Robert had most of the spill wiped up when the phone on my desk rang. I reached past him and picked up the receiver. “Morgan,” I said.
“I need you in my office,” said a familiar voice that was grumpy but authoritative. “Bring the case file.”
“What case file?” I said.
“The girl in the Dumpster,” Deborah hissed at me. “Jesus, Dexter.” She hung up, and I stared at the phone for a moment, wondering what my sister was up to. This was not her case—Anderson had the lead, and Deborah was theoretically not involved in it at all, except as an observer, a guide assigned to take Jackie Forrest through the maze of her first real homicide case. Perhaps she was going to show Jackie what the forensic file looked like. That probably meant that Jackie was there with her now, and at that thought a small sparkle of anticipation lurched up inside me, until I remembered I was angry with her for making me think of her so often and so pleasantly. But I couldn’t ignore Deborah’s summons without risking one of her blistering arm punches, so I would just have to take the chance of being assailed by more of the dreadful human feelings of delight caused by exposure to Jackie.
I hung up the phone. Robert had finished his cleanup and stood behind the desk with the wad of coffee-soaked paper towels in his hand. “What’s up?” he said.
I pulled the coffee-stained blotter off my desk and dumped it into the trash can. “We have been summoned,” I said. “Bring the pastries.”
SIX
DEBORAH’S DESK WAS IN AN AREA OF THE SECOND FLOOR where the homicide cops clustered. Like me, she kept a folding chair for her visitors, and as I led Robert in, that chair was occupied by Jackie Forrest. Her hair was pulled back into a tight ponytail that did nothing to hide the glow that seemed to come out of each individual strand of it. If she was wearing makeup I couldn’t see it, but her face was smooth and flawless, her eyes sparkled with intelligence and wit, and she looked so perfect she might have been some kind of idealized picture of what DNA could do if it was really trying. She looked up as we came in and gave me a bright smile, and then turned away with a frown when she saw Robert trailing in behind me.
“What took you so long?” Deborah said, and I was touched by the warmth of her greeting.
“Traffic was a bitch,” I said. “And how was your weekend?”
She snatched the case file from my hand and flung it on her desk. “This fucking case,” she said.
I had known that Deborah would be bothered by the unusual brutality of this murder, enough to want to do something about it—but technically speaking, she couldn’t. “I thought this was Anderson’s case,” I said.
“Anderson couldn’t find an ocean of shit if he was swimming in it,” she said.
“Detective Anderson?” Robert said. “He seems like a good guy.”
Deborah flicked a quick glance at Robert; Jackie rolled her eyes. I took the high road and simply ignored him.
“Well,” I said, “even Anderson has to get lucky sometime. And it’s his case.”
Debs gave her head an irritated shake. “He’s got the whole weekend and he can’t even get an ID,” she said, and I blinked in surprise. Finding the victim’s name was the most basic first step, and for forty-eight hours to go by without learning who this was seemed to take the Art of Clueless to an epic level.
“That’s pretty spectacular,” I said, and because I knew my sister very well, I added, “So what are you going to do about it, against all orders and contrary to department regulations?”
Deborah looked at the folder on her desk, and then at Jackie. The two of them shared a moment I couldn’t quite read. “I would never go against orders or department regulations,” she said, which did not really agree with history as I had lived it. But Debs said it with a straight face. Then she looked up at me and, wonder of wonders, she smiled. It was so unlike her that for a moment I thought she must have been possessed by demons, and I almost took a step backward to protect myself. But she didn’t unleash any gouts of fire, or even speak in tongues. She just kept smiling and tilted her head at Jackie.
