Dexter in the Dark (15 page)

Of course, it was still possible that our lab work would show that it was chicken blood, and Halpern had simply been indulging in an innocent pastime, perhaps as an amateur poultry butcher. Somehow, I doubted it. It seemed overwhelmingly clear that Halpern had done something truly unkind to someone.

And yet, the small nagging thought tugged at me that it was, just as overwhelmingly so, too easy. Something was not quite right here. But since I had no Passenger to point me in the right direction, I kept it to myself. It would have been cruel, in any case, to burst Deborah’s happy balloon. She was very nearly glowing with satisfaction as the results came in and Halpern looked more and more like our demented catch of the day.

Deborah was actually humming when she dragged me along to interview Halpern, which took my unease to a new level. I watched her as we went into the room where Halpern was waiting. I could not remember the last time she had seemed so happy. She even forgot to wear her expression of perpetual disapproval. It was very unsettling, a complete violation of natural law, as if everyone on I-95 suddenly decided to drive slowly and carefully.

“Well, Jerry,” she said cheerfully as we settled into chairs facing Halpern. “Would you like to talk about those two girls?”

“There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. He was very pale, almost greenish, but he looked a lot more determined than he had when we brought him in. “You’ve made a mistake,” he said. “I didn’t do anything.”

Deborah looked at me with a smile and shook her head. “He didn’t do anything,” she said happily.

“It’s possible,” I said. “Somebody else might have put the bloody clothes in his apartment while he was watching Letterman.”

“Is that what happened, Jerry?” she said. “Did somebody else put those bloody clothes in your place?”

If possible, he looked even greener. “What—bloody—what are you talking about?”

She smiled at him. “Jerry. We found a pair of your pants with blood on ’em. It matches the victims’ blood. We found a shoe and a sock, same story. And we found a bloody fingerprint in your car. Your fingerprint, their blood.” Deborah leaned back in her chair and folded her arms. “Does that jog your memory at all, Jerry?”

Halpern had started shaking his head while Deborah was talking, and he continued to do so, as if it was some kind of weird reflex and he didn’t know he was doing it. “No,” he said. “No. That isn’t even—No.”

“No, Jerry?” Deborah said. “What does that mean, no?”

He was still shaking his head. A drop of sweat flew off and plopped on the table and I could hear him trying very hard to breathe. “Please,” he said. “This is crazy. I didn’t do anything. Why are you—This is pure Kafka, I didn’t do anything.”

Deborah turned to me and raised an eyebrow. “Kafka?” she said.

“He thinks he’s a cockroach,” I told her.

“I’m just a dumb cop, Jerry,” she said. “I don’t know about Kafka. But I know solid evidence when I see it. And you know what, Jerry? I’m seeing it all over your apartment.”

“But I didn’t
do
anything,” he pleaded.

“Okay,” said Deborah with a shrug. “Then help me out here. How did all that stuff get into your place?”

“Wilkins did it,” he said, and he looked surprised, as if someone else had said it.

“Wilkins?” Deborah said, looking at me.

“The professor in the office next door?” I said.

“Yes, that’s right,” Halpern said, suddenly gathering steam and leaning forward. “It was Wilkins—it had to be.”

“Wilkins did it,” Deborah said. “He put on your clothes, killed the girls, and then put the clothes back in your apartment.”

“Yes, that’s right.”

“Why would he do that?”

“We’re both up for tenure,” he said. “Only one of us will get it.”

Deborah stared at him as if he had suggested dancing naked. “Tenure,” she said at last, and there was wonder in her voice.

“That’s right,” he said defensively. “It’s the most important moment in any academic career.”

“Important enough to kill somebody?” I asked.

He just stared at a spot on the table. “It was Wilkins,” he said.

Deborah stared at him for a full minute, with the expression of a fond aunt watching her favorite nephew. He looked at her for a few seconds, and then blinked, glanced down at the table, over to me, and back down to the table again. When the silence continued, he finally looked back up at Deborah. “All right, Jerry,” she said. “If that’s the best you can do, I think it might be time for you to call your lawyer.”

He goggled at her, but seemed unable to think of anything to say, so Deborah stood up and headed for the door, and I followed.

“Got him,” she said in the hallway. “That son of a bitch is
cooked
. Game, set, point.”

And she was so positively sunny that I couldn’t help saying, “If it was him.”

She absolutely beamed at me. “Of course it was him, Dex. Jesus, don’t knock yourself. You did some great work here, and for once we got the right guy first time out.”

“I guess so,” I said.

She cocked her head to one side and stared at me, still smirking in a completely self-satisfied way. “Whatsa matter, Dex,” she said. “Got your shorts in a knot about the wedding?”

“Nothing’s the matter,” I said. “Life on earth has never before been so completely harmonious and satisfying. I just—” And here I hesitated, because I didn’t really know what I just. There was only this unshakable and unreasonable feeling that something was not right.

“I know, Dex,” she said in a kindly voice that somehow made it feel even worse. “It seems way too easy, right? But think of all the shit we go through every day, with every other case. It stands to reason that now and then we get an easy one, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “This just doesn’t
feel
right.”

She snorted. “With the amount of hard evidence we got on this guy, nobody’s going to give a shit how it
feels
, Dex,” she said. “Why don’t you lighten up and enjoy a good day’s work?”

I’m sure it was excellent advice, but I could not take it. Even though I had no familiar whisper to feed me my cues, I had to say something. “He doesn’t act like he’s lying,” I said, rather feebly.

Deborah shrugged. “He’s a nut job. Not my problem. He did it.”

