Dexter in the Dark (11 page)

“Fine,” Deborah said. “We’re looking for a lead on somebody who might be connected to a local alternative religious group that has a thing for bulls.”

For a second I thought the woman was almost going to smile, but she caught herself just in time. “Bulls? Jesus, who doesn’t have a thing for bulls. Goes all the way back to Sumer, Crete, all those old cradle-of-civilization places. Lots of people have worshipped them. I mean, aside from the huge cocks, they’re very powerful.”

If the woman thought she was going to embarrass Deborah, she didn’t know as much about Miami cops as she thought she did. My sister didn’t even blink. “Do you know of any group in particular that might be local?” Debs said.

“I dunno,” she said. “What kind of group?”

“Candomblé?” I said, briefly grateful to Vince for supplying a word. “Palo Mayombe? Or even Wicca.”

“The Spanish stuff, you gotta go over to Eleggua on Eighth Street. I wouldn’t know about that. We sell some stuff to the Wicca people, but I’m not gonna tell you about it without a warrant. Anyway, they don’t do bulls.” She snorted. “They just stand around in the Everglades naked, waiting for their power to come.”

“Is there anybody else?” Debs insisted.

The woman just shook her head. “I dunno. I mean, I know about most of the groups in town, and nothing like that I can think of.” She shrugged. “Maybe the Druids, they got a spring event coming up. They used to do human sacrifice.”

Deborah frowned even more intensely. “When was that?” she said.

This time the woman actually did smile, just a little, with one corner of her mouth. “About two thousand years ago. You’re a little late on that one, Sherlock.”

“Is there anything else you can think of that might help?” Deborah asked.

The woman shook her head. “Help with what? There might be some psycho loser out there who read Aleister Crowley and lives on a dairy farm. How would I know?”

Deborah looked at her for a moment, as if trying to decide if she had been offensive enough to arrest, and then apparently decided against it. “Thank you for your time,” she said, and she flipped her business card on the counter. “If you think of anything that might be helpful, please give me a call.”

“Yeah, sure,” the woman said, without even glancing at the card. Deborah glared at her for a moment longer and then stalked out of the door. The woman stared at me and I smiled.

“I really like vegetables,” I said. Then I gave the woman the peace sign and followed my sister out.

“That was a stupid idea,” Deborah said as we walked rapidly back to her car.

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that,” I said. And it was quite true, I wouldn’t say it. Of course, it really was a stupid idea, but to say so would have been to invite one of Debs’s vicious arm punches. “If nothing else, we eliminated a few possibilities.”

“Sure,” she said sourly. “We know it probably wasn’t a bunch of naked fruits, unless they did it two thousand years ago.”

She did have a point, but I see it as my job in life to help all those around me maintain a positive attitude. “It’s still progress,” I said. “Shall we check out the place on Eighth Street? I’ll translate for you.” In spite of being a Miami native, Debs had whimsically insisted on studying French in school, and she could barely order lunch in Spanish.

She shook her head. “Waste of time,” she said. “I’ll tell Angel to ask around, but it won’t go anywhere.”

And she was right. Angel came back late that afternoon with a very nice candle that had a prayer to St. Jude on it in Spanish, but other than that his trip to the place on Eighth Street was a waste of time, just as Debs had predicted.

We were left with nothing, except two bodies, no heads, and a very bad feeling.

That was about to change.

TEN

T
HE NEXT DAY PASSED UNEVENTFULLY AND WE GOT NO
closer to any kind of hint about the two murders at the university. And life being the kind of lopsided, grotesque affair that it is, Deborah blamed our lack of progress on me. She was still convinced that I had special magical powers and had used them to see straight into the dark heart of the killings, and that I was keeping vital information from her for petty personal reasons.

Very flattering, but totally untrue. The only insight I had into the matter was that something about it had scared the Dark Passenger, and I did not want that to happen again. I decided to stay away from the case, and since there was almost no blood work involved, that should have been easy in a logical and well-ordered universe.

But alas, we do not live in any such place. Our universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. At the moment, the chief of these was my sister. Late the following morning she cornered me in my little cubbyhole and dragged me away to lunch with her boyfriend, Kyle Chutsky. I had no real objections to Chutsky, other than his permanent attitude of knowing the real truth about everything. Aside from that, he was just as pleasant and amiable as a cold killer can be, and it would have been hypocritical for me to object to his personality on those grounds. And since he seemed to make my sister happy, I did not object on any other grounds, either.

So off I went to lunch, since in the first place she was my sister, and in the second, the mighty machine that is my body needs almost constant fuel.

The fuel it craves most often is a
medianoche
sandwich, usually with a side of fried
plátanos
and a
mamey
milk shake. I don’t know why this simple, hearty meal plays such a transcendent chord on the strings of my being, but there is nothing else like it. Prepared properly, it takes me as close to ecstasy as I can get. And no one prepares it quite as properly as Café Relampago, a storefront place not far from police HQ, where the Morgans have been eating since time out of mind. It was so good even Deborah’s perpetual grumpiness couldn’t spoil it.

“Goddamn it!” she said to me through a mouthful of sandwich. It was certainly far from a novel phrase coming from her, but she said it with a viciousness that left me lightly spattered with bread crumbs. I took a sip of my excellent
batido de mamey
and waited for her to expand on her argument, but instead she simply said it again. “Goddamn it!”

“You’re covering up your feelings again,” I said. “But because I am your brother, I can tell something is bothering you.”

Chutsky snorted as he sawed at his Cuban steak. “No shit,” he said. He was about to say more, but the fork clamped in his prosthetic left hand slipped sideways. “Goddamn it,” he said, and I realized that they had a great deal more in common than I had thought. Deborah leaned over and helped him straighten the fork. “Thanks,” he said, and shoveled in a large bite of the pounded-flat meat.

