Jeffry Lindsay - Dexter in the Dark

It was nice to confirm my identity as the Weird Creepy Shit King, but I did have to wonder how long it would last without my Dark Crown. Still, with my reputation on the line I had to venture some kind of insightful opinion, so I took a small bloodless stab at it.

“All right,” I said. “Then from a weird creepy point of view, it doesn’t make sense to have two different killers with the same ritual. So either Halpern killed ’em and somebody found the heads and thought, what the hell, I’ll hang ’em up-or else the wrong guy is in jail.”

“Fuck that,” she said.

“Which part?”

“All of it, goddamn it!” she said. “Neither one of those choices is any better.”

“Well, shit,” I said, surprising us both. And since I felt cranky beyond endurance with Deborah, and with myself, and with this whole burned-and-headless thing, I took the only logical, reasonable course. I kicked a coconut.

Much better. Now my foot hurt, too.

“I’m checking Goldman’s background,” she said abruptly, nodding at the house. “So far, he’s just a dentist. Owns an office building in Davie. But this-it smells like the cocaine cowboys. And that doesn’t make sense, either. Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said. “Give me something.”

I looked at Deborah with surprise. Somehow she had brought it around so it was back in my lap again, and I had absolutely nothing beyond a very strong hope that Goldman would turn out to be a drug lord who was only disguised as a dentist. “I have come up empty,” I said, which was sad but far too true.

“Aw, crap,” she said, looking past me to the edge of the gathering crowd. The first of the news vans had arrived, and even before the vehicle had come to a full stop the reporter leaped out and began poking at his cameraman, prodding him into position for a long shot. “Goddamn it,” Deborah said, and hurried over to deal with them.

“That guy is scary, Dexter,” said a small voice behind me, and I turned quickly around. Once again, Cody and Astor had snuck up on me unobserved. They stood together, and Cody inclined his head toward the small crowd that had gathered on the far side of the crime-scene tape.

“Which guy is scary?” I said, and Astor said, “There. In the orange shirt. Don’t make me point, he’s looking .”

I looked for an orange shirt in the crowd and saw only a flash of color at the far end of the cul-de-sac as someone ducked into a car. It was a small blue car, not a white Avalon-but I did notice a familiar dab of additional color dangling from the rearview mirror as the car moved out onto the main road. And although it was difficult to be sure, I was relatively confident that it was a University of Miami faculty parking pass.

I turned back to Astor. “Well, he’s gone now,” I said. “Why did you say he was scary?”

“ He says so,” Astor said, pointing to Cody, and Cody nodded.

“He was,” Cody said, barely above a whisper. “He had a big shadow.”

“I’m sorry he scared you,” I said. “But he’s gone now.”

Cody nodded. “Can we look at the heads?”

Children are so interesting, aren’t they? Here Cody had been frightened by something as insubstantial as somebody’s shadow, and yet he was as eager as I’d ever seen him to get a closer look at a concrete example of murder, terror, and human mortality. Of course I didn’t blame him for wanting a peek, but I didn’t think I could openly allow it. On the other hand, I had no idea how to explain all of this to them, either. I am told that the Turkish language, for example, has subtleties far beyond what I can imagine, but English was definitely not adequate for a proper response.

Happily for me, Deborah came back just then, muttering, “I will never complain about the captain again.” That seemed highly unlikely, but it did not seem politic to say so. “He can have those bloodsucking bastards from the press.”

“Maybe you’re just not a people person,” I said.

“Those assholes aren’t people,” she said. “All they want is to get some goddamned pictures of their perfect fucking haircuts standing in front of the heads, so they can send their tape to the network. What kind of animal wants to see this?”

Actually, I knew the answer to that one, since I was shepherding two of them at the moment and, truth be told, might be considered one myself. But it did seem like I should avoid this question and try to keep our focus on the problem at hand. So I pondered whatever it was that had made Cody’s scary guy seem scary, and the fact that he’d had what looked very much like a university parking permit.

“I’ve had a thought,” I said to Deborah, and the way her head snapped around you might have thought I’d told her she was standing on a python. “It doesn’t really fit with your dentist-as-drug-lord theory,” I warned her.

“Out with it,” she said through her teeth.

“Somebody was here, and he scared the kids. He took off in a car with a faculty parking tag.”

Deborah stared at me, her eyes hard and opaque. “Shit,” she said softly. “The guy Halpern said, what’s his name?”

“Wilkins,” I said.

“No,” she said. “Can’t be. All because the kids say somebody scared them? No.”

“He has a motive,” I said.

“To get tenure, for Christ’s sake? Come on, Dex.”

“We don’t have to think it’s important,” I said. “ They do.”

“So to get tenure,” she said, shaking her head, “he breaks into Halpern’s apartment, steals his clothes, kills two girls-”

“And then steers us to Halpern,” I said, remembering how he had stood there in the hall and suggested it.

Deborah’s head jerked around to face me. “Shit,” she said. “He did do that, didn’t he? Told us to go see Halpern.”

“And however feeble tenure might seem as a motive,” I said, “it makes more sense than Danny Rollins and Ted Bundy getting together on a little project, doesn’t it?”

Deborah smoothed down the back of her hair, a surprisingly feminine gesture for someone I had come to think of as Sergeant Rock. “It might,” she said finally. “I don’t know enough about Wilkins to say for sure.”

“Shall we go talk to him?”

She shook her head. “First I want to see Halpern again,” she said.

“Let me get the kids,” I said.

Naturally enough, they were not anywhere near where they should have been. But I found them easily enough; they had wandered over to get a better look at the two heads, and it may have been my imagination, but I thought I could see a small gleam of professional appreciation in Cody’s eyes.

“Come on,” I told them, “we have to get going.” They turned away and followed me reluctantly, but I did hear Astor muttering under her breath, “Better than a stupid museum anyway.”

From the far edge of the group that had gathered to see the spectacle he had watched, careful to be just one of the staring crowd, no different from all the rest of them, and unobserved in any specific way. It was a risk for the Watcher to be there at all-he could well be recognized, but he was willing to take the chance. And of course, it was gratifying to see the reaction to his work; a small vanity but one he allowed himself.

Besides, he was curious to see what they would make of the one simple clue he had left. The other was clever-but so far he had ignored it, walking right past and allowing his coworkers to photograph it and examine it. Perhaps he should have been a little more blatant-but there was time to do this right. No hurry at all, and the importance of getting the other ready, taking him when it was all just right-that outweighed everything else.