She gave a long hard snuffle, and then blew her nose on a paper towel from the table beside her. “I wish you’d stop saying that,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what else to tell you.”
“Tell me what this guy is up to. Tell me how to find him.”
I sat back down in the wobbly little chair. “I don’t think I D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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can, Debs. I don’t really have much of a feel for what he’s doing.”
“Bullshit,” she said.
“Seriously. I mean, technically speaking, he hasn’t actually killed anybody, you know.”
“Dexter,” she said, “you already understand more about this guy than Kyle did, and he knows who it is. We’ve got to find him. We’ve GOT to.” She bit her lower lip, and I was afraid she would start blubbering again, which would have left me totally helpless since she had already told me I couldn’t say “There there” again. But she pulled it together like the tough sergeant sister she was and merely blew her nose again.
“I’ll try, Deb. Can I assume that you and Kyle have done all the basic work? Talked to witnesses and so on?”
She shook her head. “We didn’t need to. Kyle knew—” She paused at that past tense, and then went on, very determined.
“Kyle KNOWS who did it, and he KNOWS who should be next.”
“Excuse me. He knows who’s next?”
Deborah frowned. “Don’t sound like that. Kyle said there are four guys in Miami who are on the list. One of them is missing, Kyle figured he was already taken, but that gave us a little time to set up surveillance on the other three.”
“Who are these four guys, Deborah? And how does Kyle know them?”
She sighed. “Kyle didn’t tell me their names. But they were all part of a team of some kind. In El Salvador. Along with this . . . Dr. Danco guy. So—” She spread her hands and looked helpless, a new look for her. And although it gave her a certain little-girl charm, the only thing it did for me was to 1 2 6
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make me feel even more put-upon. The whole world goes spinning merrily along, getting itself into the most God-awful trouble, and then it’s all up to Dashing Dexter to tidy things up again. It didn’t seem fair, but what can you do?
More to the point—what could I do now? I didn’t see any way to find Kyle before it was too late. And although I am fairly sure I didn’t say that out loud, Deborah reacted as if I had. She slapped one hand on the table and said, “We have to find him before he starts on Kyle. Before he even STARTS, Dexter. Because—I mean, am I supposed to hope Kyle will only lose an arm before we get there? Or a leg? Either way, Kyle is . . .” She turned away without finishing, looking out into the darkness through the French doors by the little table.
She was right, of course. It looked like there was very little we could do to get Kyle back intact. Because with all the luck in the world, even my dazzling intellect couldn’t possibly lead us to him before the work started. And then—how long could Kyle hold out? Presumably he’d had some sort of training in dealing with this sort of thing, and he knew what was coming, so—
But wait a moment. I closed my eyes and tried to think about it. Dr. Danco would know that Kyle was a pro. And as I had already told Deborah, the whole purpose was to shatter the victim into screaming unfixable pieces. Therefore . . .
I opened my eyes. “Deb,” I said. She looked at me. “I am in the rare position of having some hope to offer.”
“Spill it,” she said.
“This is only a guess,” I said. “But I think Dr. Demented will probably keep Kyle around for a while, without working on him.”
She frowned. “Why would he do that?”
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“To make it last longer, and to soften him up. Kyle knows what’s coming. He’s braced for it. But now, imagine he’s just left lying in the dark, tied up, so his imagination goes to work.
And so I think maybe,” I added as it occurred to me, “there’s another victim ahead of him. The guy who’s missing. So Kyle hears it—the saws and scalpels, the moans and whispers. He even smells it, knows it’s coming but doesn’t know when.
He’ll be half crazy before he even loses a toenail.”