Vince nodded at me. “Unless you have a hit single I didn’t know about?”
I blinked and looked at the picture again, hoping to find that it had gone away, but it hadn’t. And as I looked I felt my stomach churn with something that was very close to fear. Because there was my face and my name and even my job all together in one convenient package, and the first thought that popped into my brain was not, Oh, boy, I look studly. Instead it instantly gave a shape to the anonymous unease I had been feeling, and it looked like this:
What if my unknown Witness saw the pictures? My name was right there with my face, along with my job—practically everything but my shoe size. Even if he had not traced my license plate or tracked me before, this would give him everything he needed. This was not even a matter of putting two and two together; it was looking at four. I swallowed, which was not as easy as it should have been, since my mouth was suddenly dry, and I realized that Vince was staring at me with a strange look on his face. I searched for something witty and forceful to say and finally settled on, “Oh. Um—shit.”
Vince shook his head and looked very serious. “Too bad you’re not still single,” he said. “This would so get you laid.”
It seemed more likely that it would so get me arrested and executed. I had always been very careful to avoid publicity of any kind; it was far better for someone with my recreational tendencies to stay anonymous as much as possible, and until now I had managed to keep my face out of public view. But here it was, apparently splashed across the blogosphere, and there was nothing I could do except hope that my Witness was not a reader of the Miami Murder blog. If my picture had really spread as much as Vince said, maybe I should also hope he lived under a rock—and a rock without an Internet connection at that. There was no way to cover myself; this was public nudity, pure and simple. Worse still, there was absolutely no way out; I just had to wait for all the attention to go away when things calmed down.
Things did not, in fact, calm down right away, not as far as the Cop-Hammer case was concerned—but happily enough, things did move on away from me. The details of the case began to pour out into the mainstream media. A few photographs of the bodies appeared online—originating at Miami Murder, of course, but the newspapers got hold of them, as well as some very graphic descriptions of what had been done to Klein and Gunther. Public interest shot up several notches, and when the exciting conclusion leaked out, the newspaper and TV talking heads found the headline just too good to ignore—“Working Mom Puts Psycho Killer in Time-out!”—and the press stampede for Deborah left me far behind in the dust, and made me wonder if my sister had actually been one of the Beatles and forgotten to mention it.
Debs really was a much better story than me, but, of course, she wanted no part of it. And, of course, the reporters assumed that meant she was holding out for money, which made her even less eager to talk to them. Captain Matthews had to order her to accept one or two requests for interviews with the national media; he considered it his primary job to maintain a positive public image, for himself and the department, and nationally televised interviews do not grow on trees. But Deborah was clearly uncomfortable, awkward, and terse on camera. So Captain Matthews quickly decided that Debs as PR maven was a bad idea, and concentrated on trying to get his own manly face on TV instead. TV was not terribly interested, however, in spite of the captain’s truly impressive chin, and after a week or so the requests for Deborah died out and our happy nation moved on to the next Incredibly Fascinating Story: an eight-year-old girl who had climbed halfway up Mount Everest all by herself before getting frostbite and losing her leg. The interviews with her proud parents were particularly compelling—especially the mother weeping at the expense of a new prosthetic leg every six months as the girl grew—and I made a mental note to be certain not to miss their reality show in the fall.
At about the same time the press moved on, the rest of the police force got tired of telling Deborah how terrific she was, too, especially since her thank-yous were growing very close to vicious. One or two of the other detectives even began to make the kind of sarcastic remarks that a suspicious mind might assume were tinged with envy. In any case, the congratulations and praise at work dried up and the force returned to the routine brutality of life on the job as Miami’s Finest. The tense, haunted-house atmosphere seeped out of the department, and things settled back into their old comfortable workday rut once more, with Debs happily back out of the spotlight and working on routine stabbings and beheadings again. Her broken arm didn’t seem to slow her down too much, and Alex Duarte was always at her side on the job if she needed a hand, literal or figurative.
For my part, I crossed off a few more names on the list, but it was all happening with nightmare slowness now, and I could do nothing but plod on. I knew something terrible was about to happen, and that I would be on the receiving end. My Witness absolutely had to know who I was now. I had been identified by name, with a picture, and it seemed to me that it would have to be only a matter of time before those two hard facts crashed together, with Dexter in between. I moved through my day with the horrible uneasy feeling of being observed by hostile eyes. I couldn’t see any sign that I was, no matter how hard and long I stared around me, but the feeling would not go away. No one was staring intently at me when I was out in public, although I imagined that I could feel his eyes on me everywhere. I didn’t see anything out of the ordinary anywhere, not even once, but I felt it. Something was coming my way, and I knew I wouldn’t like it when it got here, not at all.
The Dark Passenger was just as disturbed; it seemed to be pacing endlessly back and forth, like a tiger in a cage, but it offered no help and no suggestions, nothing but more unease. And my near-constant feeling of creeping dread stayed with me over the next few days. At home I found it almost impossible to keep up my mask of cheerful daddyhood. Rita had not mentioned hunting for a new house again, but it might have been because some kind of crisis involving euros and long-term-bond yields had come up at her job, and she was suddenly too busy to do anything about it, although she still found time to give me odd, disapproving looks, and I still had no idea what I had or hadn’t done.
