by Jeff Lindsay
She did not move. She would never move again. Her face was pale and set in an expression of weary terror, and she looked up at me with clouded eyes that did not blink and did not see and would never blink or weep or see anything ever again.
Beautiful violet eyes.
THIRTY-TWO
I don’t know how long I stood there looking down at Jackie’s lifeless body. It seemed like forever. I had no reason for it; staring down at the mess she had turned into wouldn’t bring her back, wouldn’t even roll the awful sticky red blood back inside her. And it didn’t help me like her being dead any better, either.
I am no stranger to death. It has been my whole life for many years, and I know what it looks like, smells like, and sounds like-but for the very first time I thought I knew what it felt like, too, because it was her, Jackie. And suddenly Death was something new, wrong, evil and intractable. It had no right to roll over Jackie and suck her dry and leave me here without her. It did not belong on her; Death did not fit Jackie, not someone so very much alive and beautiful and full of wonderful plans for me. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. It shouldn’t be.
But it was. She was dead and there was no going back from it. Death had breathed its ugly gray film over those violet eyes and it seemed like a very final and painful thing all of a sudden, in a way it never had before.
I am not sentimental, not at all-I believe sentiment requires some trace of humanity-but Feelings surged through me that had no place inside a Thing like me. I watched them go by in their lunatic haste: regret, anger, even guilt, a bitter sense of lost opportunity, and anger again. Feelings rippled out of the Dark Basement and up the cold stone stairs of Castle Dexter, squealing with contempt and sliding up the banister, screeching through the halls and ripping down the tapestries.
And then the feelings were gone, and they had left behind the final, most lasting feeling of all:
Emptiness.
It was done. It was over. The dream was dead, cold and bloodless as the pitiful lump of meat at my feet. Jackie was gone-but Dexter must move on somehow, move away from the magical future that had been dangling there in front of him and back into the painful squalor that had been his life before all this had swept him away into a world of bright and glittering hope-a hope that had turned out to be as solid and real as a piece of TV scenery.
I turned away from Jackie’s body and went back to stand by the front door. I knew what I had to do now. It would not be much fun, but I would get used to that again. Fun was gone forever from Dexter’s world.
I took out my phone and called Deborah. She didn’t answer, letting the call go right to voice mail. I disconnected and called again. Still nothing. I tried a third time, and finally, she answered.
“What,” she said, in a voice so flat and dead it might have been Jackie’s.
“Can you find Jackie’s trailer?” I said.
Silence; then finally, she said, “Yes.”
“Find it now,” I said. “Quickly.” And I hung up.
I was certain that whatever it was that lay there between us, it would not stop Deborah from coming. She is not stupid, and she would know that I would not call her lightly at this point.
And sure enough, inside of four minutes I heard her feet on the steps outside, and then the trailer’s door swung open and she was standing there, frowning into the relative darkness of the interior. “What is it,” she said in that same expressionless voice.
I stepped back from the door and pointed toward the bedroom. “In there,” I said. She shook her head once, still frowning, and then came inside and looked past me to where Jackie lay sprawled in her untidy heap.
Deborah froze for a second; then she hissed, “Fuck,” and strode quickly in to the body. She squatted down beside it and reached her hand halfway toward Jackie’s neck, and then pulled it back again as she realized there was no need to feel for a pulse. She sat there on her heels for several long seconds before she finally stood up, looked down at the body again, and then came back to me.
“What happened,” she said, and there was cold rage in her voice. “Did she try to break up with you?”
For a moment I just blinked at her stupidly, with no idea what she meant, and then I understood. “I didn’t do it, Debs,” I said.
“I’m not going to cover this up, Dexter,” she went on, as if she hadn’t heard me. “I can’t help you, and I wouldn’t even if I could.”
“Deborah, it wasn’t me. I didn’t do it.”
I guess she heard me this time, but she still didn’t believe me. She cocked her head to one side and glared at me with cold unblinking eyes, like a bird of prey deciding whether to strike. “Who did?” she said.
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
“Uh-huh. Where were you?”
“I wasn’t here,” I said. “Rita called me-Astor ran away, and I went home to look for her.”
Deborah curled her lip. “Home,” she said, with heavy irony.
I ignored it. “Astor came here, to be on location, and I came to ask if Jackie had seen her, and …” For no good reason, I looked back to where Jackie’s body lay. “And there she was,” I finished, rather lamely.
Deborah was silent, and I watched her. She was still staring at me with unblinking frostiness, but at least she hadn’t reached for her cuffs yet. “Where is she now?” she said at last.
I looked at her, wondering whether she had lost her mind. “Deborah, she’s right there,” I said, nodding toward the body. “She’s not going anywhere.”
“Astor,” she said through her teeth. “Where is Astor?”
“Oh,” I said, oddly relieved. “I don’t know. With Robert somewhere.”
Deborah looked at Jackie’s body again, then shook her head. “You left her here alone,” she said. “And he got her.”
