Dexter in the Dark (13 page)

Professor Halpern’s office was on the ground floor just inside the main entrance, and before the outer door could swing shut Debs was already knocking on his door. There was no answer. Deborah tried the knob. It was locked, so she thumped on the door again with the same lack of result.

A man came strolling along the hall and stopped at the office next door, glancing at us with a raised eyebrow. “Looking for Jerry Halpern?” he said. “I don’t think he’s in today.”

“Do you know where he is?” Deborah said.

He gave us a slight smile. “I imagine he’s home, at his apartment, since he’s not here. Why do you ask?”

Debs pulled out her badge and showed it to him. He didn’t seem impressed. “I see,” he said. “Does this have anything to do with the two dead bodies across campus?”

“Do you have any reason to think it would?” Deborah said.

“N-n-n-o,” he said, “not really.”

Deborah looked at him and waited, but he didn’t say anything more. “Can I ask your name, sir?” she said at last.

“I’m Dr. Wilkins,” he said, nodding toward the door he stood in front of. “This is my office.”

“Dr. Wilkins,” Deborah said. “Could you please tell me what your remark about Professor Halpern means?”

Wilkins pursed his lips. “Well,” he said, hesitating, “Jerry’s a nice enough guy, but if this is a murder investigation…” He let it hang for a moment. So did Deborah. “Well,” he said at last, “I believe it was last Wednesday I heard a disturbance in his office.” He shook his head. “These walls are not terribly thick.”

“What kind of disturbance?” Deborah asked.

“Shouting,” he said. “Perhaps a little bit of scuffling? Anyway, I peeked out the door and saw a student, a young woman, stagger out of Halpern’s office and run away. She was, ah—her shirt was torn.”

“By any chance did you recognize the young woman?” Deborah asked.

“Yes,” Wilkins said. “I had her in a class last semester. Her name is Ariel Goldman. Lovely girl, but not much of a student.”

Deborah glanced at me and I nodded encouragingly. “Do you think Halpern tried to force himself on Ariel Goldman?” Deborah said.

Wilkins tilted his head to one side and held up one hand. “I couldn’t say for sure. That’s what it looked like, though.”

Deborah looked at Wilkins, but he didn’t have anything to add, so she nodded and said, “Thank you, Dr. Wilkins. You’ve been very helpful.”

“I hope so,” he said, and he turned away to open his door and enter his office. Debs was already looking at the printout from the registrar.

“Halpern lives just a mile or so away,” she said, and headed toward the doors. Once again I found myself hurrying to catch up to her.

“Which theory are we giving up?” I asked her. “The one that says Ariel tried to seduce Halpern? Or that he tried to rape her?”

“We’re not giving up anything,” she said. “Not until we talk to Halpern.”

TWELVE

D
R
. J
ERRY
H
ALPERN HAD AN APARTMENT LESS THAN TWO
miles from the campus, in a two-story building that had probably been very nice forty years ago. He answered the door right away when Deborah knocked, blinking at us as the sunlight hit his face. He was in his mid-thirties and thin without looking fit, and he hadn’t shaved for a few days. “Yes?” he said, in a querulous tone of voice that would have been just right for an eighty-year-old scholar. He cleared his throat and tried again. “What is it?”

Deborah held up her badge and said, “Can we come in, please?”

Halpern goggled at the badge and seemed to sag a little. “I didn’t—what, what—why come in?” he said.

“We’d like to ask you a few questions,” Deborah said. “About Ariel Goldman.”

Halpern fainted.

I don’t get to see my sister look surprised very often—her control is too good. So it was quite rewarding to see her with her mouth hanging open as Halpern hit the floor. I manufactured a suitable matching expression, and bent over to feel for a pulse.

“His heart is still going,” I said.

“Let’s get him inside,” Deborah said, and I dragged him into the apartment.

