Dexter by Design Read online

  “Let me take some pictures and think about it,” I said.

  “That’s a no, right?”

  “It’s not a stated no,” I said. “It’s an implied no.”

  Deborah held up a middle finger. “Imply this,” she said, and she turned away and trudged back to look at the body.

  SEVEN

  IT IS SURPRISING, BUT TRUE: COLD COQ AU VIN REALLY doesn’t taste as good as it should. Somehow the wine gives off an odor of stale beer, and the chicken feels slightly slimy, and the whole experience becomes an ordeal of grim perseverance in the face of bitterly disappointed expectations. Still, Dexter is nothing if not persistent, and when I got home around midnight, I worked through a large portion of the stuff with truly stoic fortitude.

  Rita did not wake up when I slipped into bed, and I did not dawdle overlong on the shores of sleep. I closed my eyes, and it seemed like almost immediately the clock radio beside the bed began to scream at me about the rising tide of dreadful violence threatening to overwhelm our poor battered city.

  I pried open an eye and saw that it really was six o’clock and time to get up. It didn’t seem fair, but I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower, and by the time I reached the kitchen, Rita had breakfast on the table. “I see you had some of the chicken,” she said, a little grimly, I thought, and I realized a little blarney was called for.

  “It was wonderful,” I said. “Better than what we had in Paris.”

  She brightened a little, but shook her head. “Liar,” she said. “It never tastes right when it’s cold.”

  “You have the magic touch,” I said. “It tasted warm.”

  She frowned and brushed a lock of hair off her face. “I know you have to, you know,” she said. “I mean, your job is … But I wish you could have tasted it when—I mean, I really do understand,” she said, and I was not sure I could say the same thing. Rita put a plate of fried eggs and sausage in front of me and nodded at the small TV set over by the coffeemaker. “It was all over the news this morning, about… that’s what it was, wasn’t it? And they had your sister on, saying that, you know. She didn’t look very happy.”

  “She’s not happy at all,” I said. “Which doesn’t seem right, since she has a really challenging job, and her picture is on TV. Who could ask for more?”

  Rita did not smile at my lighthearted jest. Instead, she pulled a chair over next to mine and, sitting down and clasping her hands in her lap, she frowned even deeper. “Dexter,” she said, “we really need to talk.”

  I know from my research into human life that these are the words that strike terror into men’s souls. Conveniently enough, I have no soul, but I still felt a surge of discomfort at what those ominous syllables might mean. “So soon after the honeymoon?” I said, hoping to deflect at least some small bit of seriousness.

  Rita shook her head. “It’s not—I mean …” She fluttered one hand, and then let it drop back into her lap. She sighed deeply. “It’s Cody,” she said at last.

  “Oh,” I said, without even a clue of what sort of “it” Cody might be. He seemed perfectly all right to me—but then, I knew better than Rita that Cody was not at all the small and quiet human child he seemed to be, but instead a Dexter-in-training.

  “He still seems, so …” She shook her head again and looked down, her voice dropping. “I know his … father … did some things that… hurt him. Probably changed him forever. But…” She looked up at me, her eyes bright with tears. “It isn’t right that… he should still be like this. Should he? So quiet all the time, and …” She looked down again. “I’m just afraid for what… you know.” A tear fell onto her lap and she sniffled. “He might be … you know … permanently …”

  Several more tears joined the first one, and even though I am generally helpless in the face of emotion, I knew that some kind of reassuring gesture was called for here.

  “Cody will be fine,” I said, blessing my ability to lie convincingly. “He just needs to come out of his shell a little bit.”

  Rita sniffled again. “Do you really think so?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, putting a hand over hers, as I had seen in a movie not too long ago. “Cody is a great kid. He’s just maturing a little slower than others. Because of what happened to him.”

  She shook her head and a tear hit me on the face. “You can’t know that,” she said.

  “I can,” I told her, and oddly enough, now I was actually telling the truth. “I know perfectly well what he’s going through, because I went through it myself.”

