Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

“Then,” I said, reliving that moment with terrible slow-motion clarity, “Deborah fell over. She tried to get up and couldn’t and I ran to help her.”

“And this guy Dankawitz, whatever, he was there the whole time?”

“No,” I said. “He was gone, and then he came back out as I got close to Deborah.”

“Uh-huh,” Coulter said. “How long was he gone?”

“Maybe ten seconds tops,” I said. “Why does that matter?”

Coulter took the toothpick out of his mouth and stared at it. Apparently it even looked awful to him, because after a moment of thinking about it, he threw it at my wastebasket. He missed, of course. “Here’s the problem,” he said. “The fingerprints on the knife aren’t his.”

About a year ago I’d had an impacted tooth removed, and the dentist had given me nitrous oxide. For just a moment I felt the same sense of dizzy silliness whipping through me. “The—urm—fingerprints …?” I finally managed to stutter.

“Yeah,” he said, swigging briefly from the huge soda bottle. “We took his prints when we booked him. Naturally.” He wiped the corner of his mouth with his wrist. “And we compared them to the ones on the handle of that knife? And hey. They don’t match. So I’m thinking, what the fuck, right?”

“Naturally,” I said.

“So I thought, what if there was two of ’em, ’cuz what else could it be, right?” He shrugged and, sadly for all of us, fumbled another toothpick out of his shirt pocket and began to munch on it. “Which is why I had to ask you again what you think you saw.”

He looked at me with an expression of totally focused stupidity and I had to close my eyes to think at all. I replayed the scene in my memory one more time: Deborah waiting by the door, the door opening. Deborah showing her badge and then suddenly falling—but all I could see in my memory was the man’s profile with no details. The door opens, Deborah shows the badge, the profile … No, that was it. There was no more detail. Dark hair and a light shirt, but that was true of half the world, including the Doncevic I had kicked in the head a moment later.

I opened my eyes. “I think it was the same guy,” I said, and although for some reason I was reluctant to give him any more, I did. He was, after all, the representative of Truth, Justice, and the American Way, no matter how unattractive. “But to be honest, I can’t really be sure. It was too quick.”

Coulter bit down on the toothpick. I watched it bobble around in the corner of his mouth for a moment while he tried to remember how to speak. “So it coulda been two of ’em,” he said at last.

“I suppose so,” I said.

“One of ’em stabs her, runs inside like, shit, what’d I do,” he said. “And the other one goes, shit, and runs out to look, and you pop him one.”

“It’s possible,” I said.

“Two of ’em,” he repeated.

I did not see the point of answering the same question twice, so I just sat and watched the toothpick wiggle. If I had thought I was filled with unpleasant rumblings before, it was nothing to the whirlpool of unease that was forming in me now. If Doncevic’s fingerprints were not on the knife, he had not stabbed Deborah; that was elementary, Dear Dexter. And if he had not stabbed Deborah, he was innocent and I had made a very large mistake.

This really should not have bothered me. Dexter does what he must and the only reason he does it to the well deserving is because of Harry’s training. For all the Dark Passenger cares, it could just as easily be random. The relief would be just as sweet for us. The way I choose is merely the Harry-imposed icy logic of the knife.

But it was possible that Harry’s voice was in me deeper than I had ever thought, because the idea that Doncevic might be innocent was sending me into a tailspin. And even before I could get a grip on this nasty uncomfortable sensation, I realized Coulter was staring at me.

“Yes,” I said, not at all sure what that meant.

Coulter once again threw a mangled toothpick at the trash can. He missed again. “So where’s the other guy?” he said.

“I don’t know,” I told him. And I didn’t.

But I really wanted to find out.

SIXTEEN

I HAVE HEARD COWORKERS SPEAK OF HAVING “THE BLAHS,” and always thought myself blessed that I lacked the ability to provide a host for anything with such an unattractive name

. But the last few hours of my workday could be described in no other way. Dexter of the Bright Knife, Dexter the Duke of Darkness, Dexter the Hard and Sharp and Totally Empty, had the Blahs. It was uncomfortable, of course, but due to the very nature of the thing, I did not have the energy to do anything about it. I sat at my desk and pushed paper clips around, wishing I could just as easily push the pictures out of my head: Deborah falling, my foot connecting to Doncevic’s head, the knife going up, the saw coming down…

Blah. It was as stupid as it was embarrassing and enervating. Okay, technically speaking, Doncevic had been sort of innocent. I had made one lousy little mistake. Big deal. Nobody’s perfect. Why should I even pretend to be? Was I really going to imagine that I felt bad about ending an innocent life? Preposterous. And anyway, what is innocent, after all? Doncevic had been playing around with dead bodies, and he had caused millions of dollars in damage to the city budget and the tourist industry. There were plenty of people in Miami who would gladly have killed him just to stop the bleeding.

The only problem was that one of those people was not me.

I was not much, I knew that. I never pretended to have any real humanity, and I certainly didn’t tell myself that what I did was all right just because my playmates were cut from the same cloth. In fact, I was fairly certain that the world would be a much better place without me. Mind you, I have never been in a very big hurry to make the world a better place in that regard, either. I wanted to stick around as long as possible, because when you die either everything stops forever, or else Dexter was in for a very warm surprise. Neither option seemed like much of a choice.