His body had been dumped behind a small theater on Lincoln Road, beside a pile of old lumber and canvas and a barrel overflowing with plastic trash bags. And it lay on its back, rather theatrically, shirtless, with hands folded over chest and clutching the shaft of what looked to be a plain wooden stake, pounded into the approximate area of his heart.
His face was set in a tight mask of agony, presumably caused by the stake slamming through living skin and bone, but it was quite clearly Deke, even with the chunks of flesh gouged out from his face and arms, the teeth marks visible from ten feet away. And even I felt a small twinge of pity for the man as I stood and looked down on all that was left of my sister’s annoying and ridiculously handsome ex-partner.
“We found this,” Debs said, standing at my shoulder and holding up a plastic evidence bag with a sheet of plain white paper in it. There was a red-brown stain of dried blood on one corner, but I took the bag from her and looked: On the paper was written a short message, in a large and ornate font that could have come from any computer printer in the world. It said, He disagreed with someone who ate him.
“I didn’t realize cannibals were so clever,” I said. Deborah stared at me, and all the soft despair she had been fighting with lately seemed to settle on her face and begin to smolder.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s pretty funny. Especially to somebody like you who enjoys this kind of thing.”
“Debs,” I said, looking around me to see if anybody might have overheard. There was no one in immediate earshot, but judging by her face, I doubt she would have cared.
“Which is why I need you here now, Dexter,” she went on, and now there was definitely fire in her voice as it rose higher and louder. “Because I have run out of patience with this shit, and I have run out of partners—and Samantha Aldovar has run out of time and I need to fucking understand this shit—” She paused and took a deep, ragged breath before going on in a quieter tone. “So I can find these assholes and put them away.” She poked me in the chest with her finger and got even quieter, without losing any intensity. “And that is where you come in. You”—poke, poke—“put yourself into your trance, or talk to your spirit guide, or get your Ouija board, whatever it is you do”—and she poked me with each syllable—“and—you—do—it—now.”
“Deborah, really,” I said. “It isn’t that simple.” My sister was the only living person I had tried to talk to about my Dark Passenger, and I think she deliberately misunderstood my clumsy description of the whispered not-quite-voice that lurked in the basement just under consciousness. Of course, it had helped me in the past with some good guesses, but Debs apparently pictured it as some kind of dark Sherlock I could summon up at will.
“Make it that simple,” she said, and she turned away and walked back toward the yellow-tape perimeter.
Not terribly long ago I had thought of myself as lucky to have family. Now, in one night, I had been ignored by my wife and children, replaced by my brother, and shoved into a late-night session of impossible expectation by my sister. My loving family—I would have traded them all for one decent jelly doughnut.
Still, I really was on the spot, and I had to try. So I took a deep breath and tried to put away all my brand-new emotions. I laid down my kit and knelt beside the ravaged body of Deke Slater, looking carefully at the wounds on the face and arms, almost certainly caused by human teeth and showing some dried blood—which meant the wounds had been made while his heart was still pumping. Eaten alive.
There were traces of blood starting where the stake punctured the chest and running all over the exposed torso, indicating that he had also been alive briefly after they had pounded it in. Probably the blood had soaked his shirt, which was why they removed it. Or maybe they just liked his abs. That would explain why several mouthfuls of them were missing.
Around the teeth marks on the stomach wounds there was a faint brown stain: I didn’t think it was blood, and after a moment I remembered the stuff we had found in the Everglades. The party drink, made of ecstasy and salvia. I reached behind me and got some collection tools out of my kit, swabbing carefully at the brown spots and then placing the swab in an evidence bag.
I looked higher, up by the chest wound, and then to the hands gripping tightly around the wooden stake: not a lot to see there. A plain piece of wood that could have come from anywhere. Under several of the visible fingernails I could see something dark, possibly collected in a struggle—and as I looked and tried to analyze it by sight, I realized I was behaving exactly like Dark Sherlock, and it was a waste of time. The rest of the forensics team would swoop in and do all this better than I could hope to do with the naked eye. What I needed and what Deborah expected from me was one of my special insights into the twisted and wicked minds that had come up with this particular way to kill Deke. Always before I had been able to see these things a little clearer than the
others in forensics, because I was twisted and wicked myself.
But now? Now that I had reformed, changed into Dex-Daddy? Ignored and even snubbed the Passenger? Could I still do it?
I didn’t know if I could, and I didn’t really want to find out, but it seemed like my sister had left me no choice—just like in every other situation involving family, my options were limited to either impossible or unpleasant.
So I closed my eyes and listened, waited for the sly whispered hint.
Nothing. Not a leathery rustle of wings, not a suggestion of offended disregard, not even an almost-syllable of huffish dismissal. The Passenger was as silent as if it had never been there at all.
Oh, come on, I said silently to the place where it lived. You’re just sulking.
There was at last a ruffle of aloof disregard, as if I were not worth answering.
Please …? I thought at it.
For a moment there was no response, and then I quite clearly almost heard a kind of reptilian Hmmph, a reordering of wings, and then a snide echo of my own voice right back at me—And stay away—and then silence, as if it had hung up on me.
I opened my eyes. Deke was still dead, and I had no more idea about how and why than I’d had before my mini-séance. And quite clearly, if I was going to come up with any kind of idea, I was going to have to do it alone.
I looked around. Deborah was standing behind me about thirty feet away and she stared back at me with angry expectation. I had nothing to tell her, and although I did not know what she might do when I told her that, I had a feeling that we were beyond arm-punch territory into something new and potentially much more painful.
All right, then: Scientific forensics was for the others, there was no time for diligence, and the Passenger was on huffy hiatus—that left dumb luck. I looked around the body. There were no telltale footprints from tailor-made left-handed shoes, nobody had dropped a one-of-a-kind matchbook or a business card, and Deke had apparently not scrawled the name of his killer in blood. I looked further around, and at last something caught my eye. In the heap of plastic trash bags overflowing the garbage can by the door, all of the bags were semitransparent yellowish brown industrial garbage bags. But one of them, shoved into the pile halfway down, was white.
It almost certainly meant nothing: Probably the cleaning service had run out of the other bags, or somebody brought their garbage from home. Still, if I was really relying on luck, I might as well roll the dice. I stood up, trying to remember the name of the old Roman goddess of chance—Fortuna? It didn’t matter. I was quite sure she only spoke Latin, and I didn’t.
I approached the garbage pile carefully, not wanting to disturb any potential evidence that might be lying on the ground, and I crouched again, putting my face a few inches from the white bag. It was smaller than the others, too, a standard kitchen trash bag that anybody might use at home. Even more interesting, it was much less than half-full. Why would anybody throw away a bag of trash that close to empty? At the end of a business day, maybe—but this one was shoved in under three or four others; it had either come out at the same time only part-full … or somebody had shoved it into the pile later. And why not just drop it on top of the heap? Because somebody in a hurry wanted to hide this bag, and had done a half-assed rush job.
I took a ballpoint pen from my pocket and poked at the bag with the blunt end. Whatever was inside was soft, yielding—fabric? I pushed a little harder and the inside of the plastic bag came up against something, close enough so that I could just see dark red blotches on whatever was inside, and I shuddered involuntarily. It was blood; I was certain. And even though it was not really one of my Passenger-driven hunches, I was reasonably sure the blood had not come from someone inside the theater cutting their finger on the popcorn machine.
I stood up and looked for my sister. She was in the same place, still glaring at me. “Deborah?” I called. “Come look at this.”