Double Dexter (26 page)

Nothing that happened in the next few hours made me feel any easier. Camilla’s body had been found in a car parked in the far corner of the lot at a giant superstore located very close to headquarters. A lot of cops stopped at the store on their way home from work, and quite probably Camilla had, too. There were three plastic shopping bags with the store’s logo scattered across the floor in the backseat of the car, and Camilla’s body had been poured onto the seat above them. Just like the other two victims, she had been savagely hammered on every bone and joint until her body had lost its original shape.

But the car was not an official police vehicle, and apparently it was not even Camilla’s, either. It was a five-year-old Chevy Impala, registered to a store employee named Natalie Bromberg. Ms. Bromberg had not had a great deal to say to the detectives so far, possibly because, since finding Camilla in her car, her time had been filled with screaming, crying, and finally accepting a large syringe filled with sedative.

Vince and I worked slowly through the area around the Impala, and inside it as well, and my sense that this was the work of a different hand grew steadily. Camilla’s body was slumped half-on, half-off the seat, while the other two had been arranged a little more carefully. A small thing, but once again, it didn’t fit the previous pattern, and it made me look a little closer.

I am not really an expert on blunt-force trauma, but the places on Camilla’s body where she had been hit looked different from what I had seen in the two previous cases; Gunther’s and Klein’s impact
points had visibly been made by the flat surface on the end of the hammer. These had a slight curve to them, a faint concave contour, as if the weapon had been rounded rather than flat, something like a pole, or a dowel, or … or maybe a baseball bat? The kind a former minor-league baseball player with anger-management problems might have lying around?

I thought about it hard, and it seemed like it fit—except for one small thing: Why would Bernie Elan want to kill Camilla Figg? And if for some reason he did want to kill her, why choose this difficult and repulsive method? It didn’t add up, not at all. I was leaping to paranoid conclusions. Merely because somebody was after me, that didn’t mean he would do this. Ridiculous.

I worked around the outside of the car, spraying Bluestar in the hopes of finding some telltale blood spatter. I found a very faint bloody impression from the toe of a running shoe on the white line separating the Impala’s parking spot from the one next to it. And there were no taco wrappers inside the car, either, which was hardly conclusive. But there was a large patch of blood on the seat under the body that had leaked out from a savage wound on the left side of Camilla’s head. Head wounds are notorious gushers—but this one had merely trickled onto the seat, meaning that she had been killed somewhere else and then dumped here soon after. The killer had probably parked close to the Impala and quickly slid the body out of his vehicle and into the Chevy’s backseat, and it was my guess that blood from the head injury had made the partial footprint.

There was another smaller wound on Camilla’s arm, where the bone of the forearm was actually poking up through the skin. It had not leaked nearly as much as the head wound, but to me it was significant. Neither of the other victims’ bodies had bled at all, and this one had been thumped open twice. It was not quite enough evidence to swear out a warrant and arrest somebody, but to me it was a very important point, and in keeping with my position as a responsible adult in the law enforcement community, I immediately brought it to the attention of the detective in charge, a man named Hood.

Detective Hood was a large guy with a low forehead and a lower IQ. He had a permanent leer and he liked put-downs, sexual innuendo,
and hitting suspects to encourage them to speak. I found him standing a few feet away from the Impala’s owner, waiting impatiently for the sedative to kick in a little so she could understand his questions without shrieking. He was watching her with his arms crossed and a very intimidating expression on his face, and Ms. Bromberg would probably need a second shot if she glanced up and saw him staring.

I knew Hood slightly from working with him in the past, so I approached him with chummy directness. “Hey, Richard,” I said; his head jerked around toward me and his expression darkened a notch.

“What do
you
want?” he said, and he made no attempt to match my cordial tone. In fact, he sounded almost hostile.

Every now and then I find that I have misjudged a situation and used an incorrect phrase or expression; clearly I had done so now. It always takes a moment to adjust and pick a new one, particularly if I am not sure what I did wrong. But a blank stare and a long pause seemed unsuitable, so I filled the gap as best I could. “Um,” I said. “Just, you know—”

“ ‘You
know
’?” he said, with a mean mimicking tone. “You wanna hear what I
know
, dickless?”

