Double Dexter (11 page)

“Nobody saw anything,” Deborah said as she materialized at my elbow, and on top of the unexpected explosion from Camilla’s flashbulb, my nerves responded instantly and I jumped as if there really was a ghost on the loose and Debs was it. As I settled back to earth she looked at me with mild surprise.

“You startled me,” I said.

“I didn’t know you could startle,” she said. She frowned and shook her head. “This thing is enough to give anybody the creeps. It’s like the most crowded public area in the city, and the guy just pops up with a body, drops it by the Torch, and drives away?”

“They found it right around dawn,” I said. “So it was dark when he dumped the body.”

“It’s never dark here,” she said. “Streetlights, all the buildings, Bayside Market, the arena a block away? Not to mention the goddamned Torch. It’s lit up twenty-four/seven.”

I looked around me. I had been here many times, day and night,
and it was true that there was always a very bright spill of light from the buildings in this neighborhood. And with Bayside Marketplace right next to us and American Airlines Arena just a block away, there was even more light, more traffic, and more security. Plus the goddamned Torch, of course.

But there was also a line of trees and a relatively deserted belt of grass in the other direction, and I turned to look that way. As I did, Deborah glanced at me, frowned, and then she turned around to look, too.

Through the trees and beyond the stretch of park on the far side of the Torch, the morning sun blazed off the water of Biscayne Bay. In the middle of the near-blinding glare a large sailboat slid regally across the water toward the marina, until an even larger motor yacht powered past it and set it bobbing frantically. A half thought wobbled into my brain and I raised an arm to point; Deborah looked at me expectantly, and then, as if to signal that we really were in a cartoon, another camera flash came from the perimeter, and Deborah’s eyes went wide-open as the idea blossomed.

“Son of a bitch,” Deborah said. “The motherfucker came by boat. Of course!” She clapped her hands together and swiveled her head around until she located her partner. “Hey, Duarte!” she called. He looked up and she beckoned him to follow as she turned and hurried away toward the water.

“Glad to help,” I said as my sister raced away to the seawall. I turned to see who had taken the picture, but saw nothing except Angel with his face hovering six inches over a fascinating clump of grass, and Camilla waving to somebody standing in the crowd of gawkers who were two-deep at the yellow crime scene tape. She went over to talk to whoever it was, and I turned away and watched as my sister raced to the seawall to look for some clue that the killer had come by boat. It really did make sense; I knew very well from a great deal of happy personal experience that you can get away with almost anything on a boat, especially at night. And when I say “almost anything,” I mean much more than merely the surprising acts of athletic immodesty one sees couples performing out on the water from time to time. In the pursuit of my hobby I had done many things on my boat that narrow minds might find objectionable, and it was quite
clear to me that nobody ever sees anything. Not even, apparently, a psychotic and semisupernatural killer lugging a completely limp but rather large dead cop around the Bay and then up over the seawall and into Bayfront Park.

But because this was Miami, it was at least possible that somebody had, in fact, seen something of the sort, and simply decided not to report it. Maybe they were afraid it would make them a target, or they didn’t want the police to find out they had no green card. Modern life being what it is, it was even possible that there was a really good episode of
Mythbusters
on TV and they wanted to watch the end. So for the next hour or so, Debs and her team went all along the seawall looking for that Certain Special Someone.

Not surprisingly—at least, not to me—they didn’t find him or her. Nobody knew nothin’; nobody saw nothin’. There was plenty of activity along the seawall, but it was morning traffic, people getting to work in one of the shops in Bayside, or on one of the tour boats tied up by the wall. None of this crowd had been keeping watch in the dark of the night. All those people had gone home to their well-earned rest, no doubt after a full night of staring anxiously into the darkness, alert for every danger—or possibly just watching TV. But Deborah dutifully collected names and telephone numbers of all the night security personnel and then came back to me and scowled, as if it was all my fault because she had found nothing and I was the one who had made her look for it.

We stood on the seawall not far from the
Biscayne Pearl
, one of the boats that provided tours of the city by water, and Deborah squinted along the wall toward Bayside. Then she shook her head and started to walk back toward the Torch, and I tagged along.

