Chutsky slapped the palm of his hand on the table, looked around with a big happy smile, and said, “I want to thank you all for your cooperation with this thing. It’s very important that we keep this quiet until my people can move in on it.”
Captain Matthews cleared his throat. “Ahem. I, uh, I assume you will want us to continue our routine investigative procedures and the, uh, interrogating of witnesses and so on.”
Chutsky shook his head slowly. “Absolutely not. I need D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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your people all the way out of the picture immediately. I want this whole thing to cease and desist, disappear—as far as your department is concerned, Captain, I want it never to have happened at all.”
“Are YOU taking over this investigation?” Deborah demanded.
Chutsky looked at her and his smile got bigger. “That’s right,” he said. And he probably would have kept smiling at her indefinitely if not for Officer Coronel, the cop who had sat on the porch with the weeping and retching old lady. He cleared his throat and said, “Yeah, okay, just a minute here,”
and there was a certain amount of hostility in his voice that made his very slight accent a little more obvious. Chutsky turned to look at him, and the smile stayed on his face. Coronel looked flustered, but he met Chutsky’s happy stare. “Are you trying to stop us from doing our jobs here?”
“Your job is to protect and serve,” Chutsky said. “In this case that means to protect this information and serve me.”
“That’s bullshit,” Coronel said.
“It doesn’t matter what kind of shit it is,” Chutsky told him. “You’re gonna do it.”
“Who the fuck are you to tell me that?”
Captain Matthews tapped the table with his fingertips.
“That’s enough, Coronel. Mr. Chutsky is from Washington, and I have been instructed to render him every assistance.”
Coronel was shaking his head. “He’s no goddamn FBI,” he said.
Chutsky just smiled. Captain Matthews took a deep breath to say something—but Doakes moved his head half an inch toward Coronel and said, “Shut your mouth.” Coronel looked 7 2
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at him and some of the fight went out of him. “Don’t want to mess with this shit,” Doakes went on. “Let his people handle it.”
“It isn’t right,” said Coronel.
“Leave it,” said Doakes.
Coronel opened his mouth, Doakes raised his eyebrows—and on reflection, looking at the face underneath those eyebrows, perhaps, Officer Coronel decided to leave it.
Captain Matthews cleared his throat in an attempt to take back control. “Any more questions? All right then—Mr. Chutsky. If there’s any other way we can help . . .”
“As a matter of fact, Captain, I would appreciate it if I could borrow one of your detectives for liaison. Somebody who can help me find my way around, dot all the t’s, like that.”
All the heads around the table swung to Doakes in perfect unison, except for Chutsky’s. He turned to his side, to Deborah, and said, “How about it, Detective?”
C H A P T E R 9
Ihave to admit the surprise ending to captain Matthew’s meeting caught me off guard, but at least I now knew why everyone was acting so much like lab rats thrown into a lion’s cage. No one likes to have the Feds come in on a case; the only joy in it is making things as hard as possible for them when they do. But Chutsky was apparently such a very heavy hitter that even this small pleasure would be denied to us.
The significance of Deborah’s bright red skin condition was a deeper mystery, but it wasn’t my problem. My problem had suddenly become a little bit clearer. You may think that Dexter is a dull boy for not putting it together sooner, but when the nickel finally dropped it was accompanied by a desire to smack myself on the head. Perhaps all the beer at Rita’s house had short-sheeted my mental powers.
But clearly this visitation from Washington had been called down upon us by none other than Dexter’s personal nemesis, Sergeant Doakes. There had been some vague rumors that his 7 4
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service in the army had been somewhat irregular, and I was starting to believe them. His reaction when he saw the thing on the table had not been shock, outrage, disgust, or anger, but something far more interesting: recognition. Right at the scene he had told Captain Matthews what this was, and who to talk to about it. That particular who had sent Chutsky. And therefore when I had thought Chutsky and Doakes had recognized each other at the meeting, I had been right—because whatever was going on that Doakes knew about, Chutsky knew about it, too, probably even more so, and he had come to squash it. And if Doakes knew about something like this, there had to be a way to use his background against him in some small way, thus flinging the chains off poor Detained Dexter.