  She looked at me with very bright, wet eyes. “You—you never talked about what happened to you,” she said.

  “No,” I said. “And I never will. But it was close enough to what happened to Cody, so I do know. Trust me on this, Rita.” And I patted her hand again, thinking, Yes, trust me. Trust me to turn Cody into a well-adjusted, smoothly functioning monster, just like me.

  “Oh, Dexter,” she said. “I do trust you. But he’s so …” She shook her head again, sending a spray of tears around the room.

  “He’ll be fine,” I said. “Really. He just needs to come out of his shell a little bit. Learn to be with other kids his own age.” And learn to pretend to be like them, I thought, but it didn’t seem terribly comforting to say aloud, so I didn’t.

  “If you’re sure,” Rita said with a truly enormous snuffle.

  “I’m sure,” I said.

  “All right,” she said, reaching for a napkin off the table and blotting at her nose and eyes. “Then let’s just…” Sniffle. Honk. “I guess we’ll just think of ways to get him to mix with other kids.”

  “That’s the ticket,” I said. “We’ll have him cheating at cards in no time.”

  Rita blew her nose a last, long time.

  “Sometimes I couldn’t tell that you’re being funny,” she said. She stood up and kissed me on the top of the head. “If I didn’t know you so well.”

  Of course, if she really knew me as well as she thought, she would stab me with a fork and run for her life, but maintaining our illusions is an important part of life’s work, so I said nothing, and breakfast went on in its wonderfully soothing monotony. There is a real pleasure in being waited upon, especially by someone who really knows what she’s doing in the kitchen, and it was worth listening to all the chatter that went with it.

  Cody and Astor joined us as I started my second cup of coffee, and the two of them sat side by side with identical expressions of heavily sedated incomprehension on their faces. They didn’t have the benefit of coffee, and it took them several minutes to realize that they were, in fact, awake. It was Astor, naturally enough, who broke the silence.

  “Sergeant Debbie was on TV,” she said. Astor had developed a strange case of hero worship for Deborah, ever since she found out that Debs carried a gun and got to boss around big beefy uniformed cops.

  “That’s part of her job,” I said, even though I realized it would probably feed the hero worship.

  “How come you’re never on TV, Dexter?” she said accusingly.

  “I don’t want to be on TV,” I said, and she looked at me like I had suggested outlawing ice cream. “It’s true,” I said. “Imagine if everybody knew what I look like. I couldn’t walk down the street without people pointing at me and talking behind my back.”

  “Nobody points at Sergeant Debbie,” she said.

  I nodded. “Of course not,” I said. “Who would dare?” Astor looked like she was ready to argue, so I put my coffee cup down with a bang and stood up. “I’m off to another day of mighty work defending the good people of our city.”

  “You can’t defend people with a microscope,” Astor said.

  “That’s enough, Astor,” Rita said, and she hustled over to plant another kiss on me, on the face this time. “I hope you catch this one, Dexter,” she said. “It sounds awful.”

  I rather hoped we would catch this one, too. Four victims in one day seemed a little bit overzealous, even to me, and it would certainly create
a citywide atmosphere of paranoid watchfulness that would make it almost impossible for me to have any quiet fun of my own.

  So it was with a real determination to see justice done that I went in to work. Of course, any real attempt at justice would have to start with the traffic, since Miami drivers have long ago taken the simple chore of going from one place to another and turned it into a kind of high-speed, heavily armed game of high-stakes bumper cars. It’s even more interesting because the rules change from one driver to the next. For example, as I drove along in the tight bundle of cars on the expressway, a man in the next lane suddenly started honking his horn. When I turned to look, he flipped me off, yelled, “Maricón!” and forced his way in front of me, and then over on to the shoulder, where he accelerated away.

  I had no idea what had caused the display, so I simply waved at his car as it vanished in a distant concerto of honking and shouting. The Miami Rush-Hour Symphony.

