Dexter in the Dark (36 page)

“It’s always later,” she muttered.

On the way through the gate I paused and spoke to the uniformed cop there, a large heavy man with black hair and a very low forehead. “Could you keep one eye on my kids there?” I asked him.

He stared at me. “What am I, day-care patrol?”

“Just for a few minutes,” I said. “They’re very well behaved.”

“Lookit, sport,” he said, but before he could finish his sentence there was a rustle of movement and Deborah was beside us.

“God
damn
it, Dexter!” she said. “Get your ass on the boat!”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I have to find somebody to watch the kids.”

Deborah ground her teeth together. Then she glanced at the big cop and read his name tag. “Suchinsky,” she said. “Watch the fucking kids.”

“Aw, come on, Sarge,” he said. “Jesus Christ.”

“Stick with the kids, goddamn it,” she said. “You might learn something. Dexter—get on the goddamn boat, now!”

I turned meekly and hurried for the goddamn boat. Deborah strode past me and was already seated when I jumped on, and the cop driving the boat headed for one of the smaller islands, weaving between the anchored sailboats.

There are several small islands on the outside of Dinner Key Marina that provide protection from wind and wave, one of the things that makes it such a good anchorage. Of course, it’s only good under ordinary circumstances, as the islands themselves proved. They were littered with broken boats and other maritime junk deposited by the many recent hurricanes, and every now and then a squatter would set up housekeeping, building a shack from shattered boat parts.

The island we headed for was one of the smaller ones. Half of a forty-foot sports fisherman lay on the beach at a crazy angle, and the pine trees inland of the beach were hung with chunks of Styrofoam, tattered cloth, and wispy shreds of plastic sheeting and garbage bags. Other than that, it was just the way the Native Americans had left it, a peaceful little chunk of land covered with Australian pines, condoms, and beer cans.

Except, of course, for Kurt Wagner’s body, which had most likely been left by someone other than Native Americans. It was lying in the center of the island in a small clearing, and like the others, it had been arranged in a formal pose, with the arms folded across the chest and the legs pressed together. The body was headless and unclothed, charred from being burned, very much like the others—except that this time there had been a small addition. Around the neck was a leather string holding a pewter medallion about the size of an egg. I leaned closer to look; it was a bull’s head.

Once again I felt a strange twinge in the emptiness, as if some part of me were recognizing that this was significant, but didn’t know why or how to express it—not alone, not without the Passenger.

Vince Masuoka was squatting next to the body examining a cigarette butt and Deborah knelt down beside him. I circled them one time, looking at it from all angles: Still Life with Cops. I was hoping, I suppose, that I would find a small but significant clue. Perhaps the killer’s driver’s license, or a signed confession. But there was nothing of the kind, nothing but sand, pockmarked from countless feet and the wind.

I went down on one knee beside Deborah. “You looked for the tattoo, right?” I asked her.

“First thing,” Vince said. He extended a rubber-gloved hand and lifted the body slightly. There it was, half covered with sand but still visible, only the upper edge of it cut off and left, presumably, with the missing head.

“It’s him,” Deborah said. “The tattoo, his car is at the marina—it’s him, Dexter. And I wish I knew what the hell that tattoo meant.”

“It’s Aramaic,” I said.

“How the fuck would you know that?” Deborah said.

“My research,” I said, and I squatted down next to the body. “Look.” I picked a small pine twig out of the sand and pointed with it. Part of the first letter was missing, cut off along with the head, but the rest was plainly visible and matched my language lesson. “There’s the
M
, what’s left of it. And the
L
, and the
K
.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Deborah demanded.

“Moloch,” I said, feeling a small irrational chill just saying the word here in the bright sunshine. I tried to shake it off, but a feeling of uneasiness stayed behind. “Aramaic has no vowels. So
MLK
spells Moloch.”

“Or milk,” Deborah said.

“Really, Debs, if you think our killer would tattoo
milk
on his neck, you need a nap.”

“But if Wagner is Moloch, who killed him?”

“Wagner kills the others,” I said, trying very hard to sound thoughtful and confident at the same time, a difficult task. “And then, um…”

“Yeah,” she said. “I already figured out ‘um.’”

“And you’re watching Wilkins.”

“We’re watching Wilkins, for Christ’s sake.”

I looked at the body again, but there was nothing else on it to tell me more than I knew, which was almost nothing. I could not stop my brain from going in a circle; if Wagner had been Moloch, and now Wagner was dead, and killed by Moloch…

I stood up. For a moment I felt dizzy, as if bright lights were crashing in on me, and in the distance I heard that awful music beginning to swell up into the afternoon and for just that moment I could not doubt that somewhere nearby the god was calling me—the real god himself and not some psychotic prankster.

I shook my head to silence it and nearly fell over. I felt a hand grabbing my arm to steady me, but whether it was Debs, Vince, or Moloch himself, I couldn’t tell. From far away a voice was calling my name, but it was singing it, the cadence rising up to the far-too-familiar rhythm of that music. I closed my eyes and felt heat on my face and the music got louder. Something shook me and I opened my eyes.

The music stopped. The heat was just the Miami sun, with the wind whipping in the clouds of an afternoon squall. Deborah held both my elbows and shook me, saying my name over and over patiently.

“Dexter,” she said. “Hey Dex, come on. Dexter. Dexter.”

“Here I am,” I said, although I was not entirely sure of that.

“You okay, Dex?” she said.

“I think I stood up too fast,” I said.

She looked dubious. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“Really, Debs, I’m fine now,” I said. “I mean, I think so.”

