by Jeff Lindsay
I scanned the body head to toe, marveling at the thoroughness of the devastation, and the Passenger murmured its appreciation. Someone had spent a great deal of time and effort doing this, and although the results were certainly not up to my high artistic standards, they still showed a certain primitive vigor and abandon that were admirable, even infectious. The technique was clumsy, inefficient, even brutal, but it spoke of a wild experimental joy in the work that was a pleasure to see. After all, so very few of us seem to enjoy our jobs nowadays. Whoever did this clearly did enjoy it. Just as clearly—at least to me—the killer was exploring, seeking something he had not quite found, in spite of a very thorough search.
I took one more long, studious look at the whittled-away remains of the young woman, and I did not need the Passenger’s whispered endorsement to agree with Vince. This might be the very first time Our Perp had done this, but it would not be the last. Things being what they were, it would be a very good thing to catch him before he turned too many more young women into fish bait, and that meant it was time for Dexter to push his mighty brain online and get busy. There was real and compelling work to do, and with Chase in exile at the perimeter tape, I was at last free to do it.
But I had done no more than find a relatively clean place to set down my bag when I heard what sounded like a spatter of applause coming from the perimeter. I have been at the scene of hundreds of homicides, both professionally and in pursuit of my hobby, and I have seen and heard many surprising things. I can truthfully say, however, that I had never before heard a mutilated body receive a standing ovation. I turned to look with more than a little curiosity.
Deborah was just ducking under the yellow tape, and for half a second I wondered whether she was somehow finally getting the public appreciation she so richly deserved for her years of hard toil in the service of Justice. But no—a few steps behind my sister, a perfectly tousled golden head bobbed into view, and I realized that the eager spatter of approval was actually directed at Deborah’s shadow, Jackie Forrest. She paused at the tape to give the crowd a wave of the hand and a dazzling smile, and the people around her pushed forward—not as if they meant to grab her or touch her, but more like they couldn’t help themselves, that there was just something about her that made them move closer.
I watched as Jackie traded words with a few of the eagerly, mindlessly smiling people, and I found it strangely fascinating. What was it about her that acted like catnip on these people? She was famous, yes, but so was Robert, and the crowd’s reaction hadn’t been anything like this. And she was pretty—but I could see at least three women in the crowd around her who were, quite frankly, better-looking. And yet they all surged forward toward Jackie, apparently without knowing why.
I watched as Jackie gave the crowd a few final words, a last smile, and then ducked under the tape and moved toward the Dumpster. They watched her go, unable to take their eyes off her, and I realized that I was no better. Now that I had seen a brainless and drooling crowd staring at a TV actor, I felt compelled to watch her, too. I told myself that I was just trying to understand why the unwashed mob found her so mesmerizing, but myself didn’t seem to believe it.
I finally peeled my eyes away and went to join my sister. Debs was already peering into the Dumpster with a very hard look on her face. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “Jesus Fucking Christ.” She shook her head. “You got anything yet?”
“I just got here,” I said.
“Who’s got the lead?” she said, her eyes flicking over the body.
“Anderson,” I told her,
“Shit,” she said. “He couldn’t find his ass with both hands.”
“What is it?” said a husky voice, and Jackie Forrest joined us.
“You might not want to look,” I said, but she had already pushed past me to stare into the Dumpster. Remembering Chase’s reaction, I braced myself for the inevitable explosion of horror, dismay, and vomit, but Jackie just stared.
“Wow,” she said. “Oh, my God.” She glanced at Debs. “Who could do that?”
“A lot of people,” Deborah snarled. “More every day.”
“Wow,” Jackie said again, still looking at the dead girl, and then she frowned. “So what do you do now?”
“Nothing,” Debs said through her teeth. “It’s not my case.”
“Okay, right,” Jackie said with an impatient wave of her hand. “But if it was your case, what would you do?”
Deborah turned away from the body and stared at Jackie. After a very long moment, Jackie ripped her gaze away from the thing in the Dumpster and faced my sister. “What?” she said.
