Dexter 4 - Dexter by Design (16 page)

I managed not to burst into tears. I got in and drove home, peering through the cracked glass and listening to my head throb.

RITA WAS NOT HOME YET WHEN I ARRIVED, SINCE I'D gotten there a bit early as a result of my explosive misfortune.

The house seemed very empty, and I stood inside the front door for a minute just listening to the unnatural silence. A pipe ticked in the back of the house, and then the air conditioner came on, but these were not living sounds and I still felt as if I had stumbled into a movie where everyone else had been whisked away in a spaceship. The lump on my head was still throbbing, and I was very tired and very alone. I went to the couch and fell onto it as if I suddenly had no bones left to hold me up.

I lay there for some time —a kind of strange interval in the urgency. I knew I still had to explode into action, track down Weiss, head him off at the pass and beard him in his den, but for some reason I was completely unable to move, and the mean little voice that had been urging me on did not sound terribly convincing at the moment, as if it, too, needed a coffee break. So I just lay there, face down, trying to feel the sense of emergency that had deserted me, and failing to feel anything except, as mentioned, fatigue and pain.

If somebody had shouted at me, “Look out behind you! He's got a gun!” I would have replied with no more than a weary mumble, “Tell him to take a number and wait.” I woke up, I don't know how much later, to an overwhelming sense of blue, which made no sense at all until I was able to focus my eyes. There stood Cody, no more than six inches away from my head, in his apparently brand new Cub Scout uniform. I sat up, which caused my head to clang like a gong, and looked at him.

“Well” I said. “You certainly look official.”

“Look stupid” he said. “Shorts.” I looked at him in his dark blue shirt and shorts, the little hat perched on top of his head and the neckerchief in its slide around his neck, and it didn't seem fair to pick on the shorts. “What's wrong with shorts?” I said. “You wear shorts all the time.”

“Uniform shorts” he said, as if it was some kind of impossible assault on the last frontier of human dignity.

“Lots of people wear uniform shorts” I said, desperately flinging my battered brain through its paces in search of an example.

Cody looked very doubtful. “Who?” he said.

“Well, ah, the mail man wears shorts—” I broke off quickly; the look he was giving me was louder and more pointed than anything he could have said. “And, um, the British soldiers wore shorts in India” I said, with incredibly feeble hope.

He stared at me for a moment longer without saying anything, as if I had let him down badly when all the chips were on the table.

And before I could think of another brilliant example, Rita came charging into the room.

“Oh, Cody, you didn't wake him up, did you? Hello, Dexter, we've been shopping, we got all the things Cody needs for the Cub Scouts, he doesn't like the shorts, I think because Astor said something, my God what happened to your head?” she said, running through two octaves and eight emotions without breathing.

“It's nothing” I said. “Just a flesh wound” which was something I'd always wanted to say, even though I didn't really know what that meant. Weren't all wounds flesh wounds, unless they bypassed the flesh somehow and went right to the bone?

Nevertheless, Rita responded with a gratifying circus of concern, shooing away Cody and Astor and getting me an ice pack, a comforter, and a cup of tea before flinging herself down beside me on the couch and demanding to know what had happened to my poor dear head. I filled her in on all the dreadful details —leaving out one or two things with no real relevance, like what I had been doing at a house that blew up in an attempt to kill me —and as I spoke, I watched with dismay as her eyes got big and moist, until they began to overflow and tears ran down her cheeks and across her face. It was really quite flattering to think that minor damage to my skull could cause such a display of hydrotechnics, but at the same time it left me slightly uneasy about what my response ought to be.

Luckily for my reputation as a method actor, Rita left me in no doubt at all about how I should behave. “You stay right here and rest” she said. “Quiet and rest when you get a bump on the head like that. I'm going to make you some soup.” I had not known that soup was good for concussions, but Rita seemed very sure about it, and with a few gentle strokes on my face and a light kiss near the bump she was off the couch and into the kitchen, where she immediately began a muted clatter that very soon smelled like garlic, onion, and then chicken, and I drifted into a state of half-sleep where even the faint throbbing of my head seemed distant, cozy and almost pleasant. I wondered if Rita would bring me soup if I was arrested. I wondered if Weiss had anyone to bring him soup. I hoped not —I was starting to dislike him, and he certainly didn't deserve soup.

