Double Dexter: A Novel Page 10

  “What?” Rita said. “What do you mean? There’s nothing— Oh, Dexter, you’re being so— I just meant, we have to move. Because of Lily Anne.”

  I looked at the happy little face of the child bouncing on my lap. Rita was not making sense, at least not to me. How could this perfect little person force us to move? Of course, she was my child, which raised a few terrifying possibilities. Perhaps some vagrant strand of wicked DNA had surfaced in her and the outraged neighborhood was demanding her exile. It was a horrible thought, but it was at least possible. “What did she do?” I said.

  “What did she— Dexter, she’s only a year old,” Rita said. “What could she possibly do?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “But you said we have to move because of Lily Anne.”

  “Oh, for God’s sake,” she said. “You’re being completely …” She fluttered a hand in the air, and then she turned around again and took another gulp of wine, bending over the glass and shielding it from me, as if she didn’t want me to know what she was doing over there.

  “Rita,” I said, and she slapped the glass down onto the bench and turned back toward me, swallowing convulsively. “If nothing is wrong with Lily Anne, and she didn’t do anything wrong, why do we have to move?”

  She blinked, and then wiped the corners of her eyes with her sleeve. “That’s just …” she said. “I mean, because look at her.” Rita gestured at the baby, and it seemed to me that her motor skills were not quite what they should have been, because her hand bumped clumsily against my arm. She jerked the hand back and waved at the house. “Such a little house,” she said. “And Lily Anne is getting so big.”

  I looked at her and waited for more, but I waited in vain. Her words did not add up to anything I could understand, but they were apparently all I was going to get. Did Rita really think that Lily Anne was growing into some kind of gigantic creature, like in Alice in Wonderland, and soon the house would be too small to contain her? Or was there some hidden message here, possibly in Aramaic, that would take me years of study to decipher? I have heard and read many suggestions about what it takes to make a marriage work, but at the moment what mine seemed to need most was a translator. “Rita, you’re not making any sense,” I said, with all the gentle patience I could fake.

  She shook her head, just a little bit sloppily, and scowled at me. “I’m not drunk,” she said.

  One of the few eternal truths about humans is that if someone says they aren’t sleeping, they’re not rich, or they’re not drunk, they almost certainly are. But telling them so when they deny it is thankless, unpleasant, and sometimes dangerous. So I just smiled understandingly at Rita. “Of course you’re not,” I said. “So why do we have to move because Lily Anne is getting so big?”

  “Dexter,” Rita said. “Our little family is all getting so big. We need a bigger house.”

  A small light flickered in my mighty brain and then came on. “You mean we need a house with more room? Because the kids are growing up?”

  “Yes,” she said, slapping her hand on the picnic table for emphasis. “That’s exactly right.” She frowned. “What jid you think I meaned?”

  “I had no idea what you meaned,” I said. “But you’re sitting out here—and you’re crying.”

  “Oh,” she said, and she looked away, and once more she blotted clumsily at her face with her sleeve. “It doesn’t seem like right now.” She looked at me and quickly looked away again. “I mean, you know, I’m not soopit. Stooper.” She frowned, and then said very carefully,

  “I’m. Not. Stupid.”

  “I never thought you were,” I said, which was actually true: amazingly scatterbrained, yes, but not stupid. “Is that why you’re crying?”

  She looked at me very hard, and I was just beginning to get uncomfortable when her eyes glazed over a little, and she looked away.

  “It’s just hormones,” she said. “I didn’t want anyone to see.”

  I skipped over the image of anyone seeing her hormones and tried to focus on the heart of the matter. “So there’s nothing wrong with Lily Anne?” I said, still not quite sure that everything was exactly what it should be.

  “No, no, of course not,” Rita said. “It’s the house too small. Cody and Astor can’t share a room forever, because you know,” she said. “Astor is getting to that age.”

  Even without really knowing what specific age she meant, I thought I understood. Astor was growing up, and she couldn’t share a room with her brother forever. But even so, aside from the fact that I was used to this house and didn’t really want to move away from it, I had a few practical objections. “We can’t afford a new house,” I said. “Especially not a bigger one.”

  Rita waggled a finger at me and squinted playfully through one eye. “You have not been paying attention,” she said, working very hard to make each word distinct.

  “I guess not.”

  “There are lots of wonderful opportoonies,” she said. “Toon-a-nitties. Damn.” She shook her head, and then closed her eyes tightly. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, lord.” She breathed heavily for a moment and swayed so that I wondered if she was going to fall off the bench. But then she took an extra-deep breath, rolled her head in a half circle, and opened her eyes. “Foreclosures,” she said carefully. “Not a new house. A foreclosing houses.” She smiled loopily, and then jerked around and hunched over the wineglass again; this time she drained it.

  I thought about what she said—or at any rate, I thought about what I thought she had said. It was true that South Florida was littered with bargain real estate right now. No matter how much the economy was officially improving everywhere else, Miami was still full of people who were in over their heads on a bad mortgage, and many of them were simply walking away, leaving the bank holding the worthless paper as well as the overpriced house. And quite often the banks, in turn, were anxiously unloading the houses for a fraction of the original price.

