“Oh, dear,” he said, and he looked at me thoughtfully, running his eyes over my entire frame. “Still,” he said, “it seems to agree with you.”
“I suppose it must seem like it,” I said.
“Do you mean it doesn’t agree with you?” Brian asked, arching his eyebrows up high on his forehead.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I guess it really does. It’s just that lately—”
“Lights seem dimmer, tastes are all duller?” he asked me.
“Something like that,” I admitted, although in truth I could not tell if he was merely mocking me.
But Brian looked at me very seriously, and for once he did not seem to be faking his expression, nor the thoughts behind his words. “Why don’t you come along with me some night very soon?” he said softly. “We’ll have a Boys’ Night Out. Rita couldn’t possibly object.”
There was absolutely no mistaking what he meant; aside from the fact that he only had one form of recreation, I knew that he had long dreamed of sharing a playtime with me, his only living relative, who had so much in common with him—we were brothers of the blade as well as in blood. And truthfully the idea was almost unbearably compelling to me, too—but … but …
“Why not, brother?” Brian said softly, leaning forward with genuine intensity on his face. “Why shouldn’t we?”
For a moment I simply stared at him, frozen between lunging at his offer with both hands and thrusting him away from me, probably with one hand to my brow and a loud cry of, Retro me, Brianus! But before I could decide which choice to jump at, life intervened, as it usually does, and made the decision for me.
“Dexter!” Astor yelled from down the hall, with all the fury of a very cranky eleven-year-old girl. “I need help with my math homework! Now!”
I looked at Brian and shook my head. “You’ll excuse me, brother?” I said.
He settled back into the sofa and smiled, the old fake smile again. “Mmm,” he said. “Domestic bliss.”
I got up and went down the hall to help Astor.
SEVEN
ASTOR WAS IN THE ROOM SHE SHARED WITH CODY, HUNCHED over a book at the little hutch that served them both as a desk. The expression on her face had probably started life as a frown of concentration, and then evolved into a scowl of frustration. From there it had been just a short jump to a full-blown menacing glare, which she turned on me as I came into the room. “This is bullshit,” she snarled at me with such ferocity that I wondered whether I should get a weapon. “It doesn’t make any sense at all!”
“You shouldn’t use that word,” I said, and rather mildly, too, since I was quite sure she would attack if I raised my voice.
“What word, sense?” she sneered. “ ’Cause that must be a word they forgot in this stupid book.” She slammed the book closed and slumped down in the chair with her arms crossed over her chest. “Bunch of crap,” she said, looking at me out of the corner of her eye to see whether she would get away with “crap.” I let it go and went to stand next to her.
“Let’s take a look,” I said.
Astor shook her head and refused to look up at me. “Useless dumb crap,” she muttered.
I felt a sneeze coming on and fumbled out a tissue, and still without looking up she said, “And if I get your cold, I swear.” She didn’t tell me what she swore, but from her tone it was clear that it wouldn’t be pleasant.
I put the tissue in my pocket, leaned over the desk, and opened the book. “You won’t get my cold; I took a vitamin C,” I said, still trying for a winning note of lighthearted and tolerant reason. “What page are we on?”
“It’s not like I’ll ever have to know this stuff when I’m grown up,” she grumbled.
“Maybe not,” I said. “But you have to know it now.” She clamped her jaw and didn’t say anything, so I pushed a little. “Astor, do you want to be in sixth grade forever?”
“I don’t wanna be in sixth grade now,” she hissed.
“Well, the only way you’ll ever get out of it is if you get a passing grade. And to do that you have to know this stuff.”
“It’s stupid,” she said, but she seemed to be winding down a bit.
“Then it should be no problem for you, because you’re not stupid,” I said. “Come on; let’s look at it.”
