Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

“Absolutely,” I said, putting a hand over hers, as I had seen in a movie not too long ago. “Cody is a great kid. He’s just maturing a little slower than others. Because of what happened to him.”

She shook her head and a tear hit me on the face. “You can’t know that,” she said.

“I can,” I told her, and oddly enough, now I was actually telling the truth. “I know perfectly well what he’s going through, because I went through it myself.”

She looked at me with very bright, wet eyes. “You—you never talked about what happened to you,” she said.

“No,” I said. “And I never will. But it was close enough to what happened to Cody, so I do know. Trust me on this, Rita.” And I patted her hand again, thinking, Yes, trust me. Trust me to turn Cody into a well-adjusted, smoothly functioning monster, just like me.

“Oh, Dexter,” she said. “I do trust you. But he’s so …” She shook her head again, sending a spray of tears around the room.

“He’ll be fine,” I said. “Really. He just needs to come out of his shell a little bit. Learn to be with other kids his own age.” And learn to pretend to be like them, I thought, but it didn’t seem terribly comforting to say aloud, so I didn’t.

“If you’re sure,” Rita said with a truly enormous snuffle.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“All right,” she said, reaching for a napkin off the table and blotting at her nose and eyes. “Then let’s just…” Sniffle. Honk. “I guess we’ll just think of ways to get him to mix with other kids.”

“That’s the ticket,” I said. “We’ll have him cheating at cards in no time.”

Rita blew her nose a last, long time.

“Sometimes I couldn’t tell that you’re being funny,” she said. She stood up and kissed me on the top of the head. “If I didn’t know you so well.”

Of course, if she really knew me as well as she thought, she would stab me with a fork and run for her life, but maintaining our illusions is an important part of life’s work, so I said nothing, and breakfast went on in its wonderfully soothing monotony. There is a real pleasure in being waited upon, especially by someone who really knows what she’s doing in the kitchen, and it was worth listening to all the chatter that went with it.

Cody and Astor joined us as I started my second cup of coffee, and the two of them sat side by side with identical expressions of heavily sedated incomprehension on their faces. They didn’t have the benefit of coffee, and it took them several minutes to realize that they were, in fact, awake. It was Astor, naturally enough, who broke the silence.

“Sergeant Debbie was on TV,” she said. Astor had developed a strange case of hero worship for Deborah, ever since she found out that Debs carried a gun and got to boss around big beefy uniformed cops.

“That’s part of her job,” I said, even though I realized it would probably feed the hero worship.

“How come you’re never on TV, Dexter?” she said accusingly.

“I don’t want to be on TV,” I said, and she looked at me like I had suggested outlawing ice cream. “It’s true,” I said. “Imagine if everybody knew what I look like. I couldn’t walk down the street without people pointing at me and talking behind my back.”

“Nobody points at Sergeant Debbie,” she said.

I nodded. “Of course not,” I said. “Who would dare?” Astor looked like she was ready to argue, so I put my coffee cup down with a bang and stood up. “I’m off to another day of mighty work defending the good people of our city.”

“You can’t defend people with a microscope,” Astor said.

“That’s enough, Astor,” Rita said, and she hustled over to plant another kiss on me, on the face this time. “I hope you catch this one, Dexter,” she said. “It sounds awful.”

I rather hoped we would catch this one, too. Four victims in one day seemed a little bit overzealous, even to me, and it would certainly create

a citywide atmosphere of paranoid watchfulness that would make it almost impossible for me to have any quiet fun of my own.

So it was with a real determination to see justice done that I went in to work. Of course, any real attempt at justice would have to start with the traffic, since Miami drivers have long ago taken the simple chore of going from one place to another and turned it into a kind of high-speed, heavily armed game of high-stakes bumper cars. It’s even more interesting because the rules change from one driver to the next. For example, as I drove along in the tight bundle of cars on the expressway, a man in the next lane suddenly started honking his horn. When I turned to look, he flipped me off, yelled, “Maricón!” and forced his way in front of me, and then over on to the shoulder, where he accelerated away.

I had no idea what had caused the display, so I simply waved at his car as it vanished in a distant concerto of honking and shouting. The Miami Rush-Hour Symphony.

I arrived at work a little bit early, but the building was already buzzing with frantic activity. The press room was overflowing with more people than I had ever seen before—at least, I assumed they were people, although with reporters you can never be sure. And the true seriousness of the situation hit me when I realized that there were dozens of cameras and microphones and no sign of Captain Matthews.

More unprecedented shocks awaited: a uniformed cop stood at the elevator and demanded to see my credentials before he let me past, even though he was a guy I knew slightly. And even more—when I finally got to the lab area, I found that Vince had actually brought in a bag of croissants.

“Good lord,” I said, gazing at the flakes of crust that covered Vince’s shirtfront. “I was just kidding, Vince.”