Dexter Is Dead

by Jeff Lindsay

  “I see,” he said. “Where did this file come from?”

  “If you don’t mind,” I said, “I’d rather not say on the phone.”

  Kraunauer chuckled. “I can assure you the NSA is not monitoring my calls,” he said. “They wouldn’t dare.”

  “Even so,” I said. “It’s a little bit, um…sensitive?”

  He was silent for a few seconds, and I heard a rhythmic clacking sound—drumming his fingers on the desk, no doubt. “Mr. Morgan,” he said, “you haven’t been doing any amateur sleuthing, have you?”

  “Oh, no, not at all,” I said. After all, Vince had done all the legwork.

  “All right,” he said abruptly. “Can you bring it to me at the office? I’ll be here until about six.”

  “I should be there around five,” I said.

  “See you then,” he said, and hung up. No peaceful music this time, just a dead line.

  I looked at my watch. I had killed an entire seventeen minutes, and accomplished just about everything definite I could think of. On the one hand, I was filled with a hard-earned pride at my industry and efficiency. On the other hand, I still had several blank hours before I met Vince, and no place to go other than a lethal hotel room at the far end of town. I sighed heavily and shook my head. For the first time I understood and appreciated the true joy of having a job—it gave you someplace to go! And when you were done there, you could go to a home, however squalid. Suddenly I had neither, and I truly felt it. This whole homeless-and-unemployed thing was becoming a true burden.

  Still, I couldn’t just sit here in the parking lot with the engine running. Eventually I would die of exhaust fumes, or perhaps boredom. And with the price of gas what it is, I couldn’t afford it, either.

  I thought about going back to the library, but that seemed almost as bad. I wondered about trying a few stops on my Food Pilgrimage. True, I’d just eaten lunch, but it was only sushi. Wasn’t I supposed to get hungry again in half an hour? Or was that only true of Chinese food? It could be both, if the recurring hunger was caused by rice. But it was probably MSG, and I was pretty sure Japanese food didn’t have any. In any case, I wasn’t hungry, and I was quite sure that a pro forma eating binge would be frowned on in the best circles.

  I looked out the side window. The scenery hadn’t changed. I was still in a strip mall parking lot.

  Was it really the library or nothing? In the time I spent languishing in jail, I had formed an ideal picture of freedom as something worth having, even striving for. As with all idealistic notions, the reality was proving to be quite different. I had a choice of doing nothing in a parking lot, or doing it in the library. I tried to revive my flagging enthusiasm for Sacred Liberty by reminding myself that I could also go back to my hotel room, or even drive pointlessly around the city. It didn’t work. My enthusiasm stayed flagged.

  With one last heavy sigh to show that I was acting under protest, I put the car in gear and headed back to the library.

  It took about twenty minutes to drive over the causeway, down U.S. 1, and back to the Grove. Nothing had changed when I got there, except that the parking spot in front of the library was taken now. So were all the other parking spaces. I drove around for a few minutes until I finally found a place down at the foot of the hill by the sailing club. I tried to put money in the meter, but it was jammed. It still had five minutes on it, though, and it didn’t seem to be ticking off the time. A meter that perpetually showed five minutes was a marvelous thing, a real stroke of luck. Perhaps my fortunes were changing after all.

  I trudged up the hill to the library and went in. My seat by the back window was still available. I was literally being showered with good fortune. What a wonderful world we live in.

  I sat and flipped through magazines I didn’t care about and scanned stories that bored me to tears. When I finally glanced at my watch and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed, I was stunned. It had seemed like an eternity. I flung down the magazines and went looking for something more substantial to read.

  I found something better: books with lots of pictures. I settled on an art-history book that bragged about having over twenty-five hundred pictures, from cave to contemporary. Even on a day as slow-paced as this one, I could make twenty-five hundred pictures last awhile.

