Double Dexter (43 page)

After a quick and quiet conversation with the desk clerk she came over and spoke to me. “Mr. Morgan?” she said formally, and I recognized the tone right away. Her next words proved that I was right. “I’m Detective Blanton,” she said. “I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Of course,” I said.

“First I’d like to make sure your children are okay?” she said, and without waiting for an answer from me she crouched down beside Cody and Astor. “Hi,” she said to them, in a tone of voice usually reserved for clever puppies or human idiots. “My name is Detective Shari. Can you talk about what you saw upstairs in your room?”

“It’s a suite,” Astor said. “And anyway, we didn’t get to see hardly anything because Dexter made us leave the room before we could really look at it.”

Blanton blinked with her mouth hanging open. This was clearly not quite the reaction she’d been expecting. “I see,” she said, and she looked up at me.

“They’re very frightened,” I said, putting a little emphasis on the word so they would remember that they were scared.

“Of course they are,” Blanton said. She looked at Cody. “You gonna be okay, buddy?”

“Fine,” he said softly, and then he glanced at me and added, “Really scared.”

“That’s totally normal,” Blanton said, and Cody looked very pleased. “How about you, sweetheart?” she continued, turning back to Astor. “You doing all right?”

Astor made a visible effort not to snarl at being called “sweetheart” and instead managed to say, “Yes, I’m fine, thank you, just scared.”

“Uh-huh,” Blanton said. She looked back and forth between the two of them, apparently searching for some clue that they might be slipping into shock.

My phone rang—it was Rita. “Hello, dear,” I said, turning half away from Blanton and the children.

“Dexter, I just went past the aquarium? It doesn’t open until almost— And so, where are you? Because it’s a couple of hours.”

“Well,” I said. “We got a little sidetracked. There’s been a little incident here at the hotel—”

“Oh, my God, I knew it,” she said.

“Nothing at all to worry about,” I said, raising my voice over hers. “We’re all fine; it’s just something that happened and we were witnesses, so we have to make a statement, that’s all.”

“But they’re just children,” Rita said. “It isn’t even legal, and they have to— Are they all right?”

“They’re both fine; they’re talking to a very nice policewoman,” I said, and thinking it was best to cut things short, I said, “Rita, please, you go right ahead with the auction. We’ll be fine.”

“I can’t possibly— Because, I mean, the
police
are there?”

“You have to do the auction; it’s what we came for,” I said. “Get us the place on a Hundred and Forty-second Street.”

“It’s terrace,” she said. “A Hundred and Forty-second Terrace.”

“Even better,” I said. “And don’t worry; we’ll be there in plenty of time.”

“Well, but,” she said, “I just think I should be there—”

“You need to get ready for the auction,” I said. “And don’t worry about us. We’ll finish up here and then go see the sharks. This is just a minor inconvenience.”

“Mr. Morgan?” Blanton said behind me. “There’s somebody here who wants to talk to you.”

“Get that house,” I said to Rita. “I have to go now.” And I turned to
face Blanton, and saw that my minor inconvenience had just grown a few sizes.

Gliding into the room, teeth first, was Sergeant Doakes.

I have been in many police interrogation rooms, and truthfully, the one in the Key West police station was fairly standard. But it did look a little different this time, since I was on the wrong side of the table. They hadn’t handcuffed me, which I thought was very nice of them, but they also didn’t seem to want me to go anywhere. So I sat there at the table while first Blanton and then several other detectives came and went, snarling the same questions, and then disappearing again. And each time the door swung open, I could see Sergeant Doakes standing in the hall outside the room. He was not smiling now, although I’m sure he was very happy, since I was right where he wanted me, and I knew he’d think it was worth losing Hood to put me here.

I tried very hard to be patient and answer the four standard questions the Key West cops kept asking, no matter how many times they asked, and I tried just as hard to remember that this one time I really was completely innocent and I had nothing to worry about. Sooner or later they would have to let me go, no matter how many ways Doakes managed to invoke professional cooperation.