“Jackie thought of it,” she said, and she turned to face the actress again. This time the smirks they traded were clearly looks of great mutual satisfaction. “We are going to run a mock investigation to teach Jackie how it is done,” Deborah said, and then her words took on an odd lilt, as if she was reading from an official report. “In this way, we will parallel the department’s actual investigation, without interfering in the official process or compromising the investigating officer’s mandate, while at the same time constructing a valid simulation and comparing our results to those achieved by Detective Anderson, which will allow our subject, Ms. Forrest, to understand the subtleties of a homicide investigation and all its procedural complexity as such things are conducted in real time by the Miami-Dade Police Department.” She looked back at me again, still smiling. “Pretty cute, huh? I get to slip around Detective Dumbfuck and track this asshole down, and Matthews can’t say anything, because I am doing exactly what he ordered.”
“Plus,” Jackie said. “If we actually come up with something—”
“When we come up with something,” Deborah said.
“Then it’s spectacular publicity. For the show and the department.”
I looked at Jackie with new respect. “Ingenious,” I said, and she gave me a smile that made me want to sing.
“So,” Deborah said, jerking me back to reality, “I wanted to go over the whole thing with you, and see what we got.” She tapped the folder with her finger. “Starting with the forensic stuff.” She gave Jackie another smirk. “You know. So Jackie can see how it’s done.”
“In theory,” Jackie said, smirking back.
“Right,” Deborah said.
I was very pleased that my sister had found a new Best Friend for Life, but their Ain’t We Cute act was getting a little annoying. Happily for me, Robert felt the same way, and he was not nearly as bashful about saying so.
“Well, hey,” he said. “I need to be in on this, too.” Deborah gave him a blank look, and Jackie got very interested in her fingernails. “I mean,” he said, “this is like a perfect way for me to learn stuff, too, right?”
Deborah flicked her eyes at me, then back to Robert. “Sure,” she said flatly.
“Great,” Robert said. He leaned back against the windowsill and folded his arms across his chest, clearly a man taking command of things. “So what would my character do first?”
“Whatever I tell him to do,” Jackie said, and he glared at her. She shrugged. “I’m the detective. My character is. So it’s my case. You are only here to feed me clues.”
Robert looked very unhappy. He unfolded his arms and put his hands in his pockets. “All right, sure,” he said. “But that’s … I mean, I’ve got to have some kind of … I mean, my character has to have, you know. Respect.”
Jackie’s face got hard. She slapped the desk. “Respect is earned,” she said. “Now what have you got for me?”
Robert’s mouth flapped open, then closed. He looked like a man who had just been thoroughly scolded. I, on the other hand, realized what Jackie was doing. It was a near-perfect imitation of Deborah, and I was very impressed.
“Wow,” I said. “That’s good. Just like her.”
Jackie gave a low gurgling laugh that made my toes curl and beamed at me. “Thanks,” she said. “Sergeant Morgan—your sister—we worked on it this weekend. At Bennie’s.” Bennie’s was a cop bar, a place where off-duty police officers hung out—and sometimes stopped in for a quick snort while on duty. The clientele was not known to be friendly to non-cops who wandered in. If Deborah had taken Jackie to Bennie’s, they had clearly bonded even more than I’d realized. “It’s a really good place for background,” Jackie said. “I have to send the writers there to see it.” She winked at Deborah. “We did tequila shots. She’s not so tough with a couple of drinks under her belt.” Debs snorted, but didn’t say anything.
“Sounds like quite a party,” I said,
and oddly, I almost wished I’d been invited. “So now that you’re actually my sister, what would you like me to do?”
For a moment it looked like Jackie was going to say something, but then she bit her lip and picked up the file. “Let’s go over the labs,” she said, and then she glanced at Deborah. “Is that right?”
“No,” Debs said. “The lab work is just background bullshit.”
“Thank you very much,” I said.
“Is anything in there important?” Deborah said.
“Rope burns on the wrists,” I said. “Nylon fibers probably mean clothesline.”
“Which could have come from any grocery store in the world,” she said.
“She was gagged with her own panties,” I said. “They found ’em in the Dumpster.”
“I said important,” Debs said. “That’s all standard crap.”
“Well,” I said, “there’s nothing on her, nothing in the Dumpster or the immediate vicinity to give any clue about who she was.”
