I was surprised at the personal turn her remarks were taking, but I let it go. “Normal for somebody who could do this,” I said.
“There needs to be some passion, some sign that whoever did this was really, uh—feeling the need to do it. Not this. Not just like, what can I do after that’s fun.”
“This is fun for you?” she said.
I shook my head, irritated that she was deliberately missing the point. “No, it’s not, that’s what I’m trying to say. The killing part is supposed to be fun, and the bodies should reveal that. Instead, the killing wasn’t the point at all, it was just a means to an end. Instead of the end itself … Why are you looking at me like that?”
“Is that what it’s like for you?” she said.
I found myself somewhat taken aback, an unusual situation for Dashing Dexter, always ready with a quip. Deborah wa
s still coming to terms with what I was, and what her father had done with me, and I could appreciate that it was difficult for her to deal with on a daily basis, especially at work—which for her, after all, involved finding people like me and sending them to Old Sparky.
On the other hand, it was truly not something I could talk about with anything approaching comfort. Even with Deborah, it felt like discussing oral sex with your mother. So I decided to sidestep ever so slightly. “My point,” I said, “is that this doesn’t seem to be about the killing. It’s about what to do with the bodies afterward.”
She stared at me for a moment, and then shook her head. “I would love to know what the fuck you think that means,” she said. “But even more, I think I would love to know what the fuck goes on in your head.”
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. It sounded soothingly like a sound the Passenger might make. “Look, Debs,” I said. “What I’m saying is, we’re not dealing with a killer—we’re dealing with somebody who likes to play with dead bodies, not live ones.”
“And that makes a difference?”
“Yes.”
“Does he still kill people?” she asked.
“It sure looks like it.”
“And he’ll probably do it again?”
“Probably,” I said over a cold chuckle of interior certainty that only I could hear.
“So what’s the difference?” she said.
“The difference is that there won’t be the same kind of pattern. You can’t know when he’ll do it again, or who he’ll do it to, or any of the things you can usually count on to help you catch him. All you can do is wait and hope you get lucky.”
“Shit,” she said. “I never was good at waiting.”
There was a little bit of a commotion over where the cars were parked, and an overweight detective named Coulter came scuffling rapidly over the sand to us.
“Morgan,” he said, and we both said, “Yeah?”
“Not you,” he told me. “You. Debbie.”
Deborah made a face—she hated being called Debbie. “What?” she said.
“We’re supposed to partner on this,” he said. “Captain said.”
“I’m already here,” she said. “I don’t need a partner.”
“Now you do,” Coulter said. He took a swig from a large soda bottle. “There’s another one of these,” he said, gasping for breath. “Over at Fairchild Gardens.”
“Lucky you,” I said to Deborah. She glared at me and I shrugged. “Now you don’t have to wait,” I said.
FOUR
ONE OF THE GREAT THINGS ABOUT MIAMI HAS ALWAYS been the total willingness of its residents to pave everything. Our Fair City began as a subtropical garden spot teeming with wildlife, both animal and vegetable, and after only a very few years of hard work all the plants were gone and the animals were dead. Of course their memory lingers on in the condo clusters that replaced them. It is an unwritten law that each new development be named after whatever was killed to build it. Destroy eagles? Eagle’s Nest Gated Community. Kill off the panthers? Panther Run Planned Living. Simple and elegant and generally very lucrative.
I don’t mean to suggest by this that Fairchild Gardens was a parking lot where all the Fairchilds and their tulips had been killed. Far from it. If anything, it represented the revenge of the plants. Of course you had to drive past a certain number of Orchid Bays and Cypress Hollows to get there, but when you arrived, you were greeted by a vast natural-looking wilderness of trees and orchids nearly devoid of hedge-clipping humanity. Except for the busloads of tourists, of course. Still, there were actually one or two places where you could look at a genuine palm tree without seeing neon lights in the background, and on the whole I usually found it a relief to walk among the trees and vegetate far from the hurly-burly.