by Jeff Lindsay
“Patrick Bergmann,” Deborah said when I stepped into her office a few minutes later. It seemed like an odd greeting, but I had to assume she meant that was our stalker’s name.
“That was fast,” I said. “How’d you do it?”
Deborah made a face and shook her head. “The letters,” she said. “He signed them. Even put his address.”
“That’s practically cheating,” I said. “So the real question is, why did it take you so long?”
“He lives in some shit-hole place in Tennessee,” Deborah said. “I couldn’t get anybody local to go check, see if he was still there.”
Jackie beamed at me. “So I checked Facebook,” she said. She gave Deborah a fondly amused glance. “Your sister didn’t know anything about it.”
“I heard of it,” Deborah said defensively. She shook her head with disbelief. “But shit. It’s fucking nutso. People put any fucking thing on there.”
Jackie nodded at Debs. “I showed her how it works, and we found him. Patrick Bergmann, Laramie, Tennessee. With pictures, and postings about where he is.” The smile dropped off her face. “Um,” she said slowly, “he’s here. In Miami.”
“Well,” I said, “but we already knew that.”
Jackie shrugged and seemed to pull herself into a smaller shape, abruptly making herself look like a lost little girl. “I know,” she said. “But it kind of … I mean, I know this is stupid, but—to see it on Facebook? That kind of makes it more real.”
I’m sure that Jackie was actually making sense—just not to me. Facebook made it more real? More real than the tattered body of the young woman in the Dumpster? Of course, I am not, and never will be, a fan of Facebook. It can be a very helpful way to track people I am interested in interviewing in connection with my hobby, but the idea of a Dexter page seems a little bit counterintuitive. Attended University of Miami. Friends: None, really. Interests: Human vivisection. I’m sure I would get plenty of friend requests, especially locally, but …
Still, I suppose the important point was that it was, in fact, more real for Jackie. It was hard work to guard somebody from a determined psychotic killer, and if the guardee didn’t believe in the reality of the threat, it was even harder.
So for once, Facebook proved to be practical. Better, it also gave us a photo of our new friend Patrick. Like I said, it was practically cheating.
“Could I see his picture?” I said.
Deborah’s mouth twitched into a slight smile, and she handed me a sheet of paper from her desk. It was a printout of a picture from Facebook and it showed a guy in his twenties, squatting down beside a deer. The deer looked very, very dead, and the guy looked just a little too happy about it. I have seen enough Hunting Trophy pictures to know what they are supposed to look like: Noble Beast settling into Eternal Rest while the Mighty Hunter stands beside it, clutching his rifle and looking solemnly proud.
This picture was nothing like that. To begin with, the deer was not merely dead; it was eviscerated. The body cavity had been opened up and emptied out, and the Mighty Hunter’s arms were covered with its blood almost up to his shoulders. He held up what looked like a bowie knife and smirked at the camera, a coil of intestines at his feet.
I tried to focus on his face, and as I studied his features the Passenger muttered sibilant encouragement. Patrick Bergmann was not an awful-looking person—wiry, athletic build, dirty-blond hair in a shaggy cut, regular features—but something about him was not quite right. Beyond his obvious enjoyment of the horrible blood-soaked mess he wallowed in, his eyes were open just a little too wide, and his smirk had an unsettling feeling to it, as if he was posing naked for the first time and liking it. His face was saying, just as clearly as possible, that this was a portrait of the real Him, his Secret Self. This was who he was, somebody who lived to feel the blood run down his blade and crouch in the viscera piled at his feet. I did not need to hear the Passenger chanting, One of Us, One of Us, to know what he was.
I tuned back in to the conversation as Deborah said, “Which means we gotta tell Anderson about this, too. I mean, we got an ID, an actual fucking photo.…” She held up both hands, palms up: portrait of a helpless detective. “I can’t sit on that,” she said.
