I thought them for a few minutes, but I didn’t come up with anything more profound than the realization that I was hungry, and there was nothing for me to eat here. There was also nothing for me to do; no blood spatter at all, and the other geeks from Forensics had things well in hand.
I turned away from Gunther’s body and looked around the perimeter. The usual crowd of casual ghouls was still there, standing in back of the tape in a jostling bunch as if they were waiting to get into a rock concert. They were staring at the body and, to their credit, one or two of them actually tried very hard to look horrified as they craned their necks to see. Of course, most of the others made up for it by leaning forward over the tape to get a better picture with their cell phones. Soon the pictures of Officer Gunther’s smooshed corpse would be all over the Web, and the whole world could join together and pretend to be appalled and dismayed in perfect harmony. Isn’t technology wonderful?
I hung around and made helpful suggestions for a little while longer, but as usual, no one seemed to care about my thoughtful insights; real expertise is never appreciated. People would always rather muddle along in their own dim, blundering way than have someone else point out where they were going wrong—even if that other person is clearly brighter.
And so it was that at an hour depressingly far beyond lunchtime, an underappreciated and underutilized Dexter finally got bored enough to hitch a ride back to the land of real work waiting for me in my little cubbyhole. I found a friendly cop who was headed that way. He just wanted to talk about fishing, and since I do know something about that, we got along very nicely. He was even willing to make a quick stop along the way for some Chinese takeout, which was certainly a very chummy gesture, and in gratitude I paid for his order of shrimp lo mein.
By the time I said good-bye to my new BFF and sat down at my desk with my fragrant lunch, I was beginning to feel like there might be some actual point to this patchwork quilt of humiliation and suffering we call Life. The hot-and-sour soup was very good, the dumplings were tender and juicy, and the kung pao was hot enough to make me sweat. I caught myself feeling rather contented as I finished eating, and I wondered why. Could I really be so shallow that the simple act of eating a good lunch made me happy? Or was something deeper and more sinister at work here? Perhaps it was the MSG in the food, attacking the pleasure center in my brain and forcing me to feel good against my will.
Whatever it was, it was a relief to be out of the dark clouds that had been clustered around my head for the past few weeks. It was true that I had some legitimate worries, but I had been wallowing in them a little too much. Apparently, however, one meal of good Chinese food had cured me. I actually caught myself humming as I tossed the empty containers into the trash, a very surprising development for me. Was this real human happiness? From a dumpling? Perhaps I should notify some national mental health organization: Kung pao chicken works better than Zoloft. There might be a Nobel Prize waiting for me for this. Or at least a letter of thanks from China.
Whatever my lighthearted mood was really all about, it lasted almost until quitting time. I had gone down to the evidence room to return a few samples I’d been working with, and when I came back to my little cubbyhole I found a large and unpleasant surprise waiting for me.
My surprise was about five feet, ten inches, two hundred pounds of African-American anger, and it looked more like an exceptionally sinister insect than a human being. He was perched on two shiny prosthetic feet, and one of the metal claws he had for hands was doing something to my computer as I walked in.
“Why, Sergeant Doakes,” I said, with as much pleasantness as I could fake. “Do you need help logging onto Facebook?”
He jerked around to face me, clearly not expecting me to catch him snooping. “Nyuk ookig,” he said quite clearly; the same amateur surgeon who had removed his hands and feet had taken out his tongue, too, and having a pleasant conversation with the man had become nearly impossible.
Of course, it had never been easy; he had always hated me, always suspected what I was. I had never given him any reason to doubt my carefully manufactured innocence, but doubt it he did, and always had—even before I had failed to rescue him from his unfortunate surgery. I had tried, really I had: It just hadn’t quite worked out. To be fair to me, which is very important, I did get most of him back safely. But now he blamed me for the amputations as well as many other unspecified acts. And here he was at my computer, and he was “Nyuk ookig.”
“Nyuk?” I repeated brightly. “Really? Are you a fan of the Three Stooges, Sergeant? I never knew. Nyuk nyuk nyuk!”
