Double Dexter (42 page)

“All right,” I said. “Where will you be?”

Rita frowned and looked around the room until she found the clock. “The auction office opens at seven—that’s ten minutes. I’ll take Lily Anne over there and ask them— And Brian said they have pictures, too, better than the ones— But, Dexter, really …”

I reached across and patted her arm comfortingly.

“It’s going to be fine,” I said again. “You’re really good at this.”

Rita shook her head. “Don’t let them get too close to the sharks?” she said. “Because after all.”

“We’ll be careful,” I assured her, and as I walked out to join Cody and Astor, Rita was lifting Lily Anne out of the high chair and wiping apple sauce from her face.

Astor and Cody were out in front of the hotel, watching in dumbstruck awe as several clusters of stocky bearded men headed past, hurrying down Duval Street and glaring suspiciously at each other.

Astor shook her head and said, “They all look alike, Dexter. They even dress the same. Are they gay or something?”

“They can’t all be,” I said. “Even in Key West.”

“So then what’s up?” she said, as if it was my fault that the men looked the same.

I was about to tell her it was a strange cosmic accident, when I remembered that it was July and this was, after all, Key West. “Oh,” I said. “Hemingway Days.” They both looked at me blankly. “The men are all Hemingway look-alikes,” I told them.

Astor frowned and looked at Cody. He shook his head.

“What’s Hemingway?” Astor said.

I watched the crowd of look-alikes milling around on the sidewalk, jostling each other and slurping beer. “A man who grew a beard and drank a lot,” I said.

“Well, I wouldn’t want to look like that,” she muttered.

“Come on,” I said. “You have to brush your teeth.”

I herded them in and over to the elevator, just in time to see Rita heading out the door. She gave us a big wave and called out,
“Don’t get too close— I’ll call you when I— Remember, be there at two o’clock!”

“Bye, Mom!” Astor called back, and Cody waved to her.

We rode up to our floor in silence, and trudged down the hall to our room. I put the key card into the lock on our door, pushed the door open, and held it for Cody and Astor. They hurried inside and, before I could follow them in and close the door, they stopped dead in their tracks.

“Whoa,” Astor said.

“Cool,” Cody added, and his voice seemed louder and sharper than normal.

“Dex-ter,” Astor called in a happy singsong tone. “You’d better come look.”

I pushed past them into the room for a look, and after one quick glance, looking was all I could do. My feet would not move, my mouth was dry, and all coherent thought had fled me, replaced by the single syllable “but,” which repeated itself in an endless loop as I just stared.

The foldout couch where Cody and Astor had slept was pulled out and neatly made up, with pillows fluffed and blanket turned down. And nestled snugly onto the bed was a rigid lump of something that had once been a human being. But it didn’t look like one now; where a face should have been there was a shallow, flattened crater with a smear of crusted blood around it where some large, hard object had come in contact with flesh and bones. A few stubs of gray teeth showed in the middle, and one eyeball, popped out of its socket by the force of the blow, dangled down one side of the mess.

Somebody had hit that face with appalling force, with something like a baseball bat, crushing it out of shape and probably killing it instantly, which almost seemed too bad. Because even without a shape, and in spite of the fact that I was shocked nearly thoughtless by finding it here, I recognized the cheap suit and enough of the squashed features to know who this scabby lump had once been.

It was Detective Hood.

I
HAD NEVER LIKED DETECTIVE HOOD, AND I LIKED HIM A LOT
less now. He had been enough of an annoyance alive; turning up dead in my hotel room was much worse, violating even the most basic standards of etiquette and decency. It was just plain wrong, and I almost wished he was still alive, so I could kill him again.

But beyond this severe breach of decorum there were other implications, infinitely more troubling. And although I would like to say that my high-powered brain immediately kicked into top gear and began to compute them all, the truth is sadly otherwise. I was so busy being angry at Hood’s final offense against good taste that I did not think at all until I heard Astor say, “But, Dexter, what’s it
doing
here?”