But they seemed in no hurry, and after an hour or so in which they didn’t even offer me coffee, I thought perhaps I should encourage them. So when the fourth detective came in and sat down opposite me, and informed me for the third time that this was a very serious matter, I stood up and said, “Yes, it is. You are holding me here for no reason, without filing a charge, when I have done absolutely nothing wrong.”

“Sit down, Dexter,” the detective said. He was probably about fifty and looked like he’d been beaten up a few times, and I felt very strongly that one more time would be a good idea, because he said my name like he thought it was funny, and although I am normally very patient with stupidity—after all, there’s so much of it—this was the last straw.

So I put my knuckles on the table and leaned toward him, and I let fly with all the righteous indignation that I actually felt. “No,” I
said. “I will not sit down. And I will not answer the same questions over and over anymore. If you aren’t going to file a charge and aren’t going to let me go, I want an attorney.”

“Look,” the guy said, with world-weary chumminess. “We know you’re with the Miami-Dade department. A little professional cooperation wouldn’t hurt you, would it?”

“It would not hurt me at all,” I said. “And unless you release me immediately, I plan to cooperate as much as possible with your Internal Affairs department.”

The detective drummed his fingers on the table for a few seconds and looked like he thought he might tough it out. But instead he slapped the table softly, stood up, and walked out without another word.

It was only another five minutes before Blanton came back in. She didn’t look happy, but maybe she didn’t know how. She was holding a manila folder in one hand and smacking it against the other one, and she looked at me like she wanted to blame me for the federal budget deficit. But she didn’t say anything; she just looked, smacked the folder a few times, and then shook her head. “You can go,” she said.

I waited to see if there was anything else. There wasn’t, so I walked through the door and into the hall. Naturally enough, Sergeant Doakes was standing there waiting for me. “Better luck next time,” I told him.

He didn’t say anything, and he didn’t even show me his teeth. He just stared at me with that hungry-jackal look of his that I knew so well, and since I have never been the sort who enjoys uncomfortable silence, I turned away from him and stuck my head back into the interrogation room that had been my home for the last ninety minutes.

“Blanton,” I said, rather proud of myself for remembering her name. “Where are my children?”

She put the folder down, sighed, and came over to the doorway. “They’ve gone to be with their mother,” she said.

“Oh, all right,” I said. “Did they get to ride over in a patrol car?”

“No, we could get in trouble for that,” she said. “We got budget problems, you know.”

“Well, you didn’t just stick them in a taxicab all alone, did you?” I
said, and I admit I was getting irritated with her, and the entire Key West Police Department.

“No, of course not,” she said, with a little more spirit than she’d shown so far. “They left with an authorized adult.”

I could think of only one or two people who might be considered authorized, and for a moment I felt a brief glimmer of hope; perhaps Deborah had arrived and things were looking up at last. “Oh, good,” I said. “Was it their aunt, Sergeant Deborah Morgan?”

Blanton blinked at me and shook her head. “No,” she said. “But it’s okay; your son knew him. It was his Cub Scout leader.”

I
HAD SPENT FAR TOO MUCH TIME LATELY BEMOANING THE
decline of my once-stunning mental powers, and so it was a great relief to realize that the gray cells were coming back online, because I did not think, even for a second, that “Cub Scout leader” meant Frank, the big-bellied, ghost story–telling
real
leader of the pack. I knew instantly who had taken Cody and Astor.

It was Crowley.

He had come right into the station, a building filled with policemen who were looking for
him
, even though they didn’t know it, and he had bluffed his way into possession of my children and walked out with them, and while a very small part of me admired the absolute brazen nerve of it, the rest of me was in no mood to hand out compliments.

