Dearly Devoted Dexter

by Jeff Lindsay

  She sighed. “Kyle didn’t tell me their names. But they were all part of a team of some kind. In El Salvador. Along with this . . . Dr. Danco guy. So—” She spread her hands and looked helpless, a new look for her. And although it gave her a certain little-girl charm, the only thing it did for me was to 1 2 6

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  make me feel even more put-upon. The whole world goes spinning merrily along, getting itself into the most God-awful trouble, and then it’s all up to Dashing Dexter to tidy things up again. It didn’t seem fair, but what can you do?

  More to the point—what could I do now? I didn’t see any way to find Kyle before it was too late. And although I am fairly sure I didn’t say that out loud, Deborah reacted as if I had. She slapped one hand on the table and said, “We have to find him before he starts on Kyle. Before he even STARTS, Dexter. Because—I mean, am I supposed to hope Kyle will only lose an arm before we get there? Or a leg? Either way, Kyle is . . .” She turned away without finishing, looking out into the darkness through the French doors by the little table.

  She was right, of course. It looked like there was very little we could do to get Kyle back intact. Because with all the luck in the world, even my dazzling intellect couldn’t possibly lead us to him before the work started. And then—how long could Kyle hold out? Presumably he’d had some sort of training in dealing with this sort of thing, and he knew what was coming, so—

  But wait a moment. I closed my eyes and tried to think about it. Dr. Danco would know that Kyle was a pro. And as I had already told Deborah, the whole purpose was to shatter the victim into screaming unfixable pieces. Therefore . . .

  I opened my eyes. “Deb,” I said. She looked at me. “I am in the rare position of having some hope to offer.”

  “Spill it,” she said.

  “This is only a guess,” I said. “But I think Dr. Demented will probably keep Kyle around for a while, without working on him.”

  She frowned. “Why would he do that?”

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  “To make it last longer, and to soften him up. Kyle knows what’s coming. He’s braced for it. But now, imagine he’s just left lying in the dark, tied up, so his imagination goes to work.

  And so I think maybe,” I added as it occurred to me, “there’s another victim ahead of him. The guy who’s missing. So Kyle hears it—the saws and scalpels, the moans and whispers. He even smells it, knows it’s coming but doesn’t know when.

  He’ll be half crazy before he even loses a toenail.”

  “Jesus,” she said. “That’s your version of hope?”

  “Absolutely. It gives us a little extra time to find him.”

  “Jesus,” she said again.

  “I could be wrong,” I said.

  She looked back out the window. “Don’t be wrong, Dex.

  Not this time,” she said.

  I shook my head. This was going to be pure drudgery, no fun at all. I could only think of two things to try, and neither of them were possible until the morning. I glanced around for a clock. According to the VCR, it was 12:00. 12:00. 12:00. “Do you have a clock?” I asked.

  Deborah frowned. “What do you want a clock for?”

  “To find out what time it is,” I said. “I think that’s the usual purpose.”

  “What the hell difference does that make?” she demanded.

  “Deborah. There is very little to go on here. We will have to go back and do all the routine stuff that Chutsky pulled the department away from. Luckily, we can use your badge to barge around and ask questions. But we will have to wait until morning.”

  “Shit,” she said. “I hate waiting.”

  “There there,” I said. Deborah gave me a very sour look, but didn’t say anything.

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  I didn’t like waiting either, but I had done so much of it lately that perhaps it came easier to me. In any case, wait we did, dozing in our chairs until the sun came up. And then, since I was the domestic one lately, I made coffee for the two of us—one cup at a time, since Deborah’s coffeemaker was one of those single-cup things for people who don’t expect to be entertaining a great deal and don’t actually have a life.

  There was nothing in the refrigerator remotely worth eating, unless you were a feral dog. Very disappointing: Dexter is a healthy boy with a high metabolism, and facing what was sure to be a difficult day on an empty stomach was not a happy thought. I know family comes first, but shouldn’t that mean after breakfast?

