Darkly Dreaming Dexter (Dexter 1)

“Ha,” he said, with his terrible artificial laugh. “But it is, I’m sure of it. Candomblé is like Santeria, but it’s Brazilian.”

“Vince, I have no reason to doubt you on that. My question is, what the hell are you talking about?”

He came two steps into the room in a kind of prance, as if his body wanted to take off and he couldn’t quite fight it down. “They have a thing about animal heads in some of their rituals,” he said.

“It’s on the Internet.”

“Really,” I said. “Does it say on the Internet that this Brazilian thing barbecues humans, cuts off their heads, and replaces them with ceramic bulls’ heads?”

Vince wilted just a bit. “No,” he admitted, and he raised his eyebrows hopefully. “But they use animals.”

“How do they use them, Vince?” I asked.

“Well,” he said, and he looked around my little room, possibly DEXTER IN THE DARK

67

for another topic of conversation. “Sometimes they, you know, offer a part to the gods, and then they eat the rest.”

“Vince,” I said, “are you suggesting that somebody ate the missing heads?”

“No,” he said, turning sullen, almost like Cody and Astor might have done. “But they could have.”

“It would be very crunchy, wouldn’t it?”

“All right,” he said, exceedingly sulky now. “I’m just trying to help.” And he stalked away, without even a small fake smile.

But the chaos had only begun. As my unwanted trip to dream-land indicated, I was already under enough pressure without the added strain of a rampaging sister. But only a few minutes later, my small oasis of peace was ripped asunder once again, this time by Deborah, who came roaring into my office as if pursued by killer bees.

“Come on,” she snarled at me.

“Come on where?” I asked, quite a reasonable question, I thought, but you would have thought I had asked her to shave her head and paint her skull blue.

“Just get in gear, and come on!” she said, so I came on and followed her down to the parking lot and into her car.

“I swear to God,” she fumed as she hammered her car through the traffic, “I have never seen Matthews this pissed before. And now it’s my fault!” She banged on the horn for emphasis and swerved in front of a van that said palmview assisted living on the side. “All because some asshole leaked the heads to the press.”

“Well, Debs,” I said, with all the reasonable soothing I could muster, “I’m sure the heads will turn up.”

“You’re goddamned right they will,” she said, narrowly missing a fat man on a bicycle that had huge saddlebags stuffed with scrap metal. “Because I am going to find out which cult the son of a bitch belongs to, and then I’m going to nail the bastard.”

I paused in mid-soothe. Apparently my dear demented sister, just like Vince, had gotten hold of the idea that finding the appropriate alternative religion would yield a killer. “Ah, all right,” I said.

“And where are we going to do that?”

68

JEFF LINDSAY

She slid the car out onto Biscayne Boulevard and into a parking space at the curb without answering, and got out of the car. And so I found myself patiently following her into the Centre for Inner Enhancement, a clearinghouse for all the wonderfully useful things that have the words “holistic,” “herbal,” or “aura” in them.

The Centre was a small and shabby building in an area of Biscayne Boulevard that had apparently been designated by treaty as a kind of reservation for prostitutes and crack dealers. There were enormous bars on the storefront windows and more of them on the door, which was locked. Deborah pounded on it and after a moment it gave an annoying buzz. She pushed, and finally it clicked and swung open.

We stepped in. A suffocating cloud of sickly sweet incense rolled over me, and I could tell that my inner enhancement had begun with a complete overhaul of my lungs. Through the smoke I could dimly see a large yellow silk banner hung along one wall that stated we are all one. It did not say one of what. A recording played softly, the sound of someone who seemed to be fighting off an overdose of downers by occasionally ringing a series of small bells. A waterfall murmured in the background and I am sure that my spirit would have soared, if only I had one. Since I didn’t, I found the whole thing just a bit irritating.

But of course, we weren’t here for pleasure, or even inner enhancement. And Sergeant Sister was, of course, all business all the time. She marched over to the counter, where there stood a middle-aged woman wearing a full-length tie-dyed dress that seemed to be made out of old crepe paper. Her graying hair radiated out from her head in a kind of random mess, and she was frowning. Of course, it may have been a beatific frown of enlightenment.

“Can I help you?” she said, in a gravelly voice that seemed to suggest we were beyond help.