Dexter by Design Read online

  There was a little bit of a commotion over where the cars were parked, and an overweight detective named Coulter came scuffling rapidly over the sand to us.

  “Morgan,” he said, and we both said, “Yeah?”

  “Not you,” he told me. “You. Debbie.”

  Deborah made a face—she hated being called Debbie. “What?” she said.

  “We’re supposed to partner on this,” he said. “Captain said.”

  “I’m already here,” she said. “I don’t need a partner.”

  “Now you do,” Coulter said. He took a swig from a large soda bottle. “There’s another one of these,” he said, gasping for breath. “Over at Fairchild Gardens.”

  “Lucky you,” I said to Deborah. She glared at me and I shrugged. “Now you don’t have to wait,” I said.

  FOUR

  ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT MIAMI HAS ALWAYS been the total willingness of its residents to pave everything. Our Fair City began as a subtropical garden spot teeming with wildlife, both animal and vegetable, and after only a very few years of hard work all the plants were gone and the animals were dead. Of course their memory lingers on in the condo clusters that replaced them. It is an unwritten law that each new development be named after whatever was killed to build it. Destroy eagles? Eagle’s Nest Gated Community. Kill off the panthers? Panther Run Planned Living. Simple and elegant and generally very lucrative.

  I don’t mean to suggest by this that Fairchild Gardens was a parking lot where all the Fairchilds and their tulips had been killed. Far from it. If anything, it represented the revenge of the plants. Of course you had to drive past a certain number of Orchid Bays and Cypress Hollows to get there, but when you arrived, you were greeted by a vast natural-looking wilderness of trees and orchids nearly devoid of hedge-clipping humanity. Except for the busloads of tourists, of course. Still, there were actually one or two places where you could look at a genuine palm tree without seeing neon lights in the background, and on the whole I usually found it a relief to walk among the trees and vegetate far from the hurly-burly.

  But this morning the parking area was overflowing when we arrived, since the Gardens had been closed with the discovery of Something Awful, and the crowds of people who had scheduled a visit had backed up at the entrance, hoping to get inside so they could mark it off on their itinerary, and maybe even see something horrible so they could pretend to be shocked. A perfect vacation visit to Miami: orchids and corpses.

  There were even two elfin young men with video cameras circulating through the crowd and filming, of all things, the people standing around and waiting. And as they moved they called out, “Murder in the Gardens!” and other encouraging remarks. Perhaps they had a good parking spot and didn’t want to leave it, since there was absolutely no place left to park anything larger than a unicycle.

  Deborah, of course, was a Miami native, and a Miami cop; she pushed her motor-pool Ford through the crowd and parked it right in front of the main entrance to the park, where several other official cars were already parked, and jumped right out. By the time I got out of the car, she was already talking to the uniformed officer standing there, a short and beefy guy named Meltzer, who I knew slightly. He was pointing down one of the paths on the far side of the entrance, and Deborah was already headed past him along the trail to which he had pointed.

  I followed as quickly as I could. I was used to tagging along behind Deborah and playing catch-up, since she always rushed onto a crime scene. It never seemed quite politic to point out to her that there was really no need to hurry. After all, the victim wasn’t going anywhere. Still, Deborah hurried, and she expected me to be there to tell her what she thought of it. And so, before she could get lost in the carefully tended jungle, I hurried after her.

  I finally caught up to her just as she skidded to a halt in a small clearing off the main trail, in an area called Rain Forest. There was a bench where the weary nature lover could pause and recuperate amid the blooms. Alas for poor panting Dexter, breathing hard now as a result of racing pell-mell after Debs, the bench was already occupied by someone who clearly needed to sit down far more than I did.

