Dexter 3 - Dexter in the Dark (2 page)

So on top of the endless debates about chicken versus
fish and wine versus cash bar, a series of monomaniacal rambling monologues
about Paris began to emerge. Surely we could afford a whole week, that would
give us time to see the Jardin des Tuileries and the Louvre-and maybe something
by Molière at the Comédie-Française. I had to applaud the depth of her
research. For my part, my interest in Paris had faded away completely long ago
when I learned that it was in France.

Luckily for us, I was saved from the necessity of
finding a politic way of telling her all this when Cody and Astor made their
subtle entrance. They don't barrel into a room with guns blazing as most
children of seven and ten do. As I have said, they were somewhat damaged by
their dear old biological dad, and one consequence is that you never see them
come and go: they enter the room by osmosis. One moment they are nowhere to be
seen and the next they are standing quietly beside you, waiting to be noticed.

“We want to play kick the can,” Astor said. She was the
spokesperson for the pair; Cody never put more than four words together in a
single day. He was not stupid, very far from it. He simply preferred not to
speak most of the time. Now he just looked at me and nodded.

“Oh,” said Rita, pausing in her reflections
on the land of Rousseau, Candide, and Jerry Lewis, “well then, why don't
you-”

“We want to play kick the can with Dexter,”
Astor added, and Cody nodded very loudly.

Rita frowned. “I guess we should have talked about this before,
but don't you think Cody and Astor-I mean, shouldn't they start to call you
something more, I don't know-but just Dexter? It seems kind of-”

“How about mon papere?” I asked. “Or
Monsieur le Comte?”

“How about, I don't think so?” muttered
Astor.

“I just think-” said Rita.

“Dexter is fine,” I said. “They're used
to it.”

“It doesn't seem respectful,” she said.

I looked down at Astor.
“Show your mother you can say 'Dexter' respectfully,” I told her.

She rolled her eyes.
“Puh-leeeeeze,” she said. I smiled at Rita. “See? She's ten
years old. She can't say anything respectfully.” “Well, yes,
but-” Rita said. “It's okay. They're okay,” I said. “But
Paris-” “Let's go outside,” said Cody, and I looked at him with
surprise. Four entire syllables-for him it was

practically an oration. “All right,” said
Rita. “If you really think-” “I almost never think,” I
said. “It gets in the way of the mental process.” “That doesn't
make any sense,” Astor said. “It doesn't have to make sense. It's
true,” I said. Cody shook his head. “Kick the can,” he said. And
rather than break in on his talking jag, I simply

followed him out into the yard.

TWO

OF COURSE, EVEN WITH RITA'S GLORIOUS PLANS UNFOLDING,
life was not all jubilation and strawberries. There was real work to do, too.
And because Dexter is nothing if not conscientious, I had been doing it. I had
spent the past two weeks dabbing on the last few brushstrokes of a brand-new
canvas. The young gentleman who served as my inspiration had inherited a great
deal of money, and he had apparently been using it for the kind of dreadful
homicidal escapades that made me wish I was rich, too. Alexander Macauley was
his name, though he called himself “Zander,” which seemed somewhat
preppy to me, but perhaps that was the point. He was a dyed-in-the-wool trust-fund
hippie, after all, someone who had never done any real work, devoting himself
entirely to lighthearted amusement of the kind that would have made my hollow
heart go pitter-pat, if only Zander had shown slightly better taste in choosing
his victims.

The Macauley family's money came from vast hordes of cattle, endless
citrus groves, and dumping phosphates into Lake Okeechobee. Zander came
frequently to the poor areas of town to pour out his largesse across the city's
homeless. And the favored few he really wished to encourage he reportedly
brought back to the family ranch and gave employment, as I learned from a
teary-eyed and admiring newspaper article.

