Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark (8 page)

eliminated a few possibilities.“
”Sure,“ she said sourly. ”We know it probably wasn't a bunch of
naked fruits, unless they did it two thousand years ago."

She did have a point, but I
see it as my job in life to help all those around me maintain a positive
attitude. “It's still progress,” I said. “Shall we check out the
place on Eighth Street? I'll translate for you.” In spite of being a Miami
native, Debs had whimsically insisted on studying French in school, and she
could barely order lunch in Spanish.

She shook her head. “Waste of time,” she
said. “I'll tell Angel to ask around, but it won't go anywhere.” And
she was right. Angel came back late that afternoon with a very nice candle that
had a prayer to St.

Jude on it in Spanish, but other than that his trip to
the place on Eighth Street was a waste of time, just as Debs had predicted. We
were left with nothing, except two bodies, no heads, and a very bad feeling.
That was about to change.

TEN

THE NEXT DAY PASSED UNEVENTFULLY AND WE GOT NO closer to any kind of
hint about the two murders at the university. And life being the kind of
lopsided, grotesque affair that it is, Deborah blamed our lack of progress on
me. She was still convinced that I had special magical powers and had used them
to see straight into the dark heart of the killings, and that I was keeping
vital information from her for petty personal reasons.

Very flattering, but totally untrue. The only insight I had into the
matter was that something about it had scared the Dark Passenger, and I did not
want that to happen again. I decided to stay away from the case, and since
there was almost no blood work involved, that should have been easy in a
logical and well-ordered universe.

But alas, we do not live in any such place. Our
universe is ruled by random whim, inhabited by people who laugh at logic. At
the moment, the chief of these was my sister. Late the following morning she
cornered me in my little cubbyhole and dragged me away to lunch with her
boyfriend, Kyle Chutsky. I had no real objections to Chutsky, other than his
permanent attitude of knowing the real truth about everything. Aside from that,
he was just as pleasant and amiable as a cold killer can be, and it would have
been hypocritical for me to object to his personality on those grounds. And
since he seemed to make my sister happy, I did not object on any other grounds,
either.

So off I went to lunch,
since in the first place she was my sister, and in the second, the mighty
machine

that is my body needs almost constant fuel.

The fuel it craves most often is a medianoche sandwich, usually with a
side of fried plátanos and a mamey milk shake. I don't know why this simple,
hearty meal plays such a transcendent chord on the strings of my being, but
there is nothing else like it. Prepared properly, it takes me as close to
ecstasy as I can get. And no one prepares it quite as properly as Café
Relampago, a storefront place not far from police HQ, where the Morgans have
been eating since time out of mind. It was so good even Deborah's perpetual
grumpiness couldn't spoil it.

“Goddamn it!” she said to me through a
mouthful of sandwich. It was certainly far from a novel phrase coming from her,
but she said it with a viciousness that left me lightly spattered with bread
crumbs. I took a sip of my excellent batido de mamey and waited for her to
expand on her argument, but instead she simply said it again. “Goddamn
it!”

“You're covering up your feelings again,” I said. “But
because I am your brother, I can tell something is bothering you.”

Chutsky snorted as he sawed at his Cuban steak. “No shit,” he
said. He was about to say more, but the fork clamped in his prosthetic left
hand slipped sideways. “Goddamn it,” he said, and I realized that
they had a great deal more in common than I had thought. Deborah leaned over
and helped him straighten the fork. “Thanks,” he said, and shoveled
in a large bite of the pounded-flat meat.

“There, you see?” I said brightly. “All you needed was
something to take your mind off your own problems.”

We were sitting at a table where we had probably eaten
a hundred times. But Deborah was rarely troubled by sentiment; she straightened
up and slapped the battered Formica tabletop hard enough to make the sugar bowl
jump.

“I want to know who talked to that asshole Rick Sangre!” she
said. Sangre was a local TV reporter who believed that the gorier a story was,
the more vital it was for people to have a free press that could fill them in
on as many gruesome details as possible. From the tone of her voice, Deborah
was apparently convinced that Rick was my new best friend.

