Dexter in the Dark (37 page)

I leaned forward and handed her the card. “He left this,” I said.

Deborah took the card, glanced at it, and then dropped it on the seat as if it was made out of cobra venom. “Shit,” she said. She turned off the car’s engine. “Where did he leave it?”

“With Cody,” I said.

She swiveled her head around and looked at the three of us, one after the other. “Why would he leave it with a kid?” she asked.

“Because—” Astor said, and I put a hand on her mouth.

“Don’t interrupt, Astor,” I said, before she could say anything about seeing shadows.

She took a breath, but then she thought better of it and just sat there, unhappy at being muzzled but going along with it for the time being. We sat there for a moment, the four of us, one big unhappy extended family.

“Why not stick it on the windshield, or send it in the mail?” Deborah said. “For that matter, why the hell give us the damn thing at all? Why even have it printed, for Christ’s sake?”

“He gave it to Cody to intimidate us,” I said. “He’s saying, ‘See? I can get to you where you’re vulnerable.’”

“Showing off,” Deborah said.

“Yes,” I said. “I think so.”

“Well goddamn it, that’s the first thing he’s done that made any sense at all.” She slapped the heels of her hands on the steering wheel. “He wants to play catch-me-if-you-can like all the other psychos, then by God I can play that game, too. And I’ll catch the son of a bitch.” She looked back at me. “Put that card in an evidence bag,” she said, “and try to get a description from the kids.” She opened the car door, vaulted out, and went over to talk to the big cop, Suchinsky.

“Well,” I said to Cody and Astor, “can you remember what this man looked like?”

“Yes,” said Astor. “Are we really going to play with him like your sister said?”

“She didn’t mean ‘play’ like you play kick the can,” I said. “It’s more like he’s daring us to try to catch him.”

“Then how is that different from kick the can?” she said.

“Nobody gets killed playing kick the can,” I told her. “What did this man look like?”

She shrugged. “He was old.”

“You mean, really old? White hair and wrinkles?”

“No, you know. Old like you,” she said.

“Ah, you mean
old
,” I said, feeling the icy hand of mortality brush its fingers across my forehead and leave feebleness and shaky hands in its wake. It was not a promising start toward getting a real description, but after all, she was ten years old and all grown-ups are equally uninteresting. It was clear that Deborah had made the smart move by choosing to speak to Officer Dim instead. This was hopeless. Still, I had to try.

A sudden inspiration hit me—or at any rate, considering my current lack of brain power, something that would have to stand in for inspiration. It would at least make sense if the scary guy had been Starzak, coming back after me. “Anything else about him you remember? Did he have an accent when he spoke?”

She shook her head. “You mean like French or something? No, he just talked regular. Who’s Kurt?”

It would be an exaggeration to say that my little heart went flip-flop at her words, but I certainly felt some kind of internal quiver. “Kurt is the dead guy I just looked at. Why do you want to know?”

“The man said,” Astor said. “He said someday Cody would be a much better helper than Kurt.”

A sudden, very cold chill rolled through Dexter’s interior climate. “Really,” I said. “What a nice man.”

“He wasn’t nice at all, Dexter, we told you. He was scary.”

“But what did he look like, Astor?” I said without any real hope. “How can we find him if we don’t know what he looks like?”

“You don’t have to catch him, Dexter,” she said, with the same mildly irritated tone of voice. “He said you’ll find him when the time is right.”

The world stopped for a moment, just long enough for me to feel drops of ice water shoot out of all my pores as if they were spring-loaded. “What exactly did he say?” I asked her when things started up again.

“He said to tell you you’ll find him when the time is right,” she said. “I just said.”

“How did he say it?” I said. “‘Tell Daddy?’ ‘Tell that man?’ What?”

She sighed again. “Tell
Dexter
,” she said, slowly so I would understand. “That’s you. He said, ‘Tell Dexter he’ll find me when the time is right.’”

I suppose I should have been even more scared. But strangely enough, I wasn’t. Instead, I felt better. Now I knew for sure—someone really was stalking me. Whether a god or a mortal, it didn’t matter anymore, and he would come get me when the time was right, whatever that meant.

Unless I got him first.

It was a silly thought, straight out of a high-school locker room. I had so far shown absolutely no ability to stay even half a step ahead of whoever this was, let alone find him. I’d done nothing but watch as he stalked me, scared me, chased me, and drove me into a state of dark dithering unlike anything I had ever experienced before.

He knew who, what, and where I was. I didn’t even know what he looked like. “Please, Astor, this is important,” I said. “Was he real tall? Did he have a beard? Was he Cuban? Black?”

She shrugged. “Just, you know,” she said, “a white man. He had glasses. Just a regular man. You know.”

I didn’t know, but I was saved from admitting it when Deborah yanked open the driver’s door and slid back into the car. “Jesus Christ,” she said. “How can a man be that dumb and still tie his own shoes?”

“Does that mean Officer Suchinsky didn’t have a lot to say?” I asked her.

“He had plenty to say,” Deborah said. “But it was all brain-dead bullshit. He thought the guy might have been driving a green car, and that’s about it.”

“Blue,” Cody said, and we all looked at him. “It was blue.”

“Are you sure?” I asked him, and he nodded.

“So do I believe a little kid?” Deborah asked. “Or a cop with fifteen years on the force and nothing in his head but shit?”

“You shouldn’t keep saying those bad words,” Astor said. “That’s five and a half dollars you owe me. And anyway, Cody’s right, it was a blue car. I saw it, too, and it was blue.”

I looked at Astor, but I could feel the pressure of Deborah’s stare on me and I turned back to her.

“Well?” she said.

“Well,” I said. “Without the bad words, these are two very sharp kids, and Officer Suchinsky will never be invited to join Mensa.”

“So I’m supposed to believe them,” she said.