Of course Dexter always
applauds the charitable spirit. But in general, I am so very much in favor of
it because it is nearly always a warning sign that something nefarious, wicked,
and playful is going on behind the Mother Teresa mask. Not that I would ever
doubt that somewhere in the depths of the human heart there really and truly
does live a spirit of kind and caring charity, mingled with the love of fellow
man. Of course it does. I mean, I'm sure it must be in there somewhere. I've
just never seen it. And since I lack both humanity and real heart, I am forced
to rely on experience, which tells me that charity begins at home, and almost
always ends there, too.

So when I see a young, wealthy, handsome, and otherwise
normal-appearing young man lavishing his resources on the vile downtrodden of
the earth, I find it difficult to accept the altruism at face value, no matter
how beautifully presented. After all, I am fairly good at presenting a charming
and innocent picture of myself, and we know how accurate that is, don't we?

Happily for my consistent worldview, Zander was no different-just a lot
richer. And his inherited money had made him a little bit sloppy. Because in
the meticulous tax records I uncovered, the family ranch appeared to be
unoccupied and idle, which clearly meant that wherever he was taking his dear
dirty friends, it was not to a healthy and happy life of country labor.

Even better for my purposes, wherever they went with
their new friend Zander, they were going barefoot. Because in a special room at
his lovely Coral Gables home, guarded by some very cunning and expensive locks
that took me almost five full minutes to pick, Zander had saved some souvenirs.
It's a foolish risk for a monster to take; I know this full well, since I do it
myself. But if someday a hardworking investigator comes across my little box of
memories, he will find no more than some glass slides, each with a single drop
of blood preserved upon it, and no way ever to prove that any of them is
anything sinister at all.

Zander was not quite so clever. He had saved a shoe from each of his
victims, and counted on too much money and a locked door to keep his secrets
safe.

Well really. No wonder monsters get such a bad reputation. It was just
too naive for words-and shoes? Seriously, shoes, by all that's unholy? I try to
be tolerant and understanding of the foibles of others, but this was a bit
much. What could possibly be the attraction in a sweaty, slime-encrusted,
twenty-year-old sneaker? And then to leave them right out in the open like
that, too. It was almost insulting.

Of course, Zander probably thought that if he was ever
caught he could count on buying the best legal care in the world, who would
surely get him off with only community service-a little ironic, since that was how
it had all started. But one thing he had not counted on was being caught by
Dexter instead of the police. And his trial would take place in the Traffic
Court of the Dark Passenger, in which there are no lawyers-although I certainly
hope to catch one someday soon-and the verdict is always absolutely final.

But was a shoe really enough proof? I had no doubt of
Zander's guilt. Even if the Dark Passenger hadn't been singing arias the entire
time I looked at the shoes, I knew very well what the collection meant-left to
his own devices, Zander would collect more shoes. I was quite sure that he was
a bad man, and I wanted very much to have a moonlight discussion with him and
give him some pointed comments. But I had to be absolutely sure-that was the
Harry Code.

I had always followed the careful rules laid down by
Harry, my cop foster father, who taught me how to be what I am with modesty and
exactness. He had shown me how to leave a crime scene clean as only a cop can,
and he had taught me to use the same kind of thoroughness in selecting my
partner for the dance. If there was any doubt at all, I could not call Zander
out to play.

And now? No court in the world would convict Zander of
anything beyond unsanitary fetishism based on his display of footwear-but no
court in the world had the expert testimony of the Dark Passenger, either, that
soft, urgent inner voice that demanded action and was never wrong. And with
that sibilance mounting in my interior ear it was difficult to stay calm and
impartial. I wanted to claim Zander for the Final Dance the way I wanted my
next breath.

I wanted, I was sure-but I knew what Harry would say.
It wasn't enough. He taught me that it's good to see bodies in order to be
certain, and Zander had managed to hide all of them well enough to keep me

from finding them. And without a body, no amount of
wanting it would make it right.

I went back to my research to find out where he might
be stashing a short row of pickled corpses. His home was out of the question. I
had been in it and had not had a hint of anything other than the shoe museum,
and the Dark Passenger is normally quite good at nosing out cadaver
collections. Besides, there was no place to put them at the house-there are no basements
in Florida, and it was a neighborhood where he could not dig in the yard or
carry in bodies without being observed. And a short consultation with the
Passenger convinced me that someone who mounted his souvenirs on walnut plaques
would certainly dispose of the leftovers neatly.

