Double Dexter (16 page)

“Oh. Of course,” I said, and now it made sense. Deborah was totally inept with public relations, departmental politics, routine ass kissing, and any aspect of police work that didn’t involve finding or shooting bad guys. If she’d been even half-good at dealing with people, she’d probably already be Division Chief at the least. But she wasn’t, and here she was again in the middle of a situation that called for fake smiles and bullshitting, two talents that were as alien to her as a Klingon mating dance. Clearly she needed a warning from someone who knew the steps. Since Nicholas couldn’t even say his own name, that left me.

“Well,” I said cautiously, “you’re probably going to be in the spotlight for a couple of days.”

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Lucky me.”

“It wouldn’t hurt to play the game a little, Debs,” I said, and I admit that I was getting a little cranky now, too. “You know the right words: ‘The entire Miami-Dade team did outstanding work in their tireless effort to apprehend this suspect—’ ”

“Fuck it, Dex,” she snapped. “You know I can’t do that kind of crap. They want me to smile at the camera and tell the whole fucking world how great I am, and I never could do that shit and you know it.”

I did know it, but I also knew that she would have to try again, which meant she was probably in for a couple of rough days. But before I could think of something really smart to say on the subject,
Nicholas began to bounce again and say, “Ba ba ba
ba
!” Deborah looked at him with a tired smile and then back at me. “Anyway, I’d better get my little buddy to bed. Thanks for picking him up, Dex.”

“Dexter’s Day Care,” I said. “We never close.”

“I’ll see you at work,” she said. “Thanks again.” And then she turned for the door. I had to open it for her, since she only had one good arm and that was full of Nicholas. “Thanks,” she said again—a third time in less than a minute, which was certainly a record for her.

Deborah trudged to her car, looking as tired as I had ever seen her, and I watched as Duarte climbed out from behind the wheel and opened the back door for her. She fumbled Nicholas into a car seat, and Duarte held the passenger door as she got in. Then he closed it, nodded to me, and climbed in behind the wheel.

I watched as they drove away. The whole world thought Debs was wonderful right now because they believed she had caught a dangerous killer, and all she wanted was to get on with catching the next one. I wished she could learn to exploit a moment like this, but I knew she never would. She was tough and smart and efficient, but she would never learn to lie with a straight face, which was a real killer for any career.

I also had a niggling little feeling that at some point in the next few days she would need a little PR skill, and since she didn’t have any, that would make it a case for the public relations firm of Dexter and Dexter, Spin Doctors to the Stars.

Naturally—it always ended up being my problem, no matter how much it actually wasn’t. I sighed, watched as Deborah’s car disappeared around the corner, and then I locked the door and went to bed.

T
HE MEDIA FRENZY THAT DEBORAH’S BIG ARREST GENERATED
was bigger than anyone had anticipated, and for the next few days Deborah was a very reluctant rock star. She was deluged with requests for interviews and photographs, and even in the relative security of police headquarters she was not safe from people stopping her to tell her how wonderful she was. Of course, being Deborah, the attention did not please her. She turned down all the invitations from the media, and she tried very hard to disengage herself from the workplace well-wishers without showing them any actual hostility. She didn’t always succeed, but that was all right. It made the other cops think that, on top of being spectacular, she was modest, gruff, and impatient with bullshit—which was actually true, for the most part—and it added even more luster to the growing Morgan Legend.

And somehow, some of the shine even reflected onto me. I had helped Deborah solve her cases often enough, usually with my special insight into things as they really are—wicked, and quite happily so—and just as often I had been beaten, bullied, and battered in the process. Never once in all those times had I ever received so much as a casual pat of thanks on my bruised back—but now, the one time I had done absolutely nothing, I began to get credit. I had three
requests for interviews from reporters who had suddenly come to believe that blood spatter was fascinating, and I was invited to submit an article to the
Forensic Examiner
.

