Double Dexter (29 page)

I thought about Camilla and how she had behaved toward me over the years. Just recently, while we were working on the site where Officer Gunther’s body had been dumped, she had taken a picture of me, and then stammered out something lame and incoherent about the flash when I looked at her. Maybe her inability to speak in complete sentences only happened when she was in my presence. And it was true that she had blushed every time she saw me—and come to think of it, she had tried to kiss me in a drunken stupor at my bachelor party, instead only managing to pass out at my feet. Did all this add up to a secret obsession with little old me? And if so, how did a crush get her crushed?

I have always prided myself on my ability to see things as they really are, without any of the hundreds of emotional filters humans put between themselves and the facts. So I made a conscious effort
to clear away the bad air, real and metaphorical, that Hood had left behind. Fact one: Camilla was dead. Two: She had been killed in a very unusual way—and that was actually more important than fact one, because it was an imitation of what had been done to Gunther and Klein. Why would somebody do that?

First, it made Deborah look bad. There were people who would want that, but they were either in jail or busy running a murder investigation. But it also made
me
look bad—and that was more to the point. My Witness had made the threat, and then Camilla turned up dead and I was the main suspect.

But how could he have known that Camilla had all those pictures? A stray wisp of memory wafted by, some snippet of office gossip.…

I looked at Deborah. She was watching me with one eyebrow raised, as if she thought I might fall off my chair. “Did you hear that Camilla had a boyfriend?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said. “You think he did it?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because he saw her photo gallery of me,” I said.

Debs looked dubious and shook her head. “So, what?” she said. “He killed her because he was jealous?”

“No,” I said. “He killed her to frame me.”

Deborah stared at me for several seconds, with a look on her face that said she couldn’t decide whether to smack me or call for medical assistance. She finally blinked, took a deep breath, and said, with obviously artificial calm, “All right, Dexter. Camilla’s new boyfriend killed her to frame you. Sure, why not. Just because it’s totally fucking crazy—”

“Of course it’s crazy, Debs. That’s why it makes sense.”

“Uh-huh,” she said. “Very logical, Dex. So what kind of psycho asshole would kill Camilla just to drop you in the shit?”

It was an awkward question. I knew what psycho asshole had done it. My Witness had said he was moving closer, and he had; that had been
him
watching me at the crime scene and taking pictures. And he had killed Camilla Figg, purely as a way to get at me. It really was remarkably wicked, killing an innocent person merely to cause me inconvenience, and it would have been very tempting
to pause and ponder the absolute depths of callous perfidy that this act revealed. But there really wasn’t a lot of time to ponder at present, and in any case worrying about moral turpitude is best left to those with morals.

The real question at this point, and it was an awkward one, was how to tell Deborah that all this was happening because somebody had seen me in flagrante delicto. Debs had accepted me for the monster I am, but that was not at all the same thing as sitting in police headquarters and hearing about an actual example of my hobby. Aside from that, I really find it a bit uncomfortable to talk about my Dark Dabbling, even to Debs. Still, it was the only way to explain things.

So without giving her too many embarrassing details, I told her how I had been seen at play by an unhinged blogger who was now taking it all personally. As I stumbled awkwardly through my tale of woe, Deborah took on her stonefaced I-am-a-cop expression, and she said nothing at all until I finished. Then she sat quietly a little longer and looked at me as if she was waiting for more.

“Who was it,” she said at last—a statement rather than a question, and it didn’t quite make sense to me.

“I don’t know who it is, Debs,” I said. “If I did we could go get him.”

She shook her head impatiently. “Your victim,” she said. “The guy he saw you doing. Who was it.”

For a moment I just blinked at her; I couldn’t imagine why she would focus on such an unimportant detail when my precious neck was halfway into the noose. And she made it sound so tawdry, just saying it right out like that. “Victim” and “doing,” in that flat cop tone of voice, and I didn’t really like thinking about it that way. But she kept staring, and I realized that explaining to her that it really wasn’t like that would be a great deal harder than simply answering her question. “Steven Valentine,” I told her. “A pedophile. He raped and strangled little boys.” She just stared, so I added, “Um,
at least
three of them.”

Deborah nodded. “I remember him,” she said. “We pulled him in twice, couldn’t make it stick.” About half the frown lines vanished from her forehead, and I realized with surprise why she had wanted
to know who my playmate had been. She had to be sure that I had followed the rules set down by Harry, her demigod father, and she was now satisfied that I had. She knew Valentine fit the bill, and she accepted the justice of his unorthodox end with satisfaction. I looked at my sister with a real fondness. She had certainly come a long way from when she first found out what I am, and had needed to fight down the desire to lock me up.

“All right,” she said, jolting me out of my doting reverie before I could sing “Hearts and Flowers.” “So he saw you, and now he wants to take you down.”

“That’s it,” I said. Deborah nodded and continued to study me, pursing her lips and shaking her head as if I was a repair problem beyond her ability to fix.

“Well,” I said at last, when I had gotten tired of being stared at. “So what do we do about it?”

“There’s not a whole shitload we
can
do, at least officially,” she said. “Anything I try is going to get me suspended—and I can’t even ask somebody off the record, because it’s my
brother
under investigation—”

“It’s not actually my fault,” I said, mildly peeved that she made it sound like it was.

“Yeah, well, so lookit,” she said, waving that off. “If you really are innocent—”

“Deborah!”

