by Jeff Lindsay
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said. “And Captain Matthews damn sure didn’t either. Did you send somebody to the fucking airport, Dexter?”
“My limo was out of gas,” I said.
“Well then GOD DAMN it!” she said, and I had to agree with her analysis.
“Anyway,” I said, “at least we found out how good Kyle’s replacement is.”
Deborah slumped into the folding chair by my desk.
“Square fucking one,” she said. “And Kyle is . . .” She bit her lip and didn’t finish the sentence.
“Did you tell Captain Matthews about this yet?” I asked her. She shook her head. “Well, he has to call them. They’ll send somebody else.”
“Sure, great. They send somebody else, who might make it all the way to baggage claim this time. Shit, Dexter.”
“We have to tell them, Debs,” I said. “By the way, who are them? Did Kyle ever tell you exactly who he works for?”
She sighed. “No. He joked about working for the OGA, but he never said why that was funny.”
“Well, whoever they are, they need to know,” I said. I pried the cassette out of my boom box and put it on the desk in front of her. “There has to be something they can do.”
Deborah didn’t move for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling they’ve already done it, and Burdett was it?” she said.
Then she scooped up the tape and trudged out of my office.
I was sipping coffee and digesting my lunch with the help of a jumbo chocolate-chip cookie when the call came to report to the scene of a homicide in the Miami Shores area. Angel-no-relation and I drove over to where a body had been found in the shell of a small house on a canal that was being ripped apart and rebuilt. Construction had been temporarily halted 1 5 0
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while the owner and the contractor sued each other. Two teenaged boys skipping school had snuck into the house and found the body. It was laid out on heavy plastic on top of a sheet of plywood which had been placed over two sawhorses.
Someone had taken a power saw and neatly lopped off the head, legs, and arms. The whole thing had been left like that, with the trunk in the middle and the pieces simply trimmed off and moved a few inches away.
And although the Dark Passenger had chuckled and whispered little dark nothings in my ear, I put it down to pure envy and went on with my work. There was certainly plenty of blood spatter for me to work with, still very fresh, and I probably would have spent a cheerfully efficient day finding and analyzing it if I hadn’t happened to overhear the uniformed officer who had been first on the scene talking with a detective.
“The wallet was right there by the body,” Officer Snyder was saying. “Got a Virginia driver’s license in the name of Daniel Chester Burdett.”
Oh, well then, I said to the happy chattering voice in the backseat of my brain. That would certainly explain a lot, wouldn’t it? I looked again at the body. Although the removal of the head and limbs had been fast and savage, there was a neatness to the arrangement that I could now recognize as slightly familiar, and the Dark Passenger chuckled happily in agreement. Between the trunk and each part, the gap was as precise as if it had been measured, and the whole presentation was arranged almost like an anatomy lesson. The hip bone disconnected from the leg bone.
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said to the detective. I glanced back at the two of them, wondering how to tell them my news. Of course, it was possible that I was wrong, but—
“Sonamabeech,” I heard someone mutter. I looked back to where Angel-no-relation was squatting on the far side of the body. Once again he was using his tweezers to hold up a small piece of paper. I stepped behind him and looked over his shoulder.
In a clear and spidery hand, someone had written
“POGUE,” and crossed it out with a single line. “Whassa pogue?” Angel asked. “His name?”
“It’s somebody who sits behind a desk and orders around the real troops,” I told him.
He looked at me. “How you know all this shit?” he asked.
“I see a lot of movies,” I said.
Angel glanced back down at the paper. “I think the hand-writing is the same,” he said.
“Like the other one,” I said.
“The one that never happened,” he said. “I know, I was there.”
I straightened up and took a breath, thinking how nice it was to be right. “This one never happened, either,” I said, and walked over to where Officer Snyder was chatting with the detective.
The detective in question was a pear-shaped man named Coulter. He was sipping from a large plastic bottle of Moun-tain Dew and looking out at the canal that ran by the backyard. “What do you think a place like this goes for?” he asked Snyder. “On a canal like that. Less than a mile from the bay, huh? Figure maybe what. Half a million? More?”
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“Excuse me, Detective,” I said. “I think we have a situation here.” I’d always wanted to say that, but it didn’t seem to impress Coulter.
“A situation. You been watching CSI or something?”
“Burdett is a federal agent,” I said. “You have to call Captain Matthews right away and tell him.”
“I have to,” Coulter said.
“This is connected to something we’re not supposed to touch,” I said. “They came down from Washington and told the captain to back off.”
Coulter took a swig from his bottle. “And did the captain back off?”
“Like a rabbit in reverse,” I said.
Coulter turned and looked at Burdett’s body. “A fed,” he said. He took one more swig as he stared at the severed head and limbs. Then he shook his head. “Those guys always come apart under pressure.” He looked back out the window and pulled out his cell phone.