“There, you see?” I said brightly. “All you needed was something to take your mind off your own problems.”

We were sitting at a table where we had probably eaten a hundred times. But Deborah was rarely troubled by sentiment; she straightened up and slapped the battered Formica tabletop hard enough to make the sugar bowl jump.

“I want to know who talked to that asshole Rick Sangre!” she said. Sangre was a local TV reporter who believed that the gorier a story was, the more vital it was for people to have a free press that could fill them in on as many gruesome details as possible. From the tone of her voice, Deborah was apparently convinced that Rick was my new best friend.

“Well, it wasn’t me,” I said. “And I don’t think it was Doakes.”

“Ouch,” said Chutsky.

“
And
,” she said, “I want to find those fucking heads!”

“I don’t have them, either,” I said. “Did you check lost and found?”

“You know something, Dexter,” she said. “Come on, why are you holding out on me?”

Chutsky looked up and swallowed. “Why should he know something you don’t?” he asked. “Was there a lot of spatter?”

“No spatter at all,” I said. “The bodies were cooked, nice and dry.”

Chutsky nodded and managed to scoop some rice and beans onto his fork. “You’re a sick bastard, aren’t you?”

“He’s worse than sick,” Deborah said. “He’s holding out something.”

“Oh,” Chutsky said through a mouthful of food. “Is this his amateur profiling thing again?” It was a small fiction; we had told him that my hobby was actually analytical, rather than hands-on.

“It is,” Deborah said. “And he won’t tell me what he’s figured out.”

“It might be hard to believe, Sis, but I know nothing about this. Just…” I shrugged, but she was already pouncing.

“What! Come on, please?”

I hesitated again. There was no good way to tell her that the Dark Passenger had reacted to these killings in a brand-new and totally unsettling way. “I just get a feeling,” I said. “Something is a little off with this one.”

She snorted. “Two burned headless bodies, and he says something’s a little off. Didn’t you used to be smart?”

I took a bite of my sandwich as Deborah frittered away her precious eating time by frowning. “Have you identified the bodies yet?” I asked.

“Come on, Dexter. There’s no heads, so we got no dental records. The bodies were burned, so there’s no fingerprints. Shit, we don’t even know what color their hair was. What do you want me to do?”

“I could probably help, you know,” Chutsky said. He speared a chunk of fried
maduras
and popped it into his mouth. “I have a few resources I can call on.”

“I don’t need your help,” she said and he shrugged.

“You take Dexter’s help,” he said.

“That’s different.”

“How is that different?” he asked, and it seemed like a reasonable question.

“Because he gives me
help
,” she said. “You want to solve it for me.”

They locked eyes and didn’t speak for a long moment. I’d seen them do it before, and it was eerily reminiscent of the nonverbal conversations Cody and Astor had. It was nice to see them so clearly welded together as a couple, even though it reminded me that I had a wedding of my own to worry about, complete with an apparently insane high-class caterer. Happily, just before I could begin to gnash my teeth, Debs broke the eerie silence.

“I won’t be one of those women who needs help,” she said.

“But I can get you information that you can’t get,” he said, putting his good hand on her arm.

“Like what?” I asked him. I’ll admit I had been curious for some time about what Chutsky was, or had been before his accidental amputations. I knew that he had worked for some government agency which he referred to as the OGA, but I still didn’t know what that stood for.

He turned to face me obligingly. “I have friends and sources in a lot of places,” he said. “Something like this might have left some kind of trail somewhere else, and I could call around and find out.”

“You mean call your buddies at the OGA?” I said.

He smiled. “Something like that,” he said.

“For Christ’s sake, Dexter,” Deborah said. “OGA just means other government agency. There’s no such agency, it’s an in-joke.”

“Nice to be in at last,” I said. “And you can still get access to their files?”

He shrugged. “Technically I’m on convalescent leave,” he said.

“From doing what?” I asked.

He gave me a mechanical smile. “You don’t really want to know,” he said. “The point is, they haven’t decided yet whether I’m any fucking good anymore.” He looked at the fork clamped in his steel hand, turning his arm over to see it move. “Shit,” he said.

And because I could feel that one of those awkward moments was upon us, I did what I could to move things back onto a sociable footing. “Didn’t you find anything at the kiln?” I asked. “Some kind of jewelry or something?”

“What the fuck is that?” she said.

“The kiln,” I said. “Where the bodies were burned.”

“Haven’t you been paying attention? We haven’t found where the bodies were burned.”

“Oh,” I said. “I assumed it was done right there on campus, in the ceramic studio.”

By the suddenly frozen look on her face, I realized that either she was experiencing massive indigestion or she did not know about the ceramic studio. “It’s just half a mile from the lake where the bodies were found,” I said. “You know, the kiln. Where they make pottery?”

Deborah stared at me for a moment longer, and then jumped up from the table. I thought it was a wonderfully creative and dramatic way to end a conversation, and it took a moment before I could do more than blink after her.

“I guess she didn’t know about that,” Chutsky said.

“That’s my first guess,” I said. “Shall we follow?”

He shrugged and speared the last chunk of his steak. “I’m gonna have some flan, and a
cafecita
. Then I’ll get a cab, since I’m not allowed to help,” he said. He scooped up some rice and beans and nodded at me. “You go ahead, unless you want to walk back to work.”

I did not, in fact, have any desire to walk back to work. On the other hand, I still had almost half a milk shake and I did not want to leave that, either. I stood up and followed, but I softened the blow by grabbing the uneaten half of Deborah’s sandwich and taking it with me as I lurched out the door after her.