“What?” I said, filled with righteous indignation and certainty. “It wasn’t Patrick. The stalker-it couldn’t be!”
She looked back at me. “Why not?”
And she had me there, of course. If we were still enjoying our old bonhomie, I might have told her why not, explained that Patrick the stalker was no more. But as things stood between us now, I did not think I could explain away one death by confessing to another. So I did what Dexter does and temporized. “It doesn’t look like the way he works,” I said carefully. “And, you know. Both eyes are still there.”
“Uh-huh,” she said, just the way I’d heard her say it many times before when she was trying to get a suspect to keep talking. And for some reason, it worked on me.
“And anyway,” I babbled, “how could he get in here? There’s cops all around the perimeter, all over the place. Nobody could get past them.”
“Nobody who didn’t belong here,” she amended.
“Yes, of course.”
“Like, for instance, an extra? Maybe an extra who was also her boyfriend?” And she put an awful lot of venom into that word.
“All right, Deborah,” I said, and if my tone of voice revealed that I was peeved past caring, fine. “If you’re so mad at me that you’d rather lock me up than get whoever really did this, fine. Get the cuffs. Take me away and be a hero, the hard-ass who locked up her brother for a murder he didn’t commit.” I held out my hands, wrists together for the cuffs. “Go ahead,” I said.
Deborah looked at me a little longer, as if she might really do it. Then she shook her head and hissed out a long breath between her teeth. “All right,” she said. “One way or the other, it’s not my problem.”
“Deborah-”
“Don’t even bother,” she said. “I don’t give a shit.” And she turned away from me and took out her phone to call it in.
I have been on the scene of a great many homicides, professionally as well as personally, but I had never before been there as the person who found the body. And I had never been there as a suspect, either, even when I was guilty. I found it to be a vastly different experience, and I didn’t like it-especially when Detective Anderson arrived to take
charge.
The first thing Anderson did was to usher Deborah out the door, and then he stumped around the trailer and grumbled and hissed and bullied Angel-No-Relation, who had arrived to handle the forensic side of things. And when he finally got around to taking me aside for questioning, he did not behave like a man talking to a professional colleague caught in unfortunate circumstances. Instead, he took me by the elbow and pulled me off to stand by the refrigerator. We stood there and he gave me a long and hooded stare. I waited politely, but he just stared, obviously convinced he could soften me up before dragging an incriminating statement out of me.
My phone chirped. I reached for it, but he shot out his hand and clamped it on my wrist. I looked at him with raised eyebrows; he shook his head. It didn’t seem worth fighting about, so I let go of the phone and looked at him, waiting for him to do something that might hint at an intelligence higher than the refrigerator’s. I waited in vain, but he finally shook his head and favored me with a slight frown.
“Some blanket,” he said.
It took me a moment to understand what he meant. It must have shown on my face, because he went on. “You said you were protecting her.” He sneered. “Like a blanket.”
It is usually best to stay polite and meek when being questioned by a detective, but the meekness had drained out of me with Jackie’s death, and I was irritated enough by his cheap shot to give it right back. “Some detective,” I said. “You said you’d find the killer.”
He blushed very slightly, and then shook his head. “Maybe I have,” he said, and there was no way to misunderstand him this time.
“You haven’t,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” he said. “Except it’s always the boyfriend, isn’t it?”
“Sure,” I said. “Even when the victim is being stalked by a homicidal psychopath who has killed before and has sworn to kill her. It makes perfect sense to suspect the boyfriend, and not the psycho stalker. At least,” I said, “it makes sense to you.”
He stared at me, and he thought he was going to say something else, some truly witty and withering put-down. But as we have all noted previously, Wit blossoms on a branch that is forever out of reach to Detective Anderson, and so he just stared, and then shook his head again as he finally realized no bon mot was on the way. “You’re not out of this,” he said, and he moved away to bully Angel some more.
And I wasn’t out of it. Not by a long shot. I stood there for most of an hour and watched. Whenever he thought of it, Anderson would give me an intimidating stare, but other than that nothing happened.
I didn’t mind. In fact, I was glad that Anderson was in charge, instead of someone like Deborah, who might actually solve this murder, because I didn’t want it solved just yet. Whoever did this had done it to me as much as to Jackie. They had killed my whole beautiful future along with her, and thrown me back on the dung heap of cloying mundane hand-to-mouth existence in the slough of the petty, pointless life I had outgrown, and whoever did that to me, I would find them and make them pay. No, I didn’t want anybody finding this killer. Nobody except Me.
So I stood there beside the refrigerator and watched Anderson stump around, the very Classical Ideal of sound and fury signifying nothing, and I looked at the two or three small factoids I had about this killer.
First, I knew it wasn’t Patrick. But I was the only one who knew that, and somebody else could well have hoped to use the whole Psycho Stalker thing as a shield. They already had, in fact, if I assumed that the same person had killed Kathy. I thought only a moment, and then I went ahead and assumed it; Kathy’s eye had been taken, and there was no reason to do that except as a red herring. The same killer had killed them both.
