“Don’t be an asshole,” she said. “I got a briefing in a half hour, and I need to have something to say to everybody.”
I looked at my sister with some little annoyance. I knew very well that even though she could face down an angry and well-armed mob of cocaine cowboys, or bully around large thuglike cops twice her size, she fell to pieces when she had to speak in front of any group containing more than two people. That was fine, even a little bit endearing, since it was rather nice to see her humbled from time to time. But somehow, her terrible stage fright had become my problem, and I always ended up writing the script for her presentations—a completely thankless job, since she fell apart anyway, no matter how many great lines I wrote for her.
But here she was; she had come all the way down to my office for once, and she was asking nicely, for her, so I really had to help out, no matter how much I resented the idea. “Well,” I said, thinking out loud. “So it fits the same pattern, all the bones broken, and the tacos.”
“I got that,” she snapped. “Come on, Dex.”
“The interval between kills is interesting,” I said. “Two weeks.”
She blinked and stared at me for a moment. “Does that mean something?” she said.
“Absolutely,” I said.
“What?” she said eagerly.
“I don’t have a clue,” I said, and before she could lean over and hit me I added, “But the differences must mean something, too.”
“Yeah, I know,” she said thoughtfully. “Gunther’s in uniform; Klein is a detective. He gets left in his vehicle; Gunther gets dumped by the goddamned Torch. By boat, for Christ’s sake. Why?”
“More important,” I said, “why does the other stuff stay the same?” She looked at me oddly. “I mean, yeah, the MO stays the same. And they’re both cops. But why these two specific cops? What is it about the two of them that fit the killer’s pattern of need?”
Debs shook her head impatiently. “I don’t really give a shit about the psychological stuff,” she said. “I need to catch this psycho motherfucker.”
I could have said that the best way to catch a psycho motherfucker is by understanding what makes him a psycho motherfucker, but I doubted that Deborah would be very receptive to that message right now. Besides, it wasn’t really true. Based on my years of experience in the business, the best way to catch a killer is by getting lucky. Of course, you don’t say that out loud, especially if you’re talking to the evening news. You have to look serious and mention patient and thorough detective work. So I just said, “What about the boat?”
“We’re looking,” she said. “But, shit, do you know how many boats there are in Miami—even if you only count the legally registered ones?”
“It won’t be his. It was probably stolen in the last week,” I said helpfully.
Deborah snorted. “Almost as many,” she said. “Shit, Dexter, I got all the obvious stuff covered. I need an actual idea here, not more dumb-ass chatter.”
It was true that I had not been in the best of moods lately, but it seemed to me that she was moving rapidly past the boundaries of how to speak when begging someone else for help. I opened my mouth to make a crushing remark and then, out of nowhere, an actual idea hit me. “Oh,” I said.
; “What,” she said.
“You don’t want to find a stolen boat,” I said.
“The fuck I don’t,” she said. “I know he wouldn’t be stupid enough to use his own boat, even if he had one. He stole one.”
I looked at her and shook my head patiently. “Debs, that’s obvious,” I said, and I admit I might have been smirking slightly. “But then it’s also obvious that he wouldn’t hang on to that boat afterward. So you don’t look for a stolen boat; you look for—”
“A found boat!” she said, and she clapped her hands together. “Right! A boat that was abandoned somewhere for no reason.”
“It had to be somewhere he had a car stashed,” I said. “Or even better, someplace he could steal a car.”
“Goddamn it, that’s more like it,” Debs said. “There can’t be more than one place in town where a boat turned up and a car got stolen the same night.”
“A quick and simple computer search to cross-reference it,” I said, and the moment the words were out of my mouth I wanted to jam them back in and slide under my desk, because Deborah knew almost as much about using a computer as she did about ballroom dancing. I, on the other hand, must modestly admit to something verging on expertise in that area, and so anytime the word “computer” came up in conversation, my sister automatically made it my problem. And sure enough, she bounced to her feet and whacked me playfully on the arm.
“That’s great, Dex,” she said. “How long will it take you?”
I looked around the room quickly, but Debs was standing between me and the door, and there was no emergency exit. So I turned to my computer and went to work. Deborah jiggled around anxiously like she was jogging in place, which made it very hard to concentrate, until finally I said, “Debs, please. I can’t work with you vibrating like that.”
“Well, shit,” she said, but at least she stopped hopping up and down and perched on the edge of a chair instead. But three seconds later, she started rapidly tapping her foot on the floor. Clearly there was no way to keep her still, short of flinging her out the door or finding what she wanted. Since she had a gun and I didn’t, flinging was too chancy, so with a heavy and pointed sigh I went back to my search.
Less than ten minutes later, I had it. “Here we go,” I said, and before I got out the final syllable Deborah was at my elbow, leaning in anxiously to see the screen. “The pastor of St. John’s Church on Miami Beach reported his car stolen this morning. And he’s got a new twenty-one-foot Sea Fox at his dock.”