Dearly Devoted Dexter (Dexter, #2)

by Jeff Lindsay

During my first visit to the boat, I had been looking for signs that MacGregor was a pedophile. Now I was trying to find something a little bit more subtle, some small clue to the identity of MacGregor's photographer friend.

Stuck to the bottom of the duct-tape roll was a small scrap of paper, and written on the paper was, “Reiker,” and under that a telephone number.

Behind me, practically nosing into my backseat, was a maroon Ford Taurus. It looked very much like the sort of car the Miami-Dade Police Department maintained in large numbers for the use of plainclothes personnel.

I could not see through the glare of the windshield to know who was driving the other car, but it suddenly seemed very important to know just how long the car had been following me, who was driving, and how much the driver had seen.

The window rolled down and the always angry face of Sergeant Doakes looked out at me, like an idol for some wicked god, carved from a piece of dark wood.

“Why, Sergeant Doakes!” I said cheerfully. “What an amazing coincidence. What are you doing here?”

“I'm watching YOU,” he said.

CHAPTER 5

I knew Sergeant Doakes well enough to know that this was not simply a rainy-day whim on his part. If he was watching me, he would keep watching me until he caught me doing something naughty. Or until he was unable to watch me anymore.

No, said the small soft voice in my ear. Hello, Harry. Why not? And as I asked, I thought back to the time he had told me. There are rules, Dexter, Harry had said.

So my sixteenth birthday was a rather restrained affair. Doris, my foster mom, had recently died of cancer. But my foster sister, Deborah, made me a cake and Harry gave me a new fishing rod.

“No,” he said again, “we both know what you want. But you're not ready.” Since the first time Harry had talked to me about what I was, on a memorable camping trip a couple of years ago, we had been getting me ready. Getting me, in Harry's words, squared away

“There are rules, Dexter. There have to be. That's what separates you from the other ones.”

“Get some proof. It doesn't have to hold up in court, thank God.” He gave a small and bitter laugh. “You'd never get anywhere. But you need proof, Dexter. That's the most important thing.” He tapped the table with his knuckle.

“Sometimes even then, you let them go. No matter how much they deserve it. If they're too . . . conspicuous, for example. If it would raise too much attention, let it go.”

No matter how necessary it seemed, Doakes was out of bounds for me. I could look out the window at the maroon Taurus nosed under a tree, but I could do nothing about it except wish for some other solution to spontaneously arise—for example, a piano falling on his head. Sadly enough, I was left hoping for luck.

The number belonged to a cell phone, which was registered to a Mr. Steve Reiker of Tigertail Avenue in Coconut Grove. A little bit of cross-checking revealed that Mr. Reiker was a professional photographer. Of course, it could have been a coincidence. I am sure that there are many people named Reiker around the world who are photographers. I looked in the Yellow Pages and found that this particular Reiker had a specialty. He had a quarter-page ad that said, “Remember Them as They Are Now.”

Reiker specialized in pictures of children.

All right then: I would be unstintingly ordinary until it made his teeth hurt. It might take weeks rather than days, but I would do it. I would live fully the synthetic life I had created in order to appear human. And since humans are generally ruled by sex, I would start with a visit to my girlfriend Rita.

If everyone else in the world were to mysteriously disappear, I would feel irritated about it only because there would be no one to make me doughnuts. But children are interesting to me and, in fact, I like them. Rita's two kids had been through a traumatic early childhood, and maybe because I had, too, I felt a special attachment to them, an interest that went beyond maintaining my disguise with Rita.

With a cheerful synthetic smile I headed out the door, waved to Doakes, and drove over to Rita's modest South Miami house.

I am not a drinker—really, drinking is not a recommended habit for predators. It slows the reflexes, dulls the perceptions, and knits up the raveled sleeve of care, which always sounded to me like a very bad thing. But here I was, a demon on vacation, attempting the ultimate sacrifice by giving up my powers and becoming human—and so a beer was just the thing for Dipsophobic Dexter.

Rita sat up and looked from my left eye to my right eye and back again. “But you are, you KNOW you are.” She smiled and nestled her head back down on my shoulder. “I think it's . . . nice that you came here. To see me. When you were feeling bad.” I started to tell her that wasn't quite right, but then it occurred to me: I had come here when I felt bad. True, it was only to bore Doakes into going away, after the terrible frustration of losing my playdate with Reiker. But it had turned out to be a pretty good idea after all, hadn't it? Good old Rita. She was very warm and she smelled nice. “Good old Rita,” I said. I pulled her against me as tight as I could and leaned my cheek against the top of her head. We sat that way for a few minutes, and then Rita wiggled to her feet and pulled me up by the hand. “Come on,” she said. “Let's get you to bed.”