I turned down the interviews, of course—I had worked very hard to keep my face out of public view and saw no reason to change now. But the attention continued; people stopped me to say nice things, shake my hand, and tell me what a good job I had done. And it was true enough; I usually do a very good job—I just hadn’t done it
this
time. But suddenly I was the target of far too much unwelcome attention. It was disconcerting, even annoying, and I found myself flinching when the phone rang, ducking as the door opened, and even chanting the classic mantra of the clueless:
Why me?

Tragically, it was Vince Masuoka who finally answered that lame question. “Grasshopper,” he said, shaking his head wisely, on the morning when he overheard me turning down
Miami Hoy
for the third time. “When temple bell rings, crane must fly.”

“Yes, and one apple every eight hours keeps three doctors away,” I said. “So what?”

“So,” he said, with a sly semismile, “what did you expect?”

I looked at him and he smirked back; he seemed to have some actual point in mind, as much as he ever did, so I gave him a more or less serious answer. “What I expect,” I said, “is to be ignored and unrecognized, laboring on in solitude at my unique level of unmatchable excellence.”

He shook his head. “Then you gotta get a new agent,” he said. “Because your face is all over the blogosphere.”

“My what is where?” I said.

“Lookit,” Vince said. He scrabbled at the keyboard of his laptop for a moment, and then turned the screen to face me. “It’s you, Dexter,” he said. “A superman shot. Very studly.”

I looked at the screen and had a moment of almost hallucinogenic disorientation. The computer showed a Web site with a red and dripping headline that said, “Miami Murder.” And under that was a photo of a male model in a heroic pose in front of the Torch of Friendship—at the scene where Officer Gunther’s body had been discovered. The model looked commanding, brilliant, and sexy—and he also looked an awful lot like me. In fact, to my astonishment, it
was
me, just as Vince had said. I was standing beside Deborah and pointing toward the waterfront, and she had an expression of eager compliance on her face. I had no idea how someone had managed to capture the two of us frozen in these completely uncharacteristic expressions, and somehow make me look so very
studly
in the process—but there it was. And even worse, the caption to the picture said, “Dexter Morgan—the
real
brains in the Cop-Hammer case!”

“It’s a really popular blog,” Vince said. “I can’t believe you haven’t seen this, ’cause everybody else in the world has.”

“And
this
is why everybody suddenly thinks I’m interesting?” I said.

Vince nodded at me. “Unless you have a hit single I didn’t know about?”

I blinked and looked at the picture again, hoping to find that it had gone away, but it hadn’t. And as I looked I felt my stomach churn with something that was very close to fear. Because there was my face and my name and even my job all together in one convenient package, and the first thought that popped into my brain was not,
Oh, boy, I look studly
. Instead it instantly gave a shape to the anonymous unease I had been feeling, and it looked like this:

What if my unknown Witness saw the pictures?
My name was right there with my face, along with my job—practically everything but my shoe size. Even if he had not traced my license plate or tracked me before, this would give him everything he needed. This was not even a matter of putting two and two together; it was looking at four. I swallowed, which was not as easy as it should have been, since my mouth was suddenly dry, and I realized that Vince was staring at me with a strange look on his face. I searched for something witty and forceful to say and finally settled on, “Oh. Um—shit.”

Vince shook his head and looked very serious. “Too bad you’re not still single,” he said. “This would
so
get you laid.”

It seemed more likely that it would
so
get me arrested and executed. I had always been very careful to avoid publicity of any kind; it was far better for someone with my recreational tendencies to stay anonymous as much as possible, and until now I had managed to keep my face out of public view. But here it was, apparently splashed across the blogosphere, and there was nothing I could do except hope
that my Witness was not a reader of the Miami Murder blog. If my picture had really spread as much as Vince said, maybe I should also hope he lived under a rock—and a rock without an Internet connection at that. There was no way to cover myself; this was public nudity, pure and simple. Worse still, there was absolutely no way out; I just had to wait for all the attention to go away when things calmed down.