“Yeah, sorry, I mean,
because
you’re really innocent,” she said. “And Hood is a brain-dead bag of shit who couldn’t find anything even if you were guilty, right?”

“Is this going somewhere?” I said. “Maybe someplace far away from me?”

“Listen,” she said. “I’m just saying, in a couple of days, when they got nothing at all, we can start looking for this guy. For now, just don’t get too worked up about Hood and his bullshit. Nothing to worry about. They got nothing.”

“Really,” I said.

“Just stay cool for a couple of days,” my sister said with complete conviction. “It
can’t
get any worse.”

I
F WE ARE CAPABLE OF LEARNING ANYTHING AT ALL IN THIS
life, we very quickly discover that anytime somebody is absolutely certain about something, they are almost always absolutely wrong, too. And the present case was no exception. My sister is a very good detective and an excellent pistol shot, and I’m sure she has several other praiseworthy qualities—but if she ever has to make a living as a fortune-teller, she will starve to death. Because her words of reassurance,
It can’t get any worse
, were still echoing in my ears when I discovered that actually, things
could
get worse by a great deal, and they already had.

Things were not great to start with: I had crawled through the entire rest of the day at work with everyone avoiding me, which is much more difficult than it sounds, and it resulted in several moments of classic comedy, as people scrambled to escape my presence while pretending that they hadn’t seen me. For some reason, however, I had a bit of difficulty in appreciating the comic effect, and by six minutes of five o’clock I was feeling more worn-down than I should have as I slumped into my chair to watch the clock tick away the last few minutes of my career, and possibly my liberty.

I heard a noise in the lab and turned to watch as Vince Masuoka
came in, saw me, and stopped dead. “Oh,” he said. “I forgot, um.” And he spun around and raced out the door. Clearly, what he forgot was that I might still be there and he would have to say something to a coworker under investigation for the murder of another coworker, and for someone like Vince that would have been too uncomfortable.

I heard myself sigh heavily, and I wondered if this was really how it all ended; framed by a brainless thug, shunned by my colleagues, stalked by a whining computer nerd who couldn’t even make it in minor-league baseball. It was well beyond ignoble, and very sad—I’d shown such tremendous early progress, too.

The clock ticked; two minutes of five. I might as well get my things together and head for home. I reached for my laptop, but as I put my hand on the screen to close it up a small and ugly thought crawled across the floor of my brain and I clicked on my in-box instead. It was really not even definite enough to call a hunch, but a soft and leathery voice was whispering that after I found the Dexter-ized body in the grubby little house he had sent an e-mail and now Camilla was dead and maybe, just maybe …

And as I opened my in-box, maybe turned to certainly as I read the subject line of my most recent e-mail. It said, “If you can read this, you’re not in jail!”

With no doubt at all in my mind about who had sent this, I clicked it open.

On the plus side, it was nice to see that I was not having paranoid delusions. My Shadow really had killed Camilla to get at me. On the minus side, Camilla was dead and I was in deeper trouble than I had ever been.

And of course, things got even worse, all because Deborah said they couldn’t.

I headed home in a state of numb misery, wanting only a little bit of quiet comfort from my loving family. And when I arrived, Rita was waiting for me by the front door—but not in a spirit of tender welcome. “You son of a bitch, I
knew
it,” she hissed at me in greeting; it was as shocking as if she had flung the couch at my head. And she wasn’t done yet. “God
damn
you, Dexter, how
could
you?” she said, and she glared at me, with her fists clenched and a look of righteous fury on her face. I know very well that I am guilty of a great many things that might make many people unhappy with me—even Rita—but lately it seemed like everyone was finding me guilty of all the wrong things: things that I hadn’t done and couldn’t even guess at. So my normally rapid wit did not respond with the kind of clever, brainy comeback for which I am so justly famous. Instead, I just goggled at Rita and stammered, “I could … How … What do I …?”

It was almost unforgivably feeble, and Rita took advantage of it. She socked me on the arm, right smack in the middle of the tender bull’s-eye that was Deborah’s favorite target, and said, “You fucking
bastard!
I
knew
it!”

I glanced past her to the couch; Cody and Astor were completely hypnotized by the game they were playing on the Wii, and Lily Anne was in her playpen next to them, happily watching them slay monsters. They hadn’t heard any of Rita’s naughty words, not yet, but if it
went on much longer, even mesmerized children would wake up and notice. I grabbed Rita’s hand before she could hit me again and said, “Rita, for God’s sake, what did I do?”

She yanked her hand away. “Bastard,” she repeated. “You know goddamned well what you did. You
fucked
that pasty-faced bitch, god damn you!”

Every now and then we find ourselves living through moments that make no sense at all. It’s almost as if some omnipotent film editor has snipped us out of our familiar everyday movie and spliced us into something completely random, from a different time and genre and even from a foreign country and partially animated, because suddenly you look around you and the language is unknown and nothing that happens has any relationship to what you think of as reality.

This was clearly one of those moments. Mild-mannered, Dexter-Devoted Rita, who never lost her temper and never,
never
said bad words, was doing both at the same time and directing it all at her innocent-just-this-once husband.

But even though I didn’t know what movie I was in, I knew it was my line, and I knew I had to take control of the scene quickly. “Rita,” I said as soothingly as I could. “You’re not making any sense—”

“
Fuck
making sense and
fuck
you!” she said, stamping her foot and raising her fist to hit me again. Astor’s head came up and she looked at us—it was Cody’s turn in the game—and so once more I took Rita’s hand and pulled her away from the front door.