  I sat back down with the book. I took my time with the pictures—and not merely because I wanted to while away a few hours. I have always liked art. In the first place, some of it is quite pretty. And even if you don’t always understand the picture, or the emotions it tries to convey, there is usually some nice, colorful something to look at somewhere in the picture. There were a lot of religious pictures in this book, many of them quite cheerfully gory. I particularly liked the pictures of saints with holes in them. The blood pouring from the wounds was presented in a very restrained and dignified manner, which is unusual for blood. Nasty stuff, and unpredictable. And the expressions on their faces, which could only be called Justified Anguish, were wonderful fun.

  Altogether, it gave me a new appreciation for religion. Although to be truthful, I had always wondered at the blind and unfailing insistence on combining violent and gooey death with human worship. It almost made me wish I could join a church of some kind. What fun they had, especially with their saints! I would fit right in! Dexter the Saint Maker!

  But of course, it wouldn’t do. I could never sit through an entire service without giggling. Seriously, how can people actually believe such things? And in any case, the altar would almost certainly burst into flames when I entered.

  Ah, well. At least religion was responsible for some nice pictures, and that should count for something. If nothing else, the pictures whiled away the time for me until around three-forty-five, when I left for my rendezvous—if not with destiny, then at least with some very nice drapes.

  Vince Masuoka had a small house in North Miami, at the end of a dead-end street off 125th Street. It was painted pale yellow with pastel purple trim, which really made me question my taste in associates. There were a few very well-barbered bushes in the front yard and a cactus garden lining the cobblestone walkway up to his front door. His car was in the driveway when I arrived, so at least he hadn’t decided he would rather work late than save my life and his.

  I rang the bell and he opened the door immediately. He was so pale and sweaty that for a moment I wondered whether he had food poisoning, and I felt a brief surge of near-panic because I had eaten the same things at lunch that he had. But he grabbed my arm with a very strong grip and pulled me inside so powerfully that I ruled it out and settled on mere nervous collapse.

  Sure enough, the first words out of his mouth revealed that he was teetering on the brink of total disintegration. “Dexter, Jesus, you wouldn’t believe—Oh, my God, I don’t even know how—I mean I nearly…Holy Christ I gotta sit down.” And he collapsed onto a very stylish Deco chaise longue, patting at his brow with a paper towel.

  “Fine, thanks,” I said cheerfully. “Do you have the file?”

  He blinked at me with reproach, as if I hadn’t appreciated his suffering enough. “Anderson was right there—I mean, he nearly saw me! With the file!”

  “Nearly?” I said. “But he didn’t, did he?”

  He sighed, long and painfully. “No, he didn’t,” he admitted. “But, my God. He was…I hid behind the, you know the closet by the coffee room?”

  “Vince,” I said. “Do you have the file?”

  He shook his head. “Of course I do. What have I been saying?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Well, I have it right here,” he said, waving a limp and sweaty arm at a strange yellow-painted end table. The legs were giraffe necks and the handle of the one small drawer was an elephant’s trunk, and the whole was so distracting that I had to squint to see that, as advertised, a manila folder lay neatly on top of the table. I managed to show quite commendable restraint, by stepping calmly over to pick up the file, rather than leaping through the air and snatching it with b
oth hands, as seemed more appropriate.

  I opened the folder and leafed quickly through it, page by page. I paused after only the first few pages: Vince had been wonderfully thorough. The file started with the initial incident report, and went on step by step through the long and many-faceted paper pathway that our wonderful System of Justice demands. It was all here, every step, and even to the casual eye it was clear that most of the scribbled signatures were done by the same messy hand, though the names were different. And by a remarkable coincidence, that ubiquitous sloppy handwriting looked an awful lot like Detective Anderson’s. I looked at Vince with a raised eyebrow. “How on earth did they get away with this?” I asked.

  He nodded vigorously. “I know, right?” he said. “I mean, anybody can tell—and, Dexter, that’s not even the worst of it!” He jumped up off the chaise and leaped to my side, eagerly snatching away the folder and flipping to a page near the bottom of the stack. “Hear—lookit this!” he said with a kind of triumphant shock.

