Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

Somehow, I stopped myself from saying, “If you only knew …” and I ushered her to the front door.

“We’ll keep a cop posted here for a couple of days, for safety’s sake,” she said, which was not really welcome news, and with unfortunate timing, as she said it I swung open the door to reveal Sergeant Doakes in almost the exact position we had left him, staring malevolently at the door. I said my fond good-byes to them both, and as I closed the door the last thing I saw was Doakes’s unblinking glare, for all the world like the Cheshire cat’s evil twin.

The FBI’s interest had done very little to make Rita feel better, however. She still clutched at the children and spoke in jangled half sentences. So I reassured her the best I could, and for a while we all sat there together on the couch, until finally the squirming of Cody and Astor made it too difficult to sit all together like that. Rita gave up and put on a DVD for them to watch and went into the kitchen, where she began her alternative comfort therapy by rattling pots and pans, and I went down the hall to the small extra room she called “Dexter’s Office” to look at Weiss’s sketchbook again and think dark thoughts.

The list of people who could not be considered friendly was certainly growing: Doakes, Coulter, Salguero, and now the FBI.

And of course, Weiss himself. He was still out there, and he still wanted to get at me to get his revenge. Would he come after the children again, limping out of the shadows to grab them, perhaps wearing Kevlar pants and a groin protector this time? If so, I would have to stay with the kids until it was over, which was not the best way to catch him—especially not if he tried something different. And if he wanted to kill me, staying with Cody and Astor endangered them; judging by his exploding-house trick, he clearly didn’t worry about collateral damage.

But I did—I had to. I was worried about the children, and protecting them was a top priority. It was a very strange epiphany, to realize that I was concerned with their safety as much as with protecting my secret identity. It did not fit with how I thought of myself, how I had built up my careful self-image. Of course I had always taken special delight in tracking down predators who preyed on children, but I had never really thought about why that was. And certainly I planned to do my duty to Cody and Astor, both as their stepfather and, far more importantly, as their guide onto the Harry Path. But to see myself spinning in mother-hen circles at the thought of someone trying to hurt them was new and somewhat unsettling.

So stopping Weiss was important in a brand-new way. I was Daddy Dexter now, and I had to do it for the children, as well as for myself, and I was experiencing a surge of something dangerously close to emotion at the thought of any attempt to harm them.

All right then, I clearly had to figure out Weiss’s next move and try to stop him before he could pull it off. I picked up his notebook and flipped through the drawings one more time, perhaps unconsciously hoping I had missed something before—an address where I could find Weiss, perhaps, or even a suicide note. But the pages were still the same, and truthfully the novelty had worn off and I took no real joy in looking at the pictures of me. I have never been all that interested in looking at me, and looking at me in a series of pictures intended to depict me-as-I-really-am to the world at large took any possible vestigial joy out of it.

And what was the point of all this? To expose me? To create a great work of art? I paused and studied several of the detailed drawings, the ones depicting the other elements of the display. It may sound self-centered for me to say so since, after all, they were competing for space with the pictures of me, but they were really not very interesting. You could probably call them clever, but no more. They lacked any real originality and seemed rather lifeless—even for dead bodies.

And to be brutally honest, even the pictures of me were something any talented high school kid might have done. They might be projected in huge scale on the front of The Breakers Hotel, but they were not in the same class as anything I had seen so recently in Paris—not even the stuff in the small galleries. Of course, there was that last piece, Jennifer’s Leg. It had used amateurish videos, too—but there the whole point had been the audience’s reaction and not the …

For a moment there was absolute silence in Dexter’s brain, a silence so thick it obscured everything else. And then it rolled away to reveal a jabbering little monkey of a thought.

Audience reaction.

If you were interested in the reaction, then the quality of the work is not so important, as long as it provokes shock. And you would arrange to capture that reaction—for example, on videotape. And perhaps you would have the services of a video professional—someone like, just for example, Kenneth Wimble, whose house Weiss had blown up. It made much more sense to think of Wimble as one of them, rather than a random victim.

