My sense of disappointment was completely gone. This was a brand-new video after all, something I had never seen, and I was immediately very anxious to see it for the first time.
I watched as Dexter Past straightened up, looked around—still, happily, without showing his face to the camera. Clever boy. Dexter walked out of the frame and was gone. The lump in the tub moved slightly, and then Dexter came back and picked up the saw. The blade whirred, the arm went up—
And darkness. End of video.
I sat in a quiet and stunned stupor for several minutes. There was a clatter of some kind in the hall. Someone came into the lab and opened a drawer, closed it again, and left. The phone rang; I didn’t answer it.
That was me. Right there on YouTube. In full glorious living and slightly grainy color. Dexter of the Deadly Dimples, now starring in a minor motion-picture classic. Smile at the camera, Dexter.
Wave to the nice audience. I had never been very fond of home movies, and this one left me even colder than ever. But there I was—not merely captured on film but posted on YouTube for all the world to see and admire. It was more than I could wrap my mind around; my thoughts just moved in a circle, like a film clip in a loop. That was me; it couldn’t be me but it was; I had to do something, but what could I do? Don’t know, but something—because that was me …
Things were certainly getting interesting, weren’t they?
All right; that was me. Obviously, there was a camera hidden somewhere above the tub. Weiss and Doncevic had used it for their decorative projects, and it was still there when I showed up. Which meant that Weiss was still somewhere in the area—
But no, it didn’t mean that at all. It was ridiculously easy to connect a camera to the Internet and monitor from a computer. Weiss could be anywhere, collecting the video and sending it on to me—
To me, precious anonymous me, Dexter the mostly modest, who toiled in the shadows and never ever looked for publicity of any kind for his good works. But of course, in the hideous clamor of media attention that had surrounded this whole thing, including the attack on Deborah, my name had almost certainly been mentioned somewhere. Dexter Morgan, unassuming forensic whiz, brother of the nearly-slain. One picture, one frame of evening news footage, and he would have me.
A cold and awful lump began to grow in my stomach. It was just that easy. So simple a deranged decorator could figure out who and what I was. I had been too clever for too long and grown accustomed to being the only tiger in the forest. And I had forgotten that when there is only one tiger, it’s awfully easy for the hunter to follow the tracks.
And he had. He had followed me to my den and taken pictures of Dexter at play, and there it was.
My finger twitched almost unwillingly on the mouse and I watched the video again.
It was still me. Right there on the video. It was me.
I took a deep breath and let the oxygen work its magic on my thought process, or what wa
s left of it. This was a problem, to be sure, but it had a solution like every other problem. Time to apply logic, turn the full power of Dexter’s icy biocomputer on the problem. First: What did this guy want? Why had he done this? Obviously, he wanted some reaction from me—but which one? The most obvious would be that he was looking for revenge. I had killed his friend—partner? Lover? It didn’t matter. He wanted me to know that he knew what I had done, and, and …
And he had sent the clip to me, not to someone who would presumably do something about it, like Detective Coulter. Which meant that this was a personal challenge, something that he was not going to make public, at least not yet.
Except that it was public—it was on YouTube, and it was only a matter of time before someone else stumbled onto it and saw the clip. And that meant that there was a time element. So what was he saying? Find me before they find you?
Okay so far. But then what? An Old West showdown—power saws at ten paces? Or was the idea just to torture me, keep me chasing until I made a mistake, or until he grew bored and sent the whole thing on to the evening news?
It was enough to create at least the idea of panic in a lesser being. But Dexter is made of far sterner stuff. He wanted me to try to find him—but he could not know that I had my varsity letter in finding. If I was even half as good as modesty let me admit I was, I would find him a great deal quicker than he thought I could. Fine: if Weiss wanted to play, I would play.
But we were going to play by Dexter’s rules, not his.
TWENTY
FIRST THINGS FIRST HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY MOTTO, mostly because it makes absolutely no sense—after all, if first things were second or third, they wouldn’t be first things, would they? Still, clichés exist to comfort the feebleminded, not to provide any actual meaning. Since I was feeling somewhat weak between the ears at the moment, I took a little bit of consolation from the thought as I pulled up the police records on Brandon Weiss.
It wasn’t much; there was a parking ticket that he had paid, and the complaint filed against him by the Tourist Board. He had no outstanding warrants, no special permits beyond a driver’s license, no permit to carry a concealed firearm—or a concealed power saw, for that matter. His address was the one I knew, where Deborah had been stabbed. With a little digging, I found one previous address, in Syracuse, New York. Before that he had lived in Montreal, Canada. A quick check showed that he was still a Canadian citizen.
No real leads there; nothing that qualified as a clue of any kind. I hadn’t really expected anything, but my job and my adoptive father had taught me well that due diligence paid off from time to time. This was just the beginning.
The next step, Weiss’s e-mail address, was a little harder. With a certain amount of slightly illegal maneuvering, I got into AOL’s subscriber list and found out just a little more. The same address in the Design District was still given as his home address, but there was also a cell-phone number. I wrote it down in case I needed it later. Other than that, there was nothing helpful here, either—surprising, really, that an organization like AOL fails to ask simple and vital questions, like, “Where would you hide if Dexter was after you?”
Still, nothing worth doing is ever easy—another fascinatingly stupid cliché. After all, breathing is fairly easy, for the most part, and I think many scholars would agree it pays handsome dividends. In any case, I got no real information from the AOL file, except the phone number, which I set aside to use as a last resort. The telephone company’s records would tell me much the same thing as AOL’s, but there was a chance I could track down the location of the cell phone itself, a trick I had done once before when I very nearly saved Sergeant Doakes from being surgically modified.
For no particular reason I went back to YouTube. Perhaps I just wanted to see me one more time, relaxing and being myself. It was, after all, something I had never seen before, and never expected to see. Dexter in action, as only he can do it. I watched the video one more time, marveling at how graceful and natural I looked. What a wonderful sense of style I showed as I swung the saw up toward the camera. Beautiful. A true artist. I should do more film work.
And with that, another thought popped into my slowly awakening brain. Beside the screen, the e-mail address was highlighted. I really didn’t know much about YouTube, but I knew that if an e-mail address was highlighted, it led somewhere. So I clicked on it and almost immediately an orange background came up onscreen and I was on a YouTube personal page. And in large fiery letters across the top of the page, it said THE NEW MIAMI. I scrolled partway down to a box that said VIDEOS (5), with a row of thumbnail shots of each video. The one showing my back was number four.
In an effort to be methodical and not simply watch my riveting performance again, I clicked on the first one, which showed a man’s face twisted into a grimace of disgust. The video began, and again the title appeared on the screen in fiery letters: THE NEW MIAMI, #1.