Jackie looked dismayed, and then she actually wrung her hands. I had always thought “wringing your hands” was only an expression, or at most something actors did in old movies—but Jackie did it. She lifted both hands chest-high and shook them from the wrist, and I very clearly thought, Wow. She’s wringing her hands.
“Isn’t that kind of, oh, you know,” Jackie said, “pushing our luck?”
“You gave Anderson your file already?” I said.
Deborah nodded. “First thing this morning,” she said.
“And what happened?”
She made a face and then added, rather grudgingly, “Just like you said. He stuck it in a drawer—didn’t even wait for me to leave the room.”
“Well, then,” I said. “This shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Yes, but, I mean,” Jackie said, and she looked very worried, “it’s his name, and picture, and everything. Even Anderson can’t ignore that.”
Deborah snorted. “Man could lose his own ass in a chair,” she said.
“It’s just, the rest of the cast gets here today and tomorrow, and then we start shooting and—I mean, it’s my career,” Jackie said.
Debs looked dubious. “It’s your life, too,” she said. “That counts for something.”
“My career is my life,” Jackie said. “I’ve given up everything for this, and if I lose this show, too …” She took a ragged breath and grabbed her left hand with her right, squeezing them together. “I’m just worried, I guess.”
“I got no choice,” Deborah said. “I got to pass it on to him.”
“But he’ll ignore it,” I said. “And in the meantime, we will find Patrick and keep you safe.”
Jackie gave me a smile of gratitude that made me feel four inches taller.
“Thank you,” she said. “And, Dexter—”
She raised a hand and took a step toward me, and I believe she was going to say something exceptionally nice, but I never got to hear it. Somebody cleared their throat, and as I realized it was not Jackie, Debs, nor even me, I turned as a man stepped forward into Deborah’s cubicle. He was maybe forty-five, about five-ten, and in decent physical shape, except for some extra bulk around the waist. He had dark hair and eyes, and wore something that was almost certainly supposed to be a suit, except that it looked like it had been made out of a slipcover taken from the couch in an old disco lounge. And even though I did not recognize him, he also wore that indefinable look that said he was a cop.
He raised one eyebrow at Deborah. “Detective Morgan?” he said.
Deborah gave him the same look. “Yes?”
The man held up a badge, and then stepped forward and stuck out his hand. “Detective Echeverria, NYPD,” he said, and his speech very much matched what we have all come to think of as a New York Accent.
Deborah looked him over for a moment, then stuck out her hand. “Right,” she said. “I got your e-mails.”
They shook hands briefly, and then Echeverria stepped back and looked at Jackie. “Hey,” he said. “Jackie Forrest. How ’bout that.”
She gave him a small, low-wattage smile. “Detective,” she said. He looked at her without blinking for a few seconds too long, until finally Deborah cleared her throat, and Echeverria snapped his head back around to face my sister.
“What can I do for you?” Deborah said, putting a slight ironic twist on the words so he would know his ogling had been observed.
“Yeah, right,” he said. “What you can do, you can let me see what you got on this psycho you’re working on.”
Deborah gave him a very thin, Professional Courtesy smile. “Can’t do that,” she said.
Echeverria frowned and blinked twice. “Why not,” he said.
“It’s not my case,” she said.
He shook his head. “What the fuck,” he said.
“I know,” Deborah said. “But I told you not to fly down here.”
Echeverria shook his head again. His mouth twitched. “You know how many Brooks Brothers suits I got crawling up my ass on this thing?” he said.
“Yeah,” Debs said. “We got ’em here, too.”
“Except here the suits are a nice, tropical-weight fabric,” I added, always eager to be helpful.
Echeverria looked at me. Oddly enough, it was not a glance filled with warmth, camaraderie, and appreciation of my vast knowledge of sartorial standards. It was closer to the kind of look you give somebody you caught jaywalking to spit on nuns. Then he looked back at Deborah. “Okay,” he said. “So what the fuck.” He frowned and nodded at Jackie. “ ’Scuse me, Miss Forrest.” She showed him five or six teeth, and he looked back at Deborah. Apparently it was all right to say “fuck” without apologizing to my sister, because he said it to her again. “What’s the fucking deal here, Morgan?”
