Dexter's Final Cut (10 page)

“But that’s exactly it, Debs,” I said.

“What is?” Jackie demanded, sounding very much like Deborah.

“He didn’t blind her,” I said. “He left her one good eye. He wanted her to see what he was doing.”

“Jesus Christ,” Robert muttered.

“And I still don’t know why, or what it means,” Deborah snarled, her normal cranky self once more.

“The whole thing for him is centered around it,” I said, and I felt a soft rustle of encouragement from the Passenger, almost as if it was whispering,
Good, go on
.… “Vision, watching,
seeing
 … It’s all about that. It’s not just part of it; it’s the whole point.”

“What the fuck does that mean?” Deborah snapped.

“I’m not sure yet,” I said, and Robert cleared his throat to show he wasn’t going to say what he was thinking.

“I don’t understand,” Jackie said. “I mean, okay, the thing with the eye socket. But how does that say anything except he’s a sick bastard?”

“You have to try to go inside his mind,” I said, and I took a deep breath. “Try to picture what he was thinking.”

“I’d rather not,” Jackie said softly, but I was already hearing the far-off whisper of wings and the slow rising of shadows and I closed my eyes and tried to
see
it, reaching down into the Dark Basement and stroking the thing that uncurled there, petting it until it purred, stretched, and sprang up into the black interior sky and showed me all the pictures of Eternal Nighttime pleasure.…

And I see her, see the way she thrashes, moans, twists wildly against the ropes, fighting to get a scream past the gag, seeing nothing but her approaching death and not even seeing the all-important Why of it, the reason it must be, the Me who is doing this to her because she has refused to notice—and even now her eyes are on the knife and not the hand holding it and I need to make her see ME, need to make her pay attention to ME, and I drop the knife and I move closer, more direct, more intimate, and I begin to use hands, feet, fingernails, teeth—and still she will not see ME and so I grab her by the hair, that perfect golden hair, and I haul her face around to look and she has to see ME at last
.

And she does
.

She sees me. For the first time, she looks at ME and she sees ME and she knows me for who I really am and at last at last I can show her how I can care for her like no one else ever could, show her that this was meant to be, this
was how it was always supposed to be, and at last at last I can show her my Truth, my Self, my Reason for Being
.

I can show her my love
.

And so I will know that she will always see my love I take her eye and I will keep it with me forever so I will remember, too
.

And so she will really and truly
see
how I love her I put my love there where her eye used to be
.

And then I am done. And I feel the sadness again. Because nothing is forever. But love is supposed to be forever, and I want this love to last. And so she will know that, and so this love will be forever and can never change and never end, and so it can never be anything else, there is one more thing. Nothing else can ever happen that will tarnish this matchless love or make this perfect moment less than forever. It’s important
.

And so I kill her
.

Somebody cleared their throat; I opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was Jackie. She was looking at me with a very strange expression on her face, a mix of fascination and fright, almost as if she had heard the soft and leathery whispers that were still fluttering through my brain.

“What?” I said to her.

She shook her head. Her ponytail flopped to one side, then back. “Nothing,” she said. “I just …” She bit her lip and frowned. “Where did you go just now?”

“Oh,” I said, and I could feel a hot flush mounting into my cheeks. “I, uh, it’s hard to explain.”

Deborah snickered, which I thought was extremely unkind. “Try,” she said. “I want to hear it, too.”

“Well, uh,” I said, which was not up to my usual stellar standards of wit. “I, um … I try to imagine it, you know. What the killer was thinking, and feeling.”

Jackie was still staring, still frowning. She hadn’t even blinked. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“Um,” I said, still wallowing in uninspired monosyllables. “So, you know. I work backward from what we can see. Using what I know. I mean,” I added quickly, “what I know from
research
, and, uh, studying these things. In books, and …”

“Work backward,” Jackie said. “What does that mean?”

“It’s, um, you know,” I said, feeling exceptionally awkward. “There’s something unique about every murder, so you try to see what would make somebody do that.”

Jackie blinked at last. “Okay,” she said. “So this time, he rips off her nipple. And that tells you what?”