And as I opened my mouth to snap some angry dismissal at her, it hit me that this was a very important question. Not why Hood was in Key West; he had clearly followed me to make sure I didn’t steal a boat and run for Cuba. I had half expected that. But someone else had followed along, too, and killed Hood in this very distinctive way, and that was far more troubling, because theoretically, it was impossible. Because unless I was willing to accept the idea that a monstrous coincidence had led a complete stranger to kill Hood for some whimsical reason, and then by miraculous happenstance chose to dump him
randomly in my suite, there was only one person in the world who could have done this.

Crowley.

Of course, he was supposed to be dead, which should have kept him too busy to do anything like this. But even if he was still alive somehow … how had he found me here? How had he discovered not only that I was in Key West, but that I was here, in this hotel, in this exact room? He had known every move I was going to make before I had made it, and now even my room number. How?

Cody tried to push past and get a closer look, and I pushed him firmly back toward the door. “Stay back,” I said, and I reached for my phone. If I couldn’t figure out how Crowley had stayed ahead of me the whole time, at least I could find out if he was really dead. I dialed. There were three short rings and then a dreadfully cheerful, “Hello!”

“Brian,” I said. “Sorry if this is an odd question, but, um … did you take care of that thing you were going to do the other night?”

“Oh, yes,” he said, and even through the phone I could hear the very real happiness in his voice. “And a good time was had by nearly all.”

“You’re sure?” I said, staring at the lump that had been Hood.

“You’re right; that really is an odd question,” Brian said. “Of course I’m sure, brother; I was there.”

“And there was no mistake?”

There was a pause on the line, and I wondered whether the connection had dropped. “Brian?” I said.

“Well,” he said after a moment, “it’s just funny that you should ask that. The, um … the gentleman in question? He used that word a lot. He kept saying I was making a terrible mistake. Something about identity theft, I think? I wasn’t really listening.”

Something nudged me from behind. “Dexter,” Astor said, pushing harder. “We can’t
see
.”

“Just a minute,” I snapped at her, pushing them back again. “Brian,” I said into the phone. “Can you describe the, um, gentleman in question?”

“Before or after?” he said.

“Before.”

“We-e-ellllll,” he said. “I would say about forty-five, maybe five-foot-ten and a hundred and sixty pounds? Blond hair, clean shaven, with little gold-rimmed glasses.”

“Oh,” I said. Crowley was probably thirty pounds heavier than that, younger, and he had a beard.

“Is everything okay, brother? You sound a little out of sorts.”

“I’m afraid that everything is not quite okay,” I said. “I think the gentleman in question was right.”

“Oh, dear,” Brian said. “There was a mistake?”

“It sure looks like it from here,” I said.

“Oh, well,” Brian said.
“Qué será.”

Astor nudged me again. “Dex-ter, come
on,
” she said.

“I have to go,” I told Brian.

“I’d love to know what I did,” he said. “Call me later?”

“If I can,” I told him. I put away the phone and turned to face Cody and Astor. “Now,” I said, “you two go wait in the hall.”

“But, Dexter,” Astor said, “we didn’t get to see anything, not really.”

“Too bad,” I said firmly. “You can’t go any closer until the police are done.”

“Not fair,” Cody said, with a major-league pout.

“Tough. This is what I do for a living,” I told him—meaning crime scene work, of course, and not the actual crime. “We have to leave the room without touching anything and go call the police.”

“We just wanna look; we won’t
touch
anything,” Astor said.

“No,” I said, pushing them toward the door. “Wait in the hall. I’ll just be a minute.”

They didn’t like it, not at all, but they went, trying all the way to get one more look at the thing on the foldout sofa. But I hustled them into the hall and shut the door and went to take a closer look of my own.

No one would ever have called Hood a handsome man, but as he was now he was positively repulsive. His tongue stuck out between the broken teeth, and the eye that wasn’t hanging out of the socket had gone red. This had clearly been the result of one tremendously powerful blow, and I didn’t think Hood had suffered for very long, which didn’t seem fair.

I knelt down beside the bed and looked underneath. There were no hastily dropped keys or monogrammed handkerchiefs to tell me who had done this, but they weren’t needed. I knew who had done it. But I still needed to know
how
. On the far side of the bed I saw something, and I went around to the other side and poked it out just far enough so I could see it. It was a large souvenir pirate hat, the kind with the black rubber eye patch molded onto it so it hangs down the front. Stuffed inside was a red bandanna. Even without touching it, I could see blood on the bandanna. A disguise for Hood? Probably to cover the wounds long enough to get him into the hotel.