The ranch was an excellent possibility, but a quick trip to the old
place revealed no traces at all. It had clearly been abandoned for some time;
even the driveway was overgrown.

I dug deeper: Zander owned a condo in Maui, but that
was much too far away. He had a few acres in North Carolina-possible, but the
thought of driving twelve hours with a body in the car made it seem unlikely.
He owned stock in a company that was trying to develop Toro Key, a small island
south of Cape Florida. But a corporate site was certainly out of the
question-too many people might wander in and poke around. In any case, I
remembered trying to land on Toro Key when I was younger, and it had armed
guards strolling about to keep people away. It had to be somewhere else.

Among his many portfolios and assets, the only thing that made any
sense at all was Zander's boat, a forty-five-foot Cigarette. I knew from my
experience with a previous monster that a boat provided wonderful opportunities
for disposing of leftovers. Simply wire the body to a weight, flip it over the
rail, and wave bye-bye. Neat, clean, tidy; no fuss, no muss, no evidence.

And no way for me to get my proof, either. Zander kept
his boat at the most exclusive private marina in Coconut Grove, the Royal Bay
Yacht Club. Their security was very good, too good for Dexter to sneak in with
a lock pick and a smile. It was a full-service marina for the terminally rich,
the kind of place where they cleaned and polished your bowline when you brought
the boat in. You didn't even have to fuel up your own boat; just call ahead and
it would be ready for you, down to chilled champagne in the cockpit. And
happily smiling armed guards infested the grounds night and day, tipping their
hats at the Quality and shooting anyone who climbed the fence.

The boat was unreachable. I was as certain as I could
be that Zander was using it to dispose of the bodies, and so was the Dark
Passenger, which counts for even more. But there was no way to get to it.

It was annoying, even frustrating, to picture Zander
with his latest trophy-probably bundled neatly into a gold-plated ice
chest-calling cheerfully ahead to the dockmaster and ordering the boat fueled,
and then strolling nonchalantly down the dock while two grunting Wackenhuts put
the chest on board his boat and waved a respectful good-bye. But I could not
get to the boat and prove it. Without this final proof, the Harry Code would
not allow me to proceed.

Certain as I was, what did that leave me? I could try
to catch Zander in the act the next time. But there was no way to be sure when
that would be, and I couldn't watch him all the time. I did have to show up at
work now and then, and make my token appearances at home, and go through all
the motions of maintaining a normal-seeming life. And so at some point in the
next weeks or so if the pattern held, Zander would call the dockmaster and
order his boat prepared, and-

And the dockmaster, because he was an efficient
employee at a rich man's club, would make a note of exactly what he did to the
boat and when: how much fuel he put in, what kind of champagne, and how much
Windex he used on the windscreen. He would put all that in the file marked
“Macauley,” and store

it on his computer.

And suddenly we were back in Dexter's world again, with the Passenger
hissing certainty and urging me to the keyboard.

Dexter is modest, even self-effacing, and certainly aware of the limits
of his considerable talent. But if there was a limit to what I could discover
on the computer, I had not found it yet. I sat back down and went to work.

It took me less than half an hour to hack into the
club's computers and find the records. Sure enough, there was a thorough service
record. I checked it against the meetings of the board of Zander's favorite
charity, One World Mission of Divine Light, which was on the edge of Liberty
City. On February 14, the board was delighted to announce that Wynton Allen
would be moving out of the den of iniquity that is Miami and onto Zander's
ranch to be rehabilitated by honest labor. And on February 15, Zander had taken
a boat trip that used thirty-five gallons of fuel.

On March 11, Tyrone Meeks had been granted similar happiness. And on
March 12, Zander took a boat ride.

And so it went; each time some lucky homeless person was chosen for a
life of bucolic joy, Zander placed a service order on his boat within
twenty-four hours.