Jeff Lindsay - Dexter's Final Cut

But it was all part of maintaining my disguise as Proud Papa Dexter, and there was no way around it. At least I had the evening to look forward to after that: lollygagging on a chaise longue with Jackie and eating strawberries as the sun set. It would almost make the frustration and annoyance of the rest of the day worthwhile.

And I thought again of what it might be like if only I could live Jackie’s lifestyle full-time: no teacher conferences, no housepainting while standing in a mound of fire ants, no squalling and screeching and dirty diapers. Nothing but eternal vigilance in a bejeweled setting. It was a fantasy, of course, nothing more than a way to soothe the grumpy beast within after its day of disappointments. But it was a very good fantasy, and lingering inside it was good enough to put a very small smile on my face by the time I got back to my office.

The smile, as tiny as it was, lasted until I got almost to my chair, when I ran into Vince Masuoka, headed out at full speed as I was trying to head in. We collided forcefully, and because I am larger than Vince, he bounced off me and into the doorframe.

“Ouch, my elbow!” he said, quickly straightening and rubbing his arm where it had banged against the frame. “Got another one!”

“Another elbow?” I said. “Big deal. Everyone has two.”

“Another body!” Vince said, straightening up and continuing his headlong rush out of the lab, pausing only to call over his shoulder, “The eye-fucker! He’s killed another girl!” Then he was gone down the hall, leaving me to stand at the door and stare after him and realize that I now knew what Patrick had been doing this afternoon instead of sleeping in his tent. And very oddly indeed, I really and truly wanted to go along and see what he had done.

I went on into the lab. Robert and Renny were both there, standing uncertainly together and looking as if they didn’t quite know what their characters would do when the eye-fucker struck again, and didn’t really want to hear anybody tell them.

I told them anyway. “Let’s go,” I said.

They both blinked at me like uncertain owls. “Go?” Robert said. Renny licked his lips.

“Crime scene,” I said. “Nothing like it for learning about crime scenes.”

They looked at each other like they were both hoping the other would come up with a really good way to suggest we go for coffee instead, but neither of them did, and so we followed Vince downstairs and out of the building.

This time the body had been left in a dumpster on the docks in Coconut Grove, near City Hall, just half a mile or so across the water from the Grove Isle Hotel, where I was staying with Jackie. I could see the high-rise profile of the hotel quite clearly as I got out of the car, standing tall above the painfully bright glare from the water.

The yellow perimeter tape was already up, with two uniformed cops in front of it, standing with that solid, meaty stance that cops everywhere seem to fall into instinctively when they put on the uniform. Even Deborah had stood like that back in the days when she wore the blue to work. Their eyes swiveled toward me, and I stepped forward, reaching for my ID.

“Yeah, hey, Dexter,” Renny said from behind me, and I turned to look at him. Robert hurried past us, headed for the two cops by the yellow tape. Like he had last time, he would stand there by the perimeter, joking with the cops, so he wouldn’t have to see the wonderful horror in the Dumpster. But this was Renny’s first dead body, as far as I knew, and he stood uncertainly, licking his lips and glancing longingly at Robert’s retreating back. “Robert says the last one was fucking sick,” he said.

“Well,” I said, “Robert didn’t really get a good look at it.”

“Ran his ass away screaming and hurling chunks, huh?” Renny said, just a ghost of a smile on his face.

“He didn’t actually scream,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” Renny said, looking once more at Robert, and then beyond him to the Dumpster. “Hey, seriously,” he said. “How bad is this gonna be?”

It may not be the very best character reference for me, but I was very eager to see whether this body was indeed the work of Bone-head Patrick, and if there was anything different about it, and I was growing annoyed listening to Renny’s dithering instead of peeking in at the surprise in the Dumpster. So reassurance was not uppermost on my mind. “Oh, it’s going to be very bad,” I said. “Come on; I’ll show you.”

He didn’t move. “Do I really got to look at this shit?” he said.

“Well,” I said, torn between my duty to shepherd Renny and my growing desire to see the waiting wonder, “you really should see what Vince does at a crime scene. I mean, that’s what your character does, right?”

Renny looked at the Dumpster out on the dock, and swallowed. “Yeah, okay,” he said. Then he gave me a hard look and I saw once more the small gleam of some interior Something flaring up. “But I throw up, you cleaning it up.” He took a deep breath, and then moved past me with determination in his pace and steel in his spine, and hopefully not too much in his stomach.

I followed behind Renny until he was ten feet from the Dumpster, and then he stopped dead. “I can see Vince fine from here,” he said.

There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing about it, so I slid past him and right up beside Vince Masuoka, who crouched in the shade of the Dumpster. “You’re just in time,” Vince said.

“For what?”

“Now the real fun starts,” he said. He jerked his head over to one side. I looked, and about forty feet away I saw Detective Anderson talking to a thin, white-haired man in khaki pants, a pale blue polo shirt, and boat shoes. Even from this distance, the white-haired man looked badly shaken.

“Anderson has a witness,” Vince said. “The old guy is off one of the big sailboats. He saw somebody dump a rolled-up carpet in here and take off in a kayak.”

The kayak gave me pause; did Patrick have a new, Miami-flavored way to get around? Or was it possible that somebody else had done it this time? Feeling a small flutter of uncertainty and rising interest, I stepped past Vince and peeked inside, into the heart of the garbage.

The girl’s body lay on top of a chunk of dirty brown carpet, the kind of ratty, stained carpet you can see in the garbage in any residential area where someone is remodeling. It was partially unrolled, just enough to see the top half of a very bad time, and not enough to hide the other contents of the Dumpster.

It was almost all garbage-no paper or cardboard or plastic wrappings like the last time. This Dumpster was used by the people from the rows of large yachts at the nearby dock, and by anyone who used the fish-cleaning station nearby, and the smell rising up from inside was enough to kill small animals at ten paces. But it didn’t discourage the nearly solid cloud of flies that whirled around the heaps of moist, sloppy rotting leftovers. And, of course, it didn’t have any effect at all on the dead girl who perched naked on top of the putrid mound of decomposing gunk.

It looked like she’d had a very hard time of it. Like the previous victim, this one had been hacked, stabbed, bitten, and clawed with an undisciplined but frenzied abandon, a wild impatience that had left very few patches of visible skin unmarked by trauma.

The state of the blood around the wounds indicated that she had been alive for most of the cuts, gashes, and punches, an entire arsenal of attacks that left the corpse looking like she had spent a week at the Academy of Psychotic Assault.

Once again a large hank of golden hair had been ripped out by the roots, leaving a raw, dark red section of scalp exposed. Under that hair, so very like Jackie’s in color and cut, there was not much recognizable left of the face that wasn’t slashed by fingernails, teeth, and knife blade, but something about the profile tugged at my memory for a second, before I shrugged it off. Of course she looked familiar-she looked like Jackie, just as all the other victims did. That was the whole point of it for Patrick.