“Somebody saw something,” she said, and I hoped she sounded more convincing to herself than she did to me. “Had to. You can’t lug a full-grown cop onto the seawall and all the way up to the Torch and nobody sees you.”

“Freddy Krueger could,” I said.

Deborah whacked me on the upper arm, but her heart really wasn’t in it this time, and it was relatively easy for me to stop myself from screaming with pain.

“All I need,” she said, “is to have more of that supernatural bullshit going around. One of the guys actually asked Duarte if we could get a
santero
in here, just in case.”

I nodded. It might make sense to bring in a
santero
, one of Santeria’s priests, if you believed in that sort of thing, and a surprising number of Miami’s citizens did. “What did Duarte tell him?” Deborah snorted. “He said, ‘What’s a
santero
?’ ”

I looked at her to see if she was kidding; every Cuban-American knew
santeros
. Odds were good there was at least one in his very own family. But of course, they hadn’t asked Duarte in French, and anyway, before I could pretend to get the joke and then pretend to laugh, Debs went on. “I know this guy’s a psycho, but he’s a live human being, too,” she said, and I was relatively sure she didn’t mean Duarte. “He isn’t invisible, and he didn’t teleport in and out.”

She paused by a large tree and looked up at it thoughtfully, and then turned back around the way we’d come. “Lookit this,” she said, pointing up at the tree and then back to the
Pearl
. “If he ties up right there by the tour boat,” she said, “he’s got cover from these trees most of the way to the Torch.”

“Not quite invisible,” I said. “But pretty close.”

“Right beside the fucking boat,” she muttered. “They
had
to see something.”

“Unless they were asleep,” I said.

She just shook her head and then looked toward the Torch along the line of trees as if she was aiming a rifle, and then shrugged and began to walk again. “Somebody saw something,” she repeated stubbornly. “Had to.”

We walked back to the Torch together in what would have been comfortable silence if my sister hadn’t been so obviously distracted. The medical examiner was just finishing up with Officer Gunther’s body when we got there. He shook his head at Debs to indicate that he’d found nothing interesting.

“Do we know where Gunther had lunch?” I asked Deborah. She stared at me as if I had suggested we should strip naked and jog down Biscayne Boulevard.

“Lunch, Debs,” I said patiently. “Like maybe Mexican food?”

The light came on and she lurched over to the ME. “I want stomach contents from the autopsy,” I heard her say. “See if he ate any tacos recently.” Oddly enough, the ME looked at her without surprise, but I suppose if you have worked with corpses and cops in Miami long enough you are very hard to surprise, and a request to search for tacos in a dead officer’s stomach was mere routine. The ME just nodded wearily, and Deborah stalked off to talk to Duarte, leaving me to twiddle my thumbs and think deep thoughts.

I thought them for a few minutes, but I didn’t come up with anything more profound than the realization that I was hungry, and there was nothing for me to eat here. There was also nothing for me to do; no blood spatter at all, and the other geeks from Forensics had things well in hand.

I turned away from Gunther’s body and looked around the perimeter. The usual crowd of casual ghouls was still there, standing in back of the tape in a jostling bunch as if they were waiting to get into a rock concert. They were staring at the body and, to their credit, one or two of them actually tried very hard to look horrified as they craned their necks to see. Of course, most of the others made up for it by leaning forward over the tape to get a better picture with their cell phones. Soon the pictures of Officer Gunther’s smooshed corpse would be all over the Web, and the whole world could join together and pretend to be appalled and dismayed in perfect harmony. Isn’t technology wonderful?

I hung around and made helpful suggestions for a little while longer, but as usual, no one seemed to care about my thoughtful insights; real expertise is never appreciated. People would always rather muddle along in their own dim, blundering way than have someone else point out where they were going wrong—even if that other person is clearly brighter.

And so it was that at an hour depressingly far beyond lunchtime, an underappreciated and underutilized Dexter finally got bored enough to hitch a ride back to the land of real work waiting for me in my little cubbyhole. I found a friendly cop who was headed that way. He just wanted to talk about fishing, and since I do know something about that, we got along very nicely. He was even willing to make a quick stop along the way for some Chinese takeout, which was certainly
a very chummy gesture, and in gratitude I paid for his order of shrimp lo mein.