  He sat beside running water in the shade of a palm tree, dressed in baggy cotton shorts, the flimsy kind that have somehow become okay to wear in public recently, and he wore the rubber flip-flops that invariably go with the shorts. He also had on a T-shirt that said I’M WITH BUTTHEAD, and he was draped with a camera and pensively clutching a bouquet. And although I say pensively, it was a very different kind of pensing, because his head had been neatly removed and replaced with a gaudy spray of tropical flowers. And in the bouquet, instead of flowers, was a bright and festive heap of intestines, topped by what was almost certainly a heart and surrounded by an appreciative cloud of flies.

  “Son of a bitch,” Deborah said, and it was hard to argue with her logic. “Son of a goddamn bitch. Three of ’em in one day.”

  “We don’t know for sure that they’re connected,” I said carefully, and she glared at me.

  “You want to tell me we got TWO of these assholes running around at the same time?” she demanded.

  “It doesn’t seem very likely,” I admitted.

  “You’re goddamned right it doesn’t. And I’m about to have Captain Matthews and every reporter on the Eastern Seaboard on my ass.”

  “Sounds like quite a party,” I said.

  “So what am I supposed to tell them?”

  “We are pursuing a number of leads and hope to have something more definite to tell you shortly,” I said.

  Deborah stared at me with the look of a large and very angry fish, all teeth and wide eyes. “I can remember that shit without your help,” she said. “Even the reporters can remember that shit. And Captain Matthews invented that shit.”

  “What kind of shit would you prefer?” I asked.

  “The kind of shit that tells me what this is about, asshole.”

  I ignored my sister’s name-calling and looked again at our nature-loving new friend. There was an air of studied ease to the position of the body that created a very large contrast to the fact that it was actually a very dead and headless former human being. It had apparently been posed with extreme care, and once again I got the distinct impression that this final die-orama was more important than the actual killing had been. It was a little bit disturbing, in spite of the mocking chuckle from the Dark Passenger. It was as if someone admitted they went through all the bother and mess of sex only in order to smoke a cigarette.

  Equally disturbing was the fact that, as at the scene where the first two bodies were displayed, I was getting no hints at all from the Passenger, beyond a kind of disconnected and appreciative amusement.

  “What this seems to be about,” I said hesitatingly, “is making some kind of statement.”

  “Statement,” Deborah said. “What kind of statement?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Deborah stared at me for a moment longer, then shook her head. “Thank God you’re here to help,” she said, and before I could think of some suitable remark that would defend me and sting her a little at the same time, the forensic team bustled into our peaceful little glen and began to photograph, measure, dust, and peer into all the tiny places that might hold answers. Deborah immediately turned away to talk to Camilla Figg, one of the lab geeks, and I was left alone to suffer in the knowledge that I had failed my sister.

  I am sure the suffering would have been terrible if I was capable of feeling remorse, or any other crippling human emotion, but I am not built for it, and so I didn’t feel it—or anything else except hunger. I went back out to the parking area and talked to Officer Meltzer until someone came along who could give me a ride back to the South Beach site. I had left my kit there, and had not even made a start on looking for any blood evidence.

  I spent the rest of the morning shuttling back and forth between the two crime scenes. There was very little actual spatter work for me to do, no more than a few small, nearly dry s
pots in the sand that suggested the couple on the beach had been killed elsewhere and brought out onto the beach later. I was pretty sure we had all assumed this already, since it was very unlikely that somebody would do all that chopping and rearranging quite so publicly, so I didn’t bother to mention this to Deborah, who was already in a pointless frenzy, and I didn’t want any more of it aimed at me.

  The only real break I got all day was at almost one o’clock, when Angel-No-Relation offered to drive me back to my cubicle, and stop along the way at Calle Ocho for lunch at his favorite Cuban restaurant, Habanita. I had a very nice Cuban steak with all the trimmings, and two cafecitas with my flan dessert, and I felt a whole lot better about myself as I headed into the building, flashed my credentials, and stepped into the elevator.

