Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark (16 page)

“Where the hell are you?” Deborah demanded.

“Cutler Ridge, looking at a canal,” I said.

It gave her pause for a full second before she said,
“Well, dry off and get your ass over to the campus. We got another
body.”

IT TOOK ME A FEW MINUTES
TO DISENGAGE MYSELF FROM the driver of the yellow Hummer, and I might have been
there still if not for the cop who had jumped into the canal. He finally
climbed out of the water and came over to where I stood listening to a nonstop
stream of threats and obscenities, none very original. I tried to be polite
about it-the man obviously had a great deal to get off his chest, and I
certainly didn't want him to sustain psychological damage by repressing it-but
I did have some urgent police business to attend to, after all. I tried to
point that out, but apparently he was one of those

individuals who could not yell and listen to reason at
the same time.

So the appearance of an unhappy and extremely wet cop was a welcome
interruption to a conversation that was verging on tedious and one-sided.
“I would really like to know what you find out about the driver of that
car,” I said to the cop.

“I bet you would,” he said. “Can I see
some ID, please?”

“I have to get to a crime scene,” I said.

“You're at one,” he told me. So I showed him my credentials
and he looked at them very carefully, dripping canal water onto the laminated
picture. Finally he nodded and said, “Okay, Morgan, you're out of
here.”

From the Hummer driver's reaction you might have thought the cop had
suggested setting the Pope on fire. “You can't let that son of a bitch
just go like that!” he screeched. “That goddamn asshole dinged up my
car!”

And the cop, bless him, simply stared at the man, dripped a little more
water, and said, “May I see your license and registration, sir?” It
seemed like a wonderful exit line, and I took advantage of it.

My poor battered car was making very unhappy noises,
but I put it on the road to the university anyway-there really was no other
choice. No matter how badly damaged it was, it would have to get me there. And
it made me feel a certain kinship with my car. Here we were, two splendidly
built pieces of machinery, hammered out of our original beautiful condition by
circumstances beyond our control. It was a wonderful theme for self-pity, and I
indulged it for several minutes. The anger I had felt only a few minutes ago
had leeched away, dripped onto the lawn like canal water off the cop. Watching
the Avalon's driver swim to the far side, climb out, and walk away had been in
the same spirit as everything else lately; get a little bit close and then have
the rug pulled out from under your feet.

And now there was a new body, and we hadn't even
figured out what to do about the others yet. It was making us look like the
greyhounds at a dog track, chasing after a fake rabbit that is always just a
little bit too far ahead, jerked tantalizingly away every time the poor dog
thinks he's about to get it in his teeth.

There were two squad cars at the university ahead of me, and the four
officers had already cordoned off the area around the Lowe Art Museum and
pushed back the growing crowd. A squat, powerful-looking cop with a shaved head
came over to meet me, and pointed toward the back of the building.

The body was in a clump of vegetation behind the
gallery. Deborah was talking to someone who looked like a student, and Vince
Masuoka was squatting beside the left leg of the body and poking carefully with
a ballpoint pen at something on the ankle. The body could not be seen from the
road, but even so you could not really say it had been hidden. It had obviously
been roasted like the others, and it was laid out just like the first two, in a
stiff formal position, with the head replaced by a ceramic bull's head. And
once again, as I looked at it I waited by reflex for some reaction from within.
But I heard nothing except the gentle tropical wind blowing through my brain. I
was still alone.

As I stood in huffish thought, Deborah came roaring over to me at full
volume. “Took you long enough,” she snarled. “Where have you
been?”

“Macramé class,” I
said. “It's just like the others?”

“Looks like it,”
she said. “What about it, Masuoka?” “I think we got a break this
time,” Vince said. “About fucking time,” Deborah said.
“There's an ankle bracelet,” Vince said. “It's made of platinum,
so it didn't melt off.” He looked up at

