“Square fucking one,” she said. “And Kyle is . . .” She bit her lip and didn’t finish the sentence.
“Did you tell Captain Matthews about this yet?” I asked her. She shook her head. “Well, he has to call them. They’ll send somebody else.”
“Sure, great. They send somebody else, who might make it all the way to baggage claim this time. Shit, Dexter.”
“We have to tell them, Debs,” I said. “By the way, who are them? Did Kyle ever tell you exactly who he works for?”
She sighed. “No. He joked about working for the OGA, but he never said why that was funny.”
“Well, whoever they are, they need to know,” I said. I pried the cassette out of my boom box and put it on the desk in front of her. “There has to be something they can do.”
Deborah didn’t move for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling they’ve already done it, and Burdett was it?” she said.
Then she scooped up the tape and trudged out of my office.
I was sipping coffee and digesting my lunch with the help of a jumbo chocolate-chip cookie when the call came to report to the scene of a homicide in the Miami Shores area. Angel-no-relation and I drove over to where a body had been found in the shell of a small house on a canal that was being ripped apart and rebuilt. Construction had been temporarily halted 1 5 0
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while the owner and the contractor sued each other. Two teenaged boys skipping school had snuck into the house and found the body. It was laid out on heavy plastic on top of a sheet of plywood which had been placed over two sawhorses.
Someone had taken a power saw and neatly lopped off the head, legs, and arms. The whole thing had been left like that, with the trunk in the middle and the pieces simply trimmed off and moved a few inches away.
And although the Dark Passenger had chuckled and whispered little dark nothings in my ear, I put it down to pure envy and went on with my work. There was certainly plenty of blood spatter for me to work with, still very fresh, and I probably would have spent a cheerfully efficient day finding and analyzing it if I hadn’t happened to overhear the uniformed officer who had been first on the scene talking with a detective.
“The wallet was right there by the body,” Officer Snyder was saying. “Got a Virginia driver’s license in the name of Daniel Chester Burdett.”
Oh, well then, I said to the happy chattering voice in the backseat of my brain. That would certainly explain a lot, wouldn’t it? I looked again at the body. Although the removal of the head and limbs had been fast and savage, there was a neatness to the arrangement that I could now recognize as slightly familiar, and the Dark Passenger chuckled happily in agreement. Between the trunk and each part, the gap was as precise as if it had been measured, and the whole presentation was arranged almost like an anatomy lesson. The hip bone disconnected from the leg bone.
“Got the two boys who found it in the squad car,” Snyder D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
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said to the detective. I glanced back at the two of them, wondering how to tell them my news. Of course, it was possible that I was wrong, but—
“Sonamabeech,” I heard someone mutter. I looked back to where Angel-no-relation was squatting on the far side of the body. Once again he was using his tweezers to hold up a small piece of paper. I stepped behind him and looked over his shoulder.
In a clear and spidery hand, someone had written
“POGUE,” and crossed it out with a single line. “Whassa pogue?” Angel asked. “His name?”
“It’s somebody who sits behind a desk and orders around the real troops,” I told him.
He looked at me. “How you know all this shit?” he asked.
“I see a lot of movies,” I said.
Angel glanced back down at the paper. “I think the hand-writing is the same,” he said.
“Like the other one,” I said.
“The one that never happened,” he said. “I know, I was there.”
I straightened up and took a breath, thinking how nice it was to be right. “This one never happened, either,” I said, and walked over to where Officer Snyder was chatting with the detective.
The detective in question was a pear-shaped man named Coulter. He was sipping from a large plastic bottle of Moun-tain Dew and looking out at the canal that ran by the backyard. “What do you think a place like this goes for?” he asked Snyder. “On a canal like that. Less than a mile from the bay, huh? Figure maybe what. Half a million? More?”
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