I didn’t want to hear, of course; Hood couldn’t possibly know anything beyond the third-grade level, except possibly about pornography, and that sort of thing is not really interesting to me. But it didn’t seem politic to say so, and in any case he didn’t wait for me to answer.

“What I
know
is, your half-ass Hollywood sister shit the bed,” he said, and, completely untroubled by the fact that this image did not really make sense, he repeated it. “She shit the fucking bed,” he said again.

“Well, maybe,” I said, trying to sound meek yet confident, “but there’s actually some evidence that this might be a copycat killer.”

He glared at me, and his jaw bulged out on the sides. It was a very big jaw, and it looked quite able and willing to bite a large chunk of flesh out of me if it had to. “Evidence,” Hood said, as if the word tasted bad. “Like what.”

“The, um, wounds,” I said. “The body is bleeding from two places, and on the other two the skin wasn’t even broken at all.”

Hood turned his head a quarter of an inch to the side and spit.
“You’re fulla shit,” he said, and he turned away from me, back to facing Ms. Bromberg. He recrossed his arms, and his upper lip twitched. “Just like your half-ass sister.”

I looked down at my feet, just to be sure his glob of spit had really missed my shoe, and was very happy to see that it had. But it was clear that I would get nothing from Detective Hood except saliva and scatology, so I decided to leave him to his lowbrow musings and go back to looking at all that was left of Camilla Figg.

But as I began to turn away from Hood, I felt a dry, seismic rumble pushing up from a deep and shadowy corner inside, a sharp and urgent shock of warning from the Passenger that Dexter stood in the crosshairs of some hostile scope. Time slowed to a crawl as I froze midturn and searched around me for the threat, and as I looked to the side, off by the yellow tape guarding our perimeter, a bright flash went off and the Passenger hissed.

I blinked, bracing for a bullet, but none came. It was nothing but some gawker taking a photograph. I squinted through lingering blindness from the flash, and saw only the blur of a thick man in a gray T-shirt lowering a camera and turning away to blend back into the crowd. He was gone before I could see his face, or anything else about him, and there wasn’t any visible reason why he had set off my silent alarm. He was not a sniper, not a terrorist with an exploding bicycle. He couldn’t possibly be any real danger at all, nothing but another one of the many unwashed feeding a queasy curiosity about death. Now I was truly being stupid; I was seeing Shadows everywhere, even where they made no sense. Was I slipping completely out of the world of reason and into kaleidoscopic paranoia?

I watched the spot where the photographer had disappeared for a few more moments. He didn’t come back, and nothing came roaring out to kill me. It was just nerves, nothing more, and not my Witness, and I had work to do.

I went back to the Impala, where Camilla’s battered body lay in its final untidy heap. She was still dead, and I couldn’t lose the feeling that somewhere, somebody was watching me, licking his lips, and planning to make me dead, too.

I
T WAS VERY LATE WHEN I GOT HOME, ALMOST MIDNIGHT, AND
out of pure reflexive habit I went into the kitchen and looked to see if Rita had left some food for me. But no matter how hard I looked, there were no leftovers, not even a single slice of pizza. I searched carefully, all in vain. There was no Tupperware container on the counter, nothing on the stove, no covered bowl in the refrigerator, not even a Wendy’s bag on the table. I searched the entire kitchen, but I found no sign of anything edible.

I suppose it was not really a tragedy, comparatively speaking. Worse things happen every day, and one of them had just happened to Camilla Figg, someone I had known for years. I really should have been grieving a little bit. But I was hungry, and Rita had left me nothing to eat; to me that seemed vastly more saddening, the death of a great and sustaining tradition, a violation of some unspoken but important principle that had nurtured me through my many trials. No food for Dexter; All was Utterly Lost.