Deborah got to the scene just as Angel-no-relation was putting his kit back in the van, which was three minutes before Captain Matthews. I don’t mean to seem critical of the captain. To be perfectly fair, Debs didn’t have to put on a fresh spray of Aramis, and he did, and redoing the knot in his tie must have taken some time, too. Just moments behind Matthews came a car I had come to know as well as my own; a maroon Ford Taurus, piloted by Sergeant Doakes. “Hail, hail, the gang’s all here,” I said cheerfully. Officer Snyder looked at me like I had suggested we dance naked, but Coulter just pushed his index finger into the mouth of his soda bottle and let it dangle as he walked away to meet the captain.
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and directing Snyder’s partner to move the perimeter tape back a little. By the time she finally walked over to talk to me, I had reached a startling conclusion. It had started as an exercise in ironic whimsy, but it grew into something that I couldn’t argue with, as much as I tried. I stepped over to Coulter’s expensive window and stared out, leaning on the wall and looking hard at the idea. For some reason, the Dark Passenger found the notion hugely amusing and began whispering frightful counterpoint. And finally, feeling like I was selling nuclear secrets to the Taliban, I realized it was all we could do. “Deborah,” I said as she stalked over to where I stood by the window, “the cavalry isn’t coming this time.”
“No shit, Sherlock,” she said.
“We are all there is, and we are not enough.”
She pushed a lock of hair away from her face and blew out a deep breath. “What have I been saying?”
“But you didn’t take the next step, Sis. Since we are not enough, we need help, somebody who knows something about this—”
“For Christ’s sake, Dexter! We’ve been feeding people like that to this guy!”
“Which means the only remaining candidate at the moment is Sergeant Doakes,” I said.
It might not be fair to say that her jaw dropped. But she did stare at me with h
er mouth open before turning to look at Doakes, where he stood beside Burdett’s body, talking to Captain Matthews.
“Sergeant Doakes,” I repeated. “Formerly Sergeant Doakes.
Of the Special Forces. On detached service in El Salvador.”
She looked back at me, and then at Doakes again.
“Deborah,” I said, “if we want to find Kyle, we need to 1 5 4
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know more about this. We need to know the names on Kyle’s list and we need to know what kind of team it was and why all this is happening. And Doakes is the only one I can think of who knows any of it.”
“Doakes wants you dead,” she said.
“No working situation is ever ideal,” I said with my best smile of cheerful perseverance. “And I think he wants this to go away as badly as Kyle does.”
“Probably not as much as Kyle,” Deborah said. “Not as much as I do, either.”
“Well then,” I said. “This looks like your best shot.”
Deborah still didn’t look convinced for some reason. “Captain Matthews won’t want to lose Doakes for this. We’d have to clear it with him.”
I pointed to where that very same captain was conferring with Doakes. “Behold,” I said.
Deborah chewed her lip for a moment before she finally said, “Shit. It might work.”
“I can’t think of anything else that might,” I said.
She took another breath, and then as if someone had clicked a switch, she stepped toward Matthews and Doakes with her jaw clenched. I trailed along behind, trying hard to blend in with the bare walls so Doakes wouldn’t pounce and rip out my heart.
“Captain,” Deborah said, “we need to get proactive with this.”
Even though “proactive” was one of his favorite words, Matthews stared at her like she was a cockroach in the salad.
“What we need,” he said, “is for these . . . people . . . in Washington to send somebody competent to clean up this situation.”
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Deborah pointed at Burdett. “They sent him,” she said.
Matthews glanced down at Burdett and pushed his lips out thoughtfully. “What do you suggest?”
“We have a couple of leads,” she said, nodding toward me.
I really wished she hadn’t, since Matthews swung his head in my direction and, much worse, so did Doakes. If his hungry-dog expression was any indication, he apparently hadn’t mellowed in his feelings toward me.
“What is your involvement with this?” Matthews asked me.
“He’s providing forensic assistance,” Deborah said, and I nodded modestly.
“Shit,” Doakes said.
“There’s a time factor here,” Deborah said. “We need to find this guy before he—before more of these turn up. We can’t keep a lid on it forever.”
“I think the term ‘media feeding frenzy’ might be appropriate,” I offered, always helpful. Matthews glared at me.
“I know the overall shape of what Kyle—of what Chutsky was trying to do,” Deborah went on. “But I can’t go on with it because I don’t know any background details.” She stuck her chin out in the direction of Doakes. “Sergeant Doakes does.”
Doakes looked surprised, which was obviously an expression he hadn’t practiced enough. But before he could speak Deborah plowed ahead. “I think the three of us together can catch this guy before another fed gets on the ground and catches up to what’s happened so far.”
“Shit,” Doakes said again. “You want me to work with him?” He didn’t need to point to let everyone know he meant me, but he did anyway, pushing a muscular, knobby index finger at my face.
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“Yeah, I do,” Deborah said. Captain Matthews was chewing on his lip and looking undecided, and Doakes said,
“Shit,” again. I did hope that his conversational skills would improve if we were going to work together.
