“Shit,” Deborah said again. She chewed on a fingernail, a habit I hadn’t seen from her since she was a teenager. Apparently it tasted good, because when it was gone she started on another. She was on her third fingernail when the door to the little house opened and Chutsky came back out, smiling and waving. The door closed and he disappeared behind a wall of water as the clouds finally opened wide. He came pounding up the street to the car and slid into the front seat, dripping wet.
“GodDAMN!” he said. “I’m totally soaked!”
“What the fuck was that all about?” Deborah demanded.
Chutsky cocked an eyebrow at me and pushed the hair off his forehead. “Don’t she talk elegant?” he said.
“Kyle, goddamn it,” she said.
“The smell of ammonia,” he said. “No surgical use, and no commercial cleaning crew would use it.”
“We did this already,” Deborah snapped.
He smiled. “But ammonia IS used for cooking metham-phetamine,” he said. “Which turns out to be what these guys are doing.”
“You just walked right into a meth kitchen?” Deb said.
“What the hell did you do in there?”
He smiled and pulled a Baggie out of his pocket. “Bought an ounce of meth,” he said.
C H A P T E R 1 3
Deborah didn’t speak for almost ten minutes, just drove the car and stared ahead with her jaw clamped shut. I could see the muscles flexing along the side of her face and all the way down into her shoulders. Knowing her as I did I was quite sure that an explosion was brewing, but since I knew nothing at all about how Debs in Love might behave, I couldn’t tell how soon. The target of her impending meltdown, Chutsky, sat beside her in the front seat, equally silent, but apparently quite happy to sit quietly and look at the scenery.
We were almost to the second address and well into the shadow of Mount Trashmore when Debs finally erupted.
“Goddamn it, that’s illegal! ” she said, smacking the steering wheel with the palm of her hand for emphasis.
Chutsky looked at her with mild affection. “Yes, I know,”
he said.
“I am a sworn fucking officer of the law!” Deborah told 1 1 6
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him. “I took an oath to stop this kind of shit—and you—!” She sputtered to a halt.
“I had to be sure,” he said calmly. “This seemed like the best way.”
“I ought to put the cuffs on YOU!” she said.
“That might be fun,” he said.
“You SON of a bitch!”
“At least.”
“I will not cross over to your motherfucking dark side!”
“No, you won’t,” he said. “I won’t let you, Deborah.”
The breath whooshed out of her and she turned to look at him. He looked back. I had never seen a silent conversation, and this one was a doozy. Her eyes clicked anxiously from the left side of his face to the right and then left again. He simply looked back, calm and unblinking. It was elegant and fasci-nating and almost as interesting as the fact that Debs had apparently forgotten she was driving.
“I hate to interrupt,” I said. “But I believe that’s a beer truck right ahead?”
Her head snapped back around and she braked, just in time to avoid turning us into a bumper sticker on a load of Miller Lite. “I’m calling that address in to vice. Tomorrow,”
she said.
“All right,” Chutsky said.
“And you’re throwing away that Baggie.”
He looked mildly surprised. “It cost me two grand,” he said.
“You’re throwing it away,” she repeated.
“All right,” he said. They looked at each other again, leaving me to watch for lethal beer trucks. Still, it was nice to see everything settled and harmony restored to the universe so D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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we could get on with finding our hideous inhuman monster of the week, secure in the knowledge that love will always prevail. And so it was a great satisfaction to cruise down South Dixie Highway through the last of the rainstorm, and as the sun broke out of the clouds we turned onto a road that led us into a twisty series of streets, all with a terrific view of the gigantic pile of garbage known as Mount Trashmore.
The house we were looking for was in the middle of what looked like the last row of houses before civilization ended and garbage reigned supreme. It was at the bend of a circular street and we went past it twice before we were sure that we had found it. It was a modest dwelling of the three-bedroom two-mortgage kind, painted a pale yellow with white trim, and the lawn was very neatly cropped. There was no car visible in the driveway or the carport, and a for sale sign on the front lawn had been covered with another that said sold! in bright red letters.
“Maybe he hasn’t moved in yet,” Deborah said.
“He has to be somewhere,” Chutsky said, and it was hard to argue with his logic. “Pull over. Have you got a clipboard?”
Deborah parked the car, frowning. “Under the seat. I need it for my paperwork.”
“I won’t smudge it,” he said, and fumbled under the seat for a second before pulling out a plain metal clipboard with a stack of official forms clamped onto it. “Perfect,” he said.
“Gimme a pen.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked, handing him a cheap white ballpoint with a blue top.
“Nobody ever stops a guy with a clipboard,” Chutsky said with a grin. And before either of us could say anything, he was out of the car and walking up the short driveway in a 1 1 8
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steady, nine-to-five-bureaucrat kind of pace. He stopped halfway and looked at the clipboard, turning over a couple of pages and reading something before looking at the house and shaking his head.
“He seems very good at this kind of thing,” I said to Deborah.
