Dexter in the Dark Read online

  “How about mon papere?” I asked. “Or Monsieur le Comte?”

  “How about, I don’t think so?” muttered Astor.

  “I just think—” said Rita.

  “Dexter is fine,” I said. “They’re used to it.”

  “It doesn’t seem respectful,” she said.

  I looked down at Astor. “Show your mother you can say

  ‘Dexter’ respectfully,” I told her.

  She rolled her eyes. “Puh- leeeeeze,” she said.

  I smiled at Rita. “See? She’s ten years old. She can’t say anything respectfully.”

  “Well, yes, but—” Rita said.

  “It’s okay. They’re okay,” I said. “But Paris—”

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  “Let’s go outside,” said Cody, and I looked at him with surprise. Four entire syllables—for him it was practically an oration.

  “All right,” said Rita. “If you really think—”

  “I almost never think,” I said. “It gets in the way of the mental process.”

  “That doesn’t make any sense,” Astor said.

  “It doesn’t have to make sense. It’s true,” I said.

  Cody shook his head. “Kick the can,” he said. And rather than break in on his talking jag, I simply followed him out into the yard.

  T W O

  Of course, even with Rita’s glorious plans unfolding, life was not all jubilation and strawberries. There was real work to do, too. And because Dexter is nothing if not conscientious, I had been doing it. I had spent the past two weeks dabbing on the last few brushstrokes of a brand-new canvas. The young gentleman who served as my inspiration had inherited a great deal of money, and he had apparently been using it for the kind of dreadful homicidal escapades that made me wish I was rich, too. Alexander Macauley was his name, though he called himself

  “Zander,” which seemed somewhat preppy to me, but perhaps that was the point. He was a dyed-in-the-wool trust-fund hippie, after all, someone who had never done any real work, devoting himself entirely to lighthearted amusement of the kind that would have made my hollow heart go pitter-pat, if only Zander had shown slightly better taste in choosing his victims.

  The Macauley family’s money came from vast hordes of cattle, endless citrus groves, and dumping phosphates into Lake Okee-chobee. Zander came frequently to the poor areas of town to pour out his largesse across the city’s homeless. And the favored few he 12

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  really wished to encourage he reportedly brought back to the family ranch and gave employment, as I learned from a teary-eyed and admiring newspaper article.

  Of course Dexter always applauds the charitable spirit. But in general, I am so very much in favor of it because it is nearly always a warning sign that something nefarious, wicked, and playful is going on behind the Mother Teresa mask. Not that I would ever doubt that somewhere in the depths of the human heart there really and truly does live a spirit of kind and caring charity, mingled with the love of fellow man. Of course it does. I mean, I’m sure it must be in there somewhere. I’ve just never seen it. And since I lack both humanity and real heart, I am forced to rely on experience, which tells me that charity begins at home, and almost always ends there, too.

  So when I see a young, wealthy, handsome, and otherwise normal-appearing young man lavishing his resources on the vile downtrodden of the earth, I find it difficult to accept the altruism at face value, no matter how beautifully presented. After all, I am fairly good at presenting a charming and innocent picture of myself, and we know how accurate that is, don’t we?

  Happily for my consistent worldview, Zander was no different—just a lot richer. And his inherited money had made him a little bit sloppy. Because in the meticulous tax records I uncovered, the family ranch appeared to be unoccupied and idle, which clearly meant that wherever he was taking his dear dirty friends, it was not to a healthy and happy life of country labor.

  Even better for my purposes, wherever they went with their new friend Zander, they were going barefoot. Because in a special room at his lovely Coral Gables home, guarded by some very cunning and expensive locks that took me almost five full minutes to pick, Zander had saved some souvenirs. It’s a foolish risk for a monster to take; I know this full well, since I do it myself. But if someday a hardworking investigator comes across my little box of memories, he will find no more than some glass slides, each with a single drop of blood preserved upon it, and no way ever to prove that any of them is anything sinister at all.