Deborah, of course, is no slouch in the dirty-words department, and she rose to the occasion with her customary flair. “The fucking deal is the same old shit,” she said.
“Which is what,” he said.
Deborah’s face twitched into a very small and angry smile. “Does it ever happen in New York that the captain gives a big case to some limp-dick asshole who couldn’t find a shit heap if he was wearing it for a hat, and everybody else has to stand around and watch him fuck up another one?” she said.
“Never happens,” he said with a matching smile that said even he didn’t believe what he was saying.
“Course not,” Deborah said. “Doesn’t happen here, either. Our whole department is made up of highly skilled professionals.”
Echeverria nodded. “Right,” he said. “So who’s the limp-dick asshole?”
“If you mean, who is the officer in charge of the investigation,” Debs said, “that would be Detective Anderson.”
Echeverria looked surprised. “Billy Anderson?” he said, and Debs nodded. “I’m s’posed to look him up for drinks. I was told he’s a good guy.”
Deborah managed not to give a wild hoot of laughter, but her mouth twitched several times, which is the same thing for her. “Who told you that?” she said. “Somebody you’d want watching your back?”
“Uh,” Echeverria said, frowning, “maybe not.”
“He might be able to find drinks,” I offered. “But that’s about it.”
Echeverria looked at me again, and then decided he’d rather look at Jackie. He did, and then he frowned and turned back to face Debs. “Okay, I get it,” he said. “But, uh—what’s the deal with you? What are you doing working on it if it’s not your case?”
Deborah’s face froze into her official Talking to the Captain Face. “I am on detached duty as a technical adviser to the Big Ticket Network, which is shooting a pilot here. Starring,” she said with a nod at Jackie, “Miss Forrest.”
Echeverria looked at Jackie again.
“And so,” Debs said, and Echeverria tore his eyes off Jackie and looked back at my sister, “Miss Forrest and I are conducting a parallel mock investigation of our own in order to teach her proper police investigative technique and procedure.”
Echeverria looked at Deborah with new respect. “Fucking brilliant,” he said.
Deborah just nodded.
“So, what,” Echeverria said. “I gotta go talk to Anderson, ask him if I can see the case file?”
“I’m afraid so,” Deborah said.
“And he really is a total fucking dope?”
“Or worse,” she said. “But I never said that.”
“Well, shit,” he said.
“Pretty much,” Deborah said.
THIRTEEN
ECHEVERRIA LEFT TO FIND ANDERSON, WITH ONE MORE LONG look at Jackie, and I was not particularly unhappy to see him go. Of course, he had a right to ogle whoever he wanted, and Jackie was certainly ogle-worthy. But for some reason, I didn’t like it. Perhaps I was merely getting overzealous in my role as her bodyguard. Maybe it was something else.
In any case, I was glad to see the last of Echeverria, and it gave me a chance to think a little bit more about Patrick Bergmann. Knowing what he looked like was very nice, of course, but for my purposes it was more important to know what he thought like. Would he stalk Jackie as if she were a deer, staying in heavy cover and then leaping out when she wasn’t expecting it? Or would he be the kind of freak who showed himself to his victim a few times, just to build suspense? Would he approach in some bizarre, brilliant, unimaginable manner? Or just charge her with a lasso?
I knew what he liked to do after he caught his victims—I had seen it three times already. But I didn’t know how he liked to stalk, and it would certainly help if I could figure that out. And all that aside, I naturally enough felt a certain amount of curiosity about somebody who shared my interests.
“Could I read the letters?” I asked Deborah. She looked at me blankly. “The letters Patrick wrote to Jackie,” I said as patiently as possible.
Deborah cocked her head to one side. “Patrick,” she said. “He’s already ‘Patrick’ to you.”
“It is his name,” I said, trying very hard not to sound cranky.
“His name is sicko,” she said. “Or fucking psycho. Or the suspect or the perp.” She shook her head. “But to you he’s Patrick.”