Astor suddenly appeared beside the couch, interrupting my reverie. “Mom says you got hit on the head” she said.

“Yes, that's right” I said.

“Can I see it?” she asked, and I was so deeply touched by her concern that I bowed my head to reveal the lump and the matted hair around it where it had bled. “It doesn't look so bad” she said, sounding a little disappointed.

“It isn't” I told her.

“So you're not going to die, are you?” she asked politely.

“Not yet” I said. “Not until after you do your homework.” She nodded, glanced toward the kitchen, and said, I hate math.” Then she wandered away down the hall, presumably to hate her math at closer range.

I drifted a while longer. The soup finally came, and while I would not absolutely insist that it was good for my head injury, it certainly did me no harm. As I may have mentioned before, Rita in the kitchen can do things that are far beyond mortal ken, and after a big portion of her chicken soup I began to think that the world at large might deserve one last chance. She fussed over me the whole time, which was not really my favorite thing, but at the moment it seemed kind of soothing and I let her fluff the pillows, mop my brow with a cool cloth, and rub my neck when the soup was all gone.

Before too long, the entire evening had passed, and Cody and Astor came in to say muted goodnights. Rita herded them away to bed and tucked them in and I staggered down the hall to the bathroom to brush my teeth. Just as I got the toothbrush going in a really good rhythm, I caught sight of myself in the mirror over the sink.

My hair stuck up in all directions, there was a bruise on one cheek, and the normal sprightly emptiness of my eyes seemed hollow.

I looked like a very unflattering mug shot, the kind where the recently arrested is still sobering up and trying to figure out what he did and how he got caught. I hoped it was not an omen of what was to come.

In spite of an evening of nothing more strenuous than lounging on the couch and dozing, I was nearly overwhelmed with sleepiness, and the teeth-brushing had taken the last of my energy. Still, I made it all the way to the bed under my own power, and I flopped down onto the pillows thinking that I would just drift off into slumberland and worry about everything else in the morning. But alas, Rita had other plans.

After the hushed murmur of bedtime prayers had died away down the hall in the children's room, I heard her come into the bathroom and run water for a while, and I had almost fallen asleep when the sheets rustled and something that smelled like very aggressive orchids slid into bed beside me.

“How do you feel?” Rita said.

“Much better,” I said, and giving credit where it was due I added, “The soup seemed to help.”

“Good,” she whispered, and she put her head down on my chest.

For a while she just lay there, and I could feel her breath blowing across my chest and I wondered if I could really get to sleep with the weight of her head pressed onto my ribs like that. But then the pattern of her breathing changed, got slightly percussive, and I realized she was crying.

There are few things in the world that make me feel more clueless than a woman's tears. I know that I am supposed to do something comforting and then go slay whatever dragon caused the crying fit, but it has been my experience, in my limited dealings with women, that the tears never come when they should, and they are never about what you might think, and consequently you are reduced to truly stupid options like patting her head and saying, “There there” in the hopes that at some point she will let you in on what the display is actually about.

But Dexter is nothing if not a team player, and so I slid my arm up across her back, put the palm of my hand on her head and patted.

“It's okay” I said, and no matter how stupid that sounded I thought it was a tremendous improvement over “there there'.

True to form, Rita's reply came out of absolutely nowhere that I could hope to predict. I can't lose you” she said.

I certainly had no plans to be lost, and I would gladly have told her so, but she was just hitting her stride now, and the silent sobs were jerking her body and sending a small rivulet of salt water rolling down my chest.

