“Well, good,” the man said, straightening up and moving back a step.
“He’s not really shy,” I said. “He’s just a little tired today.”
The man turned his grin on me, looked me over for a moment, then stuck out his hand. “Roger Deutsch,” he said, holding out his hand. “I’m the den master. I just like to get to know everybody a little before we start.”
“Dexter Morgan,” I said, shaking his hand. “This is Cody.”
Deutsch held his hand out to Cody. “Hi, Cody, glad to meet you.” Cody looked at the hand, then at me; I nodded at him, and he put his small hand into the meaty paw held out in front of him. “Hi,” he said.
“So,” Deutsch said relentlessly, “what brings you to Scouting, Cody?”
Cody glanced at me. I smiled, and he turned back to Deutsch. “Have fun,” he said, his small, deadpan face looking like he was at a funeral.
“Great,” said Deutsch. “Scouting should be fun. But there’s a serious part, too. You can learn about all kinds of cool things. Is there anything special you really want to learn about, Cody?”
“Animal carving,” Cody said, and I had to fight not to fall out of my tiny chair.
“Cody,” I said.
“No, that’s okay, Mr. Morgan,” Deutsch said. “We do lots of crafts. We can start with soap carving and move on to wood.” He winked at Cody. “If you’re worried about him working with knives, we won’t let him hurt himself.”
It didn’t seem politic to say that I wasn’t worried about Cody hurting himself with a blade in his hand. He already knew very well which end to hold, and he had shown a precocious talent for finding the right way to put in the point. But I was fairly certain Cody could not learn the kind of animal carving he wanted in Scouting—at least not until the Eagle Scout level. So I simply said, “We’ll talk it over with Mom, and see what she says,” and Deutsch nodded his head.
“Great,” he said. “In the meantime, don’t be shy. You just jump in here with both feet, buddy.”
Cody looked at me, and then nodded at Deutsch.
“All right,” Deutsch said, finally straightening up. “Well, let’s get this thing started, then.” He nodded at me and turned back to begin rallying the troops.
Cody shook his head and whispered something. I leaned a little closer to him. “What?” I said.
“Both feet,” he said.
“It’s just an expression,” I told him.
He looked at me. “Stupid expression,” he said.
Deutsch had moved across the room, calling for quiet, getting all the kids together, and they were now assembling in the front of the room. It was time for Cody to jump in, even if it was only with one foot at first. So I stood up and held out a hand to him. “Come on,” I said. “This will work out fine.”
Cody didn’t look convinced, but he stood up and looked at the group of normal boys converging on Deutsch. He pulled himself as straight and tall as possible, took a deep breath, and said, “Okay,” and marched over to join the group.
I watched him push carefully through the crowd to find his spot and then stand there, all alone and being as brave as he could be. This was not going to be easy—not for him, and not for me. There would be a very natural awkwardness for him as he tried to fit into a group that he had nothing in common with. He was a tiny wolf trying to grow lamb’s wool and learn to say baaa! And if he howled at the moon even once, the game was over.
And for me? I could only watch, and possibly give him a few pointers in between rounds. I had gone through a similar phase myself, and I still remembered the terrible pain of it: realizing that this was all and forever something for the others and never for me—that laughter, friendship, the sense of belonging, were things I would never really feel. And even worse, once I realized that I was outside all of it, I had to pretend to feel it, learn to show the mask of happiness in order to hide the deadly emptiness inside.
And I remembered the dreadful clumsiness of those first years of trying; the first horrible attempts at laughter, always at the wrong time and always sounding so very inhuman. Even speaking to the others naturally, easily, about the right things and with the right manufactured feelings. Slowly, painfully, awkwardly learning, watching how the others did these things so effortlessly and feeling the added pain of being outside that graceful easiness of expression. A small thing, knowing how to laugh. So very inconsequential, unless you don’t know how and have to learn it from watching others, as I did.
