Dexter Is Dead (Dexter 8)

“All right,” he said abruptly. “Can you bring it to me at the office? I’ll be here until about six.”

“I should be there around five,” I said.

“See you then,” he said, and hung up. No peaceful music this time, just a dead line.

I looked at my watch. I had killed an entire seventeen minutes, and accomplished just about everything definite I could think of. On the one hand, I was filled with a hard-earned pride at my industry and efficiency. On the other hand, I still had several blank hours before I met Vince, and no place to go other than a lethal hotel room at the far end of town. I sighed heavily and shook my head. For the first time I understood and appreciated the true joy of having a job—it gave you someplace to go! And when you were done there, you could go to a home, however squalid. Suddenly I had neither, and I truly felt it. This whole homeless-and-unemployed thing was becoming a true burden.

Still, I couldn’t just sit here in the parking lot with the engine running. Eventually I would die of exhaust fumes, or perhaps boredom. And with the price of gas what it is, I couldn’t afford it, either.

I thought about going back to the library, but that seemed almost as bad. I wondered about trying a few stops on my Food Pilgrimage. True, I’d just eaten lunch, but it was only sushi. Wasn’t I supposed to get hungry again in half an hour? Or was that only true of Chinese food? It could be both, if the recurring hunger was caused by rice. But it was probably MSG, and I was pretty sure Japanese food didn’t have any. In any case, I wasn’t hungry, and I was quite sure that a pro forma eating binge would be frowned on in the best circles.

I looked out the side window. The scenery hadn’t changed. I was still in a strip mall parking lot.

Was it really the library or nothing? In the time I spent languishing in jail, I had formed an ideal picture of freedom as something worth having, even striving for. As with all idealistic notions, the reality was proving to be quite different. I had a choice of doing nothing in a parking lot, or doing it in the library. I tried to revive my flagging enthusiasm for Sacred Liberty by reminding myself that I could also go back to my hotel room, or even drive pointlessly around the city. It didn’t work. My enthusiasm stayed flagged.

With one last heavy sigh to show that I was acting under protest, I put the car in gear and headed back to the library.

It took about twenty minutes to drive over the causeway, down U.S. 1, and back to the Grove. Nothing had changed when I got there, except that the parking spot in front of the library was taken now. So were all the other parking spaces. I drove around for a few minutes until I finally found a place down at the foot of the hill by the sailing club. I tried to put money in the meter, but it was jammed. It still had five minutes on it, though, and it didn’t seem to be ticking off the time. A meter that perpetually showed five minutes was a marvelous thing, a real stroke of luck. Perhaps my fortunes were changing after all.

I trudged up the hill to the library and went in. My seat by the back window was still available. I was literally being showered with good fortune. What a wonderful world we live in.

I sat and flipped through magazines I didn’t care about and scanned stories that bored me to tears. When I finally glanced at my watch and saw that only fifteen minutes had passed, I was stunned. It had seemed like an eternity. I flung down the magazines and went looking for something more substantial to read.

I found something better: books with lots of pictures. I settled on an art-history book that bragged about having over twenty-five hundred pictures, from cave to contemporary. Even on a day as slow-paced as this one, I could make twenty-five hundred pictures last awhile.

I sat back down with the book. I took my time with the pictures—and not merely because I wanted to while away a few hours. I have always liked art. In the first place, some of it is quite pretty. And even if you don’t always understand the picture, or the emotions it tries to convey, there is usually some nice, colorful something to look at somewhere in the picture. There were a lot of religious pictures in this book, many of them quite cheerfully gory. I particularly liked the pictures of saints with holes in them. The blood pouring from the wounds was presented in a very restrained and dignified manner, which is unusual for blood. Nasty stuff, and unpredictable. And the expressions on their faces, which could only be called Justified Anguish, were wonderful fun.

Altogether, it gave me a new appreciation for religion. Although to be truthful, I had always wondered at the blind and unfailing insistence on combining violent and gooey death with human worship. It almost made me wish I could join a church of some kind. What fun they had, especially with their saints! I would fit right in! Dexter the Saint Maker!

But of course, it wouldn’t do. I could never sit through an entire service without giggling. Seriously, how can people actually believe such things? And in any case, the altar would almost certainly burst into flames when I entered.

Ah, well. At least religion was responsible for some nice pictures, and that should count for something. If nothing else, the pictures whiled away the time for me until around three-forty-five, when I left for my rendezvous—if not with destiny, then at least with some very nice drapes.

Vince Masuoka had a small house in North Miami, at the end of a dead-end street off 125th Street. It was painted pale yellow with pastel purple trim, which really made me question my taste in associates. There were a few very well-barbered bushes in the front yard and a cactus garden lining the cobblestone walkway up to his front door. His car was in the driveway when I arrived, so at least he hadn’t decided he would rather work late than save my life and his.

I rang the bell and he opened the door immediately. He was so pale and sweaty that for a moment I wondered whether he had food poisoning, and I felt a brief surge of near-panic because I had eaten the same things at lunch that he had. But he grabbed my arm with a very strong grip and pulled me inside so powerfully that I ruled it out and settled on mere nervous collapse.

Sure enough, the first words out of his mouth revealed that he was teetering on the brink of total disintegration. “Dexter, Jesus, you wouldn’t believe—Oh, my God, I don’t even know how—I mean I nearly…Holy Christ I gotta sit down.” And he collapsed onto a very stylish Deco chaise longue, patting at his brow with a paper towel.

“Fine, thanks,” I said cheerfully. “Do you have the file?”

He blinked at me with reproach, as if I hadn’t appreciated his suffering enough. “Anderson was right there—I mean, he nearly saw me! With the file!”

“Nearly?” I said. “But he didn’t, did he?”

He sighed, long and painfully. “No, he didn’t,” he admitted. “But, my God. He was…I hid behind the, you know the closet by the coffee room?”

“Vince,” I said. “Do you have the file?”

He shook his head. “Of course I do. What have I been saying?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Well, I have it right here,” he said, waving a limp and sweaty arm at a strange yellow-painted end table. The legs were giraffe necks and the handle of the one small drawer was an elephant’s trunk, and the whole was so distracting that I had to squint to see that, as advertised, a manila folder lay neatly on top of the table. I managed to show quite commendable restraint, by stepping calmly over to pick up the file, rather than leaping through the air and snatching it with b

oth hands, as seemed more appropriate.

I opened the folder and leafed quickly through it, page by page. I paused after only the first few pages: Vince had been wonderfully thorough. The file started with the initial incident report, and went on step by step through the long and many-faceted paper pathway that our wonderful System of Justice demands. It was all here, every step, and even to the casual eye it was clear that most of the scribbled signatures were done by the same messy hand, though the names were different. And by a remarkable coincidence, that ubiquitous sloppy handwriting looked an awful lot like Detective Anderson’s. I looked at Vince with a raised eyebrow. “How on earth did they get away with this?” I asked.