Double Dexter

by Jeff Lindsay

  I really couldn’t help myself, and I blurted out, “That’s wonderful!”

  “Sure,” Deborah said, a little sour. She continued her silent funk for a few more seconds and then shook herself out of it. “What the hell,” she said.

  “What happens back home?” I said. “Am I still a person of interest to the investigation?”

  Deborah shrugged. “Officially you are,” she said. “But Laredo has taken over the case, and he’s not a dope. You’ll probably be back at work in a few days.” She looked at me. It was a hard look, and there was clearly something on her mind, but whatever it was she didn’t say it. She just looked, and then finally turned away to stare at the front door. “If only,” she said, “there was …” She hesitated, cleared her throat, and went on slowly. “… just a little bit of evidence, so … Then you’d be home free.” A fat man in plaid shorts came in the front door, followed by two small blond girls. Deborah seemed to find them interesting.

  “What kind of evidence, Debs?” I said.

  She shrugged and watched the fat man. “Ah, I dunno,” she said. “Maybe something that showed that Hood was bent. You know. So we can see he was not clean, not really a good cop. And maybe why he tried to put it on you.”

  The fat man and his entourage disappeared down the hall, and Deborah looked at the cast on her broken arm where it lay in her lap. “If we could find something like that,” she said, “and keep your name out of the thing in the Tortugas, who knows.” She looked up at me at last, with a small, very strange smile. “We just might get away with it.”

  Perhaps there really is some kindly, doting Demigod of Darkness that watches over the truly wicked, because we actually did get away with it—at least the first part. The Thing in the Tortugas caused a little fuss in the press, and there was some mention of the anonymous hero who had saved the old man’s life. But nobody actually knew the hero’s name, and witnesses’ descriptions of him were so vague they could have been six different randomly selected strangers. It was too bad, because it turned out that the old man really was important, and he owned several TV stations and quite a few state legislators.

  There was some confusion about what had happened to the very bad man who had attacked the old guy. The woman who lost her bikini gave a good description of Crowley, and it matched up with what the Key West cops had, so it was clear that this terrible felon had killed a Miami cop and then tried to steal a boat and flee, probably to Cuba. Whether he had ended up in Havana or someplace else was not clear, but he was gone. He was listed as officially missing, wanted, and he went onto a few assorted lists. But no one really missed the missing person, and these are hard times, with dwindling budgets, so there was not a great deal of money and effort spent trying to find him. He was gone, nobody cared, and The Thing in the Tortugas was soon pushed out of the news by a triple nude decapitation involving a middle-aged man who had once been a child star on TV.

  We really were getting away with it. If only one last small miracle could somehow discredit Hood, my coworkers would welcome me back to work with open arms and joyous smiles, and life would return to its wondrous banal predictable everyday boring bliss. And the day after I returned from Key West, Deborah called to inform me that a forensics team would be going to Hood’s house the next morning. We just had to hope that something helpful might turn up.

  And it might. It very well might. It might be something so very helpful that the entire case would vanish in a puff of malodorous smoke, and Dexter would go from a shabby felon slinking out of his office, to a real live martyr, a victim of gross injustice and wicked defamation of character.

  But was it really possible that something like that might turn up?

  Oh, yes, quite possibly it might. In fact, it might be a great deal of Something Like That, things that might be so very damning that they cast doubt not just on the case against me, but on Detective Hood himself, and his right to wear Our Proud Uniform, and to walk among the Just, so absolutely damning that the department would want the whole thing to disappear quickly and quietly, rather than risk a huge and stinking blemish on its proud reputation.

  In fact, it might be that the forensics team will come into the vile, smelly little hovel where Hood had lived, and stare around in disgusted wonder at the heaps of garbage, dirty dishes, filthy discarded clothing, and they will marvel that a human being could actually live like this. Because the place just might be a truly nauseating mess—why, I can almost picture what it might look like.

  And I can almost picture my coworkers’ disgust as it turns slowly to shock, and then grim but total condemnation as they find kiddie porn on the hard drive of Hood’s computer—I mean, they might find it, along with a series of torrid love notes written to Camilla Figg and her reply that she never wanted to see him again because of his sick thing about children, and anyway his breath was so horrible. It would be easy to conclude that Hood had killed her out of rage at the breakup and then tried to cover his ass by pinning it on poor guiltless Dexter—especially since he found all her pictures of me, and these hypothetical notes might reveal that he had never liked me anyway.

  And at some point in this remarkable train ride into Hood’s inarguable guilt and shame, someone could very well pause and say, “But isn’t this all just a little too perfect? Isn’t there almost too much evidence against Detective Hood, who is no longer here to defend himself? Why, it’s almost as if somebody snuck into this foul shanty and planted fabricated evidence, isn’t it?”

  But this pause will be a short one, and it will end with a disapproving shake of the head and a return to belief in the evidence, because it’s all there, right before their eyes, and the thought that someone might have planted it is too wacky for words. After all, who would ever do such a thing? And even more, who could do it? Might there really be one person who has the amazing combination of talents, cunning, and moral emptiness to pull off such a complete destruction of Detective Hood’s posthumous character? Was there really one person who might know enough about the case to manufacture just the right evidence, and have enough knowledge of police procedure to make it airtight? Who?

  And Who might slide through the night like a darker part of the shadows and slither unseen into Hood’s house to plant it? And once inside, Who might have the computer know-how to take all this evidence off a flash drive—for example—and put it onto Hood’s little computer in such a way that it is utterly convincing? And Who, on top of all that, might do all this not merely so well but with such a truly clever, original, naughty sense of humor?

  Is there really any Who anywhere who might be that good at all these dark and different things—and more important, wicked enough to do them? In all the world, might there possibly be anybody so wonderfully just like that?

  Yes.

  There might be.

  But only one.