As Cody would have to do now. He would have to go through the whole vile process of understanding that he was different and always would be, and then learning to pretend he was not. And that was just the starting point, the first easy leg of the Harry Path. After that, things got even more complicated, more difficult and painful, until an entire artificial life was built and hammered into place. All fake, all the time, with only the short and far-too-rare intervals of razor-edged reality to look forward to—and I was passing all this on to Cody, that small and damaged creature who stood up there now so stiffly, watching with such intense focus for a hint of belonging that would never come.
Did I really have the right to force him into this agonizing mold? Merely because I had gone through this, did that truly mean HE had to? Because if I was honest with myself, it had not been working terribly well for me lately. The Harry Path, a thing that had seemed so clear, clean, and clever, had taken a turn into the underbrush. Deborah, the one person in the world who should understand, doubted that it was right, that it was even real, and now she lay in the ICU while I floundered around the city slaughtering the innocent.
Was this really what I wanted for Cody?
I watched him follow along through the Pledge of Allegiance, and found no answers there.
And so it was a very thoughtful Dexter who eventually tottered home after the meeting, with a wounded and uncertain Cody in tow.
Rita met us at the door, a look of worry on her face. “How did it go?” she asked Cody.
“Okay,” he said, with a look on his face that said it was not okay.
“It was fine,” I said, sounding a little more convincing. “And it will get much better.”
“Has to,” Cody said softly.
Rita looked from Cody to me and then back again. “I don’t—I mean, did you, did you … Cody. Are you going to keep going?”
Cody looked at me and I could almost see a small and sharp blade flashing in his eyes. “I’ll go,” he said to his mother.
Rita looked relieved. “That’s wonderful,” she said. “Because it really is—I know that you’ll, you know.”
“I’m sure he will,” I said.
My cell phone began to chirp and I answered it. “Yes,” I said.
“She woke up,” Chutsky said. “And she spoke.”
“I’ll be right there,” I said.
NINETEEN
I DON’T REALLY KNOW WHAT I WAS EXPECTING WHEN I GOT to the hospital, but I didn’t get it. Nothing seemed to have changed. Deborah was not sitting up in bed and doing the crossword puzzle while listening to her iPod. She still lay motionless, surrounded by the clutter of machinery and Chutsky. And he sat in the same position of supplication in the same chair, although he had managed to shave and change his shirt somewhere along the way.
“Hey, man!” he called out cheerfully as I pushed in to Deborah’s bedside. “We’re on the mend,” he said. “She looked right at me, and she said my name. She’s gonna be totally fine.”
“Great,” I said, although it didn’t seem clear to me that saying a one-syllable name meant that my sister was rocketing back to full, unimpaired normality. “What did the doctors say?”
Chutsky shrugged. “Same old shit. Not to get my hopes up too high, too soon to be sure, autonomic nervous blah blah blah.” He held up his hand in a what-the-hell gesture. “But they didn’t see it when she woke up and I did. She looked into my eyes, and I could tell. She’s still in there, buddy. She’s gonna be fine.”
There seemed to
be very little to say to that, so I muttered a few well-meaning and empty syllables and sat down. And although I waited very patiently for two and a half hours, Debs did not leap out of bed and begin to do calisthenics; she did not even repeat her parlor trick of opening her eyes and saying Chutsky’s name, and so I finally tottered home to bed without feeling any of Chutsky’s magical certainty.
The next morning when I arrived at my job, I was determined to get to work right away and find out all I could about Doncevic and his mysterious associate. But I barely had time to put my coffee cup down on my desk when I received a visitation from the Ghost of Christmas Gone Terribly Wrong, in the person of Israel Salguero, from Internal Affairs. He came wafting silently in and sat in the folding chair across from me without a sound. There was a sense of velvet menace to his movement that I would have admired, if it had not been aimed at me. I watched him, and he watched me for a moment, before he finally nodded and said, “I knew your father.”
I nodded and took the very great risk of sipping my coffee—but without taking my eyes off Salguero.
