Double Dexter Page 8

  “What kind of thing?” Duarte said.

  I hesitated; for some reason, I felt a little bit uncomfortable, probably because I was talking about this stuff in front of a stranger—generally speaking, I don’t really like to talk about it at all, even with Debs; it seems a little too personal. I covered the pause by grabbing a paper towel and blotting at my nose, but they both kept looking at me expectantly, like two dogs waiting for a treat. I was on the spot, with no real choice but to go on. “Well,” I said, tossing the paper towel into the trash, “a lot of the time they start with, you know, pets. When they’re young, just twelve years old or so. And they kill small dogs, cats, like that. Just, um, experimenting. Trying to find what feels right. And, you know. Somebody in the family, or in the neighborhood, finds the dead pets, and they get caught and arrested.”

  “So there’s a record,” Debs said.

  “Well, there might be,” I said. “But if he follows the pattern, he’s young when he does that, so he goes to Juvie. So the record is going to be sealed, and you can’t just ask a judge to give you every sealed case file in the system.”

  “Then give me something better,” Deborah said urgently. “Give me something to work with here.”

  “Debs,” I protested, “I don’t have anything.” I sneezed again. “Except a cold.”

  “Well, shit,” she said. “Can’t you think up some kind of hint?”

  I looked at her, and then at Duarte, and my discomfort grew and mixed with frustration. “How?” I said.

  Duarte shrugged. “She says you’re like some kind of amateur profiler,” he said.

  I was surprised, and a bit upset, that Debs had shared that with Duarte. My so-called profiling talent was highly personal, something that grew out of my firsthand experience with sociopathic individuals like myself. But she had shared it; that probably meant she trusted him. In any case, I was on the spot. “Ah, well,” I said at last. “Más o menos.”

  Duarte shook his head. “What is that, yes or no?” he said. I looked at Debs, and she actually smirked at me. “Alex doesn’t speak Spanish,” she said.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “Alex speaks French,” she said, looking at him with hard-edged fondness.

  I felt even more uncomfortable, since I had made a social blunder by assuming that anybody with a Cuban name who lived in Miami would speak Spanish—but I also realized that this was one more clue to why Debs liked her new partner. For some reason, my sister had taken French in school, too, in spite of the fact that we grew up in a city where Spanish was used more widely than English, and French was no more useful than lips on a chicken—it didn’t even help her with the city’s growing Haitian population. They all spoke Creole, which was only slightly closer to French than Mandarin.

  And now she had found a kindred spirit, and clearly they had bonded. I am sure a real human being would have felt a warm glow of affectionate satisfaction at my sister’s newly happy work situation, but this was me, and I didn’t. All I felt was irritation and discomfort. “Well, bonne chance,” I said. “But even speaking French to a judge won’t get him to unseal a juvenile record—especially since we don’t even know which record.”

  Deborah lost her annoying fond look. “Well, shit,” she said. “I can’t just wait around and hope I get lucky.”

  “You may not have to,” I said. “I’m pretty sure he’s going to do it again.”

  She just looked at me for a long moment, and then she nodded. “Yeah,” she said. “I’m pretty sure he will.” She shook her head, looked at Duarte, and walked out of the room. He followed right behind her, and I sneezed.

  “Gesundheit,” I told myself. But it didn’t make me feel any better.

  EIGHT

  OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS I PICKED UP THE PACE OF MY Honda hunt. I stayed out a little later each evening, trying to squeeze in just one more address, driving when it was too far to walk. I went home only when it was too dark to see any longer, trudging past the family tableau in the living room and into the shower without speaking, a little more frustrated every evening.

  On the third night of my enhanced search, I walked in the front door, very sweaty, and realized that Rita was staring at me, her eyes running over me as if she was searching for a blemish, and I stopped in front of her. “What?” I said.

  She looked up at me and blushed. “Oh,” she said. “It’s just late, and you’re so sweaty, I thought— It’s nothing, really.”

  “I was jogging,” I said, not sure why I felt like I was on the defensive.

  “You took the car,” she said.

  It seemed to me that she was paying far too much attention to my activities, but perhaps this was one of the little perks of marriage, so I shrugged it off. “I went over to the track at the high school,” I said.

  She looked at me for a very long moment without saying anything, and there was clearly something going on in there, but I had no idea what it might be. Finally, she just said, “That would explain it.” She stood up and pushed past me into the kitchen, and I went to my hard-earned shower.

  Perhaps I just hadn’t noticed it before, but each evening when I came in after my “exercise,” she would watch me with that same mysterious intensity, and then head into the kitchen. On the fourth night of this exotic behavior, I followed her and stood silently in the kitchen doorway. I watched as she opened a cupboard, took out a bottle of wine, and poured herself a full glass, and as she raised it to her lips I backed away, unobserved.

  It made no sense to me; it was almost as if there was a connection between my coming home sweaty and Rita wanting a glass of wine. I thought about it as I showered, but after a few minutes of musing I realized that I didn’t know enough about the complex topics of humans and marriage, and Rita in particular, and in any case I had other worries. Finding the right Honda was far more important, and even though it was something I did know a lot about, I wasn’t getting that done either. So I put the Mystery of Rita and the Wine out of my mind as just one more brick in the wall of frustration that was forming all around me.