“It depends on how it was taken off,” I said. “If it’s slashed off, that means, ‘I am punishing you for having a nipple, and now you don’t.’ ”

“This was
bitten
off,” Deborah said. “What does that say?”

“ ‘I love you,’ ” I said without thinking, but a happy hiss from the Passenger said I was right.

Deborah made a throat-clearing sound and Robert muttered, “For fuck’s sake.” But Jackie looked completely floored. “ ‘I
love
you’?” she said. “He bites her nipple off to say, ‘I
love
you’?”

“It’s, um,” I said. “It’s not absolutely normal love as we might know it.”

“No shit,” Deborah said.

“But the whole thing with this guy, it’s sexual,” I said. I felt a bit defensive, and was not quite sure why. “It’s a mix of compulsion and sex and love, and it’s all so powerful and so frustrating that he can’t even express it except, um”—I shrugged—“like he did.”

I looked around at my little audience. Deborah had resumed her normal stone-faced cop expression, and Robert looked like he was trying very hard not to laugh out loud. But Jackie looked past me, somewhere in the great distance over my shoulder, and slowly began to nod her head. “I think I see it,” she said.

Deborah twitched her head in disbelief. “You do?” she said. “Jesus Christ, how do you see that?”

Jackie looked at her. “It’s kind of like acting,” she said. “I mean, like, when you’re doing Shakespeare? He doesn’t tell you anything in the script, like how you should react, or how you should say things. So you look at what he has you
do
, what he has you
say
, and you work backward from that.” She turned and gave me a quick smile. “Like Dexter said.”

The warmth I’d been feeling in my face suddenly slid down into my chest. Somebody understood me. Jackie understood what I had done. It was so wildly unlikely that this goddess of the silver screen should understand anything, let alone something like me, that I just
stood and looked at her and felt a small and grateful smile creep up onto my lips.

But of course, Robert could not allow me to feel any real happiness. “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” he said. “This isn’t fucking Shakespeare, sweetheart. This isn’t your goddamn
thee
-ate-ter. This is the
real
world. This is a fucking wacko, psycho, out-of-his-skull asshole who likes to bite your tits off, and playing Neighborhood Playhouse acting games in your head isn’t going to catch him.”

“Neither is throwing up every time you see a little blood, Bob,” Jackie said sweetly.

Robert opened his mouth, closed it, and then opened it again. But Deborah spoke before he could get out his no-doubt-stinging reply.

“All right, fine,” Debs said. “I’m glad you see it, Jackie. I don’t see it, but what the fuck; that’s why I put up with Dexter.”

“What about my stunning competence?” I said. “And my understated wit? And—”

“What I still don’t see,” Deborah said, riding over the rest of my modest list of good qualities, “is how it connects to where you started. About the eyes. I mean,” she said, holding up a hand to stop me from saying something I wasn’t going to say, “all right, he rips out an eye, he fucks the eye socket, and he kills her.”

“And he keeps the eyeball,” I said.

“You don’t know that,” Robert blurted out.

“I think I do,” I said.

“Most of these guys keep souvenirs,” Deborah said, and I enjoyed a rare moment of having a sister who backed me up now and then. “That’s cold fact, right out of the book.”

“So we’re supposed to look for a guy carrying around a bunch of eyeballs?” Robert said, making a face of great disbelief and distaste. “Jesus fuck.”

Jackie snorted. “Good idea, Bob,” she said. “Let’s just start frisking people, and when we find somebody with a baggie full of eyeballs, he’s our guy.”

“I’m not the one who brought it up,” Robert said, and he was going to say more, but Deborah stopped him.

“Shut the fuck up, both of you,” she said, and they both did. She
looked at me. “What are the odds he’s done something like this before?” she asked me.

I thought about it. “Pretty good,” I said. “Maybe not a lot, but almost certainly once or twice before.”

Jackie frowned and cocked her head. “How do you get that?” she said.

“The first time couldn’t be this, uh … this
complete
,” I said. “Just killing for the first time would be too distracting, too powerful. He would rush through it, and then panic and run, quickly. But then he doesn’t get caught; he starts thinking about what he should have done.…” I nodded at her, nearly overwhelmed with the idea that she understood. “You know.”