She fought it for another minute or so, but I finally got her to the right page. It was a relatively simple problem of graphing coordinates, and once she calmed down I had no problem explaining it to her. I have always been good at math; it seems very straightforward compared to understanding human behavior. Astor did not seem to have a natural gift for it, but she caught on quickly enough. When she finally closed the book again she was a lot calmer, almost contented, and so I decided to push my luck just a bit and tackle another small item of pressing business.
“Astor,” I said, and I must have unconsciously used my I’m-a-grown-up-here-it-comes voice, because she looked up at me with an expression of alert worry. “Your mom wanted me to talk to you about braces.”
“She wants to ruin my life!” she said, hurtling up into an impressive level of preteen outrage from a standing start. “I’ll be hideous and no one will look at me!”
“You won’t be hideous,” I said.
“I’ll have these huge steel things all over my teeth!” she wailed. “It is so hideous!”
“Well, you can be hideous for a few months now, or hideous forever when you’re grown up,” I said. “It’s a very simple choice.”
“Why can’t they just do an operation?” she moaned. “Just get it over with, and I’d even get to miss school for a few days.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” I said.
“Doesn’t work at all,” she said. “They make me look like a cyborg and everybody will laugh at me.”
“Why do you think they’ll laugh at you?”
She gave me a look of amused contempt that was almost adult. “Weren’t you ever in middle school?” she said.
It was a good point, but not the one I wanted to make. “Middle school doesn’t last forever,” I said, “and neither will the braces. And when they come off, you’ll have great teeth and a terrific smile.”
“What do I care; I’ve got nothing to smile about,” she grumbled.
“Well, you will,” I said. “When you’re a little older, and you start to go to dances and things with a really great smile. You have to think of it in a long-term kind of way—”
“Long-term!” she said angrily, as if now I was the one using bad words. “The long term is that I’ll look like a freak for a whole year of middle school and everybody will remember that forever and I’ll always be That Girl with Huge Awful Braces even when I’m forty years old!”
I could feel my jaw moving, but no words were coming out; there were so many things wrong with what Astor had said that I couldn’t seem to pick one to start on—and in any case she had walled herself into such a high tower of miserable anger that whatever I said would just set her off again.
But luckily for my reputation as an urbane negotiator, before I could say anything and have it slammed back down my throat, Rita’s raised voice came floating down the hall. “Dexter? Astor? Come to dinner!” And while my mouth was still hanging open, Astor was up and out the door and my little encouraging chat about braces was over.
I woke up again on Monday morning in the middle of an enormous sneeze and feeling like a Turkish weight lifter had spent the entire weekend squeezing every bone in my body. For that one confused moment between waking and sleeping I thought the psycho who had hammered Detective Klein into a limp pudding had somehow gotten into my bedroom and worked me over while I slept. But then I heard the toilet flush, and Rita hurried through the bedroom and down the hall toward the kitchen, and normal life lurched up onto its feet and stumbled on into another day.
I stretched, and the ache in my joints stretched with me. I wondered whether the pain could make me feel empathy for Klein. It didn’t seem likely; I’d never been cursed with t
hat kind of weak emotion before, and even Lily Anne’s transformational magic couldn’t turn me into a soft-shelled empathy feeler overnight. It was probably just my subconscious playing connect-the-dots.
Still, I found myself dwelling on Klein’s death as I got up and went through my morning routine, which now included sneezing every minute or so. Klein’s skin had not been broken; a remarkable amount of force had been used on him, but there had been no blood spilled at all. It was my guess—and the Passenger hissed its agreement—that Klein had remained conscious as every bone in his body had been shattered. He’d been awake and alert for every smash and crunch, every agonizing smack of the hammer, until finally, after a very impressive period of agony, the killer had done enough internal damage to allow Klein to slip away into death. It was much worse than having a cold. It didn’t sound like a lot of fun—especially not for Klein.