“Oh, my God, he’s doing that thing again,” Jackie said, staring at me as if I was a piece of alien technology that had just turned itself on. “You know, where he goes inside the guy’s head.”
“If you’d rather,” I said with all the dignity I could muster under the circumstances, “I can go back to drinking awful coffee with Robert.”
Deborah made a snorting sound. “I wouldn’t wish that on anybody,” she said. She picked up the sheaf of papers from her desk. “Read the fucking letters,” she said, holding them out to me. “Go away into your fucking trance. Bring back something I can use.”
“Thank you,” I said, and although I thought I had managed a tone of quiet but injured self-possession, Jackie and Deborah snickered in unison. But I fought down my quite natural impulse to lay about me with a chair and took the letters, settling into the folding chair beside Deborah’s desk as I began to read. The letters were all printed out from a standard computer printer.
“Dear Miss Forrest,” the first one began.
I guess I should just say Jackie but I wanted to be polite the first time, so here goes. I got to say I seen a lot of beautiful girls in my time and not all of them on the internet hahaha but you are something special. First I seen you I new you are something rilly special and now I watched everything you done and I new that you and me was spose to be together like it was something just spose to happen. I no I don’t have to try and discripe it to you because you are goin to feel it to soon as you see me and so I will just say for rite now I rilly need you to send me something maybe you were wearing and you don’t have to wash it first if you no what I mean. I no you will see me real soon.
youre soul mate Patrick Bergmann
I flipped through the next few letters; they were pretty much the same, telling her with increasing frustration that she was meant to be with him; anybody could see it, and she had to see it, too, and would definitely see it as soon as she saw him. They didn’t get really interesting until the fifth letter.
“I am sick of heering from that dum bitch you got working for you,” it started, and it just got better.
You dint anser me your own self and I told you you should. You dint sent me the thing you were wearing and I told you I need that. You have to start listing to me or this goin to turn rilly bad. Why cant you see what is so cristal clear and plain as day that you and me are goin to be together? You no I rilly love you and you will rilly love me if you just see me for two seconds. And you got to no that one way or other you are going to see me!!!
The next letter was even angrier, starting out with a string
of misspelled curse words that really made me lament the state of public education in our once-great nation, and then settling down into a steady stream of thinly veiled and completely naked threats.
You better jus get it thru youre head that this is goin to happen and that is all there is to it and if you cant see it I am goin to MAKE you see it and make you see ME. I am not afraid to do some pretty bad things if its goin to make you open up youre eyes and look at me and no what I am sayin about you and me is the total hunred percent true.
Given what had led up to it, the final letter was fairly standard stuff, disappointingly predictable in its turn to cold rage, threats of violence, and general psychotic unhappiness. I read it twice, pausing in between to think grateful thoughts about the education I had been lucky enough to receive from Harry—and, as unlikely as it seemed, from the Miami-Dade public school system, which was really starting to look good compared to what Patrick got in Laramie, Tennessee. But of course, as I reminded myself, the schools in Tennessee were not totally to blame; several intelligent people had come from that state, and I was almost certain that another one could come along any day now.
I read through the last letter one more time.
If that is the way how you want to play it than that is the way how I am goin to do it. You want to go all cold and mean on me that’s fine because I can play that game even better and you will be so sorry you ever did that. I will fine you and I will make you see me and I will make you see what you could have had and than I will take it all away from you one little piece at a time. And I do mean ALL of it. I will show you that you are no diffrent but just a hore like all the other girls think they are so special and I will make you SEE what you could have had and that will be the last thing you ever see and I am coming for you bitch and you better believe it.
This last letter was not signed, “youre soulmate”; love is so fragile, isn’t it? And again, it really was just a little bit disappointing in the blunt and ignorant mind it revealed. I do not absolutely demand that every sick and twisted killer must show a bright gleam of intelligence and originality, but really. Something this pedestrian did seem to be letting down the side just a bit, don’t you think?