  As the elevator doors slid shut I felt a small flutter of uncertainty from the Passenger, and I listened hard, wondering if this was a reaction to the morning’s carnival of carnage, or perhaps the result of too many onions on my steak. But I could get nothing more from it beyond a certain tensing of black invisible wings, very often a sign that things were not what they should be. How this could happen in an elevator I did not know, and I considered the idea that the Passenger’s recent sabbatical in the face of Moloch might have left it in a mildly dithering and unsettled state. It would not do, of course, to have a less than effective Passenger, and I was pondering what to do about that when the elevator doors opened and all questions were answered.

  As if he had known we would be aboard, Sergeant Doakes stood glaring and unblinking at the exact spot where we stood, and the shock was considerable. He had never liked me; had always had the unreasonable suspicion that I was some kind of monster, which of course I was, and he had been determined to prove it somehow. But an amateur surgeon had captured Doakes and removed his hands, feet, and tongue, and although I had endured considerable inconvenience in trying to save him—and really, I did help save most of him—he had decided his new, trimmed-down form was my fault, and he liked me even less.

  Even the fact that without his tongue he was now incapable of saying anything that was minimally coherent was no help; he said it anyway, and the rest of us were forced to endure what sounded like a strange new language made up of all G and N sounds, and spoken with an urgent and threatening delivery that made you look for an emergency exit even while you strained to understand.

  And so I braced myself for some angry gibberish and he stood there looking at me with an expression that is usually reserved for grandmother-rapers, and I began to wonder if I could possibly just push past him, and nothing else happened until the elevator doors began to close automatically. But before I could escape back downstairs, Doakes shot out his right hand—actually a gleaming steel claw—and stopped the doors from closing.

  “Thank you,” I said, and took a tentative step forward. But he did not budge and he did not blink, and without knocking him down, I did not see how I could get by.

  Doakes kept his unblinking, loathing stare on me and brought up a small silver thing about the size of a hardcover book. He flipped it open to reveal that it was a small handheld computer or PDA and, still without looking away from me, he jabbed at it with his claw.

  “Put it on my desk,” said a disjointed male voice from the PDA, and Doakes snarled a little more and jabbed again. “Black with two sugars,” the voice said, and he poked again. “Have a nice day,” it said, really a very pleasant baritone that should have come from a happy and pudgy white American man instead of this glowering dark cyborg so bent on revenge.

  But at least he finally had to look away, down to the keyboard of the thing he held in his claw, and after staring for a moment at what was clearly a cluster of prerecorded sentences, he found the right button.

  “I am still watching you,” said the happy baritone voice, and the cheerful and positive tone should have made me feel very good about myself, but the fact that it was Doakes saying it by proxy somehow spoiled the effect.

  “That’s very reassuring,” I said. “Would you mind watching me get off the elevator?”

  For a moment he thought he did mind, and he moved his claw to the keyboard again. But then he remembered that it hadn’t worked out too well before to poke it without looking, so he glanced down, punched a button, and looked up at me as the cheerful voice said, “Motherfucker,” in a tone that made it sound like “Jelly doughnut.” But at least he moved aside slightly so I could get by.

  “Thank you,” I said, and because I am sometimes not a very kind person, I added, “And I will put it on your desk. Black with two sugars. Have a nice day.” I stepped past him and headed down the hall, but I could feel his eyes on me all the way to my cubicle.

  FIVE

  THE ORDEAL OF THE WORKING DAY HAD BEEN NIGHTMARISH enough, from being stranded without doughnuts in the morning all the way through the terrifying encounter with what was left of Sergeant Doakes, vocally enhanced version. Even so, none of this prepared me for the shock of arriving home.

  I’d been hoping for the warm and fuzzy glow of a good meal and some downtime with Cody and Astor—perhaps a game of Kick the Can out in the yard before dinner. But as I pulled up and parked at Rita’s house—now My House, too, which took some getting used to—I was surprised to see the two small and tousled heads sitting in the front yard and apparently waiting for me. Since I knew full well that SpongeBob was on TV right now, I could not imagine what would make them sit out here, instead of in front of the TV. So it was with a growing sense of alarm that I climbed out of my car and approached them.