“That doesn’t bother you?” Debs said, nodding at the corpse.
Jackie made a face. “Of course it bothers me,” she said, her voice rich with irritation. “But I’m just trying to be, you know. Professional. I mean, doesn’t it bother you?”
“It’s my job,” Deborah said.
Jackie nodded. “Exactly,” she said. “And right now it’s my job, too. I need to learn about this. I mean, what. You want me to go all girly-girl, and squeal and pass out?”
Deborah studied her for another long moment. Jackie studied her right back. “No,” Debs said at last. “I guess not.”
Jackie nodded. “All right then,” she said. “So if it’s your case, what do you do now?”
Deborah looked at her. Then she nodded. She jerked her head toward me. “Usually, I talk to him,” she said, and Jackie turned her violet eyes on me. I will not say that my knees went weak and wobbly, but I definitely felt like I should bow, straighten my tuxedo, and hand her an orchid.
“Why him?” she said.
“Dexter is forensics,” Deborah said, “and sometimes he gets lucky, finds something that can help me. Also”—she shrugged—“he’s my brother.”
“Your brother!” she exclaimed with what looked like real delight. “That’s perfect! So you’re the tough cop and he’s the nerd! Just like the show!”
“The preferred term is geek,” I said. “Although wonk will do in a pinch. But never nerd.”
“Oh, I’m sorry,” she said, and she put a hand on my shoulder. I could feel the warmth of it right through my shirt. “I didn’t mean to insult you. I’m sorry.”
“Um,” I said, horribly aware of her warm hand on my shoulder. “Perfectly all right.”
She smiled and took her hand away. “Good,” she said. “So, um, have you found anything that’s, you know. Something that might help?”
In fact, the only thing I had found was a fondness for having her hand on my shoulder, and for some reason that was tremendously irritating. After all, I had gone my entire life without feeling even a small zephyr from the hurricane winds of human lust—why should I start now, with an unobtainable golden-haired goddess? And seriously, I had much more important things to do, many of them involving duct tape and fillet knives. But I fought down my rising crankiness and, in the spirit of cooperation mandated by Captain Matthews, I gave her an answer.
“In the first place,” I said, “you’re supposed to say, ‘What have you got?’ Not, ‘Um, have you found anything?’ ”
Jackie smiled again. “Okay,” she said, and added, “What have you got?”
“Don’t look so happy,” I said. “It’s kind of a casual, short-tempered snarl. Like this.” I set my face in my very best imitation of Deborah’s Cop Face and said, “What have you got.”
Jackie laughed. It was such an infectiously cheerful sound that for a moment I forgot we were standing by a mutilated corpse dumped on a heap of garbage. “Okay,” she said. “So you’re not just a forensics geek; you’re an acting coach, too, huh? All right. How’s this?” And she twisted her face into a cranky-fish mask that actually looked a lot like Deborah’s expression. “What have you got,” she deadpanned. Then she chuckled again, and I felt an answering smile creeping onto my face.
Deborah, however, did not seem to share our good spirits. She scowled even more, and said, “If you two Twinkies are done clow
ning around, we still got a chopped-up body here.”
“Oh,” Jackie said, immediately looking serious again. “I’m sorry, Sergeant. Of course you’re right.”
Although I couldn’t help thinking that Debs was a little bit of a buzz-kill, I also knew she was right. And in any case, I didn’t like the bizarre human feelings that Jackie was causing in me. So I gave them both a short, very professional nod, and went back to work.
I had only been working at it for a very short time when I heard someone gag and say, “Oh, Jesus. Oh, my God,” and since I was fairly certain Robert had not come back for another peek at the party, I turned to look at Vince to see what had caused that kind of reaction in someone who was usually so unflappable, even in the face of the most extreme carnage.
Vince had dragged a box over to the Dumpster. He was standing on it and very carefully examining the body, but something had frozen him in place, absolutely motionless, half bent into the Dumpster, and I felt a new hiss of interest from the Passenger.
“What is it,” I asked him, fighting to keep the eagerness out of my voice.
