Double Dexter Read online

  Vince shook his head and looked very serious. “Too bad you’re not still single,” he said. “This would so get you laid.”

  It seemed more likely that it would so get me arrested and executed. I had always been very careful to avoid publicity of any kind; it was far better for someone with my recreational tendencies to stay anonymous as much as possible, and until now I had managed to keep my face out of public view. But here it was, apparently splashed across the blogosphere, and there was nothing I could do except hope that my Witness was not a reader of the Miami Murder blog. If my picture had really spread as much as Vince said, maybe I should also hope he lived under a rock—and a rock without an Internet connection at that. There was no way to cover myself; this was public nudity, pure and simple. Worse still, there was absolutely no way out; I just had to wait for all the attention to go away when things calmed down.

  Things did not, in fact, calm down right away, not as far as the Cop-Hammer case was concerned—but happily enough, things did move on away from me. The details of the case began to pour out into the mainstream media. A few photographs of the bodies appeared online—originating at Miami Murder, of course, but the newspapers got hold of them, as well as some very graphic descriptions of what had been done to Klein and Gunther. Public interest shot up several notches, and when the exciting conclusion leaked out, the newspaper and TV talking heads found the headline just too good to ignore—“Working Mom Puts Psycho Killer in Time-out!”—and the press stampede for Deborah left me far behind in the dust, and made me wonder if my sister had actually been one of the Beatles and forgotten to mention it.

  Debs really was a much better story than me, but, of course, she wanted no part of it. And, of course, the reporters assumed that meant she was holding out for money, which made her even less eager to talk to them. Captain Matthews had to order her to accept one or two requests for interviews with the national media; he considered it his primary job to maintain a positive public image, for himself and the department, and nationally televised interviews do not grow on trees. But Deborah was clearly uncomfortable, awkward, and terse on camera. So Captain Matthews quickly decided that Debs as PR maven was a bad idea, and concentrated on trying to get his own manly face on TV instead. TV was not terribly interested, however, in spite of the captain’s truly impressive chin, and after a week or so the requests for Deborah died out and our happy nation moved on to the next Incredibly Fascinating Story: an eight-year-old girl who had climbed halfway up Mount Everest all by herself before getting frostbite and losing her leg. The interviews with her proud parents were particularly compelling—especially the mother weeping at the expense of a new prosthetic leg every six months as the girl grew—and I made a mental note to be certain not to miss their reality show in the fall.

  At about the same time the press moved on, the rest of the police force got tired of telling Deborah how terrific she was, too, especially since her thank-yous were growing very close to vicious. One or two of the other detectives even began to make the kind of sarcastic remarks that a suspicious mind might assume were tinged with envy. In any case, the congratulations and praise at work dried up and the force returned to the routine brutality of life on the job as Miami’s Finest. The tense, haunted-house atmosphere seeped out of the department, and things settled back into their old comfortable workday rut once more, with Debs happily back out of the spotlight and working on routine stabbings and beheadings again. Her broken arm didn’t seem to slow her down too much, and Alex Duarte was always at her side on the job if she needed a hand, literal or figurative.

  For my part, I crossed off a few more names on the list, but it was all happening with nightmare slowness now, and I could do nothing but plod on. I knew something terrible was about to happen, and that I would be on the receiving end. My Witness absolutely had to know who I was now. I had been identified by name, with a picture, and it seemed to me that it would have to be only a matter of time before those two hard facts crashed together, with Dexter in between. I moved through my day with the horrible uneasy feeling of being observed by hostile eyes. I couldn’t see any sign that I was, no matter how hard and long I stared around me, but the feeling would not go away. No one was staring intently at me when I was out in public, although I imagined that I could feel his eyes on me everywhere. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary anywhere, not even once, but I felt it. Something was coming my way, and I knew I wouldn’t like it when it got here, not at all.