  I arrived at work a little bit early, but the building was already buzzing with frantic activity. The press room was overflowing with more people than I had ever seen before—at least, I assumed they were people, although with reporters you can never be sure. And the true seriousness of the situation hit me when I realized that there were dozens of cameras and microphones and no sign of Captain Matthews.

  More unprecedented shocks awaited: a uniformed cop stood at the elevator and demanded to see my credentials before he let me past, even though he was a guy I knew slightly. And even more—when I finally got to the lab area, I found that Vince had actually brought in a bag of croissants.

  “Good lord,” I said, gazing at the flakes of crust that covered Vince’s shirtfront. “I was just kidding, Vince.”

  “I know,” he said. “But it sounded kind of classy, so …” He shrugged, which caused a trickle of croissant flakes to fall off him and onto the floor. “They make ’em with chocolate filling,” he said. “And ham and cheese, too.”

  “I don’t think they’ll approve of that in Paris,” I said.

  “Where the fuck have you been?” Deborah snarled from behind me, and she snatched up a ham-and-cheese croissant.

  “Some of us like to sleep from time to time,” I said.

  “Some of us don’t get to sleep,” she said. “Because some of us have been trying to work, surrounded by camera crews from fucking Brazil and who knows where.” She took a savage bite of croissant and, with a full mouth, looked at the rest of it in her hand and said, “Jesus Christ, what is this thing?”

  “It’s a French doughnut,” I said.

  Debs threw the rest of it at a nearby trash can and missed by about four feet. “Tastes like shit,” she said.

  “Would you rather try some of my jelly roll?” Vince asked her.

  Debs didn’t even blink. “Sorry, I’d need at least a mouthful, which you ain’t got,” she said, and she grabbed my arm. “Come on.”

  My sister led me down the hall to her cubicle and flung herself into the chair at her desk. I sat in the folding chair and waited for whatever onslaught of emotion she might have prepared for me.

  It came in the form of a stack of newspapers and magazines that she started to throw at me, saying, “L.A. Times. Chicago Sun-Times. New York Fucking Times. Der Spiegel. Toronto Star.”

  Just before I vanished completely under a pile of papers, battered insensible, I reached across and grabbed her arm, stopping her from flinging the Karachi Observer at me. “Debs,” I said. “I can see them better if they’re not wedged into my eye sockets.”

  “This is a shit-storm,” she said, “like no shit-storm you have ever seen before.”

  Truthfully I had not seen many actual shit-storms, although one time in middle school Randy Schwartz flushed a cherry bomb down a full toilet in the boys’ restroom, forcing Mr. O’Brien to go home early to change clothes. But clearly Debs was in no mood for fond reminiscence, even though neither of us had liked Mr. O’Brien. “I gathered that,” I said, “from the fact that Matthews is suddenly invisible.”

  She snorted. “Like he never existed.”

  “I never thought we’d see a case so hot the captain didn’t want to be on TV,” I said.

  “Four fucking bodies in one fucking day,” she spat out. “Like nothing anybody has ever seen, and it lands in my lap.”

  “Rita says you looked very nice on television,” I said encouragingly, but for some reason that caused her to slap at the pile of newspapers and knock several more onto the floor.

  “I don’t wanna BE on fucking television,” she said. “Fucking Matthews has thrown me to the lions, because this is absolutely the biggest, most badass god-awful goddamn story in the whole fucking world right now, and we haven’t even released any pictures of the bodies but somehow everybody knows there’s something weird going on, and the mayor is having a shit fit, and the fucking GOVERNOR is having a shit fit, and if I personally do not solve this thing by lunchtime the whole fucking state of Florida is going to fall into the ocean and I am going to be underneath it when it happens.” She slapped at the pile of newspapers and this time at least half of them fell to the floor. That seemed to take all the fury out of her, because she slumped over and suddenly looked drained and exhausted. “I really need some help here, bro. I hate it like hell that I have to ask you, but… if you could ever really figure one of these out, this is the time.”

