Jeff Lindsay - Double Dexter

I looked back at Deborah, expecting her to resume her eruption. But to my surprise she did not reach for her weapon, or even wind up to throw a blistering arm punch. Instead, she took a deep breath and visibly calmed herself down. Guys, she said, I got a really bad feeling about this guy. This psycho that smashed up Marty Klein.

Vince opened his mouth, presumably to say something he thought of as witty. Deborah looked at him, and he thought better of it and closed his mouth.

I think he s going to do it again, and soon, Debs said. The whole force thinks so, too. They think this guy is some kind of spook, like Freddy Krueger or something. Everybody is freaking out, and everybody is looking at me to find the killer. And all I got is just this one small lead a crappy little taco wrapper. She shrugged and shook her head.

I know it s not much, but it s what there is, and I Please, guys Dex isn t there something else you can do? Anything?

There was real need in her face, and it was clear that she was really and truly pleading with us. Vince looked at me with a very uncomfortable expression. He was not good at sincerity, and it obviously made him too nervous to speak, which meant it was my problem. Debs, I said, we d like to catch this guy, too. But we ve hit the wall. The wrapper is standard, from a restaurant supply place. There s not enough left of the tacos to say anything except that they were tacos, and even that I couldn t swear to on the stand. No prints, no trace evidence, nothing. We don t have any magic tricks, I said, and as I said magic tricks the image of a clown secured to a table with duct tape popped into my mind. But I pushed the happy memory firmly out of my head and tried to concentrate on Deborah. I m sorry, I said, and my sincerity was no more than half-artificial, which was pretty good for me. But we ve done everything we can think of.

Deborah looked at me for a long moment. She took another deep breath, looked at Vince, and then shook her head slowly. All right, she said. Then I guess we just wait for him to hit again, and hope we get lucky next time. And she turned away and walked out of the lab at about one-quarter the speed she d come in.

Wow, said Vince in a hushed voice when Deborah was gone. I ve never seen her like that. He shook his head. Very scary, he said.

I guess this really bothers her, I said.

Vince shook his head. No, it s her; she s changed, he said. I think motherhood has made her all mushy inside.

I could have said that she was not nearly as mushy as Detective Klein, but that might have hit the wrong note, and anyway it was true. Deborah had softened since the birth of her son, Nicholas. The child had been a parting gift from Kyle Chutsky, her live-in boyfriend of several years who had vanished in a fit of low self-esteem. Nicholas was a few months younger than Lily Anne, and a nice enough little chap, although next to Lily Anne he did seem to be a bit slow and not nearly as attractive.

But Deborah doted on him, which was natural enough, and she really had seemed to mellow around the edges since his arrival. Still, I would almost rather have seen the old Debs and suffered one of her terrifying arm punches than see her so visibly deflated. But even her new sensitivity couldn t get cheese from a stone; there truly wasn t anything we could do that we had not already done. A taco wrapper from the floor of a car is not a lot to go on; that was all we had, and wishing for more wouldn t make it appear in front of me.

I spent the rest of the day turning the problem over in my head, trying to think of some neat and clever angle to make the wrapper yield more information, but I came up empty. I am good at my job, and I do have a certain amount of professional pride. I would also prefer to see my sister happy and successful. But there was just no way to take things any further than we had done. It was frustrating, and very bad for my sense of personal worth, and it added to my general feeling that life was a mangy dog that was badly in need of a hearty kick.

By five o clock I was quite happy to slip away from the frustration and tension, and head for a relaxing and recuperative weekend at home. Traffic was worse than usual; after all, this was Friday night. All the usual violence and anger were there, but there was a festive edge to it, as if people had saved all the energy left over from the workweek and were putting it into causing as much mayhem as possible on the way home. On the Dolphin Expressway a tanker truck had rammed into the back end of a van from a retirement village. They had only been going five miles per hour, but the back of the van still crumpled a bit, and it had plowed forward into a fifteen-year-old Toyota with only one regular tire and three doughnuts on it.

I crawled past in a long, slow line of cars, most of them filled with people cheering as the tanker s driver yelled at the four men in the Toyota and a flock of terrified old people from the van huddled together on the shoulder. Traffic ground to a dead stop, then slowly started up again. I saw two more fender-benders before I got off onto Dixie Highway. But somehow, through a combination of skill, lifelong practice, and blind luck, I made it home without serious injury.

I parked my car behind a two-year-old SUV that was already in front of the house; my brother, Brian, was here for his every-week Friday-night dinner with the family. It was a custom we had gotten used to over the last year, after he had turned up and apparently wanted nothing more than to be with me, his only living relative. He had already bonded with Cody and Astor, since they knew him for what he was a cold and empty killer, like me and they wanted to be just like him. And Rita, showing the same solid good judgment about men that had led her to marry two different monsters, ate up Brian s horribly fake flattery and thought he was wonderful, too. And as for me? Well, I still had trouble believing that Brian did not have some secret motive for hanging around, but he was my brother, after all, and family is family. We don t get to pick our kin. The best we can hope for is to survive them, especially in my family.

Inside the house, Lily Anne was in her playpen next to the couch, where Brian was sitting with Rita, deep in very serious conversation. They looked up at me as I entered, and for some reason I thought Rita looked a little guilty when she saw me. It was impossible to read Brian, of course. He certainly couldn t feel guilt, and he merely gave me his large and very fake smile of greeting, like always.

Greetings, brother, he said.

Dexter, Rita said, and she jumped up and came over to greet me with a quick hug and a peck on the cheek. Brian and I were just talking, she said, probably to reassure me that they had not been performing amateur brain surgery on the neighbors.

Wonderful, I said, and before I could say more I sneezed.

Rita jumped back and managed to avoid most of the spray from my nose. Oh, she said. Here, I ll get some tissues. And she vanished down the hall toward the bathroom.

I blotted my nose with my sleeve and sat in the easy chair. I looked at my brother, and he looked back at me. Brian had recently landed a job with a large Canadian real estate conglomerate that was buying up homes in South Florida. My brother was charged with approaching people whose houses were in foreclosure and encouraging them to leave right away. In theory, this was done by offering them key money, usually around fifteen hundred dollars, to walk away and let the corporation take over and resell the property. I say in theory because Brian seemed very prosperous and happy lately, and I was almost certain that he was pocketing the key money and using less conventional means of emptying the houses. After all, if someone is running out on a mortgage, they generally want to disappear for a while and why shouldn t Brian help them do a more thorough job of it?