He glared at me with even more venom, which added up to an impressive amount, and he reached down to the desk for the small notebook-size artificial-speech device he carried around. He punched in something, and the machine called out in its cheerful baritone, “Just! Looking!”
“Of course you are!” I said, with real synthetic good cheer, trying to match the bizarre happiness of his voice machine. “And no doubt doing a wonderful job of it! But unfortunately, you are accidentally looking on my private computer, in my private space, and technically speaking, that’s kind of against the rules.”
He glared at me some more; really, the man had become completely one-note. Without taking his eyes off me he punched in something new on his speech machine and after a moment it called out, in its unlikely and happy voice, “I will! Get! You! Someday! Maa-ther. Fucker!”
“I’m sure you will,” I said soothingly. “But you’ll have to do it on your own computer.” I smiled at him, just to show there were no hard feelings, and pointed in the direction of the door. “So if you don’t mind?”
He pulled a large breath of air in through his nostrils, and then hissed it out again through his teeth, all without blinking, and then he tucked the speech machine under his arm and stomped out of my office, taking the tatters of my good mood with him.
And now I had another reason for uneasiness. Why had Sergeant Doakes been looking on my computer? Obviously, he thought there was something incriminating to find—but what? And why now, on my computer, of all things? There could be absolutely no legitimate reason for him to look at my computer. I was reasonably sure he had no knowledge of or interest in IT. Since the loss of his limbs he had been given a desk job out of pity, so he could serve out his last few years and qualify for a full pension. He’d been working at some kind of useless administrative thing in Human Resources; I didn’t really know or care what.
So he had been here, in my space, on my computer, strictly as a part of his private program to Demolish Dexter—but right here at work? Why? As far as I knew, he had always confined his attempts to “get” me to general surveillance, and he had never actually snooped through my things before. What had brought on this new and unwelcome escalation? Had he finally slipped over the line into a kind of hostile insanity, permanently focused on me? Or did he really have some reason to think he was onto something specific, and he had a chance to prove me guilty?
It seemed impossible, on the face of it. I mean, of course I really am guilty, of many somethings, all of them lethal and very enjoyable and technically not quite legal. But I was extremely careful, I always cleaned up nicely afterward, and I could not imagine what Doakes thought he might come up with. I was fairly sure that there was nothing there to find.
It was puzzling, and very unsettling. But at least it jolted me out of my stupid good cheer and back into gene
ral gloominess again. So much for Chinese food: Half an hour later you’re grumpy again.
Deborah, however, was even grumpier when she slouched into my office as I was getting ready to go home.
“You took off early,” she said, “from the Torch.” And she made it sound like she was accusing me of stealing office supplies.
“I had to go to work,” I said, and I did what I could to match her surly tone.
She blinked. “What the hell has gotten into you lately?” she said. I took a breath, more to stall for time than because I needed air. “What do you mean?”
She pursed her lips, cocked her head to one side. “You’re jumpy all the time. You snap at people. Maybe a little distracted? I don’t know. Like something’s bothering you.”
It was a very uncomfortable moment for me. She was right, of course, but how much could I tell her? Something was bothering me; I was convinced that someone had seen me and recognized me, and now I had caught Sergeant Doakes looking at my computer. It was nearly impossible to connect the two things in any way—the idea of some anonymous witness to Me at Play teaming up with Doakes to get me was ludicrous—but taken together, the two separate things had knocked me for a very uneasy loop. I was in the grip of illogical emotions, and I was not used to that at all.
But what could I say to her? Debs and I had always been close, of course, but that was partly because we didn’t share our feelings with each other. We couldn’t; I didn’t have any, and she was too ashamed of hers to admit she had them.
Still, I had to say something, and when I thought about it, she was probably the only one in the world I could really talk to, unless I was willing to shell out a hundred dollars an hour to talk to a shrink, which seemed like a very bad idea; I would either have to tell him the truth about myself, which was unthinkable, or make up some plausible fiction, which was certainly a waste of good money that might be put toward Lily Anne’s medical school tuition.