Jeff Lindsay - Dexter's Final Cut

I looked a moment longer, but saw nothing helpful, so I stepped back and looked down at Vince.

“Did you find anything?” I asked him, without too much hope-and truthfully, without too much interest, either. I knew who had done it, and I couldn’t be more certain even if Patrick Bergmann had signed his work.

“Just this,” Vince said. He held up a small plastic evidence bag. Inside I could see the outline of what looked like a small bar of soap, the kind of small soap bar hotels leave in the bathrooms for their guests. “You don’t want to know where I found it,” he added happily. I leaned in for a closer look, and through the plastic I could make out the crest and the words “Grove Isle Hotel and Spa” in ornate script.

Vince shook it playfully. “Maybe it’ll help Anderson figure out who the victim is this time,” he said.

I opened my mouth to say that it didn’t seem likely, that Anderson wouldn’t figure it out if he had notarized statements from the killer and the victim, and then I closed my mouth and took a step back and didn’t say anything at all.

Because I knew who she was. I remembered why she looked familiar, and it was not because she looked like Jackie. It was because I had seen her, standing in a hallway and blushing, smiling, pleased with being so very near to her real-life hero, Jackie Forrest.

I rattled the handles of my memory bank and came up with it: Her name was Amila, and she was the maid at the Grove Isle Hotel who had come to clean up the mess on the floor of our suite, and told me she styled her hair to look like Jackie Forrest’s hair, and it got her killed.…

Some small shady something tickled my spine, just a tiny breeze of unease, telling me that someone was watching, and I turned away from the Dumpster and looked, out beyond the pier with its two rows of boats, and into the painfully bright glare of the bay.

Less than fifty yards away, straight out from the end of the dock, a small yellow dot bobbed on the light chop. A paddle rose as I watched, and dipped down to make two small strokes to keep the nose pointed in at us: a double-headed kayak paddle.

Behind the kayak, as if to underline this heavy-handed hint, the Grove Isle Hotel towered up into the bright afternoon sky: the hotel where Jackie and I stayed. The hotel where Amila had worked until Patrick ended her career.

The paddle dipped lazily again, turning the boat slightly sideways so there could be no doubt at all what it was: a kayak. It was the perfect boat for Patrick’s outdoorsy lifestyle. They were light and therefore very easy to steal, and it would certainly be simpler than trying to conceal a dead body on a motorcycle. A quick trip across the half mile of water, dump the body, and then paddle away just far enough to watch the fun.

And of course he would watch. Not merely to see the excitement when his project was discovered-he would also be watching to see who showed up, because Jackie had made an appearance the last time, and he would want to see her when she came to this one, too. Without even thinking about it, I knew how important that was to him: to have Jackie look, and see, and know it could have been her-that it would be her so very soon-and to know he was watching her and waiting to make it happen again, to her.…

But to do it like this was pure hubris. He had taken a huge chance, dumping this body in broad daylight from a small boat. And I was quite sure it was not because he was getting bolder. This kill had come too soon, right on the heels of his last, breaking the pattern and revealing the first rift in Patrick’s mountain-man armor. Because as he got closer to Jackie, as he watched the hotel through all the hours of the night, waiting for a chance-waiting for even a glimpse-his frustration had been growing, eating at him, hitting so hard that his satisfaction from the previous victim had lasted only a few pitiful days. Soon these surrogates would not be enough for him; he had to have Jackie, but he could not get to her, and so he watched and waited and the frustration grew as each day slipped past, repeating the day before, without even the smallest window of opportunity.…

Patrick was getting impatient. He was losing his ability to wait for just the right moment, and feeling the pressure of time racing unstoppably by, with nothing to show for it except a dwindling bank account. By killing the maid now he was trying to push things toward a climax, challenging us to see him so very nearby, daring us to do something, defying us to try to stop him, keep him from doing what he was going to do.

And oddly enough, in those two or three seconds as I squinted into the glare on the water at Patrick in his kayak, following all these little insights as they raced through my brain, I found another small thought burbling up underneath and popping into daylight with the happy snap of a bright pink bubble of chewing gum, and that thought went like this:

All right, Patrick. I accept your challenge .

For a moment I wasn’t really sure what I meant by that, and I blinked, turning away from the glare on the Bay and staring off the dock, back toward the yellow perimeter tape, where Robert stood chatting with the two uniformed cops. No sign yet of Deborah and Jackie, which was all to the good. I looked beyond the perimeter, over the growing crowd of gawkers and into the busy streets of Coconut Grove. The Grove, that happy mecca for Miami’s idle rich, with its high-priced boutiques, quaint shops, and casually posh restaurants. The Grove, where Dexter had lived for so long before his marriage, and where even now, Dexter kept his fishing boat only a mile or so from this very spot-

Oh. Fishing boat. That must be what I meant.

I looked at my watch; it was one forty-five, only an hour and change before the conference with Cody’s teacher. I looked back at Patrick, bobbing there so insolently on his pilfered kayak, and the sight of him tripped a switch in the sinister clockwork machinery of Dexter’s bleak brain. A wheel chunked into gear and hit a lever that tipped a metal plate over and onto a fulcrum that thumped into a shiny cold ball so it rolled down the chute and into the “out” basket, and I picked it up, held it in my hand, and heard it whisper, There is just enough time .

And there would be.

I kept my boat behind a private house on a canal, just south of the heart of Coconut Grove’s busy center. The house was on a quiet street, and the elderly couple who owned it lived in New Jersey most of the year, coming down to this house only for the coldest months of winter. They were quite happy to take the modest rental fee from me, and I was just as happy paying less than the going rate for dockage. On top of getting a bargain, I also got a relatively private place to keep my boat, which was occasionally a very good thing, considering that I sometimes put Certain Items onto my boat and carried them away to consign them to the final briny deep, and it was probably best that no one saw me doing this.

And on this bright and suddenly eventful day, it would have been worth twice what I paid for it, because this dock was only a ten-minute drive from the redolent Dumpster where Amila lay in sloppy repose.

I don’t even remember what feeble excuses I made as I hurried away from the scene and into my car. I think I said I was leaving early for my son’s teacher conference because I was worried about the traffic; not my best effort, but I was in a hurry, and no one seemed to notice that it didn’t make a great deal of sense.

In any case, once I got through the maddening snarl of traffic in the middle of the Grove, it was only ten minutes before I was on my boat and heading out the canal, quite a bit faster than the No Wake-Idle Speed that is generally required. But having made up my mind to do this and do it now, I had whipped myself into a lather of impatience, grinding my teeth at the thought that I would not be in time, that Patrick would paddle away, and I would miss my second and probably final chance to set things right in my own inimitable way.