“Yeah,” she said. “And so he thinks, ‘That was too fast; I didn’t get caught—next time I’ll try
this
.…’ ” Her eyes got far away again as she saw it. It was a real pleasure to watch her—a pleasure that was quickly shattered, of course, by Deborah.

“All right,” my sister said. “Let’s put this out on the wire, see if there’s anything like it out there.”

“What good does that do?” Robert said. “I mean, even if he did it before, nobody caught him.”

“A truly keen grasp of the obvious,” Jackie said.

“It beats the hell out of psychic detective work,” Robert sneered back.

Deborah looked at me and shook her head wearily. “Get him out of here,” she said.

I
SPENT THE REST OF THE MORNING SHOWING
R
OBERT HOW TO
find latent blood with Bluestar. It isn’t very hard; you spray it on something and whatever traces of blood there might be glow at you, no matter how much it has been scrubbed. Good stuff, and it didn’t degrade the DNA, which was becoming more important every day. Robert didn’t seem to mind blood in the minute amounts we were working with, and the hours passed quickly enough with no more than minor irritation when Robert’s questions got too persistent. But at least he wasn’t being aggressively obnoxious. When Jackie wasn’t around, he wasn’t nearly as annoying, and as the clock approached noon it occurred to me that if I could put up with him a little longer, he would probably pay for lunch again.

So I endured him patiently, working with him as he happily used up almost an entire bottle of Bluestar, and I was just about to drop a casual hint to him that lunch might be a good idea when my phone began to chirp at me.

“Morgan,” I said into the phone.

“Get up here,” Deborah said. “We got a hit.”

“What?” I said, very surprised. “You mean you got a reply from the wire?”

“Yeah,” she said. “Two of ’em.”

“That isn’t possible,” I said. And it wasn’t. It was much too soon for anyone to respond to the query she had sent out. It should have taken days, even weeks for some cop somewhere in the country to get around to reading it, checking his files, finding a match, and then responding. Most cops have a life, and a caseload that is already overwhelming, and so although professional cooperation with a brother officer is a great idea, it’s never quite as important as finishing a report before the captain chews your ass, with a little time left over to make it to your kid’s soccer game.

But Deborah was claiming she’d had not one but
two
replies, and before I could question her any more she said, “Now,” and she hung up.

Deborah was alone when Robert and I got back to her desk. She was frowning at her computer screen, and she looked up and tapped it to show me her e-mail when we walked in. “Look at this,” she said. “
Two
of ’em, in two different cities, and it’s absolutely our guy, no question.” She flipped her finger at the screen. “Body found in a Dumpster, right nipple missing, same kind of marks on it—”

“What about the eyes?” I said.

She nodded. “The first one, over a year ago in New York, both eyes ripped out; one found near the body, the other never found. The second one, um …” She looked down at the paper, nodded. “Yeah. Vegas. Like, four months ago.” She looked up and smiled triumphantly. “One eye missing, semen traces on the face. It’s him, Dex. It’s gotta be.”

I nodded. It probably was him. But knowing that didn’t catch him, and it left a crucial question, maybe the most important of all. “New York, Vegas, and now Miami,” I said. “Why?”

“He’s harder to catch if he moves around?” Robert offered.

“Most serial killers don’t even think about getting caught,” Deborah said. “They stay in one place, even in one neighborhood.”

Robert looked at me. “Really?” he said.

I nodded. “Yup, pretty much,” I said. “So if this one doesn’t, it’s for an important reason.”

“Okay. So why?” Robert said.

“He could be chasing something—or someone—specific,” I said.
“Or …” A very small idea popped into my head. “Those are all cities that have a lot of conventions,” I said.

“Right,” Deborah said. “We can cross-check the lists, see if anything matches.”

“What are you saying?” Robert said. “He could be going to all these conventions, like, he’s a Shriner or something?”

Deborah shook her head wearily, and I took pity on her and came to the rescue. “Shriner sounds plausible,” I told Robert patiently. “He could make his getaway on one of those little tricycles they ride in parades.”

“The case files are coming by e-mail,” Deborah said. “But I got detectives in two different cities wanting to fly down here and shoot somebody.”