  A week later my cold was gone, and I had crossed many more names off my list, enough of them that I was beginning to wonder whether it wasn’t a waste of precious time. I could feel hot breath on the back of my neck, and a growing urgency to do before I was done to, but that got me no closer to finding my Witness than anything else I tried. I was more jittery with each day, and with each dead-end name I crossed off my list, and I actually began to bite my fingernails, a habit I had dropped in high school. It was annoying, and added to my frustration, and I began to wonder whether I was starting to fall apart under the strain.

  Still, at least I was in much better shape than Officer Gunther. Because just when Marty Klein’s brutal murder had settled into a kind of background hum of nervousness on the force, Officer Gunther turned up dead, too. He was a uniformed cop, not a detective like Klein, but there was no doubt at all that it was the handiwork of the same killer. The body had been slowly and methodically pounded into a two-hundred-pound bruise. Every major bone had bee broken with what looked like exactly the same patient routine that had been so successful with Klein.

  This time the body was not left in a police cruiser on I-95. Officer Gunther had been carefully placed in Bayfront Park, right beside the Torch of Friendship, which seemed more than a little ironic. A young Canadian couple on their honeymoon had found the corpse as they took a romantic early morning stroll: one more enduring memory of a magical time in Our Enchanted City.

  There was a feeling of something very close to superstitious dread running through the small knot of cops when I got there. It was still relatively early in the day, but the air of quiet panic on-site had nothing to do with the lack of coffee. The officers on the scene were tense, even a bit wide-eyed, as if they had all seen a ghost. It was easy to see why: To dump Gunther here, so publicly, did not seem like something a human being could get away with. Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami is not the kind of private and secluded spot where y
our average psychotic killer might normally stroll by and drop a stiff. This was an amazingly public display, and yet somehow the body was here, and apparently it had been here for several hours before it had been discovered.

  Cops are normally oversensitive to that kind of direct challenge. They take it as an insult to their manhood when someone flaunts the law with such flamboyant exhibitionism, and this really should have stirred up all the righteous wrath of an angry police force. But Miami’s Finest looked like they were filled with supernatural angst instead of fury, almost as if they were ready to throw away their weapons and call the Psychic Hotline for help.

  And I admit it was a bit disturbing, even to me, to see the corpse of a cop so carefully puddled on the pavement beside the Torch. It was very hard to understand how any living being could stroll through one of the city’s busiest streets and deposit a body that was so clearly and spectacularly dead, without being seen. No one actually suggested out loud that there were occult forces at work—at least, not that I overheard. But judging by the look of the cops in attendance, nobody was ruling it out, either.

  My real area of expertise is not the Undead, though; it’s blood spatter, and there was nothing in that line here. The killing had obviously happened somewhere else and the body had merely been dumped at this lovely and well-known landmark. But I was sure my sister, Deborah, would want my insight, so I hovered around the edges and tried to find some obscure and helpful clue that the other forensics wonks might have missed. There wasn’t a great deal to see, aside from the gelatinous blob in the blue uniform that had once been Officer Gunther, married, father of three. I watched Angel Batista-No-Relation crawl slowly around the perimeter, searching meticulously for any small crumb of evidence and, apparently, finding none.

  There was a bright flash of light behind me, and, somewhat startled, I turned around. Camilla Figg stood a few feet away, clutching a camera and blushing, with what seemed to be a guilty expression on her face. “Oh,” she said in her jerky mutter. “I didn’t mean the flash was on but I had to sorry.” I blinked at her for a moment, partly from the bright blast of the flash and partly because she had made no sense at all. And then one of the people stacked up at the perimeter leaned over and took a picture of the two of us staring at each other, and Camilla jerked into motion and scuttled away to a small square of grass between the walkways, where Vince Masuoka had found a footprint. She began to refocus her camera on the footprint, and I turned away.

  “Nobody saw anything,” Deborah said as she materialized at my elbow, and on top of the unexpected explosion from Camilla’s flashbulb, my nerves responded instantly and I jumped as if there really was a ghost on the loose and Debs was it. As I settled back to earth she looked at me with mild surprise.

  “You startled me,” I said.

  “I didn’t know you could startle,” she said. She frowned and shook her head. “This thing is enough to give anybody the creeps. It’s like the most crowded public area in the city, and the guy just pops up with a body, drops it by the Torch, and drives away?”

  “They found it right around dawn,” I said. “So it was dark when he dumped the body.”

  “It’s never dark here,” she said. “Streetlights, all the buildings, Bayside Market, the arena a block away? Not to mention the goddamned Torch. It’s lit up twenty-four/seven.”

  I looked around me. I had been here many times, day and night, and it was true that there was always a very bright spill of light from the buildings in this neighborhood. And with Bayside Marketplace right next to us and American Airlines Arena just a block away, there was even more light, more traffic, and more security. Plus the goddamned Torch, of course.

  But there was also a line of trees and a relatively deserted belt of grass in the other direction, and I turned to look that way. As I did, Deborah glanced at me, frowned, and then she turned around to look, too.

