Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark (25 page)

Debbie?“ ”Don't
call me Debbie,“ Deborah snapped. ”I just don't like the siren.“
”Why not?“ Astor insisted. Deborah blew out a huge breath and glanced
at me out of the corner of her eye. ”It's a fair question," I

said. “It makes too much noise,” Deborah
said. “Now let me drive, okay?” “All right,” Astor said,
but she didn't sound convinced. We drove in silence all the way to Grand
Avenue, and I tried to think about it by myself-clearly enough

to come up with anything that might help. I didn't,
but I did think of one thing worth mentioning. “What if Kurt's murder is
just a coincidence?” I said. “Even you can't really believe
that,” she said. “But if he was on the run,” I said, "maybe
he tried to get a fake ID from the wrong people, or get

smuggled out of the country.
There are plenty of bad guys he could run into under the circumstances."
It didn't really sound likely, even to me, but Deborah thought about it for a
few seconds anyway, chewing

on her lower lip and
absentmindedly blasting the horn as she pulled around a courtesy van from one
of the hotels. “No,” she said at last. “He was cooked, Dexter.
Like the first two. No way they could copy that.” Once again I was aware
of a small stirring in the bleak emptiness inside, the area once inhabited by
the

Dark Passenger. I closed my eyes and tried to find some shred of my
once-constant companion, but there was nothing. I opened my eyes in time to see
Deborah accelerate around a bright red Ferrari.

“People read the newspapers,” I said.
“There are always copycat killings.” She thought some more, and then
shook her head. “No,” she said at last. “I don't believe in
coincidence. Not with something like this. Cooked and headless both, and it's a
coincidence? No way.”

Hope always dies hard, but even so I had to admit that
she was probably right. Beheading and burning were not really standard
procedures for the normal, blue-collar killer, and most people would be far
more likely simply to clonk you on the head, tie an anchor to your feet, and
fling you into the bay.

So in all likelihood, we were on our way to see the
body of somebody we were sure was a killer, and he had been killed the same way
as his own victims. If I had been my cheerful old self, I would certainly have
enjoyed the delicious irony, but in my present condition it seemed like just
another annoying affront to an orderly existence.

But Deborah gave me very little time to reflect and
become grumpy; she whipped through the traffic in the center of Coconut Grove
and pulled into the parking area beside Bayfront Park, where the familiar
circus was already under way. Three police cruisers were pulled up, and Camilla
Figg was dusting for

fingerprints on a battered red Geo parked at one of
the meters-presumably Kurt Wagner's car.

I got out and looked around,
and even without an inner voice whispering clues, I noticed right away that
there was something wrong with this picture. “Where's the body?” I
asked Deborah. She was already walking toward the gate of the yacht club.
“Out on the island,” she said. I blinked and got out of the car. For
no reason I could name, the thought of the body on the island raised

the hair on the back of my neck, but as I looked out over the water for
the answer, all I got was the afternoon breeze that blew across the pines on
the barrier islands of Dinner Key and straight through the emptiness inside me.

Deborah jogged me with her
elbow. “Come on,” she said.

I looked in the backseat at
Cody and Astor, who had just now mastered the intricacies of the seat-belt
release and were trickling out of the car. “Stay here,” I said to
them. “I'll be back in a little while.” “Where are you going?”
Astor said. “I have to go out to that island,” I said. “Is there
a dead person there?” she asked me. “Yes,” I said. She glanced
at Cody, then back at me. “We want to go,” she said. “No,
absolutely not,” I said. "I got in enough trouble the last time. If I
let you see another dead body your

mother would turn me into one, too." Cody thought
that was very funny and he made a small noise and shook his head. I heard a
shout and looked through the gate into the marina. Deborah was already at the
dock, about to

step into the police boat tied
up there. She waved an arm at me and yelled, “Dexter!”

Astor stomped her foot to
get my attention, and I looked back at her. “You have to stay here,”
I said, “and I have to go now.” “But Dexter, we want to ride on
the boat,” she said. “Well, you can't,” I said. “But if you
behave I'll take you on my boat this weekend.” “To see a dead
person?” Astor said. “No,” I said. “We're not going to see
any more dead bodies for a while.” “But you promised!” she said.
“Dexter!” Deborah yelled again. I waved at her, which did not seem to
be the response she was looking

for, because she beckoned
furiously at me.

