Dexter's Final Cut (6 page)

Because we had arrived at the Dumpster so late in the day, after lunch, it was well past quitting time when we finally wrapped it up at the scene. I packed up my samples, grabbed my bag, and turned to go. Chase was standing at the yellow perimeter tape, chatting with a couple of uniformed officers. He was apparently no longer fighting to hold down his lunch; in fact, he seemed to be in the middle of some spellbinding narration, and the officers were following his every word with awestruck interest. Not really wanting to interrupt such a chummy little scene, I gave them a wide berth.

But Chase appeared at my elbow the moment I was under the tape. “What did you find?” he asked me. “Is it a serial killer?”

To be honest, I was getting a little bit annoyed at his obsession with serial killers. Why does everyone assume that Miami is overrun with serial killers? Besides, Robert made them sound like oddities, freaks, some kind of savage, ravening, subhuman beast, and as I could have told him, they really aren’t. They’re perfectly normal. I mean, most of the time.

But honesty is not always the best policy, no matter what the Boy Scouts may tell you. So I just shook my head at his inane question. “Too soon to tell,” I said.

He stayed with me all the way back to headquarters, asking questions that could easily have been answered directly if only he had watched me work: what had I done at the scene, what had I found, what kind of samples did I take, why did I want that, what would I do with it, what happened next. It was all extremely annoying and I couldn’t help thinking that Jackie Forrest would almost certainly
have asked more intelligent questions—and looked a great deal better asking them, too.

Chase stayed with me all the way up to the lab, and watched as I hurried through the routine of logging in the samples I had brought from the crime scene. I was hungry, and his questions made things take longer than they should have, since I had to explain every single step of the process. At least he had heard of chain of evidence, which saved a few minutes. But when I finally finished and was ready to hustle down to my car and away into the weekend, he stopped me one last time.

“So that’s it, right?” he said. “I mean, Friday night. The weekend. So, um, nothing happens with all this until Monday morning?”

“That’s right,” I said, maintaining a wonderful balance between answering politely and edging for the door.

“So, okay,” he said. “So then, what. You, uh—you just, um …” He looked away, and then whipped his head back to me abruptly enough to startle me. “What do you do with your weekends?”

I really wanted to say that I looked for people like him and made them go away into neat bundles, carefully packed into heavy-duty garbage bags. But I realized that it was probably not the most politically correct answer. “I’m married,” I said. “I spend time with my wife and kids.”

“Married,” he said, as if I had told him I was an astronaut. “So, what, you take the kids to the park? Playdates with other children, that kind of thing? How old are your kids?”

Deep inside, very deep, in the snuggest, darkest corner of Fort Dexter, I heard a very small and leathery sound, a mere throat clearing, not even a rustle of wings—but definitely a sign that the Passenger had perked up ever so slightly for some reason, not as if there was any danger to me, not at all, but instead … what? Something.

I looked at Chase, hoping for some kind of clue about what might have tripped the Passenger’s almost-alarm. But he just stared back, and I felt no menace of any kind from him, even though he was looking at me just as intensely as he had when asking about forensic procedure. “Is this about your character?” I asked him.

He licked his lips and looked away. “No, I— Sorry. I didn’t mean
to pry. I just, you know.” He shrugged and put his hands in his pockets. “I, um. I never got married. Came close once, but …” He took his hands out again and made a helpless gesture. “I don’t know. I never had kids, and I always wondered, you know. If I could have done it, been a father.” He looked up at me and quickly added, “I mean, not the physical—the biological part, because you know. Never any problem there.” He flashed me a quick, odd smile, then looked away and took a deep breath. “Just, the other stuff. Everyday things, like teaching her to ride a bicycle, and putting a Band-Aid on her knee, and, you know. The stuff you do all the time.” And he looked at me with that expression again, the one that said he wanted something but had no idea how to get it.

And once again I felt a small and hesitant murmur from the Basement, and once again I had no clue why. Chase was certainly not threatening me in any way—and the murmur from the Passenger had not indicated an immediate threat, just some kind of vague discomfort. But why?

So I looked at Robert and thought about what he had said. It was not dark and threatening, but it was slightly off in some way I could not pin down. If he truly liked kids, why not have a few? And if he was unsure, he could afford to rent half a dozen to try it out.

