“And there was no mistake?”
There was a pause on the line, and I wondered whether the connection had dropped. “Brian?” I said.
“Well,” he said after a moment, “it’s just funny that you should ask that. The, um … the gentleman in question? He used that word a lot. He kept saying I was making a terrible mistake. Something about identity theft, I think? I wasn’t really listening.”
Something nudged me from behind. “Dexter,” Astor said, pushing harder. “We can’t see.”
“Just a minute,” I snapped at her, pushing them back again. “Brian,” I said into the phone. “Can you describe the, um, gentleman in question?”
“Before or after?” he said.
“Before.”
“We-e-ellllll,” he said. “I would say about forty-five, maybe five-foot-ten and a hundred and sixty pounds? Blond hair, clean shaven, with little gold-rimmed glasses.”
“Oh,” I said. Crowley was probably thirty pounds heavier than that, younger, and he had a beard.
“Is everything okay, brother? You sound a little out of sorts.”
“I’m afraid that everything is not quite okay,” I said. “I think the gentleman in question was right.”
“Oh, dear,” Brian said. “There was a mistake?”
“It sure looks like it from here,” I said.
“Oh, well,” Brian said. “Qué será.”
Astor nudged me again. “Dex-ter, come on,” she said.
“I have to go,” I told Brian.
“I’d love to know what I did,” he said. “Call me later?”
“If I can,” I told him. I put away the phone and turned to face Cody and Astor. “Now,” I said, “you two go wait in the hall.”
“But, Dexter,” Astor said, “we didn’t get to see anything, not really.”
“Too bad,” I said firmly. “You can’t go any closer until the police are done.”
“Not fair,” Cody said, with a major-league pout.
“Tough. This is what I do for a living,” I told him—meaning crime scene work, of course, and not the actual crime. “We have to leave the room without touching anything and go call the police.”
“We just wanna look; we won’t touch anything,” Astor said.
“No,” I said, pushing them toward the door. “Wait in the hall. I’ll just be a minute.”
They didn’t like it, not at all, but they went, trying all the way to get one more look at the thing on the foldout sofa. But I hustled them into the hall and shut the door and went to take a closer look of my own.
No one would ever have called Hood a handsome man, but as he was now he was positively repulsive. His tongue stuck out between the broken teeth, and the eye that wasn’t hanging out of the socket had gone red. This had clearly been the result of one tremendously powerful blow, and I didn’t think Hood had suffered for very long, which didn’t seem fair.
I knelt down beside the bed and looked underneath. There were no hastily dropped keys or monogrammed handkerchiefs to tell me who had done this, but they weren’t needed. I knew who had done it. But I still needed to know how. On the far side of the bed I saw something, and I went around to the other side and poked it out just far enough so I could see it. It was a large souvenir pirate hat, the kind with the black rubber eye patch molded onto it so it hangs down the front. Stuffed inside was a red bandanna. Even without touching it, I could see blood on the bandanna. A disguise for Hood? Probably to cover the wounds long enough to get him into the hotel.
I stood up and, just to be thorough, I went into the bedroom to see if anything was amiss. But everything looked fine—no one was lurking in the closet, Rita’s suitcase seemed undisturbed, and even my laptop was still sitting on the desk, apparently untouched. When I thought about it, that seemed a little odd. After all, Crowley boasted about his mastery of computer lore; why hadn’t he taken two minutes to look at my computer and learn my secrets?
And from somewhere deep inside Dexter’s Dungeon there came a soft flex of wings and a gently whispered answer:
Because he didn’t need to.