by Jeff Lindsay
The smile, as tiny as it was, lasted until I got almost to my chair, when I ran into Vince Masuoka, headed out at full speed as I was trying to head in. We collided forcefully, and because I am larger than Vince, he bounced off me and into the doorframe.
“Ouch, my elbow!” he said, quickly straightening and rubbing his arm where it had banged against the frame. “Got another one!”
“Another elbow?” I said. “Big deal. Everyone has two.”
“Another body!” Vince said, straightening up and continuing his headlong rush out of the lab, pausing only to call over his shoulder, “The eye-fucker! He’s killed another girl!” Then he was gone down the hall, leaving me to stand at the door and stare after him and realize that I now knew what Patrick had been doing this afternoon instead of sleeping in his tent. And very oddly indeed, I really and truly wanted to go along and see what he had done.
I went on into the lab. Robert and Renny were both there, standing uncertainly together and looking as if they didn’t quite know what their characters would do when the eye-fucker struck again, and didn’t really want to hear anybody tell them.
I told them anyway. “Let’s go,” I said.
They both blinked at me like uncertain owls. “Go?” Robert said. Renny licked his lips.
“Crime scene,” I said. “Nothing like it for learning about crime scenes.”
They looked at each other like they were both hoping the other would come up with a really good way to suggest we go for coffee instead, but neither of them did, and so we followed Vince downstairs and out of the building.
EIGHTEEN
THIS TIME THE BODY HAD BEEN LEFT IN A DUMPSTER ON THE docks in Coconut Grove, near City Hall, just half a mile or so across the water from the Grove Isle Hotel, where I was staying with Jackie. I could see the high-rise profile of the hotel quite clearly as I got out of the car, standing tall above the painfully bright glare from the water.
The yellow perimeter tape was already up, with two uniformed cops in front of it, standing with that solid, meaty stance that cops everywhere seem to fall into instinctively when they put on the uniform. Even Deborah had stood like that back in the days when she wore the blue to work. Their eyes swiveled toward me, and I stepped forward, reaching for my ID.
“Yeah, hey, Dexter,” Renny said from behind me, and I turned to look at him. Robert hurried past us, headed for the two cops by the yellow tape. Like he had last time, he would stand there by the perimeter, joking with the cops, so he wouldn’t have to see the wonderful horror in the Dumpster. But this was Renny’s first dead body, as far as I knew, and he stood uncertainly, licking his lips and glancing longingly at Robert’s retreating back. “Robert says the last one was fucking sick,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “Robert didn’t really get a good look at it.”
“Ran his ass away screaming and hurling chunks, huh?” Renny said, just a ghost of a smile on his face.
“He didn’t actually scream,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” Renny said, looking once more at Robert, and then beyond him to the Dumpster. “Hey, seriously,” he said. “How bad is this gonna be?”
It may not be the very best character reference for me, but I was very eager to see whether this body was indeed the work of Bone-head Patrick, and if there was anything different about it, and I was growing annoyed listening to Renny’s dithering instead of peeking in at the surprise in the Dumpster. So reassurance was not uppermost on my mind. “Oh, it’s going to be very bad,” I said. “Come on; I’ll show you.”
He didn’t move. “Do I really got to look at this shit?” he said.
“Well,” I said, torn between my duty to shepherd Renny and my growing desire to see the waiting wonder, “you really should see what Vince does at a crime scene. I mean, that’s what your character does, right?”
Renny looked at the Dumpster out on the dock, and swallowed. “Yeah, okay,” he said. Then he gave me a hard look and I saw once more the small gleam of some interior Something flaring up. “But I throw up, you cleaning it up.” He took a deep breath, and then moved past me with determination in his pace and steel in his spine, and hopefully not too much in his stomach.
I followed behind Renny until he was ten feet from the Dumpster, and then he stopped dead. “I can see Vince fine from here,” he said.
