Jeffry Lindsay - Dearly devoted Dexter

And what could I do about it now? Surely Rita would come to her senses. I mean, really: ME? Who could possibly want to marry ME?! There had to be better alternatives, like becoming a nun, or joining the Peace Corps. This was Dexter we were talking about. In a city the size of Miami, couldn’t she find somebody who was at least human? And what was her rush to get married again anyway? It hadn’t worked out terribly well for her the first time, but she was apparently willing to plunge right back into it again. Were women really this desperate to get married?

Of course there were the children to think about. Conventional wisdom would say they needed a father, and there was something to that, because where would I have been without Harry? And Astor and Cody had looked so happy. Even if I made Rita see that a comical mistake had happened, would the kids ever understand?

I was on my second cup of coffee when the paper came. I glanced through the main sections, relieved to find that terrible things were still happening almost everywhere. At least the rest of the world hadn’t gone crazy.

By seven o’clock I thought it would be safe to call Deborah on her cell phone. There was no answer; I left a message, and fifteen minutes later she called back. “Good morning, Sis,” I said, and I marveled at the way I managed to sound cheerful. “Did you get some sleep?”

“A little,” she grumbled. “I woke up around four yesterday. I traced the package to a place in Hialeah. I drove around the area most of the night looking for the white van.”

“If he dropped the package way up in Hialeah, he probably drove in from Key West to do it,” I said.

“I know that, goddamn it,” she snapped. “But what the hell else am I supposed to do?”

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But doesn’t the guy from Washington get here today?”

“We don’t know anything about him,” she said. “Just because Kyle is good, doesn’t mean this guy will be.”

She apparently didn’t remember that Kyle had not shown himself to be particularly good, at least in public. He’d done nothing at all, in fact, except get himself captured and have his finger nipped off. But it didn’t seem politic for me to comment on how good he was, so I simply said, “Well, we have to assume the new guy knows something about this that we don’t know.”

Deborah snorted. “That wouldn’t be too hard,” she said. “I’ll call you when he gets in.” She hung up, and I got ready for work.

AT 12:30 DEB STALKED INTO MY MODEST RETREAT OFF the forensics lab and threw a cassette tape on my desk. I looked up at her; she didn’t seem happy, but that really wasn’t much of a novelty. “From my answering machine at home,” she said. “Listen to it.”

I lifted the hatch on my boom box and put in the tape Deb had flung at me. I pushed play: the tape beeped loudly, and then an unfamiliar voice said, “Sergeant, um, Morgan. Right? This is Dan Burdett, from uh- Kyle Chutsky said I should call you. I’m on the ground at the airport, and I’ll call you about getting together when I get to my hotel, which is-” There was a rustling sound and he obviously moved the cell phone away from his mouth, since his voice got fainter. “What? Oh, hey, that’s nice. All right, thanks.” His voice got louder again. “I just met your driver. Thanks for sending somebody. All right, I’ll call from the hotel.”

Deborah reached across my desk and switched off the machine. “I didn’t send anybody to the fucking airport,” she said. “And Captain Matthews damn sure didn’t either. Did you send somebody to the fucking airport, Dexter?”

“My limo was out of gas,” I said.

“Well then GOD DAMN it!” she said, and I had to agree with her analysis.

“Anyway,” I said, “at least we found out how good Kyle’s replacement is.”

Deborah slumped into the folding chair by my desk. “Square fucking one,” she said. “And Kyle is…” She bit her lip and didn’t finish the sentence.

“Did you tell Captain Matthews about this yet?” I asked her. She shook her head. “Well, he has to call them. They’ll send somebody else.”

“Sure, great. They send somebody else, who might make it all the way to baggage claim this time. Shit, Dexter.”

“We have to tell them, Debs,” I said. “By the way, who are them ? Did Kyle ever tell you exactly who he works for?”

She sighed. “No. He joked about working for the OGA, but he never said why that was funny.”

“Well, whoever they are, they need to know,” I said. I pried the cassette out of my boom box and put it on the desk in front of her. “There has to be something they can do.”

Deborah didn’t move for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling they’ve already done it, and Burdett was it?” she said. Then she scooped up the tape and trudged out of my office.

I was sipping coffee and digesting my lunch with the help of a jumbo chocolate-chip cookie when the call came to report to the scene of a homicide in the Miami Shores area. Angel-no-relation and I drove over to where a body had been found in the shell of a small house on a canal that was being ripped apart and rebuilt. Construction had been temporarily halted while the owner and the contractor sued each other. Two teenaged boys skipping school had snuck into the house and found the body. It was laid out on heavy plastic on top of a sheet of plywood which had been placed over two sawhorses. Someone had taken a power saw and neatly lopped off the head, legs, and arms. The whole thing had been left like that, with the trunk in the middle and the pieces simply trimmed off and moved a few inches away.

And although the Dark Passenger had chuckled and whispered little dark nothings in my ear, I put it down to pure envy and went on with my work. There was certainly plenty of blood spatter for me to work with, still very fresh, and I probably would have spent a cheerfully efficient day finding and analyzing it if I hadn’t happened to overhear the uniformed officer who had been first on the scene talking with a detective.

“The wallet was right there by the body,” Officer Snyder was saying. “Got a Virginia driver’s license in the name of Daniel Chester Burdett.”

Oh, well then , I said to the happy chattering voice in the backseat of my brain. That would certainly explain a lot, wouldn’t it? I looked again at the body. Although the removal of the head and limbs had been fast and savage, there was a neatness to the arrangement that I could now recognize as slightly familiar, and the Dark Passenger chuckled happily in agreement. Between the trunk and each part, the gap was as precise as if it had been measured, and the whole presentation was arranged almost like an anatomy lesson. The hip bone disconnected from the leg bone.

“Got the two boys who found it in the squad car,” Snyder said to the detective. I glanced back at the two of them, wondering how to tell them my news. Of course, it was possible that I was wrong, but-

“Sonamabeech,” I heard someone mutter. I looked back to where Angel-no-relation was squatting on the far side of the body. Once again he was using his tweezers to hold up a small piece of paper. I stepped behind him and looked over his shoulder.

In a clear and spidery hand, someone had written “POGUE,” and crossed it out with a single line. “Whassa pogue?” Angel asked. “His name?”

“It’s somebody who sits behind a desk and orders around the real troops,” I told him.

He looked at me. “How you know all this shit?” he asked.

“I see a lot of movies,” I said.

Angel glanced back down at the paper. “I think the handwriting is the same,” he said.