Dexter's Final Cut (25 page)

“Sorry!” we say in a loud official voice, and we wait for an answer. “Hello? Anybody home?” Again there is no response.

It is definite. Patrick is not here.

And although we loiter for another twenty minutes, performing meaningless tricks with the clipboard, he does not return, and we finally have to admit that staying any longer would be highly suspicious, and we must pack up our toys and admit the painful obvious truth:

We have crapped out.

We thread our way back through the camp, pausing twice to scribble bad words on the clipboard, and then climb back up onto the causeway and trudge to the car in a weary, bitter, very unhappy sheen of sweat. We try very hard to think positive thoughts, to come up with some small scrap of something that will make this whole hopeless trip seem like anything other than a complete waste of time. And finally, as we thread our way through the traffic at the end of the causeway, one tiny glimmer of optimism leaks through all the cranky sludge, and we sigh and accept it as the very best we can hope for:

At least there is now time for lunch.

I had a quick lunch alone in a restaurant on Calle Ocho, a new place that had opened so recently that the waitress was still polite. The food was good. I topped it off with a
cafecita
and then drove slowly and thoughtfully back to the office. I wondered where Patrick had gone. He knew he could not get to Jackie in daylight. If he was keeping the schedule I thought he was, this was his sleeping time, and he should have been lounging there in his tent in peaceful repose. Of course, it was possible that he had run out of buffalo jerky and gone to a convenience store to get more. But after all my preparation, and my endless dithering about doing it quickly and in daylight, it was oddly deflating to come away from the afternoon with nothing to show for it except a small spot on my shirt from some spilled black beans.

Now I would have to sit around for another hour with Robert and Renny and pretend to be mild and patient—and then I would still have to go down to the meeting with Cody’s teacher. That conference had seemed like a good idea when it was my excuse for slipping away, and my alibi. Now it began to seem like a great deal of dull niggling scut work, pointless and annoying posturing with an elementary school teacher, someone who could never understand Cody nor his difficulty in adjusting. The teacher would want to discuss ways to help Cody make a happy accommodation to his new grade, and strategies for success in fitting in, and the teacher could not hear the truth, would not believe it even if I spoke in plain one-syllable rhyming words accompanied by bright crayon-colored illustrations. No
teacher in any school in the Dade County public school system could ever understand the simple unvarnished truth.

Cody would never adjust, never be happy, and never fit in.

Cody was not, and never would be, a normal healthy boy who wanted to play ball and tease the girls. Cody wanted other things that the school system could never give him, and his only chance of being well adjusted was to learn how to get them, and how to pretend to be human, how to live by the Harry Code—and all those things he had to learn from another monster: me.

The things Cody wanted,
needed
, are frowned upon by the intolerant society in which we live, and we could never explain it, not any part of it, not at all. And so we would sit with the teacher and dither and dance and exchange fake smiles and grandiose clichés and pretend to feel hope for a bright and shiny future for a boy who would unstoppably grow into a Dark Legacy already written in blood instead of chalk. And thinking about how I must unavoidably avoid this truth with the teacher and instead spend forty-five minutes mouthing cheerful brainless New Age buzzwords with someone who Really Cared made me want to ram my car into the Buick filled with blue-haired ladies from Minnesota that chugged along on the road beside me.

But it was all part of maintaining my disguise as Proud Papa Dexter, and there was no way around it. At least I had the evening to look forward to after that: lollygagging on a chaise longue with Jackie and eating strawberries as the sun set. It would almost make the frustration and annoyance of the rest of the day worthwhile.

And I thought again of what it might be like if only I could live Jackie’s lifestyle full-time: no teacher conferences, no housepainting while standing in a mound of fire ants, no squalling and screeching and dirty diapers. Nothing but eternal vigilance in a bejeweled setting. It was a fantasy, of course, nothing more than a way to soothe the grumpy beast within after its day of disappointments. But it was a very good fantasy, and lingering inside it was good enough to put a very small smile on my face by the time I got back to my office.

