Debs stared at him without expression. “It’s too late now,” she said, and she turned away, back to the blob in the Crown Vic. “Dexter,” she called over her shoulder.
I suppose I should have known it was coming. My sister always assumed that I would have some kind of mystical insight into a crime scene. She was convinced that I would know instantly all about the sick and murderous freaks we encountered after one quick glance at their handiwork, merely because I was a sick and murderous freak myself. And so every time she was faced with an impossibly grotesque killing, she expected me to provide the name, location, and social security number of the killer. Quite often I did, guided by the soft voice of my Dark Passenger and a thorough understanding of my craft. But this time I had nothing for her.
Somewhat reluctantly, I sloshed over to stand beside Deborah. I hated to disappoint my only sister, but I had nothing to say about this. It was so savage, brutal, and unpleasant that even the Passenger had pursed its glove-leather lips with disapproval.
“What do you think?” Deborah said to me, lowering her voice to encourage me to speak frankly.
“Well,” I said, “whoever did this is off-the-charts insane.”
She stared at me as if waiting for more, and when it was clear that no more was coming, she shook her head. “No shit,” she said. “You figured that out by yourself?”
“Yes,” I said, thoroughly annoyed. “And after only one quick glance through the window. In the rain. Come on, Debs, we don’t even know yet if that’s really Klein.”
Deborah stared inside the car. “It’s him,” she said.
I wiped a small tributary of the Mississippi River off my forehead and looked into the car. I could not even say for sure that the thing inside had ever been a human being, but my sister sounded quite positive that this amorphous glob was Detective Klein. I shrugged, which naturally sent a sheet of water down my neck. “How can you be sure?”
She nodded at one end of the lump. “The bald spot,” she said. “That’s Marty’s bald spot.”
I looked again. The body lay across the car’s seat like a cold pudding, neatly arranged and apparently intact, unpunctured. There were no visible breaks in the skin and no apparent blood spill, and yet the pounding Klein had taken was total, terrible. The top of the skull was perhaps the only part of the body that had not been shattered, probably to avoid ending Klein’s life too quickly. And sure enough, the fringe of greasy hair around the bright pink circle of bare skin did look a lot like what I remembered about Klein’s bald spot. I would not have sworn an oath that it truly was, but I was not a real detective like my sister. “Is this a girl thing?” I asked her, and I admit I said it only because I was wet, hungry, and annoyed. “You can tell people apart by their hair?”
She glanced at me, and for one terrifying moment I thought I had gone too far and she was going to attack my biceps with one of her ferocious arm punches. But instead, she looked over to the rest of the group from Forensics, pointed at the car, and said, “Open it up.”
I stood in the rain and watched as they did. A shudder seemed to go through the whole group of watchers as the car door swung open; this was a cop who had died this way, one of us, so terribly hammered into oblivion, and all of the watching cops took this as a very personal affront. But worse than that, somehow we were all quite sure it would happen again, to another one of us. Sometime soon, this frightful pounding would fall once more on one of our small tribe, and we could not know who, or when, only that it was coming—
It was the dark of the moon, and a dark time for Dexter; there was dread spreading through the ranks of all Miami cops, and in spite of all this fearsome unease Dexter stood dripping and thinking only one dark thought:
I missed my dinner.
FOUR
IT WAS PAST TEN WHEN I FINISHED, AND I FELT AS IF I HAD been standing underwater for the last four hours. Even so, it seemed like a shame to head for home without checking some of the names on my list. So I cruised slowly past two of the more distant addresses that were more or less on my way. The first car was parked right in front of the house; its trunk was unblemished and I drove past.
The second car was under a carport, hidden by shadows, and I could not see the trunk. I slowed to a crawl, and then nosed into the driveway as if I was lost and merely turning around. There was something on the trunk—but as my lights hit it, it moved, and the fattest cat I had ever seen raced away into the night. I turned the car around and drove home.
It was past eleven when I parked in front of my house. The light was on over the front door, and I got out of my car and stood just outside the small circle of light it cast. The rain had finally stopped, but there was still a low bank of dark clouds filling the sky, and it reminded me of the night almost two weeks ago when I had been seen, and an echo of unease clattered through me. I stared up at the clouds, but they did not seem intimidated. We made you wet, they sneered, and you’re standing there like a schmuck while your whole body puckers.
It was true. I locked my car and went inside.
The house was relatively quiet, since it was a school night. Cody and Astor were asleep, and the late news muttered softly from the TV. Rita dozed on the couch with Lily Anne tucked o
nto her lap. Rita did not wake up when I came in, but Lily Anne looked up at me with bright and wide-awake eyes. “Da,” she said. “Da da da!”
She recognized me right away, a brilliant girl. I felt a few of the interior clouds roll away as I looked at her happy little face. “Lily-willy,” I replied with all the great seriousness required for the occasion, and she chortled back.
“Oh!” Rita said, jerking awake and blinking at me. “Dexter—are you home? I didn’t,” she said. “I mean, you’re out so late. Again.”
“Sorry,” I said. “All part of the job.”
She looked at me for a long moment, doing no more than blinking, and then she shook her head. “You’re soaking wet,” she said.
“It was raining,” I told her.
She blinked a few more times. “It stopped raining an hour ago,” she said.
I couldn’t see why that mattered, but I am full of polite clichés, so I just said, “Well, it just goes to show.”
“Oh,” Rita said. She looked at me thoughtfully again and I began to feel a little self-conscious. But she finally sighed and shook her head. “Well,” she said, “you must be very— Oh. Your dinner. It was getting so— Are you hungry?”