But in spite of my distaste for the method, and the Dark Passenger’s contempt, I really did start to feel the limp fingers of empathy tickling at the inside of my skull—empathy, yes, but not for Klein. The fellow feeling that sent small tendrils curling into my thoughts was all for Klein’s executioner. It was totally stupid, of course—but nonetheless I began to hear a niggling little whisper in my inner ear that my only real objection to what had been done to Klein was the use of the wrong tools. After all, hadn’t I made sure that Valentine, too, stayed awake to feel every moment of my attention? Of course, Valentine had earned it with his habit of molesting and killing young boys—but were any of us truly innocent? Maybe Detective Klein had been a tax cheat, or a wife beater, or perhaps he had chewed food with his mouth open. He might have deserved what the so-called psycho had done to him—and really, who was to say that what I did was any better?
I knew very well that there was a great deal wrong with that unpleasant argument, but it stayed with me anyway, a discontented murmur of self-loathing in the background as I ate my breakfast, sneezed, got ready for work, sneezed, and finally took two cold pills and headed out the door, sneezing. I couldn’t shake the absurd notion that I was just as guilty—perhaps far more so, since Klein was the only victim of this killer so far, and I had fifty-two glass slides tucked away in my rosewood souvenir box, each with its single drop of blood representing a departed playmate. Did that make me fifty-two times as bad?
It was completely ridiculous, of course; what I had done was totally justified, sanctified by the Code of Saint Harry, and beneficial to society, aside from being a great deal of fun. But because I was so wrapped up in navel-gazing, it was not until I crawled off U.S. 1 to merge onto the Palmetto Expressway that the insistent sibilance of self-preservation finally broke through my egotistical fog. It was just a quiet hiss of warning, but it was persistent enough to get my attention, and as I finally listened to it, it solidified into a single, very definite thought.
Someone is watching me.
I don’t know why I was certain, but I was. I could feel the gaze in a nearly physical way, almost as if somebody was trickling the razor-sharp point of a knife along the back of my neck. It was a sensation as definite and inarguable as the heat from the sun; someone was watching me, specifically me, and they were watching me for some reason that did not have my best interests at heart.
Reason argued that this was Miami at morning rush hour; almost anyone might stare at me with distaste, even hatred, for any reason at all—maybe they didn’t like my car, or my profile reminded them of their eighth-grade algebra teacher. But whatever Reason said, Caution argued back: It didn’t matter why someone was watching me. It only mattered that they were. Someone was watching me with mischief in mind, and I needed to find out who.
Slowly, oh-so-casually, I looked around me. I was in the middle of an exceptionally normal crush of morning traffic, indistinguishable from what I drove through every morning. To my immediate right there were two lanes of cars: a battered Impala, and beyond it an old Ford van with a camper roof. Behind them was a line of Toyotas, Hummers, and BMWs, none of them appearing to be any more menacing than any of the others.
I looked ahead again, inched forward with the traffic, and then slowly turned to look to my left—
—and before my head had turned more than six inches, there was a screech of tires, a chorus of blaring horns, and an old Honda accelerated off the Palmetto’s on-ramp, down the shoulder, and back onto U.S. 1, where it squealed north, slid through a yellow light, and vanished down a side street, and as it went I could see the left taillight dangling at an odd angle, and then the dark birthmark stain on the trunk.
I watched it go until the drivers behind me began to lean on their horns. I tried to tell myself that it was pure coincidence. I knew very well how many old Hondas there were in Miami; I had them all on my list. And I had visited only eight of them so far, and it was very possible that this was one of the others. I told myself that this was just one more idiot changing his mind and deciding to drive to work a different way this morning; probably someone had suddenly remembered that he’d left the coffeepot on, or left the disk with the PowerPoint presentation at home.
But no matter how many good and banal reasons I thought up for the Honda’s behavior, that other, darker certainty kept talking back, telling me with calm and factual insistence that whoever had been driving that car, they had been staring at me and thinking bad thoughts, and when I had turned to look at them they had rocketed away as if pursued by demons, and we knew very well what that really meant.