“Well, it wasn't me,” I said. “And I
don't think it was Doakes.”

“Ouch,” said Chutsky.

“And,” she said, “I want to find those
fucking heads!”

“I don't have them, either,” I said.
“Did you check lost and found?”

“You know something, Dexter,” she said.
“Come on, why are you holding out on me?”

Chutsky looked up and swallowed. “Why should he know something you
don't?” he asked. “Was there a lot of spatter?”

“No spatter at all,” I said. “The
bodies were cooked, nice and dry.”

Chutsky nodded and managed
to scoop some rice and beans onto his fork. "You're a sick bastard, aren't

you?“ ”He's worse
than sick,“ Deborah said. ”He's holding out something.“
”Oh,“ Chutsky said through a mouthful of food. ”Is this his
amateur profiling thing again?" It was a small

fiction; we had told him that my hobby was actually
analytical, rather than hands-on. “It is,” Deborah said. “And he
won't tell me what he's figured out.” “It might be hard to believe,
Sis, but I know nothing about this. Just…” I shrugged, but she was already

pouncing. “What! Come on, please?” I
hesitated again. There was no good way to tell her that the Dark Passenger had
reacted to these killings

in a brand-new and totally
unsettling way. “I just get a feeling,” I said. "Something is a
little off with this

one.“ She snorted. ”Two burned headless
bodies, and he says something's a little off. Didn't you used to be
smart?"

I took a bite of my
sandwich as Deborah frittered away her precious eating time by frowning.
"Have you

identified the bodies yet?“ I asked. ”Come on, Dexter.
There's no heads, so we got no dental records. The bodies were burned, so
there's no fingerprints. Shit, we don't even know what color their hair was.
What do you want me to do?"

“I could probably help, you know,” Chutsky
said. He speared a chunk of fried maduras and popped it into his mouth. “I
have a few resources I can call on.” “I don't need your help,”
she said and he shrugged. “You take Dexter's help,” he said.
“That's different.” “How is that different?” he asked, and
it seemed like a reasonable question.

“Because he gives me
help,” she said. “You want to solve it for me.” They locked eyes
and didn't speak for a long moment. I'd seen them do it before, and it was
eerily reminiscent of the nonverbal conversations Cody and Astor had. It was
nice to see them so clearly welded together as a couple, even though it
reminded me that I had a wedding of my own to worry about, complete with an
apparently insane high-class caterer. Happily, just before I could begin to
gnash my teeth, Debs broke the eerie silence.

“I won't be one of
those women who needs help,” she said. “But I can get you information
that you can't get,” he said, putting his good hand on her arm.

“Like what?” I asked him. I'll admit I had been curious for
some time about what Chutsky was, or had been before his accidental amputations.
I knew that he had worked for some government agency which he referred to as
the OGA, but I still didn't know what that stood for.

He turned to face me obligingly. “I have friends
and sources in a lot of places,” he said. “Something like this might
have left some kind of trail somewhere else, and I could call around and find
out.” “You mean call your buddies at the OGA?” I said.

He smiled. “Something
like that,” he said. “For Christ's sake, Dexter,” Deborah said.
“OGA just means other government agency. There's no such agency, it's an
in-joke.”

“Nice to be in at
last,” I said. “And you can still get access to their files?” He
shrugged. “Technically I'm on convalescent leave,” he said.
“From doing what?” I asked. He gave me a mechanical smile. “You
don't really want to know,” he said. "The point is, they haven't

decided yet whether I'm any
fucking good anymore." He looked at the fork clamped in his steel hand,

turning his arm over to see
it move. “Shit,” he said. And because I could feel that one of those
awkward moments was upon us, I did what I could to move things back onto a
sociable footing. “Didn't you find anything at the kiln?” I asked.
“Some kind of jewelry or something?”

