Jeffry Lindsay - Dexter in the Dark

“Yeah,” she said. “I already figured out ‘um.’”

“And you’re watching Wilkins.”

“We’re watching Wilkins, for Christ’s sake.”

I looked at the body again, but there was nothing else on it to tell me more than I knew, which was almost nothing. I could not stop my brain from going in a circle; if Wagner had been Moloch, and now Wagner was dead, and killed by Moloch…

I stood up. For a moment I felt dizzy, as if bright lights were crashing in on me, and in the distance I heard that awful music beginning to swell up into the afternoon and for just that moment I could not doubt that somewhere nearby the god was calling me-the real god himself and not some psychotic prankster.

I shook my head to silence it and nearly fell over. I felt a hand grabbing my arm to steady me, but whether it was Debs, Vince, or Moloch himself, I couldn’t tell. From far away a voice was calling my name, but it was singing it, the cadence rising up to the far-too-familiar rhythm of that music. I closed my eyes and felt heat on my face and the music got louder. Something shook me and I opened my eyes.

The music stopped. The heat was just the Miami sun, with the wind whipping in the clouds of an afternoon squall. Deborah held both my elbows and shook me, saying my name over and over patiently.

“Dexter,” she said. “Hey Dex, come on. Dexter. Dexter.”

“Here I am,” I said, although I was not entirely sure of that.

“You okay, Dex?” she said.

“I think I stood up too fast,” I said.

She looked dubious. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“Really, Debs, I’m fine now,” I said. “I mean, I think so.”

“You think so,” she said.

“Yes. I mean, I just stood up too fast.”

She looked at me a moment longer, then let go and stepped back. “Okay,” she said. “Then if you can make it to the boat, let’s get back.”

It may be that I was still dizzy, but there seemed to be no sense in her words, almost as if they were just made-up syllables. “Get back?” I said.

“Dexter,” she said. “We got six bodies, and our only suspect is on the ground here with no head.”

“Right,” I said, and I heard a faint drumbeat under my voice. “So where are we going?”

Deborah balled up her fists and clenched her teeth. She looked down at the body, and for a moment I thought she was actually going to spit. “What about the guy you chased into the canal?” she said at last.

“Starzak? No, he said…” I stopped myself from finishing, but not quite soon enough, because Deborah pounced.

“He said ? When did you talk to him, goddamn it?”

To be fair to me, I really was still a little bit dizzy, and I had not thought before I spoke, and now I was in a somewhat awkward spot. I could not very well tell my sister that I had spoken to him just the other night when I had taped him to his workbench and tried to cut him up into small neat pieces. But the blood must have been flowing back into my brain, because I very quickly said, “I mean, he seemed ,” I said. “He seemed to be just a…I don’t know,” I said. “I think it was personal, like I cut him off in traffic.”

Deborah looked at me angrily for a moment, but then she seemed to accept what I had said, and she turned away and kicked at the sand. “Well, we got nothing else,” she said. “It won’t hurt to check him out.”

It didn’t seem like a really good idea to tell her that I already had checked him out quite thoroughly, far beyond the boundaries of normal police routine, so I just nodded in agreement.

THERE WAS NOT A GREAT DEAL MORE WORTH SEEING ON the little island. Vince and the other forensic nerds would spot anything else worth the trouble, and our presence would only hamper them. Deborah was impatient and wanted to rush back to the mainland to intimidate suspects. So we walked to the beach and boarded the police launch for the short trip back across the harbor to the dock. I felt a little better when I climbed onto the dock and walked back to the parking lot.

I didn’t see Cody and Astor, so I went over to Officer Low Forehead. “The kids are in the car,” he told me before I could speak. “They wanted to play cops and robbers with me, and I didn’t sign up for day care.”

Apparently he was convinced that his line about day care was so sidesplittingly funny that it was worth repeating, so rather than risk having him say it again, I simply nodded, thanked him, and went over to Deborah’s car. Cody and Astor were not visible until I was practically on top of the car, and for a moment I wondered which car they were in. But then I saw them, crouching down in the backseat, looking at me with very wide eyes. I tried to open the door, but it was locked. “Can I come in?” I called through the glass.

Cody fumbled with the lock, and then swung the door open.

“What’s up?” I asked them.

“We saw the scary guy,” Astor said.

At first I had no idea what she meant by that, and so I really couldn’t say why I felt the sweat start rolling down my back. “What do you mean, the scary guy?” I said. “You mean that policeman over there?”

“Dex-terrr,” Astor said. “Not dumb, scary . Like when we saw the heads.”

“The same scary guy?”

They exchanged another look, and Cody shrugged. “Kind of,” Astor said.

“He saw my shadow,” Cody said in his soft, husky voice.

It was good to hear the boy open up like this, and even better, now I knew why the sweat was running down my back. He had said something about his shadow before, and I had ignored it. Now it was time to listen. I climbed into the backseat with them.

“How do you know he saw your shadow, Cody?”

“He said so,” Astor said. “And Cody could see his .”

Cody nodded, without taking his eyes off my face, looking at me with his usual guarded expression that showed nothing. And yet I could tell that he trusted me to take care of whatever this was. I wished I could share his optimism.

“When you say your shadow,” I asked him carefully, “do you mean the one on the ground that the sun makes?”

Cody shook his head.

“You have another shadow besides that,” I said.

Cody looked at me like I had asked him if was wearing pants, but he nodded. “Inside,” he said. “Like you used to have.”

I sat back against the seat and pretended to breathe. “Inside shadow.” It was a perfect description-elegant, economical, and accurate. And to add that I used to have one gave it a poignancy which I found quite moving.

Of course, being moved really serves no useful purpose, and I usually manage to avoid it. In this case, I mentally shook myself and wondered what had happened to the proud towers of Castle Dexter, once so lofty and festooned with silk banners of pure reason. I remembered very well that I used to be smart, and yet here I was ignoring something important, ignoring it for far too long. Because the question was not what was Cody talking about. The real puzzle was why I had failed to understand him before.

Cody had seen another predator and recognized him when the dark thing inside him heard the roar of a fellow monster, just as I had known others when my Passenger was at home. And this other had recognized Cody for what he was in exactly the same way. But why that should frighten Cody and Astor into hiding in the car-

“Did the man say anything to you?” I asked them.

“He gave me this,” Cody said. He held out a buff-colored business card and I took it from him.

On the card was a stylized picture of a bull’s head, exactly like the one I had just seen around the neck of Kurt’s body out on the island. And underneath it was a perfect copy of Kurt’s tattoo: MLK.