“Really,” I said.
“Just stay cool for a couple of days,” my sister said with complete conviction. “It can’t get any worse.”
TWENTY-ONE
IF WE ARE CAPABLE OF LEARNING ANYTHING AT ALL IN THIS life, we very quickly discover that anytime somebody is absolutely certain about something, they are almost always absolutely wrong, too. And the present case was no exception. My sister is a very good detective and an excellent pistol shot, and I’m sure she has several other praiseworthy qualities—but if she ever has to make a living as a fortune-teller, she will starve to death. Because her words of reassurance, It can’t get any worse, were still echoing in my ears when I discovered that actually, things could get worse by a great deal, and they already had.
Things were not great to start with: I had crawled through the entire rest of the day at work with everyone avoiding me, which is much more difficult than it sounds, and it resulted in several moments of classic comedy, as people scrambled to escape my presence while pretending that they hadn’t seen me. For some reason, however, I had a bit of difficulty in appreciating the comic effect, and by six minutes of five o’clock I was feeling more worn-down than I should have as I slumped into my chair to watch the clock tick away the last few minutes of my career, and possibly my liberty.
I heard a noise in the lab and turned to watch as Vince Masuoka came in, saw me, and stopped dead. “Oh,” he said. “I forgot, um.” And he spun around and raced out the door. Clearly, what he forgot was that I might still be there and he would have to say something to a coworker under investigation for the murder of another coworker, and for someone like Vince that would have been too uncomfortable.
I heard myself sigh heavily, and I wondered if this was really how it all ended; framed by a brainless thug, shunned by my colleagues, stalked by a whining computer nerd who couldn’t even make it in minor-league baseball. It was well beyond ignoble, and very sad—I’d shown such tremendous early progress, too.
The clock ticked; two minutes of five. I might as well get my things together and head for home. I reached for my laptop, but as I put my hand on the screen to close it up a small and ugly thought crawled across the floor of my brain and I clicked on my in-box instead. It was really not even definite enough to call a hunch, but a soft and leathery voice was whispering that after I found the Dexter-ized body in the grubby little house he had sent an e-mail and now Camilla was dead and maybe, just maybe …
And as I opened my in-box, maybe turned to certainly as I read the subject line of my most recent e-mail. It said, “If you can read this, you’re not in jail!”
With no doubt at all in my mind about who had sent this, I clicked it open.
At least, not yet. But don’t worry—if your luck stays this good, you’ll be there soon, which is anyway better than what I have in mind for you. It’s not enough for me just to put you in the ground. I want people to know what you are first. And then … Well, you’ve seen what I can do now. And I am totally getting better at it, just in time for your turn.
She really liked you—I mean, all those pictures? They were everywhere! It was really sick, an obsession. And she let me in to her apartment on like the second date, which you have to say, she wouldn’t do if she was a Good person. And when I saw your face plastered all over the place, I knew what I was supposed to do about it, and I did it.
Maybe I was a little hasty? Or maybe I’m just getting to like doing this, I don’t know. Ironic, huh? That trying to get rid of you, I’m becoming more and more like you. Anyway, it was too perfect to be an accident, so I did it, and I am not sorry, and I am just getting started. And if you think you can stop me, think again. Because you don’t know anything about me except that I can do exactly what you do and I am coming to do it to you and you don’t even know when except it’s soon.
Have a nice day!
On the plus side, it was nice to see that I was not having paranoid delusions. My Shadow really had killed Camilla to get at me. On the minus side, Camilla was dead and I was in deeper trouble than I had ever been.
And of course, things got even worse, all because Deborah said they couldn’t.
I headed home in a state of numb misery, wanting only a little bit of quiet comfort from my loving family. And when I arrived, Rita was waiting for me by the front door—but not in a spirit of tender welcome. “You son of a bitch, I knew it,” she hissed at me in greeting; it was as shocking as if she had flung the couch at my head. And she wasn’t done yet. “Goddamn you, Dexter, how could you?” she said, and she glared at me, with her fists clenched and a look of righteous fury on her face. I know very well that I am guilty of a great many things that might make many people unhappy with me—even Rita—but lately it seemed like everyone was finding me guilty of all the wrong things: things that I hadn’t done and couldn’t even guess at. So my normally rapid wit did not respond with the kind of clever, brainy comeback for which I am so justly famous. Instead, I just goggled at Rita and stammered, “I could … How … What do I …?”
It was almost unforgivably feeble, and Rita took advantage of it. She socked me on the arm, right smack in the middle of the tender bull’s-eye that was Deborah’s favorite target, and said, “You fucking bastard! I knew it!”
I glanced past her to the couch; Cody and Astor were completely hypnotized by the game they were playing on the Wii, and Lily Anne was in her playpen next to them, happily watching them slay monsters. They hadn’t heard any of Rita’s naughty words, not yet, but if it went on much longer, even mesmerized children would wake up and notice. I grabbed Rita’s hand before she could hit me again and said, “Rita, for God’s sake, what did I do?”
She yanked her hand away. “Bastard,” she repeated. “You know goddamned well what you did. You fucked that pasty-faced bitch, god damn you!”
Every now and then we find ourselves living through moments that make no sense at all. It’s almost as if some omnipotent film editor has snipped us out of our familiar everyday movie and spliced us into something completely random, from a different time and genre and even from a foreign country and partially animated, because suddenly you look around you and the language is unknown and nothing that happens has any relationship to what you think of as reality.
This was clearly one of those moments. Mild-mannered, Dexter-Devoted Rita, who never lost her temper and never, never said bad words, was doing both at the same time and directing it all at her innocent-just-this-once husband.
But even though I didn’t know what movie I was in, I knew it was my line, and I knew I had to take control of the scene quickly. “Rita,” I said as soothingly as I could. “You’re not making any sense—”
“Fuck making sense and fuck you!” she said, stamping her foot and raising her fist to hit me again. Astor’s head came up and she looked at us—it was Cody’s turn in the game—and so once more I took Rita’s hand and pulled her away from the front door.
“Come on,” I said. “Let’s take this into the kitchen.”
“I’m not going to—” she started to say, and I raised my voice over hers.
“Away from the kids,” I said. She glanced at them guiltily, and then followed along as I led her through the living room and into the kitchen. “All right,” I said, pulling out my chair and sitting at the familiar table. “Using words that are simple, clear, and not outlawed in Kentucky, will you please tell me what the hell you’re talking about?”
Rita stood on the far side of the table and glared down at me with an unchanging look of righteous fury on her face and her arms crossed. “You are so fucking smooth,” she said through her teeth. “Even now, I almost believe you. Bastard.”
I actually am smooth, in fact; Dexter is almost all smooth, icy control, and it has always served him well to be just that way. But right now I could feel the cool and the smooth melting away into a warm pudding of frustration, and I closed my eyes and took a deep breath in an effort to get things back to a more comfortable temperature. “Rita,” I said, opening my eyes and giving her a very authentic look of patient long suffering. “Let’s pretend for just a minute that I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
“You bastard, don’t you try—”