“You think so,” she said.

“Yes. I mean, I just stood up too fast.”

She looked at me a moment longer, then let go and stepped back. “Okay,” she said. “Then if you can make it to the boat, let’s get back.”

It may be that I was still dizzy, but there seemed to be no sense in her words, almost as if they were just made-up syllables. “Get back?” I said.

“Dexter,” she said. “We got six bodies, and our only suspect is on the ground here with no head.”

“Right,” I said, and I heard a faint drumbeat under my voice. “So where are we going?”

Deborah balled up her fists and clenched her teeth. She looked down at the body, and for a moment I thought she was actually going to spit. “What about the guy you chased into the canal?” she said at last.

“Starzak? No, he said…” I stopped myself from finishing, but not quite soon enough, because Deborah pounced.

“He
said
? When did you talk to him, goddamn it?”

To be fair to me, I really was still a little bit dizzy, and I had not thought before I spoke, and now I was in a somewhat awkward spot. I could not very well tell my sister that I had spoken to him just the other night when I had taped him to his workbench and tried to cut him up into small neat pieces. But the blood must have been flowing back into my brain, because I very quickly said, “I mean, he
seemed
,” I said. “He seemed to be just a…I don’t know,” I said. “I think it was personal, like I cut him off in traffic.”

Deborah looked at me angrily for a moment, but then she seemed to accept what I had said, and she turned away and kicked at the sand. “Well, we got nothing else,” she said. “It won’t hurt to check him out.”

It didn’t seem like a really good idea to tell her that I already had checked him out quite thoroughly, far beyond the boundaries of normal police routine, so I just nodded in agreement.

THIRTY-FOUR

T
HERE WAS NOT A GREAT DEAL MORE WORTH SEEING ON
the little island. Vince and the other forensic nerds would spot anything else worth the trouble, and our presence would only hamper them. Deborah was impatient and wanted to rush back to the mainland to intimidate suspects. So we walked to the beach and boarded the police launch for the short trip back across the harbor to the dock. I felt a little better when I climbed onto the dock and walked back to the parking lot.

I didn’t see Cody and Astor, so I went over to Officer Low Forehead. “The kids are in the car,” he told me before I could speak. “They wanted to play cops and robbers with me, and I didn’t sign up for day care.”

Apparently he was convinced that his line about day care was so sidesplittingly funny that it was worth repeating, so rather than risk having him say it again, I simply nodded, thanked him, and went over to Deborah’s car. Cody and Astor were not visible until I was practically on top of the car, and for a moment I wondered which car they were in. But then I saw them, crouching down in the backseat, looking at me with very wide eyes. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. “Can I come in?” I called through the glass.

Cody fumbled with the lock, and then swung the door open.

“What’s up?” I asked them.

“We saw the scary guy,” Astor said.

At first I had no idea what she meant by that, and so I really couldn’t say why I felt the sweat start rolling down my back. “What do you mean, the scary guy?” I said. “You mean that policeman over there?”

“Dex-terrr,” Astor said. “Not dumb,
scary
. Like when we saw the heads.”

“The
same
scary guy?”

They exchanged another look, and Cody shrugged. “Kind of,” Astor said.

“He saw my shadow,” Cody said in his soft, husky voice.

It was good to hear the boy open up like this, and even better, now I knew why the sweat was running down my back. He had said something about his shadow before, and I had ignored it. Now it was time to listen. I climbed into the backseat with them.

“How do you know he saw your shadow, Cody?”

“He
said
so,” Astor said. “And Cody could see
his
.”

Cody nodded, without taking his eyes off my face, looking at me with his usual guarded expression that showed nothing. And yet I could tell that he trusted me to take care of whatever this was. I wished I could share his optimism.

“When you say your shadow,” I asked him carefully, “do you mean the one on the ground that the sun makes?”

Cody shook his head.

“You have another shadow besides that,” I said.

Cody looked at me like I had asked him if was wearing pants, but he nodded. “Inside,” he said. “Like you used to have.”

I sat back against the seat and pretended to breathe. “Inside shadow.” It was a perfect description—elegant, economical, and accurate. And to add that I used to have one gave it a poignancy which I found quite moving.

Of course, being moved really serves no useful purpose, and I usually manage to avoid it. In this case, I mentally shook myself and wondered what had happened to the proud towers of Castle Dexter, once so lofty and festooned with silk banners of pure reason. I remembered very well that I used to be smart, and yet here I was ignoring something important, ignoring it for far too long. Because the question was not what was Cody talking about. The real puzzle was why I had failed to understand him before.

Cody had seen another predator and recognized him when the dark thing inside him heard the roar of a fellow monster, just as I had known others when my Passenger was at home. And this other had recognized Cody for what he was in exactly the same way. But why that should frighten Cody and Astor into hiding in the car—

“Did the man say anything to you?” I asked them.

“He gave me this,” Cody said. He held out a buff-colored business card and I took it from him.

On the card was a stylized picture of a bull’s head, exactly like the one I had just seen around the neck of Kurt’s body out on the island. And underneath it was a perfect copy of Kurt’s tattoo:
MLK
.

The front door of the car opened and Deborah hurled herself behind the wheel. “Let’s go,” she said. “Get in your seat.” She slammed the key into the ignition and had the car started before I could even inhale to speak.

“Wait a minute,” I said after I managed to find a little air to work with.

“I don’t
have
a goddamned minute,” she said. “Come on.”

“He was here, Debs,” I said.

“For Christ’s sake, Dex,
who
was here?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted.

“Then how the fuck do you know he was here?”