Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

“What did they do?” the boy asked—a little too eagerly, I thought.

“Probably nothing,” I told him. “We just wanted to ask them a few questions.”

“Wow,” the kid said. “Murder? Really?”

Deborah made a strange little shake of her head, as if she was clearing away a cloud of small flies. “Why do you think it was murder?” she asked him.

The boy shrugged. “On TV,” he said simply. “If it’s murder, they always say it’s nothing. If it’s nothing, they say it’s a serious violation of the penal code or something like that.” He snickered. “PEEnal code,” he said, grabbing at his crotch.

Deborah looked at the kid and just shook her head. “He’s right again,” I said to her. “I saw it on CSI.”

“Jesus,” said Debs, still shaking her head.

“Give him your card,” I said. “He’ll like that.”

“Yeah,” the boy said, smirking happily, “and tell me to call if I think of anything.”

Deborah stopped shaking her head and snorted. “Okay, kid, you win,” she said. She flipped him her business card, and he caught it neatly. “Call me if you think of anything,” she said.

“Thanks,” he said, and he was still smiling as we climbed into the car and drove away, although whether because he really did like the card, or because he was just pleased to have gotten the best of Deborah, I couldn’t say.

I glanced at the list beside her on the seat. “Brandon Weiss is next,” I said. “Um, a writer. He wrote some ads they didn’t like, and he was fired.”

Deborah rolled her eyes. “A writer,” she said. “What did he do, threaten them with a comma?”

“Well, they had to call in security and have him removed.”

Deborah turned and looked at me. “A writer,” she said. “Come on, Dex.”

“Some of them can be quite fierce,” I said, although it seemed like a bit of a stretch to me, too.

Deborah looked back at the traffic, nodded, and chewed on her lip. “Address?” she said.

I looked down at the paper again. “This sounds more like it,” I said, reading off an address just off North Miami Avenue. “It’s right in the Miami Design District. Where else would a homicidal designer go?”

“I guess you would know,” she said, rather churlishly I thought, but not much more than normal, so I let it go.

“It can’t possibly be worse than the first two,” I said.

“Yeah, sure, third time’s a charm,” Deborah said sourly.

“Come on, Debs,” I said. “You need to show a little enthusiasm.”

Deborah pulled the car off the highway and into the parking lot of a fast-food spot, which surprised me a great deal because, in the first place, it wasn’t quite lunchtime and, in the second place, the things this place served were not quite food, no matter how fast.

But she made no move to go into the restaurant. Instead, she slammed the gear lever into park and turned to face me. “FUCK it,” she said, and I could tell that something was bothering her.

“Is it that kid?” I asked. “Or are you still pissed off about Meza?”

“Neither,” she said. “It’s you.”

If I had been surprised by her choice of restaurants, I was absolutely astonished at her subject matter. Me? I replayed the morning in my head and found nothing objectionable. I had been the good soldier to her crabby general; I had even made fewer than normal insightful an

d clever remarks, for which she should really be grateful, since she was usually the target for them.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean YOU,” she said, very unhelpfully. “All of you.”