by Jeff Lindsay
J E F F L I N D S A Y
even from the mouth, where the lips and tongue had been removed. Even the teeth; one had to admire such amazing thoroughness. Every cut had been professionally closed; a white bandage was neatly taped to each shoulder where arms had once hung, and the rest of the cuts had already healed, in a way you might hope to find in the very best of hospitals.
Everything on the body had been cut off, absolutely everything. There was nothing left of it but a bare and featureless head attached to an unencumbered body. I could not imagine how it was possible to do this without killing the thing, and it was certainly far beyond me why anyone would want to. It revealed a cruelty that really made one wonder if the universe was such a good idea after all. Pardon me if this sounds a tad hypocritical coming from Death-head Dexter, but I know very well what I am and it is nothing like this. I do what the Dark Passenger deems necessary, to someone who truly deserves it, and it always ends in death—which I am sure the thing on the table would agree was not such a bad thing.
But this—to do all this so patiently and carefully and leave it alive in front of a mirror . . . I could feel a sense of black wonder drifting up from deep inside, as if for the very first time my Dark Passenger was feeling just a little bit insignificant.
The thing on the table did not appear to register my presence. It just kept making that deranged doggie sound, nonstop, the same horrible wavering note over and over.
I heard Deb scuffle to a halt behind me. “Oh Jesus,” she said. “Oh God . . . What is it?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “But at least it’s not a dog.”
C H A P T E R 8
There was a very quiet rush of air, and i looked beyond Deborah to see that Sergeant Doakes had arrived.
He glanced once around the room and then his eyes settled on the table. I admit that I had been curious to see what his reaction would be to something this extreme, and it was well worth the wait. When Doakes saw the kitchen’s central ex-hibit his eyes locked onto it and he stopped moving so completely that he could have been a statue. After a long moment he moved toward it, gliding slowly as if pulled on a string. He slid past us without noticing that we were there and came to a stop at the table.
For several seconds he stared down at the thing. Then, still without even blinking, he reached inside his sport coat and drew out his pistol. Slowly, with no expression, he aimed it between the unblinkable eyes of the still-yowling thing on the table. He cocked the pistol.
“Doakes,” said Deborah in a dry croak of a voice, and she cleared her throat and tried again. “Doakes!”
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Doakes did not answer nor look away, but he didn’t pull the trigger, which seemed a shame. After all, what were we going to do with this thing? It wasn’t going to tell us who had done this. And I had a feeling its days as a useful member of society had come to an end. Why not let Doakes put it out of its misery? And then Deb and I would reluctantly be compelled to report what Doakes had done, he would be fired and even imprisoned, and my problems would be over. It seemed like such a neat solution, but of course it was not the kind of thing Deborah would ever agree to. She can get so fussy and official at times.
“Put away your weapon, Doakes,” she said, and although the rest of him remained absolutely motionless, he swiveled his head to look at her.
“Only thing to do,” he said. “Believe me.”
Deborah shook her head. “You know you can’t,” she said.
They stared at each other for a moment, then his eyes clicked onto me. It was exceptionally hard for me to look back without blurting out something like, “Oh, what the hell—go for it!” But I managed somehow, and Doakes turned the pistol up into the air. He looked back at the thing, shook his head, and put the pistol away. “Shit,” he said. “Shoulda let me.” And he turned, walking rapidly out of the room.
Within the next few minutes the room became crowded with people who tried desperately not to look while they went to work. Camilla Figg, a stocky, short-haired lab tech who had always seemed to be limited in expression to either blushing or staring, was crying quietly as she dusted for fingerprints. Angel Batista, or Angel-no-relation as we called him, since that is how he always introduced himself, turned pale and clamped his jaw tightly shut, but he stayed in the D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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room. Vince Masuoka, a co-worker who normally acted like he was only pretending to be human, trembled so badly he had to go outside and sit on the porch.
I began to wonder if I should pretend to be horrified, too, just to avoid being too noticeable. Perhaps I should go out and sit beside Vince. What did one talk about at such times?
Baseball? The weather? Surely one wouldn’t talk about the thing we were running from—and yet, I found to my surprise that I would not mind talking about it. In truth, the thing was beginning to raise a mild twitch of interest from a Certain Interior Party. I had always worked so hard to avoid any kind of notice at all, and here was someone doing just the opposite.
Clearly this monster was showing off for some reason, and it may have been only a perfectly natural competitive spirit, but that seemed a little irritating, even while it made me want to know more. Whoever did this was unlike anyone else I had ever encountered. Should I move this anonymous predator onto my list? Or should I pretend to swoon with horror and go sit outside on the porch?
As I pondered this difficult choice, Sergeant Doakes brushed past me again, for once barely even pausing to glower at me, and I recalled that because of him I had no chance to work through a list at the moment. It was mildly disconcerting, but it did make the decision seem a little easier.
I started composing a properly unsettled facial expression, but got no further than raising my eyebrows. Two paramedics came rushing in, all focused importance, and stopped dead when they saw the victim. One of them immediately ran from the room. The other, a young black woman, turned to me and said, “What the fuck are we supposed to do?” Then she started crying, too.