  Zander was not quite so clever. He had saved a shoe from each DEXTER IN THE DARK

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  of his victims, and counted on too much money and a locked door to keep his secrets safe.

  Well really. No wonder monsters get such a bad reputation. It was just too naive for words—and shoes? Seriously, shoes, by all that’s unholy? I try to be tolerant and understanding of the foibles of others, but this was a bit much. What could possibly be the at-traction in a sweaty, slime-encrusted, twenty-year-old sneaker?

  And then to leave them right out in the open like that, too. It was almost insulting.

  Of course, Zander probably thought that if he was ever caught he could count on buying the best legal care in the world, who would surely get him off with only community service—a little ironic, since that was how it had all started. But one thing he had not counted on was being caught by Dexter instead of the police.

  And his trial would take place in the Traffic Court of the Dark Passenger, in which there are no lawyers—although I certainly hope to catch one someday soon—and the verdict is always absolutely final.

  But was a shoe really enough proof? I had no doubt of Zander’s guilt. Even if the Dark Passenger hadn’t been singing arias the entire time I looked at the shoes, I knew very well what the collection meant—left to his own devices, Zander would collect more shoes. I was quite sure that he was a bad man, and I wanted very much to have a moonlight discussion with him and give him some pointed comments. But I had to be absolutely sure—that was the Harry Code.

  I had always followed the careful rules laid down by Harry, my cop foster father, who taught me how to be what I am with modesty and exactness. He had shown me how to leave a crime scene clean as only a cop can, and he had taught me to use the same kind of thoroughness in selecting my partner for the dance. If there was any doubt at all, I could not call Zander out to play.

  And now? No court in the world would convict Zander of anything beyond unsanitary fetishism based on his display of footwear—but no court in the world had the expert testimony of the Dark Passenger, either, that soft, urgent inner voice that demanded action and was never wrong. And with that sibilance mounting in 14

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  my interior ear it was difficult to stay calm and impartial. I wanted to claim Zander for the Final Dance the way I wanted my next breath.

  I wanted, I was sure—but I knew what Harry would say. It wasn’t enough. He taught me that it’s good to see bodies in order to be certain, and Zander had managed to hide all of them well enough to keep me from finding them. And without a body, no amount of wanting it would make it right.

  I went back to my research to find out where he might be stashing a short row of pickled corpses. His home was out of the question. I had been in it and had not had a hint of anything other than the shoe museum, and the Dark Passenger is normally quite good at nosing out cadaver collections. Besides, there was no place to put them at the house—there are no basements in Florida, and it was a neighborhood where he could not dig in the yard or carry in bodies without being observed. And a short consultation with the Passenger convinced me that someone who mounted his souvenirs on walnut plaques would certainly dispose of the leftovers neatly.

  The ranch was an excellent possibility, but a quick trip to the old place revealed no traces at all. It had clearly been abandoned for some time; even the driveway was overgrown.

  I dug deeper: Zander owned a condo in Maui, but that was much too far away. He had a few acres in North Carolina—possible, but the thought of driving twelve hours with a body in the car made it seem unlikely. He owned stock in a company that was trying to develop Toro Key, a small island south of Cape Florida. But a corpo-rate site was certainly out of the question—too many people might wander in and poke around. In any case, I remembered trying to land on Toro Key when I was younger, and it had armed guards strolling about to keep people away. It had to be somewhere else.

  Among his many portfolios and assets, the only thing that made any sense at all was Zander’s boat, a forty-five-foot Cigarette.

  I knew from my experience with a previous monster that a boat provided wonderful opportunities for disposing of leftovers. Simply wire the body to a weight, flip it over the rail, and wave bye-bye. Neat, clean, tidy; no fuss, no muss, no evidence.

