Dexter in the Dark (35 page)

The two of them crowded together and stared at the book, flipping through the ten or so pages I had put together to show them that, yes indeed, I really can tell all that. It was carefully arranged to make forensics look just a tiny bit more all-seeing and all-powerful than the Wizard of Oz, of course. And to be fair, we really can do most of what I showed them. It never actually seems to do much good in catching any bad guys, but why should I tell them that and spoil a magical afternoon?

“Look back in the microscope,” I told them after a few minutes. “See what else you can find.” They did so, very eagerly, and seemed quite happy at it for a while.

When they finally looked up at me I gave them a cheerful smile and said, “All this from a clean shoe.” I closed the book and watched the two of them think about this. “And that’s just using the microscope,” I said, nodding around the room at the many gleaming machines. “Think what we can figure out if we use all the fancy stuff.”

“Yeah, but we could go barefoot,” Astor said.

I nodded as if what she had said made sense. “Yes, you could,” I said. “And then I could do something like this—give me your hand.”

Astor eyed me for a few seconds as if she was afraid I would cut her arm off, but then she held it out slowly. I held it and, using a fingernail clipper from my pocket, I scraped under her fingernails. “Wait until you see what you have here,” I said.

“But I washed my hands,” Astor said.

“Doesn’t matter,” I told her. I put the small specks of stuff onto another glass slide and fixed it to the microscope. “Now then,” I said.

CLUMP.

It really is a bit melodramatic to say that we all froze, but there it is—we did. They both looked up at me and I looked back at them and we all forgot to breathe.

CLUMP.

The sound was getting closer and it was very hard to remember that we were in police headquarters and perfectly safe.

“Dexter,” Astor said in a slightly quavery voice.

“We are in police headquarters,” I said. “We’re perfectly safe.”

CLUMP.

It stopped, very close. The hair went up on the back of my neck and I turned toward the door as it swung slowly open.

Sergeant Doakes. He stood there in the doorway, glaring, which seemed to have become his permanent expression. “You,” he said, and the sound was nearly as unsettling as his appearance as it rolled out of his tongue-less mouth.

“Why yes, it is me,” I said. “Good of you to remember.”

He clumped one more step into the room and Astor scrambled off her stool and scurried to the windows, as far away from the door as she could get. Doakes paused and looked at her. Then his eyes swung back to Cody, who slid off his stool and stood there unblinking, facing Doakes.

Doakes stared at Cody, Cody stared back, and Doakes made what I can only call a Darth Vader intake of breath. Then he swung his head back to me and clumped one rapid step closer, nearly losing his balance. “You,” he said again, hissing it this time. “Kigs!”

“Kigs?” I said, and I really was puzzled and not trying to provoke him. I mean, if he insisted on stomping around and frightening children, the least he could do is carry a notepad and pencil to communicate with.

Apparently that thoughtful gesture was beyond him, though. Instead he gave another Darth Vader breath and slowly pointed his steel claw at Cody. “Kigs,” he said agian, his lips drawn back in a snarl.

“He means me,” Cody said. I turned to him, surprised to hear him speak with Doakes right there, like a nightmare come to life. But of course, Cody didn’t have nightmares. He simply looked at Doakes.

“What about you, Cody?” I said.

“He saw my shadow,” Cody said.

Sergeant Doakes took another wobbly step toward me. His right claw snapped, as if it had decided on its own to attack me. “You. Goo. Gik.”

It was becoming apparent that he had something on his mind, but it was even clearer that he ought to stick with the silent glaring, since it was nearly impossible to understand the gooey syllables that came from his damaged mouth.

“Wuk. You. Goo,” he hissed, and it was such a clear condemnation of all that was Dexter, I at last understood that he was accusing me of something.

“What do you mean?” I said. “I didn’t do anything.”

“Goy,” he said, pointing again at Cody.

“Why, yes,” I said. “Methodist, actually.” I admit that I deliberately misunderstood him: he was saying “boy” and it came out “goy” because he had no tongue, but really, one can only take so much. It should have been painfully clear to Doakes that his attempts at vocal communication were having very limited success, and yet he insisted on trying. Didn’t the man have any sense of decorum at all?

Happily for all of us, we were interrupted by a clatter in the hallway and Deborah rushed into the room. “Dexter,” she said. She paused as she took in the wild tableau of Doakes with claw upraised against me, Astor cringing against the window, and Cody lifting a scalpel off the bench to use against Doakes. “What the hell,” Deborah said. “Doakes?”

He very slowly let his arm drop, but he did not take his eyes off me.

“I’ve been looking for you, Dexter. Where were you?”

I was grateful enough for her timely entry that I did not point out how foolish her question was. “Why, I was right here, educating the children,” I said. “Where were you?”

“On my way to the Dinner Key,” she said. “They found Kurt Wagner’s body.”

THIRTY-THREE

D
EBORAH HURLED US THROUGH TRAFFIC AT
E
VEL
Knievel–over-the-canyon speeds. I tried to think of a polite way to point out that we were going to see a dead body that would probably not escape, so could she please slow down, but I could not come up with any phrase that would not cause her to take her hands off the wheel and put them around my neck.

Cody and Astor were too young to realize that they were in mortal danger, and they seemed to be enjoying themselves thoroughly in the backseat, even getting into the spirit of things by happily returning the greetings of the other motorists by raising their own middle fingers in unison each time we cut off somebody.

There was a three-car pileup on U.S. 1 at LeJeune which slowed traffic for a few moments and we were forced to cut our pace to a crawl. Since I no longer had to spend all my breath suppressing screams of terror, I tried to find out from Deborah exactly what we were racing to see.

