Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

“I know,” he said. “But it sounded kind of classy, so …” He shrugged, which caused a trickle of croissant flakes to fall off him and onto the floor. “They make ’em with chocolate filling,” he said. “And ham and cheese, too.”

“I don’t think they’ll approve of that in Paris,” I said.

“Where the fuck have you been?” Deborah snarled from behind me, and she snatched up a ham-and-cheese croissant.

“Some of us like to sleep from time to time,” I said.

“Some of us don’t get to sleep,” she said. “Because some of us have been trying to work, surrounded by camera crews from fucking Brazil and who knows where.” She took a savage bite of croissant and, with a full mouth, looked at the rest of it in her hand and said, “Jesus Christ, what is this thing?”

“It’s a French doughnut,” I said.

Debs threw the rest of it at a nearby trash can and missed by about four feet. “Tastes like shit,” she said.

“Would you rather try some of my jelly roll?” Vince asked her.

Debs didn’t even blink. “Sorry, I’d need at least a mouthful, which you ain’t got,” she said, and she grabbed my arm. “Come on.”

My sister led me down the hall to her cubicle and flung herself into the chair at her desk. I sat in the folding chair and waited for whatever onslaught of emotion she might have prepared for me.

It came in the form of a stack of newspapers and magazines that she started to throw at me, saying, “L.A. Times. Chicago Sun-Times. New York Fucking Times. Der Spiegel. Toronto Star.”

Just before I vanished completely under a pile of papers, battered insensible, I reached across and grabbed her arm, stopping her from flinging the Karachi Observer at me. “Debs,” I said. “I can see them better if they’re not wedged into my eye sockets.”

“This is a shit-storm,” she said, “like no shit-storm you have ever seen before.”

Truthfully I had not seen many actual shit-storms, although one time in middle school Randy Schwartz flushed a cherry bomb down a full toilet in the boys’ restroom, forcing Mr. O’Brien to go home early to change clothes. But clearly Debs was in no mood for fond reminiscence, even though neither of us had liked Mr. O’Brien. “I gathered that,” I said, “from the fact that Matthews is suddenly invisible.”

She snorted. “Like he never existed.”

“I never thought we’d see a case so hot the captain didn’t want to be on TV,” I said.

“Four fucking bodies in one fucking day,” she spat out. “Like nothing anybody has ever seen, and it lands in my lap.”

“Rita says you looked very nice on television,” I said encouragingly, but for some reason that caused her to slap at the pile of newspapers and knock several more onto the floor.

“I don’t wanna BE on fucking television,” she said. “Fucking Matthews has thrown me to the lions, because this is absolutely the biggest, most badass god-awful goddamn story in the whole fucking world right now, and we haven’t even released any pictures of the bodies but somehow everybody knows there’s something weird going on, and the mayor is having a shit fit, and the fucking GOVERNOR is having a shit fit, and if I personally do not solve this thing by lunchtime the whole fucking state of Florida is going to fall into the ocean and I am going to be underneath it when it happens.” She slapped at the pile of newspapers and this time at least half of them fell to the floor. That seemed to take all the fury out of her, because she slumped over and suddenly looked drained and exhausted. “I really need some help here, bro. I hate it like hell that I have to ask you, but… if you could ever really figure one of these out, this is the time.”

I wasn’t really sure what to make of the fact that suddenly she hated like hell to ask me—after all, she had asked before, several times, apparently without hate. She seemed to be getting a little odd and even snarky lately on the subject of my special talents. But what the hell. While it is true that I am without emotion, I am not immune to being manipulated by it, and the sight of my sister so obviously at the end of her rope was more than I could comfortably sidestep. “Of course I’ll help, Debs,” I said. “I just don’t know how much I can really do.”

“Well, fuck, you have to do something,” she said. “We’re going under here.”

It was nice that she said “we” and included me, although I had not been aware until right now that I, too, was going under. But the added sense of belonging did very little to jar my giant brain into action. In fact, the huge cranial complex that is Dexter’s Cerebral Faculty was being abnormally quiet, just as it had been at the crime scenes. Nevertheless, it was clear that a display of good old team spirit was called for, so I closed my eyes and tried to look like I was thinking very hard.

All right then: if there were any real, physical clues, the tireless and dogged heroes of forensics would find them. So what I needed was some kind of hint from a source that my coworkers could not tap—the Dark Passenger. The Passenger, however, was being uncharacteristically silent, except for its mildly savage chuckling and I wasn’t sure what that meant. Normally, any display of predatory skill would evoke some kind of appreciation that quite often provided a small stab of insight into the killing. But this time, any such comment was absent. Why?

Perhaps the Passenger was not yet settled back in comfortably after its recent flight. Or perhaps it was still recovering from the trauma—although this didn’t seem likely, judging by the growing power of my Need.

So why the sudden shyness? If something wicked transpired under our nose, I had come to expect a response beyond amusement. It had not come. Therefore … nothing wicked had happened? That made even less sense, since we quite clearly had four very dead bodies.

It also meant that I was, apparently, on my own—and there was Deborah staring at me with a very hard and expectant glare. So back up a step, Oh great and grim genius. Something was different about these killings, beyond the rather gaudy presentation of the bodies. And presentation was exactly the right word—they were displayed in a way calculated to make a maximum impact.

But on whom? Conventional wisdom in the psychopathic killer community would say that the more trouble you go to show off, the more you want an adoring audience. But it is also common knowledge that the police keep such sights under tight wraps—and e

ven if they didn’t, none of the news media would run pictures of such terrible things; believe me, I have looked.

So who could the presentations be aimed at? The police? The forensics wonks? Me? None of these were likely, and beyond them and the three or four people who had discovered the bodies, nobody had seen anything, and there had been only the tremendous outcry from the entire state of Florida, desperate to save the tourist industry.

A thought snapped my eyes open, and there was Deborah staring at me like an Irish setter on point.