My breakfast began to churn in my stomach and I felt my hands turn slick with sweat. Could it be? Was it remotely possible that whoever had seen me that night had found me? Somehow tracked me down and learned my license number, long before I found them—and now they were following me? It was wildly, stupidly unlikely—the odds against it were monumental; it was ridiculous, impossible, totally beyond the bounds of belief—but was it possible?
I thought about it: There was no connection between Dexter Morgan, Boy Forensics Whiz, and the house where I had been seen with Valentine. I had gone to and from the house in Valentine’s car, and I had not been followed when I fled. So hunting along my back trail was impossible: There wasn’t one.
That left either magical powers or coincidence, and although I have nothing at all against Harry Potter, coincidence got my vote. And to make it a little more likely, that abandoned house had been only a little more than a mile from where the Palmetto Expressway intersects U.S. 1. I had already assumed that he lived in the same area—and if he did, he would almost inevitably drive to work along U.S. 1 and quite likely up onto the Palmetto, too. Work for most people started at roughly the same time every day, and everyone in this area drove to work along the same road. That was painfully obvious; it was what caused the perpetual traffic jam at this time each morning. So it was not as wildly coincidental as it had seemed at first. In fact, it was even likely that if we both repeated the same drive at the same time long enough, sooner or later he would see my car, and even me.
And he had. Once again, he had seen me, and this time he’d had an opportunity to study me at length. I tried to calculate how long he might have been staring. It was impossible; traffic had been stop-and-go, with an emphasis on stop that had lasted for almost two minutes. But it was pure guesswork to decide how long he had known it was me. Probably only a few seconds; I had to trust my alarm system.
Still, it was long enough to note the make and color of my car, write down the plate number, and who knows what else. I knew very well what I could do with only half that much information—it was entirely possible that with just the plate number he could find me—but would he? So far he had done nothing but flee in terror. Was he really going to look me up and then plant himself outside my door with a carving knife? If it was me, I would have—but he was not me. I was exceptionally good with computers, and I had resources that weren’t available to most people, and I used them to do things that no one else did. There is only one Dexter, and he was not it. Whoever this was, he could not possibly be anything l
ike me. But it was just as true that I had no idea what he was like, or what he might do, and no matter how many different ways I told myself that there was no real danger, I couldn’t shake the illogical fear that he was going to do something. The voice of calm reason was battered into silence by the screams of pure panic that had taken over my brain. He had seen me again, and this time I was in my workaday secret identity, and that made me feel more naked and helpless than I could remember.
I have no memory of driving up onto the Palmetto and continuing my morning commute, and it was pure blind chance that I was not flattened like a wandering possum by the raging traffic. By the time I got to work, I had calmed down enough to present a reasonably convincing facade, but I could not shake that steady trickle of anxiety that was once again burbling up on the floor of my brain and leaving me just on the edge of panic.
Luckily for the tattered shreds of my sanity, I didn’t have long to dwell on my own petty concerns. I had not even settled into my morning routine when Deborah came steaming in to distract me, with her new partner, Duarte, trailing along behind.
“All right,” she said, as if she was continuing a conversation we’d already been having. “So the guy has to have some kind of record, right? You don’t just suddenly do something like that out of nowhere, and nothing before it.”
I sneezed and blinked at her, which was not a very impressive response, but since I was mired in my own worries it took me a moment to connect with hers. “Are we talking about whoever killed Detective Klein?” I said.
Debs blew out an impatient breath. “Jesus shit, Dex, what did you think I was talking about?”
“NASCAR?” I said. “I think there was a big race this weekend.”
“Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “I need to know about this.”
I could have said that “asshole” might better describe somebody who charged into her brother’s office first thing Monday morning and didn’t even say “gesundheit” or ask how his weekend had been—but I knew very well that my sister had no tolerance for suggestions on workplace etiquette, so I shrugged it off. “I guess so,” I said. “I mean, something like what he did, that’s usually the end of a long process that started with other things, and … you know. The kind of thing that gets you noticed.”