Jeffry Lindsay - Dexter in the Dark

The Watcher had no real idea what was really going through the other’s mind right now, but it was not happening fast enough. It was time for a real push, something to break the other out of his passivity. He felt a rare pulse of playfulness welling up through the dark cloud of power, and he heard the flutter of dark wings inside.

IN MY LIFELONG STUDY OF HUMAN BEINGS, I HAVE FOUND that no matter how hard they might try, they have found no way yet to prevent the arrival of Monday morning. And they do try, of course, but Monday always comes, and all the drones have to scuttle back to their dreary workaday lives of meaningless toil and suffering.

That thought always cheers me up, and because I like to spread happiness wherever I go, I did my small part to cushion the blow of unavoidable Monday morning by arriving at work with a box of doughnuts, all of which vanished in what can only be called an extremely grumpy frenzy before I reached my desk. I doubted very seriously that anyone had a better reason than I did for feeling surly, but you would not have known it to watch them all snatching at my doughnuts and grunting at me.

Vince Masuoka seemed to be sharing in the general feeling of low-key anguish. He stumbled into my cubbyhole with a look of horror and wonderment on his face, an expression that must have indicated something very moving because it looked almost real. “Jesus, Dexter,” he said. “Oh, Jesus Christ.”

“I tried to save you one,” I said, thinking that with that much anguish he could only be referring to the calamity of facing an empty doughnut box. But he shook his head.

“Oh, Jesus, I can’t believe it. He’s dead!”

“I’m sure it had nothing to do with the doughnuts,” I said.

“My God, and you were going to see him. Did you?”

There comes a point in every conversation where at least one of the people involved has to know what is being talked about, and I decided that point had arrived.

“Vince,” I said, “I want you to take a deep breath, start all over from the top, and pretend you and I speak the same language.”

He stared at me as if he was a frog and I was a heron. “Shit,” he said. “You don’t know yet, do you? Holy shit.”

“Your language skills are deteriorating,” I said. “Have you been talking to Deborah?”

“He’s dead , Dexter. They found the body late last night.”

“Well, then, I’m sure he’ll stay dead long enough for you to tell me what in the hell you’re talking about.”

Vince blinked at me, his eyes suddenly huge and moist. “Manny Borque,” he breathed. “He was murdered.”

I will admit to having mixed reactions. On the one hand, I was certainly not sorry to have somebody else take the little troll out of the picture in a way I was unable to do for ethical reasons. But on the other hand, now I needed to find another caterer-and oh, yes, I would probably have to give a statement of some kind to the detective in charge. Annoyance fought it out with relief, but then I remembered that the doughnuts were gone, too.

And so the reaction that won out was irritation at all the bother this was going to cause. Still, Harry had schooled me well enough to know that this is not really an acceptable reaction to display when one hears of the death of an acquaintance. So I did my best to push my face into something resembling shock, concern, and distress. “Wow,” I said. “I had no idea. Do they know who did it?”

Vince shook his head. “The guy had no enemies,” he said, and he didn’t seem aware of how unlikely his statement sounded to anyone who had ever met Manny. “I mean, everybody was just in awe of him.”

“I know,” I said. “He was in magazines and everything.”

“I can’t believe anybody would do that to him,” he said.

In truth, I couldn’t believe it had taken so long for somebody to do that to him, but it didn’t seem like the politic thing to say. “Well, I’m sure they’ll figure it out. Who’s assigned to the case?”

Vince looked at me like I had asked him if he thought the sun might come up in the morning. “Dexter,” he said wonderingly, “his head was cut off. It’s just like the three over at the university.”

When I was young and trying hard to fit in, I played football for a while, and one time I had been hit hard in the stomach and couldn’t breathe for a few minutes. I felt a little bit like that now.

“Oh,” I said.

“So naturally they’ve given it to your sister,” he said.

“Naturally.” A sudden thought hit me, and because I am a lifelong devotee of irony, I asked him, “He wasn’t cooked, too, was he?”

Vince shook his head. “No,” he said.

I stood up. “I better go talk to Deborah,” I said.

Deborah was not in any mood to talk when I arrived at Manny’s apartment. She was bending over Camilla Figg, who was dusting for prints around the legs of the table by the window. She didn’t look up, so I peeked into the kitchen, where Angel-no-relation was bent over the body.

“Angel,” I said, and I found some difficulty believing my eyes, so I asked him, “Is that really a girl’s head there?”

He nodded and poked at the head with a pen. “Your sister says, prolly the girl from the Lowe Museum,” he said. “They put it here because this guy is such a bugero .”

I looked down at the two cuts, one just above the shoulders, the other just below the chin. The one on the head matched what we had seen before, done with neatness and care. But the one on the body that was presumably Manny was much rougher, as if it had been hurried. The edges of the two cuts were pushed together carefully, but of course they did not quite mesh. Even on my own, with no dark interior muttering, I could tell that this was different somehow, and one small cold finger crawling across the back of my neck suggested that the difference might be very important-maybe even to my current troubles-but beyond that vague and unsatisfying ghost of a hint, there was nothing for me here but uneasiness.

“Is there another body?” I asked him, remembering poor bullied Franky.

Angel shrugged without looking up. “In the bedroom,” he said. “Just with a butcher knife stuck in him. They left his head.” He sounded a little offended that someone would go to all that trouble and leave the head, but other than that he seemed to have nothing to tell me, so I walked away, over to where my sister was now squatting beside Camilla.

“Good morning, Debs,” I said, with a cheerfulness I did not feel at all, and I was not the only one, because she didn’t even look up at me.

“Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said. “Unless you have something really good for me, stay the fuck away.”

“It isn’t all that good,” I said. “But the guy in the bedroom is named Franky. This one here is Manny Borque, who has been in a number of magazines.”

“How the fuck would you know that?” she said.

“Well, it’s a little awkward,” I said, “but I may have been one of the last people to see this guy alive.”

She straightened up. “When,” she said.

“Saturday morning. Around ten thirty. Right here.” And I pointed to the coffee cup that was still on top of the table. “Those are my prints.”

Deborah was looking at me with disbelief and shaking her head. “You knew this guy,” she said. “He was a friend of yours?”

“I hired him to cater my wedding,” I said. “He was supposed to be very good at it.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “So what were you doing here on a Saturday morning?”

“He raised the price on me,” I said. “I wanted to talk him down.”

She looked around the apartment and glanced out the window at the million-dollar view. “What was he charging?” she said.