“I do.”

Deborah chewed on that for a moment, literally moving her mouth around as if she was grinding some very tough food. “Okay,” she said at last. “So now I know he’s driving a blue car, just like one out of every three people in Miami. Tell me how that helps me.”

“Wilkins drives a blue car,” I said.

“Wilkins is under surveillance, goddamn it,” she said.

“Call them.”

She looked at me, chewed on her lip, and then picked up her radio and stepped out of the car. She talked for a moment, and I heard her voice rising. Then she said another of her very bad words, and Astor looked at me and shook her head. And then Deborah slammed herself back into the car.

“Son of a bitch,” she said.

“They lost him?”

“No, he’s right there, at his house,” she said. “He just pulled in and went in the house.”

“Where did he go?”

“They don’t know,” she said. “They lost him on the shift change.”

“What?”

“DeMarco was coming in as Balfour was punching out,” she said. “He slipped away while they were changing. They swear he wasn’t gone more than ten minutes.”

“His house is a five-minute drive from here.”

“I know that,” she said bitterly. “So what do we do?”

“Keep them watching Wilkins,” I said. “And in the meantime, you go talk to Starzak.”

“You’re coming with me, right?” she said.

“No,” I said, thinking that I certainly didn’t want to see Starzak, and that for once I had a perfect excuse in place. “I have to get the kids home.”

She gave me a sour look. “And what if it isn’t Starzak?” she said.

I shook my head. “I don’t know,” I said.

“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t know either.” She started the engine. “Get in your seat.”

THIRTY-FIVE

I
T WAS WELL PAST FIVE O’CLOCK BY THE TIME WE GOT BACK
to headquarters and so, in spite of some very sour looks from Deborah, I loaded Cody and Astor into my own humble vehicle and headed for home. They remained subdued for most of the ride, apparently still a little bit shaken by their encounter with the scary guy. But they were resilient children, which was amply demonstrated by the fact that they could still talk at all, considering what their biological father had done to them. So when we were only about ten minutes from the house Astor began to return to normal.

“I wish you would drive like Sergeant Debbie,” she said.

“I would rather live a little longer,” I told her.

“Why don’t you have a siren?” she demanded. “Didn’t you want one?”

“You don’t get a siren in forensics,” I said. “And no, I never wanted one. I would rather keep a low profile.”

In the rearview mirror I could see her frown. “What does that mean?” she asked.

“It means I don’t want to draw attention to myself,” I said. “I don’t want people to notice me. That’s something you two have to learn about,” I added.

“Everybody else wants to be noticed,” she said. “It’s like all they ever do, is do stuff so everybody will look at them.”

“You two are different,” I said. “You will always be different, and you will never be like everybody else.” She didn’t say anything for a long time and I glanced at her in the mirror. She was looking at her feet. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” I said. “What’s another word for normal?”

“I don’t know,” she said dully.

“Ordinary,” I said. “Do you really want to be ordinary?”

“No,” she said, and she didn’t sound quite so unhappy. “But then if we’re not ordinary, people will notice us.”

“That’s why you have to learn to keep a low profile,” I said, secretly pleased at the way the conversation had worked around to prove my point. “You have to pretend to be
really
normal.”

“So we shouldn’t ever let anybody know we’re different,” she said. “Not anybody.”

“That’s right,” I said.

She looked at her brother, and they had another of those long silent conversations. I enjoyed the quiet, just driving through the evening congestion and feeling sorry for myself.

After a few minutes Astor spoke up again. “That means we shouldn’t tell Mom what we did today,” she said.

“You can tell her about the microscope,” I said.

“But not the other stuff?” Astor said. “The scary guy and riding with Sergeant Debbie?”

“That’s right,” I said.

“But we’re never supposed to tell a lie,” she said. “Especially to our own mother.”

“That’s why you don’t tell her anything,” I said. “She doesn’t need to know things that will make her worry too much.”

“But she loves us,” Astor said. “She wants us to be happy.”

“Yes,” I said. “But she has to think you are happy in a way she can understand. Otherwise
she
can’t be happy.”

There was another long silence before Astor finally said, just before we turned onto their street, “Does the scary guy have a mother?”

“Almost certainly,” I said.

Rita must have been waiting right inside the front door, because as we pulled up and parked the door swung open and she came out to meet us. “Well, hello,” she said cheerfully. “And what did you two learn today?”

“We saw dirt,” Cody said. “From my shoe.”

Rita blinked. “Really,” she said.

“And there was a piece of popcorn, too,” Astor said. “And we looked in the microphone and we could tell where we had been.”

“Micro
scope
,” Cody said.

“Whatever,” Astor shrugged. “But you could tell whose hair it was, too. And if it was a goat or a rug.”

“Wow,” Rita said, looking somewhat overwhelmed and uncertain, “I guess you had quite a time then.”

“Yes,” Cody said.

“Well then,” Rita said. “Why don’t you two get started on homework, and I’ll get you a snack.”

“Okay,” Astor said, and she and Cody scurried up the walk and into the house. Rita watched them until they went inside, and then she turned to me and held onto my elbow as we strolled after them.

“So it went well?” she asked me. “I mean, with the—they seemed very, um…”

“They are,” I said. “I think they’re beginning to understand that there are consequences for fooling around like that.”

“You didn’t show them anything too grim, did you?” she said.

“Not at all. Not even any blood.”

“Good,” she said, and she leaned her head on my shoulder, which I suppose is part of the price you have to pay when you are going to marry someone. Perhaps it was simply a public way to mark her territory, in which case I guess I should be very happy that she chose not to do so with the traditional animal method. Anyway, displaying affection through physical contact is not something I really understand, and I felt a bit awkward, but I put an arm around her, since I knew that was the correct human response, and we followed the kids into the house.