And when Weiss had made the jump to full-scale murder, instead of stealing bodies to play with, Wimble had probably gotten squeamish, and Weiss had blown him up in his own house at the same time that he tried to take out irreplaceable me.

But Weiss was still videoing, even without his expert. Because that was what this was about for him. He wanted pictures of people seeing what he had done. More and more he wanted to do it, too—with the Scout leader and with Wimble and the attempt on me. But the video, that was what mattered. And he would happily kill to get it.

No wonder the Dark Passenger had been bemused. Ours was very much a hands-on kind of art, and the results were extremely private. Weiss was different. He might want his revenge on me, but he would happily take it indirectly, something the Passenger and I would never consider. To Weiss, the art still mattered. He needed his pictures.

I looked at the last large, full-color rendering of ME projected onto The Breakers Hotel. The picture was clearly drawn and you could easily see the basic architecture of the place. The front was U-shaped, with the front door in the center and a wing sticking forward on each side. There was a long mall leading up to the front door, with its rows of royal-palm trees, a perfect place for a crowd to gather and gape in horror. Weiss would be there somewhere in the crowd with his camera, getting pictures of the faces. But as I looked at the picture I realized that even before that, he would want to get a room in one of the wings overlooking the front, where the projection was displayed, and he would set up a camera there, something like one of the remote cameras he had used already but this time with a really good lens, to capture the faces of the people seeing it.

The whole trick would be to stop him before he set things up—stop him when he arrived at the hotel. And to do that, all I had to do was find out when he checked in. That would be very simple if only I had access to the hotel’s records—which I didn’t—or knew a way to force my way into them—which I didn’t. But as I thought about it, I realized something.

I knew somebody who did.

TWENTY-NINE

KYLE CHUTSKY SAT ACROSS FROM ME AT THE SAME small corner table in the snack bar located on the ground floor of the coffee shop at the hospital. In spite of the fact that I didn’t think he’d left the grounds in several days, he was clean-shaven and wore what seemed to be a clean shirt, and he looked across the table at me with a look of amusement that moved the corners of his mouth up and crinkled the skin around his eyes but did not touch the eyes themselves, which stayed cold and watchful.

“That’s funny,” he said. “You wa

nt me to help you hack into registration at this hotel, The Breakers? Ha.” He gave a short laugh that was not very convincing. “Why do you think I can help you do that?”

Unfortunately, it was a fair question. I did not, in fact, know that he could help me, not based on anything he had said or done. But the little I did know about Chutsky indicated that he was a member in good standing of the shadow government, the deliberately nonmonitored and unconnected clan of people who worked for various alphabet agencies that were more or less affiliated with the federal government, and sometimes even with one another. And as such, I was quite confident that he would know any number of ways to find out when Weiss registered at the hotel.

But there was the small problem of protocol, that I was not supposed to know and he was not supposed to admit it. And to get past that I had to impress him with something that was urgent enough to overcome his instinctive reluctance. I can think of almost nothing more important than the pending demise of Dashing Dexter, but somehow I did not think that Chutsky would share my high self-evaluation. He would probably put higher ratings on foolish trifles like national security, world peace, and his own relatively worthless life and limb.

But it occurred to me that he also put a very high rating on my sister, and this provided at least a potential opening. So with my best artificial manly directness I said, “Kyle—this is the guy that stabbed Deborah.”

And in any scene of any macho TV show I had ever seen, that would have been more than enough; but apparently Chutsky did not watch a great deal of TV. He just raised one eyebrow and said, “So?”

“So,” I said, somewhat taken aback, and trying to remember a few more specifics from those scenes on TV, “he’s out there, and, um, getting away with it. Uh—and he might do it again.”

This time he raised both eyebrows. “You think he might stab Deborah again?” he said.

This was really not going well, not at all the way I’d thought it would. I had assumed that there was some kind of Man-of-Action Code in place, and all I had to do was bring up the subject of direct action and express my eagerness to be up and at ’em, and Chutsky would leap to his feet equally eager and we would charge up Pork Chop Hill together. But instead, Chutsky was looking at me as if I had suggested an enema.