Jeff Lindsay - Dexter is delicious

"It's Nichole," she said to Hood. "Not Nick." Hood smirked at her, and she shook her head, swirling a shining mass of dark and curly hair. "In fact, for you, it's Ms. Rickman." She looked him in the eye, but Hood just kept smirking, and she gave up and came to the table. She was tall and fashionably dressed and she carried a large sketch pad in one hand and a handful of pencils in the other, and I recognized her as the department's forensic artist. Deborah nodded at her and said, "Nichole. How are you?"

"Sergeant Morgan," she said. "It's nice to be drawing somebody who's not dead." She arched an eyebrow at Debs. "He's not dead, is he?"

"I hope not," Deborah said. "He's my best hope to save this girl."

"Well, then," Nichole said, "let's give it a shot." She put her pad and pencils down on the table, slid into a chair, and began to arrange herself to work.

Meanwhile, Deborah was looking over the two men Hood had brought in. "What happened to these two?" she said to Hood.

He shrugged and looked preposterously innocent. "Whataya mean?" he said.

Debs stared at Hood a little longer. He shrugged and leaned against the wall, and she turned her attention back to the prisoners. "Bonjour," she said. Neither of them said anything; they just looked at their feet, until Hood cleared his throat. Then the one with the swollen eye jerked his head up and looked at Hood nervously. Hood nodded toward Deborah, and the prisoner turned to her and began to speak in rapid Creole.

For some quixotic reason, Deborah had studied French in high school, and for a few seconds she apparently thought it was going to help her understand the man. She watched him as he raced through several paragraphs, and then finally shook her head. "Je nais comprend-Goddamn it, I can't remember how to say it. Dexter, get somebody up here to translate."

The other man, the one with the sore leg, finally looked up. "There is no need," he said. His words were very heavily accented, but at least they were easier to understand than Deborah's attempts at French.

"Good," Deborah said. "What about your friend?" She nodded at the other man.

Sore Leg shrugged. "I will speak for my cousin," he said.

"All right," Debs said. "We're going to ask you to describe the man who sold you that Porsche-it was a man, wasn't it?"

He shrugged again. "A boy," he said.

"Okay, a boy," Debs said. "What did he look like?"

Another shrug. "A blanc," he said. "He was young-"

"How young?" Deborah interrupted.

"I could not say. Old enough to shave, because he did not-maybe three, four days."

"Okay," Deborah said, and frowned.

Nichole leaned forward. "Let me do this, Sergeant," she said. Deborah looked at her for a moment, then leaned back and nodded.

"All right," she said. "Go ahead."

Nichole smiled at the two Haitians. "Your English is very good," she said. "I just need to ask you a few simple questions, all right?"

Sore Leg looked at her suspiciously, but she kept smiling, and after a moment he shrugged. "All right," he said.

Nichole went into what seemed to me like a very vague series of questions. I watched with interest, since I had heard that she was supposed to be good at what she did. At first, I thought her reputation was inflated; she just asked things like, "What do you remember about this guy?" And as Sore Leg answered her she would just nod, scribble on her pad, and say, "Uh-huh, right." She led him through an entire description of someone coming into their garage with Tyler's Porsche, what they had said, and so on, all the boring details. I didn't see how it could possibly lead to a picture of anyone living or dead, and Deborah clearly thought the same thing. She began to fidget almost immediately, and then to clear her throat as if she were trying not to interrupt. Every time she did, the Haitians would glance at her nervously.

But Nichole ignored her and continued with her hopelessly general questions, and very slowly I began to realize that she was getting a pretty good description. And at just that point she shifted to more specific things, like, "What about the outside shape of his face?" she said.

The prisoner looked at her blankly. "Outside…?" he said.

"Answer her," Hood said.

"I don't know," the man said, and Nichole glared at Hood. He smirked and leaned back against the wall, and she turned back to Sore Leg.

"I'd like to show you a few shapes," she said, and she took out a large sheet of paper with several roughly oval shapes on it.

"Does one of these remind you of the shape of his face?" she said, and the prisoner leaned forward and studied them. After a moment, his cousin leaned forward to look, and said something softly. The first man nodded and said, "That one, on the top."

"This one?" Nichole said, pointing at one with her pencil.

"Yes," he said. "That one."

She nodded and began to draw, using quick and very certain strokes, pausing only to ask questions and show more pictures: What about his mouth? His ears? One of these shapes? And so on, until a real face began to take form on the page. Deborah kept quiet and let Nichole lead the two men through it. At each of her questions they would lean together and confer in soft Creole, and then the one who spoke English would answer while his cousin nodded. Altogether, between the two handcuffed men doing their muted Creole patter and the nearly magical emergence of a face on the page, it was a riveting performance, and I was sorry to see it end.

But end it did, at last. Nichole held up the notebook for the two men to study, and the one who spoke no English looked hard and then began to nod. "Oui," he said.

"That is him," the other said, and he gave Nichole a sudden very large smile. "Like magic." He said majeek, but the meaning was clear.

Deborah had been leaning back in her chair and letting Nichole work. Now she stood and walked around the conference table, looking in over Nichole to look at the drawing. "Son of a bitch," she said. She looked up at Hood, who was still lounging around by the door with a faintly sleazy smirk still on his face. "Get that file over there," Debs said to him. "The one with the photos."

Hood stepped over to the far end of the table, where a stack of folders teetered beside the telephone. He flipped through the top five or six while Deborah fidgeted. "Come on, goddamn it," she said to him, and Hood nodded, held up one folder, and brought it over to her.

Deborah scattered a pile of photographs on the table, sorted through them quickly, and nudged one out and over to Nichole. "Not bad," she said, as the artist picked up the photo and held it beside her sketch, and Nichole nodded.

"Yeah, not bad at all," Nichole said. She looked up at Deborah with a happy smile. "Damn, I am good." She flipped the photo back to Deborah, who grabbed it and held it up for the two Haitians to see.

"Is this the man who sold you the Porsche?" Deborah asked them.

The man with the swollen eye was already nodding and saying, "Oui." His cousin made a great show of staring at the picture, leaning forward to study it carefully, before finally saying with complete authority, "Yes. Absolutely. That is him."

Deborah looked at the two of them and said, "You are positive? Both of you?" And both of them nodded vigorously.

"Bon," Debs said. "Tres beaucoup bon." The two Haitians smiled, and the one with the swollen eye said something in Creole.

Deborah looked at the cousin for a translation.

"He says, will you please speak English, so he can understand you," the man said with an even bigger smile, and Vince and Hood both snickered.

But Deborah was far too happy with the picture to let a minor jab bother her. "It's Bobby Acosta," she said, and she looked at me. "We got the little bastard."