  The Dark Passenger was just as disturbed; it seemed to be pacing endlessly back and forth, like a tiger in a cage, but it offered no help and no suggestions, nothing but more unease. And my near-constant feeling of creeping dread stayed with me over the next few days. At home I found it almost impossible to keep up my mask of cheerful daddyhood. Rita had not mentioned hunting for a new house again, but it might have been because some kind of crisis involving euros and long-term-bond yields had come up at her job, and she was suddenly too busy to do anything about it, although she still found time to give me odd, disapproving looks, and I still had no idea what I had or hadn’t done.

  It also fell to me to take Astor to the dentist to get her braces, a trip that did not delight either one of us. She still considered the whole idea of braces as a kind of personal Apocalypse, designed by a vengeful world to force her into social death, and she sulked for the entire drive. She would not speak at all, all the way to the dentist, which was very unusual for her.

  And on the trip home, with brand-new shiny silver bands on her teeth, she was just as silent, but more aggressively so. She glowered at the scenery, snarled at the passing cars, and none of my clumsy attempts to cheer her up got anything out of her except some very bitter glares and two simple declarative sentences: “I look like a cyborg,” she said. “My life is over.” And then she turned to look out the side window of the car and would say no more.

  Astor sulked, Rita stared and crunched numbers, and Cody maintained his normal silence. Only Lily Anne knew that something was wrong. She tried very hard to bring me out of my funk, distracting me with numerous rounds of “Old MacDonald” and “Frog Went A-Courtin’,” but even her great musical talent brought no more than a temporary fading of my deep disquiet.

  Something was coming; I knew it, and I couldn’t stop it. It was like watching a piano fall from a tall building and knowing that in just a few seconds there is going to be a huge and terrible crash and there is nothing you can do but wait for it. But even though this piano was entirely in my head, I still found myself bracing for the shattering din when it inevitably hit the pavement.

  And then one morning I arrived at work to find that my piano wasn’t imaginary after all.

  I had just settled into my chair with a cup of toxic sludge disguised as coffee. No one else was around yet, so I turned on my computer to check my in-box. It was all junk—a departmental memo advising us all that the new departmental dress code did not permit guayaberas, a note from Cody’s Cub Scout leader reminding me to bring snacks next week, three offers from online Canadian pharmacies, two notes suggesting some highly improper and rather personal activities, a letter from my attorney in Nigeria urging me to claim my huge inheritance, and an invitation for me to submit a blog on blood spatter to a homicide fan site. For just a moment I allowed myself to be distracted by the idea of writing for a Web site for murder groupies. It was absurd, bewildering, and weirdly attractive, and I could not stop myself from taking a quick peek. I opened the e-mail.

  My screen went briefly blank, and for two heartbeats I felt panic; had I let in some kind of virus? But then a flash-graphics file started up, and a bright red glob of animated blood went splat! across the screen. It dripped down toward the bottom edge, looking realistic enough to make me feel deeply uneasy. Dark letters began to form in the awful red mess, and as they slowly spelled out my name I felt a sick jolt of dread run through me, which did not get any better when the screen suddenly flashed a blinding blast of light and then, in huge black letters, GOTC
HA!

  For a moment I could only stare at the screen. The words began to fade, and I could feel my entire life fading away with them. I was Got; it was all over. Who it was, what they were going to do—it didn’t matter. Dexter was Done.

  And then a paragraph of text appeared, and with a sick numb helplessness, I began to read it.

  “If you’re like me,” it said, “you like murder!”

  All right, I really am like you; what’s your point?

  It went on:

  There’s nothing wrong with that—you’ll find lots of other people who feel the same way! And just like you, they love living here in Miami, where there’s always a new case to follow! Until now it’s been too hard to keep up with the latest in local homicide. But now, there’s a simple way to do just that! Tropical Blood is an exciting new online magazine that offers you an insider’s look at all kills on the current casebook—all for just $4.99 a month! This special rate is only for our founding subscribers! You must join now, before the price goes up!

