Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

And in all the time since I had picked myself up off the pavement and staggered over to lean on a tree and admire the way I could still move all my body parts—the whole time I was getting patched up and then waiting for Coulter to arrive—all these long minutes-into-hours, I had not managed to come up with anything that sounded even faintly believable. And with Coulter now turning to stare at me very hard indeed, I realized my time was up.

“So, what then?” he said. “You were here because why? Picking up your laundry? Part-time job delivering pizza? What?”

It was one of the biggest shocks of a very unsettling day to hear Coulter revealing a faint patina of wit. I had thought of him as an exceedingly dull and dim lump of dough, incapable of anything beyond filling out an accident report, and yet here he was making amusing remarks with a very professional deadpan delivery, and if he could do that, I had to assume he might have an outside chance of putting two and two together and coming up with me. I was truly on the spot. And so, throwing my cunning into high gear, I decided to go with the time-honored tactic of telling a big lie wrapped in a small truth.

“Look, Detective,” I said, with a painful and somewhat hesitant delivery that I was quite proud of. Then I closed my eyes and took a deep breath—all real Academy Award stuff, if you asked me. “I’m sorry, I’m still a little fuzzy. They say I sustained a minor concussion.”

“Was that before you got here, Dex?” Coulter said. “Or can you remember that far back, about why you were here?”

“I can remember,” I said reluctantly. “I just…”

“You don’t feel so good,” he said.

“Yeah, that’s right.”

“I can understand that,” he said, and for one wild, irrational moment I thought he might let me go. But no: “What I can’t understand,” he went on relentlessly, “is what the fuck you were doing here when the fucking house blew the fuck up.”

“It’s not easy to say,” I said.

“I guess not,” said Coulter. “’Cause you haven’t said it yet. You gonna tell me, Dex?” He popped his finger out of the bottle, took a sip, pushed the finger back in again. The bottle was more than half empty now, and it hung there like some kind of strange and embarrassing biological appendage. Coulter wiped his mouth again. “See, I kind of need to know this,” he said. “’Cuz they tell me there’s a body in there.”

A minor seismic event worked its way down my spine, from the top of my skull all the way down to my heels. “Body?” I said with my usual incisive wit.

“Yeah,” he said. “A body.”

“That’s, you mean—dead?”

Coulter nodded, watching me with distant amusement, and I realized with a terrible shock that we had switched roles, and now I was the stupid one. “Yeah, that’s right,” he said. “’Cuz it was inside the house when it went ka-boom, so you would have to figure it would be dead. Also,” he said, “it couldn’t run away, being tied up like that. Who would tie a guy up when the house was gonna blow like that, do you figure?”

“It, uh … must have been the killer,” I stammered.

“Uh-huh,” said Coulter. “So you figure the killer killed him, that it?”

“Uh, yes,” I said, and even through the growing pounding in my head, I could tell how stupid and unconvincing that sounded.

“Uh-huh. But not you, right? I mean, you didn’t tie the guy up and toss in a Cohiba or something, right?”

“Look, I saw the guy drive away as the house went up,” I said.

“And who was that guy, Dex? I mean, you got a name or anything? ’Cuz that would really help a lot here.”

It might have been that the concussion was spreading, but a terrible numbness seemed to be taking me over. Coulter suspected something, and even though I was relatively innocent in this case, any kind of investigation was bound to have uncomfortable results for Dexter. Coulter’s eyes had not left my face, and he had not blinked, and I had to tell him something, but even with a minor concussion I knew that I could not give him Weiss’s name. “I, it—the car was registered to Kenneth Wimble,” I said tentatively.

Coulter nodded. “Same guy owns the house,” he said.

“Yes, that’s right.”

He kept nodding mechanically as if that made sense and said, “Sure. So you figure Wimble ties up this guy—in his own house—and then blows up his own house and drives away in his car, like to the summer place in North Carolina, maybe?”

Again it came across to me that there was more to this man than I had thought there was, and it was not a pleasant realization. I thought I was dealing with SpongeBob, and he had turned out to be Colombo instead, hiding a much sharper mind than the shabby appearance seemed to allow for. I, who’d worn a disguise my entire life, had been fooled by a better costume, and looking at the gleam of previo

usly hidden intelligence in Coulter’s eyes, I realized that Dexter was in danger. This was going to call for a great deal of skill and cleverness, and even then I was no longer sure it would be enough.

“I don’t know where he went,” I said, which was not a great start, but it was all I could come up with.

“’Course not. And you don’t know who he is, either, right? ’Cuz you’d tell me if you did.”

“Yes, I would.”