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“Fuck that,” she said.
“Which part?”
“All of it, goddamn it!” she said. “Neither one of those choices is any better.”
“Well, shit,” I said, surprising us both. And since I felt cranky beyond endurance with Deborah, and with myself, and with this whole burned-and-headless thing, I took the only logical, reasonable course. I kicked a coconut.
Much better. Now my foot hurt, too.
“I’m checking Goldman’s background,” she said abruptly, nodding at the house. “So far, he’s just a dentist. Owns an office building in Davie. But this—it smells like the cocaine cowboys. And that doesn’t make sense, either. Goddamn it, Dexter,” she said. “Give me something.”
I looked at Deborah with surprise. Somehow she had brought it around so it was back in my lap again, and I had absolutely nothing beyond a very strong hope that Goldman would turn out to be a drug lord who was only disguised as a dentist. “I have come up empty,” I said, which was sad but far too true.
“Aw, crap,” she said, looking past me to the edge of the gathering crowd. The first of the news vans had arrived, and even before the vehicle had come to a full stop the reporter leaped out and began poking at his cameraman, prodding him into position for a long shot. “Goddamn it,” Deborah said, and hurried over to deal with them.
“That guy is scary, Dexter,” said a small voice behind me, and I turned quickly around. Once again, Cody and Astor had snuck up on me unobserved. They stood together, and Cody inclined his head toward the small crowd that had gathered on the far side of the crime-scene tape.
“Which guy is scary?” I said, and Astor said, “There. In the orange shirt. Don’t make me point, he’s looking.”
I looked for an orange shirt in the crowd and saw only a flash of color at the far end of the cul-de-sac as someone ducked into a car. It was a small blue car, not a white Avalon—but I did notice a familiar dab of additional color dangling from the rearview mirror as the car moved out onto the main road. And although it was 130
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difficult to be sure, I was relatively confident that it was a University of Miami faculty parking pass.
I turned back to Astor. “Well, he’s gone now,” I said. “Why did you say he was scary?”
“He says so,” Astor said, pointing to Cody, and Cody nodded.
“He was,” Cody said, barely above a whisper. “He had a big shadow.”
“I’m sorry he scared you,” I said. “But he’s gone now.”
Cody nodded. “Can we look at the heads?”
Children are so interesting, aren’t they? Here Cody had been frightened by something as insubstantial as somebody’s shadow, and yet he was as eager as I’d ever seen him to get a closer look at a concrete example of murder, terror, and human mortality. Of course I didn’t blame him for wanting a peek, but I didn’t think I could openly allow it. On the other hand, I had no idea how to explain all of this to them, either. I am told that the Turkish language, for example, has subtleties far beyond what I can imagine, but English was definitely not adequate for a proper response.
Happily for me,
Deborah came back just then, muttering, “I will never complain about the captain again.” That seemed highly unlikely, but it did not seem politic to say so. “He can have those blood-sucking bastards from the press.”
“Maybe you’re just not a people person,” I said.
“Those assholes aren’t people,” she said. “All they want is to get some goddamned pictures of their perfect fucking haircuts standing in front of the heads, so they can send their tape to the network.
What kind of animal wants to see this?”
Actually, I knew the answer to that one, since I was shepherding two of them at the moment and, truth be told, might be considered one myself. But it did seem like I should avoid this question and try to keep our focus on the problem at hand. So I pondered whatever it was that had made Cody’s scary guy seem scary, and the fact that he’d had what looked very much like a university parking permit.
“I’ve had a thought,” I said to Deborah, and the way her head snapped around you might have thought I’d told her she was DEXTER IN THE DARK
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standing on a python. “It doesn’t really fit with your dentist-as-drug-lord theory,” I warned her.