“Oh, holy fuck,” he said. “I can’t believe this.”
“Believe what?” I said, more than a little irritated at the way he had to emote his way through a long dramatic buildup instead of simply answering my question.
“Semen,” he said, shaking his head and turning to face me with a look of complete disgust. “There’s semen in the eye socket.”
I blinked; I have to admit that seemed extreme, even to me. “The eye socket? Are you sure?” I said, and it is an indication of how shocked I was that I said something that stupid.
“I’m sure,” he said, turning back to look at the body once more. “It’s actually in the fucking eye socket, which means— Oh, Jesus Fucking Christ.”
I stepped over beside him and looked again at the shattered remains of the young woman. She was still dead. Vince had turned her head slightly so the far side of her face was now visible, and although it was just as damaged, her other eye had not been torn out. It was wide-open, staring straight ahead at the improbable death that had come for her. I wondered what she had done to bring this kind of monstrous end to her life. Not that I am parroting the Homicidal Rapist Party Line of, She deserved it; she had it coming for dressing like that, and so on. I was quite sure that whoever this young woman had been, she had done nothing to deliberately provoke anything like this.
But there is always something the victim does unconsciously, some special trigger that brings a Passenger up out of the shadows and into the driver’s seat. Every Monster has his own specific flash point that ignites the Need, and it is almost always different.
And every Monster reacts in his own distinctive way, following a program that provides unique satisfaction, a series of rituals that makes sense only to him and ends in the way it absolutely must, no matter how bewildering it may seem to the casual human witness. And when the press and an outraged public recoil in horror and demand a reason, and wail their baffled chorus of, “Why would someone do that?” those of us in the know can only smile and say, Because. It will never make sense to you, or to anyone else, and it doesn’t need to. It only has to satisfy Me, fulfill My special fantasy. It is an E ticket to a ride with only one seat, Mine, and no one else will ever get to feel this Me-Only roller-coaster thrill, the one thing that provides just Me with the ultimate in satisfaction, and whether it is slowly and joyously slicing up a carefully selected playmate, or butchering a young woman and filling her empty eye socket with semen, it is always the same solo act with the same conclusion of release, satisfaction, fulfillment.
But this—
I know very well that we all feel sexual urges, to one degree or another, even those of us in the Dark Brotherhood. It may be the most basic and pervasive piece of the human clock; we all tick toward sex. But the hands move at different speeds for all of us, and the thing that sets off the chimes is almost always unique. Even so, this was well outside the range even of my understanding. I could not remember seeing something quite this uniquely lustful.
Semen in the eye socket: a release that was actual as well as metaphorical. What did that mean? Because it always means something. It is always a fundamental symbol in a world of personal meaning, a basic key to understanding who had done this. Semen left on dead bodies is actually very common, and the specific place where it is found is always important. It indicates a desire to control, degrade, conquer that particular spot. So it was quite possible that the killer had some very special issues with vision, or watching—or it could just as easily be a problem with blue eyes, or contact lenses, or someone winking.
Still, it was a starting point for someone with my special skills—the professional ones—and I pondered it as I worked. It was, after all, an area of real personal interest to me. And additionally, if this had been Deborah’s case, she would almost certainly have demanded some kind of special insight from Sick and Twisted Me. So I thought about it, and although I came up with nothing helpful, at least it passed the time.
Because we had arrived at the Dumpster so late in the day, after lunch, it was well past quitting time when we finally wrapped it up at the scene. I packed up my samples, grabbed my bag, and turned to go. Chase was standing at the yellow perimeter tape, chatting with a couple of uniformed officers. He was apparently no longer fighting to hold down his lunch; in fact, he seemed to be in the middle of some spellbinding narration, and the officers were following his every word with awestruck interest. Not really wanting to interrupt such a chummy little scene, I gave them a wide berth.
But Chase appeared at my elbow the moment I was under the tape. “What did you find?” he asked me. “Is it a serial killer?”
