It was not mere paranoia; Jackie had been very famous. The pressure to arrest somebody for her death would be enormous. Adding Robert into the mix increased the pressure tenfold. And just to seal the deal, Jackie had been killed while under the publicly proclaimed protection of Miami’s Finest. If a killer had slipped through that protection, the cops looked even worse. But if the killer was somebody on the inside, somebody who could easily pass through the Blue Wall, but not a rogue cop, it would take off a little heat. They would lunge at it with both hands.
Do cops arrest and frame someone they know is innocent? Not very often. But would the department at large refuse to look too closely when a brother officer arrested somebody plausible and said he was guilty? Would Captain Matthews keep his blinders on, merely to protect the department’s image?
Is water really wet?
And Deborah—whatever she’d said earlier, she would still be half unconvinced of my innocence. But which half would win? In the past, she would have gone after the truth relentlessly, no matter what, bucking flak from above and ignoring whatever the slings and arrows might be. Old Debs would have braved anything to free an innocent man—and if that innocent was her brother, nothing would hold her back. She would willingly take on the whole department.
But now?
Now, on a case that Debs had been booted off with both of the captain’s feet? Now that she was already in the Official Doghouse, her precious career hanging by a thread? She had been spanked very publicly and told to stay away. Any small rocking of the boat could tip her into the water and end something that meant more to her than anything else—would she risk that for me now? Now that she had said quite clearly that she thought I was such an utter scum-lump that I would even kill Rita, and that she was pretty much done with me forever?
I didn’t know. But it didn’t seem like a very good idea to bet my life on it.
But of course, I did have a very good way out, a simple but effective Get-Out-of-Jail-Free card: Rita. I had not, in fact, killed her. She would confirm that Robert had taken Astor, and dressed the girl in the incriminating negligee, and then attacked Rita. And that would lead back to why he killed Jackie, and even Kathy—it would all fit together, and Robert’s death was suddenly well earned, a clear case of self-defense. Anderson would probably still try to stick it on me, and he might make things very unpleasant for a while, but eventually even a dolt of his very high caliber would be forced to see the truth.
Rita was the key. She would keep me safe from Justice, and that seemed like the final irony. As hard and willingly as I’d tried to escape her and the dreadful gray subsistence-level life she stood for, she was the only one who could save me now—perfect. Welcome home, Dexter.
“Dexter?” Astor said. “Hey, Dexter?”
She startled me, even though I knew she was there, and I looked at her and blinked. I saw uncertainty on her face, and something that might even be guilt. “What should we do?” she said again. For the first time in several weeks, she looked like an eleven-year-old girl: scared, unsure of herself, lost in a sudden attack of reality.
“First,” I said, “we get your mom.”
We found Rita on the far side of the house, near the washer and dryer. She was tied up as I had been, and she was not moving, and when I knelt down beside her I felt only a very faint, very fluttery pulse. I turned her over carefully and began to work at the knots that held her wrists, and at some point while I tugged at the ropes, her pulse stopped.
I tried my basic CPR. I gave her mouth-to-mouth. I did everything that training and desperate imagination could come up with, but after five minutes of trying she was still not breathing and her flesh had already begun to turn chill and clammy.
Rita was dead.
And so, quite possibly, was Dexter.
I looked at her body. I thought of the many years we had been together, and all the excellent meals she had cooked, and all the many things she had done for me even beyond her cooking, and I shook my head. I know I should have felt something—anger, sorrow, regret, almost anything at all. But my only thought was that death had smoothed out most of the wrinkles that had lately been growing on her face.
And I thought about Jackie; death had looked much worse on her. Not that it mattered, not really. They were both equally dead. I shook my head slowly, and finally I did feel something—I felt a keen appreciation of the irony Life had inflicted on Deeply Deserving Dexter. I, who never cared for women, had felt peacock-proud because I had two.
And now I had none.
I turned away from Rita’s body. Astor stood behind me, chewing her lower lip. “Is she … is Mom … dead?” she asked me.
I nodded.
“But isn’t there … Can’t you … do something?”
“I did,” I said. “It didn’t work.” And I might have added, like everything else I’ve tried lately.
Astor looked down at her mother’s body and shook her head. For a moment I thought she might actually cry—but of course, that was not in her, any more than it was in me. Instead, she knelt beside Rita and touched her cheek. For a long moment she stared down at Rita, her face showing no more than her mother’s did. Then she turned and looked up at me. “What do we do now?” she said.
I sighed. There were many things I might do—but all of them led, eventually, to the same cell in the detention center downtown. And even I had to admit that I deserved it. My entire career had never been any more than a prelude to prison. I’d kept ahead of Just Deserts for a very long time by using my wits—but recent events proved those were gone, dried up and blown away like last autumn’s leaves. It was all over: inarguably, inescapably over, and as I admitted that to myself, I even felt a little bit of relief.
There was no point in prolonging this any more than I had to.
I pulled Astor to her feet. “We call the police,” I said. “And then we face the music.” She looked puzzled, but that didn’t matter.
I took out my phone and called it in. Then I sat with Astor and waited for the music to start.