Hood didn’t seem terribly hurt. “Asshole in charge to you, darling,” he said. “Asshole who will find the real cop killer, instead of fucking around on Good Morning America.”
Deborah blushed; it was a very unfair remark, but it hit home anyway. To her very great credit, though, she came right back with a zinger of her own. “You couldn’t find your own dick with a search party,” she said.
“And it would be a pretty small party anyway,” I added cheerfully; after all, family has to stick together.
Hood glared at me, and his smile got bigger and meaner. “You,” he said, “are off this thing altogether as of right now. Just like your Hollywood sister.”
“Really,” I said. “Because I can prove you’re wrong?”
“Nope,” he said. “Because you are now”—Hood paused to taste the words, and then let them out in a slow, obviously delicious trickle—“a person of interest to the investigation.”
I had been all set to whip another witty and stinging remark at him, no matter what he said, but this took me totally by surprise. “Person of interest” was police code for, “We think you’re guilty and we’re going to prove it.” And as I stared at him in numb horror I realized that there was no clever response to being told that you’re under investigation for murder—especially when you didn’t even get to commit one first. I felt my mouth open and close a couple of times in what must have looked like a really good imitation of a grouper pulled up out of deep water, but no sound came out. Luckily, Deborah jumped right in for me.
“What kind of brain-dead bullshit are you pulling, Richard?” she said. “You can’t chase him for this just because he knows you’re a moron.”
“Oh, don’t worry about that,” he said. “I have a really good reason.” And as he spoke you would have thought he was the happiest man in the world—until you saw the next man who came into my office.
And that next man came in like he’d been waiting his whole life for just the right cue line to his dramatic entrance. I heard a stiff and rhythmic clumping in the hall as Hood’s last two words still hung in the air, and then the real happiest man in the world came in.
I say “man,” but in truth it was really no more than three-fourths of a flesh-and-blood Homo sapiens. The prosthetic clatter of his steps revealed that the living feet were gone, and twin metal pincers gleamed where his hands should have been. But the teeth were still human, and every single one of them was showing as he stumped in and gave a large manila envelope to Hood.
“Thanks,” Hood said, and Sergeant Doakes just nodded and kept his eyes fixed on me, his supernaturally happy smile stretching across his face and filling me with dread.
“What the fuck is this?” Deborah said, but Hood just shook his head and opened the envelope. He pulled out what looked like an eight-by-ten glossy picture and twirled it onto my desk.
“Can you tell me what this is?” he said to me.
I reached over and picked up the photo. I did not recognize it, but as I looked at it I had a brief and unsettling moment of feeling that I had lost my mind as I thought, But that looks like me! And then I took a steadying breath, looked again, and thought, It is me! Which made absolutely no sense, no matter how reassuring it was.
It was me. It was a picture of Dexter: shirtless, half turned away from the camera, and stepping away from a body sprawled on the pavement. My first thought was, But I don’t remember leaving a body there.… And it doesn’t really say good things about me to admit it, but my second thought, as I looked at my bared torso, was, I look good! Muscle tone excellent, abs in good shape—no sign of the very slight spare tire that had been settling around my waist lately. So the picture was probably a year or two old—which did not explain why Doakes was so pleased with it.
I pushed away my narcissistic thoughts and tried to focus on the picture itself, since it apparently represented a very real threat to me. Nothing occurred, no hint of where it had been taken or who had taken it, and I looked up at Hood. “Where did you get this?” I asked.
“Do you recognize the picture?” Hood said.
“I’ve never seen it before,” I said. “But I think that’s me.”
Doakes made a kind of gurgling sound that might have been laughter, and Hood nodded as if a thought was actually forming in his bony head. “You think,” he said.
“Yes, I do,” I said. “And it really doesn’t hurt; you should try it sometime.”
Hood pulled another photo out of the envelope and flipped it onto the desk. “What about this one?” he said. “You think that’s you, too?”
I looked at the picture. This one showed the same setting as the first, but now I was a bit farther away from the body and
pulling on a shirt. Something new had come into the field of focus, and after a moment of study I recognized it as the back of Angel Batista’s head. He was bending over the body on the ground, and the little lightbulb over my head finally went on.
“Oh,” I said, and relief flooded in. This was not a picture of Dexter caught in the act of shuffling off somebody’s mortal coil; it was Dexter on Duty, a mere workaday nothing. I could explain it simply, even prove it, and I was off the hook. “Now I remember. This was like two years ago, a crime scene in Liberty City. Drive-by shooting—three victims, very messy. I got blood on my shirt.”
“Uh-huh,” Hood said, and Doakes shook his head, still smiling fondly.
“Well,” I said, “it happens sometimes. I keep a clean shirt in my bag just in case.” Hood kept staring at me; I shrugged. “So I changed into the clean shirt,” I said, hoping he would understand at last.
“Good idea,” he said, nodding as if he approved of my solid common sense, and he threw one more picture onto the desk. “What about this one?”
I picked it up. It was me again, very obviously me. It was a close-up shot of my face, in profile. I was looking off into the distance with an expression of noble longing that probably meant it was time for lunch. There was a slight dusting of beard stubble on my face, which hadn’t been there in the first pictures, so this one had been taken at a different time. But because it was so very tightly focused on my face, I couldn’t make out anything at all that would tell me more about the picture, or when it had been taken. On the plus side, that meant there was no way it could be used to prove anything against me, either.
So I shook my head and flipped the picture back onto my desk. “Very nice picture,” I said. “Tell me, Detective, do you think a man can be too handsome?”