  There was more, but I didn’t read it. I was somewhere between relief that this was mere spam, and anger that it had put me through such a very bad moment. I deleted the e-mail, and as I did my laptop gave a muted bong! announcing one more e-mail, a note with the one-word title “Identity.”

  I moved the mouse to delete this one, too, but I hesitated for just a moment. It made no sense at all, but the timing seemed magical—one arriving as I deleted the other. Of course, it wasn’t connected, but there was a kind of wondrous symmetry to it. So I opened it. I assumed it would be an advertisement for some amazing new product that would protect me from identity theft, or possibly enhance my sexuality. But that word, “identity” … it had been on my mind as I wrestled with the question of my Witness. I had been thinking about his identity and whether he knew mine, and now this same word in the subject line had tweaked the memory. It was a stupid, almost nonexistent connection, but it was there, and I could not stop myself from taking a quick peek. I opened the e-mail.

  A page of single-spaced writing appeared on my screen, under a large stylized heading that said “Shadowblog.” The letters of the headline were printed in a gray, semitransparent typeface, and under them was a shadowy mirror image of the letters done in faint red. There was no name below it, just a URL: http://​www.blogalodeon.com/​shadowblog.

  Oh, joy and bliss: I had made it onto some anonymous two-bit blogger’s mailing list. Was this the price of my newfound fame? To be assailed by every semiliterate twinkie with a keyboard and an opinion? I didn’t need this, and once more I moved the mouse to delete the e-mail—and then I saw the first sentence and everything went cold and very still.

  And now I know your name, it said.

  For an endless moment I just stared at that sentence. It was irrational nearly to the point of clinical brain death, but for some reason I was convinced that the sentence referred to me, and it had been written by my Witness. I stared, and I may even have blinked once or twice, but other than that I did nothing. Finally I became aware of a distant pounding, and realized it was my heart, reminding me that I needed to breathe. I did, closing my eyes and giving the oxygen a moment to get up to my brain and whip a few thoughts into action. The first thought was an order to calm down, followed by a very logical reminder that this was, after all, only a spam e-mail and it could not possibly be about me or from my Witness.

  And so I took another breath, found it to be good, and opened my eyes. The sentence was still there; it still said, “And now I know your name,” and there was still a page of writing under it. But I was very proud to discover that I had yet another calm thought, which was that looking at this page would very quickly prove that the blog had nothing to do with me. All I had to do was read one or two sentences to see that I was being a paranoid idiot, and I could go back to sipping calmly from my cup of vile coffee.

  So I moved my eyes down to the second line and began to read.

  Since I saw you that night in the foreclosed house your face has been stuck in my head. I have seen it everywhere, awake and asleep, and I can’t shove away that picture of you standing over a heap of raw red meat that had been a human being just a few minutes before. Even you have to know it is so fucking wrong—! And I keep thinking—who the fuck are you? Or maybe what the fuck—are you even human? Can someone that does that really get away with walking around in the real world, buying groceries and talking about the weather?

  I ran from you. I ran from just the sight of you doing what you were doing. But that picture ran with me, and I know I should have done something, but I didn’t, and I could not get it out of my head.

  And because I ran from you, it seems like I started seeing you everywhere. My whole life I never see you even once, and now you pop up every time I step out the door. I see you with your kids, or out there in the street with your job, and I can’t stand it anymore.

  I’m not stupid. I know it’s not an accident, because that kind of coincidence is just impossible. But I didn’t want to think about what it meant, because if I did I would have to do something about it. And I kept thinking I wasn’t ready for that. I mean, my divorce, on top of all the other shitty stuff that keeps happening to me. It seemed like it was all too much, and to have to deal with you, too—forget it.

  And then I see your picture, and it has your name and your job. Your job. I’m thinking, Holy Christ, he’s a fucking cop? Talk about brass balls. How does he get away with that? And I know right off, no fucking way can I do anything about a guy like you who’s a cop, too.