By the time I said good-bye to my new BFF and sat down at my desk with my fragrant lunch, I was beginning to feel like there might be some actual point to this patchwork quilt of humiliation and suffering we call Life. The hot-and-sour soup was very good, the dumplings were tender and juicy, and the kung pao was hot enough to make me sweat. I caught myself feeling rather contented as I finished eating, and I wondered why. Could I really be so shallow that the simple act of eating a good lunch made me happy? Or was something deeper and more sinister at work here? Perhaps it was the MSG in the food, attacking the pleasure center in my brain and forcing me to feel good against my will.

Whatever it was, it was a relief to be out of the dark clouds that had been clustered around my head for the past few weeks. It was true that I had some legitimate worries, but I had been wallowing in them a little too much. Apparently, however, one meal of good Chinese food had cured me. I actually caught myself humming as I tossed the empty containers into the trash, a very surprising development for me. Was this real human happiness? From a dumpling? Perhaps I should notify some national mental health organization: Kung pao chicken works better than Zoloft. There might be a Nobel Prize waiting for me for this. Or at least a letter of thanks from China.

Whatever my lighthearted mood was really all about, it lasted almost until quitting time. I had gone down to the evidence room to return a few samples I’d been working with, and when I came back to my little cubbyhole I found a large and unpleasant surprise waiting for me.

My surprise was about five feet, ten inches, two hundred pounds of African-American anger, and it looked more like an exceptionally sinister insect than a human being. He was perched on two shiny prosthetic feet, and one of the metal claws he had for hands was doing something to my computer as I walked in.

“Why, Sergeant Doakes,” I said, with as much pleasantness as I could fake. “Do you need help logging onto Facebook?”

He jerked around to face me, clearly not expecting me to catch him snooping. “Nyuk ookig,” he said quite clearly; the same amateur
surgeon who had removed his hands and feet had taken out his tongue, too, and having a pleasant conversation with the man had become nearly impossible.

Of course, it had never been easy; he had always hated me, always suspected what I was. I had never given him any reason to doubt my carefully manufactured innocence, but doubt it he did, and always had—even before I had failed to rescue him from his unfortunate surgery. I had tried, really I had: It just hadn’t quite worked out. To be fair to me, which is very important, I did get
most
of him back safely. But now he blamed me for the amputations as well as many other unspecified acts. And here he was at my computer, and he was “Nyuk ookig.”

“Nyuk?” I repeated brightly. “Really? Are you a fan of the Three Stooges, Sergeant? I never knew. Nyuk nyuk nyuk!”

He glared at me with even more venom, which added up to an impressive amount, and he reached down to the desk for the small notebook-size artificial-speech device he carried around. He punched in something, and the machine called out in its cheerful baritone, “Just! Looking!”

“Of course you are!” I said, with real synthetic good cheer, trying to match the bizarre happiness of his voice machine. “And no doubt doing a wonderful job of it! But unfortunately, you are accidentally looking on my private computer, in my private space, and technically speaking, that’s kind of against the rules.”

He glared at me some more; really, the man had become completely one-note. Without taking his eyes off me he punched in something new on his speech machine and after a moment it called out, in its unlikely and happy voice, “I will! Get! You! Someday! Maa-ther. Fucker!”

“I’m sure you will,” I said soothingly. “But you’ll have to do it on your own computer.” I smiled at him, just to show there were no hard feelings, and pointed in the direction of the door. “So if you don’t mind?”

He pulled a large breath of air in through his nostrils, and then hissed it out again through his teeth, all without blinking, and then he tucked the speech machine under his arm and stomped out of my office, taking the tatters of my good mood with him.

And now I had another reason for uneasiness. Why had Sergeant
Doakes been looking on my computer? Obviously, he thought there was something incriminating to find—but what? And why now, on my computer, of all things? There could be absolutely no legitimate reason for him to look at my computer. I was reasonably sure he had no knowledge of or interest in IT. Since the loss of his limbs he had been given a desk job out of pity, so he could serve out his last few years and qualify for a full pension. He’d been working at some kind of useless administrative thing in Human Resources; I didn’t really know or care what.