Double Dexter (27 page)

Until now—clearly she had gone off the tracks for some reason, and I had the unpleasant idea that I was supposed to deal with it in some way. Should I stage an intervention? Force her to go to an AA meeting? Threaten to divorce her and make her keep the kids? This was all foreign turf to me, ideas that were in the syllabus for Advanced Marriage, a postgraduate course in the area of human studies, and I knew almost nothing about it.

But whatever the answer might be, I was not going to figure it out tonight. After the long workday, dealing with Shadowblog and whimpering coworkers and Detective Knucklehead, I was bone-tired. A thick and stupid cloud of fatigue had spread over my brain and I had to sleep before I did anything else.

I rolled Rita’s limp body over to her side of the bed and climbed under the sheet. I needed sleep, as much as possible, and right now, and almost as soon as my head hit the pillow I was unconscious.

The alarm woke me up at seven, and as I slapped it off, I had the entirely unreasonable feeling that everything was going to be all right. I had gone to bed with the worry bin full: Rita and Shadowblog and Camilla Figg—and during the night something had come along and swept away all my fretting. Yes, there were problems. But I would deal with them; I always had before, and I would this time. It was entirely illogical, I know, but I was filled with relaxed confidence instead of the bone-tired anxiety of last night. I have no idea why the change had happened; maybe it was the effect of deep and dreamless sleep. In any case, I woke up into a world where unreasonable optimism seemed like common sense. I am not saying I heard birds
singing in the golden sunlight of a perfect dawn, but I did smell coffee and bacon coming from the kitchen, which was a far better thing than any singing bird I have ever heard. I showered and dressed, and when I got to the kitchen table there was a plate of sunny-side-up eggs waiting for me, with three crisp strips of bacon on the side, and a mug of hot and strong coffee on the table next to it.

“You were out awfully late,” Rita said as she cracked an egg into the skillet. For some reason, it sounded almost like she was accusing me of something, but since that made no sense, I decided it was just the residual effect of too much wine.

“Camilla Figg was killed last night,” I said. “The woman I work with?”

Rita turned from the stove, spatula in her hand, and looked at me. “So you were
working
?” she said, and once again that too-much-wine-last-night edge was in her voice.

“Yes,” I said. “They didn’t find her until late in the day.”

She watched me for a few seconds, and then finally shook her head. “That would explain it, wouldn’t it,” she said, but she kept looking at me as if it didn’t explain anything.

It made me a bit uneasy; why was she staring like that? I glanced down to make sure I was wearing pants, and I was. When I looked up again, she was still staring.

“Is something wrong?” I said.

Rita shook her head. “Wrong?” she said. She rolled her eyes toward the ceiling. “Is something
wrong
, he wants to know?” She looked at me with her hands on her hips and tapped one toe impatiently. “Why don’t
you
tell
me
if something’s wrong, Dexter?”

I looked back at her with surprise. “Um,” I said, wondering what the right answer was, “as far as I know, nothing is wrong. I mean, nothing out of the ordinary …?” It seemed like a sadly inadequate answer, even to me, and Rita clearly agreed.

“Oh, good, nothing’s wrong,” she said. And she just kept looking at me, raising one eyebrow and tapping her toe like she was expecting more, even though what I had already said was so very feeble.

I glanced behind her to the stove; smoke was rising from the pan, where fragrant steam should have been. “Um, Rita?” I said carefully. “I think something’s burning?”

She blinked at me, and then, as she understood what I had said, she whipped around to the stove. “Oh, shit, look at that,” she said, leaping forward with the spatula raised. “No, shit, look at the
time,
” she added in a voice that was rising with what must have been frustration. “Damn it, why can’t it— There’s just never any— Cody? Astor? Come get your breakfast! Now!” She scraped two eggs out of the pan, threw in a pat of butter, and broke two more eggs into the pan in a series of motions so rapid that it seemed like one move. “Kids? Now! Come on!” she said. She glanced at me again—and then hesitated for just a moment, looking down at me. “I just— We need to …” She shook her head, as if she couldn’t think what the words might be in English. “I didn’t hear you come in last night,” she said, the end of the sentence trickling off weakly.

