“Well,” I said, “Bobby Acosta may not be guilty of anything.”
Debs showed me her teeth. It would have been a smile if she were not so clearly miserable. “He’s guilty as shit,” she said, and she held up the folder in her hand. “He’s got a record you wouldn’t believe—even without the stuff they blacked out when he was a minor.”
“A juvie record doesn’t make him guilty this time,” I said.
Deborah leaned forward, and for a moment I thought she was going to hit me with Bobby Acosta’s file. “The hell it doesn’t,” she said, and then, happily for me, she opened the file instead of swinging it at my head. “Assault. Assault with intent. Assault. Grand theft auto.” She looked up at me apologetically as she said “grand theft” and shrugged before dropping her eyes back to the folder. “Twice he was arrested because he was caught on the scene when somebody died in suspicious circumstances, and it should have been manslaughter at the very least, but both times his old man bought him out of trouble.” She closed the folder and slapped it with the back of her hand. “There’s a lot more,” she said. “But it all ends the same way, with blood on Bobby’s hands and his father bailing him out.” She shook her head. “This is one bad, fucked-up kid, Dexter. He’s killed at least two people, and there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that he knows where those girls are. If he hasn’t already killed them, too.”
I thought Debs was probably right. Not because a record of past crimes always meant present guilt—but I had felt a slow and sleepy stir of interest from the Passenger, a speculative raising of inner eyebrows as Deborah read from the file, and the old Dexter would very definitely have added the name of Bobby Acosta to his little black book of potential playmates. But of course, Dexter 2.0 didn’t do those things. Instead, I merely nodded sympathetically. “You may be right,” I said.
Deborah jerked her head up. “May be,” she said. “I am right. Bobby Acosta knows where those girls are, and I can’t fucking touch him because of his old man.”
“Well,” I said, acutely conscious of speaking a cliché but unable to think of anything else worth saying, “you really can’t fight city hall, you know.”
Deborah stared at me for a moment with an absolutely blank face. “Wow,” she said. “Did you think that up by yourself?”
“Well, come on, Debs,” I said, and I admit I was a little peevish. “You knew this would happen, and it happened, so why should it bother you?”
She blew out a long breath, and then folded her hands in her lap and looked down at them, which was somehow much worse than the snarling comeback I’d expected. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe it’s not just this.” She turned her hands over and looked at the back side. “Maybe it’s … I don’t know. Everything.”
If everything really was bothering my sister, it was much easier to understand her weary misery; being in charge of everything would be a crushing burden. But in my small experience with humans, I have learned that if someone says they are oppressed by everything, it usually means one small and very specific something. And in my sister’s case, even though she had always acted like she was in charge of everything, I thought this would hold true; some particular something was eating at her and making her act like this. And remembering what she had said about her live-in boyfriend, Kyle Chutsky, I thought that was probably it.
“Is it Chutsky?” I said.
Her head jerked up. “What. You mean does he beat me up? Is he cheating on me?”
“No, of course not,” I said, holding up a hand in case she decided to hit me. I knew he wouldn’t dare cheat on her—and the idea of anybody trying to beat up my sister was laughable. “It’s just what you were saying the other day. About, you know—tick-tock, bio clock?”
She drooped over again and looked at her hands in her lap. “Uh-huh. I said that, didn’t I,” she said. She shook her head slowly. “Well, it’s still true. And fucking Chutsky—he won’t even talk about it.”
I looked at my sister, and I admit that my feelings did me no credit, because my firs
t truly conscious reaction to Deb’s outpouring was to think, Wow! I really am feeling empathy with an actual human emotion! Because Deborah’s continuing descent into a soft pudding of self-pity had actually reached me, deep down on the brand-new human level recently opened by Lily Anne, and I found that I did not have to search my memory for a response from some old daytime drama. I really felt something, and that was very impressive to me.
So without actually thinking it through at all, I got up from my chair and went over to her. I put a hand on her shoulder and squeezed gently and said, “I’m sorry, sis. Is there anything I can do?”
And naturally enough, Deborah stiffened and slapped my hand away. She stood up and looked at me with something that was at least halfway back to her natural snarl. “For starters, you can stop acting like Father Flanagan,” she said. “Jesus, Dex. What’s got into you?”
And before I could utter a single syllable of completely logical rebuttal, she stalked out of my office and disappeared down the hall.
“Glad to help,” I said to her back.
Maybe I was just too new to having feelings to really understand them and act accordingly. Or maybe it was just going to take Debs a little time to get used to the new, compassionate Dexter. But it was starting to seem even more likely to me that some terribly wicked person or persons had put something sinister in the Miami water supply.
Just as I was getting ready to leave for the day, the weirdness went up one more notch. My cell phone rang and I glanced at it, saw that it was Rita, and answered. “Hello?” I said.
“Dexter, hi, um, it’s me,” she said.
“Of course it is,” I said encouragingly.
“Are you still at work?” she said.
“Just getting ready to leave.”
“Oh, good, because—I mean, if, instead of picking up Cody and Astor?” she said. “Because you don’t have to tonight.”
A quick mental translation told me that I didn’t have to pick up the kids for some reason. “Oh, why not?” I said.
“It’s just, they’re already gone,” she said, and for one terrible moment, as I struggled to understand what she meant, I thought that something awful had happened to them.