“How was he killed?” I asked her.

“Just like the others,” she said. “Burned. And there’s no head on the body.”

“You’re sure this is Kurt Wagner?” I asked her.

“Can I prove it? Not yet,” she said. “Am I sure? Shit yes.”

“Why?”

“They found his car nearby,” she said.

I was quite sure that normally I would understand exactly why somebody seemed to have a fetish for the heads, and know where to find them and why. But of course, now that I was all alone on the inside there was no more normal.

“This doesn’t make any sense, you know,” I said.

Deborah snarled and hammered the heel of her hand on the steering wheel. “Tell me about it,” she said.

“Kurt must have done the other victims,” I said.

“So who killed him? His scoutmaster?” she said, leaning on the horn and pulling around the traffic snarl into the oncoming lane. She swerved toward a bus, stomped on the gas, and wove through traffic for fifty yards until we were past the pileup. I concentrated on remembering to breathe and reflecting that we were all certain to die someday anyway, so in the big picture what did it really matter if Deborah killed us? It was not terribly comforting, but it did keep me from screaming and diving out the car window until Deborah pulled back into the correct lane on the far side of U.S. 1.

“That was fun,” said Astor. “Can we do that again?”

Cody nodded enthusiastically.

“And we could put on the siren next time,” Astor said. “How come you don’t use the siren, Sergeant Debbie?”

“Don’t call me Debbie,” Deborah snapped. “I just don’t like the siren.”

“Why not?” Astor insisted.

Deborah blew out a huge breath and glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. “It’s a fair question,” I said.

“It makes too much noise,” Deborah said. “Now let me drive, okay?”

“All right,” Astor said, but she didn’t sound convinced.

We drove in silence all the way to Grand Avenue, and I tried to think about it by myself—clearly enough to come up with anything that might help. I didn’t, but I did think of one thing worth mentioning.

“What if Kurt’s murder is just a coincidence?” I said.

“Even you can’t really believe that,” she said.

“But if he was on the run,” I said, “maybe he tried to get a fake ID from the wrong people, or get smuggled out of the country. There are plenty of bad guys he could run into under the circumstances.”

It didn’t really sound likely, even to me, but Deborah thought about it for a few seconds anyway, chewing on her lower lip and absentmindedly blasting the horn as she pulled around a courtesy van from one of the hotels.

“No,” she said at last. “He was cooked, Dexter. Like the first two. No way they could copy that.”

Once again I was aware of a small stirring in the bleak emptiness inside, the area once inhabited by the Dark Passenger. I closed my eyes and tried to find some shred of my once-constant companion, but there was nothing. I opened my eyes in time to see Deborah accelerate around a bright red Ferrari.

“People read the newspapers,” I said. “There are always copycat killings.”

She thought some more, and then shook her head. “No,” she said at last. “I don’t believe in coincidence. Not with something like this. Cooked and headless both, and it’s a coincidence? No way.”

Hope always dies hard, but even so I had to admit that she was probably right. Beheading and burning were not really standard procedures for the normal, blue-collar killer, and most people would be far more likely simply to clonk you on the head, tie an anchor to your feet, and fling you into the bay.

So in all likelihood, we were on our way to see the body of somebody we were sure was a killer, and he had been killed the same way as his own victims. If I had been my cheerful old self, I would certainly have enjoyed the delicious irony, but in my present condition it seemed like just another annoying affront to an orderly existence.

But Deborah gave me very little time to reflect and become grumpy; she whipped through the traffic in the center of Coconut Grove and pulled into the parking area beside Bayfront Park, where the familiar circus was already under way. Three police cruisers were pulled up, and Camilla Figg was dusting for fingerprints on a battered red Geo parked at one of the meters—presumably Kurt Wagner’s car.

I got out and looked around, and even without an inner voice whispering clues, I noticed right away that there was something wrong with this picture. “Where’s the body?” I asked Deborah.

She was already walking toward the gate of the yacht club. “Out on the island,” she said.

I blinked and got out of the car. For no reason I could name, the thought of the body on the island raised the hair on the back of my neck, but as I looked out over the water for the answer, all I got was the afternoon breeze that blew across the pines on the barrier islands of Dinner Key and straight through the emptiness inside me.

Deborah jogged me with her elbow. “Come on,” she said.

I looked in the backseat at Cody and Astor, who had just now mastered the intricacies of the seat-belt release and were trickling out of the car. “Stay here,” I said to them. “I’ll be back in a little while.”

“Where are you going?” Astor said.

“I have to go out to that island,” I said.

“Is there a dead person there?” she asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

She glanced at Cody, then back at me. “We want to go,” she said.

“No, absolutely not,” I said. “I got in enough trouble the last time. If I let you see another dead body your mother would turn me into one, too.”

Cody thought that was very funny and he made a small noise and shook his head.

I heard a shout and looked through the gate into the marina. Deborah was already at the dock, about to step into the police boat tied up there. She waved an arm at me and yelled, “Dexter!”

Astor stomped her foot to get my attention, and I looked back at her. “You have to stay here,” I said, “and I have to go now.”

“But Dexter, we want to ride on the boat,” she said.

“Well, you can’t,” I said. “But if you behave I’ll take you on my boat this weekend.”

“To see a dead person?” Astor said.

“No,” I said. “We’re not going to see any more dead bodies for a while.”

“But you promised!” she said.

“Dexter!” Deborah yelled again. I waved at her, which did not seem to be the response she was looking for, because she beckoned furiously at me.

“Astor, I have to go,” I said. “Stay here. We’ll talk about this later.”