“He was a good cop, and a good man,” Salguero said. He spoke softly, fitting his way of moving so silently, and he had the slight trace of an accent that many Cuban Americans of his generation had. He had, in fact, known Harry very well, and Harry had thought highly of him. But that was in the past, and Salguero was now a very respected and very feared IA lieutenant, and no good could come of having him investigating either me or Deborah.
And so, thinking that it was probably best just to wait him out and let him get to the point, if there was one, I took another sip of my coffee. It did not taste nearly as good as it had before Salguero’s arrival.
“I would like to be able to get this thing cleared up as quickly as possible,” he said. “I’m sure that neither you or your sister have anything to worry about.”
“No, of course not,” I said, wondering why I didn’t feel reassured—unless of course it was because my entire life was built around the idea of escaping notice, and having a trained investigator peering in under the edges was not terribly comforting.
“If there is anything you care to tell me at any time,” he said, “my office door is always open to you.”
“Thank you very much,” I said, and since there didn’t seem to be anything else to say, I didn’t say it. Salguero watched me for a moment, then nodded and slid up from his chair and out the door, leaving me wondering just how much trouble the Morgans were in. It took me several minutes and a full cup of coffee to clear his visit from my head and concentrate on the computer.
And when I did, what a wonderful surprise I got.
Just as a matter of reflex, I glanced at my e-mail in-box as I went to work. There were two departmental memos that demanded my immediate inattention, an ad promising me several inches of unspecified additional length, and a note with no title that I almost deleted, until I saw who it was from:
[email protected].
It really shouldn’t have, but it took a moment for the name to register, and my finger was literally poised on the mouse to delete the message when something clicked in my head and I paused.
Bweiss. The name seemed familiar somehow. Perhaps it was “Weiss, first initial B,” like most e-mail addresses. That would make sense. And if the B stood for Brandon, that would make even more sense. Because it was the name of the person I had just sat down to investigate.
How thoughtful of him to get in touch.
I opened Weiss’s e-mail with more than usual interest, very eager to find out what he might have to say to me. But to my great disappointment, he apparently had nothing at all to say. There was merely an Internet link, underlined and in blue letters, stuck in the middle of the page with no comment at all.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99lrj?42n
How very interesting. Brandon wanted to share his videos with me. But what kind of video could it possibly be? Perhaps his favorite rock band? Or an edited montage of clips from his favorite TV show? Or even more of the kind of footage he had sent to the Tourist Board? That would be very thoughtful.
And so with a warm and fuzzy glow growing in the spot where my heart should have been, I clicked on the link and waited impatiently for the screen to open. Finally, the small box showed up and I clicked on the play button.
For a moment there was just darkness. Then once again a grainy picture blossomed and I was looking down at white porcelain from a fixed camera perched somewhere near the ceiling—the same shot featured in the video sent to the Tourist Board. I felt mildly disappointed—he had just sent me a link to a copy of something I had already seen. But then there was a sound of soft slithering, and movement started in the corner of the screen. A dark figure lurched into the frame and dumped something onto the white porcelain.
Doncevic.
And the dark figure? Dashing Dimpled Dexter, of course.
My face was not visible, but there was no doubt. That was Dexter’s back, his seventeen-dollar haircut, the collar of Dexter’s lovely dark shirt curled around Dexter’s wonderful precious neck—
My sense of disappointment was completely gone. This was a brand-new video after all, something I had never seen, and I was immediately very anxious to see it for the first time.
I watched as Dexter Past straightened up, looked around—still, happily, without showing his face to the camera. Clever boy. Dexter walked out of the frame and was gone. The lump in the tub moved slightly, and then Dexter came back and picked up the saw. The blade whirred, the arm went up—
And darkness. End of video.
I sat in a quiet and stunned stupor for several minutes. There was a clatter of some kind in the hall. Someone came into the lab and opened a drawer, closed it again, and left. The phone rang; I didn’t answer it.