“Oh, Dexter” she sobbed, “what would I do if I lost you, too?” And now, with that word “too', I had somehow joined a completely unexpected and unknown company, presumably of people Rita had carelessly left lying around where they had been easily lost, and she had given me no clue how I had managed to get a seat with that group, or even who they were. Did she mean her first husband, the addict who had beaten and tormented her, Cody and Astor, until they were traumatized into becoming my ideal family? He was in prison now, and I certainly agreed that being lost that way was a bad idea. Or was there some other string of misplaced persons who had slipped through the cracks of Rita's life and been washed away by the rains of mischance?

Then, as if I needed further proof that her thoughts were being beamed to her from a mother ship in orbit beyond Pluto, Rita began to slide her face down my chest, across my stomach —still sobbing, you understand, and leaving a trail of tears that quickly turned cool.

“Just lie still” she sniffled. “You shouldn't exert yourself with a concussion.”

As I said, you never really know what the program is going to be when a woman switches on the tears.

IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT I WOKE UP AND THOUGHT, BUT what does he want? I don't know why I hadn't asked that question before, and I don't know why it came to me now, lying in my comfy bed next to a gently snoring Rita. But there it was —it was bobbling around on the surface of Lake Dexter now, and I had to do something with it. The inside of my head still felt stiff, as if it was packed with wet sand, and for several minutes I lay there unable to do anything with my thought except to repeat it: what does he want?

What did Weiss want? He was not simply feeding a Passenger of his own, I was reasonably sure of that. I had felt no sympathy twinges from my own anywhere near either Weiss or his handiwork, which ordinarily I would, in the presence of another Presence.

And the way he went about it, starting with already dead bodies instead of creating his own —until he had killed Deutsch —argued that he was after something altogether different.

But what? He made videos of the bodies. He made videos of people looking at the bodies. And he had made a video of me at play —unique footage, yes, but it all added up to nothing that made any sense to me. Where was the fun in all that? I saw none and that made it impossible for me to get inside Weiss's head and figure him out. With normal, well-adjusted psychopaths who killed because they must and took a simple, honest pleasure from their work, I never had that problem. I understood them all too well, since I was one. But with Weiss, there was no point of contact, no place to feel empathy, and because of that I had no idea of where he would go or what he would do next. I had a very bad feeling that whatever it was, I would not like it —but I had no feeling at all of what it would be, and I didn't like that at all.

I lay there in bed for a while thinking about it —or trying to think about it, since the good ship Dexter was clearly not yet ready to raise full steam. Nothing came to me. I didn't know what he wanted.

I didn't know what he would do next. Coulter was out to get me. So was Salguero, and of course, Doakes had never given up. Debs was still in a coma.

On the plus side, Rita had made me some very good soup. She was really very good to me —she deserved better, even though she clearly didn't know that. She thought she had everything, apparently, between me, the children, and our recent trip to Paris. And although she did, in fact, have these things, none of them remotely resembled what she thought they were. She was like a mother lamb in a wolf pack, and she only saw white fluffy wool all around her when in fact the pack was licking its lips and waiting for her to turn her back. Dexter, Cody and Astor were monsters. And Paris —well, they did actually speak French there, just as she had hoped. But Paris had proved to have its own unique kind of monster, too, as our wonderful interval at the art gallery had proved. What was it called? “Jennifer's Leg.” Very interesting; after all my years of toiling in the fields it was still possible for me to see something that surprised me, and for that reason I felt a certain warmth for Paris nowadays.

Between Jennifer and her leg, and Rita's eccentric performance, and whatever it was that Weiss was doing, life was just full of surprises lately, and they all boiled down to one thing: people really deserve whatever happens to them, don't they?

It may not do me very much credit, but I found this thought very comforting, and I drifted back to sleep soon after.

The next morning my head had cleared a great deal; whether it was from Rita's attentions or just my naturally chipper metabolism, I couldn't say. In any case, I jumped out of bed with a fully functioning and powerfully effective brain at my service once again, which was all to the good.

