“Yeah, thanks,” she said, and then she frowned and shook her head. “Now if I can only make it through the next couple of days.”
It might have been that the painkillers were making her incoherent, but I didn’t know what she meant. “Is your arm painful?” I said.
“This?” she said, holding up the cast. “I’ve had worse.” She shrugged and then made a terrible face. “No. It’s Matthews,” she said. “Fucking reporters are making a big deal of it, and Matthews is ordering me to play along because it’s fucking great PR.” She sighed heavily, and Nicholas said, “Blat!” quite distinctly and hit his mother’s nose. She nuzzled him again and said, “I fucking hate that shit.”
“Oh. Of course,” I said, and now it made sense. Deborah was totally inept with public relations, departmental politics, routine ass kissing, and any aspect of police work that didn’t involve finding or shooting bad guys. If she’d been even half-good at dealing with people, she’d probably already be Division Chief at the least. But she wasn’t, and here she was again in the middle of a situation that called for fake smiles and bullshitting, two talents that were as alien to her as a Klingon mating dance. Clearly she needed a warning from someone who knew the steps. Since Nicholas couldn’t even say his own name, that left me.
“Well,” I said cautiously, “you’re probably going to be in the spotlight for a couple of days.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “Lucky me.”
“It wouldn’t hurt to play the game a little, Debs,” I said, and I admit that I was getting a little cranky now, too. “You know the right words: ‘The entire Miami-Dade team did outstanding work in their tireless effort to apprehend this suspect—’ ”
“Fuck it, Dex,” she snapped. “You know I can’t do that kind of crap. They want me to smile at the camera and tell the whole fucking world how great I am, and I never could do that shit and you know it.”
I did know it, but I also knew that she would have to try again, which meant she was probably in for a couple of rough days. But before I could think of something really smart to say on the subject, Nicholas began to bounce again and say, “Ba ba ba ba!” Deborah looked at him with a tired smile and then back at me. “Anyway, I’d better get my little buddy to bed. Thanks for picking him up, Dex.”
“Dexter’s Day Care,” I said. “We never close.”
“I’ll see you at work,” she said. “Thanks again.” And then she turned for the door. I had to open it for her, since she only had one good arm and that was full of Nicholas. “Thanks,” she said again—a third time in less than a minute, which was certainly a record for her.
Deborah trudged to her car, looking as tired as I had ever seen her, and I watched as Duarte climbed out from behind the wheel and opened the back door for her. She fumbled Nicholas into a car seat, and Duarte held the passenger door as she got in. Then he closed it, nodded to me, and climbed in behind the wheel.
I watched as they drove away. The whole world thought Debs was wonderful right now because they believed she had caught a dangerous killer, and all she wanted was to get on with catching the next one. I wished she could learn to exploit a moment like this, but I knew she never would. She was tough and smart and efficient, but she would never learn to lie with a straight face, which was a real killer for any career.
I also had a niggling little feeling that at some point in the next few days she would need a little PR skill, and since she didn’t have any, that would make it a case for the public relations firm of Dexter and Dexter, Spin Doctors to the Stars.
Naturally—it always ended up being my problem, no matter how much it actually wasn’t. I sighed, watched as Deborah’s car disappeared around the corner, and then I locked the door and went to bed.
TWELVE
THE MEDIA FRENZY THAT DEBORAH’S BIG ARREST GENERATED was bigger than anyone had anticipated, and for the next few days Deborah was a very reluctant rock star. She was deluged with requests for interviews and photographs, and even in the relative security of police headquarters she was not safe from people stopping her to tell her how wonderful she was. Of course, being Deborah, the attention did not please her. She turned down all the invitations from the media, and she tried very hard to disengage herself from the workplace well-wishers without showing them any actual hostility. She didn’t always succeed, but that was all right. It made the other cops think that, on top of being spectacular, she was modest, gruff, and impatient with bullshit—which was actually true, for the most part—and it added even more luster to the growing Morgan Legend.
And somehow, some of the shine even reflected onto me. I had helped Deborah solve her cases often enough, usually with my special insight into things as they really are—wicked, and quite happily so—and just as often I had been beaten, bullied, and battered in the process. Never once in all those times had I ever received so much as a casual pat of thanks on my bruised back—but now, the one time I had done absolutely nothing, I began to get credit. I had three requests for interviews from reporters who had suddenly come to believe that blood spatter was fascinating, and I was invited to submit an article to the Forensic Examiner.
I turned down the interviews, of course—I had worked very hard to keep my face out of public view and saw no reason to change now. But the attention continued; people stopped me to say nice things, shake my hand, and tell me what a good job I had done. And it was true enough; I usually do a very good job—I just hadn’t done it this time. But suddenly I was the target of far too much unwelcome attention. It was disconcerting, even annoying, and I found myself flinching when the phone rang, ducking as the door opened, and even chanting the classic mantra of the clueless: Why me?
Tragically, it was Vince Masuoka who finally answered that lame question. “Grasshopper,” he said, shaking his head wisely, on the morning when he overheard me turning down Miami Hoy for the third time. “When temple bell rings, crane must fly.”
“Yes, and one apple every eight hours keeps three doctors away,” I said. “So what?”
“So,” he said, with a sly semismile, “what did you expect?”
I looked at him and he smirked back; he seemed to have some actual point in mind, as much as he ever did, so I gave him a more or less serious answer. “What I expect,” I said, “is to be ignored and unrecognized, laboring on in solitude at my unique level of unmatchable excellence.”
He shook his head. “Then you gotta get a new agent,” he said. “Because your face is all over the blogosphere.”
“My what is where?” I said.
“Lookit,” Vince said. He scrabbled at the keyboard of his laptop for a moment, and then turned the screen to face me. “It’s you, Dexter,” he said. “A superman shot. Very studly.”
I looked at the screen and
had a moment of almost hallucinogenic disorientation. The computer showed a Web site with a red and dripping headline that said, “Miami Murder.” And under that was a photo of a male model in a heroic pose in front of the Torch of Friendship—at the scene where Officer Gunther’s body had been discovered. The model looked commanding, brilliant, and sexy—and he also looked an awful lot like me. In fact, to my astonishment, it was me, just as Vince had said. I was standing beside Deborah and pointing toward the waterfront, and she had an expression of eager compliance on her face. I had no idea how someone had managed to capture the two of us frozen in these completely uncharacteristic expressions, and somehow make me look so very studly in the process—but there it was. And even worse, the caption to the picture said, “Dexter Morgan—the real brains in the Cop-Hammer case!”
“It’s a really popular blog,” Vince said. “I can’t believe you haven’t seen this, ’cause everybody else in the world has.”
“And this is why everybody suddenly thinks I’m interesting?” I said.