To be honest, I was getting a little bit annoyed at his obsession with serial killers. Why does everyone assume that Miami is overrun with serial killers? Besides, Robert made them sound like oddities, freaks, some kind of savage, ravening, subhuman beast, and as I could have told him, they really aren’t. They’re perfectly normal. I mean, most of the time.
But honesty is not always the best policy, no matter what the Boy Scouts may tell you. So I just shook my head at his inane question. “Too soon to tell,” I said.
He stayed with me all the way back to headquarters, asking questions that could easily have been answered directly if only he had watched me work: what had I done at the scene, what had I found, what kind of samples did I take, why did I want that, what would I do with it, what happened next. It was all extremely annoying and I couldn’t help thinking that Jackie Forrest would almost certainly have asked more intelligent questions—and looked a great deal better asking them, too.
Chase stayed with me all the way up to the lab, and watched as I hurried through the routine of logging in the samples I had brought from the crime scene. I was hungry, and his questions made things take longer than they should have, since I had to explain every single step of the process. At least he had heard of chain of evidence, which saved a few minutes. But when I finally finished and was ready to hustle down to my car and away into the weekend, he stopped me one last time.
“So that’s it, right?” he said. “I mean, Friday night. The weekend. So, um, nothing happens with all this until Monday morning?”
“That’s right,” I said, maintaining a wonderful balance between answering politely and edging for the door.
“So, okay,” he said. “So then, what. You, uh—you just, um …” He looked away, and then whipped his head back to me abruptly enough to startle me. “What do you do with your weekends?”
I really wanted to say that I looked for people like him and made them go away into neat bundles, carefully packed into heavy-duty garbage bags. But I realized that it was probably not the most politically correct answer. “I’m married,” I said. “I spend time with my wife and kids.”
“Married,” he said, as if I had told him I was an astronaut. “So, what, you take the kids to the park? Playdates with other children, that kind of
thing? How old are your kids?”
Deep inside, very deep, in the snuggest, darkest corner of Fort Dexter, I heard a very small and leathery sound, a mere throat clearing, not even a rustle of wings—but definitely a sign that the Passenger had perked up ever so slightly for some reason, not as if there was any danger to me, not at all, but instead … what? Something.
I looked at Chase, hoping for some kind of clue about what might have tripped the Passenger’s almost-alarm. But he just stared back, and I felt no menace of any kind from him, even though he was looking at me just as intensely as he had when asking about forensic procedure. “Is this about your character?” I asked him.
He licked his lips and looked away. “No, I— Sorry. I didn’t mean to pry. I just, you know.” He shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. “I, um. I never got married. Came close once, but …” He took his hands out again and made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. I never had kids, and I always wondered, you know. If I could have done it, been a father.” He looked up at me and quickly added, “I mean, not the physical—the biological part, because you know. Never any problem there.” He flashed me a quick, odd smile, then looked away and took a deep breath. “Just, the other stuff. Everyday things, like teaching her to ride a bicycle, and putting a Band-Aid on her knee, and, you know. The stuff you do all the time.” And he looked at me with that expression again, the one that said he wanted something but had no idea how to get it.
And once again I felt a small and hesitant murmur from the Basement, and once again I had no clue why. Chase was certainly not threatening me in any way—and the murmur from the Passenger had not indicated an immediate threat, just some kind of vague discomfort. But why?
So I looked at Robert and thought about what he had said. It was not dark and threatening, but it was slightly off in some way I could not pin down. If he truly liked kids, why not have a few? And if he was unsure, he could afford to rent half a dozen to try it out.
But I had no answer, and I got none from Chase, who had turned away and looked like he’d forgotten there was anybody else in the room with him. He was staring into the distance, slumped into his own thoughts and cocking his head as if he heard some faint music playing somewhere. He took a long ragged breath, and then abruptly jerked upright again and looked back to me, startled. He shook himself. “Anyway,” he said brightly. “You have a great weekend. With your wife … and kids.” He slapped me on the shoulder, squeezing just for a second, and then he strode away, out the door and downstairs into the lonely Miami night.
