Life was good; fatherhood was once more a wonderful adventure.
I stood up and faced Doakes with great good cheer. “I know it’s toxic,” I said. “And it probably breaks several city ordinances, too.” I held out my hand for the bag. “But I beg you, Sergeant, don’t arrest me. I promise to throw it away properly.”
Doakes turned his eyes away from the diaper and onto me, and he looked at me with an expression of loathing and rage so powerful that for just a moment it overpowered the open diaper bag. Then he very carefully said, “Nguggermukker,” and opened the claw holding the bag. It dropped to the pavement, and a moment later the diaper he held in the other claw flopped down beside it.
“Nguggermukker?” I said brightly. “Is that Dutch?” But Doakes just grabbed his silver voice box from the roof of the car, turned away from me and the dirty diapers, and stomped away across the parking lot on his two artificial feet.
I felt utter and complete relief as I watched him go, and when he vanished at the far end of the parking lot I took a deep, relaxing breath—which was a very big mistake, considering what lay at my feet. Coughing slightly, and blinking away the tears, I bent down and pushed the diaper back into the bag, twisted the bag closed, and carried it to the Dumpster.
It was one-thirty in the afternoon by the time I finally got to my desk. I fiddled with a few lab reports, ran a routine test on the spectrometer, and suffered through a cup of truly despicable coffee while the hands on the clock trudged ’round the dial to four-thirty. And just when I thought I had made it safely all the way through my first day back from bondage, Deborah walked in with a horrible expression on her face. I could not read it, but I knew that something had gone terribly wrong, and it seemed to be something she was taking rather personally. And because I have known Deborah my whole life and I knew how her mind worked, I assumed it meant trouble for Dexter.
“Good afternoon,” I said brightly, in the hope that if I was cheerful enough the problem would go away, whatever it was. It didn’t, of course.
“Samantha Aldovar,” my sister said, looking straight through me, and all my anxiety from the night before washed over me, and I knew that Samantha had talked already and Deborah was here to arrest me. My irritation with the girl went up several notches; she couldn’t even wait a decent interval for me to come up with some kind of airtight excuse. It was as if her tongue was spring-loaded and had to burst out into furious activity the moment she took her first free breath. She had probably been babbling about me before the front door of her house even swung shut, and now it was all over for me. I was finished, washed up, completely—and with no pun intended—screwed. I was immediately filled with apprehension, alarm, and bitterness. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned discretion?
Still, it was done, and there was nothing left for Dexter except to face the music and pay the piper. So taking a deep breath, I looked it square in the face and did so. “It wasn’t my fault,” I said to Deborah, and I began to gather my soggy wits for Stage One of Dexter’s Defense.
But Deborah blinked, and a small frown of confusion crept into the bleakness on her face. “What the fuck do you mean, it’s not your fault?” she said. “Who said anything about—How could it possibly be your fault?”
Once again, I had the sensation that everyone else was working off a fully rehearsed script, and I was being asked to improvise. “I just meant—nothing,” I said, hoping for a clue on what my line was supposed to be.
“Jesus fuck,?
? she said. “Why is everything always about you?”
I suppose I could have said, Because somehow I am always in the middle of it, usually unwilling, and usually because you have pushed me there, but cooler heads prevailed. “I’m sorry,” I said. “What’s wrong, Debs?”
She stared at me a little longer, and then shook her head and slumped down in the chair beside my desk. “Samantha Aldovar,” she repeated. “She’s gone again.”
Sometimes I think it is a very good thing that I have had so many years of practice at showing only what I want to show on my face, and this was absolutely one of those times, because my first impulse was to shout, Whoopee! Good girl! and burst into lighthearted song. And so it was quite possibly one of the greatest demonstrations of acting skill our age has yet seen when I managed instead to look shocked and concerned. “You’re kidding,” I said, thinking, I really hope you’re not kidding.
“She stayed home from school today, resting,” Deborah said. “I mean, she went through an awful lot.” It apparently didn’t occur to my sister that I had gone through even more, but nobody’s perfect. “So around two o’clock, her mother went out to the store,” she said. “And she comes back a little while ago, and Samantha was gone.” Deborah shook her head. “She left a note: ‘Don’t look for me; I’m not coming back.’ She ran, Dex. She took off and ran.”
I was feeling so much better that I actually managed to fight down the impulse to say, I told you so. After all, Debs had refused to believe me when I told her Samantha had gone into cannibal captivity willingly, even eagerly, the first time. And since I was right about that, it made perfect sense that she would take off again at the first opportunity. It was not a terribly noble thought, but I hoped she found a good hiding place.
Deborah sighed heavily and shook her head again. “I never heard of Stockholm syndrome so strong the victim ran back to the bad guys,” she said.
“Debs,” I said, and now I really couldn’t help it, “I told you. It’s not Stockholm. Samantha wants to be eaten. It was her fantasy.”
“That’s bullshit,” she said angrily. “Nobody wants that.”
“Then why did she run away again?” I said, and she just shook her head and looked down at her hands.
“I don’t know,” she said. She stared at her hands where they lay in her lap, as if the answer might be written on her knuckles, and then she straightened up. “It doesn’t matter,” she said. “What matters is where she went.” She looked up at me. “So where would she go, Dex?”
To be honest, I didn’t really care where Samantha went, as long as she stayed there. Still, I had to say something.
“What about Bobby Acosta?” I said, and it made sense. “Did you find him yet?”
“No,” she said, very grumpy, and she shrugged. “He can’t stay lost forever,” she said. “We’re bringing way too much heat. Besides,” she said, and she raised both palms, “his family has money, and political clout, and they’re gonna figure they can get him off.”
“Can they?” I asked.
Deborah looked at her knuckles “Maybe,” she said. “Fuck. Yeah, probably. We got witnesses who can connect him to Tyler Spanos’s car—but a good lawyer could chop up those two Haitians in two seconds on the stand. And he ran from me—but that’s not much, either. The rest is guesswork and hearsay so far, and—Shit, yeah, I guess he could walk.” She nodded to herself and looked at her hands again. “Yeah, sure, Bobby Acosta will walk,” she said softly. “Again. And then nobody goes down for this.…” She studied her knuckles again, and then looked up at me, and her face was wearing an expression unlike anything I had ever seen before.
“What is it?” I said.
Deborah bit her lip. “Maybe,” she said. She looked away. “I don’t know.” She looked back at me and took a deep breath. “Maybe there’s something, you know,” she said. “Something you could do about it.”