Deborah and gave her his terribly phony smile.
“It says Tammy on it.” Deborah frowned and looked over to the side
door of the gallery. A tall man in a seersucker jacket and

bow tie stood there with
one of the cops, looking anxiously at Deborah. “Who's that guy?” she
asked Vince. “Professor Keller,” he told her. “Art history
teacher. He found the body.” Still frowning, Deborah stood up and beckoned
the uniformed cop to bring the professor over. “Professor…?” Deborah
said. “Keller. Gus Keller,” the professor said. He was a good-looking
man in his sixties with what looked like a

dueling scar on his left cheek. He didn't appear to be
about to faint at the sight of the body. “So you found the body
here,” Deb said. “That's right,” he said. "I was coming
over to check on a new exhibit-Mesopotamian art, actually, which

is interesting-and I saw it
here in the shrubbery.“ He frowned. ”About an hour ago, I
guess." Deborah nodded as if she already knew all that, even the
Mesopotamian part, which was a standard cop trick designed to make people eager
to add new details, especially if they might be a little bit guilty. It didn't
appear to work on Keller. He simply stood and waited for another question, and
Deborah stood and

tried to think of one. I am
justly proud of my hard-earned artificial social skills, and I didn't want the
silence to turn awkward, so I cleared my throat, and Keller looked at me.
“What can you tell us about the ceramic head?” I asked him.
“From the artistic point of view.” Deborah

glared at me, but she may
have been jealous that I thought of the question instead of her. “From the
artistic point of view? Not much,” Keller said, looking down at the bull's
head by the body. "It

looks like it was done in a mold, and then baked in a
fairly primitive kiln. Maybe even just a big oven. But historically, it's much
more interesting.“ ”What do you mean interesting?“ Deborah
snapped at him, and he shrugged. ”Well, it's not perfect,“ Keller
said. ”But somebody tried to recreate a very old stylized design.“
”How old?" Deborah said. Keller raised an eyebrow and shrugged, as if
to say she had asked the wrong

question, but he answered. “Three or four
thousand years old,” he said. “That's very old,” I offered
helpfully, and they both looked at me, which made me think I ought to add

something halfway clever, so I said, “And what
part of the world would it be from?”

Keller nodded. I was clever again. “Middle
East,” he said. “We see a similar motif in Babylonia, and even
earlier around Jerusalem. The bull head appears to be attached to the worship
of one of the elder gods. A particularly nasty one, really.”

“Moloch,” I said, and it hurt my throat to
say that name.

Deborah glared at me, absolutely certain now that I had been holding
out on her, but she looked back at Keller as he continued to talk.

“Yes, that's right,” he said. “Moloch liked human
sacrifice. Especially children. It was the standard deal: sacrifice your child
and he would guarantee a good harvest, or victory over your enemies.”

“Well, then, I think we can look forward to a very good harvest
this year,” I said, but neither one of them appeared to think that was
worth even a tiny smile. Ah well, you do what you can to bring a little cheer into
this dreary world, and if people refuse to respond to your efforts it's their
loss.

“What's the point of burning the bodies?”
Deborah demanded.

Keller smiled briefly, kind of a professorial thanks-for-asking smile.
“That's the whole key to the ritual,” he said. “There was a huge
bull-headed statue of Moloch that was actually a furnace.”

I thought of Halpern and his “dream.” Had he
known about Moloch beforehand, or had it come to him the way the music came to
me? Or was Deborah right all along and he had actually been to the statue and
killed the girls-as unlikely as that seemed now?

“A furnace,” said Deborah, and Keller nodded. “And they
toss the bodies in there?” she said, with an expression that indicated she
was having trouble believing it, and it was all his fault.

“Oh, it gets much better than that,” Keller
said. “They delivered the miracle in the ritual. Very sophisticated
flummery, in fact. But that's why Moloch had such lasting popularity-it was convincing,
and it was exciting. The statue had arms that stretched out to the
congregation. When you placed the sacrifice in his arms, Moloch would appear to
come to life and eat the sacrifice-the arms would slowly raise up the victim
and place it in his mouth.”

“And into the furnace,” I said, not wanting
to be left out any longer, “while the music played.”

Deborah looked at me strangely, and I realized that no one else had
mentioned music, but Keller shrugged it off and answered.

“Yes, that's right. Trumpets and drums, singing, all very
hypnotic. Climaxing as the god lifted the body up to its mouth and dropped it.
Into the mouth and you fall down into the furnace. Alive. It can't have been
much fun for the victim.”

I believed what Keller said-I heard the soft throb of the drums in the
distance, and it wasn't much fun for me, either.