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You have to agree she had a point. Sergeant Doakes’s solution was starting to look more practical, even elegant. There seemed very little point in whisking this thing onto a gurney and dashing through Miami traffic to deliver it to a hospital.
As the young lady had so elegantly put it, what the fuck were they supposed to do? But clearly somebody had to do something. If we just left it there and stood around like this, even-tually someone would complain about all the cops throwing up in the yard, which would be very bad for the department’s image.
It was Deborah who finally got things organized. She persuaded the paramedics to sedate the victim and take it away, which allowed the surprisingly squeamish lab techs to come back inside and go to work. The quiet in the little house as the drugs took hold of the thing was close to ecstatic. The paramedics got the thing covered and onto their gurney without dropping it and wheeled it off into the sunset.
And just in time; as the ambulance pulled away from the curb the news trucks started to arrive. In a way it was a shame; I would love to have seen the reaction of one or two of the reporters, Rick Sangre in particular. He had been the area’s leading devotee of “If it bleeds, it leads,” and I had never seen him express any sense of pain or horror, except on camera or if his hair was mussed. But it was not to be. By the time Rick’s cameraman was ready to roll, there was nothing left to see other than the little house fenced in by the yellow tape, and a handful of cops with clamped jaws who wouldn’t have had much to say to Sangre on a good day, and today probably wouldn’t have told him his own name.
There was really not a great deal for me to do. I had come in Deborah’s car and so I did not have my kit, and in any case D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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there was no visible blood spatter anywhere that I could see.
Since that was my area of expertise, I felt I should find somethin
g and be useful, but our surgical friend had been too careful. Just to be sure I looked through the rest of the house, which wasn’t much. There was one small bedroom, an even smaller bathroom, and a closet. They all seemed to be empty, except for a bare, battered mattress on the floor of the bedroom. It looked like it had come from the same thrift shop as the living-room chair and had been pounded flat like a Cuban steak. No other furniture or utensils, not even a plastic spoon.
The only thing that showed even the smallest hint of personality was something Angel-no-relation found under the table as I finished my quick tour of the house. “Hola,” he said, and pulled a small piece of notepaper off the floor with his tweezers. I stepped over to see what it might be. It was hardly worth the effort; nothing but a single small page of white paper, ripped slightly at the top where a little rectangle had been torn away. I looked just above Angel’s head and sure enough, there on the side of the table was the missing rectangle of paper, held to the table with a strip of Scotch tape. “Mira,” I said, and Angel looked. “Aha,” he said.
As he examined the tape carefully—tape holds fingerprints wonderfully well—he put the paper on the floor and I squatted down to look at it. There were some letters written on it in a spidery hand; I leaned over farther to read them: LOYALTY.
“Loyalty?” I said.
“Sure. Isn’t that an important virtue?”
“Let’s ask him,” I said, and Angel shuddered hard enough that he almost dropped his tweezers.
“Me cago en diez with that shit,” he said, and reached for a plastic bag to put the paper into. It hardly seemed like some-
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thing worth watching, and there was really nothing else to see, so I headed for the door.
I certainly am not a professional profiler, but because of my dark hobby I often have a certain amount of insight into other crimes that seem to come from the same neighborhood. This, however, was far outside the bounds of anything I had ever seen or imagined. There was no hint of any kind that pointed toward personality or motivation, and I was intrigued nearly as much as I was irritated. What kind of predator would leave the meat lying around and still wiggling like that?
I went outside and stood on the porch. Doakes was hud-dled with Captain Matthews, telling him something that had the captain looking worried. Deborah was crouched beside the old lady, talking quietly with her. I could feel a breeze picking up, the squall breeze that comes right before the afternoon thunderstorm, and as I looked up the first hard spatters of rain pelted down on the sidewalk. Sangre, who had been standing at the tape waving his microphone and trying to get the attention of Captain Matthews, looked up at the clouds too and, as the thunder began to rumble, threw his microphone at his producer and lurched into the news van.
My stomach rumbled, too, and I remembered that I had missed my lunch in all the excitement. This would never do; I needed to keep up my strength. My naturally high metabolism needed constant attention: no diet for Dexter. But I had to depend on Deborah for a ride, and I had the feeling, just a hunch, that she would not be sympathetic about any mention of eating at the moment. I looked at her again. She was cradling the old lady, Mrs. Medina, who had apparently given up retching and was concentrating on sobbing.
I sighed and walked to the car through the rain. I didn’t D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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really mind getting wet. It looked like I was going to have a long wait to dry off.
It was indeed a long wait, well over two hours. I sat in the car and listened to the radio and tried to picture, bite by bite, what it was like to eat a medianoche sandwich: the crackle of the bread crust, so crisp and toasty it scratches the inside of your mouth as you bite down. Then the first taste of mustard, followed by the soothing cheese and the salt of the meat. Next bite—a piece of pickle. Chew it all up; let the flavors mingle.
