Some people just don’t have a sense of Right and Wrong. Born that way. Like you, for instance. And like my ex-wife. And when she is screaming at me to get the fuck out and never come back and fucking mail the alimony check from now on—and I step outside and see you standing there in the yard …
Hey, I’m pretty quick on my feet, too. You didn’t see me, except maybe my back. And as I went back inside, and looked at her standing there with her mouth open, and thought about you standing outside and I know you’re thinking about coming back to get me—I guess I would say it just all came together and I knew who I am supposed to be now and what I am supposed to do. Old Me would have run for his life at the sight of you. But New Me saw how perfect this was, because it really is all about taking responsibility and suddenly I really understand for the first time just how far that goes and what I am supposed to do about it, which is … Get rid of her and you at the same time. Take out two Bad People with one stroke. It all adds up now. That’s who I am. I was put here to deal with the rule breakers, the ones who have gone too far and can’t come back. You. My very-ex-wife. And who knows who else? There’s lots of ’em. I see ’em every day.
So in a way I am becoming like you, right? The big difference is, I do it to stop people like you. I do it for Good. But hey, thanks for being a great role model. Maybe I should even thank you for my new girlfriend, except I don’t think she’s going to last too long.
I hope you don’t think you are safe. I hope you don’t think it’s over. Because I know who you are and where you are and you don’t know a thing about me. And think about this:
I am learning from you.
I am learning to do just exactly what you do, and I am going to do it to you. You will never know when or where. You can’t know anything at all except that I am here and I am moving even closer.
Do you hear something behind you?
Boo. It’s me.
Closer than you think …
I don’t know how long I sat there without moving, thinking, or breathing. It probably wasn’t as long as it felt, because the building where I sat had not crumbled into dust, and the sun had not turned cold and fallen from the sky. But it was still a very long time before a single jagged thought managed to penetrate the cold and empty vault between my ears, and when it finally did register I still couldn’t do any more than take a large and sharp breath and let that thought echo around all alone.
Closer …?
I read through the terrible thing again, desperately searching for some small clue that it was all a bad joke, some telltale word or phrase I might have overlooked the first time to show me I had misunderstood. But no matter how many times I read the lumpy, self-indulgent prose, it stayed the same. I found no hidden meaning, no invisible-ink message with a phone number and a Facebook page. Just the same wacky, annoying phrases, over and over, all adding up to the same vague and sinister conclusion.
He was moving closer and he thought he was just like me, and I knew very well what that meant, what he would try to do. He was circling around downwind and polishing his fangs and blending with the scenery of my life. At any moment—now, tomorrow, next week—he might spring out at me from anywhere at all, and there was not a single thing in the world I could do about it. I was fighting a shadow in a dark room. But this shadow had real hands, holding real weapons. He could see in this darkness, and I could not, and he was coming, whether from the front or from behind, from above or below; all I could know was that he wanted to do what I do just the way I do it and he wanted to do it to me and he was coming.
Closer …
SEVENTEEN
SHE WAS DIVORCED, LIVED THERE ALONE. HER NAME WAS Melissa. Fuck, wait a second,” said Detective Laredo. He flipped open a folder and ran a thick finger down a paper inside it. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s A-lissa. With an ‘A.’ Alissa Elan.” He frowned. “Funny name,” he said.
I could have told him that right away, since I’d written that name on a Post-it only a day ago, but technically I wasn’t supposed to know until he told us, so I held my tongue. And anyway, from what I knew of him, Laredo was not the kind of guy who liked to be corrected, especially not by eggheaded forensics geeks. But he was lead on the case of the chopped-up woman in the grubby little house, and we had all come together for his twenty-four, the session department policy mandated on a capital case twenty-four hours in. Since I was part of the team, I was there.
I probably would have found a reason to be there anyway, since I was desperate for any hint at all about who had done this awful thing. More than anyone else in the entire department—more than anyone else in the entire world of law enforcement, all across the globe—I wanted to find Alissa’s killer and bring him to justice. But not the old, slow, feeble-witted whorish crone that is Miami’s legal system. I wanted to find him myself and personally drag him down the steps to Dexter’s Temple of Dark and Final Justice. So I sat and squirmed and listened as Laredo led us all through the sum total of what we knew, which turned out to be a little bit less than nothing.
There was no real forensic evidence, except for a few footprints from a New Balance running shoe, very common model and size. No prints, no fibers, nothing that might possibly lead to anything but my old shoes—and then only if Laredo hired a very good scuba diver to find them.
I contributed my dose of nothing on the topic of blood spatter, and waited impatiently until somebody finally said, “Divorced, right?” and Laredo nodded.
“Yeah, I put somebody on finding her ex-husband, guy named Bernard Elan,” he said, and I perked up and leaned forward. But Laredo shrugged and said, “No luck. The guy died two years ago.”
And he may have said more, but I didn’t hear it, because in my own unobtrusive way I was reeling from the shock of hearing that Alissa’s ex-husband had been dead for two years. I might wish with all my heart that it was true, but I knew very well that he was far from dead and he was trying very hard to make me dead instead. But Laredo was a pretty good cop, and if he said the man was dead, he had a very good reason for thinking it was true.
I tuned out the dull drone of routine cop talk and thought about what that meant, and I came up with only two possibilities. Either my Witness was not really Alissa Elan’s ex-husband—or else he had somehow managed to fake his own death.
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There was no reason on earth to make up an entire pretend life, complete with months of false blogs about “A” and his divorce from her. And he had, quite clearly, seen me there in her yard looking at the Honda—it had been his angry voice inside the house, and his back I had seen going inside. So I had to believe that this much was true: He really was Alissa’s ex, and he really had killed her.
That meant he had fooled the cops into thinking he was dead.
The hardest part of faking your own death was fudging the physical evidence: You had to provide a realistic scenario, a true-to-life crime scene complete with compelling evidence and a convincing corpse. Very difficult to do with no mistakes, and very few people got away with it.
But:
Once you get past the first part of being dead, after you have cried at your funeral and buried your body, it gets a lot easier. In fact, by putting his death two years in the past, Bernard had turned the job into nothing more than paperwork. Of course, this is the twenty-first century, and paperwork nowadays means computer work. There were several basic databases you would have to hack and insert your false information—and one or two of them were fairly hard to get into, although I would rather not explain how I know that. But once past the various cyberdefenses, if you could just drop in one or two lines of new or altered information …
It could be done. Difficult—I thought I might be able to do it, but it was tricky, and my opinion of my Witness and his abilities with a computer went up several notches, which did not make me happy.