So many memories, and as I stroked each one it made me even more eager to make a new one, number forty-one, even though number forty, MacGregor, was hardly dry. But because it was connected to my next project, and therefore felt incomplete, I was anxious to get on with it. As soon as I could be sure about Reiker and then find some way—
I sat up. Perhaps the rich dessert had clogged my cranial arteries, but I had temporarily forgotten Deborah’s bribe.
“Deborah?” I said.
She glanced back at me, with a small frown of concentration on her face. “What.”
“Here we are,” I said.
“No shit.”
“None whatsoever. A complete lack of shit, in fact—and all thanks to my mighty mental labors. Wasn’t there some mention of a few things you were going to tell me?”
She glanced at Chutsky. He was staring straight ahead, still wearing the sunglasses, which did not blink. “Yeah, all right,”
she said. “In the army Doakes was in Special Forces.”
“I know that. It’s in his personnel file.”
“What you don’t know, buddy,” said Kyle without moving,
“is that there’s a dark side to Special Forces. Doakes was with them.” A very tiny smile creased his face for just a second, so small and sudden I might have imagined it. “Once you go over to the dark side, it’s forever. You can’t go back.”
I watched Chutsky sit completely motionless for a moment 1 0 8
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longer and then I looked at Debs. She shrugged. “Doakes was a shooter,” she said. “The army let the guys in El Salvador borrow him, and he killed people for them.”
“Have gun will travel,” Chutsky said.
“That explains his personality,” I said, thinking it also explained a great deal more, like the echo I heard coming from his direction when my Dark Passenger called out.
“You have to understand how it was,” Chutsky said. It was a little eerie to hear his voice coming from a completely unmoving and unemotional face, as if the voice was really coming from a tape recorder somebody had put in his body. “We believed we were saving the world. Giving up our lives and any hope for something normal and decent, for the cause.
Turns out we were just selling our souls. Me, Doakes . . .”
“And Dr. Danco,” I said.
“And Dr. Danco.” Chutsky sighed and finally moved, turning his head briefly to Deborah, then looking forward again.
He shook his head, and the movement seemed so large and theatrical after his stillness that I felt like applauding. “Dr.
Danco started out as an idealist, just like the rest of us. He found out in med school there was something missing inside him and he could do things to people and not feel any empa-thy at all. Nothing at all. It’s a lot rarer than you think.”
“Oh, I’m sure it is,” I said, and Debs glared at me.
“Danco loved his country,” Chutsky went on. “So he switched to the dark side, too. On purpose, to use this talent.
And in El Salvador it . . . blossomed. He would take somebody that we brought him and just—” He paused and took a breath, blew it out slowly. “Shit. You saw what he does.”
“Very original,” I said. “Creative.”
Chutsky gave a small snort of laughter that had no humor D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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in it. “Creative. Yeah. You could say that.” Chutsky swung his head slowly left, right, left. “I said it didn’t bother him to do that stuff—in El Salvador he got to like it. He’d sit in on the interrogation and ask personal questions. Then when he started to— He’d call the person by name, like he was a dentist or something, and say, ‘Let’s try number five,’ or number seven, whatever. Like there were all these different patterns.”