Jeff Lindsay - Double Dexter

What just happened?

It should not have been much of a surprise, but I did not sleep very much that night. Eyes open or eyes shut, all I could see or think about was that body in the small house, so very nearly Dexter-right, and Dexter himself standing above it gaping at his reflection, both of us drooling stupidly as the siren races closer and closer

It had all been a setup, a trap, flawlessly designed to catch nobody but me, and it had so nearly worked. It had been perfectly baited, drawing me in and then stunning me stupid with the body arranged just as I might have done I had seen so many bodies just like it, and they had always brought me comfort, and it did not seem fair that this one should steal my sleep, fill me with fear, slam nearly human dread into all my thoughts. Was this what it was like to have a conscience? To roll around in bed all night with the thought that you had done something terribly wrong and at any minute it was going to rear up and crush you? I didn t like the feeling at all, and I liked even less the thought that my Shadow had set me up so neatly and very nearly got me.

But what could I do? What could I possibly come up with to find and finish this awful lurking menace? Tracing the Honda had been my best shot, my only shot, and I had fired it perfectly, only to find my Witness three steps ahead of me and looking back with a mocking grin. What was left for me now except to wait for his next move? Because there would be a next move; I did not doubt that for a moment. And I had no way to know what it would be, where it would come from all I could know was that this first try had been very good, and the next one was bound to be better.

And so I rolled across the sheets all night, fretting and gnashing my teeth in helpless frustrated anxiety, finally dropping into blank and empty sleep around five thirty, and jerked right back out of it by the alarm clock at seven o clock. I lay there for several stiff and numb minutes, trying to convince myself that it had all been a bad dream, but I was not nearly persuasive enough. It had happened. It was real and I did not have even a tiny hint of what to do about it.

I stumbled into the shower and then into my clothes, and somehow I made it all the way to the table for breakfast, hoping to find some small relief there. And Rita rose to the occasion. She had filled the tabletop with the congenial clutter of blueberry pancakes and bacon. I collapsed into my chair and she thumped a steaming mug of coffee in front of me, and then she paused, hovering over me with that strange expression of half disapproval on her face until I looked up at her.

You were out late, she said, a little more grimly than I was used to from her, and I wondered why.

Yeah, sorry, I said. I had some, um, tests to run. At the lab.

Oh, tests, she said, at the lab . And then Astor came in and slammed herself into a chair.

Why do we have to have pancakes? she said.

Because they re bad for you and I want you to suffer, Rita snapped at her, and turned away to the stove. Astor watched her with an almost comical expression of surprise on her face, which vanished right away when she saw me looking at her.

The blueberries get stuck in my braces, she mumbled grumpily at me, and then Cody came in and Lily Anne threw her spoon in a perfect arc to the back of Astor s head. Astor said, Ow, Cody laughed, and then all pretense of calm and dignified behavior fled from the room as Astor jumped up, knocking her plate onto the floor, where it broke into three large pieces and a scattered pile of food. She ignored the mess and erupted into self-pitying rage while Rita cleaned up, gave her another plate, and scolded her. Lily Anne started to wail, and Cody simply sat and smirked and, when he thought no one was looking, took a piece of Astor s bacon.

I pulled Lily Anne out of her chair, partly to stop her crying and partly to protect her from Astor, and I held her on my lap with one hand while I sipped coffee with the other. It was several minutes before Astor stopped threatening her brother and sister and the uproar died away to the normal clangor of a weekday morning. I finished my pancakes and had a second cup of coffee; it didn t do a whole lot to get my brain moving, but by the time I finished it I was at least alert enough to drive, so with no other plan available to me besides following everyday routine, I put my mug in the sink and headed numbly in to work.

I could feel myself loosening up a little on the drive in. It wasn t because I had come up with any kind of Master Plan, or because I had realized that Things were not really That Bad; Things were that bad, and maybe worse. But as always, I found the vicious, backstabbing zest of Miami traffic kind of soothing, and on top of that I always take comfort in routine. By the time I arrived at work, my shoulders were no longer hunched up around my ears, and when I arrived at my desk I had actually unclenched my teeth. It didn t really make sense, but there it was. Unconsciously, I suppose I thought of work as some kind of refuge. After all, my little office was right there in police headquarters, surrounded by hundreds of hard-eyed men and women with guns who were sworn to protect and serve. But on this morning, when of all times I needed my job to be a snug and safe shelter from the storm, it turned out to be nothing but one more nail in the lid of Dexter s coffin.

I really should have seen it coming. I mean, I knew very well that my job involved going to crime scenes. And I knew just as well that a crime had been committed last night. It was a very simple equation of cause and effect, and it should not have been any kind of unpleasant shock to find myself standing once more in the dingy little room I had so recently fled, and looking down at the Dexter Duplicate mound of body parts.

But it was a shock, and it was very unpleasant, and it got even more so as the morning wore on through all the ordinary rituals of forensic magic. Each standard step of the process brought its own new jolt of panic. When Angel Batista began to dust for fingerprints, I sweated through several minutes of furiously trying to remember whether I had kept my gloves on the whole time. Just when I decided that I definitely had, Camilla Figg took her camera out into the yard and began to photograph footprints my footprints! And I spent another five awful minutes stupidly reassuring myself that I was wearing different shoes this morning and I could get rid of the ones I d worn last night as soon as I got home. And then, as if to prove that I really had descended into total idiocy, I spent several more minutes wondering if I could really afford the expense of throwing away a pair of perfectly good shoes.

I finished my own work fairly quickly; there was only a little bit of blood on the table with the body, and a few small traces on the floor underneath. I sprayed my Bluestar in a couple of likely spots in order to look diligent, but considering the funk I was in, I don t think I would have noticed anything smaller than a two-gallon spatter. All my attention was on my fellow crime scene wonks. Each procedure they performed sent a new spasm of anxiety through my system and another trickle of sweat down my back, until I was completely frazzled and my shirt was plastered to my body.

I had never before had such intense justification for anxiety, and yet even as I sweated and fretted it all seemed slightly unreal; only a few hours ago I had been right here in this same grungy room, confronting one of the great shocks of my long and wicked life. And now here I was again, in theory part of a team that was trying to find some trace of me, while the other me stood by watching the proceedings with frantic angst in case I really did. It was a nearly surreal clash of Dark Dexter with Dexter on Duty, and for the first time I wasn t sure I could keep the two parts of myself separate.