It was a terribly sad state of affairs, and I let the self-pity wash over me for a few minutes. Dexter in the Dumps, an absurd figure. I, who had sent dozens of the deserving into the afterlife, was now mourning the loss of one insignificant girl, and merely because whoever killed her had not wasted the meat.
Preposterous; and in any case, the mighty machine that was me needed some kind of fuel. So I brushed away the unhappy thoughts and trudged down the hall to the vending machines. Looking through the glass at the meager selection of snack foods brought me no joy, either. At the hospital a Snickers bar had seemed like manna from heaven. Now it looked like punishment. Nothing else called out to me and promised fulfillment, either. In spite of all the bright wrappers and gleeful slogans, all I could see was a case filled with preservatives and chemically enhanced colors. It was all artificially flavored with genuine synthetic replicas, and it seemed about as appetizing as eating a chemistry set.
But duty called, and I needed to eat something to function at the necessary high level. So I settled on the least offensive choice—crackers with a substance in the middle that claimed to be peanut butter. I fed in some money and pushed the button. The crackers dropped out into the tray, and as I bent to pick them up a small and shadowy figure in the dark basement of Castle Dexter opened a door and stuck its head out. I froze for a moment in the bent-over position and listened. I heard nothing except the silken fluttering of a tiny warning flag, that things were not what they should be, and I stood up slowly and carefully and turned around.
There was nothing at all behind me: no maniac with a knife, no semi truck careening toward me out of control, no turbaned giant with an assegai—nothing. Still, the small voice whispered at me to beware.
Clearly, the Passenger was playing with me. Perhaps it was miffed at me for failing to feed and exercise it. “Just shut up,” I told it. “Go away and leave me alone.” It continued to smirk at me, so I ignored it and stepped into the hall.
And
I walked almost directly into Sergeant Doakes—or most of him, anyway.
Doakes had always hated me, even before a crazed doctor had cut away his hands, feet, and tongue when I had failed to rescue him. I mean, I had tried—really—but things had just not worked out, and as a direct consequence Doakes had lost a few overrated body parts. But even before that, he had hated me because, out of all the cops I had ever met, he was the only one who suspected what I was. I had given him no reason and no evidence, but somehow he just knew.
And now he stood there on his artificial feet, glaring at me with all the venom of a thousand cobras. For a moment I wished that the mad doctor had taken away his eyes, too, but I quickly realized that this was an unkind thought, unsuitable for the new and human me, so I put it out of my mind and instead gave him a friendly smile. “Sergeant Doakes,” I said. “It’s good to see you, and moving around so well, too.”
Doakes did nothing at all, just kept looking at me, and I looked down at the silvery metallic claws that had replaced his hands. He was not carrying the small notebook-size speech box he used to talk—possibly he wanted both claws free to strangle me, or more likely, he planned to use the vending machines, too. And since he no longer had a tongue, his attempts at speech without the synthesizer were so embarrassing, filled with “ngah” sounds and so on, that he probably didn’t want to risk looking silly. So he just stared at me for a moment, until finally the anticipation of a sprightly encounter withered away within me.
“Well,” I said, “it’s been very nice speaking with you. Have a lovely day.” I walked away toward my lab, turning back to look only once. Doakes was still watching me with his poisonous stare.
I told you so, gloated the soft voice of the Passenger, but I just waved at Doakes and went back to the lab.
When Vince and the others got back around three, the taste of the crackers was still lingering unpleasantly in the back of my mouth.
“Wow,” Vince said as he came in and dropped his bag on the floor. “I think I got a sunburn.”
“What did you do about lunch?” I asked him.
He blinked as if I’d asked a crazy question, and maybe I had. “One of the cops drove back to a Burger King,” he said. “Why?”
“You didn’t lose your appetite thinking about that girl being roasted and eaten right there?”
Vince looked even more astonished. “No,” he said, shaking his head slowly, “I had a double Whopper with cheese, and fries. Are you okay?”
“I’m just hungry,” I said, and he looked at me a moment longer, so rather than sit through a staring contest, I turned away and went back to work.
SIXTEEN
THE TELEPHONE WOKE ME UP WHILE IT WAS STILL DARK, and I rolled over to look at the clock radio beside the bed. It said 4:47 in obnoxiously cheerful digits. I’d had just over twenty minutes of real sleep since the last time Lily Anne had cried, and I did not appreciate the wake-up call. But hoping against hope that the ringing would not reawaken her, I grabbed at the telephone. “Hello,” I said.
“I need you here early,” declared the voice of my sister. She did not sound at all tired, in spite of the hour, and I found that just as annoying as being wakened at this dreadful time of night.
“Deborah,” I said, the hoarseness of sleep still in my throat, “it’s another two and a half hours until early.”
“We matched up your DNA sample,” she said, ignoring what was really a pretty clever remark, considering the hour. “It’s Tyler Spanos.”
I blinked rapidly a few times, trying to bring my brain into some kind of state that approached wakefulness. “The girl in the Everglades?” I said. “That was Tyler Spanos? Not Samantha Aldovar?”
“Yeah,” she said. “So this morning they’re setting up a task force. Chambers is coordinating, but I got lead investigator.” And I could hear the excitement in her voice as she said it.
“That’s great,” I said, “but why do you need me early?”
She dropped her voice as if she was afraid someone would hear her. “I need your help, Dex,” she said. “This is turning into a huge thing and I can’t fuck it up. And it’s getting, you know. Political.” She cleared her throat slightly, sounding a little bit like Captain Matthews. “So I got you down to lead Forensics on the task force.”
“I have to take the kids to school,” I protested, and beside me I heard a soft rustling.
Rita’s hand came down on my arm, and she said, “I can take the kids.”