  Ah, well. Dauntless Dexter would make the sacrifice once again. Pure nobility of spirit, and I could expect no thanks, but one does what one must.

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  Dr. mark spielman was a large man who looked more like a retired linebacker than an ER physician. But he had been the physician on duty when the ambulance delivered The Thing to Jackson Memorial Hospital, and he was not at all happy about it. “If I ever have to see something like that again,” he told us, “I will retire and raise dachshunds.”

  He shook his head. “You know what the ER at Jackson is like.

  One of the busiest. All the crazy stuff comes here, from one of the craziest cities in the world. But this—” Spielman knocked twice on the table in the mild green staff lounge where we sat with him. “Something else,” he said.

  “What’s the prognosis?” Deborah asked him, and he looked at her sharply.

  “Is that a joke?” he said. “There’s no prognosis, and there’s not going to be one. Physically, there’s not enough left to do anything but sustain life, if you want to call it that. Mentally?” He put both hands palm up and then dropped them on the table. “I’m not a shrink, but there’s nothing left in 1 3 0

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  there and no way that he’ll ever have a single lucid moment, ever again. The only hope he has is that we keep him so doped up he doesn’t know who he is, until he dies. Which for his sake we should all hope is soon.” He looked at his watch, a very nice Rolex. “Is this going to take long? I am on duty, you know.”

  “Were there traces of any drugs in the blood?” Deborah asked.

  Spielman snorted. “Traces, hell. The guy’s blood is a cock-tail sauce. I’ve never seen such a mix before. All designed to keep him awake, but deaden the physical pain so the shock of the multiple amputations didn’t kill him.”

  “Was there anything unusual about the cuts?” I asked him.

  “The guy’s had training,” Spielman said. “They were all done with very good surgical technique. But any medical school in the world could have taught him that.” He blew out a breath and an apologetic smile flickered quickly across his face. “Some of them were already healed.”

  “What kind of time frame does that give us?” Deborah asked him.

  Spielman shrugged. “Four to six weeks, start to finish,” he said. “He took at least a month to surgically dismember this guy, one small piece at a time. I can’t imagine anything more horrible.”

  “He did it in front of a mirror,” I said, ever-helpful. “So the victim had to watch.”

  Spielman looked appalled. “My God,” he said. He just sat there for a minute, and then said, “Oh, my God.” Then he shook his head and looked at his Rolex again. “Listen, I’d like to help out here, but this is . . .” He spread his hands and then dropped them on the table again. “I don’t think there’s really D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R

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  anything I can tell you that’s going to do any good. So let me save you some time here. That Mister, uh—Chesney?”

  “Chutsky,” Deborah said.

  “Yes, that was it. He called in and suggested I might get an ID with a retinal scan at, um, a certain database in Virginia.”

  He raised an eyebrow and pursed his lips. “Anyway. I got a fax yesterday, with a positive identification of the victim. I’ll get it for you.” He stood up and disappeared into the hall. A moment later he ret
urned with a sheet of paper. “Here it is.

  Name is Manuel Borges. A native of El Salvador, in the import business.” He put the paper down in front of Deborah. “I know it’s not much, but believe me, that’s it. The shape he’s in . . .” He shrugged. “I didn’t think we’d get this much.”

  A small intercom speaker in the ceiling muttered something that might have come from a TV show. Spielman cocked his head, frowned, and said, “Gotta go. Hope you catch him.”

  And he was out the door and down the hall so quickly that the fax paper he had dropped on the table fluttered.

  I looked at Deborah. She did not seem particularly encouraged that we had found the victim’s name. “Well,” I said. “I know it isn’t much.”

  She shook her head. “Not much would be a big improvement. This is nothing.” She looked at the fax, read it through one time. “El Salvador. Connected to something called flange.”