  “Greetings, citizens,” I said. They stared at me with a matched set of mournful looks, but said nothing. That was to be expected from Cody, who never spoke more than four words at a time. But for Astor, it was alarming, since she had inherited her mother’s talent for circular breathing, which allowed them both to talk without pausing for air, and to see her sit there without speaking was almost unprecedented. So I switched languages and tried again. “What up, yo?” I asked them.

  “Poop van,” said Cody. Or at any rate, that’s what I thought I heard. But since none of my training had prepared me to respond to anything remotely like that, I looked over at Astor, hoping for some hint about how I should react.

  “Mom said we get to have pizza, but it’s the poop van for you, and we didn’t want you to go away, so we came out here to warn you. You’re not going away, are you, Dexter?”

  It was a small relief to know that I had heard Cody right, even though that now meant that I really was dealing with trying to make sense of “poop van.” Had Rita really said that? Did it mean that I had done something very bad that I didn’t know about? That didn’t seem fair—I liked to remember and enjoy it when I do something bad. And one day after the honeymoon—wasn’t that just a little abrupt?

  “As far as I know, I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “Are you sure that’s what your mom said?”

  They nodded in unison and Astor said, “Uh-huh. She said you’d be surprised.”

  “She was right,” I said, and it really didn’t seem fair. I was totally at a loss. “Come on,” I said. “We’ll go tell her I’m not going.” They each took one of my hands and we went inside.

  The air inside the house was filled with a tantalizing aroma, strangely familiar and yet exotic, as if you sniffed a rose and instead smelled pumpkin pie. It was coming from the kitchen, so I led my small troop in that direction.

  “Rita?” I called out, and the clatter of a pan answered me.

  “It’s not ready,” she said. “It’s a surprise.”

  As we all know, surprise is usually ominous, unless it is your birthday—and even then, there are no guarantees. But I pushed bravely into the kitchen anyway, and found Rita wearing an apron and fussing over the stove, a lock of blond hair falling unnoticed down across her forehead.

  “Am I in trouble?” I asked.

  “What? No, of course not. Why would—damn it!” she said, sticking a singed finger into her mouth, and then stirr
ing the contents of the pan furiously.

  “Cody and Astor say you’re sending me away,” I said.

  Rita dropped her stirring spoon and looked at me with an expression of alarm. “Away? That’s silly, I—why would I…” She bent to pick up the spoon and jumped to the skillet to stir again.

  “So you didn’t call the poop van?” I said.

  “Dexter,” she said, with a certain amount of stress in her voice, “I am trying to make you a special meal, and I’m working very hard not to ruin it. Can this please wait until later?” And she jumped to the counter and grabbed a measuring cup, and then rushed back to the skillet.

  “What are you making?” I said.

  “You liked the food so much in Paris,” she said, frowning and slowly stirring in whatever was in the measuring cup.

  “I almost always like the food,” I said.

  “So I wanted to make you a nice French meal,” she said. “Coq au vin.” She said it with her best Bad French accent, caca van, and a very small lightbulb came on in my head.

  “Caca van?” I said, and I looked at Astor.

  She nodded. “Poop van,” she said.

  “Damn it!” said Rita again, this time trying vainly to stick a burned elbow into her mouth.

  “Come along, children,” I said in a Mary Poppins voice. “I’ll explain it outside.” And I led them through the house, down the hall, and out into the backyard. We sat together on the step and they both looked at me expectantly.

  “All right,” I said. “Caca van is just a misunderstanding.”

  Astor shook her head. Since she knew absolutely everything, a misunderstanding was not possible. “Anthony said that caca means ‘poop’ in Spanish,” she said with certainty. “And everybody knows what a van is.”

  “But coq au vin is French,” I said. “It’s something your mother and I learned about in France.”

  Astor shook her head, a little doubt showing on her face. “Nobody speaks French,” she said.