Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

He smiled at me, the irritating, superior kind of smile that I would love to try sometime when I wasn’t in disguise. “You didn’t read your history, did you?” he said.

“I don’t think this chapter was assigned. What are you talking about?”

“Hotel Nacional and The Breakers were built from the same blueprint, to save money,” he said. “They’re virtually identical.”

“Then why are you so sure this isn’t The Breakers?”

“Lookit,” Chutsky said. “Look at the old cars. Pure Cuba. And see the little golf-cart thing, with the bubble top? That’s a Coco Loco, and you only find ’em there, not Palm Beach. And the vegetation. That stuff on the left? You don’t see that at The Breakers. Definitely only in Havana.” He dropped the notebook and leaned back. “So actually, I’d say problem solved, buddy.”

“Why would you say that?” I said, irritated both at his attitude and at the lack of any sense in what he said.

Chutsky smiled. “It’s just too hard for an American to get over there,” he said. “I don’t think he could pull it off.”

A small nickel dropped through the slot and a light went on in Dexter’s brain. “He’s Canadian,” I said.

“All right,” he said stubbornly. “So he could go down there.” He shrugged. “But hey—you maybe don’t remember that things are sort of tight down there? I mean—there’s no way he gets away with anything like this—” He smacked the notebook with the back of his hand. “Not in Cuba. The cops would be all over him like …” Chutsky frowned and thoughtfully raised his bright silver hook toward his face. He caught himself just before he put the hook into his eye. “Unless …” he said.

“What?” I said.

He shook his head slightly. “This guy’s pretty smart, right?”

“Well,” I said grudgingly, “I know HE thinks so.”

“So he’s gotta know. Which maybe means …” Chutsky said, politely refusing to finish a sentence with anything resembling a noun. He fumbled out his phone, one of those larger ones with the bigger screen. Holding it in place on the table with his hook, he began to poke rapidly at the keyboard with a finger, muttering, “Damn … okay … Uh-huh,” and other bright observations under his breath. I could see that he had Google on the screen, but nothing else was legible from across the table. “Bingo,” he said at last.

“What?”

He smiled, clearly pleased with how smart he was. “They do all these festivals down there,” he said. “To prove how sophisticated and free they are.” He pushed the phone across the table at me. “Like this one,” he said.

I pulled the phone to me and read the screen. “Festival Internacional de Artes Multimedia,” I said, scrolling down.

“It starts in three days,” Chutsky said. “And whatever this guy does—projectors or film clips or whatever—the

cops will have orders to back off and let him do his thing. For the festival.”

“And the press will be there,” I said. “From all over the world.”

Chutsky made a gesture with his hook that would have been putting a hand palm up, if only it was a hand. Of course, hooks don’t have palms, but the meaning was still clear. “Things being what they are,” he said, “it gets coverage in Miami just like it was in Miami.”

And it was true. Miami got official and unofficial coverage of everything that happened in Havana—with more detail than we got about the happenings in Fort Lauderdale, which was right next door. So if I was implicated in Havana, I would be convicted in Miami, with the added bonus that I could do nothing about it. “Perfect,” I said. And it was—Weiss had a free pass to set up his awful project, and then collect all the attention he so desperately craved, all in one gift-wrapped holiday package. Which did not seem like it could possibly be a good thing for me. Especially since he knew that I could not get to Cuba to stop him.

“All right,” Chutsky said. “It might make sense. But why are you so sure he will go there?”

It was, unfortunately, a fair question. I thought about it. First of all, was I really sure? Casually, not wanting to startle Chutsky in any way, I sent a careful, silent question mark to the Dark Passenger. Are we sure about this? I asked.

Oh, yes, it said with a sharp-toothed smirk. Quite sure.

All right then. That was settled. Weiss would go to Cuba to expose Dexter. But I needed something a little more convincing than silent certainty; what proof did I really have, aside from the drawings, which were probably not admissible in a court of law? It was true that some of them were very interesting—the image of the woman with the six breasts, for example, was the kind of thing that really stuck in your head.

I remembered that drawing, and this time there was a nearly audible clang as a very, very big nickel dropped.

There had been a piece of paper wedged into the binding at the page in question.

It had listed airline flights from Havana to Mexico.

Just exactly the kind of thing you might like to know about if, for example, you thought you would need to leave Havana in a hurry. If, just hypothetically, you had just scattered some unusual dead bodies around in front of the city’s flagship five-star hotel.

I reached for the notebook, fished out the flight schedule, and flipped the paper onto the table. “He’ll be there,” I said.