Double Dexter (25 page)

This evening’s den meeting was like most of the others: uneventful and even a little tedious. The only thing that broke the routine was the introduction of a new assistant leader, the stocky man I had seen getting out of the old Cadillac. His name was Doug Crowley. I watched him carefully, still feeling a little twitchy from my false alarm in the parking lot, but there was absolutely nothing about him that was even interesting, let alone threatening. He was about thirty-five years old and seemed dull, bland, and earnest. The round young boy he had brought in was a ten-year-old Dominican kid named Fidel. He wasn’t Crowley’s child; Crowley was a volunteer for the Big Brothers program, and he had offered to assist Frank. Frank welcomed him, thanked him, and then began some discussion of our upcoming camping trip to the Everglades. There was a report on the ecology of the area from two boys who were working on a badge project on the subject, and then Frank talked about how to practice fire safety when you were camping. Cody endured the whole tedious program with grim patience, and did not quite sprint for the door when it was over. And home we went, to our not-big-enough house with its table full of Rita’s papers instead of food, with no sign along the way of anything more threatening than a bright yellow Hummer with a too-loud sound system.

The next day at work was endless. I kept waiting for some terrible something to hit me from any possible angle, and it kept not happening. And the day after that was no different, and the day after that. Nothing happened; no sinister stranger loomed up out of the shadows; no fiendish traps were sprung upon me. There was no deadly
serpent hidden in my desk drawer, no assegais hurtling at my neck from a passing car, nothing. Even Deborah and her blistering arm punches were taking a holiday. I saw her and even spoke to her, of course. Her arm was still in a cast, and I would have expected her to call on me quite often for help, but she did not. Duarte was apparently picking up the slack, and Debs seemed content to live on a much lower dose of Dexter.

So life seemed to be slipping back into the ordinary rhythm of Dexter’s Dull Days, hour plodding calmly into boring hour with no threat of any kind, no variation in routine, no sign of change at all, at work or at home. Nothing but more of the same. I knew
it
was coming, but every day that it did
not
come seemed to make it less likely that it would come at all. Very stupid, I know, but it was—dare I say it?—entirely human of me. No one can stay on high alert around the clock, endlessly, day after day. Not even the Ever-vigilant Dark Scout, Dexter. Not when ordinary synthetic reality was so seductive.

And so I relaxed, ever so slightly. Normal life: It’s comforting exactly because it is dull and often pointless, and it slowly lulls us all into a state of waking slumber. It makes us fixate on stupid, meaningless things like running out of toothpaste or breaking a shoelace, as if these things were overwhelmingly significant—and all the while the truly important stuff we are ignoring is sharpening its fangs and slinking up behind us. In the one or two brief moments of real insight we get in our lives, we may realize that we are being hypnotized by irrelevant trivia, and we may even wish for something exciting and different to come along to help us focus and drive these stupid niggling trifles out of our minds. Because staying constantly alert is impossible, even for me. The more nothing happens, the more unlikely it all seems, until finally, I actually found myself wishing that whatever it was, it would just happen so it would all be over.

And, of course, one of the few great truths of Western thought is this: Be careful what you wish for, because you might get it.

And I did.

I
T WAS A HOT AND HUMID AFTERNOON AT AROUND THREE
o’clock, and I had just gotten back to my office from a routine appearance at a rather dull crime scene. A man had shot his neighbor’s dog, and the neighbor had shot him. The results were typical of the unfortunate mess that results so often nowadays from our modern obsession with large-caliber weapons. I tried to maintain a professional interest in separating the dog’s blood from the man’s, but there was so much of both I gave up. We had a confession, so it was clear who our killer was, and there didn’t seem like much point in getting terribly worked up about it. Nobody else on the scene was having much luck staying focused, either. We had all seen this sort of thing many times before, cops and forensics wonks alike, and after all the recent hammer excitement, a normal garden-variety shooting homicide seemed irrelevant and a little bit dull.

