“Yeah,” she said. “I already figured out ‘um.’ ”

“And you’re watching Wilkins.”

“We’re watching Wilkins, for Christ’s sake.”

I looked at the body again, but there was nothing else on it to tell me more than I knew, which was almost nothing. I could not stop my brain from going in a circle; if Wagner had been Moloch, and now Wagner was dead, and killed by Moloch . . .

I stood up. For a moment I felt dizzy, as if bright lights were crashing in on me, and in the distance I heard that awful music beginning to swell up into the afternoon and for just that moment I could not doubt that somewhere nearby the god was calling me—the real god himself and not some psychotic prankster.

I shook my head to silence it and nearly fell over. I felt a hand grabbing my arm to steady me, but whether it was Debs, Vince, or Moloch himself, I couldn’t tell. From far away a voice was calling my name, but it was singing it, the cadence rising up to the far-too-familiar rhythm of that music. I closed my eyes and felt heat on my face and the music got louder. Something shook me and I opened my eyes.

The music stopped. The heat was just the Miami sun, with the 252

JEFF LINDSAY

wind whipping in the clouds of an afternoon squall. Deborah held both my elbows and shook me, saying my name over and over patiently.

“Dexter,” she said. “Hey Dex, come on. Dexter. Dexter.”

“Here I am,” I said, although I was not entirely sure of that.

“You okay, Dex?” she said.

“I think I stood up too fast,” I said.

She looked dubious. “Uh-huh,” she said.

“Really, Debs, I’m fine now,” I said. “I mean, I think so.”

“You think so,” she said.

“Yes. I mean, I just stood up too fast.”

She looked at me a moment longer, then let go and stepped back. “Okay,” she said. “Then if you can make it to the boat, let’s get back.”

It may be that I was still dizzy, but there seemed to be no sense in her words, almost as if they were just made-up syllables. “Get back?” I said.

“Dexter,” she said. “We got six bodies, and our only suspect is on the ground here with no head.”

“Right,” I said, and I heard a faint drumbeat under my voice.

“So where are we going?”

Deborah balled up her fists and clenched her teeth. She looked down at the body, and for a moment I thought she was actually going to spit. “What about the guy you chased into the canal?” she said at last.

“Starzak? No, he said . . .” I stopped myself from finishing, but not quite soon enough, because Deborah pounced.

“He said? When did you talk to him, goddamn it?”

To be fair to me, I really was still a little bit dizzy, and I had not thought before I spoke, and now I was in a somewhat awkward spot. I could not very well tell my sister that I had spoken to him just the other night when I had taped him to his workbench and tried to cut him up into small neat pieces. But the blood must have been flowing back into my brain, because I very quickly said, “I mean, he seemed,” I said. “He seemed to be just a . . . I don’t know,”

I said. “I think it was personal, like I cut him off in traffic.”

DEXTER IN THE DARK

253

Deborah looked at me angrily for a moment, but then she seemed to accept what I had said, and she turned away and kicked at the sand. “Well, we got nothing else,” she said. “It won’t hurt to check him out.”

Tags: Jeff Lindsay Dexter Mystery
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