That was me. Right there on YouTube. In full glorious living and slightly grainy color. Dexter of the Deadly Dimples, now starring in a minor motion-picture classic. Smile at the camera, Dexter.
Wave to the nice audience. I had never been very fond of home movies, and this one left me even colder than ever. But there I was—not merely captured on film but posted on YouTube for all the world to see and admire. It was more than I could wrap my mind around; my thoughts just moved in a circle, like a film clip in a loop. That was me; it couldn’t be me but it was; I had to do something, but what could I do? Don’t know, but something—because that was me …
Things were certainly getting interesting, weren’t they?
All right; that was me. Obviously, there was a camera hidden somewhere above the tub. Weiss and Doncevic had used it for their decorative projects, and it was still there when I showed up. Which meant that Weiss was still somewhere in the area—
But no, it didn’t mean that at all. It was ridiculously easy to connect a camera to the Internet and monitor from a computer. Weiss could be anywhere, collecting the video and sending it on to me—
To me, precious anonymous me, Dexter the mostly modest, who toiled in the shadows and never ever looked for publicity of any kind for his good works. But of course, in the hideous clamor of media attention that had surrounded this whole thing, including the attack on Deborah, my name had almost certainly been mentioned somewhere. Dexter Morgan, unassuming forensic whiz, brother of the nearly-slain. One picture, one frame of evening news footage, and he would have me.
A cold and awful lump began to grow in my stomach. It was just that easy. So simple a deranged decorator could figure out who and what I was. I had been too clever for too long and grown accustomed to being the only tiger in the forest. And I had forgotten that when there is only one tiger, it’s awfully easy for the hunter to follow the tracks.
And he had. He had followed me to my den and taken pictures of Dexter at play, and there it was.
My finger twitched almost unwillingly on the mouse and I watched the video again.
It was still me. Right there on the video. It was me.
I took a deep breath and let the oxygen work its magic on my thought process, or what wa
s left of it. This was a problem, to be sure, but it had a solution like every other problem. Time to apply logic, turn the full power of Dexter’s icy biocomputer on the problem. First: What did this guy want? Why had he done this? Obviously, he wanted some reaction from me—but which one? The most obvious would be that he was looking for revenge. I had killed his friend—partner? Lover? It didn’t matter. He wanted me to know that he knew what I had done, and, and …
And he had sent the clip to me, not to someone who would presumably do something about it, like Detective Coulter. Which meant that this was a personal challenge, something that he was not going to make public, at least not yet.
Except that it was public—it was on YouTube, and it was only a matter of time before someone else stumbled onto it and saw the clip. And that meant that there was a time element. So what was he saying? Find me before they find you?
Okay so far. But then what? An Old West showdown—power saws at ten paces? Or was the idea just to torture me, keep me chasing until I made a mistake, or until he grew bored and sent the whole thing on to the evening news?
It was enough to create at least the idea of panic in a lesser being. But Dexter is made of far sterner stuff. He wanted me to try to find him—but he could not know that I had my varsity letter in finding. If I was even half as good as modesty let me admit I was, I would find him a great deal quicker than he thought I could. Fine: if Weiss wanted to play, I would play.
But we were going to play by Dexter’s rules, not his.
TWENTY
FIRST THINGS FIRST HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY MOTTO, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense—after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn’t be first things, would they? Still, clichés exist to comfort the feebleminded, not to provide any actual meaning. Since I was feeling somewhat weak between the ears at the moment, I took a little bit of consolation from the thought as I pulled up the police records on Brandon Weiss.
It wasn’t much; there was a parking ticket that he had paid, and the complaint filed against him by the Tourist Board. He had no outstanding warrants, no special permits beyond a driver’s license, no permit to carry a concealed firearm—or a concealed power saw, for that matter. His address was the one I knew, where Deborah had been stabbed. With a little digging, I found one previous address, in Syracuse, New York. Before that he had lived in Montreal, Canada. A quick check showed that he was still a Canadian citizen.