Dexter by Design (Dexter 4)

But this morning the parking area was overflowing when we arrived, since the Gardens had been closed with the discovery of Something Awful, and the crowds of people who had scheduled a visit had backed up at the entrance, hoping to get inside so they could mark it off on their itinerary, and maybe even see something horrible so they could pretend to be shocked. A perfect vacation visit to Miami: orchids and corpses.

There were even two elfin young men with video cameras circulating through the crowd and filming, of all things, the people standing around and waiting. And as they moved they called out, “Murder in the Gardens!” and other encouraging remarks. Perhaps they had a good parking spot and didn’t want to leave it, since there was absolutely no place left to park anything larger than a unicycle.

Deborah, of course, was a Miami native, and a Miami cop; she pushed her motor-pool Ford through the crowd and parked it right in front of the main entrance to the park, where several other official cars were already parked, and jumped right out. By the time I got out of the car, she was already talking to the uniformed officer standing there, a short and beefy guy named Meltzer, who I knew slightly. He was pointing down one of the paths on the far side of the entrance, and Deborah was already headed past him along the trail to which he had pointed.

I followed as quickly as I could. I was used to tagging along behind Deborah and playing catch-up, since she always rushed onto a crime scene. It never seemed quite politic to point out to her that there was really no need to hurry. After all, the victim wasn’t going anywhere. Still, Deborah hurried, and she expected me to be there to tell her what she thought of it. And so, before she could get lost in the carefully tended jungle, I hurried after her.

I finally caught up to her just as she skidded to a halt in a small clearing off the main trail, in an area called Rain Forest. There was a bench where the weary nature lover could pause and recuperate amid the blooms. Alas for poor panting Dexter, breathing hard now as a result of racing pell-mell after Debs, the bench was already occupied by someone who clearly needed to sit down far more than I did.

He sat beside running water in the shade of a palm tree, dressed in baggy cotton shorts, the flimsy kind that have somehow become okay to wear in public recently, and he wore the rubber flip-flops that invariably go with the shorts. He also had on a T-shirt that said I’M WITH BUTTHEAD, and he was draped with a camera and pensively clutching a bouquet. And although I say pensively, it was a very different kind of pensing, because his head had been neatly removed and replaced with a gaudy spray of tropical flowers. And in the bouquet, instead of flowers, was a bright and festive heap of intestines, topped by what was almost certainly a heart and surrounded by an appreciative cloud of flies.

“Son of a bitch,” Deborah said, and it was hard to argue with her logic. “Son of a goddamn bitch. Three of ’em in one day.”

“We don’t know for sure that they’re connected,” I said carefully, and she glared at me.

“You want to tell me we got TWO of these assholes running around at the same time?” she demanded.

“It doesn’t seem very likely,” I admitted.

“You’re goddamned right it doesn’t. And I’m about to have Captain Matthews and every reporter on the Eastern Seaboard on my ass.”

“Sounds like quite a party,” I said.

“So what am I supposed to tell them?”

“We are pursuing a number of leads and hope to have something more definite to tell you shortly,” I said.

Deborah stared at me with the look of a large and very angry fish, all teeth and wide eyes. “I can remember that shit without your help,” she said. “Even the reporters can remember that shit. And Captain Matthews invented that shit.”

“What kind of shit would you prefer?” I asked.

“The kind of shit that tells me what this is about, asshole.”

I ignored my sister’s name-calling and looked again at our nature-loving new friend. There was an air of studied ease to the position of the body that created a very large contrast to the fact that it was actually a very dead and headless former human being. It had apparently been posed with extreme care, and once again I got the distinct impression that this final die-orama was more important than the actual killing had been. It was a little bit disturbing, in spite of the mocking chuckle from the Dark Passenger. It was as if someone admitted they went through all the bother and mess of sex only in order to smoke a cigarette.

Equally disturbing was the fact that, as at the scene where the first two bodies were displayed, I was getting no hints at all from the Passenger, beyond a kind of disconnected and appreciative amusement.

“What this seems to be about,” I said hesitatingly, “is making some kind of statement.”

“Statement,” Deborah said. “What kind of statement?”

“I don’t know.”

Deborah stared at me for a moment longer, then shook her head. “Thank God you’re here to help,” she said, and before I could think of some suitable remark that would defend me and sting her a little at the same time, the forensic team bustled into our peaceful little glen and began to photograph, measure, dust, and peer into all the tiny places that might hold answers. Deborah immediately turned away to talk to Camilla Figg, one of the lab geeks, and I was left alone to suffer in the knowledge that I had failed my sister.

I am sure the suffering would have been terrible if I was capable of feeling remorse, or any other crippling human emotion, but I am not built for it, and so I didn’t feel it—or anything else except hunger. I went back out to the parking area and talked to Officer Meltzer until someone came along who could give me a ride back to the South Beach site. I had left my kit there, and had not even made a start on looking for any blood evidence.

I spent the rest of the morning shuttling back and forth between the two crime scenes. There was very little actual spatter work for me to do, no more than a few small, nearly dry s

pots in the sand that suggested the couple on the beach had been killed elsewhere and brought out onto the beach later. I was pretty sure we had all assumed this already, since it was very unlikely that somebody would do all that chopping and rearranging quite so publicly, so I didn’t bother to mention this to Deborah, who was already in a pointless frenzy, and I didn’t want any more of it aimed at me.

The only real break I got all day was at almost one o’clock, when Angel-No-Relation offered to drive me back to my cubicle, and stop along the way at Calle Ocho for lunch at his favorite Cuban restaurant, Habanita. I had a very nice Cuban steak with all the trimmings, and two cafecitas with my flan dessert, and I felt a whole lot better about myself as I headed into the building, flashed my credentials, and stepped into the elevator.

As the elevator doors slid shut I felt a small flutter of uncertainty from the Passenger, and I listened hard, wondering if this was a reaction to the morning’s carnival of carnage, or perhaps the result of too many onions on my steak. But I could get nothing more from it beyond a certain tensing of black invisible wings, very often a sign that things were not what they should be. How this could happen in an elevator I did not know, and I considered the idea that the Passenger’s recent sabbatical in the face of Moloch might have left it in a mildly dithering and unsettled state. It would not do, of course, to have a less than effective Passenger, and I was pondering what to do about that when the elevator doors opened and all questions were answered.

As if he had known we would be aboard, Sergeant Doakes stood glaring and unblinking at the exact spot where we stood, and the shock was considerable. He had never liked me; had always had the unreasonable suspicion that I was some kind of monster, which of course I was, and he had been determined to prove it somehow. But an amateur surgeon had captured Doakes and removed his hands, feet, and tongue, and although I had endured considerable inconvenience in trying to save him—and really, I did help save most of him—he had decided his new, trimmed-down form was my fault, and he liked me even less.

Even the fact that without his tongue he was now incapable of saying anything that was minimally coherent was no help; he said it anyway, and the rest of us were forced to endure what sounded like a strange new language made up of all G and N sounds, and spoken with an urgent and threatening delivery that made you look for an emergency exit even while you strained to understand.