It also fell to me to take Astor to the dentist to get her braces, a trip that did not delight either one of us. She still considered the whole idea of braces as a kind of personal Apocalypse, designed by a vengeful world to force her into social death, and she sulked for the entire drive. She would not speak at all, all the way to the dentist, which was very unusual for her.
And on the trip home, with brand-new shiny silver bands on her teeth, she was just as silent, but more aggressively so. She glowered at the scenery, snarled at the passing cars, and none of my clumsy attempts to cheer her up got anything out of her except some very bitter glares and two simple declarative sentences: “I look like a cyborg,” she said. “My life is over.” And then she turned to look out the side window of the car and would say no more.
Astor sulked, Rita stared and crunched numbers, and Cody maintained his normal silence. Only Lily Anne knew that something was wrong. She tried very hard to bring me out of my funk, distracting me with numerous rounds of “Old MacDonald” and “Frog Went A-Courtin’,” but even her great musical talent brought no more than a temporary fading of my deep disquiet.
Something was coming; I knew it, and I couldn’t stop it. It was like watching a piano fall from a tall building and knowing that in just a few seconds there is going to be a huge and terrible crash and there is nothing you can do but wait for it. But even though this piano was entirely in my head, I still found myself bracing for the shattering din when it inevitably hit the pavement.
And then one morning I arrived at work to find that my piano wasn’t imaginary after all.
I had just settled into my chair with a cup of toxic sludge disguised as coffee. No one else was around yet, so I turned on my computer to check my in-box. It was all junk—a departmental memo advising us all that the new departmental dress code did not permit guayaberas, a note from Cody’s Cub Scout leader reminding me to bring snacks next week, three offers from online Canadian pharmacies, two notes suggesting some highly improper and rather personal activities, a letter from my attorney in Nigeria urging me to claim my huge inheritance, and an invitation for me to submit a blog on blood spatter to a homicide fan site. For just a moment I allowed myself to be distracted by the idea of writing for a Web site for murder groupies. It was absurd, bewildering, and weirdly attractive, and I could not stop myself from taking a quick peek. I opened the e-mail.
My screen went briefly blank, and for two heartbeats I felt panic; had I let in some kind of virus? But then a flash-graphics file started up, and a bright red glob of animated blood went splat! across the screen. It dripped down toward the bottom edge, looking realistic enough to make me feel deeply uneasy. Dark letters began to form in the awful red mess, and as they slowly spelled out my name I felt a sick jolt of dread run through me, which did not get any better when the screen suddenly flashed a blinding blast of light and then, in huge black letters, GOTC
HA!
For a moment I could only stare at the screen. The words began to fade, and I could feel my entire life fading away with them. I was Got; it was all over. Who it was, what they were going to do—it didn’t matter. Dexter was Done.
And then a paragraph of text appeared, and with a sick numb helplessness, I began to read it.
“If you’re like me,” it said, “you like murder!”
All right, I really am like you; what’s your point?
It went on:
There’s nothing wrong with that—you’ll find lots of other people who feel the same way! And just like you, they love living here in Miami, where there’s always a new case to follow! Until now it’s been too hard to keep up with the latest in local homicide. But now, there’s a simple way to do just that! Tropical Blood is an exciting new online magazine that offers you an insider’s look at all kills on the current casebook—all for just $4.99 a month! This special rate is only for our founding subscribers! You must join now, before the price goes up!
There was more, but I didn’t read it. I was somewhere between relief that this was mere spam, and anger that it had put me through such a very bad moment. I deleted the e-mail, and as I did my laptop gave a muted bong! announcing one more e-mail, a note with the one-word title “Identity.”
I moved the mouse to delete this one, too, but I hesitated for just a moment. It made no sense at all, but the timing seemed magical—one arriving as I deleted the other. Of course, it wasn’t connected, but there was a kind of wondrous symmetry to it. So I opened it. I assumed it would be an advertisement for some amazing new product that would protect me from identity theft, or possibly enhance my sexuality. But that word, “identity” … it had been on my mind as I wrestled with the question of my Witness. I had been thinking about his identity and whether he knew mine, and now this same word in the subject line had tweaked the memory. It was a stupid, almost nonexistent connection, but it was there, and I could not stop myself from taking a quick peek. I opened the e-mail.
A page of single-spaced writing appeared on my screen, under a large stylized heading that said “Shadowblog.” The letters of the headline were printed in a gray, semitransparent typeface, and under them was a shadowy mirror image of the letters done in faint red. There was no name below it, just a URL: http://?www.blogalodeon.com/?shadowblog.
Oh, joy and bliss: I had made it onto some anonymous two-bit blogger’s mailing list. Was this the price of my newfound fame? To be assailed by every semiliterate twinkie with a keyboard and an opinion? I didn’t need this, and once more I moved the mouse to delete the e-mail—and then I saw the first sentence and everything went cold and very still.
And now I know your name, it said.
For an endless moment I just stared at that sentence. It was irrational nearly to the point of clinical brain death, but for some reason I was convinced that the sentence referred to me, and it had been written by my Witness. I stared, and I may even have blinked once or twice, but other than that I did nothing. Finally I became aware of a distant pounding, and realized it was my heart, reminding me that I needed to breathe. I did, closing my eyes and giving the oxygen a moment to get up to my brain and whip a few thoughts into action. The first thought was an order to calm down, followed by a very logical reminder that this was, after all, only a spam e-mail and it could not possibly be about me or from my Witness.