The apartment was probably not as small as it looked, but the walls were lined with overflowing bookshelves, a worktable stacked high with papers and more books. In the small remaining space there was a battered, mean-looking two-seater couch and an overstuffed chair with a lamp behind it. I managed to heft Halpern up and onto the couch, which creaked and sank alarmingly under him.

I stood up and nearly bumped into Deborah, who was already hovering and glaring down at Halpern. “You better wait for him to wake up before you intimidate him,” I said.

“This son of a bitch knows something,” she said. “Why else would he flop like that?”

“Poor nutrition?” I said.

“Wake him up,” she said.

I looked at her to see if she was kidding, but of course she was dead serious. “What would you suggest?” I said. “I forgot to bring smelling salts.”

“We can’t just stand around and wait,” she said. And she leaned forward as if she was going to shake him, or maybe punch him in the nose.

Happily for Halpern, however, he chose just that moment to return to consciousness. His eyes fluttered a few times and then stayed open, and as he looked up at us his whole body tensed. “What do you want?” he said.

“Promise not to faint again?” I said. Deborah elbowed me aside.

“Ariel Goldman,” she said.

“Oh God,” Halpern whined. “I knew this would happen.”

“You were right,” I said.

“You have to believe me,” he said, struggling to sit up. “I didn’t do it.”

“All right,” Debs said. “Then who did it?”

“She did it herself,” he said.

Deborah looked at me, perhaps to see if I could tell her why Halpern was so clearly insane. Unfortunately, I could not, so she looked back at him. “She did it herself,” she said, her voice loaded with cop doubt.

“Yes,” he insisted. “She wanted to make it look like I did it, so I would have to give her a good grade.”

“She burned herself,” Deborah said, very deliberately, like she was talking to a three-year-old. “And then she cut off her own head. So you would give her a good grade.”

“I hope you gave her at least a B for all that work,” I said.

Halpern goggled at us, his jaw hanging open and jerking spasmodically, as if it was trying to close but lacked a tendon. “Wha,” he said finally. “What are you talking about?”

“Ariel Goldman,” Debs said. “And her roommate, Jessica Ortega. Burned to death. Heads cut off. What can you tell us about that, Jerry?”

Halpern twitched and didn’t say anything for a long time. “I, I—are they dead?” he finally whispered.

“Jerry,” said Deborah, “their heads were cut off. What do you think?”

I watched with great interest as Halpern’s face slid through a whole variety of expressions portraying different kinds of blankness, and finally, when the nickel dropped, it settled on the unhinged-jaw look again. “You—you think I—you can’t—”

“I’m afraid I can, Jerry,” Deborah said. “Unless you can tell me why I shouldn’t.”

“But that’s—I would never,” he said.

“Somebody did,” I said.

“Yes, but, my God,” he said.

“Jerry,” Deborah said, “what did you think we wanted to ask about?”

“The, the rape,” he said. “When I didn’t rape her.”

Somewhere there’s a world where everything makes sense, but obviously we were not in it. “When you
didn’t
rape her,” Deborah said.

“Yes, that’s—she wanted me to, ah,” he said.

“She wanted you to rape her?” I said.

“She, she,” he said, and he began to blush. “She offered me, um, sex. For a good grade,” he said, looking at the floor. “And I refused.”

“And that’s when she asked you to rape her?” I said. Deborah hit me with her elbow.

“So you told her no, Jerry?” Deborah said. “A pretty girl like that?”

“That’s when she, um,” he said, “she said she’d get an A one way or the other. And she reached up and ripped her own shirt and then started to scream.” He gulped, but he didn’t look up.

“Go on,” said Deborah.

“And she waved at me,” he said, holding up his hand and waving bye-bye. “And then she ran out into the hall.” He looked up at last. “I’m up for tenure this year,” he said. “If word about something like this got around, my career would be over.”

“I understand,” Debs said very understandingly. “So you killed her to save your career.”

“What? No!” he sputtered. “I didn’t kill her!”

“Then who did, Jerry?” Deborah asked.