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  And no way for me to get my proof, either. Zander kept his boat at the most exclusive private marina in Coconut Grove, the Royal Bay Yacht Club. Their security was very good, too good for Dexter to sneak in with a lock pick and a smile. It was a full-service marina for the terminally rich, the kind of place where they cleaned and polished your bowline when you brought the boat in. You didn’t even have to fuel up your own boat; just call ahead and it would be ready for you, down to chilled champagne in the cockpit. And happily smiling armed guards infested the grounds night and day, tip-ping their hats at the Quality and shooting anyone who climbed the fence.

  The boat was unreachable. I was as certain as I could be that Zander was using it to dispose of the bodies, and so was the Dark Passenger, which counts for even more. But there was no way to get to it.

  It was annoying, even frustrating, to picture Zander
with his latest trophy—probably bundled neatly into a gold-plated ice chest—calling cheerfully ahead to the dockmaster and ordering the boat fueled, and then strolling nonchalantly down the dock while two grunting Wackenhuts put the chest on board his boat and waved a respectful good-bye. But I could not get to the boat and prove it. Without this final proof, the Harry Code would not allow me to proceed.

  Certain as I was, what did that leave me? I could try to catch Zander in the act the next time. But there was no way to be sure when that would be, and I couldn’t watch him all the time. I did have to show up at work now and then, and make my token appearances at home, and go through all the motions of maintaining a normal-seeming life. And so at some point in the next weeks or so if the pattern held, Zander would call the dockmaster and order his boat prepared, and—

  And the dockmaster, because he was an efficient employee at a rich man’s club, would make a note of exactly what he did to the boat and when: how much fuel he put in, what kind of champagne, and how much Windex he used on the windscreen. He would put all that in the file marked “Macauley,” and store it on his computer.

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  And suddenly we were back in Dexter’s world again, with the Passenger hissing certainty and urging me to the keyboard.

  Dexter is modest, even self-effacing, and certainly aware of the limits of his considerable talent. But if there was a limit to what I could discover on the computer, I had not found it yet. I sat back down and went to work.

  It took me less than half an hour to hack into the club’s computers and find the records. Sure enough, there was a thorough service record. I checked it against the meetings of the board of Zander’s favorite charity, One World Mission of Divine Light, which was on the edge of Liberty City. On February 14, the board was delighted to announce that Wynton Allen would be moving out of the den of iniquity that is Miami and onto Zander’s ranch to be rehabilitated by honest labor. And on February 15, Zander had taken a boat trip that used thirty-five gallons of fuel.

  On March 11, Tyrone Meeks had been granted similar happiness. And on March 12, Zander took a boat ride.

  And so it went; each time some lucky homeless person was chosen for a life of bucolic joy, Zander placed a service order on his boat within twenty-four hours.

  This was not seeing the bodies—but the Harry Code had been set up to operate in the cracks of the system, in the shadow areas of perfect justice rather than perfect law. I was sure, the Passenger was sure, and this was enough proof to satisfy all of us.

  Zander would go on a different kind of moonlight cruise, and not all of his money would keep him afloat.

  T H R E E

  So on a night like many others, when the moon flung down chords of manic melody onto its happily bloodthirsty children, I was humming along and preparing to go out for a sharp frolic. All the work was done and it was playtime now for Dexter. It should have been a matter of mere moments to gather my simple toys and head out the door for my appointment with the trust-fund troublemaker. But of course, with marriage looming, nothing at all was simple anymore. I began to wonder, in fact, if anything would ever be simple again.

  Of course, I was building a perfect and nearly impenetrable facade of gleaming antiseptic steel and glass to cement onto the front of the Gothic horror of Castle Dexter. So I was very willing to cooperate in retiring the Old Dexter, and therefore I had been in the process of “consolidating our lives,” as Rita put it. In this case that meant moving out of my comfy little nook on the edge of Coconut Grove and into Rita’s three-bedroom house farther south, as this was the “sensible” thing to do. Of course, aside from being sensible it was also a Monster Inconvenience. Under the new regime there was no way I could keep anything even slightly private if I should 18

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  want to. Which of course I did. Every dedicated, responsible ogre has his secrets, and there were things that I did not wish to see the light of day in anyone’s hands but my own.