There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing about it, so I slid past him and right up beside Vince Masuoka, who crouched in the shade of the Dumpster. “You’re just in time,” Vince said.
“For what?”
“Now the real fun starts,” he said. He jerked his head over to one side. I looked, and about forty feet away I saw Detective Anderson talking to a thin, white-haired man in khaki pants, a pale blue polo shirt, and boat shoes. Even from this distance, the white-haired man looked badly shaken.
“Anderson has a witness,” Vince said. “The old guy is off one of the big sailboats. He saw somebody dump a rolled-up carpet in here and take off in a kayak.”
The kayak gave me pause; did Patrick have a new, Miami-flavored way to get around? Or was it possible that somebody else had done it this time? Feeling a small flutter of uncertainty and rising interest, I stepped past Vince and peeked inside, into the heart of the garbage.
The girl’s body lay on top of a chunk of dirty brown carpet, the kind of ratty, stained carpet you can see in the garbage in any residential area where someone is remodeling. It was partially unrolled, just enough to see the top half of a very bad time, and not enough to hide the other contents of the Dumpster.
It was almost all garbage—no paper or cardboard or plastic wrappings like the last time. This Dumpster was used by the people from the rows of large yachts at the nearby dock, and by anyone who used the fish-cleaning station nearby, and the smell rising up from inside was enough to kill small animals at ten paces. But it didn’t discourage the nearly solid cloud of flies that whirled around the heaps of moist, sloppy rotting leftovers. And, of course, it didn’t have any effect at all on the dead girl who perched naked on top of the putrid mound of decomposing gunk.
It looked like she’d had a very hard time of it. Like the previous victim, this one had been hacked, stabbed, bitten, and clawed with an undisciplined but frenzied abandon, a wild impatience that had left very few patches of visible skin unmarked by trauma.
The state of the blood around the wounds indicated that she had been alive for most of the cuts, gashes, and punches, an entire arsenal of attacks that left the corpse looking like she had spent a week at the Academy of Psychotic Assault.
Once again a large hank of golden hair had been ripped out by the roots, leaving a raw, dark red section of scalp exposed. Under that hair, so very like Jackie’s in color and cut, there was not much recognizable left of the face that wasn’t slashed by fingernails, teeth, and knife blade, but something about the profile tugged at my memory for a second, before I shrugged it off. Of course she looked familiar—she looked like Jackie, just as all the other victims did. That was the whole point of it for Patrick.
I looked a moment longer, but saw nothing helpful, so I stepped back and looked down at Vince.
“Did you find anything?” I asked him, without too much hope—and truthfully, without too much interest, either. I knew who had done it, and I couldn’t be more certain even if Patrick Bergmann had signed his work.
“Just this,” Vince said. He held up a small plastic evidence bag. Inside I could see the outline of what looked like a small bar of soap, the kind of small soap bar hotels leave in the bathrooms for their guests. “You don’t want to know where I found it,” he added happily. I leaned in for a closer look, and through the plastic I could make out the crest and the words “Grove Isle Hotel and Spa” in ornate script.
Vince shook it playfully. “Maybe it’ll help Anderson figure out who the victim is this time,” he said.
I opened my mouth to say that it didn’t seem likely, that Anderson wouldn’t figure it out if he had notarized statements from the ki
ller and the victim, and then I closed my mouth and took a step back and didn’t say anything at all.
Because I knew who she was. I remembered why she looked familiar, and it was not because she looked like Jackie. It was because I had seen her, standing in a hallway and blushing, smiling, pleased with being so very near to her real-life hero, Jackie Forrest.
I rattled the handles of my memory bank and came up with it: Her name was Amila, and she was the maid at the Grove Isle Hotel who had come to clean up the mess on the floor of our suite, and told me she styled her hair to look like Jackie Forrest’s hair, and it got her killed.…
Some small shady something tickled my spine, just a tiny breeze of unease, telling me that someone was watching, and I turned away from the Dumpster and looked, out beyond the pier with its two rows of boats, and into the painfully bright glare of the bay.