  “That was our side,” I said. She looked up at me. “The side the United States supported. I looked it up on the Internet.”

  “Swell. So we just found out something we already knew.”

  She got up and headed for the door, not quite as quickly as Dr.

  Spielman but fast enough that I had to hurry and I didn’t catch up until she was at the door to the parking lot.

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  Deborah drove rapidly and silently, with her jaw clenched, all the way to the little house on N.W. 4th Street where it had all started. The yellow tape was gone, of course, but Deborah parked haphazardly anyway, cop fashion, and got out of the car. I followed her up the short walkway to the house next door to the one where we had found the human doorstop.

  Deborah rang the bell, still without speaking, and a moment later it swung open. A middle-aged man wearing gold-rimmed glasses and a tan guayabera shirt looked out at us in-quiringly.

  “We need to speak to Ariel Medina,” Deborah said, holding up her badge.

  “My mother is resting now,” he said.

  “It’s urgent,” Deborah said.

  The man looked at her, then at me. “Just a moment,” he said. He closed the door. Deborah stared straight ahead at the door, and I watched her jaw muscles working for a couple of minutes before the man opened the door again and held it wide. “Come in,” he said.

  We followed him into a small dark room crowded with dozens of end tables, each one festooned with religious arti-cles and framed photographs. Ariel, the old lady who had discovered the thing next door and cried on Deb’s shoulder, sat on a large overstuffed sofa with doilies on the arms and across the back. When she saw Deborah she said, “Aaahhh,” and stood up to give her a hug. Deborah, who really should have been expecting an abrazo from an elderly Cuban lady, stood stiffly for a moment before awkwardly returning the embrace with a few pats on the woman’s back. Deborah backed off as soon as she decently could. Ariel sat back down on the couch and patted the cushion beside her. Deborah sat.

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  The old lady immediately launched into a very rapid stream of Spanish. I speak some Spanish, and often I can even understand Cuban, but I was getting only one word in ten of Ariel’s harangue. Deborah looked at me helplessly; for whatever quixotic reasons, she had chosen to study French in school, and as far as she was concerned the woman might as well have been speaking ancient Etruscan.

  “Por favor, Señora,” I said. “Mi hermana no habla español.”

  “Ah?” Ariel looked at Deborah with a little less enthusiasm and shook her head. “Lázaro!” Her son stepped forward, and as she resumed her monologue with barely a pause, he began to translate for her. “I came here from Santiago de Cuba in 1962,” Lázaro said for his mother. “Under Batista I saw some terrible things. People disappeared. Then Castro came and for a while I had hope.” She shook her head and spread her hands. “Believe it or not, but this is what we thought at the time. Things would be different. But soon it was the same thing again. Worse. So I came here. To the United States. Because here, people don’t disappear. People are not shot in the street or tortured. That’s what I thought. And now this.” She waved an arm toward the house next door.

  “I need to ask you a few questions,” Deborah said, and Lázaro translated.

  Ariel simply nodded and went right on with her riveting tale. “Even with Castro, they would never do a thing like that,” she said. “Yes, they kill people. Or they put you in the Isle of Pines. But never a thing like this. Not in Cuba. Only in America,” she said.

  “Did you ever see the man next door?” Deborah interrupted. “The man who did this?” Ariel studied Deborah for a 1 3 4

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  moment. “I need to know,” Deb said. “There’s going to be another one if we can’t find him.”

  “Why is it you who asks me?” Ariel said through her son.

  “This is no job for you. A pretty woman like you, you should have a husband. A family.”

  “El victimo proximo es el novio de mi hermana,” I said. The next victim is my sister’s sweetheart. Deborah glared at me, but Ariel said, “Aaahhh,” clucked her tongue, and nodded her head. “Well, I don’t know what I can tell you. I did see the man, maybe two times.” She shrugged and Deborah leaned forward impatiently. “Always at night, never very close. I can say, the man was small, very short. And skinny as well. With big glasses. More than this, I don’t know. He never came out, he was very quiet. Sometimes we would hear music.” She smiled just a little and added, “Tito Puente.” And Lázaro echoed unnecessarily, “Tito Puente.”