So I had two events to provide me with clues. If I had been feeling optimistic, this would have cheered me up, because two murders provide twice as many clues. But I added up what I knew without any optimism; it was gone from me forever, leaving behind only a bitter residue.
Kathy had been a nonentity, almost a nonperson. I meant no disrespect for the dead, even though they couldn’t stop me if I did. But my short sweet time at the pinnacle of showbiz had taught me that a personal assistant was not even as high in the pecking order as the valet parking attendant, who might, after all, be an actor on the rise.
Kathy, though, had been a full-time professional gofer, and she could not possibly have the kind of high-octane enemies who would choose to kill her, especially not coldly, premeditatedly, and in such a vividly visceral way. But somebody had, in fact, killed her-and then taken her phone. Where she kept all Jackie’s appointments, phone numbers, contacts, etc. That implied-at least to me-that Kathy’s death was connected to something on the phone.
Even in Hollywood, very few people will kill to get an address or phone number-except, perhaps, the number of a really good agent. But in this case, that seemed unlikely; I was quite sure the phone had not been taken for any contact information. That left appointments, and that thought brought a small, dry rustle of interest from the Dark Detective nestled in his inner lair.
All right: The phone had been taken to hide one of the appointments. That meant that either one of Jackie’s upcoming appointments was worth killing to hide-or the appointment was not Jackie’s. It was Kathy’s phone, after all. Why shouldn’t she keep personal things on it, too? And if somebody made a date to meet her in her room at the hotel, and had gone there specifically to kill her, it made sense that he would take the phone away to hide the record of the date.
But wait: That made sense only if the killer knew Kathy kept all those things on her phone. And that meant it was somebody who knew her, and knew the way she did her job-and that meant it was either somebody from her past who flew in from L.A. just to kill her … Or much more likely, it was somebody here, now, involved in making this pilot. Somebody with a very strong motive for keeping Kathy from-what? Going somewhere, doing something, saying something …
A tiny little video clip popped onto the screen in Dexter’s personal viewing room: a few days ago at wardrobe, and Kathy slapping Renny, storming away from him, yelling something like, “Next time I’ll tell everybody!”
Another little clip: Renny staring at me as a dark and leathery shadow of a Something flaps its wings behind his eyes.
And another: Renny looking out at the audience at his special with that same look, a look I knew so well because it was a killer’s look, and I practiced every day to hide mine with convincingly meek fake smiles.
And Renny going after the heckler with an aggressive attack that could only be called lethal, flashing his true killer colors for all to see.
Renny.
It all added up: He had a motive, whatever the details were, and I knew he had that special thing inside that would make killing a simple and viable option. And so to hide this something, it didn’t matter what, he had killed Kathy-and then thrown up, according to Vince, when he saw the mess he’d made? But still killed Jackie, too, in spite of this revulsion, which he should not feel if he actually had a Dark Passenger?
The roaring freight train of Dexter’s Deduction slammed to a halt. It didn’t make sense. Nobody capable of routine murder could possibly throw up at the sight of what he’d done. And anyway, how did that connect to the most important fact, Jackie’s death?
All right, maybe it wasn’t Renny. But I still had two bodies, and I was sure they were connected. So I put Renny aside for a moment and tried to get the train back on the tracks.
Somebody, possibly not Renny, killed Kathy and took her phone to keep something from getting out. And then in spite of not enjoying it, which seemed a waste, they had killed Jackie. For the same reason? But they already had the phone, so why bother?
Anderson stomped by me and out the door of the trailer, and I looked over to where Angel was calmly, methodically combing through the area around Jackie’s body, directly in front of the big box of Kathy’s stuff. Somewhere a small brass coin dropped into a slot with a soft chiming sound, and I blinked.
; I went over to Angel. He looked up briefly, then back to a chunk of carpet he was putting into an evidence bag. “Go away,” he said. “You are bad juju.”
“I need to see something,” I said.
“No,” he said. “Anderson might shoot me.”
“It will only take a second,” I said. “It’s very important.”
Angel rocked back onto his heels and looked up at me, clearly deciding whether I was worth the risk. “What?” he said at last.
I nodded at the big cardboard box behind him. “The computer,” I said. “Is it still in the case?”
He looked at me a moment longer, and then sighed heavily. He leaned over to the box, where the black nylon computer case perched on the top of the pile. With one rubber-gloved finger he flipped the case open. “No,” he said. “No computer.” He took away his finger and the case flopped shut. “Should it be there?”
“It was there this morning,” I said.
“Shit,” he said. “Well, I didn’t take it.”
“No,” I said. “But somebody did.”
Angel sighed heavily, clearly unhappy that a computer might be missing when he had forensic lead. “Is it important?” he said.
“I think so,” I said.
“Why?”
“Because it’s an Apple,” I said.
Angel shook his head. “Dexter, coño, come on.”
“Thanks, Angel.”
He sighed again and returned to his hands and knees. “I don’t think I like you anymore,” he said.