Well. Beer really is amazing stuff, isn't it?

CHAPTER 6

This normal life was going to take a little getting used to.

I found that if I limited myself to one or two beers, I could relax just enough to blend in with the slipcover on the couch. And so several nights a week, with ever-faithful Sergeant Doakes in my rearview mirror, I would stop over at Rita's house after work, play with Cody and Astor, and sit with Rita after the kids were in bed.

For days on end Doakes stayed with me. His appearances were unpredictable, which made him seem even more threatening. I never knew when or where he might turn up, and that made me feel like he was always there.

The thought of him clomping through his unworried life in those absurd red boots was almost more than I could stand.

Very well: I would sit on the couch, can of beer in hand, watching Survivor and thinking of an interesting variation of the game that would never make it to the network. If you simply add Dexter to the castaways and interpret the title a bit more literally . .

This was Miami.

CHAPTER 7

Three weeks after my first unsettling encounter with Sergeant Doakes, the clouds finally broke.

SERGEANT Deborah. Like her father, Harry, Debs was a cop. Owing to the happy outcome of recent events, she had been promoted, pulled out of the prostitute costume she had been forced to wear by her assignment with vice, whisked off the street corner at last and into her very own set of sergeant's stripes.

Alas, even her transfer to homicide had failed to bring a smile to her face. Somewhere along the way she had decided that serious law enforcement personnel must reshape their faces until they look like large, mean-spirited fish, and she was still working very hard to accomplish this.

“It's Sergeant Doakes,” I said. She nodded. “He's got a real hard-on for you,” she said. “You better keep away from him.” “I would love to,” I said. “But HE won't keep away from ME.” Her cop stare got harder. “What do you plan to do about it?”

Two patrol cars had already pulled up in front of the house, their lights flashing. A pair of uniformed cops were rolling out the yellow crime-scene tape around the place, and as we got out, I saw a third cop sitting in the front seat of one of the cars, his head in his hands. On the porch of the house a fourth cop stood beside an elderly lady.

“What have we got?” Deb asked him, holding up her badge. The cop shook his head without looking at us and blurted out, “I'm not going in there again, not if it costs me my pension.”

Sergeant Doakes might very well prevent me from doing anything of my own, but he couldn't stop me from admiring someone else's creativity. After all, it was my job, and shouldn't we enjoy our work?

She took a deep breath, blew it out hard, and said, “All right. Let's have a look.” But she still didn't move, so I slipped past her and pushed open the door.

Well. I assume it had started life as a human being of some kind, quite probably male and Hispanic. Very difficult to say in its present state which, I admit, left even me a bit startled.

I would never have thought, for instance, of cutting off the lips and eyelids like that, and although I pride myself on my neat work, I could never have done so without damage to the eyes, which in this case were rolling wildly back and forth, unable to close or even blink, always returning to that mirror. Just a hunch, but I guessed that the eyelids had been done last, long after the nose and ears had been oh-so-neatly removed. I could not decide, however, if I would have done these before or after the arms, legs, genitals, etc.

We often speak of very neat body work as “surgical.” But this was actual surgery. There was no bleeding at all, even from the mouth, where the lips and tongue had been removed. Even the teeth; one had to admire such amazing thoroughness. Every cut had been professionally closed; a white bandage was neatly taped to each shoulder where arms had once hung, and the rest of the cuts had already healed, in a way you might hope to find in the very best of hospitals.

Everything on the body had been cut off, absolutely everything.

I do what the Dark Passenger deems necessary, to someone who truly deserves it, and it always ends in death—which I am sure the thing on the table would agree was not such a bad thing. But this—to do all this so patiently and carefully and leave it alive in front of a mirror . . .

I heard Deb scuffle to a halt behind me. “Oh Jesus,” she said. “Oh God . . . What is it?” “I don't know,” I said. “But at least it's not a dog.”

CHAPTER 8

When Doakes saw the kitchen's central exhibit his eyes locked onto it and he stopped moving so completely that he could have been a statue. After a long moment he moved toward it, gliding slowly as if pulled on a string. He slid past us without noticing that we were there and came to a stop at the table. For several seconds he stared down at the thing. Then, still without even blinking, he reached inside his sport coat and drew out his pistol. Slowly, with no expression, he aimed it between the unblinkable eyes of the still-yowling thing on the table. He cocked the pistol.

Doakes did not answer nor look away, but he didn't pull the trigger, which seemed a shame.

“Only thing to do,” he said. “Believe me.” Deborah shook her head. “You know you can't,” she said.