“But if he’s psychotic in some way, why would it just burst out all of a sudden? I mean, he’s thirty-something years old, and this is the first time he’s done anything? That doesn’t fit.”

She actually patted my shoulder and smiled again. “Good point, Dex. Why don’t you get on your computer and check his background? I bet we find something.” She glanced at her watch. “You can do that right after the press conference, okay? Come on, can’t be late.”

And I followed along dutifully, wondering how I always seemed to volunteer for extra work.

Deborah had, in fact, been granted the priceless boon of a press conference, something Captain Matthews did not give out lightly. It was her first as lead detective on a major case with its own media frenzy, and she had clearly studied up on how to look and speak for the evening news. She lost her smile and any other visible trace of emotion and spoke flat sentences of perfect cop-ese. Only someone who knew her as well as I did could tell that great and uncharacteristic happiness was burbling behind her wooden face.

So I stood at the back of the room and watched as my sister made a series of radiantly mechanical statements adding up to her belief that she had arrested a suspect in the heinous murders at the university, and as soon as she knew if he was guilty her dear friends in the media would be among the first to know it. She was clearly proud and happy and it had been pure meanness on my part even to hint that something was not quite righteous with Halpern’s guilt, especially since I did not know what that might be—or even if.

She was almost certainly right—Halpern was guilty and I was being stupid and grumpy, thrown off the trolley of pure reason by my missing Passenger. It was the echo of its absence that made me uneasy, and not any kind of doubt about the suspect in a case that really meant absolutely nothing to me anyway. Almost certainly—

And there was that almost again. I had lived my life until now in absolutes—I had no experience with “almost,” and it was unsettling, deeply disturbing not to have that voice of certainty to tell me what was what with no dithering and no doubt. I began to realize just how helpless I was without the Dark Passenger. Even in my day job, nothing was simple anymore.

Back in my cubicle I sat in my chair and leaned back with my eyes closed.
Anybody there?
I asked hopefully. Nobody was. Just an empty spot that was beginning to hurt as the numb wonder wore off. With the distraction of work over, there was nothing to keep me from self-absorbed self-pity. I was alone in a dark, mean world full of terrible things like me. Or at least, the me I used to be.

Where had the Passenger gone, and why had it gone there? If something had truly scared it away, what could that something be? What could frighten a thing that lived for darkness, that really came to life only when the knives were out?

And this brought a brand-new thought that was most unwelcome: If this hypothetical something had scared away the Passenger, had it followed it into exile? Or was it still sniffing at my trail? Was I in danger with no way left to protect myself—with no way of knowing whether some lethal threat was right behind me until its drool actually fell on my neck?

I have always heard that new experiences are a good thing, but this one was pure torture. The more I thought about it, the less I understood what was happening to me, and the more it hurt.

Well, there was one sure remedy for misery, and that was good hard work on something completely pointless. I swiveled around to face my computer and got busy.

In only a few minutes I had opened up the entire life and history of Dr. Gerald Halpern, Ph.D. Of course, it was a little trickier than simply searching Halpern’s name on Google. There was, for example, the matter of the sealed court records, which took me almost five full minutes to open. But when I did, it was certainly worth the effort, and I found myself thinking,
Well, well, well…
And because at the moment I was tragically alone on the inside, with no one to hear my pensive remarks, I said it aloud, too. “Well, well, well,” I said.

The foster-care records would have been interesting enough—not because I felt any bond with Halpern from my own parentless past. I had been more than adequately provided with a home and family by Harry, Doris, and Deborah, unlike Halpern, who had flitted from foster home to foster home until finally landing at Syracuse University.

Far more interesting, however, was the file that no one was supposed to open without a warrant, a court order, and a stone tablet direct from the hand of God. And when I had read through it a second time, my reaction was even more profound. “Well, well, well,
well
,” I said, mildly unsettled at the way the words bounced off the walls of my empty little office. And since profound revelations are always more dramatic with an audience, I reached for the phone and called my sister.

In just a few minutes she pushed into my cubicle and sat on the folding chair. “What did you find?” she said.

“Dr. Gerald Halpern has A Past,” I said, carefully pronouncing the capital letters so she wouldn’t leap across the desk and hug me.

“I knew it,” she said. “What did he do?”

“It’s not so much what he did,” I said. “At this point, it’s more like what was done to him.”

“Quit screwing around,” she said. “What is it?”

“To begin with, he’s apparently an orphan.”

“Come on, Dex, cut to the chase.”

I held up a hand to try to calm her down, but it clearly didn’t work very well, because she started tapping her knuckles on the desktop. “I am trying to paint a subtle canvas here, Sis,” I said.

“Paint faster,” she said.

“All right. Halpern went into the foster-care system in upstate New York when they found him living in a box under the freeway. They found his parents, who were unfortunately dead of recent and unpleasant violence. It seems to have been very well-deserved violence.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“His parents were pimping him out to pedophiles,” I said.

“Jesus,” Deborah said, and she was clearly a little shocked. Even by Miami standards, this was a bit much.

“And Halpern doesn’t remember any of that part. He gets blackouts under stress, the file says. It makes sense. The blackouts were probably a conditioned response to the repeated trauma,” I said. “That can happen.”

“Well, fuck,” Deborah said, and I inwardly applauded her elegance. “So he forgets shit. You have to admit that fits. The girl tries to frame him for rape, and he’s already worried about tenure—so he gets stressed and kills her without knowing it.”

“A couple of other things,” I said, and I admit that I enjoyed the drama of the moment perhaps a little more than was necessary. “To begin with, the death of his parents.”

“What about it?” she said, quite clearly lacking any theatrical pleasure at all.

“Their heads were cut off,” I said. “And then the house was torched.”