And I might have said that last night she wouldn’t have heard the Queen’s Own Highland Regiment marching through the house with bagpipes skirling, but I had no idea what she wanted me to say, and why ruin a lovely morning trying to find out? Besides, my mouth was full of egg yolk, and it would have been rude to talk through the food. So I just smiled and made a dismissive sound and ate my breakfast. She looked at me expectantly for a moment more, but then Cody and Astor trudged in, and Rita turned away to hurry their breakfast onto the table. The morning went on in its perfectly normal way, and I was once more feeling the feebleminded glimmer of unfounded hope I woke up with as I drove in to work through the crawling traffic.

Even in the early morning, Miami traffic has an edge to it that you don’t find in other cities. Miami drivers seem to wake up faster and meaner than others. Maybe it’s because the bright and relentless sunlight makes everyone realize that they could be out fishing, or at the beach, instead of crawling along the highway to a boring, soul-crushing, dead-end job that doesn’t pay them anything near what they are really worth. Or maybe it’s just the added jolt we get from our extra-strong Miami coffee.

Whatever the reason, I have never seen a morning drive without a full edge of homicidal mania, and this morning was no exception. People honked, yelled threats, and waved middle fingers, and at the interchange for the Palmetto Expressway an old Buick had
rear-ended a new BMW. A fistfight had broken out on the shoulder, and everyone else slowed down to watch, or to shout at the fighters, and it took an extra ten minutes for me to get past the mess and in to work. That was just as well, considering what was waiting for me when I got there.

Since I was still feeling stupidly bright and chipper, I did not stop for a cup of the lethal coffee that might, after all, kill the buzz—or even me. Instead I went directly to my desk, where I found Deborah waiting for me, slumped into my chair and looking like the poster girl for the National Brooding Outrage Foundation. Her left arm was still in a sling, but her cast had lost its clean and bright patina, and she had leaned it against my desk blotter and knocked over my pencil holder. But nobody is perfect, and it was such a happy morning, so I let it go.

“Good morning, sis,” I said cheerfully, which seemed to offend her more than it should have. She made a face and shook her head dismissively, as if the goodness or badness of the morning was irritating and irrelevant.

“What happened last night?” she said, in a voice that was harsher than usual. “Was it the same as the others?”

“You mean Camilla Figg?” I said, and now she very nearly snarled.

“What the fuck else would I mean?” she said. “Goddamn it, Dex, I need to know—was it the same?”

I sat down in the folding chair opposite my desk, which I thought was quite noble of me, considering that Debs was in my very own chair and this other one was not terribly comfortable. “I don’t think so,” I said, and Deborah hissed out a very long breath.

“
Fuck
it; I
knew
it,” she said, and she straightened up and looked at me with an eager gleam in her eye. “What’s different?”

I raised a hand to slow her down. “It’s nothing really compelling,” I said. “At least, Detective Hood didn’t think so.”

“That stupid asshole couldn’t find the floor using both feet,” she snapped. “What did you get?”

“Well,” I said, “just that the skin was broken in two places. So there was some blood at the scene. Uh, the body wasn’t arranged quite right, either.” She looked at me expectantly, so I said, “The, um, I think the trauma wounds were different.”

“Different how?” she said.

“I think they were made with something else,” I said. “Like, not a hammer.”

“With what,” she said. “With a golf club? A Buick? What?”

“I couldn’t tell,” I said. “But probably something with a round surface. Maybe …” I hesitated for a half-second; even saying it out loud made me feel like I was being paranoid. But Debs was looking at me with an expression of eagerness-ready-to-turn-cranky, so I said it. “Maybe a baseball bat.”

“Okay,” she said, and she kept that same expression focused on me.

“Um, the body wasn’t really arranged the same,” I said. Deborah kept staring, and when I didn’t say anything else she frowned. “That’s it?” she said.

“Almost,” I said. “We’ll have to wait for the autopsy, to be sure, but one of the wounds was on her head, and I think Camilla was unconscious or even dead when the wounds were made.”

“That doesn’t mean shit,” she said.

