“I knew it,” she said. “What did he do?”

“It’s not so much what he did,” I said. “At this point, it’s more like what was done to him.”

“Quit screwing around,” she said. “What is it?”

“To begin with, he’s apparently an orphan.”

“Come on, Dex, cut to the chase.”

I held up a hand to try to calm her down, but it clearly didn’t work very well, because she started tapping her knuckles on the desktop. “I am trying to paint a subtle canvas here, Sis,” I said.

“Paint faster,” she said.

“All right. Halpern went into the foster-care system in upstate New York when they found him living in a box under the freeway.

r /> They found his parents, who were unfortunately dead of recent and unpleasant violence. It seems to have been very well-deserved violence.”

“What the fuck does that mean?”

“His parents were pimping him out to pedophiles,” I said.

“Jesus,” Deborah said, and she was clearly a little shocked.

Even by Miami standards, this was a bit much.

“And Halpern doesn’t remember any of that part. He gets blackouts under stress, the file says. It makes sense. The blackouts were probably a conditioned response to the repeated trauma,” I said. “That can happen.”

“Well, fuck,” Deborah said, and I inwardly applauded her 106

JEFF LINDSAY

elegance. “So he forgets shit. You have to admit that fits. The girl tries to frame him for rape, and he’s already worried about tenure—so he gets stressed and kills her without knowing it.”

“A couple of other things,” I said, and I admit that I enjoyed the drama of the moment perhaps a little more than was necessary. “To begin with, the death of his parents.”

“What about it?” she said, quite clearly lacking any theatrical pleasure at all.

“Their heads were cut off,” I said. “And then the house was torched.”

Deborah straightened up. “Shit,” she said.

“I thought so, too.”

“Goddamn, that’s great, Dex,” she said. “We have his ass.”

“Well,” I said, “it certainly fits the pattern.”

“It sure as hell does,” she said. “So did he kill his parents?”

I shrugged. “They couldn’t prove anything. If they could, Halpern would have been committed. It was so violent that nobody could believe a kid had done it. But they’re pretty sure that he was there, and at least saw what happened.”

She looked at me hard. “So what’s wrong with that? You still think he didn’t do it? I mean, you’re having one of your hunches here?”

It stung a lot more than it should have, and I closed my eyes for a moment. There was still nothing there except dark and empty. My famous hunches were, of course, based on things whispered to me by the Dark Passenger, and in its absence I had nothing to go on.

“I’m not having hunches lately,” I admitted. “There’s just something that bothers me about this. It just—”

I opened my eyes and Deborah was staring at me. For the first time today there was something in her expression beyond bubbly happiness, and for a moment I thought she was going to ask me what that meant and was I all right. I had no idea what I would say if she did, since the Dark Passenger was not something I had ever talked about, and the idea of sharing something that intimate was very unsettling.

Tags: Jeff Lindsay Dexter Mystery
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