Jeff Lindsay - Double Dexter

Holy shit, he said. Oh, my God, holy shit.

Vince, I said, irritated because he had interrupted the first happy thoughts I d had in days. In traditional Western culture, we like to separate deity and feces.

He lurched to a halt and blinked at me and then, with truly annoying single-mindedness, he said, Holy shit, again.

All right, fine, holy shit, I said. Can we move on to the next syllable, please?

It s Camilla, he said. Camilla Figg?

I know who Camilla is, I said, still peeved and then I heard a distant rustle of dark wings and I realized I was sitting up straighter in my chair and feeling a soft tendril of interest from the Passenger slide up my spine.

She s dead, Vince said, and he gulped and shook his head. Camilla is dead, and it s Jesus it s the same thing, with the hammer.

I felt my head move in an involuntary twitch of denial. Um, I said. Didn t everybody agree that Deborah caught the hammer guy?

Wrong, Vince said. Your sister fucked up big-time and got the wrong guy, cause it happened again, the exact same, and now they won t let her near this one. He shook his head. She fucked up huge, cause what happened to Camilla is the same damn thing that happened to the others. He blinked and swallowed, and looked at me with the most solemn and frightened expression I had ever seen from him.

She was hammered to death, Dexter. Just like the other guys.

My mouth went dry and a small tickle of electricity ran from the back of my neck straight down my spine, and although it is not terribly flattering to me, I was not thinking of Deborah and her apparent fall from grace. Instead, I was simply sitting, hardly breathing, as several waves of hot intangible wind fluttered across my face and sent dry leaves scuttering through the gutters of Castle Dexter. The Dark Passenger was up on point, hissing with more than casual concern, and I barely heard Vince as he stuttered on stupidly about what an awful thing this was and how terrible everybody felt.

I am sure that if I could feel at all I would have felt terrible, too, since Camilla was a coworker and I had labored beside her for many years. We had not really been close, and she had often behaved in ways that I found puzzling, but I was quite well aware that when Death visits a colleague, one must display the proper feelings of shock and awfulness. That was elementary, clearly stated in one of the first chapters of The Olde Booke of Human Behavioure, and I was sure that eventually I would work my way around to playing the part with my usual dramatic excellence. But not now, not yet. Right now I had far too many things to think about.

My first thought was that somehow, this was the work of my Shadow; he had written in his blog that he was going to do something, and now Camilla turned up dead, battered into jelly. But how did that affect me? Aside from forcing me to make grieving faces and mouth clich s about Tragic Loss, it didn t touch me at all.

So this was something else, something unconnected to my own personal conflict and yet, something about it had caught the Passenger s attention, and that meant more than all the fake standardized emotions in the world. It meant that something was very off center here, wrong in a way that a Certain Shadowy Someone found extremely provocative, and that meant that whatever had happened to Camilla was far from being what it seemed to be which in turn was an indication that, for some reason that was not at all clear at the moment, Dexter needed to pay attention.

But why? Aside from the fact that Camilla was a coworker and Deborah was in disgrace, why should this cause more than a mild flutter of passing interest from the Passenger?

I tried to shut out the blather of Vince and his annoying outpouring of emotion, and concentrate for just a moment on the facts. Deborah had been certain that she caught the right man. Deborah was very good at what she did. Therefore, either Deborah had made a huge and uncharacteristic mistake, or else

It s a copycat, I said, interrupting the flow of meaningless sound that was pouring out of Vince.

He blinked at me with eyes that seemed suddenly much too large and wet. Dexter, he said. There s never in history been anybody who did something like this hammer thing, not once ever before and now you think there re two of them?

Yes, I said. Has to be.

He shook his head vigorously. No. No way. Can t be it just can t. I mean, I know it s your sister; you gotta stick up for her, but hey, he said.

But once again his pointless drivel was contradicted by the far more compelling purr of reptile logic slithering out from the deep and shadowed stronghold of the Passenger s certainty, and I knew I was right. I still did not know why that should make the alarm bells ring where was the threat to precious irreplaceable me? But the Passenger was almost never wrong, and the warning was clear. Someone had duplicated the Hammer Killer s technique, and aside from petty moral questions and copyright issues, something about that was wrong; some new threat was marching in too close for comfort, right up to the battlements of the Dark Lair, and I was suddenly deeply uneasy over what should have been no more than a routine opportunity to give another solid performance of Artificial Human Grief. Was the whole world out to get me? Was this really the new Model of how Things were going to be?

Nothing that happened in the next few hours made me feel any easier. Camilla s body had been found in a car parked in the far corner of the lot at a giant superstore located very close to headquarters. A lot of cops stopped at the store on their way home from work, and quite probably Camilla had, too. There were three plastic shopping bags with the store s logo scattered across the floor in the backseat of the car, and Camilla s body had been poured onto the seat above them. Just like the other two victims, she had been savagely hammered on every bone and joint until her body had lost its original shape.

But the car was not an official police vehicle, and apparently it was not even Camilla s, either. It was a five-year-old Chevy Impala, registered to a store employee named Natalie Bromberg. Ms. Bromberg had not had a great deal to say to the detectives so far, possibly because, since finding Camilla in her car, her time had been filled with screaming, crying, and finally accepting a large syringe filled with sedative.

Vince and I worked slowly through the area around the Impala, and inside it as well, and my sense that this was the work of a different hand grew steadily. Camilla s body was slumped half-on, half-off the seat, while the other two had been arranged a little more carefully. A small thing, but once again, it didn t fit the previous pattern, and it made me look a little closer.

I am not really an expert on blunt-force trauma, but the places on Camilla s body where she had been hit looked different from what I had seen in the two previous cases; Gunther s and Klein s impact points had visibly been made by the flat surface on the end of the hammer. These had a slight curve to them, a faint concave contour, as if the weapon had been rounded rather than flat, something like a pole, or a dowel, or or maybe a baseball bat? The kind a former minor-league baseball player with anger-management problems might have lying around?

I thought about it hard, and it seemed like it fit except for one small thing: Why would Bernie Elan want to kill Camilla Figg? And if for some reason he did want to kill her, why choose this difficult and repulsive method? It didn t add up, not at all. I was leaping to paranoid conclusions. Merely because somebody was after me, that didn t mean he would do this. Ridiculous.

I worked around the outside of the car, spraying Bluestar in the hopes of finding some telltale blood spatter. I found a very faint bloody impression from the toe of a running shoe on the white line separating the Impala s parking spot from the one next to it. And there were no taco wrappers inside the car, either, which was hardly conclusive. But there was a large patch of blood on the seat under the body that had leaked out from a savage wound on the left side of Camilla s head. Head wounds are notorious gushers but this one had merely trickled onto the seat, meaning that she had been killed somewhere else and then dumped here soon after. The killer had probably parked close to the Impala and quickly slid the body out of his vehicle and into the Chevy s backseat, and it was my guess that blood from the head injury had made the partial footprint.