Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

“That doesn’t mean we have the right to—”

“Then who does have the right, Harry? If not us, who does?”

There was another longish pause. Finally, Harry spoke, very softly, and I had to strain to make out the words.

“You weren’t in Vietnam,” Harry said. Gus didn’t respond. “Something I learned there is that some people can kill in cold blood, and others can’t. And most of us can’t,” Harry said. “It does bad things to you.”

“So what are you saying, you agree with me, but you can’t do it? If ever anybody deserved it, Harry, Otto Valdez …”

“What are you doing?” came Deborah’s voice, approximately eight inches from my ear. I jumped so hard I bumped my head on the wall.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Funny place to do it,” she said, and since she showed no inclination to move on, I decided I was done listening and I went back to zombie land in front of the TV. I had certainly heard enough to understand what was going on, and I was fascinated. Dear sweet kindly Uncle Gus wanted to kill somebody, and wanted Harry to help him. My brain whirled with the excitement of it, frantically searching for a way to persuade them to let me help—or at least watch. Where was the harm in that? It was almost a civic duty!

But Harry refused to help Gus, and a little while later Gus left the house looking like someone had let all the air out of him. Harry came back to the TV with me and Debs, and spent the next half hour trying to get his happy face back on.

Two days later they found Uncle Gus’s body. It had been mutilated and beheaded and apparently tortured first.

And three days after that, unknown to me, Harry found my little pet memorial under the bushes in the backyard. Over the next week or two I caught him staring at me more than once with his work face on. I did not know why at the time, and it was somewhat intimidating, but I was far too much of the young gawp to be able to phrase a statement like, Dad, why are you staring at me with that particular expression?

And in any case, the Why of it very soon became apparent. Three weeks after Uncle Gus met his untimely end, Harry and I went on a camping trip to Elliott Key, and with a few simple sentences—starting with, “You’re different, son”—Harry changed everything forever.

His plan. His design for Dexter. His perfectly crafted, sane, and sensible road map for me to be eternally and wonderfully me.

And now I had stepped off the Path, taken a small and dangerous back-road detour. I could almost see him shake his head and turn those ice-cold blue eyes on me.

“We’ve got to get you squared away,” Harry would have said.

SEVENTEEN

A PARTICULARLY LOUD SNORE FROM CHUTSKY BROUGHT me back to the present. It was loud enough that one of the nurses stuck her head in the door, and then checked all the dials and gauges and whirling machinery before going away again, with a suspicious backward glance at the two of us, as if we had deliberately made terrible noises in order to upset her machines.

Deborah moved one leg slightly, just enough to prove she was still alive, and I pulled myself all the way back from meandering down memory lane. Somewhere, there was somebody who actually was guilty of putting the knife into my sister. That was all that mattered. Someone had actually done this thing. It was a large and untidy loose end wandering around and I needed to grab hold and snip it back into neatness. Because the thought of such a large piece of unfinished and unpunished business gave me the urge to clean the kitchen and make the bed. It was messy, plain and simple, and Dexter doesn’t like disorder.

Another thought poked its nose into the room. I tried to shoo it away, but it kept coming back, wagging its tail and demanding that I pet it. And when I did, it seemed to me to be a good thought. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the scene one more time. The door swings open—and it stays open as Deborah shows her badge and then falls. And it is still open when I get to her side …

… which means that someone else could very well have been inside and looking out. And that meant that somewhere, there just might be somebody who knew what I looked like. A second person, just like Detective Coulter had suggested. It was a little insulting to admit that a drooling dolt like Coulter might be right about something, but after all, Isaac Newton didn’t reject gravity just because the apple had a low IQ.

&n

bsp; And happily for my self-esteem, I was one step ahead of Coulter, because I might know this hypothetical second person’s name. We had been going to ask someone named Brandon Weiss about his threats to the Tourist Board, and somehow ended up with Doncevic instead. So there might well have been two of them, living together—

Another small train chugged into the station: Arabelle, the cleaning woman at Joe’s, had seen two gay tourists, with cameras. And I had seen two men who fit that description at Fairchild Gardens, also with cameras, filming the crowd. A film of the crime scene arriving at the Tourist Board had started all this. It was not conclusive, but it was certainly a nice start, and I was pleased, since it proved that a certain amount of mental function might well be returning to Cyber-Dex.

And as if to prove it, I had one more thought. Taking it a step further, if this hypothetical Weiss had followed the story in the media, which seemed very likely, he would know who I was, and quite possibly consider me a person worth talking to, in the strictly Dexter-ian sense of the word. Dexter-ose? Probably not—this was not a sweet thought, and it did not fill me with sociable good cheer. It meant that either I would have to defend myself successfully when he came, or let him do unto me. Either way there would be a mess, and a body, and a great deal of publicity, and all of them attached to my secret identity, Daytime Dexter, which was something I would very much like to avoid if possible.

All that meant one simple thing: I had to find him first.

This was not a daunting task. I have spent my adult life getting very good at finding things, and people, on the computer. In fact, it was this particular talent that had gotten Debs and me into our current mess, so there was a certain symmetry to the idea that this same skill would get me out of it now.

All right then: to work. Time to heed the clarion call and strap myself into my trusty computer.

And as always seems to happen when I have reached the point where I am ready to take decisive action, everything began to happen at once.

As I took a breath in preparation for standing up, Chutsky suddenly opened his eyes and said, “Oh, hey, buddy, the doctor said—” and was interrupted by the sound of my cell phone ringing, and as I reached to answer it, a doctor stepped into the room and said, “All right,” to two interns following close behind him.

And then in rapid-fire confusion I heard, from the doctor, the phone, and Chutsky, “Hey, buddy, it’s the doc—Cub Scouts, and Astor’s friend has the mumps—the higher nerve center seems to be responding to …”