“And that’s what we need the most,” Deborah said. “To get an ID on the victim.”
“Why is that so important?” Robert asked, and the two women swiveled their heads and gave him matching expressions of disdain. Robert looked very uncomfortable. “I mean,” he said, “the forensic evidence is, you know. There’s a lot of stuff there.” He nodded at the folder. “We might get like, you know. A fingerprint.”
“We did,” Deborah said. “In fact, we got about three dozen fingerprints. We always get lots of fingerprints. You know how many times we caught somebody from a fingerprint?”
“No,” Robert said. “How many?”
“In round numbers? Zero,” Debs said. “Even when it’s a match with the perp, a decent lawyer will get it thrown out. Fingerprints are for Sherlock Holmes.”
“I’m not sure he actually used them,” I said helpfully.
“Oh, he did,” Jackie said. “There was one story—I forget the name? But he caught the guy from his fingerprint.”
“To catch a killer in real life,” Deborah went on patiently, “you need to backtrack from the victim. Because ninety-nine percent of the time they knew each other; they were seen together; they got some connection. So first we need to know who the victim is.”
“Oh, okay,” Robert said. “Well, so how do we find that out? I mean, if we can’t use fingerprints, and the lab work is bullshit—what do we do?”
“Yeah,” Debs said. “Good question.” And even before she turned to look at me, I knew what was coming, because although she would never admit it, whenever my sister was stuck, it somehow became my problem. I sometimes thought she must have a secret tattoo somewhere on her body: “WWDD?” What Would Dexter Do? And sure enough, as Robert’s question was still echoing in the air, her head swiveled my way.
“Dex?” she said expectantly.
Oddly enough, it was Robert who managed to say what I was thinking. “Why Dexter?” he said, and I felt like applauding. “I mean, he does the lab stuff, and you said it was useless, so—you know,” he said, looking at me. “Not that I think you’re useless, or anything, buddy. But what is he supposed to do?”
Deborah stared at Robert, just long enough to make him uncomfortable, before she answered. “Sometimes Dexter gets these … insights,” she said. “About the killer.”
It is a scientific fact that most situations in life go from bad to worse—I believe it’s called entropy. Any scientists who happened to be observing us at this moment would have been quietly satisfied to see that this natural law held true. As Deborah had said, I really did get insights into the sick and twisted creatures of the night. But that was because I was one of them. Deborah was the only living person I had ever talked to on the subject. After all, I didn’t want people walking around and saying things like, “Gee, Dexter thinks just like a killer. Wonder why?” Additionally, since these thoughts came from a private place, deep inside Dexter’s Dungeon, discussing it always made me feel slightly naked. I thought my sister understood that, but every now and then, like now, she dragged me stripped and flinching into the spotlight.
Robert and Jackie both looked at me, and I began to feel even more uncomfortable. “What,” Robert said. “Like he, uh, profiles?” I’d never heard it used as a verb before. It didn’t make me feel any more at ease.
“Kind of,” Deborah said.
“Wow,” Jackie said, and she looked at me with new respect. “How did you learn to do that?”
Of course, that was exactly the question I did not want to answer. The only honest reply was not something I felt I could profitably discuss with Jackie. So I did my best to steer the conversation onto something a little less personal. “Oh,” I said modestly, “I took a psychology course in college. I assume you ran a missing-persons check, sis?”
Deborah flipped her hand dismissively at that. “First thing we did,” she said. “Come on, Dex; let’s get serious.” She put her arms on her thighs and leaned toward me. “I really want to collar this bastard, and I want him before Anderson fucks up the trail. And before this guy does it again. Because you know he’s going to do it again.”
“Probably,” I said, overriding the mean little voice inside me that was chortling, Almost Certainly.