  Through the trees and beyond the stretch of park on the far side of the Torch, the morning sun blazed off the water of Biscayne Bay. In the middle of the near-blinding glare a large sailboat slid regally across the water toward the marina, until an even larger motor yacht powered past it and set it bobbing frantically. A half thought wobbled into my brain and I raised an arm to point; Deborah looked at me expectantly, and then, as if to signal that we really were in a cartoon, another camera flash came from the perimeter, and Deborah’s eyes went wide-open as the idea blossomed.

  “Son of a bitch,” Deborah said. “The motherfucker came by boat. Of course!” She clapped her hands together and swiveled her head around until she located her partner. “Hey, Duarte!” she called. He looked up and she beckoned him to follow as she turned and hurried away toward the water.

  “Glad to help,” I said as my sister raced away to the seawall. I turned to see who had taken the picture, but saw nothing except Angel with his face hovering six inches over a fascinating clump of grass, and Camilla waving to somebody standing in the crowd of gawkers who were two-deep at the yellow crime scene tape. She went over to talk to whoever it was, and I turned away and watched as my sister raced to the seawall to look for some clue that the killer had come by boat. It really did make sense; I knew very well from a great deal of happy personal experience that you can get away with almost anything on a boat, especially at night. And when I say “almost anything,” I mean much more than merely the surprising acts of athletic immodesty one sees couples performing out on the water from time to time. In the pursuit of my hobby I had done many things on my boat that narrow minds might find objectionable, and it was quite clear to me that nobody ever sees anything. Not even, apparently, a psychotic and semisupernatural killer lugging a completely limp but rather large dead cop around the Bay and then up over the seawall and into Bayfront Park.

  But because this was Miami, it was at least possible that somebody had, in fact, seen something of the sort, and simply decided not to report it. Maybe they were afraid it would make them a target, or they didn’t want the police to find out they had no green card. Modern life being what it is, it was even possible that there was a really good episode of Mythbusters on TV and they wanted to watch the end. So for the next hour or so, Debs and her team went all along the seawall looking for that Certain Special Someone.

  Not surprisingly—at least, not to me—they didn’t find him or her. Nobody knew nothin’; nobody saw nothin’. There was plenty of activity along the seawall, but it was morning traffic, people getting to work in one of the shops in Bayside, or on one of the tour boats tied up by the wall. None of this crowd had been keeping watch in the dark of the night. All those people had gone home to their well-earned rest, no doubt after a full night of staring anxiously into the darkness, alert for every danger—or possibly just watching TV. But Deborah dutifully collected names and telephone numbers of all the night security personnel and then came back to me and scowled, as if it was all my fault because she had found nothing and I was the one who had made her look for it.

  We stood on the seawall not far from the Biscayne Pearl, one of the boats that provided tours of the city by water, and Deborah squinted along the wall toward Bayside. Then she shook her head and started to walk back toward the Torch, and I tagged along.

  “Somebody saw something,” she said, and I hoped she sounded more convincing to herself than she did to me. “Had to. You can’t lug a full-grown cop onto the seawall and all the way up to the Torch and nobody sees you.”

  “Freddy Krueger could,” I said.

  Deborah whacked me on the upper arm, but her heart really wasn’t in it this time, and it was relatively easy for me to stop myself from screaming with pain.

  “All I need,” she said, “is to have more of that supernatural bullshit going around. One of the guys actually asked Duarte if we could get a santero in here, just in case.”

  I nodded. It might make sense to bring in a santero, one of Santeria’s priests, if you believed in that sort of thing, and a surprising number of Miami’s citizens did. “What did Duarte tell him?�
� Deborah snorted. “He said, ‘What’s a santero?’ ”

  I looked at her to see if she was kidding; every Cuban-American knew santeros. Odds were good there was at least one in his very own family. But of course, they hadn’t asked Duarte in French, and anyway, before I could pretend to get the joke and then pretend to laugh, Debs went on. “I know this guy’s a psycho, but he’s a live human being, too,” she said, and I was relatively sure she didn’t mean Duarte. “He isn’t invisible, and he didn’t teleport in and out.”

  She paused by a large tree and looked up at it thoughtfully, and then turned back around the way we’d come. “Lookit this,” she said, pointing up at the tree and then back to the Pearl. “If he ties up right there by the tour boat,” she said, “he’s got cover from these trees most of the way to the Torch.”

  “Not quite invisible,” I said. “But pretty close.”

  “Right beside the fucking boat,” she muttered. “They had to see something.”

  “Unless they were asleep,” I said.

  She just shook her head and then looked toward the Torch along the line of trees as if she was aiming a rifle, and then shrugged and began to walk again. “Somebody saw something,” she repeated stubbornly. “Had to.”

  We walked back to the Torch together in what would have been comfortable silence if my sister hadn’t been so obviously distracted. The medical examiner was just finishing up with Officer Gunther’s body when we got there. He shook his head at Debs to indicate that he’d found nothing interesting.

  “Do we know where Gunther had lunch?” I asked Deborah. She stared at me as if I had suggested we should strip naked and jog down Biscayne Boulevard.