  There was, for example, a certain amount of research on potential playmates; and there was also the small wooden box, very dear to me, that contained forty-one glass slides, each with a single drop of dried blood preserved in the center, each drop representing a single less-than-human life that had ended at my hands—the entire scrapbook of my inner life. Because I do not leave great heaps of de-caying flesh lying about. I am not a slovenly, slipshod, madly slashing fiend. I am an extremely tidy, madly slashing fiend. I am always very careful indeed to get rid of my leftovers, and even some cruel implacable foe bent on proving me the vile ogre that I am would be hard-pressed to say what my little slides really were.

  Still, explaining them might raise questions that could eventually prove awkward, even to a doting wife—and even more so to some fearsome nemesis passionately devoted to my destruction.

  There had been one such recently, a Miami cop named Sergeant Doakes. And although he was technically still alive, I had begun to think of him in the past tense, since his recent misadventures had cost him both his feet and hands, as well as his tongue. He was certainly in no shape to bring me to well-deserved justice. But I knew enough to know that if there had been one like him, there would sooner or later be another.

  And so privacy seemed important—not that I had ever been a show-off where my personal affairs were concerned. As far as I knew, no one had ever seen into my little slide box. But I had never had a fiancée cleaning up for me, nor two very inquisitive kids sniffing around my things so they could learn to be much more like Dark Daddy Dexter.

  Rita seemed to appreciate my need for a bit of personal space, if not the reasons for it, and she had sacrificed her sewing room, turning it into something she called Dexter’s study. Eventually this would house my computer and my few books and CDs and, I suppose, my little rosewood box of slides. But how could I possibly leave it in here? I could explain it to Cody and Astor easily DEXTER IN THE DARK

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  enough—but what to tell Rita? Should I try to hide it? Build a secret passage behind a fake bookcase leading down a winding stairway to my dark lair? Put the box in the bottom of a fake can of shaving cream, perhaps? It was something of a problem.

  So far I had avoided needing to find a solution by hanging on to my apartment. But I still kept a few simple things in my study, like my fillet knives and duct tape, which could readily be explained away by my love for fishing and air-conditioning. The solution could come later. Right now I felt icy fingers prodding and tickling at my spine, and I had an urgent need to keep an appointment with a spoiled young man.

  And so into my study I went, in search of a navy blue nylon gym bag I had been saving for a formal occasion, to hold my knife and tape. I pulled it from the closet, a sharp taste of anticipation building on my tongue, and put in my party toys: a new roll of duct tape, a fillet knife, gloves, my silk mask, and a coil of nylon rope for emergencies. All set. I could feel my veins gleaming with steely excitement, the wild music rising in my inner ears, the roaring of the Passenger’s pulse urging me on, out, into it. I turned to go—

  And ran into a matched pair of solemn children, staring up at me with expectation.

  “He wants to go,” Astor said, and Cody nodded, looking at me with large unblinking eyes.

  I honestly believe that those who know me would say I have a glib tongue and a ready wit, but as I mentally played back what Astor had said and tried again to find a way to make it mean something else, all I could manage was a very human sound, something like, “He muh whu hoo?”

  “With you,” Astor said patiently, as if speaking to a mentally challenged chambermaid. “Cody wants to go with you tonight.”

  In retrospect, it’s easy to see that this problem would come up sooner or later. And to be perfectly fair to me, which I think is very important, I had expected it—but later. Not now. Not on the edge of my Night of Need. Not when every hair on my neck was standing straight up and screeching with the pure and urgent compulsion to slither into the night in cold, stainless-steel fury—

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  The situation clearly called for some serious pondering, but all my nerves were clamoring for me to leap out the window and be off into the night—but there they were, and so somehow I took a deep breath and pondered the two of them.