to do it, but it was tricky, and my opinion of my Witness and his abilities with a computer went up several notches, which did not make me happy.