  I looked. The page in question was the lab report, submitted by V. Masuoka, who signed his name in the same hand as the officer who had signed the incident report. Even better, “Masuoka” was spelled wrong: M-A-S-S-O-K-A.

  “Shame on you, Vince,” I said. “At your age, you really should know how to spell your own name.”

  “That’s not the half of it!” he said. “Look—he has me using luminol. We haven’t used that stuff in years, we use Bluestar now. And,” he finished triumphantly, “he spelled that wrong, too—with an ‘A’ instead of an ‘I.’ ”

  It was true. And as I gently pried the folder out of Vince’s sweaty grip and examined it with a little more care, I saw that the whole thing was almost as shoddy. I found myself sharing Vince’s shock; to frame me was one thing, but to do such a terrible job at it was unforgivable. Really, a child could do better work. Either Anderson was truly an overgrown case of arrested mental development, or he was such an arrogant and dim-witted buffoon that he thought he’d done it well enough to get away with it. A moment’s serious reflection led me to conclude that the second explanation was correct. Anderson was so completely brainless that he didn’t realize just how stupid he really was.

  I closed the folder and gave Vince a reassuring pat on the shoulder. “This is wonderful, Vince,” I said. “You have truly saved the day.” And I wondered whether I’d laid it on too thick, because he seemed to swell a few sizes, and he actually blushed.

  “Well, I, you know,” he said. “I wanted to help, and…I mean, this just isn’t right, and everything I ever worked for, you know.” He paused and rubbed at the corner of his eye, and I realized with horror that he was on the verge of tears, and who knows what other terrifying manifestations of emotional excess. Sure enough, he sniffed, and said, “What else could I—”

  “And it absolutely is,” I said, cutting him off before he could burst into a chorus of I Pagliacci, followed by grabbing my hands and leading us in a rousing fit of tears and a communal singing of “Kumbaya.” “This is just what the doctor ordered.”

  “That’s…that’s…I mean, because…” he said, pausing as he visibly filled up with even more emotion.

  I took the pause as an opening for my getaway, and began to move toward the door. “Thanks, Vince,” I said. “You have saved us both. Bye!” And I was out the door before he could say more than two more confused syllables.

  As I started up my car and drove away I saw him standing in the doorway, gazing mournfully after me, and I was filled with immense relief that I had escaped an episode of naked sentiment that could only have been humiliating for both of us. I did wonder why I should feel so strongly about it, and because I have studied the endlessly fascinating subject of Me for such a long time, I came to a simple conclusion. One of the things I liked about Vince was that he generally faked all the human rituals and expressions. He had a terrible phony laugh, and a habit of making suggestive remarks that were so clearly synthetically generated I marveled that he got away with it. In other words, as far as simple person-to-person interaction went, he was an awful lot like me.

  And to see him like this, floundering helplessly in the savage grip of genuine feelings, was very disturbing, because on some deep level I had been thinking, If it can happen to Vince, it might happen to Me! and that thought was nearly unbearable.

  Still, Vince had brought home the bacon when the chips were down and my fat was truly in the fire. I tried to think of more food metaphors, and wondered whether that meant I was already hungry again. I looked at the dashboard clock; it was nearly five, which was bad news all around. In the first place, it meant I probably was hungry again, and in the second it meant rush hour was already in full swing.

  I went up onto I-95 South anyway, hoping for the best. As usual, I didn’t get it. Traffic was crawling along at a pace a snail would have laughed at. I had hoped to drive straight down to the MacArthur Causeway and then over to Kraunauer’s office to deliver the file. After ten minutes and only about half a mile, I got down onto surface streets and headed over to Biscayne Boulevard instead. The traffic was moving better there, and I got to the causeway and all the way to Kraunauer’s office in only about forty minutes.

  It was eight minutes of six when I stepped off the elevator and began the elaborate ritual of getting myself passed through the layers of insulation around the Great Man, and the Ice Queen herself nudged me through the door and into the Presence just as the clock began to tick through the last minute before six o’clock. Kraunauer was at his desk, packing things into a gorgeous leather briefcase with one hand and speaking on a cell phone with the other. He looked up at me and blinked, as if surprised. Then he nodded, placing a heap of paper into the case and holding up one finger to me to indicate, Just a minute.

