“I’m looking for a girl,” I said.
“Ain’t we all,” he told me deadpan, looking away into the distance.
“This one is eleven years old,” I said. “Blond hair, maybe a backpack?”
The cop focused on me. “Runaway?” he said.
I smiled reassuringly; I didn’t want a huge and offi
cial fuss about this, not just yet. “Not yet,” I said. “She wants to be a movie star, so …”
He nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “My kid, ten years old. He wants to be a relief pitcher. So he turns up in Fort Myers, at Red Sox spring training.” He snorted. “Fucking Red Sox?!”
“Could have been worse,” I said. “Might have been the Mets.”
“Got that right,” he said. “Lemme call around the perimeter.”
The cop turned his back and took a step away while he spoke into his radio, and a few seconds later he turned back to me and nodded. “Got her,” he said. “Few hours ago. Alvarez says she came right up and asked for Robert Chase, the actor guy?”
I nodded; I was pretty sure I knew who Robert Chase was.
“So naturally, Alvarez says, ‘No way, I can’t do that, and why aren’t you in school?’ And she says she’s his niece, and Chase is expecting her.” He shrugged. “So, this is Miami. Weirder shit happens every day, right? Alvarez sends the word, and like two seconds later, here comes Chase on the run. And he leads her away by the hand.”
It made sense: However angelic she might look, Astor was a predator, in her own way. She would naturally make a beeline for Robert; he had shown her weakness, and even though his first impulse would be to call me, or Deborah, Astor would not let him. I could almost hear her wheedling and bullying and lying her little tail off—and poor Robert, who thought he liked kids but had never had to deal with one, especially one like this, would have no defense at all. He would cave in to her, helpless, telling himself that he would call in just a little while, and anyway, she was safe here on the set, and where was the harm?
“Where’d they go?” I asked the cop.
He jerked his head at the row of actors’ trailers. “Over to his trailer,” he said. I thanked him, and I headed over there, too.
Robert’s trailer was at the far end of the row. He had insisted on being put there in semi-isolation, probably because he wanted privacy so he could go into his Method trance and become his character. Since that character still had a disturbing number of habits he had stolen from me, I thought he should have been placed even farther away, maybe in the middle of the Everglades, where he might be eaten by a Burmese python.
But the end of the row was as far as he’d made it to date. I trudged along the line of sleek aluminum trailers: one for Renny, one for women and one for men, one for Victor, the director. A trailer for makeup and one for wardrobe. A thick white-noise murmur of air conditioners muffled any sounds that might have come from inside. The door of the women’s trailer opened just after I passed it, and I heard laughter over the thump of hip-hop coming from inside. Then the door closed again and all was quiet.
Three steps led up to the door of Robert’s trailer. I climbed them and knocked on the door. There was no response. There was no sound anywhere except the blanket of air-conditioner noise. I waited, then knocked again; still nothing.
I tried the handle, and to my surprise it turned easily and the door swung open. I paused for just a moment; a long and wicked life has taught me that, far too often, an unpleasant surprise lurks just inside the door. Of course, that surprise had usually been Me, but caution is never out of place.
I looked around the inside; nothing lurked. The trailer was dim, all the blinds pulled shut and the lights turned off, and nothing moved or made any sound. I stepped inside and looked around. It was very similar to Jackie’s trailer: the same arrangement of living area with couch and kitchenette, and through a door to a bedroom with adjoining bath. I poked through the rooms, looked in all the closets and drawers, found no sign that Astor had ever been there.
For that matter, there were very few signs that Robert had ever been there, either. A couple of wardrobe items hung in the closet, and a pair of shoes sat on the floor underneath, but there were no personal touches at all: no iPod, briefcase, or book, no comfy shoes, baseball cap, or sunglasses. No vitamins, or tooth whitener, or deodorant—none of the things a Working Actor should have in his trailer on location.
It was puzzling, but not really worth any brain sweat. The important question was this: If he had gone somewhere with Astor, where? A quick jaunt off-site for ice cream? Or were they still here on the set somewhere? He might be leading Astor around to see all the really cool stuff—Dickie and his squibs, makeup, even another visit to Sylvia in Wardrobe. There was a lot to see, and if Astor wanted to see all of it—and she would—she would not give Robert a great deal of wiggle room.
So they might be anywhere in this vast forest of trailers and vans and generators, and finding them could take more time than I really wanted to spend. But it was also possible that Robert was shooting a scene, with Astor looking on raptly from the sidelines. That would be quick and easy—and it would even be quick and easy to find out. There was a fifteen-page-long shooting schedule on the table in Jackie’s trailer that would tell me who, when, and where. I took a last look around, just to be sure, and then went out, closing the door behind me.
Jackie’s trailer was at the other end of the row. I hurried down the line and up the steps to her door. It was not locked; I felt a silly little surge of hope that Jackie would be inside, and I stepped quickly through the doorway—
—and I froze, one foot in midair, as all the hackles went up on my neck.
There was neither sight nor sound of anything out of place, but I stood there frozen into unmoving wide-awake readiness. Deep down, but moving rapidly up the basement steps and onto the ramparts of Castle Dexter, Something had hissed and uncoiled and begun to whisper its soft and sibilant warnings that all was not what it should be, and so I did not move. I listened. I looked and I waited, and there was nothing at all but the rising rustle of that leathery whisper.
I took half a step into the trailer. A waft of frigid air from inside blew into my face, air cold enough to chill beer, and with it came a faint tang of something that sent my brain crashing back through time, far away, back to that small, awful, cold room so long ago where the Real Dexter had been born in a gelatinous lake of blood.…
And I sit there unmoving in the awful sticky thickening red wetness and that smell is all there is, the smell of rotting copper, and Mommy is not moving, and I am lost and helpless and floundering in a dark world of blood and there is no way out and no help—
And I blink and I am back here, back now, right here in Jackie’s trailer, and not in that horrible wet nasty hell, not at all; I am here, and that was long ago and far away and there is no reason to remember that dreadful three-day birth, no reason at all—
Except that smell is here now, too. The chilled and cloying smell of rotting copper—the smell of blood.