The smile, as tiny as it was, lasted until I got almost to my chair, when I ran into Vince Masuoka, headed out at full speed as I was trying
to head in. We collided forcefully, and because I am larger than Vince, he bounced off me and into the doorframe.

“Ouch, my elbow!” he said, quickly straightening and rubbing his arm where it had banged against the frame. “Got another one!”

“Another elbow?” I said. “Big deal. Everyone has two.”

“Another body!” Vince said, straightening up and continuing his headlong rush out of the lab, pausing only to call over his shoulder, “The eye-fucker! He’s killed another girl!” Then he was gone down the hall, leaving me to stand at the door and stare after him and realize that I now knew what Patrick had been doing this afternoon instead of sleeping in his tent. And very oddly indeed, I really and truly wanted to go along and see what he had done.

I went on into the lab. Robert and Renny were both there, standing uncertainly together and looking as if they didn’t quite know what their characters would do when the eye-fucker struck again, and didn’t really want to hear anybody tell them.

I told them anyway. “Let’s go,” I said.

They both blinked at me like uncertain owls. “Go?” Robert said. Renny licked his lips.

“Crime scene,” I said. “Nothing like it for learning about crime scenes.”

They looked at each other like they were both hoping the other would come up with a really good way to suggest we go for coffee instead, but neither of them did, and so we followed Vince downstairs and out of the building.

T
HIS TIME THE BODY HAD BEEN LEFT IN A
D
UMPSTER ON THE
docks in Coconut Grove, near City Hall, just half a mile or so across the water from the Grove Isle Hotel, where I was staying with Jackie. I could see the high-rise profile of the hotel quite clearly as I got out of the car, standing tall above the painfully bright glare from the water.

The yellow perimeter tape was already up, with two uniformed cops in front of it, standing with that solid, meaty stance that cops everywhere seem to fall into instinctively when they put on the uniform. Even Deborah had stood like that back in the days when she wore the blue to work. Their eyes swiveled toward me, and I stepped forward, reaching for my ID.

“Yeah, hey, Dexter,” Renny said from behind me, and I turned to look at him. Robert hurried past us, headed for the two cops by the yellow tape. Like he had last time, he would stand there by the perimeter, joking with the cops, so he wouldn’t have to see the wonderful horror in the Dumpster. But this was Renny’s first dead body, as far as I knew, and he stood uncertainly, licking his lips and glancing longingly at Robert’s retreating back. “Robert says the last one was fucking sick,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “Robert didn’t really get a good look at it.”

“Ran his ass away screaming and hurling chunks, huh?” Renny said, just a ghost of a smile on his face.

“He didn’t actually scream,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” Renny said, looking once more at Robert, and then beyond him to the Dumpster. “Hey, seriously,” he said. “How bad is this gonna be?”

It may not be the very best character reference for me, but I was very eager to see whether this body was indeed the work of Bone-head Patrick, and if there was anything different about it, and I was growing annoyed listening to Renny’s dithering instead of peeking in at the surprise in the Dumpster. So reassurance was not uppermost on my mind. “Oh, it’s going to be very bad,” I said. “Come on; I’ll show you.”

He didn’t move. “Do I really got to look at this shit?” he said.

“Well,” I said, torn between my duty to shepherd Renny and my growing desire to see the waiting wonder, “you really should see what Vince does at a crime scene. I mean, that’s what your character does, right?”

Renny looked at the Dumpster out on the dock, and swallowed. “Yeah, okay,” he said. Then he gave me a hard look and I saw once more the small gleam of some interior Something flaring up. “But I throw up, you cleaning it up.” He took a deep breath, and then moved past me with determination in his pace and steel in his spine, and hopefully not too much in his stomach.

I followed behind Renny until he was ten feet from the Dumpster, and then he stopped dead. “I can see Vince fine from here,” he said.

There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing about it, so I slid past him and right up beside Vince Masuoka, who crouched in the shade of the Dumpster. “You’re just in time,” Vince said.

“For what?”

“Now the real fun starts,” he said. He jerked his head over to one side. I looked, and about forty feet away I saw Detective Anderson talking to a thin, white-haired man in khaki pants, a pale blue polo shirt, and boat shoes. Even from this distance, the white-haired man looked badly shaken.