“You said you know something about this,” Matthews said to Doakes, and the sergeant reluctantly turned his glare away from me and onto the captain.
“Uh-huh,” said Doakes.
“From your, uh— From the army,” Matthews said. He didn’t seem terribly frightened by Doakes’s expression of petulant rage, but perhaps that was just the habit of command.
“Uh-huh,” Doakes said again.
Captain Matthews frowned, looking as much as he possibly could like a man of action making an important decision.
The rest of us managed to control our goose bumps.
“Morgan,” Captain Matthews finally said. He looked at Debs, and then he paused. A van that said Action News on the side pulled up in front of the little house and people began to get out. “Goddamn it,” Matthews said. He glanced at the body and then at Doakes. “Can you do it, Sergeant?”
“They’re not going to like it in Washington,” Doakes said.
“And I don’t much like it here.”
“I’m beginning to lose interest in what they like in Washington,” Matthews said. “We have our own problems. Can you handle this?”
Doakes looked at me. I tried to look serious and dedicated, but he just shook his head. “Yeah,” he said. “I can do this.”
Matthews clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man,” he said, and he hurried away to talk to the news crew.
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Doakes was still looking at me. I looked back. “Think how much easier it’s going to be to keep track of me,” I said.
“When this is over,” he said. “Just you and me.”
“But not until it’s over,” I said, and he finally nodded, just once.
“Until then,” he said.
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Doakes took us to a coffee shop on calle ocho, just across the street from a car dealership. He led us to a small table in the back corner and sat down facing the door.
“We can talk here,” he said, and he made it sound so much like a spy movie that I wished I had brought sunglasses. Still, perhaps Chutsky’s would come in the mail. Hopefully without his nose attached.
Before we could actually talk, a man came from the back room and shook Doakes’s hand. “Alberto,” he said. “Como estas?” And Doakes answered him in very good Spanish—better than mine, to be honest, although I do like to think that my accent is better. “Luis,” he said. “Mas o menos.” They chattered away for a minute, and then Luis brought us all tiny cups of horribly sweet Cuban coffee and a plate of pastelitos.
He nodded once at Doakes and then disappeared into the back room.
Deborah watched the whole performance with growing impatience, and when Luis finally left us she opened up.
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“We need the names of everybody from El Salvador,” she blurted out.
Doakes just looked at her and sipped his coffee. “Be a big list,” he said.
Deborah frowned. “You know what I mean,” she said.
“Goddamn it, Doakes, he’s got Kyle.”
Doakes showed his teeth. “Yeah, Kyle getting old. Never would have got him in his prime.”
“What exactly were you doing down there?” I asked him. I know it was a bit off message, but my curiosity about how he would answer got the best of me.
Still smiling, if that’s what it was, Doakes looked at me and said, “What do you think?” And just underneath the thresh-old of hearing there came a quiet rumble of savage glee, answered right away from deep inside my dark backseat, one predator calling across a moonlit night to another. And really and truly, what else could he have been doing? Just as Doakes knew me, I knew Doakes for what he was: a cold killer. Even without what Chutsky had said, it was very clear what Doakes would have been doing in a homicidal carnival like El Salvador. He would have been one of the ringmasters.
“Cut the staring contest,” Deborah said. “I need
some names.”
Doakes picked up one of the pastelitos and leaned back.
“Why don’t you-all bring me up to date,” he said. He took a bite, and Deborah tapped a finger on the table before deciding that made sense.
“All right,” she said. “We got a rough description of the guy who’s doing this, and his van. A white van.”
Doakes shook his head. “Don’t matter. We know who’s doing this.”
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“We also got an ID on the first victim,” I said. “A man named Manuel Borges.”
“Well, well,” Doakes said. “Old Manny, huh? Really should’ve let me shoot him.”
“A friend of yours?” I asked, but Doakes ignored me.
“What else you got?” he said.
“Kyle had a list of names,” Deborah said. “Other men from the same unit. He said one of them would be the next victim.
But he didn’t tell me the names.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” Doakes said.
“So we need you to tell us,” she said.
Doakes appeared to think this over. “If I was a hotshot like Kyle, I’d pick one of these guys and stake him out.” Deborah pursed her lips and nodded. “Problem is, I am not a hotshot like Kyle. Just a simple cop from the country.”
“Would you like a banjo?” I asked, but for some reason he didn’t laugh.
“I only know about one guy from the old team here in Miami,” he said, after a quick and savage glance at me. “Oscar Acosta. Saw him at Publix two years ago. We could run him down.” He pointed his chin at Deborah. “Two other names I can think of. You look ’em up, see if they’re here.” He spread his hands. “About all I got. I could maybe call some old buddies in Virginia, but no telling what that might stir up.” He snorted. “Anyway, take them two days to decide what I was really asking and what they ought to do about it.”
