Jeff Lindsay - Dexter by Design

But it was bothering me, and it continued to rankle throughout the morning and on into the afternoon when I stopped at the hospital on my lunch break.

“Hey buddy” Chutsky said wearily as I came into the room. “Not much change. She's opened her eyes a couple of times. I think she's getting a little stronger.” I sat in the chair on the opposite side of the bed from Chutsky.

Deborah didn't look stronger. She looked about the same —pale, barely breathing, closer to death than life. I had seen this expression before, many times, but it did not belong on Deborah. It belonged on people I had carefully chosen to wear that look as I pushed them down the dark slope and away into emptiness as the reward for the wicked things they had done.

I had seen it just last night on Doncevic —and even though I had not carefully chosen him, I realized the look truly belonged there, on him. He had put this same look on my sister, and that was enough.

There was nothing here to stir unease in Dexter's non-existent soul.

I had done my job, taken a bad person out of the crawling frenzy of life and hurried him into a cluster of garbage bags where he belonged. If it was untidy and unplanned it was still righteous, as my law enforcement associates would say. Associates like Israel Salguero, who would now have no need to harass Deborah and damage her career just because the man with the shiny head was making noise in the press.

When I ended Doncevic, I had ended that mess, too. A small weight lifted. I had done what Dexter does, and done it well, and my little corner of the world was just a tiny bit better. I sat in the chair and chewed on a really terrible sandwich, chatting with Chutsky and actually getting to see Deborah open her eyes one time, for a full three seconds. I could not say for sure that she knew I was there, but the sight of her eyeballs was very encouraging and I began to understand Chutsky's wild optimism a little more.

I went back to work feeling a great deal better about myself and things in general. Had I been hasty? Too bad. Doncevic deserved it, and I had given it to him. And with Deborah getting better unhassled by Internal Affairs and the press, life was really going right back on track to where it belonged, so nanny-poo-poo to worrying about it.

It was a lovely and gratifying way to roll back from lunch, and the feeling lasted all the way into the building and up to my cubicle, where I found Detective Coulter waiting for me.

“Morgan” he said. “Siddown.” I thought it was very nice of him to invite me to sit in my own chair, so I sat down. He looked at me for a long moment, chewing on a toothpick that stuck out of one corner of his mouth. He was a pear-shaped guy, never terribly attractive, and at the moment even less so. He had crammed his sizeable buttocks into the extra chair by my desk and, aside from the toothpick, he was working on a giant bottle of Mountain Dew, some of which had already stained his dingy white shirt. His appearance, together with his attitude of staring silently at me as if hoping I would burst into tears and confess to something, was extremely annoying, to say the least. So, fighting off the temptation to collapse into a weeping heap, I picked up a lab report from my in-basket and began to read.

After a moment Coulter cleared his throat. “All right” he said, and I looked up and raised a polite eyebrow at him. “We gotta talk about your statement” he said.

“Which one?” I said.

“When your sister got stabbed” he said. “Couple of things don't add up.”

“All right” I said.

Coulter cleared his throat again. “So, uh —tell me again what you saw.”

“I was sitting in the car” I said.

“How far away?”

“Oh, maybe fifty feet” I said.

“Uh-huh. How come you didn't go with her?”

“Well” I said, thinking it was really none of his business, I really didn't see the point.”

He stared some more and then shook his head. “You coulda helped her” he said. “Maybe stopped the guy from stabbing her.”

“Maybe” I said.

“You coulda acted like a partner” he said. It was clear that the sacred bond of partnership was still pulling strongly at Coulter, so I bit back my impulse to say something, and after a moment he nodded and went on.

“So the door opens and boom, he sticks a knife in?”

“The door opens and Deborah showed her badge” I said.

“You sure about that?”

“Yes.”

“But you're fifty feet away?” I have really good eyesight” I said, wondering if everyone who came in to see me today was going to be profoundly annoying.

“Okay” he said. “And then what?”

“Then” I said, reliving that moment with terrible slow-motion clarity, “Deborah fell over. She tried to get up and couldn't and I ran to help her.”

“And this guy Dankawitz, whatever, he was there the whole time?”

“No” I said. “He was gone, and then he came back out as I got close to Deborah.”

“Uh-huh” Coulter said. “How long was he gone?”

“Maybe ten seconds tops” I said. “Why does that matter?” Coulter took the toothpick out of his mouth and stared at it.

Apparently it even looked awful to him, because after a moment of thinking about it, he threw it at my waste basket. He missed, of course. “Here's the problem” he said. “The fingerprints on the knife aren't his.”

About a year ago I'd had an impacted tooth removed, and the dentist had given me nitrous oxide. For just a moment I felt the same sense of dizzy silliness whipping through me. “The —urm fingerprints ...?” I finally managed to stutter.

“Yeah” he said, swigging briefly from the huge soda bottle. “We took his prints when we booked him. Naturally” He wiped the corner of his mouth with his wrist. “And we compared them to the ones on the handle of that knife? And hey. They don't match. So I'm thinking, what the fuck, right?”

“Naturally” I said.

“So I thought, what if there was two of “em, cuz what else could it be, right?” He shrugged and, sadly for all of us, fumbled another toothpick out of his shirt pocket and began to munch on it. “Which is why I had to ask you again what you think you saw.” He looked at me with an expression of totally focused stupidity and I had to close my eyes to think at all. I replayed the scene in my memory one more time: Deborah waiting by the door, the door opening. Deborah showing her badge and then suddenly falling but all I could see in my mind was the man's profile with no details.

The door opens, Deborah shows the badge, the profile —no, that was it. There was no more detail. Dark hair and a light shirt, but that was true of half the world, including the Doncevic I had kicked in the head a moment later.

I opened my eyes. I think it was the same guy” I said, and although for some reason I was reluctant to give him any more, I did. He was, after all, the representative of Truth, Justice and the American Way, no matter how unattractive. “But to be honest, I can't really be sure. It was too quick.” Coulter bit down on the toothpick. I watched it bobble around in the corner of his mouth for a moment while he tried to remember how to speak. “So it coulda been two of “em” he said at last.

I suppose so” I said.

“One of “em stabs her, runs inside like, shit, what'd I do” he said.

“And the other one goes, shit, and runs out to look, and you pop him one.”

“It's possible” I said.

“Two of “em” he repeated.

I did not see the point of answering the same question twice, so I just sat and watched the toothpick wiggle. If I had thought I was filled with unpleasant rumblings before, it was nothing to the whirlpool of unease that was forming in me now. If Doncevic's fingerprints were not on the knife, he had not stabbed Deborah; that was elementary, Dear Dexter. And if he had not stabbed Deborah, he was innocent and I had made a very large mistake.