life modern. Her living area generally looked like a cheap hotel room that had been occupied by a rock band and looted of everything except a TV and VCR. There was a chair and a small table by French doors that led out to a patio that was almost lost in a tangle of bushes. She had found another chair somewhere, though, a rickety folding chair, and she pulled it over to the table for me. I was so touched by her hospitable gesture that I risked life and limb by sitting in the flimsy thing. “Well,” I said. “How long has he been gone?”
“Shit,” she said. “About three and a half hours. I think.”
She shook her head and slumped into the other chair. “We were supposed to meet here, and—he didn’t show up. I went to his hotel, and he wasn’t there.”
“Isn’t it possible he just went away somewhere?” I asked—and I’m not proud of it, but I admit I sounded a little hopeful.
Deborah shook her head. “His wallet and keys were still on the dresser. The guy has him, Dex. We gotta find him before—” She bit her lip and looked away.
I was not at all sure what I could do to find Kyle. As I said, this was not the kind of thing I generally had any insight into, and I had already given it my best shot tracking down the real estate. But since Deborah was already saying “we” it seemed that I didn’t have a lot of choice in the matter. Family ties and all that. Still, I tried to make a little bit of wiggle room. “I’m sorry if this sounds stupid, Debs, but did you report this?”
She looked up with a half snarl. “Yeah, I did. I called Captain Matthews. He sounded relieved. He told me not to get hysterical, like I’m some kind of old lady with the vapors.”
She shook her head. “I asked him to put out an APB, and he said, ‘For what?’ ” She hissed out her breath. “For what . . .
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Goddamn it, Dexter, I wanted to strangle him, but . . .” She shrugged.
“But he was right,” I said.
“Yeah. Kyle is the only one who knows what the guy looks like,” she said. “We don’t know what he’s driving or what his real name is or— Shit, Dexter. All I know is he’s got Kyle.” She took a ragged breath. “Anyway, Matthews called Kyle’s people in Washington. Said that was all he could do.” She shook her head and looked very bleak. “They’re sending somebody Tuesday morning.”
“Well then,” I said hopefully. “I mean, we know that this guy works very slowly.”
“Tuesday morning,” she said. “Almost two days. Where do you think he starts, Dex? Does he take a leg off first? Or an arm? Will he do them both at the same time?”
“No,” I said. “One at a time.” She looked at me hard. “Well, it just makes sense, doesn’t it?”
“Not to me,” she said. “Nothing about this makes sense.”
“Deborah, cutting off the arms and legs is not what this guy wants to do. It’s just how he does it.”
“Goddamn it, Dexter, talk English.”
“What he wants to do is totally destroy his victims. Break them inside and out, way beyond repair. Turn them into musical beanbags that will never again have a moment of anything except total endless insane horror. Cutting off limbs and lips is just the way he— What?”
“Oh, Jesus, Dexter,” Deborah said. Her face had screwed up into something I hadn’t seen since our mom died. She turned away, and her shoulders began to shake. It made me just a little uneasy. I mean, I do not feel emotions, and I know 1 2 4
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Deborah quite often does. But she was not the kind of person who showed them, unless irritation is an emotion. And now she was making wet snuffly sounds, and I knew that I should probably pat her shoulder and say, “There there,” or something equally profound and human, but I couldn’t quite make myself do it. This was Deb, my sister. She would know I was faking it and—
And what? Cut off my arms and legs? The worst she would do would be to tell me to stop it, and go back to being Sergeant Sourpuss again. Even that would be a great improvement over her wilting-lily act. In any case, this was clearly one of those times where some human response was called for, and since I knew from long study what a human would do, I did it. I stood up and stepped over to her. I put my arm on her shoulder, patted her, and said, “All right, Deb.
There there.” It sounded even stupider than I had feared, but she leaned against me and snuffled, so I suppose it was the right thing to do after all.
“Can you really fall in love with somebody in a week?” she asked me.
“I don’t think I can do it at all,” I said.
“I can’t take this, Dexter,” she said. “If Kyle gets killed, or turned into— Oh, God, I don’t know what I’ll do.” And she collapsed against me again an
d cried.
“There there,” I said.