“I don’t need your help,” she said and he shrugged.
“You take Dexter’s help,” he said.
“That’s different.”
“How is that different?” he asked, and it seemed like a reasonable question.
“Because he gives me help,” she said. “You want to solve it for me.”
They locked eyes and didn’t speak for a long moment. I’d seen them do it before, and it was eerily reminiscent of the nonverbal conversations Cody and Astor had. It was nice to see them so clearly welded together as a couple, even though it reminded me that I had a wedding of my own to worry about, complete with an apparently insane high-class caterer. Happily, just before I could begin to gnash my teeth, Debs broke the eerie silence.
“I won’t be one of those women who needs help,” she said.
“But I can get you information that you can’t get,” he said, putting his good hand on her arm.
“Like what?” I asked him. I’ll admit I had been curious for some time about what Chutsky was, or had been before his accidental amputations. I knew that he had worked for some government agency which he referred to as the OGA, but I still didn’t know what that stood for.
He turned to face me obligingly. “I have friends and sources in a lot of places,” he said. “Something lik
e this might have left some kind of trail somewhere else, and I could call around and find out.”
“You mean call your buddies at the OGA?” I said.
He smiled. “Something like that,” he said.
76
JEFF LINDSAY
“For Christ’s sake, Dexter,” Deborah said. “OGA just means other government agency. There’s no such agency, it’s an in-joke.”
“Nice to be in at last,” I said. “And you can still get access to their files?”
He shrugged. “Technically I’m on convalescent leave,” he said.
“From doing what?” I asked.
He gave me a mechanical smile. “You don’t really want to know,” he said. “The point is, they haven’t decided yet whether I’m any fucking good anymore.” He looked at the fork clamped in his steel hand, turning his arm over to see it move. “Shit,” he said.
And because I could feel that one of those awkward moments was upon us, I did what I could to move things back onto a sociable footing. “Didn’t you find anything at the kiln?” I asked. “Some kind of jewelry or something?”
“What the fuck is that?” she said.
“The kiln,” I said. “Where the bodies were burned.”
“Haven’t you been paying attention? We haven’t found where the bodies were burned.”
“Oh,” I said. “I assumed it was done right there on campus, in the ceramic studio.”
By the suddenly frozen look on her face, I realized that either she was experiencing massive indigestion or she did not know about the ceramic studio. “It’s just half a mile from the lake where the bodies were found,” I said. “You know, the kiln. Where they make pottery?”
Deborah stared at me for a moment longer, and then jumped up from the table. I thought it was a wonderfully creative and dramatic way to end a conversation, and it took a moment before I could do more than blink after her.
“I guess she didn’t know about that,” Chutsky said.
“That’s my first guess,” I said. “Shall we follow?”
He shrugged and speared the last chunk of his steak. “I’m gonna have some flan, and a cafecita. Then I’ll get a cab, since I’m not allowed to help,” he said. He scooped up some rice and beans and nodded at me. “You go ahead, unless you want to walk back to work.”