I did, however, find a chair pulled out from the kitchen table at a sloppy angle, and Rita’s shoes flung haphazardly down beside it. Her work was once again piled up on the table, and her blouse hung messily
from the back of the chair. Across the room I saw a yellow square stuck to the refrigerator and I went over to look; it was a Post-it note, presumably from Rita, although the scrawled words did not look like her usual neat handwriting. The note was stuck to the freezer door and it said, “Brian called—where were you!?!” It had taken her two tries to write the “B” in “Brian,” and the last word was crookedly underlined three times; the point of the pen had gone all the way through and made a small tear in the paper.

It was only a small yellow note, but something about it made me pause, and I stood there by the refrigerator for a moment, holding the Post-it and wondering why it troubled me. It was surely not the slapdash handwriting; no doubt Rita was simply tired, frazzled by rushing out of work after a long tense day of fighting her annual crisis at work, and then hustling three kids through the hot and crowded Miami evening and into a burger joint. It was enough to make anybody tense up, grow weary, and …

 … and lose the ability to make the letter “B” properly?

That didn’t make any sense at all. Rita was a precise person, neurotically neat and methodical. It was one of the qualities I admired in her, and mere fatigue and frustration had never before dimmed her passion for doing things in an orderly way. She had faced many hardships in her life, like her disastrous first marriage to the physically abusive drug addict, and she had always dealt with the violent disorder of life by making it stand up straight, brush its teeth, and put its laundry in the hamper. For her to scrawl a messy note and leave her shoes and clothing scattered across the floor like this was very much out of character, and a clear indication that, um … what?

Last time it had been a spilled glass of wine—had it spilled because she’d had more than one? And done the same thing again tonight?

I went back over to the kitchen table and looked down at where Rita had sat and left her shoes, and I looked at it as a trained and highly skilled forensics technician. The angle of the left shoe showed a lack of motor control, and the sloppily hanging blouse was a definite indication of lessened inhibition. But just for the sake of scientific confirmation I walked over to the big covered trash can by the back
door. Inside the can, underneath a scattering of paper towels and junk mail, was an empty bottle that had recently contained red wine.

Rita was enthusiastic about recycling—but here was an empty bottle stuffed into the trash can and covered over with paper. And I did not remember seeing the bottle when it was full, and I am usually very familiar with what is in my kitchen. This was a whole bottle of merlot, and it should have been visible almost anywhere in the kitchen. But I hadn’t seen it. That meant that either Rita had gone to some trouble to hide it—or else she bought the bottle tonight, drank it all in one sitting, and forgot to recycle.

This was not a glass of wine while she worked and I ordered pizza. This was a whole bottle—and worse, she drank it when I was out of the house, leaving the children unwatched and unprotected.

She was drinking far too much, and far too often. I had assumed that she was just sipping a little wine as a way of dealing with the temporary stress—but this was more than that. Had some other unknown factor suddenly changed Rita into an emerging lush? And if so, wasn’t I supposed to do something about it? Or should I wait until she began to miss work and neglect the children?

From down the hall, as if on cue, I heard Lily Anne begin to cry, and I hurried into the bedroom to her crib. She was kicking her feet and waving her arms around, and when I lifted her out of her little bed it was obvious why. Her diaper was bulging out against her sleepy suit, full to overflowing. I glanced at Rita; she was facedown on the bed, snoring, one arm flung up and the other pinned under her. Clearly, Lily Anne’s fussing had not penetrated the fog of her sleep, and Rita had failed to change the baby’s diaper before she went to bed. It was not at all like her—but then, neither was secret and excessive wine drinking.

Lily Anne kicked her feet harder and moved the volume of her crying up a few notches, and I took her over to the changing table. Her problem was clear and immediate and it was something I could deal with simply. Rita would take some thought, and it was too late at night for thinking. I got the baby changed into a dry diaper and rocked her until she stopped fussing and went back to sleep. I put her back in the crib, and went over to my bed.

Rita lay there in the exact same position, sprawled unmoving across two-thirds of the bed. She might have been dead, except for the snoring. I looked down at her and wondered what was going on in that pleasant-looking blond head. She had always been totally reliable, completely predictable and dependable, never deviating even one small step from her basic pattern of behavior. It was one of the reasons I had decided it was a good idea to marry her—I almost always knew exactly what she would do. She was like a perfect little toy railroad set, whirring around the same track, past the same scenery, day after day without change.