I certainly am not a professional profiler, but because of my dark hobby I often have a certain amount of insight into other crimes that seem to come from the same neighborhood. This, however, was far outside the bounds of anything I had ever seen or imagined. There was no hint of any kind that pointed toward personality or motivation, and I was intrigued nearly as much as I was irritated. What kind of predator would leave the meat lying around and still wiggling like that?
I went outside and stood on the porch. Doakes was hud-dled with Captain Matthews, telling him something that had the captain looking worried. Deborah was crouched beside the old lady, talking quietly with her. I could feel a breeze picking up, the squall breeze that comes right before the afternoon thunderstorm, and as I looked up the first hard spatters of rain pelted down on the sidewalk. Sangre, who had been standing at the tape waving his microphone and trying to get the attention of Captain Matthews, looked up at the clouds too and, as the thunder began to rumble, threw his microphone at his producer and lurched into the news van.
My stomach rumbled, too, and I remembered that I had missed my lunch in all the excitement. This would never do; I needed to keep up my strength. My naturally high metabolism needed constant attention: no diet for Dexter. But I had to depend on Deborah for a ride, and I had the feeling, just a hunch, that she would not be sympathetic about any mention of eating at the moment. I looked at her again. She was cradling the old lady, Mrs. Medina, who had apparently given up retching and was concentrating on sobbing.
I sighed and walked to the car through the rain. I didn’t D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
6 5
really mind getting wet. It looked like I was going to have a long wait to dry off.
It was indeed a long wait, well over two hours. I sat in the car and listened to the radio and tried to picture, bite by bite, what it was like to eat a medianoche sandwich: the crackle of the bread crust, so crisp and toasty it scratches the inside of your mouth as you bite down. Then the first taste of mustard, followed by the soothing cheese and the salt of the meat. Next bite—a piece of pickle. Chew it all up; let the flavors mingle.
Swallow. Take a big sip of Iron Beer (pronounced Ee-roan Bay-er, and it’s a soda). Sigh. Sheer bliss. I would rather eat than do anything else except play with the Passenger. It’s a true miracle of genetics that I am not fat.
I was on my third imaginary sandwich when Deborah finally came back to the car. She slid into the driver’s seat, closed the door, and just sat there, staring ahead through the rain-splattered windshield. And I knew it wasn’t the best thing I could have said, but I couldn’t help myself. “You look beat, Deb. How about lunch?”
She shook her head but didn’t say anything.
“Maybe a nice sandwich. Or a fruit salad—get your blood sugar back up? You’ll feel so much better.”
Now she looked at me, but it was not a look that showed any real promise of lunch at any time in the near future. “This is why I wanted to be a cop,” she said.
“The fruit salad?”
“That thing in there—” she said, and then turned to look out the windshield again. “I want to nail that—that, whatever 6 6
J E F F L I N D S A Y
it is that could do that to a human being. I want it so bad I can taste it.”
“Does it taste like a sandwich, Deborah? Because—”
She smacked the heels of her palms onto the rim of the steering wheel, hard. Then she did it again. “GodDAMN it,”
she said. “God-fucking-DAMN it!”
I sighed. Clearly long-suffering Dexter was going to be denied his crust of bread. And all because Deborah was having some kind of epiphany from seeing a piece of wiggling meat.
Of course it was a terrible thing, and the world would be a much better place without someone in it who could do that, but did that mean we had to miss lunch? Didn’t we all need to keep up our strength to catch this guy? Still, it did not seem like the very best time to point this out to Deborah, so I simply sat there with her, watching the rain splat against the windshield, and ate imaginary sandwich number four.
The next morning I had hardly settled into my little cubicle at work when my phone rang. “Captain Matthews wants to see everybody who was there yesterday,” Deborah said.
“Good morning, Sis. Fine, thanks, and you?”
“Right now,” she said, and hung up.
The police world is made up of routine, both official and unofficial. This is one of the reasons I like my job. I always know what’s coming, and so there are fewer human responses for me to memorize and then fake at the appropriate times, fewer chances for me to be caught off guard and react in a way that might call into question my membership in the race.
D E A R LY D E V O T E D D E X T E R
6 7
As far as I knew, Captain Matthews had never before called in “everybody who was there.” Even when a case was generating a great deal of publicity, it was his policy to handle the press and those above him in the command structure, and let the investigating officer handle the casework. I could think of absolutely no reason why he would violate this protocol, even with a case as unusual as this one. And especially so soon—there had barely been enough time for him to approve a press release.
But “right now” still meant right now, as far as I could tell, so I tottered down the hall to the captain’s office. His secre-tary, Gwen, one of the most efficient women who had ever lived, sat there at her desk. She was also one of the plainest and most serious, and I found it almost impossible to resist tweaking her. “Gwendolyn! Vision of radiant loveliness! Fly away with me to the blood lab!” I said as I came into the office.
She nodded at the door at the far end of the room. “They’re in the conference room,” she said, completely stone-faced.