  “Sí. Sí, comprendo,” he said into the phone, and to show that I am no slouch as an investigator, I immediately concluded that he was speaking Spanish, which meant that the person he was speaking with probably was, too. I patted myself on the back for my burst of acumen; if I was this sharp, I would lick this thing yet. “Sí, seguro, no hay problema,” he said. “¿Quince? ¿Es suficiente? Bueno, te doy quince,” he said, and he broke the connection and put the phone down. He put both hands on his desk and turned his full focus on me. “Well, Mr. Morgan,” he said, with a truly brilliant imitation smile. For the first time in my life, I had met somebody who could fake it better than I could, and it made me feel almost dizzy, like a young boy facing a famous quarterback. “Sit down. Tell me what you’ve brought me.”

  I didn’t really need to sit down; I’d imagined I would just drop the folder, give a brief explanation of its provenance, and dash away into the evening without taking up too much of Kraunauer’s valuable—and therefore expensive—time. And I wondered whether I was generating billable hours that would be added to a fee I was quite sure was already astronomical. But I was just a bit intimidated by his awesome faux sincerity, and felt I should do what he told me. On top of everything else, Brian was paying, and to be honest, I was not pleased with him for dropping me so carelessly into a firing range with a bull’s-eye on my forehead and a bevy of drug-crazed Mexican assassins on the other end. So I eased carefully into the unquestionably pricey chair across from Kraunauer.

  “Well,” I said, “this is a folder of documents from the police file on my case. Um,” I added, “they’re all originals.”

  “Really,” he said, raising one carefully barbered eyebrow. “How did they come into your possession?”

  “One of my friends in forensics,” I said, conscious of a slight exaggeration. Vince was my only friend left in forensics—maybe my only friend left anywhere. It made me truly grateful that I didn’t actually need friends. But telling all this to Kraunauer wasn’t necessary. Aside from painting an unflattering picture of Dexter, it was also not something Kraunauer really needed to know. So I skipped to the chase and held up the file. “The documents are all filled with deliberate falsifications, forgeries, and fiction. They altered my
friend’s report—um, rather clumsily, too,” I said. He didn’t seem to feel the sting of that insult the way I did, so I shrugged. “And when my friend complained about it, they threatened him.”

  Kraunauer leaned back in his chair and put his fingertips together, the picture of an erudite man deep in thought. “Threatened him how?” he said.

  “At first with losing his job,” I said. “Then with violence. At the end, he says he was afraid they might even kill him.”

  “Exactly who made these threats?”

  “Mostly Detective Anderson,” I said.

  “Uh-huh,” Kraunauer said. He frowned as if remembering something. “That’s the name of the officer who arrested you.”

  “No coincidence,” I said. “It’s the same guy.”

  “Hmm,” Kraunauer said. He tapped his fingertips together rhythmically and looked very thoughtful. “He’s obviously willing to go pretty far over the line to keep you in jail.”

  “At this point,” I said, “I don’t think he can even see the line anymore.”

  Kraunauer thought for just a second, and then he sat up straight and leaned over his desk. He took a business card from a small pile of them nestling in a little silver stand, plucked a fountain pen from the desk beside him, and scribbled on the back of the card. “My cell phone,” he said. He handed me the card. A phone number was on it, in still-drying vermilion ink. “You can reach me here twenty-four/seven.”

  “Oh,” I said, somewhat surprised. “Thank you, but, um—”

  He smiled again, this time a “gotcha” smile. “If he tries to intimidate you, arrest you without cause, rough you up, whatever. Call me.” He leaned back in his chair again and the smile changed to one of simple satisfaction. “We want to keep you on the outside.”

  “Yes, we do,” I said. I put the card carefully—reverently—into my pocket. Twenty-four/seven; I was surely one of the Blessed.

  “Back to this friend of yours,” he said, serious again. “The one who Anderson threatened. What did he do about that?”