“Astor, I have to go,” I said. “Stay
here. We'll talk about this later.”

“It's always later,” she muttered.

On the way through the gate I paused and spoke to the
uniformed cop there, a large heavy man with black hair and a very low forehead.
“Could you keep one eye on my kids there?” I asked him.

He stared at me. “What am I, day-care
patrol?”

“Just for a few minutes,” I said.
“They're very well behaved.”

“Lookit, sport,” he said, but before he could finish his
sentence there was a rustle of movement and Deborah was beside us.

“Goddamn it, Dexter!” she said. “Get
your ass on the boat!”

“I'm sorry,” I said. “I have to find
somebody to watch the kids.”

Deborah ground her teeth together. Then she glanced at the big cop and
read his name tag. “Suchinsky,” she said. “Watch the fucking
kids.”

“Aw, come on, Sarge,” he said. “Jesus
Christ.”

“Stick with the kids, goddamn it,” she said. “You might
learn something. Dexter-get on the goddamn boat, now!”

I turned meekly and hurried for the goddamn boat.
Deborah strode past me and was already seated when I jumped on, and the cop
driving the boat headed for one of the smaller islands, weaving between the
anchored sailboats.

There are several small islands on the outside of
Dinner Key Marina that provide protection from wind and wave, one of the things
that makes it such a good anchorage. Of course, it's only good under ordinary
circumstances, as the islands themselves proved. They were littered with broken
boats and other maritime junk deposited by the many recent hurricanes, and
every now and then a squatter would set up housekeeping, building a shack from
shattered boat parts.

The island we headed for was one of the smaller ones. Half of a
forty-foot sports fisherman lay on the beach at a crazy angle, and the pine
trees inland of the beach were hung with chunks of Styrofoam, tattered cloth,
and wispy shreds of plastic sheeting and garbage bags. Other than that, it was
just the way the Native Americans had left it, a peaceful little chunk of land
covered with Australian pines, condoms, and beer cans.

Except, of course, for Kurt Wagner's body, which had
most likely been left by someone other than Native Americans. It was lying in
the center of the island in a small clearing, and like the others, it had been
arranged in a formal pose, with the arms folded across the chest and the legs
pressed together. The body was headless and unclothed, charred from being
burned, very much like the others-except that this time there had been a small
addition. Around the neck was a leather string holding a pewter medallion about
the size of an egg. I leaned closer to look; it was a bull's head.

Once again I felt a strange
twinge in the emptiness, as if some part of me were recognizing that this was

significant, but didn't
know why or how to express it-not alone, not without the Passenger. Vince
Masuoka was squatting next to the body examining a cigarette butt and Deborah
knelt down beside him. I circled them one time, looking at it from all angles:
Still Life with Cops. I was hoping, I suppose,

that I would find a small
but significant clue. Perhaps the killer's driver's license, or a signed
confession. But there was nothing of the kind, nothing but sand, pockmarked
from countless feet and the wind. I went down on one knee beside Deborah.
“You looked for the tattoo, right?” I asked her. “First
thing,” Vince said. He extended a rubber-gloved hand and lifted the body
slightly. There it was,

half covered with sand but
still visible, only the upper edge of it cut off and left, presumably, with the

missing head. “It's
him,” Deborah said. “The tattoo, his car is at the marina-it's him,
Dexter. And I wish I knew what the hell that tattoo meant.”

“It's Aramaic,” I
said. “How the fuck would you know that?” Deborah said. “My
research,” I said, and I squatted down next to the body. “Look.”
I picked a small pine twig out of the

sand and pointed with it. Part of the first letter was missing, cut off
along with the head, but the rest was plainly visible and matched my language
lesson. “There's the M, what's left of it. And the L, and the K.”

“What the hell does
that mean?” Deborah demanded. “Moloch,” I said, feeling a small
irrational chill just saying the word here in the bright sunshine. I tried to
shake it off, but a feeling of uneasiness stayed behind. “Aramaic has no vowels.
So MLK spells Moloch.”

