Jeff Lindsay - Dexter by Design

The black wings reached out from deep inside and spread across the night sky and carried us forward.

We slid through the night and around the block, checking the entire area carefully. Down at the far end of the street there was an alley and we went down it into deeper darkness, cutting back toward the rear of Doncevic's building. There was a battered van parked at a covered and well-masked loading dock at the back of it —a quick and dry whisper from the Passenger saying, look; this is how he moved the bodies out and took them to their display points. And soon he would leave the same way.

We circled back around and found nothing alarming in the area.

An Ethiopian restaurant around the corner. Loud music three doors down. And then we were back at the front door and we rang the bell. He opened the door and had one small moment of surprise before we were on him, putting him quickly face down on the floor with the noose on his neck as we taped his mouth, hands and feet.

When he was secure and quiet we moved quickly through the rest of the place and found no one . We did find a few items of interest: some very nice tools in the bathroom, right next to a large bathtub.

Saws and snips and all, lovely Dexter Playtime Toys, and it was quite clearly the white porcelain background from the home movie we had seen at the Tourist Board and it was proof, all the proof we needed now, in this night of need. Doncevic was guilty. He had stood here on the tile by the tub holding these tools, and done unthinkable things —exactly the unthinkable acts that we were thinking of doing to him now.

We dragged him into the bathroom and put him in the tub and then we stopped again, just for a moment. A very small and insistent whisper was hinting that all was not right, and it went up our spine and into our teeth. We rolled Doncevic into the tub, face down, and went quickly through the place again. There was nothing and no one, and all was well, and the very loud voice of the Dark Driver was drowning out the feeble whisper and once again demanding that we steer back to the dance with Doncevic.

So we went back to the tub and went to work. And we hurried a little because we were in a strange place without any real planning, and also because Doncevic said one strange thing before we took the gift of speech away from him forever. “Smile” he said, and that made us angry and he was quickly unable to say anything very definite again. But we were thorough, oh yes, and when we were done, we were quite pleased with a job well done. Everything had gone very well indeed, and we had taken a very large step toward getting things back to the way things must be.

They were that way until it ended, with nothing left but a few bags of garbage and one small drop of Doncevic's blood on a glass slide for my rosewood box.

And as always, I felt a whole lot better afterwards.

IT WAS THE NEXT MORNING THAT THINGS BEGAN TO unravel.

I went in to work tired but content from my happy chores and the late night they had put me through. I had just settled down with a cup of coffee to attack a heap of paperwork when Vince Masuoka poked his head in the door. “Dexter” he said.

“The one and only” I said with proper modesty.

“Did you hear?” he said with an irritating bet-you-didn't-hear smirk.

I hear so many things, Vince” I said. “Which one do you mean?”

“The autopsy report” he said. And because it was apparently important to him to stay as annoying as possible, he said nothing else, just looked at me expectantly.

“All right, Vince” I said at last. “Which autopsy report did I not hear about that will change the way I think about everything?” He frowned. “What?” he said.

I said, no, I didn't hear. Please tell me.” He shook his head. I don't think that's what you said” he said.

“But anyway, you know those wacky designer bodies, with all the fruit and stuff in them?”

“At South Beach, and Fairchild Gardens?” I said.

“Right” he said. “So they get them to the morgue for the autopsy, and the ME is like, whoa, great, they're back.” I don't know if you have noticed this, but it is quite possible for two human beings to have a conversation in which one or both parties involved has absolutely no idea what they're talking about.

I seemed to be in one of those brain-puzzling chats right now, since so far the only thing I'd gotten from talking to Vince was a profound sense of irritation.

“Vince” I said. “Please use small and simple words and tell me what you're trying to say before you force me to break a chair over your head.”

“I'm just saying” he said, which at least was true and easy to understand, as far as it went. “The ME gets those four bodies and says, these were stolen from here. And now they're back.” The world seemed to tilt to one side ever so slightly and a heavy grey fog settled over everything, which made it hard to breathe. “The bodies were stolen from the morgue?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Meaning, they were already dead, and somebody took them away and then did all the weird stuff to them?” He nodded. “It's just like the craziest thing I ever heard” he said. I mean, you steal dead bodies from the morgue? And you play with “em like that?”

“But whoever did it didn't actually kill them” I said.

“No, they were all accidental deaths, just lying there on their slabs.”

Accidental is such a terrible word. It stands for all the things I have fought against my whole life: it is random, messy, unplanned and therefore dangerous. It is the word that will get me caught some day, because in spite of all the care in the world, something accidental can still happen and, in this world of ragged chaotic chance, it always does.

And it just had. I had just last night filled half a dozen garbage bags with someone who was more or less accidentally innocent.

“So it isn't murder after all” I said.

He shrugged. “It's still a felony” he said. “Stealing a corpse, desecrating the dead, something like that. Endangering public health? I mean, it's gotta be illegal.”

“So is jaywalking” I said.

“Not in New York. They do it all the time.” Learning more about the jaywalking statutes in New York did nothing at all to fill me with good cheer. The more I thought about it, the more I would have to say that I was skating perilously close to having real human emotions about this, and as the day went on I thought about it more and more. I felt a strange kind of choking sensation just below my throat, and a vague and aimless anxiety that I could not shake, and I had to wonder; is this what guilt feels like? I mean, supposing I had a conscience, would mine be troubled now? It was very unsettling, and I didn't like it at all.

And it was all so pointless —Doncevic had, after all, stuck a knife in Deborah, and if she wasn't dead, it was not from lack of trying on his part. He was guilty of something rather naughty, even if it was not the more final version of the deed.

So why should I “feel” anything? It is all very well for a human being to say, I did something that made me feel bad.” But how could cold and empty Dexter possibly say anything of the sort? To begin with, I don't feel. More importantly —even if I did feel something, the odds are very good that it would be something that most of us would agree is, after all, kind of bad.

This society does not look with fondness and approval on emotions like Need to Kill, or Enjoying Cutting, and realistically those are the most likely things to pop up in my case.

Was this one small accidental and impulsive little dismemberment really the thing to push me over the edge into the turmoil soup that is human feeling? There was nothing to regret here —applying the smooth and icy logic of Dexter's great intellect resulted in the same bottom line no matter how many times I ran through it: Doncevic was no great loss to anybody, and he had at least tried to kill Deborah. Did I have to hope she would die, simply so I could feel good about myself?