Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

“I’m sure you’re right. But Vince said there’s something weird about these bodies.”

He frowned at something and bent closer to the sand.

“Don’t you worry about sand mites?” I asked him.

Angel just nodded. “They were killed somewhere else,” he said. “But one of them dripped a little.” He frowned. “But it’s not blood.”

“How lucky for me.”

“Also,” he said, using tweezers to put something invisible into a plastic bag, “they got…” And he paused here, not for any reason connected with unseen objects, but as if to find a word that wouldn’t frighten me, and in the silence I heard a rising whir of stretching wings from the dark backseat of the Dexter-mobile.

“What?” I said, when I could stand it no longer.

Angel shook his head slightly. “They got—arranged,” he said, and as if a spell had broken, he jerked into motion, sealing his plastic bag, placing it carefully to one side, and then going back down on one knee.

If that was all he had to say on the subject, I would clearly have to go see for myself what all the sibilant silence was about. So I walked another twenty feet to the bodies.

Two of them, one male and one female, apparently in their thirties, and they had not been chosen for their beauty. Both were pale, overweight, and hairy. They had been carefully arranged on gaudy beach towels, the kind so popular with tourists from the Midwest. Casually spread open on the woman’s lap was a bright pink paperback novel with the kind of gaudy cover that people from Michigan love to carry around on vacation: Tourist Season. A perfectly ordinary married couple enjoying a day at the beach.

To underline the happiness they were supposed to be experiencing, each of them had a semitransparent plastic mask stuck onto their face and apparently held in place with glue, the kind of mask that gave the wearer’s face a large and artificial smile while still allowing the actual face to show through. Miami, the home of permanent smiles.

Except that these two had somewhat unusual reasons to smile, reasons that had my Dark Passenger burbling with what very nearly sounded like a case of the giggles. These two bodies had been split open from the bottom of the rib cage down to the waistline, and then the flesh had been peeled back to show what was inside. And I did not need the surge of sibilant hilarity that rose up from my shadowy friend to appreciate that what was inside was just a little bit out of the ordinary.

All of the standard-issue messiness had been removed, which I thought was a very nice start. There was no awful gooey heap of intestines or other glistening horrible guts. Instead, all the dreadful bloody gunk had been scooped out. The woman’s body cavity had then been neatly and tastefully converted into a tropical fruit basket, the kind that might welcome special guests to a good hotel. I could see a couple of mangoes, papayas, oranges and grapefruits, a pineapple, and of course some bananas. There was even a bright red ribbon attached to the rib cage, and poking up out of the middle of the fruit was a bottle of cheap champagne.

The man had been arranged with a somewhat more casual diversity. Instead of the bright and attractive fruit medley, his emptied gut had been filled with a huge and gaudy pair of sunglasses, a dive mask and snorkel, a squeeze bottle of sunscreen, a can of insect repellent, and a small plate of pasteles, Cuban pastries. It seemed like a terrible waste in this sandy wilderness without doughnuts. Propped up on one side of the cavity was some kind of large pamphlet or brochure. I could not see the cover, so I bent over and looked closer; it was The South Beach Swimsuit Calendar. A grouper’s head peeked out from behind the calendar, its gaping fishy face frozen into a smile that was eerily similar to the one on the plastic mask glued to the man’s face.

I heard the hiss of feet through the sand behind me and turned around.

“Friend of yours?” my sister, Deborah, said as she walked over and nodded at the bodies. Perhaps I should say Sergeant Deborah, since my job requires me to be polite to someone who has reached her exalted rank in the police force. And polite I generally am, even to the point of ignoring her snarky remark. But the sight of what she held in her hand wiped away all my political obligations. Somehow, she had managed to come up with a doughnut—a Bavarian cream, my favorite—and she took a large bite. It seemed horribly unfair. “What do you think, bro?” she said through a mouthful.

“I think you should have brought me a doughnut,” I said.

She bared her teeth in a large smile, which did not help anything, since her gums were lined with chocolate frosting from the doughnut in question. “I did,” she said. “But I got hungry and ate it.”

It was nice to see my sister smile, since it was not something she had been doing much of for the last few years; it just didn’t seem to fit in with her cop self-image. But I was not filled with the warm glow of brotherly affection at seeing her—mostly because I was not filled with doughnut, either, and I wanted to be. Still, I knew from my research that the happiness of one’s family was the next-best thing, so I put the best possible face on it.

“I’m very happy for you,” I said.

“No you’re not, you’re pouting,” she said. “What do you think?” And she crammed the last chunk of Bavarian cream into her mouth and nodded down at the bodies again.

Of course, Deborah, of all people in the world, had the right to ask for the benefit of my special insight into the sick and twisted animals who killed like this, since she was my only relative and I was sick and twisted myself. But aside from the slowly fading amusement of the Dark Passenger, I had no particular insight into why these two bodies had been arranged like a welcome message from a very troubled civic booster. I listened intently for a long moment, pretending to study the bodies, but I neither heard nor saw anything, except a faint and impatient clearing of the throat from the shadows inside Chateau Dexter. But Deborah was expecting some sort of pronouncement.

“It seems awfully contrived,” I managed to say.

“Nice word,” she said. “What the fuck does that mean?”

I hesitated. Usually my special insight into unusual homicides makes it easy for me to develop an idea of what kind of psychological chaos produced the heap of human leftovers in question. But in this case, I was drawing a blank. Even a true expert like myself has limits, and whatever trauma created the need to turn a pudgy woman into a fruit basket was beyond me and my interior helper.

Deborah looked at me expectantly. I didn’t want to give her any casual chatter that she might take for genuine insight and charge off in the wrong direction. On the other hand, my reputation required that I offer some kind of learned opinion.

“It’s nothing definite,” I said. “It’s just that—” And I paused for a moment, because I realized that what I had been about to say actually was a genuine insight, and the small encouraging chuckle from the Passenger confirmed it.

“What, goddamn it?” Deborah said, and it was something of a relief to see her return to her own cranky normality.

“This was done with a kind of cold control you don’t see normally,” I said.

Debs snorted. “Normally,” she said. “Like, what—normal like you?”