Things did not, in fact, calm down right away, not as far as the Cop-Hammer case was concerned—but happily enough, things did move on away from me. The details of the case began to pour out into the mainstream media. A few photographs of the bodies appeared online—originating at Miami Murder, of course, but the newspapers got hold of them, as well as some very graphic descriptions of what had been done to Klein and Gunther. Public interest shot up several notches, and when the exciting conclusion leaked out, the newspaper and TV talking heads found the headline just too good to ignore—“Working Mom Puts Psycho Killer in Time-out!”—and the press stampede for Deborah left me far behind in the dust, and made me wonder if my sister had actually been one of the Beatles and forgotten to mention it.

Debs really was a much better story than me, but, of course, she wanted no part of it. And, of course, the reporters assumed that meant she was holding out for money, which made her even less eager to talk to them. Captain Matthews had to order her to accept one or two requests for interviews with the national media; he considered it his primary job to maintain a positive public image, for himself and the department, and nationally televised interviews do not grow on trees. But Deborah was clearly uncomfortable, awkward, and terse on camera. So Captain Matthews quickly decided that Debs as PR maven was a bad idea, and concentrated on trying to get his own manly face on TV instead. TV was not terribly interested, however, in spite of the captain’s truly impressive chin, and after a week or so the requests for Deborah died out and our happy nation moved on to the next Incredibly Fascinating Story: an eight-year-old girl who had climbed halfway up Mount Everest all by herself before getting frostbite and losing her leg. The interviews with her proud parents were particularly compelling—especially the mother weeping at the expense of a new prosthetic leg every six months as the
girl grew—and I made a mental note to be certain not to miss their reality show in the fall.

At about the same time the press moved on, the rest of the police force got tired of telling Deborah how terrific she was, too, especially since her thank-yous were growing very close to vicious. One or two of the other detectives even began to make the kind of sarcastic remarks that a suspicious mind might assume were tinged with envy. In any case, the congratulations and praise at work dried up and the force returned to the routine brutality of life on the job as Miami’s Finest. The tense, haunted-house atmosphere seeped out of the department, and things settled back into their old comfortable workday rut once more, with Debs happily back out of the spotlight and working on routine stabbings and beheadings again. Her broken arm didn’t seem to slow her down too much, and Alex Duarte was always at her side on the job if she needed a hand, literal or figurative.

For my part, I crossed off a few more names on the list, but it was all happening with nightmare slowness now, and I could do nothing but plod on. I knew something terrible was about to happen, and that I would be on the receiving end. My Witness absolutely
had
to know who I was now. I had been identified by name, with a picture, and it seemed to me that it would have to be only a matter of time before those two hard facts crashed together, with Dexter in between. I moved through my day with the horrible uneasy feeling of being observed by hostile eyes. I couldn’t see any sign that I was, no matter how hard and long I stared around me, but the feeling would not go away. No one was staring intently at me when I was out in public, although I imagined that I could feel his eyes on me everywhere. I didn’t
see
anything out of the ordinary anywhere, not even once, but I
felt
it. Something was coming my way, and I knew I wouldn’t like it when it got here, not at all.

The Dark Passenger was just as disturbed; it seemed to be pacing endlessly back and forth, like a tiger in a cage, but it offered no help and no suggestions, nothing but more unease. And my near-constant feeling of creeping dread stayed with me over the next few days. At home I found it almost impossible to keep up my mask of cheerful daddyhood. Rita had not mentioned hunting for a new house again, but it might have been because some kind of crisis involving euros
and long-term-bond yields had come up at her job, and she was suddenly too busy to do anything about it, although she still found time to give me odd, disapproving looks, and I still had no idea what I had or hadn’t done.

It also fell to me to take Astor to the dentist to get her braces, a trip that did not delight either one of us. She still considered the whole idea of braces as a kind of personal Apocalypse, designed by a vengeful world to force her into social death, and she sulked for the entire drive. She would not speak at all, all the way to the dentist, which was very unusual for her.