“Deborah, there was no blood at all with the others. And the first two times the killer was incredibly careful to keep them awake the whole time—he never even broke the skin.”

“You’ll never sell that to the captain,” she said. “The whole fucking department wants my head on a stick, and if I can’t prove I got the right guy locked up, he’s going to give it to them.”

“I can’t
prove
anything,” I said. “But I know I’m right.” She cocked her head to one side and looked at me quizzically. “One of your
voices
?” she said carefully. “Can you make it tell you anything more?”

When Deborah had finally found out what I really am, I had tried to explain the Dark Passenger to her. I had told her that the many times I’d had “hunches” about a killer were actually hints from a kindred spirit inside me. Apparently I’d made a clumsy mess of it, because she still seemed to think I went into some kind of trance and chatted long-distance with somebody in the Great Beyond.

“It’s not really like a Ouija board,” I said.

“I don’t care if it’s talking tea leaves,” she said. “Get it to tell us something I can use.”

Before I could open my mouth and let out the cranky comeback
that was lurking there, a massive foot clomped at the doorway, and a large dark shadow fell over the shreds of my pleasant morning. I looked around, and there, in person, was the end of all happy thoughts.

Detective Hood leaned against the doorframe and gave us his very best mean smile. “Looka this,” he said. “Wall-to-wall loser.”

“Looka that,” Debs snapped back at him. “Talking asshole.”

Hood didn’t seem terribly hurt. “Asshole in charge to you, darling,” he said. “Asshole who will find the
real
cop killer, instead of fucking around on
Good Morning America
.”

Deborah blushed; it was a very unfair remark, but it hit home anyway. To her very great credit, though, she came right back with a zinger of her own. “You couldn’t find your own dick with a search party,” she said.

“And it would be a pretty small party anyway,” I added cheerfully; after all, family has to stick together.

Hood glared at me, and his smile got bigger and meaner. “You,” he said, “are off this thing altogether as of right now. Just like your Hollywood sister.”

“Really,” I said. “Because I can prove you’re wrong?”

“Nope,” he said. “Because you are now”—Hood paused to taste the words, and then let them out in a slow, obviously delicious trickle—“a person of interest to the investigation.”

I had been all set to whip another witty and stinging remark at him, no matter what he said, but this took me totally by surprise. “Person of interest” was police code for, “We think you’re guilty and we’re going to prove it.” And as I stared at him in numb horror I realized that there was no clever response to being told that you’re under investigation for murder—especially when you didn’t even get to commit one first. I felt my mouth open and close a couple of times in what must have looked like a really good imitation of a grouper pulled up out of deep water, but no sound came out. Luckily, Deborah jumped right in for me.

“What kind of brain-dead bullshit are you pulling, Richard?” she said. “You can’t chase him for this just because he knows you’re a moron.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. “I have a really
good
reason.”
And as he spoke you would have thought he was the happiest man in the world—until you saw the next man who came into my office.

And that next man came in like he’d been waiting his whole life for just the right cue line to his dramatic entrance. I heard a stiff and rhythmic clumping in the hall as Hood’s last two words still hung in the air, and then the
real
happiest man in the world came in.

I say “man,” but in truth it was really no more than three-fourths of a flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens. The prosthetic clatter of his steps revealed that the living feet were gone, and twin metal pincers gleamed where his hands should have been. But the teeth were still human, and every single one of them was showing as he stumped in and gave a large manila envelope to Hood.

“Thanks,” Hood said, and Sergeant Doakes just nodded and kept his eyes fixed on me, his supernaturally happy smile stretching across his face and filling me with dread.

“What the fuck is this?” Deborah said, but Hood just shook his head and opened the envelope. He pulled out what looked like an eight-by-ten glossy picture and twirled it onto my desk.

“Can you tell me what this is?” he said to me.

I reached over and picked up the photo. I did not recognize it, but as I looked at it I had a brief and unsettling moment of feeling that I had lost my mind as I thought,
But that looks like me!
And then I took a steadying breath, looked again, and thought,
It
is
me!
Which made absolutely no sense, no matter how reassuring it was.