The down side to that, however, was that any effective brain, realizing it was in the situation in which I found myself, would also find itself fighting down a very strong urge to panic, pack a bag, and run for the border. But even with my mental powers in high gear, I could not think of a border that would protect me from the mess I was in.

Still, life gives us very few real choices, and most of them are awful, so I headed for work, determined to track down Weiss, and not to rest until I had him. I still did not understand him, or what he was doing, but that did not mean I couldn't find him. No, indeed; Dexter was part bloodhound and part bulldog, and when he is on your trail you might as well give up and save us all time and bother.

I wondered if there was a way to get that message to Weiss.

I got to work a little bit early and so managed to grab a cup of coffee that almost tasted like coffee. I took it to my desk, sat at the computer, and got down to work. Or to be perfectly accurate, I got down to staring at my computer screen and trying to think of the right way to go to work. I had used up most of my clues already and felt like I was at something of a dead end —and not the kind I usually enjoy, either. Weiss had stayed one step ahead of me, and I had to admit that he could be anywhere now; holed up somewhere nearby or even back in Canada, there was no way to know. And although I had thought my brain was fully functional once again, it was offering me no way to find out.

I tried to organize what I knew, and found that I did not know enough to organize. Where could he be? I don't know, anywhere, I guess. What would he do next? I don't know, almost anything.

What did he want? We'd already beaten our head against that one in the night, and sitting in my cubicle offered me no new insight.

I had exhausted all the obvious lines to explore on the Internet, and I had watched myself on YouTube more often than modesty would really permit.

Far away, on top of an ice-covered peak in the distant skyline of Dexter's mind, a signal flag rose up the pole and fluttered in the wind. I stared across the distance, trying to read the signal, and finally I got it: “Five!” it said. I blinked against the glare and read it again. “Five.”

A lovely number, five. I tried to remember if it was a prime number, and discovered I could not recall what that meant. But it was a very welcome number right now, because I had remembered why it was important, prime or not.

There were five videos on Weiss's YouTube page. One each for the sites where Weiss had left his modified bodies, one of Dexter at play ... and one more that I had been about to watch when Vince clattered in and called me away to work. It could not be another “New Miami” commercial featuring Deutsch's body, because Weiss had still been filming that when I arrived at the crime scene. So it showed something else. And although I did not really expect it to tell me how to get to Weiss, it would almost certainly tell me something I did not know.

I grabbed my mouse and eagerly drove to YouTube, then clicked through to the New Miami page. It was unchanged, the orange background still lighting up the screen behind the blazing letters.

And on the right side were the five videos, neatly lined up in a thumbnail gallery, just as I remembered them.

Number five, the last one down, showed no picture in its box, just an area of blurry darkness. I moved the cursor over it and clicked. For a moment nothing happened; then a thick white line pulsed across the screen from left to right, and there was a blare of trumpets that was oddly familiar. And then a face appeared on the screen —Doncevic, smiling, his hair puffed out, and a voice began to sing, “Here's the story ...” and I realized why it sounded familiar.

It was the opening to The Brady Bunch.

The horribly cheerful music bumped out at me and I watched as the voice warbled, “Here's the story, of a guy named Alex, who was lonely, bored, and looking —for a change.” Then the first three arranged corpses appeared to the left of Doncevic's happy face. He looked up at them and smiled as the song went on. They even smiled back, thanks to the plastic masks glued on to their faces.

The white line slid across the screen again, and the voice went on. “It's the story, of a guy named Brandon, who had time of his own on his hands.” A picture of a man's face appeared in the middle Weiss?

He was thirty or so, about the same age as Doncevic, but he was not smiling as the song continued. “They were two guys living all together, until suddenly Brandon was alone.” Three boxes appeared on the right side of the screen, and in each one a dark and blurry frame appeared that was just as familiar as the song, but in a very slightly different way: these were three action shots lifted from the film of Dexter at play.