“I don’t know!” he said, and he sounded almost petulant, as if we had accused him of taking the last cookie. Deborah just stared at him, and he stared back, flicking his gaze from her to me and back again. “I didn’t!” he insisted.

“I’d like to believe you, Jerry,” Deborah said. “But it’s really not up to me.”

“What do you mean?” he said.

“I’m going to have to ask you to come with me,” she said.

“You’re
arresting
me?” he said.

“I’m taking you down to the station to answer a few questions, that’s all,” she said reassuringly.

“Oh my God,” he said. “You’re arresting me. That’s—no. No.”

“Let’s do this the easy way, Professor,” Deborah said. “We don’t need the handcuffs, do we?”

He looked at her for a long moment and then suddenly jumped up to his feet and ran for the door. But unfortunately for him and his masterful escape plan, he had to get past me, and Dexter is widely and justly praised for his lightning reflexes. I stuck a foot in the professor’s way, and he went down onto his face and slid headfirst into the door.

“Ow,” he said.

I smiled at Deborah. “I guess you do need the cuffs,” I said.

THIRTEEN

I
AM NOT REALLY PARANOID
. I
DON’T BELIEVE THAT I AM
surrounded by mysterious enemies who seek to trap me, torture me, kill me. Of course, I know very well that if I allow my disguise to slip and reveal me for what I am, then this entire society will join together in calling for my slow and painful death, but this is not paranoia—this is a calm, clearheaded view of consensus reality, and I am not frightened by it. I simply try to be careful so it doesn’t happen.

But a very large piece of my carefulness had always been listening to the subtle whisperings of the Dark Passenger, and it was still being strangely shy about sharing its thoughts. And so I faced a new and unsettling inner silence, and that made me very edgy, sending out a little ripple of uneasiness. It had started with that feeling of being watched, even stalked, at the kilns. And then, as we drove back to headquarters, I could not shake the idea that a car seemed to be following us. Was it really? Did it have sinister intent? And if so, was it toward me or Deborah, or was it just random Miami driver spookiness?

I watched the car, a white Toyota Avalon, in the side mirror. It stayed with us all the way until Deborah turned into the parking lot, and then it simply drove by without slowing or the driver appearing to stare, but I could not lose my ridiculous notion that it had indeed been following us. Still, I could not be sure unless the Passenger told me, which it did not—it merely gave a sort of sibilant throat-clearing, and so it seemed beyond stupid for me to say anything to Deborah about it.

And then later, when I came out of the building to my own car to go home for the night, I had the same feeling once again, that someone or something was watching—but it was a
feeling
. Not a warning, not an interior whisper from the shadows, not a get-ready flutter of invisible black wings—a
feeling
. And that made me nervous. When the Passenger speaks, I listen. I act. But it was not speaking now, merely squirming, and I had no idea what to do given that message. So in the absence of any more definite idea, I kept my eyes on my rearview mirror as I headed south for home.

Was this what it was like to be human? To walk through life with the perpetual feeling that you were meat on the hoof, stumbling down the game trail with tigers sniffing at your heels? If so, it would certainly go a long way toward explaining human behavior. As a predator myself, I knew very well the powerful feeling of strolling in disguise through the herds of potential prey, knowing that I could at any moment cut one of them from the herd. But without any word from the Passenger I did not merely blend in; I was actually part of the herd, vulnerable. I was prey, and I did not like it. It made me a great deal more watchful.

And when I came down off the expressway, my watching revealed a white Toyota Avalon following me.

Of course there are lots of white Toyota Avalons in the world. After all, the Japanese lost the war and that gives them the right to dominate our car market. And certainly many of these Avalons could reasonably be heading for home along the same crowded route I took. Logically speaking, there are only so many directions in which to go, and it made perfect sense for a white Avalon to go in any one of them. And it was not logical to assume that anyone would want to follow me. What had I done? I mean, that anybody could prove?