  I wasn’t really sure what to make of the fact that suddenly she hated like hell to ask me—after all, she had asked before, several times, apparently without hate. She seemed to be getting a little odd and even snarky lately on the subject of my special talents. But what the hell. While it is true that I am without emotion, I am not immune to being manipulated by it, and the sight of my sister so obviously at the end of her rope was more than I could comfortably sidestep. “Of course I’ll help, Debs,” I said. “I just don’t know how much I can really do.”

  “Well, fuck, you have to do something,” she said. “We’re going under here.”

  It was nice that she said “we” and included me, although I had not been aware until right now that I, too, was going under. But the added sense of belonging did very little to jar my giant brain into action. In fact, the huge cranial complex that is Dexter’s Cerebral Faculty was being abnormally quiet, just as it had been at the crime scenes. Nevertheless, it was clear that a display of good old team spirit was called for, so I closed my eyes and tried to look like I was thinking very hard.

  All right then: if there were any real, physical clues, the tireless and dogged heroes of forensics would find them. So what I needed was some kind of hint from a source that my coworkers could not tap—the Dark Passenger. The Passenger, however, was being uncharacteristically silent, except for its mildly savage chuckling and I wasn’t sure what that meant. Normally, any display of predatory skill would evoke some kind of appreciation that quite often provided a small stab of insight into the killing. But this time, any such comment was absent. Why?

  Perhaps the Passenger was not yet settled back in comfortably after its recent flight. Or perhaps it was still recovering from the trauma—although this didn’t seem likely, judging by the growing power of my Need.

  So why the sudden shyness? If something wicked transpired under our nose, I had come to expect a response beyond amusement. It had not come. Therefore … nothing wicked had happened? That made even less sense, since we quite clearly had four very dead bodies.

  It also meant that I was, apparently, on my own—and there was Deborah staring at me with a very hard and expectant glare. So back up a step, Oh great and grim genius. Something was different about these killings, beyond the rather gaudy presentation of the bodies. And presentation was exactly the right word—they were displayed in a way calculated to make a maximum impact.

  But on whom? Conventional wisdom in the psychopathic killer community would say that the more trouble you go to show off, the more you want an adoring audience. But it is also common knowledge that the police keep such sights under tight wraps—and e
ven if they didn’t, none of the news media would run pictures of such terrible things; believe me, I have looked.

  So who could the presentations be aimed at? The police? The forensics wonks? Me? None of these were likely, and beyond them and the three or four people who had discovered the bodies, nobody had seen anything, and there had been only the tremendous outcry from the entire state of Florida, desperate to save the tourist industry.

  A thought snapped my eyes open, and there was Deborah staring at me like an Irish setter on point.

  “What, goddamn it?” she said.

  “What if this is what they want?” I said.

  She stared at me for a moment, looking quite a bit like Cody and Astor when they’ve just woken up. “What’s that mean?” she finally said.

  “The first thing I thought about the bodies was that it wasn’t about killing them. It was about playing with them afterward. Displaying them.”

  Debs snorted. “I remember. It STILL doesn’t make any sense.”

  “But it does,” I said. “If somebody is trying to create an effect. To have an impact in some way. So look at it backward—what impact has this already had?”

  “Aside from getting media attention all over the world—”

  “No, NOT aside from that. That is exactly what I mean.”

  She shook her head. “What?”

  “What’s wrong with media attention, sis? The whole world is looking at the Sunshine State—at Miami, tourist beacon to the world—”

  “They’re looking, and they’re saying no fucking way am I going anywhere near that slaughterhouse,” Debs said. “Come on, Dex, what’s the fucking point? I told you … Oh.” She frowned.

  “You’re saying somebody did this to attack the tourist industry? The whole fucking state? That’s fucking nuts.”

  “You think somebody did this who isn’t nuts, sis?”

  “But who the hell would do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “California?”