Jeff Lindsay - Dexter's Final Cut

“Uh-huh,” she said, just the way I’d heard her say it many times before when she was trying to get a suspect to keep talking. And for some reason, it worked on me.

“And anyway,” I babbled, “how could he get in here? There’s cops all around the perimeter, all over the place. Nobody could get past them.”

“Nobody who didn’t belong here,” she amended.

“Yes, of course.”

“Like, for instance, an extra? Maybe an extra who was also her boyfriend ?” And she put an awful lot of venom into that word.

“All right, Deborah,” I said, and if my tone of voice revealed that I was peeved past caring, fine. “If you’re so mad at me that you’d rather lock me up than get whoever really did this, fine. Get the cuffs. Take me away and be a hero, the hard-ass who locked up her brother for a murder he didn’t commit.” I held out my hands, wrists together for the cuffs. “Go ahead,” I said.

Deborah looked at me a little longer, as if she might really do it. Then she shook her head and hissed out a long breath between her teeth. “All right,” she said. “One way or the other, it’s not my problem.”

“Deborah-”

“Don’t even bother,” she said. “I don’t give a shit.” And she turned away from me and took out her phone to call it in.

I have been on the scene of a great many homicides, professionally as well as personally, but I had never before been there as the person who found the body. And I had never been there as a suspect, either, even when I was guilty. I found it to be a vastly different experience, and I didn’t like it-especially when Detective Anderson arrived to take charge.

The first thing Anderson did was to usher Deborah out the door, and then he stumped around the trailer and grumbled and hissed and bullied Angel-No-Relation, who had arrived to handle the forensic side of things. And when he finally got around to taking me aside for questioning, he did not behave like a man talking to a professional colleague caught in unfortunate circumstances. Instead, he took me by the elbow and pulled me off to stand by the refrigerator. We stood there and he gave me a long and hooded stare. I waited politely, but he just stared, obviously convinced he could soften me up before dragging an incriminating statement out of me.

My phone chirped. I reached for it, but he shot out his hand and clamped it on my wrist. I looked at him with raised eyebrows; he shook his head. It didn’t seem worth fighting about, so I let go of the phone and looked at him, waiting for him to do something that might hint at an intelligence higher than the refrigerator’s. I waited in vain, but he finally shook his head and favored me with a slight frown.

“Some blanket,” he said.

It took me a moment to understand what he meant. It must have shown on my face, because he went on. “You said you were protecting her.” He sneered. “Like a blanket.”

It is usually best to stay polite and meek when being questioned by a detective, but the meekness had drained out of me with Jackie’s death, and I was irritated enough by his cheap shot to give it right back. “Some detective,” I said. “You said you’d find the killer.”

He blushed very slightly, and then shook his head. “Maybe I have,” he said, and there was no way to misunderstand him this time.

“You haven’t,” I said.

“Uh-huh,” he said. “Except it’s always the boyfriend, isn’t it?”

“Sure,” I said. “Even when the victim is being stalked by a homicidal psychopath who has killed before and has sworn to kill her. It makes perfect sense to suspect the boyfriend, and not the psycho stalker. At least,” I said, “it makes sense to you .”

He stared at me, and he thought he was going to say something else, some truly witty and withering put-down. But as we have all noted previously, Wit blossoms on a branch that is forever out of reach to Detective Anderson, and so he just stared, and then shook his head again as he finally realized no bon mot was on the way. “You’re not out of this,” he said, and he moved away to bully Angel some more.

And I wasn’t out of it. Not by a long shot. I stood there for most of an hour and watched. Whenever he thought of it, Anderson would give me an intimidating stare, but other than that nothing happened.

I didn’t mind. In fact, I was glad that Anderson was in charge, instead of someone like Deborah, who might actually solve this murder, because I didn’t want it solved just yet. Whoever did this had done it to me as much as to Jackie. They had killed my whole beautiful future along with her, and thrown me back on the dung heap of cloying mundane hand-to-mouth existence in the slough of the petty, pointless life I had outgrown, and whoever did that to me, I would find them and make them pay. No, I didn’t want anybody finding this killer. Nobody except Me.

So I stood there beside the refrigerator and watched Anderson stump around, the very Classical Ideal of sound and fury signifying nothing, and I looked at the two or three small factoids I had about this killer.

First, I knew it wasn’t Patrick. But I was the only one who knew that, and somebody else could well have hoped to use the whole Psycho Stalker thing as a shield. They already had, in fact, if I assumed that the same person had killed Kathy. I thought only a moment, and then I went ahead and assumed it; Kathy’s eye had been taken, and there was no reason to do that except as a red herring. The same killer had killed them both.

So I had two events to provide me with clues. If I had been feeling optimistic, this would have cheered me up, because two murders provide twice as many clues. But I added up what I knew without any optimism; it was gone from me forever, leaving behind only a bitter residue.

Kathy had been a nonentity, almost a nonperson. I meant no disrespect for the dead, even though they couldn’t stop me if I did. But my short sweet time at the pinnacle of showbiz had taught me that a personal assistant was not even as high in the pecking order as the valet parking attendant, who might, after all, be an actor on the rise.

Kathy, though, had been a full-time professional gofer, and she could not possibly have the kind of high-octane enemies who would choose to kill her, especially not coldly, premeditatedly, and in such a vividly visceral way. But somebody had, in fact, killed her-and then taken her phone. Where she kept all Jackie’s appointments, phone numbers, contacts, etc. That implied-at least to me-that Kathy’s death was connected to something on the phone.

Even in Hollywood, very few people will kill to get an address or phone number-except, perhaps, the number of a really good agent. But in this case, that seemed unlikely; I was quite sure the phone had not been taken for any contact information. That left appointments, and that thought brought a small, dry rustle of interest from the Dark Detective nestled in his inner lair.

All right: The phone had been taken to hide one of the appointments. That meant that either one of Jackie’s upcoming appointments was worth killing to hide-or the appointment was not Jackie’s. It was Kathy’s phone, after all. Why shouldn’t she keep personal things on it, too? And if somebody made a date to meet her in her room at the hotel, and had gone there specifically to kill her, it made sense that he would take the phone away to hide the record of the date.

But wait: That made sense only if the killer knew Kathy kept all those things on her phone. And that meant it was somebody who knew her, and knew the way she did her job-and that meant it was either somebody from her past who flew in from L.A. just to kill her … Or much more likely, it was somebody here, now, involved in making this pilot. Somebody with a very strong motive for keeping Kathy from-what? Going somewhere, doing something, saying something …