Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

FIFTEEN

IT WAS THE NEXT MORNING THAT THINGS BEGAN TO UNRAVEL. I went into work tired but content from my happy chores and the late night they had put me through. I had just settled down with a cup of coffee to attack a heap of paperwork when Vince Masuoka poked his head in the door. “Dexter,” he said.

“The one and only,” I said with proper modesty.

“Did you hear?” he said with an irritating bet-you-didn’t-hear smirk.

“I hear so many things, Vince,” I said. “Which one do you mean?”

“The autopsy report,” he said. And because it was apparently important to him to stay as annoying as possible, he said nothing else, just looked at me expectantly.

“All right, Vince,” I said at last. “Which autopsy report did I not hear about that will change the way I think about everything?”

He frowned. “What?” he said.

“I said, no, I didn’t hear. Please tell me.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think that’s what you said,” he said. “But anyway, you know those wacky designer bodies, with all the fruit and stuff in them?”

“At South Beach, and Fairchild Gardens?” I said.

“Right,” he said. “So they get them to the morgue for the autopsy, and the M.E. is like, whoa, great, they’re back.”

I don’t know if you have noticed this, but it is quite possible for two human beings to have a conversation in which one or both parties involved have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about. I seemed to be in one of those brain-puzzling chats right now, since so far the only thing I’d gotten from talking to Vince was a profound sense of irritation.

“Vince,” I said. “Please use small and simple words and tell me what you’re trying to say before you force me to break a chair over your head.”

“I’m just saying,” he said, which at least was true and easy to understand, as far as it went, “the M.E. gets those four bodies and says, these were stolen from here. And now they’re back.”

The world seemed to tilt to one side ever so slightly, and a heavy gray fog settled over everything and made it hard to breathe. “The bodies were stolen from the morgue?” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Meaning, they were already dead, and somebody took them away and then did all the weird stuff to them?”

He nodded. “It’s just like the craziest thing I ever heard,” he said. “I mean, you steal dead bodies from the morgue? And you play with ’em like that?”

“But whoever did it didn’t actually kill them,” I said.

“No, they were all accidental death, just lying there on their slabs.”

Accidental is such a terrible word. It stands for all the things I have fought against my whole life: it is random, messy, unplanned, and therefore dangerous. It is the word that will get me caught someday, because in spite of all the care in the world, something accidental can still happen and, in this world of ragged chaotic chance, it always does.

And it just had. I had just last night filled a half-dozen garbage bags with someone who was more or less accidentally innocent.

“So it isn’t murder after all,” I said.

He shrugged. “It’s still a felony,” he said. “Stealing a corpse, desecrating the dead, something like that. Endangering public health? I mean, it’s gotta be illegal.”

“So is jaywalking,” I said.

“Not in New York. They do it all the time.”

Learning more about the jaywalking statutes in New York did nothing at all to fill me with good cheer. The more I thought about it, the more I would have to say that I was skating perilously close to having real human emotions about this, and as the day went on I thought about it more and more. I felt a strange kind of choking sensation just belo

w my throat, and a vague and aimless anxiety that I could not shake, and I had to wonder: Is this what guilt feels like? I mean, supposing I had a conscience, would mine be troubled now? It was very unsettling, and I didn’t like it at all.

And it was all so pointless—Doncevic had, after all, stuck a knife in Deborah, and if she wasn’t dead, it was not from lack of trying on his part. He was guilty of something rather naughty, even if it was not the more final version of the deed.