  “Ah,” I said, and they all looked at me. “It would hide the noise,” I said, a little embarrassed at all the attention.

  “Did he have a car?” Deborah asked, and Ariel frowned.

  “A van,” she said. “He drove an old white van with no windows. It was very clean, but had many rust spots and dents. I saw it a few times, but he usually kept it in his garage.”

  “I don’t suppose you saw the license plate?” I asked her, and she looked at me.

  “But I did,” she said through her son, and held up one hand, palm outward. “Not to get the number, that only happens in the old movies. But I know it was a Florida license plate. The yellow one with the cartoon of a child,” she said, and she stopped talking and glared at me, because I was giggling. It’s not at all dignified, and certainly not something I D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R

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  practice on a regular basis, but I was actually giggling and I could not help myself.

  Deborah glared at me, too. “What is so goddamned funny?” she demanded.

  “The license plate,” I said. “I’m sorry, Debs, but my God, don’t you know what the yellow Florida plate is? And for this guy to have one and do what he does . . .” I swallowed hard to keep from laughing again, but it took all my self-control.

  “All right, damn it, what’s so funny about the yellow license plate?”

  “It’s a specialty plate, Deb,” I said. “The one that says, choose life.”

  And then, picturing Dr. Danco carting around his wrig-gling victims, filling them with chemicals and cutting so very perfectly to keep them alive through it all, I’m afraid I giggled again. “Choose life,” I said.

  I really wanted to meet this guy.

  We walked back to the car in silence. Deborah got in and called in the description of the van to Captain Matthews, and he agreed that he could probably put out an APB. While she talked to the captain, I looked around. Neatly manicured yards, mostly consisting of colored rocks. A few children’s bicycles chained to the front porch, and the Orange Bowl looming in the background. A nice little neighborhood to live in, work in, raise a family in—or chop off somebody’s arms and legs.

  “Get in,” said Deborah, interrupting my rustic reverie. I got in and we drove off. At one point, stopped at a red light, 1 3 6

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  Deb glanced at me and said, “You pic
k a funny time to start laughing.”

  “Really, Deb,” I said. “This is the first hint of personality we’ve got from the guy. We know he has a sense of humor. I think that’s a big step forward.”

  “Sure. Maybe we’ll catch him at a comedy club.”

  “We will catch him, Deb,” I said, although neither one of us believed me. She just grunted; the light changed and she stomped on the gas as if she was killing a poisonous snake.

  We moved through the traffic back to Deb’s house. The morning rush hour was coming to an end. At the corner of Flagler and 34th a car had run up onto the sidewalk and smacked into a light pole in front of a church. A cop stood beside the car between two men who were screaming at each other. A little girl sat on the curb crying. Ah, the enchanting rhythms of another magical day in paradise.

  A few moments later we turned down Medina and Deborah parked her car beside mine in the driveway. She switched off the engine and for a moment we both just sat there listening to the ticking of the cooling motor. “Shit,” she said.

  “I agree.”

  “What do we do now?” she said.

  “Sleep,” I said. “I’m too tired to think.”

  She pounded both hands on the steering wheel. “How can I sleep, Dexter? Knowing that Kyle is . . .” She hit the wheel again. “Shit,” she said.

  “The van will turn up, Deb. You know that. The database will spit out every white van with a choose life tag, and with an APB out it’s just a matter of time.”

  “Kyle doesn’t have time,” she said.

  “Human beings need sleep, Debs,” I said. “And so do I.”

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  A courier’s van squealed around the corner and clunked to a halt in front of Deborah’s house. The driver jumped out with a small package and approached Deb’s front door. She said, “Shit,” one last time and got out of the car to collect the package.