“He’d goddamned well better be,” she said. She bit another nail and I worried that soon she would run out.
Chutsky continued up the drive, consulting his clipboard, apparently unaware that he was causing a fingernail shortage in the car behind him. He looked natural and unrushed, and had obviously had a lot of experience at either chicanery or skulduggery, depending on which word was better suited for describing officially sanctioned mischief. And he had Debs biting her nails and almost ramming beer trucks. Perhaps he was not a good influence on her after all, although it was nice to have another target for her scowling and her vicious arm punches. I am always willing to let someone else wear the bruises for a while.
Chutsky paused outside the front door and wrote something down. And then, although I did not see how he did it, he unlocked the front door and went in. The door closed behind him.
“Shit,” said Deborah. “Breaking and entering on top of possession. He’ll have me hijacking an airliner next.”
“I’ve always wanted to see Havana,” I said helpfully.
“Two minutes,” she said tersely. “Then I call for backup and go in after him.”
To judge from the way her hand was twitching toward the radio, it was one minute and fifty-nine seconds when the front door opened again and Chutsky came back out. He paused in D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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the driveway, wrote something on the clipboard, and returned to the car.
“All right,” he said as he slid into the front seat. “Let’s go home.”
“The house is empty?” Deborah demanded.
“Clean as a whistle,” he said. “Not a towel or a soup can anywhere.”
“So now what?” she asked as she put the car in gear.
He shook his head. “Back to plan A,” he said.
“And what the hell is plan A?” Deborah asked him.
“Patience,” he said.
And so in spite of a delightful lunch and a truly original little shopping trip afterward, we were back to waiting. A week passed in the now typically boring way. It didn’t seem lik
e Sergeant Doakes would give up before my conversion to a beer-bellied sofa ornament was complete, and I could see nothing else to do except play kick the can and hangman with Cody and Astor, performing outrageously theatrical good-bye kisses with Rita afterward for the benefit of my stalker.
Then came the telephone ringing in the middle of the night.
It was Sunday night, and I had to leave for work early the next day; Vince Masuoka and I had an arrangement, and it was my turn to pick up doughnuts. And now here was the telephone, brazenly ringing as if I had no cares in the world and the doughnuts would deliver themselves. I glanced at the clock on my bedside table: 2:38. I admit I was somewhat cranky as I lifted the receiver and said, “Leave me alone.”
“Dexter. Kyle is gone,” Deborah said. She sounded far be-
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yond tired, totally tense, and unsure whether she wanted to shoot someone or cry.
It took me just a moment to get my powerful intellect up to speed. “Uh, well Deb,” I said, “a guy like that, maybe you’re better off—”
“He’s gone, Dexter. Taken. The, the guy has him. The guy who did that thing to the guy,” she said, and although I felt like I was suddenly thrust into an episode of The Sopranos, I knew what she meant. Whoever had turned the thing on the table into a yodeling potato had taken Kyle, presumably to do something similar to him.
“Dr. Danco,” I said.
“Yes.”
“How do you know?” I asked her.
“He said it could happen. Kyle is the only one who knows what the guy looks like. He said when Danco found out Kyle was here, he’d make a try. We had a—a signal set up, and—
Shit Dexter, just get over here. We have to find him,” she said, and hung up.
It’s always me, isn’t it? I’m not really a very nice person, but for some reason it’s always me that they come to with their problems. Oh, Dexter, a savage inhuman monster has taken my boyfriend! Well damn it, I’m a savage inhuman monster, too—didn’t that entitle me to some rest?
I sighed. Apparently not.
I hoped Vince would understand about the doughnuts.
C H A P T E R 1 4
It was a fifteen-minute drive to deborah’s house from where I lived in the Grove. For once, I did not see Sergeant Doakes following me, but perhaps he was using a Klingon cloaking device. In any case, the traffic was very sparse and I even made the light at U.S. 1. Deborah lived in a small house on Medina in Coral Gables, overgrown with some neglected fruit trees and a crumbling coral-rock wall. I nosed my car in next to hers in the short driveway and was only two steps away when Deborah opened her front door.
“Where have you been?” she said.
“I went to yoga class, and then out to the mall to buy shoes,” I said. In truth, I had actually hurried over, getting there less than twenty minutes after her call, and I was a little miffed at the tone she was taking.
“Get in here,” she said, peering around into the darkness and holding on to the door as if she thought it might fly away.
“Yes, O Mighty One,” I said, and I got in.
Deborah’s little house was lavishly decorated in I-have-no-
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life modern. Her living area generally looked like a cheap hotel room that had been occupied by a rock band and looted of everything except a TV and VCR. There was a chair and a small table by French doors that led out to a patio that was almost lost in a tangle of bushes. She had found another chair somewhere, though, a rickety folding chair, and she pulled it over to the table for me. I was so touched by her hospitable gesture that I risked life and limb by sitting in the flimsy thing. “Well,” I said. “How long has he been gone?”
“Shit,” she said. “About three and a half hours. I think.”