“What the fuck is
that?” she said. “The kiln,” I said. “Where the bodies were
burned.” “Haven't you been paying attention? We haven't found where
the bodies were burned.” “Oh,” I said. “I assumed it was
done right there on campus, in the ceramic studio.” By the suddenly frozen
look on her face, I realized that either she was experiencing massive
indigestion

or she did not know about
the ceramic studio. "It's just half a mile from the lake where the bodies
were

found,“ I said.
”You know, the kiln. Where they make pottery?" Deborah stared at me
for a moment longer, and then jumped up from the table. I thought it was a
wonderfully creative and dramatic way to end a conversation, and it took a
moment before I could do more than blink after her.

“I guess she didn't
know about that,” Chutsky said. “That's my first guess,” I said.
“Shall we follow?” He shrugged and speared the last chunk of his
steak. "I'm gonna have some flan, and a cafecita. Then I'll

get a cab, since I'm not
allowed to help," he said. He scooped up some rice and beans and nodded at
me.

“You go ahead, unless you want to walk back to
work.”

I did not, in fact, have any desire to walk back to
work. On the other hand, I still had almost half a milk shake and I did not
want to leave that, either. I stood up and followed, but I softened the blow by
grabbing the uneaten half of Deborah's sandwich and taking it with me as I
lurched out the door after her.

Soon we were rolling through the front gate of the university campus. Deborah
spent part of the ride talking on the radio and arranging for people to meet us
at the kilns, and the rest of the ride clenching her teeth and muttering.

We turned left after the gate and headed down the
winding road that leads to the ceramic and pottery area. I had taken a class in
pottery there my junior year in an effort to widen my horizons, and found out
that I was good at making very regular-looking vases but not terribly
successful at creating original works of art, at least not in that medium. In
my own area, I flatter myself that I can be creative, as I had recently
demonstrated with Zander.

Angel-no-relation was already there, carefully and patiently looking
through the first kiln for any sign of practically anything. Deborah went over
and squatted beside him, leaving me alone with the last three bites of her
sandwich. I took the first bite. A crowd was beginning to gather by the yellow
tape. Perhaps they were hoping to see something too terrible to look at: I
never knew why they gathered like that, but they always did.

Deborah was now on the ground beside Angel, who had his head inside the
first of the kilns. This would probably be a long wait.

I had barely put the last bite of sandwich into my mouth when I became
aware that I was being watched. Of course I was being looked at, anyone on the
business side of the yellow tape always was. But I was also being watched-the
Dark Passenger clamored at me that I had been singled out by something with an
unhealthy interest in special wonderful me, and I did not like the feeling. As
I swallowed the last of the sandwich and turned to look, the whisper inside me
hissed something that sounded like confusion…and then settled into silence.

And as it did I felt again the wave of panicked nausea
and the bright yellow edge of blindness, and I stumbled for a moment, all my
senses crying out that there was danger but my ability to do anything about it
completely gone. It lasted only a second. I fought my way back to the surface
and looked harder at my surroundings-nothing had changed. A handful of people
stood looking on, the sun shone brightly, and a gentle wind riffled through the
trees. Just another perfect Miami day, but somewhere in paradise the snake had
reared its head. I closed my eyes and listened hard, hoping for some hint about
the nature of the menace, but there was nothing but the echo of clawed feet
scrabbling away.

I opened my eyes and looked around again. There was a crowd of perhaps
fifteen people pretending not to be fascinated by the hope of seeing gore, but
none of them stood out in any way. None of them were skulking or staring evilly
or trying to hide a bazooka under their shirt. In any normal time, I might have
expected my Passenger to see a dark shadow around an obvious predator, but there
was no such assistance now. As far as I could see, nothing sinister loomed in
the crowd. So what had set off the Passenger's fire alarm? I knew so little
about it; it was just there, a presence filled with wicked amusement and sharp
suggestions. It had never showed confusion before, not until it saw the two
bodies by the lake. And now it was repeating its vague uncertainty, only half a
mile from the first spot.

Was it something in the
water? Or was there some connection to the two burned bodies here at the kilns?

I wandered over to where Deborah and Angel-no-relation were working.
They didn't seem to be finding anything particularly alarming, and there were
no jolts of panic roiling out from the kiln to the place where the Dark
Passenger was hiding.