Jeffry Lindsay - Dexter in the Dark

“Sir?” she prompted impatiently.

“I was wondering,” I said, which was true enough, “do you have any books on possession by demons? Er-in English?”

She pursed her lips with great disapproval and shook her head vigorously. “It is not the demons,” she said. “Why do you ask this-are you a reporter?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just, um, interested. Curious.”

“Curious about the voudoun ?” she said.

“Just the possession part,” I said.

“Huh,” she said, and if possible her disapproval grew even more. “Why?”

Someone very clever must already have said that when all else fails, try the truth. It sounded so good that I was sure I was not the first to think of it, and it seemed like the only thing I had left. I gave it a shot.

“I think,” I said, “I mean, I’m not sure. I think I may have been possessed. A while ago.”

“Ha,” she said. She looked at me long and hard, and then shrugged. “May be,” she said at last. “Why do you say so?”

“I just, um…I had the feeling, you know. That something else was, ah. Inside me? Watching?”

She spat on the floor, a very strange gesture from such an elegant woman, and shook her head. “All you blancs,” she said. “You steal us and bring us here, take everythin’ from us. And then when we make somethin’ from the nothin’ you give us, now you want to be part of that, too. Ha.” She shook her finger at me, for all the world like a second-grade teacher with a bad student. “You listen, blanc. If the spirit enters you, you would know. This is not somethin’ like in a movie. It is a very great blessing, and,” she said with a mean smirk, “it does not happen to the blancs.”

“Well, actually,” I said.

“Non,” she said. “Unless you are willing, unless you ask for the blessing, it does not come.”

“But I am willing,” I said.

“Ha,” she said. “It never come to you. You waste my time.” And she turned around and walked through the bead curtains to the back of the store.

I saw no point in waiting around for her to have a change of heart. It didn’t seem likely to happen-and it didn’t seem likely that voodoo had any answers about the Dark Passenger. She had said it only comes when called, and it was a blessing. At least that was a different answer, although I did not remember ever calling the Dark Passenger to come in-it was just always there. But to be absolutely sure, I paused at the curb outside the store and closed my eyes. Please come back in, I said.

Nothing happened. I got in my car and went back to work.

What an interesting choice , the Watcher thought. Voodoo. There was a certain logic to the idea, of course, he could not deny that. But what was really interesting was what it showed about the other. He was moving in the right direction-and he was very close .

And when his next little clue turned up, the other would be that much closer. The boy had been so panicky, he had almost wriggled away. But he had not; he had been very helpful and he was now on his way to his dark reward.

Just like the other was.

IHAD BARELY SETTLED BACK INTO MY CHAIR WHEN DEBORAH came into my little cubicle and sat in the folding chair across from my desk.

“Kurt Wagner is missing,” she said.

I waited for more, but nothing came, so I just nodded. “I accept your apology,” I said.

“Nobody’s seen him since Saturday afternoon,” she said. “His roommate says he came in acting all freaked out, but wouldn’t say anything. He just changed his shoes, and left, and that’s it.” She hesitated, and then added, “He left his backpack.”

I admit I perked up a little at that. “What was in it?” I asked.

“Traces of blood,” she said, as if she was admitting she had taken the last cookie. “It matches Tammy Connor’s.”

“Well then,” I said. It didn’t seem right to say anything about the fact that she’d had somebody else do the blood work. “That’s a pretty good clue.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s him. It has to be him. So he did Tammy, took the head in his backpack and did Manny Borque.”

“It does look like that,” I said. “That’s a shame-I was just getting used to the idea that I was guilty.”

“It makes no fucking sense,” Deborah complained. “The kid’s a good student, on the swimming team, good family-all of that.”

“He was such a nice guy,” I said. “I can’t believe he did all those horrible things.”

“All right,” Deborah said. “I know it, goddamn it. Total cliché. But what the hell-the guy kills his own girlfriend, sure. Maybe even her roommate, because she saw it. But why everybody else? And all that crap with burning them, and the bulls’ heads, what is it, Mollusk?”

“Moloch,” I said. “Mollusk is a clam.”

“Whatever,” she said. “But it makes no sense, Dex. I mean…” She looked away, and for a moment I thought she was going to apologize after all. But I was wrong. “If it does make sense,” she said, “it’s your kind of sense. The kind of thing you know about.” She looked back at me, but she still seemed to be embarrassed. “That’s, you know-I mean, is it, um-did it come back? Your, uh…”

“No,” I said. “It didn’t come back.”

“Well,” she said, “shit.”

“Did you put out a BOLO on Kurt Wagner?” I asked.

“I know how to do my job, Dex,” she said. “If he’s in the Miami-Dade area, we’ll get him, and FDLE has it, too. If he’s in Florida, somebody’ll find him.”

“And if he’s not in Florida?”

She looked hard at me, and I saw the beginnings of the way Harry had looked before he got sick, after so many years as a cop: tired, and getting used to the idea of routine defeat. “Then he’ll probably get away with it,” she said. “And I’ll have to arrest you to save my job.”

“Well, then,” I said, trying hard for cheerfulness in the face of overwhelming grim grayness, “let’s hope he drives a very recognizable car.”

She snorted. “It’s a red Geo, one of those mini-Jeep things.”

I closed my eyes. It was a very odd sensation, but I felt all the blood in my body suddenly relocating to my feet. “Did you say red?” I heard myself ask in a remarkably calm voice.

There was no answer, and I opened my eyes. Deborah was staring at me with a look of suspicion so strong I could almost touch it.

“What the hell is that,” she said. “One of your voices?”

“A red Geo followed me home the other night,” I said. “And then somebody tried to break into my house.”

“Goddamn it,” she snarled at me, “when the fuck were you going to tell me all this?”

“Just as soon as you decided you were speaking to me again,” I said.

Deborah turned a very gratifying shade of crimson and looked down at her shoes. “I was busy,” she said, not very convincingly.

“So was Kurt Wagner,” I said.

“All right, Jesus,” she said, and I knew that was all the apology I would ever get. “Yeah, it’s red. But shit,” she said, still looking down, “I think that old man was right. The bad guys are winning.”

I didn’t like seeing my sister this depressed. I felt that some cheery remark was called for, something that would lift the gloom and bring a song back to her heart, but alas, I came up empty. “Well,” I said at last, “if the bad guys really are winning, at least there’s plenty of work for you.”

She looked up at last, but not with anything resembling a smile. “Yeah,” she said. “Some guy in Kendall shot his wife and two kids last night. I get to go work on that.” She stood up, straightening slowly into something that at least resembled her normal posture. “Hooray for our side,” she said, and walked out of my office.