So I wrapped up my part of the work rather quickly, and as I strolled into my office and slumped into my chair I was not thinking about the outraged dog owner who was now sitting in a cell at the detention center, nor even about the poor disemboweled pit bull he had avenged. Idiotically enough, I even stopped thinking about my Shadow, since I was in the safety of my own little nook, surrounded
by the might of Miami-Dade’s fearless police force. Instead, I was pondering a vastly more important question: how to persuade Rita to take one small evening off from working at home and cook us a real dinner. It was a touchy problem, and it would call for a rare and difficult combination of flattery and firmness, mixed with just the right touch of compassionate understanding, and I was certain it would be a real challenge to my skill as a Human Impersonator.

I practiced a couple of facial expressions that blended all the right things into a believable mask until I thought I had them right, and in one of those weird moments of self-awareness, I suddenly saw myself from the outside, and I had to stop. I mean, here I was, with a relentless invisible enemy laying siege to Castle Dexter, and instead of sharpening my sword and piling boulders on the battlements I was playing with my face in the hopes of getting Rita to make me a decent last meal. And I had to ask myself—did that really make sense? Was it truly the best way to prepare for what was certainly coming at me? And I had to admit that the answer was a very definite,
Probably not
.

But what actually
was
the best way to get ready? I thought about what I knew, which was almost nothing, and realized that once again I had let the uncertainty push me away from what I do best. I needed to drop my passive waiting and get back to being proactive. I had to circle back downwind, find something that told me more about my Shadow, and somehow track him back to his lair and let Dark Nature take its course once more. Thinking coldly, rationally, realistically, I knew that he was no match for me. I had been hunting people like him my entire adult life, and he was no more than a wannabe, a sheep in wolf’s clothing, a poor sad clown trying to turn himself into a knockoff of the Very Real Deal that was Me. And I could oh-so-easily make that overwhelming truth very clear to him—all I had to do was find him.

But how? I no longer knew what kind of car he drove. I couldn’t even be sure he was still living in the same area, down in South Miami near my house. It was very likely that he had gone somewhere else—where? I didn’t know enough about him to guess where he might go to ground, and that was a problem. The first rule of being a successful hunter is to understand your prey, and I did not. I needed to get a better sense of how he thought, what made him tick, even if it
was only background and not actually an address or a passport number. And the only window into his world I knew about was Shadowblog. I had read and reread that tedious, self-involved drivel a dozen times already, and I had not learned anything worth repeating. But I read through it once more anyway, and this time I tried to build a profile of the person behind the rant.

The biggest building block, of course, was his anger. At the moment it seemed to be directed mostly at me, but there was more than enough to go around. It started with the unfairness of the game of baseball that never gave him a fair shot at the majors, even though he did everything they asked and always played by the rules. It rambled on endlessly about Assholes who cut corners, cheated, committed crimes without punishment, and even more Assholes who thought hacking a Web site was
funny
. He certainly wasn’t happy with his ex-wife, “A,” either, or with the typical Miami drivers he encountered.

The anger clearly came from a rigid and overdeveloped sense of morality, and it had been there for a long time, burbling under the surface and waiting for some reason to boil over and become about something specific. He raged against everybody who didn’t follow the rules as he saw them, and spoke longingly of “the Priest” and his teachings. Wonderful news, a real clue: I was looking for an angry Catholic, which narrowed it down to only about seventy-five percent of Miami’s population. I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate, but it was no good. All I could think of was how badly I wanted to tape him down and teach him about True Penance, the kind that comes in the Dark Confession Booth at the Cathedral of Our Lady of Dexter’s Knife. I could almost see him squirming, fighting helplessly against the duct tape that held him down, and I had just begun to savor the picture when Vince Masuoka stumbled into the room in a complete dither.

“Holy shit,” he said. “Oh, my God, holy shit.”

“Vince,” I said, irritated because he had interrupted the first happy thoughts I’d had in days. “In traditional Western culture, we like to separate deity and feces.”

He lurched to a halt and blinked at me and then, with truly annoying single-mindedness, he said, “Holy shit,” again.

“All right, fine, holy shit,” I said. “Can we move on to the next syllable, please?”

“It’s Camilla,” he said. “Camilla Figg?”

