“All right,” Deborah said. “She can go home.”
I nodded at Arabelle. “Va a su casa,” I said.
“Gracias,” she said again. And she smiled hugely and then turned and almost ran for the street.
“Shit,” Deborah said. “Shit shit SHIT.”
I looked at her with raised eyebrows, and she shook her head. She seemed deflated, the anger and tension drained out of her. “I know it’s stupid,” she said. “I just hoped she might have seen something. I mean—” She shrugged and turned away, looking in the direction of the body in the doorway. “We’ll never find the gay tourists, either. Not in South Beach.”
“They can’t have seen anything anyway,” I said.
“In broad daylight. And nobody saw anything?”
“People see what they expect to see,” I said. “He probably used a delivery van, and that would make him invisible.”
“Well, shit,” she said again, and this didn’t seem like a good time to criticize her for such a limited vocabulary. She faced me again. “I don’t suppose you got anything helpful from looking at this one.”
“Let me take some pictures and think about it,” I said.
“That’s a no, right?”
“It’s not a stated no,” I said. “It’s an implied no.”
Deborah held up a middle finger. “Imply this,” she said, and she turned away and trudged back to look at the body.
SEVEN
IT IS SURPRISING, BUT TRUE: COLD COQ AU VIN REALLY doesn’t taste as good as it should. Somehow the wine gives off an odor of stale beer, and the chicken feels slightly slimy, and the whole experience becomes an ordeal of grim perseverance in the face of bitterly disappointed expectations. Still, Dexter is nothing if not persistent, and when I got home around midnight, I worked through a large portion of the stuff with truly stoic fortitude.
Rita did not wake up when I slipped into bed, and I did not dawdle overlong on the shores of sleep. I closed my eyes, and it seemed like almost immediately the clock radio beside the bed began to scream at me about the rising tide of dreadful violence threatening to overwhelm our poor battered city.
I pried open an eye and saw that it really was six o’clock and time to get up. It didn’t seem fair, but I dragged myself out of bed and into the shower, and by the time I reached the kitchen, Rita had breakfast on the table. “I see you had some of the chicken,” she said, a little grimly, I thought, and I realized a little blarney was called for.
“It was wonderful,” I said. “Better than what we had in Paris.”
She brightened a little, but shook her head. “Liar,” she said. “It never tastes right when it’s cold.”
“You have the magic touch,” I said. “It tasted warm.”
She frowned and brushed a lock of hair off her face. “I know you have to, you know,” she said. “I mean, your job is … But I wish you could have tasted it when—I mean, I really do understand,” she said, and I was not sure I could say the same thing. Rita put a plate of fried eggs and sausage in front of me and nodded at the small TV set over by the coffeemaker. “It was all over the news this morning, about… that’s what it was, wasn’t it? And they had your sister on, saying that, you know. She didn’t look very happy.”
“She’s not happy at all,” I said. “Which doesn’t seem right, since she has a really challenging job, and her picture is on TV. Who could ask for more?”
Rita did not smile at my lighthearted jest. Instead, she pulled a chair over next to mine and, sitting down and clasping her hands in her lap, she frowned even deeper. “Dexter,” she said, “we really need to talk.”
I know from my research into human life that these are the words that strike terror into men’s souls. Conveniently enough, I have no soul, but I still felt a surge of discomfort at what those ominous syllables might mean. “So soon after the honeymoon?” I said, hoping to deflect at least some small bit of seriousness.
Rita shook her head. “It’s not—I mean …” She fluttered one hand, and then let it drop back into her lap. She sighed deeply. “It’s Cody,” she said at last.
“Oh,” I said, without even a clue of what sort of “it” Cody might be. He seemed perfectly all right to me—but then, I knew better than Rita that Cody was not at all the small and quiet human child he seemed to be, but instead a Dexter-in-training.
“He still seems, so …” She shook her head again and looked down, her voice dropping. “I know his … father … did some things that… hurt him. Probably changed him forever. But…” She looked up at me, her eyes bright with tears. “It isn’t right that… he should still be like this. Should he? So quiet all the time, and …” She looked down again. “I’m just afraid for what… you know.” A tear fell onto her lap and she sniffled. “He might be … you know … permanently …”
Several more tears joined the first one, and even though I am generally helpless in the face of emotion, I knew that some kind of reassuring gesture was called for here.
“Cody will be fine,” I said, blessing my ability to lie convincingly. “He just needs to come out of his shell a little bit.”
Rita sniffled again. “Do you really think so?”