The first showed Doncevic's body dumped in the tub. The second showed Dexter's arm raising the saw up, and the third was the saw slashing down on Doncevic. All three were short, two second loops that repeated, over and over, as the song lurched on.

From the middle box Weiss looked on as the voice sang, “Until one day Brandon Weiss will get this fellow, and I promise he will not be saved by luck. There is nothing you can do to escape me.

Because you have made me a crazy fuck.” The cheerful tune crashed on as Weiss sang, “A crazy fuck. A crazy fuck. When you killed Alex —I became —a crazy fuck.” But then, instead of a happy smile and dissolve to the first commercial, Weiss's face swelled up to fill the whole screen and he said, I loved Alex, and you took him away from me, just when we were getting started. In a way it's very funny, because he was the one who said we shouldn't kill anybody. I thought it would have been ... truer.” He made a face and said, “Is that a word?” He gave a short and bitter laugh and went on. “Alex came up with the idea of taking bodies from the morgue, so we didn't have to kill anybody.

And when you took him, you took away the only thing that stopped me from killing.”

For a moment he just stared at the camera. Then, very softly, he said, “Thank you. You're right. It's fun. I'm going to do it some more.” He gave a kind of twisted smile, as if he found something funny but didn't feel like laughing. “You know, I kind of admire you.” Then the screen went black.

When I was much younger I used to feel cheated by my lack of human feelings. I could see the huge barrier between me and humanity, a wall built of feelings I would never feel, and I resented it very much. But one of those feelings was guilt —one of the most common and powerful, in fact —and as I realized that Weiss was telling me I had turned him loose as a killer, I also realized that I really ought to feel a little guilt, and I was very grateful that I did not.

Instead of guilt, what I felt was relief. Chilled waves of it, pulsing through me and snapping the tension that had been winding itself tighter and tighter inside me. I was well and truly relieved —because now I knew what he wanted. He wanted me. It had not been said out loud, but it was there: the next time it will be you and yours. And following the relief came a sense of cold urgency, a slow spreading and flexing of dark interior talons as the Dark Passenger caught the challenge in Weiss's voice and responded in kind.

This was a great relief, too. Up until now the Passenger had been silent, having nothing at all to say about borrowed bodies, even when they were converted into patio furniture or gift baskets. But now there was menace, another predator sniffing down our back trail and threatening a territory we had already marked. And this was a challenge we could not allow, not for a moment. Weiss had served notice that he was coming —and finally, at last, the Passenger was rising from its nap and polishing its teeth. We would be ready.

But ready for what? I did not believe for a moment that Weiss would run away, that was not even a question. So what would he do?

The Passenger hissed an answer, an obvious one, but I felt its Tightness because it was what we would have done. And Weiss had as much as told me himself: I loved Alex and you took him away ...” So he would go after someone close to me. And by leaving the photo on Deutsch's body he had even told me who. It would be Cody and Astor, because that would hit me the same way I had hit him —and it would also bring me to him, and on his terms.

But how would he do it? That was the big question —and it seemed to me that the answer was fairly obvious. So far Weiss had been very straightforward —there is nothing terribly subtle about blowing up a house. I had to believe that he would move quickly, when he felt the odds favored him most. And since I knew he had been watching me, I had to assume he knew my daily routine —and the routine the children followed. They would be most vulnerable when Rita picked them up from school, coming out of a secure environment and into anything goes Miami. I would be far away at work, and he could certainly overcome one relatively frail and unsuspecting woman to grab at least one of the kids.

So what I had to do was get into position first, before Weiss, and watch for him to arrive. It was a simple plan, and not without risk I might well be wrong. But the Passenger was hissing agreement, and it is rarely wrong, so I resolved to leave work early, right after lunch, and get into position at the elementary school to intercept Weiss.

And once again, as I gathered myself for a great leap at the jugular vein of the impending foe —my telephone rang.

“Hey, buddy” Kyle Chutsky said. “She's awake, and she's asking for you.”