I stood up and, just to be thorough, I went into the bedroom to see if anything was amiss. But everything looked fine—no one was lurking in the closet, Rita’s suitcase seemed undisturbed, and even my laptop was still sitting on the desk, apparently untouched. When I thought about it, that seemed a little odd. After all, Crowley boasted about his mastery of computer lore; why hadn’t he taken two minutes to look at my computer and learn my secrets?

And from somewhere deep inside Dexter’s Dungeon there came a soft flex of wings and a gently whispered answer:

Because he didn’t need to
.

I blinked. It was a painfully simple answer, and it made me feel stupider than I could ever remember feeling.

He didn’t need to learn my secrets.

He already knew them.

He had stayed a step ahead of me because he had
already
hacked into my hard drive, and every time I powered on to find his address or read my e-mail or make a hotel reservation, he was there with me. There were plenty of programs that could do that. The only question was how he had put it on my hard drive. I tried to remember if I had left my computer alone anyplace but home or work—I hadn’t. I never would. But, of course, you didn’t need to touch a computer to hack into it. With the right worm, wi-fi would work fine. And with that thought I remembered sitting in front of my computer and opening an e-mail pitching the new Web site “Tropical Blood.” There had been a burst of fancy flash graphics and then a slow crawl of blood—perfect for distracting me for just a moment while the program wormed onto my hard drive and started telling Crowley everything about me.

It made sense; I was sure I was right, and with two minutes on the computer I could know for sure—but a rapid pounding came on the door, followed by Astor’s muffled, anxious voice calling my name. I turned away from my computer. It didn’t matter. Even without finding Crowley’s worm, I knew it was there. Nothing else was possible.

The knocking came again, and I opened the door and went out into the hall. The two of them tried to peer around me and see Hood’s body, but I pulled the door closed.

“We just wanted one last look,” Astor said.

“No,” I said. “And that’s another thing. You have to pretend to be grossed out and scared. So people think you’re just ordinary kids.”

“Scared?”
Astor demanded. “Scared of what?”

“Scared of a dead body, and thinking that a killer was right here in your hotel room.”

“It’s a suite,” she said.

“So put on your frightened faces for the cops,” I said, and I got us all into the elevator. Luckily, there was a mirror in the elevator, and all the way down to the lobby they practiced looking scared. Neither one of them was completely convincing—it really does take years of practice—but I hoped nobody would notice.

I have been at hundreds of crime scenes in my career, and many of them were in hotels, so I was quite well aware that the management, generally speaking, does not consider dead bodies in the rooms a major selling point. They prefer to keep such things quiet, and in the spirit of polite cooperation, I went to the front desk and asked to see the manager.

The desk clerk was a nice-looking African-American woman. She smiled with genuine sympathy and said, “Of course, sir. Is there a problem?”

“There’s a dead body in our suite,” Astor said.

“Hush,” I told her.

The desk clerk’s smile twitched and then faded as she looked from me to Astor. “Are you sure about that, young lady?” she asked Astor.

I put a restraining hand on Astor. “I’m afraid so,” I told the clerk.

She just gaped for several seconds. “Oh, my God,” she said at last. “I mean …” She cleared her throat and then made a very visible effort to pull her official clerk face back together. “Wait right here,” she said
formally, and then she thought again and added, “I mean … please come with me?”

We followed her through the doorway behind the desk and waited while she called the manager. The manager arrived, and we waited some more while he called the police. And then we waited even longer while the police and local forensics team went up to our suite. A woman arrived and stared at us while she talked to the clerk. She seemed to be about forty-five, with graying hair, and loose skin hanging from her neck like crepe paper. She looked like she had been one of the party girls who came to Key West and hung out in the bars, until one day she woke up and realized the party was over and she had to get a real job. It didn’t seem to agree with her; she had a look of permanent disappointment etched onto her face, like there was a bad taste on her tongue and she couldn’t get rid of it.