Less than fifty yards away, straight out from the end of the dock, a small yellow dot bobbed on the light chop. A paddle rose as I watched, and dipped down to make two small strokes to keep the nose pointed in at us: a double-headed kayak paddle.
Behind the kayak, as if to underline this heavy-handed hint, the Grove Isle Hotel towered up into the bright afternoon sky: the hotel where Jackie and I stayed. The hotel where Amila had worked until Patrick ended her career.
The paddle dipped lazily again, turning the boat slightly sideways so there could be no doubt at all what it was: a kayak. It was the perfect boat for Patrick’s outdoorsy lifestyle. They were light and therefore very easy to steal, and it would certainly be simpler than trying to conceal a dead body on a motorcycle. A quick trip across the half mile of water, dump the body, and then paddle away just far enough to watch the fun.
And of course he would watch. Not merely to see the excitement when his project was discovered—he would also be watching to see who showed up, because Jackie had made an appearance the last time, and he would want to see her when she came to this one, too. Without even thinking about it, I knew how important that was to him: to have Jackie look, and see, and know it could have been her—that it would be her so very soon—and to know he was watching her and waiting to make it happen again, to her.…
But to do it like this was pure hubris. He had taken a huge chance, dumping this body in broad daylight from a small boat. And I was quite sure it was not because he was getting bolder. This kill had come too soon, right on the heels of his last, breaking the pattern and revealing the first rift in Patrick’s mountain-man armor. Because as he got closer to Jackie, as he watched the hotel through all the hours of the night, waiting for a chance—waiting for even a glimpse—his frustration had been growing, eating at him, hitting so hard that his satisfaction from the previous victim had lasted only a few pitiful days. Soon these surrogates would not be enough for him; he had to have Jackie, but he could not get to her, and so he watched and waited and the frustration grew as each day slipped past, repeating the day before, without even the smallest window of opportunity.…
Patrick was getting impatient. He was losing his ability to wait for just the right moment, and feeling the pressure of time racing unstoppably by, with nothing to show for it except a dwindling bank account. By killing the maid now he was trying to push things toward a climax, challenging us to see him so very nearby, daring us to do something, defying us to try to stop him, keep him from doing what he was going to do.
And oddly enough, in those two or three seconds as I squinted into the glare on the water at Patrick in his kayak, following all these little insights as they raced through my brain, I found another small thought burbling up underneath and popping into daylight with the happy snap of a bright pink bubble of chewing gum, and that thought went like this:
All right, Patrick. I accept your challenge.
For a moment I wasn’t really sure what I meant by that, and I blinked, turning away from the glare on the Bay and staring off the dock, back toward the yellow perimeter tape, where Robert stood chatting with the two uniformed cops. No sign yet of Deborah and Jackie, which was all to the good. I looked beyond the perimeter, over the growing crowd of gawkers and into the busy streets of Coconut Grove. The Grove, that happy mecca for Miami’s idle rich, with its high-priced boutiques, quaint shops, and casually posh restaurants. The Grove, where Dexter had lived for so long before his marriage, and where even now, Dexter kept his fishing boat only a mile or so from this very spot—
Oh. Fishing boat. That must be what I meant.
I looked at my watch; it was one forty-five, only an hour and change before the conference with Cody’s teacher. I looked back at Patrick, bobbing there so insolently on his pilfered kayak, and the sight of him tripped a switch in the sinister clockwork machinery of Dexter’s bleak brain. A wheel chunked into gear and hit a lever that tipped a metal plate over and onto a fulcrum that thumped into a shiny cold ball so it rolled down the chute and into the “out” basket, and I picked it up, held it in my hand, and heard it whisper, There is just enough time.
And there would be.