He had taken
my
kids. Cody and Astor were
mine
, and he had snatched them from under my nose. It was a special, personal affront, and it filled me with a rage larger and brighter and more blinding than anything I had ever felt before. A red mist came down and covered over everything I saw, starting with Detective Blanton. She was goggling at me like some kind of awful, stupid, droopy fish, just gawking
and mocking me for getting caught and for losing the children—and it was all her fault. All of it—she had listened to Doakes and brought me here and taken
my
kids away, only to give them to the one person on earth I didn’t want anywhere near them—and she was standing right there in front of me making stupid faces and I wanted very badly to grab her around her saggy little neck and shake her until the crepe-paper wrinkles on her neck rattled and then squeeze until her eyes popped and her tongue flopped out and her face turned purple and all the small and delicate bones in her throat crunched and splintered in my hands—

Blanton must have noticed that my reaction was a little more than a polite thank-you and a carefree nod of the head. She took a step away from me, back into the interrogation room, and said, “Uh, that was okay, wasn’t it, Mr. Morgan?” And even though it was a step up from being called by my first name, it did not pacify me, not at all. Without realizing what I was doing I took a step toward her and flexed my fingers. “Your boy
knew
him,” she said, starting to sound a little desperate. “It was … I mean, the Cub Scouts? They all have to pass a background check—”

Just before I got my hands on her throat, something very hard and metallic grabbed my elbow and jerked me back a half step. I turned toward it, ready to rip it into small pieces, too—but of course, it was Sergeant Doakes, and he did not look at all rippable, even through the red mist. He had latched onto my arm with one of his prosthetic claws, and he was looking at me with an expression of amused interest, as if hoping I would really try something. The red mist dropped away from my vision.

I pried his claw from my arm, which was harder than it sounds, and I looked one more time at Detective Blanton. “If anything has happened to my children,” I told her, “you will regret it for the rest of your short, stupid, miserable little life.”

And before she could think of anything to say to that, I turned away, pushed past Doakes, and walked away down the hall.

It was not really a very long walk back to the center of town. There aren’t any long walks in Key West. Everything you read about the place tells you it is a small island, no more than a few square miles tucked snugly away at the end of the Florida Keys. It’s supposed to
be a comfy little town stuffed full of sun and fun and relentless good times that never end. But when you step into the smothering heat of Duval Street trying to locate one specific man and two children, there is nothing small about it. And as I finally hit the center of town and stared around me in my angry panic, that came home to me with a force that nearly took the wind out of me. I was looking for the tip of a needle in a field full of haystacks. It was far past futile, beyond hopeless; there was not even a place to begin that made any sense.

Everything seemed to be stacked against me. The streets were overflowing with people of all sizes and shapes, and I couldn’t even see half a block in any direction. A trio of Hemingways walked past me, and it rubbed my nose in the fact that even looking for Crowley was ridiculous. He was a stocky guy with a beard, and the streets of Key West were crammed full of stocky guys with beards. I stared wildly around, but it was useless, pointless, hopeless; they were everywhere. Several more stocky bearded men pushed past; two of them held children by the hand, kids about the size and shape of Cody and Astor, and each time I felt a sharp stab of hope, and each time the faces were wrong and the crowd closed around them and surged along Duval and left me stewing in a dark gray cloud of despair. I would never find them. Crowley had won and I might as well go home and wait for the end of all things.

The hopelessness came flooding in like a spring tide and I slumped against a building and closed my eyes. It was easier to do nothing while resting in one place than to do the same nothing galloping around with no idea where to go or what to look for. I could just stay here, leaning in the shade and wrapped in defeat. And I might have stayed there placidly for a much longer time—except that one very small bright idea swam upstream through the gray tide and wiggled its tail at me.

I watched it swim in its lazy slow circles for a moment, and when at last I understood what it was saying I grabbed it by the fins and held it up to look at it. I turned it over and looked at all sides, and the more I did, the more right it seemed. I opened my eyes and stood up slowly and deliberately and looked at the wiggly little thing one more time, and I knew it was right.

Crowley had not won—not yet.

I don’t mean that my thought brought some flicker of idiot hope, or that it had told me where Crowley had gone with Cody and Astor. It had told me a much simpler, more compelling truth:

The game was not over.

Crowley had not yet done what he needed to do. Taking Cody and Astor was not the Endgame, because we were not playing Capture the Kids. We were playing Let’s Demolish Dexter. He didn’t want to hurt them—his overdeveloped sense of right and wrong wouldn’t let him hurt innocent children. No, he wanted to hurt
me
, to punish
me
for the wicked things I had done. So until I was dead or at the very least in leg irons, Crowley was not done playing.