“Or milk,” Deborah
said. “Really, Debs, if you think our killer would tattoo milk on his
neck, you need a nap.” “But if Wagner is Moloch, who killed
him?” “Wagner kills the others,” I said, trying very hard to
sound thoughtful and confident at the same time, a

difficult task. “And
then, um…” “Yeah,” she said. “I already figured out
'um.'” “And you're watching Wilkins.” “We're watching
Wilkins, for Christ's sake.” I looked at the body again, but there was
nothing else on it to tell me more than I knew, which was almost

nothing. I could not stop my
brain from going in a circle; if Wagner had been Moloch, and now Wagner

was dead, and killed by
Moloch… I stood up. For a moment I felt dizzy, as if bright lights were
crashing in on me, and in the distance I heard that awful music beginning to
swell up into the afternoon and for just that moment I could not

doubt that somewhere nearby
the god was calling me-the real god himself and not some psychotic

prankster. I shook my head
to silence it and nearly fell over. I felt a hand grabbing my arm to steady me,
but whether it was Debs, Vince, or Moloch himself, I couldn't tell. From far
away a voice was calling my name, but it was singing it, the cadence rising up
to the far-too-familiar rhythm of that music. I closed my eyes and felt heat on
my face and the music got louder. Something shook me and I opened my eyes.

The music stopped. The heat was just the Miami sun, with
the wind whipping in the clouds of an afternoon squall. Deborah held both my
elbows and shook me, saying my name over and over patiently.
“Dexter,” she said. “Hey Dex, come on. Dexter. Dexter.”
“Here I am,” I said, although I was not entirely sure of that.
“You okay, Dex?” she said. “I think I stood up too fast,” I
said. She looked dubious. “Uh-huh,” she said. “Really, Debs, I'm
fine now,” I said. “I mean, I think so.” “You think
so,” she said.

“Yes. I mean, I just stood up too fast.” She looked at me a
moment longer, then let go and stepped back. “Okay,” she said.
“Then if you can make it to the boat, let's get back.”

It may be that I was still dizzy, but there seemed to be no sense in
her words, almost as if they were just made-up syllables. “Get back?”
I said. “Dexter,” she said. “We got six bodies, and our only
suspect is on the ground here with no head.”

“Right,” I said, and I heard a faint drumbeat under my voice.
“So where are we going?” Deborah balled up her fists and clenched her
teeth. She looked down at the body, and for a moment I thought she was actually
going to spit. “What about the guy you chased into the canal?” she
said at last.

“Starzak? No, he said…” I stopped myself from finishing, but
not quite soon enough, because Deborah pounced.

“He said? When did you
talk to him, goddamn it?” To be fair to me, I really was still a little
bit dizzy, and I had not thought before I spoke, and now I was in a somewhat
awkward spot. I could not very well tell my sister that I had spoken to him
just the other night when I had taped him to his workbench and tried to cut him
up into small neat pieces. But the blood must have been flowing back into my
brain, because I very quickly said, “I mean, he seemed,” I said.
“He seemed to be just a…I don't know,” I said. “I think it was
personal, like I cut him off in traffic.”

Deborah looked at me angrily for a moment, but then she seemed to
accept what I had said, and she turned away and kicked at the sand. “Well,
we got nothing else,” she said. “It won't hurt to check him
out.”

It didn't seem like a really good idea to tell her that I already had
checked him out quite thoroughly, far beyond the boundaries of normal police
routine, so I just nodded in agreement.

THIRTY-FOUR THERE WAS NOT
A GREAT DEAL MORE WORTH SEEING ON the little island. Vince and the other
forensic nerds would spot anything else worth the trouble, and our presence
would only hamper them. Deborah was impatient and wanted to rush back to the mainland
to intimidate suspects. So we

walked to the beach and
boarded the police launch for the short trip back across the harbor to the
dock. I felt a little better when I climbed onto the dock and walked back to
the parking lot. I didn't see Cody and Astor, so I went over to Officer Low
Forehead. “The kids are in the car,” he told me

before I could speak.
“They wanted to play cops and robbers with me, and I didn't sign up for
day care.” Apparently he was convinced that his line about day care was so
sidesplittingly funny that it was worth repeating, so rather than risk having
him say it again, I simply nodded, thanked him, and went over to Deborah's car.
Cody and Astor were not visible until I was practically on top of the car, and
for a moment I wondered which car they were in. But then I saw them, crouching
down in the backseat, looking at me