But I had no answer, and I got none from Chase, who had turned away and looked like he’d forgotten there was anybody else in the room with him. He was staring into the distance, slumped into his own thoughts and cocking his head as if he heard some faint music playing somewhere. He took a long ragged breath, and then abruptly jerked upright again and looked back to me, startled. He shook himself. “Anyway,” he said brightly. “You have a great weekend. With your wife … and kids.” He slapped me on the shoulder, squeezing just for a second, and then he strode away, out the door and downstairs into the lonely Miami night.

I thought about Chase and his odd performance all the way down to my car. There was clearly a little bit more to the man than I had suspected, a depth of feeling that he kept well hidden behind his everyday mask of self-involved inanity. Or his several masks, since he certainly hid all kinds of things about himself, like why he disliked Jackie so much. Probably all part of being a Leading Man. He would
have to hide everything that didn’t fit perfectly with his macho-but-sensitive public image. So he couldn’t let anyone know it if he liked fluffy little white dogs, or liked to read romance novels. If the public learned about it, that sort of thing could cost him his career. They might think he was a sissy, or worse—even a Liberal! It wouldn’t do.

But in all truth, it didn’t matter, not even a little bit. It was just one more of the dozens of dopey contradictions making up the many-sided mess that was humanity, and all things considered, it was much less interesting than thinking about what Rita might have cooked for dinner.

I started my car and put Chase out of my mind as I nosed out into the merry brutality of Friday-night traffic in Miami.

B
ECAUSE
I
HAD STAYED SO LATE AT THE CRIME SCENE
, dinnertime had come and gone when I finally got home. The foyer inside the front door was crowded with three tall stacks of cardboard boxes that hadn’t been there that morning, and I had to hunch in beside them to close the door. Rita and I had recently taken advantage of the collapsed real estate market and bought a foreclosed house, larger than our current one, and equipped with a swimming pool. We had all worked ourselves up into an absolute lather at the thought of our palatial new house, with more room for all, and our very own pool, and even a brick barbecue in the back. And then—we waited.

The local office of the bank gave us a number to call. We called the number, and our calls were shunted away to an office in Iowa, where we were offered a complicated recorded menu, put on hold, and then disconnected. We called back, trying all the selections on the menu, one after another, until we finally reached a nonrecorded human voice, which told us they couldn’t help, we had to go through the local office, and hung up.

We went back to the local office, who explained that their bank had just been bought out by a larger bank, and now that the merger was complete everything would be quick and simple.

We called the home office of the new bank, where we were offered a complicated recorded menu, put on hold, and then disconnected.

Those who know me best will tell you I am a mild and patient man, but there were more than a few moments in our epic struggle with our nation’s great financial system when I was sorely tempted to pack a few rolls of duct tape and a fillet knife into a small bag and solve our communication problem in a more direct way. But happily for all, after eighteen encounters with different Assistant Vice Presidents for Repeating Annoying Redundancy, Rita stepped in and took over. She had spent her career in the world of big-dollar bureaucracy, and she knew how Things worked. She finally found the right person, called the right number, filed the correct form, got it to the correct office, and the paperwork entered the system at last.

And then we waited.

Several more months went by while the bank busily lost the papers and forgot to file forms, and then sent us threatening letters demanding outrageous fees for all kinds of things we had never done and never even heard of. But miraculously enough, Rita was persistent and firm and the bank finally ran through its entire arsenal of reptilian bureaucratic blunders, and reluctantly allowed us to close on our new house.

Moving day was now approaching rapidly, only two weeks away, and with her customary savage efficiency Rita had been spending every free moment stuffing things into cardboard boxes, taping them shut, labeling them with Magic Markers—a different color for each room in our new house—and stacking them in well-ordered piles.

But as I squirmed past the boxes and into the living room, where Lily Anne was sound asleep in her playpen, I discovered that tonight Rita had done a great deal more than simply fill boxes; one quick sniff was enough to fill my nostrils with the lingering aroma of roast pork, one of Rita’s signature dishes. There would almost certainly be a plate of leftovers waiting for me, and at the thought of it my mouth began to water. So I hurried through the living room and into the kitchen.