“So come on,” she said. “Give me something to go on.” She stared at me intently, without blinking, and even more unsettling, Jackie leaned toward me and did exactly the same thing. I was surrounded by Deborahs, all of them impatiently waiting for me to perform a miracle. It was an awful lot of expectation for one lonely Dark Dabbler, no matter how righteously wicked. Luckily for me, Robert provided a perfect counterbalance by recrossing his arms and leaning back again with a skeptical expression on his face.
“Hey, come on,” he said. “Profiling is serious shit. I mean, these FBI guys who do it, it takes years, and they’re still only right, like, fifty percent of the time.” Everybody looked at him, which was a great relief to me. He shrugged. “Well, so, I’m just saying,” he said.
“Dexter does a little better than that,” Deborah said.
“Very cool,” Jackie said. She gave me an encouraging smile, and I couldn’t decide whether to crouch at her feet and let her scratch behind my ear, or slap my sister for bringing it up in the first place.
“All right, well, so,” Robert said. He sounded a little defiant, as if he’d decided that we were all against him, so he might as well push back. He jutted his chin at me. “Let’s see something.”
It was really very thoughtful of him to provide me with a motivation to do something besides wishing I was somewhere else. His Show Me attitude was so annoying it made me forget that I was hesitant to talk about something this intimate, because I wanted so much to say something wonderful that would push his face in the dirt.
“Well,” I said. I thought about the body as I’d seen it: the degree of damage, the strange variety of slash, bite, smash—and, of course, that final optical assault. Everyone was still looking at me, and I realized I had to say something.
“It, um …” I said. “It starts with the eyes.…”
“All right,” Deborah said expectantly. “What about ’em?”
“That’s the most important thing,” I said. “What he’s trying to say about her seeing. And, um, not seeing.”
Deborah snorted. “I didn’t know that?” she said. “I mean, he rips out her eye and shoots his wad into her eye socket, and I’m supposed to think that’s an accident? I know he blinded her, so he had a thing about the eyes. So what?”
“But that’s exactly it, Debs,” I said.
“What is?” Jackie demanded, sounding very much like Deborah.
“He didn’t blind her,” I said. “He left her one good eye. He wanted her to see what he was doing.”
“Jesus Christ,” Robert muttered.
“And I still don’t know why, or what it means,” Deborah snarled, her normal cranky self once more.
“The whole thing for him is centered around it,” I said, and I felt a soft rustle
of encouragement from the Passenger, almost as if it was whispering, Good, go on.… “Vision, watching, seeing … It’s all about that. It’s not just part of it; it’s the whole point.”
“What the fuck does that mean?” Deborah snapped.
“I’m not sure yet,” I said, and Robert cleared his throat to show he wasn’t going to say what he was thinking.
“I don’t understand,” Jackie said. “I mean, okay, the thing with the eye socket. But how does that say anything except he’s a sick bastard?”
“You have to try to go inside his mind,” I said, and I took a deep breath. “Try to picture what he was thinking.”
“I’d rather not,” Jackie said softly, but I was already hearing the far-off whisper of wings and the slow rising of shadows and I closed my eyes and tried to see it, reaching down into the Dark Basement and stroking the thing that uncurled there, petting it until it purred, stretched, and sprang up into the black interior sky and showed me all the pictures of Eternal Nighttime pleasure.…
And I see her, see the way she thrashes, moans, twists wildly against the ropes, fighting to get a scream past the gag, seeing nothing but her approaching death and not even seeing the all-important Why of it, the reason it must be, the Me who is doing this to her because she has refused to notice—and even now her eyes are on the knife and not the hand holding it and I need to make her see ME, need to make her pay attention to ME, and I drop the knife and I move closer, more direct, more intimate, and I begin to use hands, feet, fingernails, teeth—and still she will not see ME and so I grab her by the hair, that perfect golden hair, and I haul her face around to look and she has to see ME at last.
And she does.
She sees me. For the first time, she looks at ME and she sees ME and she knows me for who I really am and at last at last I can show her how I can care for her like no one else ever could, show her that this was meant to be, this was how it was always supposed to be, and at last at last I can show her my Truth, my Self, my Reason for Being.