  I knew all this very well from a general and somewhat disinterested standpoint. Lately the whole subject of foreclosure and bargain houses was on everybody’s lips, much like the weather. Everyone talked about it, and the media were full of stories and discussions and panels with dire warnings. And closer to home, even my own brother, Brian, was happily employed dealing with this same phenomenon.

  But to go from this theoretical awareness of foreclosure into the very real idea of taking personal advantage of it took a moment of adjustment. I liked living where we were, and I had already given up my comfy little apartment to do so. Moving again would be difficult and uncomfortable and inconvenient, and there was no guarantee at all that we would end up someplace better, especially with a house that had been abandoned in despair and anger. There might be holes kicked in the roof, and wiring ripped out—and at the very least, wouldn’t there be bad karma to deal with?

  But once again, Lily Anne proved that she saw things a little more clearly and shrewdly than her dunderheaded father. As I wrestled with all the concepts of foreclosure and moving and personal inconvenience, she cut right to the heart of the matter with an insight that was sharp and compelling. She bounced three times on her powerful little legs and said, “Da. Da da da.” And for emphasis, she reached out and pulled on my earlobe.

  I looked at my little girl, and I came to a decision. “You’re right,” I told her. “You deserve your own room.” I turned to Rita to tell her what I had decided, but she had leaned back against the edge of the table and closed her eyes again, and her head was swaying gently, her mouth open and her hands clasped in her lap.

  “Rita?” I said.

  She jerked upright and her eyes popped open wide. “Oh!” she said. “Oh, my God, you scared me.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “About the house?”

  “Yes,” she said, and she frowned. “Brian says— Oh, I hope you don’t mind,” she said, and she looked a little bit guilty. “I talked to him first? Because, you know, his job.” She fluttered a hand again and it bumped against the edge of the table.
“Ouch,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, with soothing encouragement. “You talked to Brian. That’s good.”

  “It is good,” she said. “He Is Good. He knows really what ups. Wha’s up. With houses. Right now, I mean.” “Yes, he does.”

  “He’s going to help us,” she said. “Find, find …”

  “Find a house,” I said.

  Rita shook her head slowly and then closed her eyes. I waited, but nothing happened. “I’m sorry,” she said at last, very softly. “I think I need to go lie down.” She got up from the bench; the empty wineglass fell to the ground and the stem snapped off, but Rita didn’t notice. She stood there, swayed for a moment, and then meandered back into the house.

  “Well, then,” I said to Lily Anne. “I guess we’re moving.”

  Lily Anne bounced. “Da,” she said firmly.

  I stood up and carried her into the house to make a telephone call; it looked like it was pizza night after all.

  TEN

  THE NEXT MORNING WHEN I GOT IN TO WORK, THERE WAS A lab report from the medical examiner’s office waiting on my desk. I glanced through it briefly and then, when I saw what it was, I sat down and read it with real interest. The report gave the results of the autopsy on Officer Gunther, and if you threw out all the technical jargon, it said several significant things. First, blood pooling in the tissue indicated that he had been lying facedown for several hours after death—interesting, since he had been faceup when his body was found by the Torch of Friendship. It probably meant our psycho had killed Gunther in the late afternoon, then left him stashed all alone somewhere until dark. Sometime in the night he had recovered his sense of camaraderie and moved the body to the Torch of Friendship.

  There were several pages detailing the massive trauma to Gunther’s assorted organs and limbs, adding up to the same picture we’d gotten from Klein. The report did not speculate, of course; that would have been unprofessional and possibly a little too helpful. But it did state that the damage had been caused by an object that was probably made of steel and possessed a smooth, oblong striking surface about the size of a playing card, which sounded like some kind of large hammer to me.

  Once again, the condition of the internal organs confirmed what the exterior tissue indicated: The killer had worked very hard to keep Gunther alive as long as possible, while carefully breaking every conceivable bone with deliberate and vicious force. It didn’t seem like a very pleasant way to die, but then, on reflection, I couldn’t think of a single way to die that was pleasant—certainly nothing I had ever tried. Not that I’d really looked for anything of the kind; where would the fun be in a pleasant death?

  I flipped through the report until I came to a page that had been highlighted with fluorescent yellow marker. It listed the contents of Gunther’s stomach, and half of the list had been colored in a solid bright yellow, almost certainly by Deborah. I read it and I didn’t need the highlighting to find the significant part. Among the other nasty things swimming around in his guts, Gunther had eaten something containing cornmeal, iceberg lettuce, ground beef, and several spices, chief among them chili powder and cumin.

  In other words, his last meal had been a taco, just like it had been for Klein. For both their sakes, I hoped they were really good tacos.

  I had barely finished reading the report when my desk telephone rang, and using my vast and all-seeing psychic powers I determined that it was probably my sister calling. I picked up the receiver anyway and said, “Morgan.”

  “Did you read the coroner’s report?” Deborah demanded.

  “Just finished it,” I said.

  “Stay put,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”

  Two minutes later she walked into my office carrying her own copy of the report. “What did you think?” she said, sliding into a chair and waving the pages.