“Anderson has a witness,” Vince said. “The old guy is off one of
the big sailboats. He saw somebody dump a rolled-up carpet in here and take off in a kayak.”

The kayak gave me pause; did Patrick have a new, Miami-flavored way to get around? Or was it possible that somebody else had done it this time? Feeling a small flutter of uncertainty and rising interest, I stepped past Vince and peeked inside, into the heart of the garbage.

The girl’s body lay on top of a chunk of dirty brown carpet, the kind of ratty, stained carpet you can see in the garbage in any residential area where someone is remodeling. It was partially unrolled, just enough to see the top half of a very bad time, and not enough to hide the other contents of the Dumpster.

It was almost all garbage—no paper or cardboard or plastic wrappings like the last time. This Dumpster was used by the people from the rows of large yachts at the nearby dock, and by anyone who used the fish-cleaning station nearby, and the smell rising up from inside was enough to kill small animals at ten paces. But it didn’t discourage the nearly solid cloud of flies that whirled around the heaps of moist, sloppy rotting leftovers. And, of course, it didn’t have any effect at all on the dead girl who perched naked on top of the putrid mound of decomposing gunk.

It looked like she’d had a very hard time of it. Like the previous victim, this one had been hacked, stabbed, bitten, and clawed with an undisciplined but frenzied abandon, a wild impatience that had left very few patches of visible skin unmarked by trauma.

The state of the blood around the wounds indicated that she had been alive for most of the cuts, gashes, and punches, an entire arsenal of attacks that left the corpse looking like she had spent a week at the Academy of Psychotic Assault.

Once again a large hank of golden hair had been ripped out by the roots, leaving a raw, dark red section of scalp exposed. Under that hair, so very like Jackie’s in color and cut, there was not much recognizable left of the face that wasn’t slashed by fingernails, teeth, and knife blade, but something about the profile tugged at my memory for a second, before I shrugged it off. Of course she looked familiar—she looked like Jackie, just as all the other victims did. That was the whole point of it for Patrick.

I looked a moment longer, but saw nothing helpful, so I stepped back and looked down at Vince.

“Did you find anything?” I asked him, without too much hope—and truthfully, without too much interest, either. I knew who had done it, and I couldn’t be more certain even if Patrick Bergmann had signed his work.

“Just this,” Vince said. He held up a small plastic evidence bag. Inside I could see the outline of what looked like a small bar of soap, the kind of small soap bar hotels leave in the bathrooms for their guests. “You don’t want to know where I found it,” he added happily. I leaned in for a closer look, and through the plastic I could make out the crest and the words “Grove Isle Hotel and Spa” in ornate script.

Vince shook it playfully. “Maybe it’ll help Anderson figure out who the victim is this time,” he said.

I opened my mouth to say that it didn’t seem likely, that Anderson wouldn’t figure it out if he had notarized statements from the killer and the victim, and then I closed my mouth and took a step back and didn’t say anything at all.

Because I knew who she was. I remembered why she looked familiar, and it was not because she looked like Jackie. It was because I had seen her, standing in a hallway and blushing, smiling, pleased with being so very near to her real-life hero, Jackie Forrest.

I rattled the handles of my memory bank and came up with it: Her name was Amila, and she was the maid at the Grove Isle Hotel who had come to clean up the mess on the floor of our suite, and told me she styled her hair to look like Jackie Forrest’s hair, and it got her killed.…

Some small shady something tickled my spine, just a tiny breeze of unease, telling me that someone was watching, and I turned away from the Dumpster and looked, out beyond the pier with its two rows of boats, and into the painfully bright glare of the bay.

Less than fifty yards away, straight out from the end of the dock, a small yellow dot bobbed on the light chop. A paddle rose as I watched, and dipped down to make two small strokes to keep the nose pointed in at us: a double-headed kayak paddle.

Behind the kayak, as if to underline this heavy-handed hint, the
Grove Isle Hotel towered up into the bright afternoon sky: the hotel where Jackie and I stayed. The hotel where Amila had worked until Patrick ended her career.