She paused, and then very casually said, “Kyle said some interesting things about Doakes.”
I felt my long-fanged friend inside stretch just a little and absolutely purr. “You’re getting very subtle all of a sudden, Deborah,” I said. “All you had to do was ask me.”
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“I just asked, and you gave me all that crap about how you can’t help,” she said, suddenly good old plain-speaking Debs again. “So how about it. What have you got?”
“Nothing at the moment,” I said.
“Shit,” said Deborah.
“But I might be able to find something.”
“How soon?”
I admit that I was feeling irked by Kyle’s attitude toward me. What had he said? I would be “in the shit and you will get flushed”? Seriously—who wrote his dialogue? And Deborah’s sudden onset of subtlety, which had been my traditional bailiwick, had done nothing to calm me down. So I shouldn’t have said it, but I did. “How about by lunchtime?” I said.
“Let’s say I’ll have something by one o’clock. Baleen, since Kyle can pick up the check.”
“This I gotta see,” she said, and then added, “The stuff about Doakes? It’s pretty good.” She hung up.
Well, well, I said to myself. Suddenly, I did not mind the thought of working a little bit on a Saturday. After all, the only alternative was to hang out at Rita’s and watch moss grow on Sergeant Doakes. But if I found something for Debs, I might at long last have the small opening I had hoped for. I merely had to be the clever boy we all believed I was.
But where to start? There was precious little to go on, since Kyle had pulled the department away from the crime scene before we had done much more than dust for prints. Many times in the past I had earned a few modest brownie points with my police colleagues by helping them track down the sick and twisted demons who lived only to kill. But that was because I understood them, since I am a sick and twisted demon myself. This time, I could not rely on getting any hints D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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from the Dark Passenger, who had been lulled into an uneasy sleep, poor fellow. I had to depend on my own bare-naked native wit, which was also being alarmingly silent at the moment.
Perhaps if I gave my brain some fuel, it would kick into high gear. I went to the kitchen and found a banana. It was very nice, but for some reason it did not launch any mental rockets.
I threw the peel in the garbage and looked at the clock.
Well, dear boy, that was five whole minutes gone by. Excellent. And you have already managed to figure out that you can’t figure anything out. Bravo, Dexter.
There really were very few places to start. In fact, all I had was the victim and the house. And since I was fairly certain that the victim would not have a lot to say, even if we gave him back his tongue, that left the house. Of course it was possible that the house belonged to the victim. But the decor had such a temporary look to it, I was sure it did not.
Strange to simply walk away from an entire house like that.
But he had done so, and with no one breathing down his neck and forcing a hasty and panicked retreat—which meant that he had done it deliberately, as part of his plan.
And that should imply that he had somewhere else to go.
Presumably still in the Miami area, since Kyle was here looking for him. It was a starting point, and I thought of it all by myself. Welcome home, Mr. Brain.
Real estate leaves fairly large footprints, even when you try to cover them up. Within fifteen minutes of sitting down at my computer I had found something—not actually a whole footprint, but certainly enough to make out the shape of a couple of toes.
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The house on N.W. 4th Street was registered to Ramon Puntia. How he expected to get away with that in Miami, I don’t know, but Ramon Puntia was a Cuban joke name, like
“Joe Blow” in English. But the house was paid for and no taxes were due, a sound arrangement for someone who valued privacy as much as I assumed our new friend did. The house had been bought with a single cash payment, a wire transfer from a bank in Guatemala. This seemed a bit odd; with our trail starting in El Salvador and leading through the murky depths of a mysterious government agency in Washington, why take a left turn into Guatemala? But a quick online study of contemporary money laundering showed that it fit very well. Apparently Switzerland and the Cayman Is-lands were no longer à la mode, and if one wished for discreet banking in the Spanish-speaking world, Guatemala was all the rage.
This raised the interesting question of how much money Dr. Dismember had, and where it came from. But it was a question that led nowhere at the moment. I had to assume that he had enough for another house when he was done with the first one, and probably in the same approximate price range.