She shook her head and slumped into the other chair. “We were supposed to meet here, and—he didn’t show up. I went to his hotel, and he wasn’t there.”
“Isn’t it possible he just went away somewhere?” I asked—and I’m not proud of it, but I admit I sounded a little hopeful.
Deborah shook her head. “His wallet and keys were still on the dresser. The guy has him, Dex. We gotta find him before—” She bit her lip and looked away.
I was not at all sure what I could do to find Kyle. As I said, this was not the kind of thing I generally had any insight into, and I had already given it my best shot tracking down the real estate. But since Deborah was already saying “we” it seemed that I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Family ties and all that. Still, I tried to make a little bit of wiggle room. “I’m sorry if this sounds stupid, Debs, but did you report this?”
She looked up with a half snarl. “Yeah, I did. I called Captain Matthews. He sounded relieved. He told me not to get hysterical, like I’m some kind of old lady with the vapors.”
She shook her head. “I asked him to put out an APB, and he said, ‘For what?’ ” She hissed out her breath. “For what . . .
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Goddamn it, Dexter, I wanted to strangle him, but . . .” She shrugged.
“But he was right,” I said.
“Yeah. Kyle is the only one who knows what the guy looks like,” she said. “We don’t know what he’s driving or what his real name is or— Shit, Dexter. All I know is he’s got Kyle.” She took a ragged breath. “Anyway, Matthews called Kyle’s people in Washington. Said that was all he could do.” She shook her head and looked very bleak. “They’re sending somebody Tuesday morning.”
“Well then,” I said hopefully. “I mean, we know that this guy works very slowly.”
“Tuesday morning,” she said. “Almost two days. Where do you think he starts, Dex? Does he take a leg off first? Or an arm? Will he do them both at the same time?”
“No,” I said. “One at a time.” She looked at me hard. “Well, it just makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Not to me,” she said. “Nothing about this makes sense.”
“Deborah, cutting off the arms and legs is not what this guy wants to do. It’s just how he does it.”
“Goddamn it, Dexter, talk English.”
“What he wants to do is totally destroy his victims. Break them inside and out, way beyond repair. Turn them into musical beanbags that will never again have a moment of anything except total endless insane horror. Cutting off limbs and lips is just the way he— What?”
“Oh, Jesus, Dexter,” Deborah said. Her face had screwed up into something I hadn’t seen since our mom died. She turned away, and her shoulders began to shake. It made me just a little uneasy. I mean, I do not feel emotions, and I know 1 2 4
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Deborah quite often does. But she was not the kind of person who showed them, unless irritation is an emotion. And now she was making wet snuffly sounds, and I knew that I should probably pat her shoulder and say, “There there,” or something equally profound and human, but I couldn’t quite make myself do it. This was Deb, my sister. She would know I was faking it and—
And what? Cut off my arms and legs? The worst she would do would be to tell me to stop it, and go back to being Sergeant Sourpuss again. Even that would be a great improvement over her wilting-lily act. In any case, this was clearly one of those times where some human response was called for, and since I knew from long study what a human would do, I did it. I stood up and stepped over to her. I put my arm on her shoulder, patted her, and said, “All right, Deb.
There there.” It sounded even stupider than I had feared, but she leaned against me and snuffled, so I suppose it was the right thing to do after all.
“Can you really fall in love with somebody in a week?” she asked me.
“I don’t think I can do it at all,” I said.
“I can’t take this, Dexter,” she said. “If Kyle gets killed, or turned into— Oh, God, I don’t know what I’ll do.” And she collapsed against me again an
d cried.
“There there,” I said.
She gave a long hard snuffle, and then blew her nose on a paper towel from the table beside her. “I wish you’d stop saying that,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“Tell me what this guy is up to. Tell me how to find him.”
I sat back down in the wobbly little chair. “I don’t think I D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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can, Debs. I don’t really have much of a feel for what he’s doing.”
“Bullshit,” she said.
“Seriously. I mean, technically speaking, he hasn’t actually killed anybody, you know.”
“Dexter,” she said, “you already understand more about this guy than Kyle did, and he knows who it is. We’ve got to find him. We’ve GOT to.” She bit her lower lip, and I was afraid she would start blubbering again, which would have left me totally helpless since she had already told me I couldn’t say “There there” again. But she pulled it together like the tough sergeant sister she was and merely blew her nose again.
“I’ll try, Deb. Can I assume that you and Kyle have done all the basic work? Talked to witnesses and so on?”
She shook her head. “We didn’t need to. Kyle knew—” She paused at that past tense, and then went on, very determined.
“Kyle KNOWS who did it, and he KNOWS who should be next.”
“Excuse me. He knows who’s next?”
Deborah frowned. “Don’t sound like that. Kyle said there are four guys in Miami who are on the list. One of them is missing, Kyle figured he was already taken, but that gave us a little time to set up surveillance on the other three.”
“Who are these four guys, Deborah? And how does Kyle know them?”