NINETEEN
I KEPT MY BOAT BEHIND A PRIVATE HOUSE ON A CANAL, JUST south of the heart of Coconut Grove’s busy center. The house was on a quiet street, and the elderly couple who owned it lived in New Jersey most of the year, coming down to this house only for the coldest months of winter. They were quite happy to take the modest rental fee from me, and I was just as happy paying less than the going rate for dockage. On top of getting a bargain, I also got a relatively private place to keep my boat, which was occasionally a very good thing, considering that I sometimes put Certain Items onto my boat and carried them away to consign them to the final briny deep, and it was probably best that no one saw me doing this.
And on this bright and suddenly eventful day, it would have been worth twice what I paid for it, because this dock was only a ten-minute drive from the redolent Dumpster where Amila lay in sloppy repose.
I don’t even remember what feeble excuses I made as I hurried away from the scene and into my car. I think I said I was leaving early for my son’s teacher conference because I was worried about the traffic; not my best effort, but I was in a hurry, and no one seemed to notice that it didn’t make a great deal of sense.
In any case, once I got through the maddening snarl of traffic in the middle of the Grove, it was only ten minutes before I was on my boat and heading out the canal, quite a bit faster than the No Wake–Idle Speed that is generally required. But having made up my mind to do this and do it now, I had whipped myself into a lather of impatience, grinding my teeth at the thought that I would not be in time, that Patrick would paddle away, and I would miss my second and probably final chance to set things right in my own inimitable way.
And so I hurried out the canal, earning a wicked glare from a shirtless old man on the bank as I went past at a good ten knots, and a shout for good measure as I reached the mouth of the canal and nosed the boat up to full speed and onto a plane.
It was a straight line by water back to the far side of Dinner Key basin, where I devoutly hoped Patrick would still be waiting and watching, and I made the distance in half the time it had taken me to drive. There were several tricky patches of shallow water, but I headed straight through them at full speed, ignoring the possibility of hitting bottom and losing a propeller blade, and I would have gone even faster if I could have. I could not shake the worry that Patrick might be gone when I got there, and I gnashed my teeth impatiently the whole way.
It was only a bit more than twenty minutes from the time I had hurried off the dock to the time I nosed my boat around the first barrier island and into the boat basin, remarkably good time. But it was not the record-setting journey that put a smile in my heart and a song on my lips; it was the sight of the small yellow kayak, still bobbing in place, as I came off plane and slid down to idle speed inside the boat basin. Now that I knew he was still there, I could take my time, and I did not want to draw attention from anyone onshore—nor, heavens forfend, from the Marine Patrol, known as the AquaNazi
s by those of us who have been stopped and boarded by these diligent seagoing crime fighters.
And as I saw Patrick sitting there so placidly on his kayak, staring intently at all the fuss caused by his crude handiwork, it occurred to me that I had not even thought about how I would do this. I had hurried through the anxious hurly-burly of getting away, and then getting here, with never an idea of what to do when I got here, and now that I actually was here I did not know what to do next, and I took a deep and centering breath and looked at the thing from several angles. It was very bright broad daylight, and the sun would shine far too clearly on the wicked as well as the just, and I could not really be sure which one I was right now, but either way I was illuminated far too well.
Anyone onshore who saw me stick a knife into Patrick would have no such doubts about my affiliation—and there was a great crowd of possible onlookers: people on their boats at the dock, more people thronging at the yellow perimeter tape, and worse, an entire flock of law enforcement personnel. Any one of them might look up at just the wrong moment and see the very visible violence of Patrick’s well-deserved demise.
I looked around. Ahead of me, on the far side of Patrick, was the last barrier island that marked the end of Dinner Key’s harbor area. Onshore on the far side of that, and therefore invisible from here, was a park—had Patrick found a quiet spot there to leave his motorcycle? It would be largely deserted right now, especially with some real excitement on the nearby docks.
Off to my right, Biscayne Bay stretched away, down to Turkey Point on one side and Elliot Key on the other. There were a few boats scattered across the vast expanse of water, but nothing close enough to see what I might do.
