“What about them?” I said. “I didn’t take them, and I don’t see what you think they mean.”
“I’m just saying they mean a lot to a brainless shit-bag like Hood—and he’s going to run with it, and he might even make it stick,” she went on, recklessly mixing her metaphors. “It’s perfect for him—married guy bangs chick at work, then kills her to keep his wife from finding out.”
“That’s what you think?” I said.
“I’m just saying,” she said. “I mean, you gotta see how it would look like that. It’s totally believable.”
“It’s totally unbelievable to anybody who knows me,” I said. “That’s just completely … How can you even think that for a second?” And I was actually feeling authentic human emotions of hurt, betrayal, and outrage. Because for once, I was totally innocent—but even my very own sister didn’t seem to believe that I was.
“All right, Jesus,” she said. “I’m just saying, you know.”
“You’re just saying I’m up Shit Creek and you won’t hand me a paddle?” I said.
“Come on,” she said, and to her great credit she squirmed uncomfortably.
“You’re saying you want to
know if it’s all right if they arrest your brother,” I said, because I can be relentless, too. “Because you know he’s secretly the kind of guy who smashes his coworkers with a hammer?”
“Dexter, for fuck’s sake!” she said. “I’m sorry, okay?”
I looked at her another second, but she actually did seem sorry, and she wasn’t reaching for her cuffs, so I just said, “Okay.”
Deborah cleared her throat, looked away for a moment, then looked back at me. “So you never banged Camilla,” she said, and with a little more conviction she added, “And you totally never beat anybody to death with a hammer.”
“Not yet,” I said, with just a touch of warning.
“Fine,” she said, holding up her good hand, as if she wanted to make sure she was ready if I really did try to smack her with a hammer.
“And seriously,” I said. “Why would anybody want even one picture of me?”
Deborah opened her mouth, closed it again, and then looked like she’d thought of something funny, although I certainly didn’t see anything to laugh about. “You really don’t know?” she said.
“Know what, Debs?” I said. “Come on.”
She still seemed to think something was comical. But she shook her head and said, “All right. You don’t know. Shit.” She smiled and said, “I shouldn’t be the one to tell you, your sister, but hey.” She shrugged. “You’re a good-looking guy, Dexter.”
“Thank you, you’re not so bad yourself,” I said. “What’s that got to do with anything?”
“Dexter, for Christ’s sake, don’t be dense,” she said. “Camilla had a crush on you, asshole.”
“On me?” I said. “A crush? Like, a romantic infatuation crush?”
“Shit, yeah, for years. Everybody knew about it,” Deborah said.
“Everybody but me.”
“Yeah, well,” she said, shrugging. “But all those pictures, it looks more like a total obsession.”
I shook my head, as if I could make the idea go away. I mean, I don’t pretend to understand the clinically insane human race, but this was a bit much. “That’s crazy,” I said. “I’m married.”
Apparently that was a funny thing to say. In any case, it was funny to Deborah; she snorted with amusement. “Yeah, well, getting married didn’t make you ugly,” she said. “Not yet, anyway.”
I thought about Camilla and how she had behaved toward me over the years. Just recently, while we were working on the site where Officer Gunther’s body had been dumped, she had taken a picture of me, and then stammered out something lame and incoherent about the flash when I looked at her. Maybe her inability to speak in complete sentences only happened when she was in my presence. And it was true that she had blushed every time she saw me—and come to think of it, she had tried to kiss me in a drunken stupor at my bachelor party, instead only managing to pass out at my feet. Did all this add up to a secret obsession with little old me? And if so, how did a crush get her crushed?
I have always prided myself on my ability to see things as they really are, without any of the hundreds of emotional filters humans put between themselves and the facts. So I made a conscious effort to clear away the bad air, real and metaphorical, that Hood had left behind. Fact one: Camilla was dead. Two: She had been killed in a very unusual way—and that was actually more important than fact one, because it was an imitation of what had been done to Gunther and Klein. Why would somebody do that?
First, it made Deborah look bad. There were people who would want that, but they were either in jail or busy running a murder investigation. But it also made me look bad—and that was more to the point. My Witness had made the threat, and then Camilla turned up dead and I was the main suspect.