Rita stood at the sink, pale blue rubber gloves pulled up onto both hands as she scrubbed the roasting pan. Astor slumped beside her, drying dinner plates with a sulky expression on her face. Rita looked up and frowned. “Oh, Dexter,” she said. “You’re finally home?”

“I think so,” I said. “My car is out front.”

“You didn’t call,” she said. “I didn’t know if— Astor, for God’s sake, can’t you go a little faster? And so I didn’t know when you’d be home,” she finished, looking at me accusingly.

It was true. I hadn’t called, mostly because I forgot. I had been so distracted by Chase, and Jackie, and thinking about the dreadful, fascinating mess in the Dumpster, that it just slipped my mind. I suppose I took it for granted that Rita would know I was coming and save me some dinner.

But from the way she was looking at me now, I began to think that perhaps that had been a mistake. Human relationships, especially the whole Being Married Thing, were foreign territory for me. It was clear I should have called to say I would be late—but could the consequences really be this calamitous? Was it really possible that there was no plate with Dexter’s name on it, filled with succulent roast pork and who knows what other wonderful things? A fate far worse than death—at least, worse than someone else’s death.

“We had a really bad one today,” I said. “We got the call late in the day, after lunch.”

“Well,” Rita said, “I do need to know when you’re coming home. That’s enough, Astor. Tell Cody to take his bath.”

“I want a bath, too,” Astor snarled.

“You take forever,” Rita said. “Cody will be in and out in ten minutes and then you can take all the time you want.”

“With his gross germs all over the tub!” Astor said.

Rita raised an arm and pointed. “Go,” she said sternly.

“I’m sorry,” I told Rita, as Astor stalked past me, looking like Miss Preteen Rage of 2013. “Um, we just got really, uh, tied up, and— So, is there any roast pork left?”

“It’s practically bedtime,” Rita said, slapping the roasting pan into the dish drainer. “And we were supposed to watch that new penguin movie tonight, remember?”

As she mentioned it, I did, in fact, remember that we had talked about having some quality family time, watching a DVD together. Normally, I would have accepted it as one of those annoying tasks that I simply have to perform in order to maintain the polite fiction
of my disguise: Daddy Dexter, Pillar of Family Life. But under the circumstance, it seemed to me that Rita was avoiding the only subject of any real interest—was there, in fact, some roast pork left?

“I am sorry,” I said. “If it’s too late, maybe we could, um … Is there? Some pork left for me?”

“Pork?” Rita said. “That isn’t— Oh, of course there’s some pork. I wouldn’t let— It’s in the fridge. But, Dexter, really, you have to be a little more …” She fluttered one hand, and then began to pull off the rubber gloves. “I’ll heat it up for you. But Cody has been wanting to—I suppose we can see the movie tomorrow night, but still …”

She hustled over to the refrigerator and started taking out the leftovers, and a great sense of relief washed over me. In fact, as the microwave began to heat my dinner and reignite the wonderful aroma, I actually felt smug. After all, I was getting an excellent dinner without having to watch another animated movie about penguins. Life was good.

It was even better when I finally sat at the kitchen table with my plate and began to ply my fork. There were fried
plátanos
as well as roast pork, and tortellini in a garlic sauce, instead of the more traditional rice and beans. But I lost no time bemoaning the fall of an institution. I set to with a will, and in only a few happy minutes I was sated, and already sliding into the dopey half-asleep state that follows when you add a good meal to a clean conscience. Somehow, I managed to make it onto my feet and stagger to the couch, where I sloshed onto the cushions and began to digest my meal and think profound Friday-night thoughts.

Because I was in such a deep state of contentment, I pushed away all the nagging disagreeable trivia of the week and concentrated on more pleasant things. I thought about the body in the Dumpster, and it occurred to me that a Dumpster was an odd place to dump a body that had been so thoroughly and distinctively whittled away—especially a Dumpster right there on the edge of the campus, a few blocks from the busiest part of downtown Miami. As I know very well, it is incredibly easy to put a body where it will never be found—especially here in the tropical splendor that I call home. Practically right outside my front door was a delightful aquatic graveyard that
was nearly bottomless. And then there was the Everglades, with its lovely gator holes, and the scrublands so full of sinkholes—South Florida was truly a corpse disposer’s Paradise.