Swallow. Take a big sip of Iron Beer (pronounced Ee-roan Bay-er, and it’s a soda). Sigh. Sheer bliss. I would rather eat than do anything else except play with the Passenger. It’s a true miracle of genetics that I am not fat.
I was on my third imaginary sandwich when Deborah finally came back to the car. She slid into the driver’s seat, closed the door, and just sat there, staring ahead through the rain-splattered windshield. And I knew it wasn’t the best thing I could have said, but I couldn’t help myself. “You look beat, Deb. How about lunch?”
She shook her head but didn’t say anything.
“Maybe a nice sandwich. Or a fruit salad—get your blood sugar back up? You’ll feel so much better.”
Now she looked at me, but it was not a look that showed any real promise of lunch at any time in the near future. “This is why I wanted to be a cop,” she said.
“The fruit salad?”
“That thing in there—” she said, and then turned to look out the windshield again. “I want to nail that—that, whatever 6 6
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it is that could do that to a human being. I want it so bad I can taste it.”
“Does it taste like a sandwich, Deborah? Because—”
She smacked the heels of her palms onto the rim of the steering wheel, hard. Then she did it again. “GodDAMN it,”
she said. “God-fucking-DAMN it!”
I sighed. Clearly long-suffering Dexter was going to be denied his crust of bread. And all because Deborah was having some kind of epiphany from seeing a piece of wiggling meat.
Of course it was a terrible thing, and the world would be a much better place without someone in it who could do that, but did that mean we had to miss lunch? Didn’t we all need to keep up our strength to catch this guy? Still, it did not seem like the very best time to point this out to Deborah, so I simply sat there with her, watching the rain splat against the windshield, and ate imaginary sandwich number four.
The next morning I had hardly settled into my little cubicle at work when my phone rang. “Captain Matthews wants to see everybody who was there yesterday,” Deborah said.
“Good morning, Sis. Fine, thanks, and you?”
“Right now,” she said, and hung up.
The police world is made up of routine, both official and unofficial. This is one of the reasons I like my job. I always know what’s coming, and so there are fewer human responses for me to memorize and then fake at the appropriate times, fewer chances for me to be caught off guard and react in a way that might call into question my membership in the race.
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As far as I knew, Captain Matthews had never before called in “everybody who was there.” Even when a case was generating a great deal of publicity, it was his policy to handle the press and those above him in the command structure, and let the investigating officer handle the casework. I could think of absolutely no reason why he would violate this protocol, even with a case as unusual as this one. And especially so soon—there had barely been enough time for him to approve a press release.
But “right now” still meant right now, as far as I could tell, so I tottered down the hall to the captain’s office. His secre-tary, Gwen, one of the most efficient women who had ever lived, sat there at her desk. She was also one of the plainest and most serious, and I found it almost impossible to resist tweaking her. “Gwendolyn! Vision of radiant loveliness! Fly away with me to the blood lab!” I said as I came into the office.
She nodded at the door at the far end of the room. “They’re in the conference room,” she said, completely stone-faced.
“Is that a no?”
She moved her head an inch to the right. “That door over there,” she said. “They’re waiting.”
They were indeed. At the head of the conference table Captain Matthews sat with a cup of coffee and a scowl. Ranged around the table were Deborah and Doakes, Vince Masuoka, Camilla Figg, and the four uniformed cops who had been setting the perimeter at the little house of horror when we arrived. Matthews nodde
d at me and said, “Is this everybody?”
Doakes stopped glaring at me and said, “Paramedics.”
Matthews shook his head. “Not our problem. Somebody will talk to them later.” He cleared his throat and looked 6 8
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down, as though consulting an invisible script. “All right,” he said, and cleared his throat again. “The, uh, the event of yesterday which occurred at, um, N.W. 4th Street has been inter-dicted, ah, at the very highest level.” He looked up, and for a moment I thought he was impressed. “Very highest,” he said.
“You are all hereby ordered to keep to yourselves what you may have seen, heard, or surmised in connection with this event and its location. No comment, public or private, of any kind.” He looked at Doakes, who nodded, and then he looked around the table at all of us. “Therefore, ah . . .”
Captain Matthews paused and frowned as he realized that he didn’t actually have a “therefore” for us. Luckily for his reputation as a smooth talker, the door opened. We all turned to look.
The doorway was filled with a very big man in a very nice suit. He wore no tie and the top three buttons of his shirt were undone. A diamond pinkie ring glittered on the little finger of his left hand. His hair was wavy and artfully mussed. He looked to be in his forties, and time had not been kind to his nose. A scar ran across his right eyebrow and another down one side of his chin, but the overall impression was not disfigurement so much as decoration. He looked at us all with a cheerful grin and bright, empty blue eyes, pausing in the doorway for a dramatic moment before he looked to the head of the table and said, “Captain Matthews?”
The captain was a reasonably large man and masculine in a very well-kept way, but he looked small and even effeminate compared to the man in the doorway, and I believe he felt it. Still, he clenched his manly jaw and said, “That’s right.”