Dexter in the Dark (Dexter 3)

“Kurt Wagner is missing,” she said.

I waited for more, but nothing came, so I just nodded. “I accept your apology,” I said.

“Nobody’s seen him since Saturday afternoon,” she said. “His roommate says he came in acting all freaked out, but wouldn’t say anything. He just changed his shoes, and left, and that’s it.” She hesitated, and then added, “He left his backpack.”

I admit I perked up a little at that. “What was in it?” I asked.

“Traces of blood,” she said, as if she was admitting she had taken the last cookie. “It matches Tammy Connor’s.”

“Well then,” I said. It didn’t seem right to say anything about the fact that she’d had somebody else do the blood work. “That’s a pretty good clue.”

“Yeah,” she said. “It’s him. It has to be him. So he did Tammy, took the head in his backpack and did Manny Borque.”

“It does look like that,” I said. “That’s a shame—I was just getting used to the idea that I was guilty.”

228

JEFF LINDSAY

“It makes no fucking sense,” Deborah complained. “The kid’s a good student, on the swimming team, good family—all of that.”

“He was such a nice guy,” I said. “I can’t believe he did all those horrible things.”

“All right,” Deborah said. “I know it, goddamn it. Total cliché.

But what the hell—the guy kills his own girlfriend, sure. Maybe even her roommate, because she saw it. But why everybody else?

And all that crap with burning them, and the bulls’ heads, what is it, Mollusk?”

“Moloch,” I said. “Mollusk is a clam.”

“Whatever,” she said. “But it makes no sense, Dex. I mean . . .”

She looked away, and for a moment I thought she was going to apologize after all. But I was wrong. “If it does make sense,” she said,

“it’s your kind of sense. The kind of thing you know about.” She looked back at me, but she still seemed to be embarrassed. “That’s, you know—I mean, is it, um—did it come back? Your, uh . . .”

“No,” I said. “It didn’t come back.”

“Well,” she said, “shit.”

“Did you put out a BOLO on Kurt Wagner?” I asked.

“I know how to do my job, Dex,” she said. “If he’s in the Miami-Dade area, we’ll get him, and FDLE has it, too. If he’s in Florida, somebody’ll find him.”

“And if he’s not in Florida?”

She looked hard at me, and I saw the beginnings of the way Harry had looked before he got sick, after so many years as a cop: tired, and getting used to the idea of routine defeat. “Then he’ll probably get away with it,” she said. “And I’ll have to arrest you to save my job.”

“Well, then,” I said, trying hard for cheerfulness in the face of overwhelming grim grayness, “let’s hope he drives a very recogniz-able car.”

She snorted. “It’s a red Geo, one of those mini-Jeep things.”

I closed my eyes. It was a very odd sensation, but I felt all the blood in my body suddenly relocating to my feet. “Did you say red?” I heard myself ask in a remarkably calm voice.

There was no answer, and I opened my eyes. Deborah was staring at me with a look of suspicion so strong I could almost touch it.

DEXTER IN THE DARK