  But I can’t stop thinking about it, and the more I think the more I keep shoving it away, because I’ve already got way too many problems to have to deal with your kind of shit, too. And it just buzzes around and around in my head until I think I’m going to totally freak and I want to run for it, but there’s no place to run, and I can’t avoid dealing with you anymore because now I know who you are and where you work, and I got no more excuses, and it just piles up and whirls around in my head and it’s making me fucking nuts—

  And then all of a sudden it’s almost like a switch going on in my brain. Click. And I can almost hear a voice saying, You are looking at this all wrong. Like the Priest used to say, every stumbling spot is really a stepping-stone if you look at it right. And I think, Yeah.

  This is not another problem. This is an answer.

  This is a way to make all the other bullshit mean something, to finally bring it all together. And I may not know exactly how to do it just yet, but I know it’s right, and I know I can do this.

  And I will do this. Soon.

  Because now I know your name.

  Somewhere down the hall I heard a door slam shut. Two voices called to each other, but I couldn’t hear the words, and I wouldn’t have understood them if I did, because there was only one thing in the entire world that meant anything:

  He knew my name.

  He had seen the pictures online, with my name on them, and he had put that together with what he had Witnessed me doing with Valentine. He knew me. He knew who I was and he knew where I worked. I sat there and tried to be calm and think of the right thing to do about this, but I could not get beyond that one wild, world-shattering thought. He knew me. He was out there and he could destroy me at any moment. I didn’t have the faintest notion of who he was, but he knew me and he could expose me whenever he wanted to and there didn’t seem to be a whole lot I could do about it.

  And what was that about seeing me with my kids—was he threatening Lily Anne? I could not allow that—I had to find some way to get to him and stop him. But how could I, when I’d been trying to find him for two weeks and failing?

  I scanned the blog again, looking for any clue that might tell me who he was, just some tiny hint of a way out of this nightmare, but the words had not changed. Still, on second reading, I saw that he had not written anything that might reveal me to anyone else. I was at least safe from that. So what was he really threatening? A physical attack on me or my fa
mily? He wrote about “dealing with” me, and I had no idea what that meant, but I didn’t like the sound of it. And there, at the end, he said he didn’t know yet exactly what to do—that could mean anything, and I couldn’t rule out a single thing until I knew more about who he was.

  I needed to find a clue the way a drowning man needs air, and I had nothing but this single page of blather. But wait: It wasn’t technically blather; it was a blog. That implied that it was a semiregular thing, and if there were other postings, one of them might reveal something useful.

  I copied the URL at the top of the page, pasted it into my browser’s window, and went to the Web address. It was one of the sites that allowed anybody to post a blog for free, and Shadowblog was just one of thousands. But at least there were other entries, one every few days, and I scanned them all as quickly as I could. The very first one opened with, “Why does everything always turn to shit?” It was a fair question, and it showed a little more insight into life than I expected. But that still told me nothing about him.

  I read on: Most of it was a rambling, unfocused whine about how nobody appreciated him, ending with his decision to start this blog to help him figure out why. It ended with, I mean, I don’t get it. I walk into a room and it’s like they can’t even see me, like I’m not real to anyone else, no more than a fucking shadow. So I’m calling this the Shadowblog.… Very touching and sensitive, a true existential call for human contact, and I very much wanted to make contact as quickly as possible. But first I needed to know who this was.

  I read more postings. They covered a period of over a year, and they seemed increasingly angry, but they were all anonymous, even the ones that mentioned the writer’s divorce from someone he referred to only as “A.” He wrote very bitterly about the fact that she wouldn’t get off her ass and get a job and still expected him to give her alimony to pay for everything, and he couldn’t afford two places so even though they were divorced now, he had to live under the same roof with her. It was a very touching portrait of lower-middle-class anguish, and I’m sure it would have melted my heart, if only I had one.