“I know who Camilla is,” I said, still peeved—and then I heard a distant rustle of dark wings and I realized I was sitting up straighter in my chair and feeling a soft tendril of interest from the Passenger slide up my spine.

“She’s dead,” Vince said, and he gulped and shook his head. “Camilla is dead, and it’s—Jesus—it’s the same thing, with the hammer.”

I felt my head move in an involuntary twitch of denial. “Um,” I said. “Didn’t everybody agree that Deborah caught the hammer guy?”

“Wrong,” Vince said. “Your sister fucked up big-time and got the wrong guy, ’cause it happened
again
, the exact same, and now they won’t let her near this one.” He shook his head. “She fucked up
huge
, ’cause what happened to Camilla is the same damn thing that happened to the others.” He blinked and swallowed, and looked at me with the most solemn and frightened expression I had ever seen from him. “She was
hammered
to death, Dexter. Just like the other guys.”

My mouth went dry and a small tickle of electricity ran from the back of my neck straight down my spine, and although it is not terribly flattering to me, I was not thinking of Deborah and her apparent fall from grace. Instead, I was simply sitting, hardly breathing, as several waves of hot intangible wind fluttered across my face and sent dry leaves scuttering through the gutters of Castle Dexter. The Dark Passenger was up on point, hissing with more than casual concern, and I barely heard Vince as he stuttered on stupidly about what an awful thing this was and how terrible everybody felt.

I am sure that if I could feel at all I would have felt terrible, too, since Camilla was a coworker and I had labored beside her for many years. We had not really been close, and she had often behaved in ways that I found puzzling, but I was quite well aware that when Death visits a colleague, one must display the proper feelings of shock and awfulness. That was elementary, clearly stated in one of the first chapters of
The Olde Booke of Human Behavioure
, and I was sure that eventually I would work my way around to playing the part with my
usual dramatic excellence. But not now, not yet. Right now I had far too many things to think about.

My first thought was that somehow, this was the work of my Shadow; he had written in his blog that he was going to do something, and now Camilla turned up dead, battered into jelly. But how did that affect me? Aside from forcing me to make grieving faces and mouth clichés about Tragic Loss, it didn’t touch me at all.

So this was something else, something unconnected to my own personal conflict—and yet, something about it had caught the Passenger’s attention, and that meant more than all the fake standardized emotions in the world. It meant that something was very off center here, wrong in a way that a Certain Shadowy Someone found extremely provocative, and
that
meant that whatever had happened to Camilla was far from being what it seemed to be—which in turn was an indication that, for some reason that was not at all clear at the moment, Dexter needed to pay attention.

But why? Aside from the fact that Camilla was a coworker and Deborah was in disgrace, why should this cause more than a mild flutter of passing interest from the Passenger?

I tried to shut out the blather of Vince and his annoying outpouring of emotion, and concentrate for just a moment on the facts. Deborah had been certain that she caught the right man. Deborah was very good at what she did. Therefore, either Deborah had made a huge and uncharacteristic mistake, or else—

“It’s a copycat,” I said, interrupting the flow of meaningless sound that was pouring out of Vince.

He blinked at me with eyes that seemed suddenly much too large and wet. “Dexter,” he said. “There’s never in
history
been anybody who did something like this hammer thing, not once ever before—and now you think there’re
two
of them?”

“Yes,” I said. “Has to be.”

He shook his head vigorously. “No. No way. Can’t be—it just can’t. I mean, I know it’s your sister; you gotta stick up for her, but hey,” he said.

But once again his pointless drivel was contradicted by the far more compelling purr of reptile logic slithering out from the deep and shadowed stronghold of the Passenger’s certainty, and I knew I
was right. I still did not know why that should make the alarm bells ring—where was the threat to precious irreplaceable me? But the Passenger was almost never wrong, and the warning was clear. Someone had duplicated the Hammer Killer’s technique, and aside from petty moral questions and copyright issues, something about that was
wrong;
some new threat was marching in too close for comfort, right up to the battlements of the Dark Lair, and I was suddenly deeply uneasy over what should have been no more than a routine opportunity to give another solid performance of Artificial Human Grief. Was the whole world out to get me? Was this really the new Model of how Things were going to be?