Jeffrey Lindsay - Dexter is delicious

Sometimes I think it is a very good thing that I have had so many years of practice at showing only what I want to show on my face, and this was absolutely one of those times, because my first impulse was to shout, Whoopee! Good girl! and burst into lighthearted song. And so it was quite possibly one of the greatest demonstrations of acting skill our age has yet seen when I managed instead to look shocked and concerned. "You're kidding," I said, thinking, I really hope you're not kidding.

"She stayed home from school today, resting," Deborah said. "I mean, she went through an awful lot." It apparently didn't occur to my sister that I had gone through even more, but nobody's perfect. "So around two o'clock, her mother went out to the store," she said. "And she comes back a little while ago, and Samantha was gone." Deborah shook her head. "She left a note: 'Don't look for me; I'm not coming back.' She ran, Dex. She took off and ran."

I was feeling so much better that I actually managed to fight down the impulse to say, I told you so. After all, Debs had refused to believe me when I told her Samantha had gone into cannibal captivity willingly, even eagerly, the first time. And since I was right about that, it made perfect sense that she would take off again at the first opportunity. It was not a terribly noble thought, but I hoped she found a good hiding place.

Deborah sighed heavily and shook her head again. "I never heard of Stockholm syndrome so strong the victim ran back to the bad guys," she said.

"Debs," I said, and now I really couldn't help it, "I told you. It's not Stockholm. Samantha wants to be eaten. It was her fantasy."

"That's bullshit," she said angrily. "Nobody wants that."

"Then why did she run away again?" I said, and she just shook her head and looked down at her hands.

"I don't know," she said. She stared at her hands where they lay in her lap, as if the answer might be written on her knuckles, and then she straightened up. "It doesn't matter," she said. "What matters is where she went." She looked up at me. "So where would she go, Dex?"

To be honest, I didn't really care where Samantha went, as long as she stayed there. Still, I had to say something.

"What about Bobby Acosta?" I said, and it made sense. "Did you find him yet?"

"No," she said, very grumpy, and she shrugged. "He can't stay lost forever," she said. "We're bringing way too much heat. Besides," she said, and she raised both palms, "his family has money, and political clout, and they're gonna figure they can get him off."

"Can they?" I asked.

Deborah looked at her knuckles "Maybe," she said. "Fuck. Yeah, probably. We got witnesses who can connect him to Tyler Spanos's car — but a good lawyer could chop up those two Haitians in two seconds on the stand. And he ran from me — but that's not much, either. The rest is guesswork and hearsay so far, and — Shit, yeah, I guess he could walk." She nodded to herself and looked at her hands again. "Yeah, sure, Bobby Acosta will walk," she said softly. "Again. And then nobody goes down for this…" She studied her knuckles again, and then looked up at me, and her face was wearing an expression unlike anything I had ever seen before.

"What is it?" I said.

Deborah bit her lip. "Maybe," she said. She looked away. "I don't know." She looked back at me and took a deep breath. "Maybe there's something, you know," she said. "Something you could do about it."

I blinked several times, and I just barely managed to stop myself from looking down to see if there was still a floor underneath our feet. It was impossible to misunderstand what she was suggesting. As far as Debs was concerned I only did two things, and my sister was not talking about using my forensic skills on Bobby Acosta.

Deborah was the one person on earth who knew about my hobby. I thought she had come to accept it, however reluctantly — but to have her suggest that I should actually use it on somebody was so completely outside the limits of what I thought Deborah would ever approve of that the idea never occurred to me, and I was truly stunned. "Deborah," I said, and the shock had to be showing in my voice. But she leaned as far forward as she could without tipping out of her chair and lowered her voice.

"Bobby Acosta is a killer," she said with savage intensity. "And he's going to walk — again — just because he's got money and clout. It's not right, and you know it — and that has to be the kind of thing that Dad wanted you to take care of."

"Listen," I said, but she wasn't quite done.

"Goddamn it, Dexter," she said, "I tried like hell to understand you, and what Daddy wanted with you, and I finally do — I get it, okay? I know exactly what Daddy was thinking. Because I'm a cop like he was, and every cop comes up against a Bobby Acosta someday, somebody who does murder and walks, even if you do everything right. And you can't sleep and you grind your teeth and you want to scream and strangle somebody but it's your job to eat the shit and like it and there's nothing you can do about it." She actually stood up, and she leaned her fist on my desk and put her face about six inches away from mine. "Until now," she said. "Until finally Daddy solved this whole thing, the whole fucked-up mess." She poked me in the chest. "With you," she said. "And now I need you to be what Daddy wanted you to be, Dexter. I need you to take care of Bobby Acosta."

Debs glared at me for several seconds as I scrambled for something to say. And in spite of my well-deserved reputation for a glib tongue and a ready wit, there were absolutely no words there for me to grab on to and speak. I mean, really; I had been trying so hard to reform, to live a normal life, and because of that I had been drugged, forced into an orgy, taunted and beaten by cannibals — and now my sister, a sworn officer of the law and a lifelong opponent of everything I held dear, was actually asking me to kill someone. I began to wonder if perhaps I was still lying somewhere, tied up and drugged, and hallucinating all this. The idea was very comforting — but my stomach was growling, and my chest hurt where Debs had poked me, and I realized that something so unpleasant was probably true, and that meant I had to deal with it.

"Deborah," I said carefully. "I think you're a little bit upset —"

"You're goddamned right I'm upset," she said. "I bust my ass to get Samantha Aldovar back, and now she's gone again — and I'm betting Bobby Acosta has her, and he's going to get away with it."

Of course, it would have been more accurate for Debs to say she had busted my ass getting Samantha back — but now was not the best time to correct her, and anyway I suspected she was right about Bobby Acosta. Samantha had gotten into this because of him, and he was one of the last people left who could still help her fulfill her dream. But at least it offered a way out of the awkward moment — if I could steer the conversation on to where Acosta was, rather than what to do with him.

"I think you're right," I said. "Acosta got her started on all this. Samantha would go to him now."

Deborah still didn't sit back down, and she was still looking at me with red spots on her cheeks and fire in her eyes. "All right," she said. "I'm going to find the little bastard. And then…"

Sometimes a short reprieve and a change of subject is the very best you can hope for, and clearly I was there now. I could only hope that in the time it took to find Acosta, Debs would calm down a little bit and decide that feeding her felon to Dexter was not the wisest course. Maybe she would shoot him herself. In any case, I was off the hook — temporarily, at least.

"Okay," I said. "How are you going to find him?"

Deborah straightened up and ran a hand through her hair. "I'll talk to his old man," she said. "He's got to know Bobby's best chance is to walk in here with a lawyer."