“Does anybody still
worship this guy?” Deborah asked.

Keller shook his head.
“Not for two thousand years, as far as I know,” he said. “Well
then, what the hell,” Deborah said. “Who's doing this?” “It
isn't any kind of secret,” Keller said. "It's a pretty
well-documented part of history. Anybody could

have done a little research
and found out enough to do something like this.“ ”But why would
they?“ Deborah said. Keller smiled politely. ”I'm sure I don't
know,“ he said. ”So what the hell good does any of that do me?"
she said, with a tone that suggested it was Keller's job to

come up with an answer. He gave her a kindly professor
smile. “It never hurts to know things,” he said. “For
instance,” I said, "we know that somewhere there must be a big statue
of a bull with a furnace

inside.“ Deborah snapped her head around so that
she faced me. I leaned close to her and said softly, ”Halpern." She
blinked at me and I could see she hadn't thought of

that yet. “You think it wasn't a dream?” she
demanded. “I don't know what to think,” I said. "But if somebody
is doing this Moloch thing for real, why wouldn't

he do it with all the proper
equipment?“ ”Goddamn it,“ Deborah said. ”But where could
you hide something like that?“ Keller coughed with a certain delicacy.
”I'm afraid there's more to it than that,“ he said. ”Like
what?“ Deborah demanded. ”Well, you'd have to hide the smell,
too,“ he said. ”The smell of cooking human bodies. It lingers, and
it's

rather unforgettable." He sounded a little bit
embarrassed and he shrugged.

“So we're looking for
a gigantic smelly statue with a furnace inside,” I said cheerfully. “That
shouldn't be too hard to find.” Deborah glared at me, and once again I had
to feel a little disappointed at her heavy-handed approach to

life-especially since I
would almost certainly join her as a permanent resident in the Land of Gloom if
the

Dark Passenger refused to behave and come out of
hiding. “Professor Keller,” she said, turning away from me and
completing the abandonment of her poor brother, “is there anything else
about this bull shit that might help us?”

It was certainly a clever enough remark to be
encouraging, and I almost wished I had said it, but it appeared to have no
effect on Keller, nor even on Deborah herself, who looked as though she was

unaware that she had said something notable. Keller
merely shook his head.

“It's not really my
area, I'm afraid,” he said. “I know just a little background stuff
that affects the art history. You might check with somebody in philosophy or
comparative religion.” “Like Professor Halpern,” I whispered
again, and Deborah nodded, still glaring. She turned to go and luckily
remembered her manners just in time; she turned back to Keller and said,

“You've been very helpful, Dr. Keller. Please let
me know if you think of anything else.” “Of course,” he said,
and Debs grabbed my arm and propelled me onward. “Are we going back to the
registrar's office?” I asked politely as my arm went numb.
“Yeah,” she said. "But if there's a Tammy enrolled in one of
Halpern's classes, I don't know what I'm

going to do.“ I pulled the tattered remnants of
my arm from her grip. ”And if there isn't?“ She just shook her head.
”Come on,“ she said. But as I passed by the body once more, something
clutched at the leg of my pants, and I looked down. ”Ahk,“ Vince said
to me. He cleared his throat. ”Dexter," he said, and I raised an
eyebrow. He flushed

and let go of my pants.
“I have to talk to you,” he said. “By all means,” I said.
“Can it wait?” He shook his head. “It's pretty important,”
he said. “Well, all right then.” I took the three steps back to where
he was still squatting beside the body. "What is

it?"

He looked away, and as unlikely as it was that he
would show real emotion, his face flushed even more. “I talked to
Manny,” he said. “Wonderful. And yet you still have all your
limbs,” I said. “He, ahm,” Vince said. "He wants to make a
few changes. Ahm. In the menu. Your menu. For the

wedding."

“Aha,” I said, in spite of how corny it
sounds to say “Aha” when you are standing beside a dead body. I just
couldn't help myself. “By any chance, are these expensive changes?”
Vince refused to look up at me. He nodded his head. “Yes,” he said.
"He said he's had an inspiration.

Something really new and different.“ ”I
think that's terrific,“ I said, ”but I don't think I can afford
inspiration. We'll have to tell him no.“ Vince shook his head again.
”You don't understand. He only called because he likes you. He says the