  “I don’t like his prose style,” I said. “And the plot seems very familiar.”

  “Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “I got a briefing in a half hour, and I need to have something to say to everybody.”

  I looked at my sister with some little annoyance. I knew very well that even though she could face down an angry and well-armed mob of cocaine cowboys, or bully around large thuglike cops twice her size, she fell to pieces when she had to speak in front of any group containing more than two people. That was fine, even a little bit endearing, since it was rather nice to see her humbled from time to time. But somehow, her terrible stage fright had become my problem, and I always ended up writing the script for her presentations—a completely thankless job, since she fell apart anyway, no matter how many great lines I wrote for her.

  But here she was; she had come all the way down to my office for once, and she was asking nicely, for her, so I really had to help out, no matter how much I resented the idea. “Well,” I said, thinking out loud. “So it fits the same pattern, all the bones broken, and the tacos.”

  “I got that,” she snapped. “Come on, Dex.”

  “The interval between kills is interesting,” I said. “Two weeks.”

  She blinked and stared at me for a moment. “Does that mean something?” she said.

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “What?” she said eagerly.

  “I don’t have a clue,” I said, and before she could lean over and hit me I added, “But the differences must mean something, too.”

  “Yeah, I know,” she said thoughtfully. “Gunther’s in uniform; Klein is a detective. He gets left in his vehicle; Gunther gets dumped by the goddamned Torch. By boat, for Christ’s sake. Why?”

  “More important,” I said, “why does the other stuff stay the same?” She looked at me oddly. “I mean, yeah, the MO stays the same. And they’re both cops. But why these two specific cops? What is it about the two of them that fit the killer’s pattern of need?”

  Debs shook her head impatiently. “I don’t really give a shit about the psychological stuff,” she said. “I need to catch this psycho motherfucker.”

  I could have said that the best way to catch a psycho motherfucker is by understanding what makes him a psycho motherfucker, but I doubted that Deborah would be very receptive to that message right now. Besides, it wasn’t really true. Based on my years of experience in the business, the best way to catch a killer is by getting lucky. Of course, you don’t say that out loud, especially if you’re talking to the evening news. You have to look serious and mention patient and thorough detective work. So I just said, “What about the boat?”

  “We’re looking,” she said. “But, shit, do you know how many boats there are in Miami—even if you only count the legally registered ones?”

  “It won’t be his. It was probably stolen in the last week,” I said helpfully.

  Deborah snorted. “Almost as many,” she said. “Shit, Dexter, I got all the obvious stuff covered. I need an actual idea here, not more dumb-ass chatter.”

  It was true that I had not been in the best of moods lately, but it seemed to me that she was moving rapidly past the boundaries of how to speak when begging someone else for help. I opened my mouth to make a crushing remark and then, out of nowhere, an actual idea hit me. “Oh,” I said.

  “What,” she said.

  “You don’t want to find a stolen boat,” I said.

  “The fuck I don’t,” she said. “I know he wouldn’t be stupid enough to use his own boat, even if he had one. He stole one.”

  I looked at her and shook my head patiently. “Debs, that’s obvious,” I said, and I admit I might have been smirking slightly. “But then it’s also obvious that he wouldn’t hang on to that boat afterward. So you don’t look for a stolen boat; you look for—”

  “A found boat!” she said, and she clapped her hands together. “Right! A boat that was abandoned somewhere for no reason.”

  “It had to be somewhere he had a car stashed,” I said. “Or even better, someplace he could steal a car.”

  “Goddamn it, that’s more like it,” Debs said. “Ther
e can’t be more than one place in town where a boat turned up and a car got stolen the same night.”

  “A quick and simple computer search to cross-reference it,” I said, and the moment the words were out of my mouth I wanted to jam them back in and slide under my desk, because Deborah knew almost as much about using a computer as she did about ballroom dancing. I, on the other hand, must modestly admit to something verging on expertise in that area, and so anytime the word “computer” came up in conversation, my sister automatically made it my problem. And sure enough, she bounced to her feet and whacked me playfully on the arm.

  “That’s great, Dex,” she said. “How long will it take you?”

  I looked around the room quickly, but Debs was standing between me and the door, and there was no emergency exit. So I turned to my computer and went to work. Deborah jiggled around anxiously like she was jogging in place, which made it very hard to concentrate, until finally I said, “Debs, please. I can’t work with you vibrating like that.”

  “Well, shit,” she said, but at least she stopped hopping up and down and perched on the edge of a chair instead. But three seconds later, she started rapidly tapping her foot on the floor. Clearly there was no way to keep her still, short of flinging her out the door or finding what she wanted. Since she had a gun and I didn’t, flinging was too chancy, so with a heavy and pointed sigh I went back to my search.

  Less than ten minutes later, I had it. “Here we go,” I said, and before I got out the final syllable Deborah was at my elbow, leaning in anxiously to see the screen. “The pastor of St. John’s Church on Miami Beach reported his car stolen this morning. And he’s got a new twenty-one-foot Sea Fox at his dock.”

  “A fucking church?” Deborah said. “On the Beach, for God’s sake? How did he get the boat in there?”