“Yes,” I said. “Has to be.”

He shook his head vigorously. “No. No way. Can’t be—it just can’t. I mean, I know it’s your sister; you gotta stick up for her, but hey,” he said.

But once again his pointless drivel was contradicted by the far more compelling purr of reptile logic slithering out from the deep and shadowed stronghold of the Passenger’s certainty, and I knew I was right. I still did not know why that should make the alarm bells ring—where was the threat to precious irreplaceable me? But the Passenger was almost never wrong, and the warning was clear. Someone had duplicated the Hammer Killer’s technique, and aside from petty moral questions and copyright issues, something about that was wrong; some new threat was marching in too close for comfort, right up to the battlements of the Dark Lair, and I was suddenly deeply uneasy over what should have been no more than a routine opportunity to give another solid performance of Artificial Human Grief. Was the whole world out to get me? Was this really the new Model of how Things were going to be?

Nothing that happened in the next few hours made me feel any easier. Camilla’s body had been found in a car parked in the far corner of the lot at a giant superstore located very close to headquarters. A lot of cops stopped at the store on their way home from work, and quite probably Camilla had, too. There were three plastic shopping bags with the store’s logo scattered across the floor in the backseat of the car, and Camilla’s body had been poured onto the seat above them. Just like the other two victims, she had been savagely hammered on every bone and joint until her body had lost its original shape.

But the car was not an official police vehicle, and apparently it was not even Camilla’s, either. It was a five-year-old Chevy Impala, registered to a store employee named Natalie Bromberg. Ms. Bromberg had not had a great deal to say to the detectives so far, possibly because, since finding Camilla in her car, her time had been filled with screaming, crying, and finally accepting a large syringe filled with sedative.

Vince and I worked slowly through the area around the Impala, and inside it as well, and my sense that this was the work of a different hand grew steadily. Camilla’s body was slumped half-on, half-off the seat, while the other two had been arranged a little more carefully. A small thing, but once again, it didn’t fit the previous pattern, and it made me look a little closer.

I am not really an expert on blunt-force trauma, but the places on Camilla’s body where she had been hit looked different from what I had seen in the two previous cases; Gunther’s and Klein’s impact points had visibly been made by the flat surface on the end of the hammer. These had a slight curve to them, a faint concave contour, as if the weapon had been rounded rather than flat, something like a pole, or a dowel, or … or maybe a baseball bat? The kind a former minor-league baseball player with anger-management problems might have lying around?

I thought about it hard, and it seemed like it fit—except for one small thing: Why would Bernie Elan want to kill Camilla Figg? And if for some reason he did want to kill her, why choose this difficult and repulsive method? It didn’t add up, not at all. I was leaping to paranoid conclusions. Merely because somebody was after me, that didn’t mean he would do this. Ridiculous.

I worked around the outside of the car, spraying Bluestar in the hopes of finding some telltale blood spatter. I found a very faint bloody impression from the toe of a running shoe on the white line separating the Impala’s parking spot from the one next to it. And there were no taco wrappers inside the car, either, which was hardly conclusive. But there was a large patch of blood on the seat under the body that had leaked out from a savage wound on the left side of Camilla’s head. Head wounds are notorious gushers—but this one had merely trickled onto the seat, meaning that she had been killed somewhere else and then dumped here soon after. The killer had probably parked close to the Impala and quickly slid the body out of his vehicle and into the Chevy’s backseat, and it was my guess that blood from the head injury had made the partial footprint.

There was another smaller wound on Camilla’s arm, where the bone of the forearm was actually poking up through the skin. It had not leaked nearly as much as the head wound, but to me it was significant. Neither of the other victims’ bodies had bled at all, and this one had been thumped open twice. It was not quite enough evidence to swear out a warrant and arrest somebody, but to me it was a very important point, and in keeping with my position as a responsible adult in the law enforcement community, I immediately

brought it to the attention of the detective in charge, a man named Hood.

Detective Hood was a large guy with a low forehead and a lower IQ. He had a permanent leer and he liked put-downs, sexual innuendo, and hitting suspects to encourage them to speak. I found him standing a few feet away from the Impala’s owner, waiting impatiently for the sedative to kick in a little so she could understand his questions without shrieking. He was watching her with his arms crossed and a very intimidating expression on his face, and Ms. Bromberg would probably need a second shot if she glanced up and saw him staring.

I knew Hood slightly from working with him in the past, so I approached him with chummy directness. “Hey, Richard,” I said; his head jerked around toward me and his expression darkened a notch.

“What do you want?” he said, and he made no attempt to match my cordial tone. In fact, he sounded almost hostile.

Every now and then I find that I have misjudged a situation and used an incorrect phrase or expression; clearly I had done so now. It always takes a moment to adjust and pick a new one, particularly if I am not sure what I did wrong. But a blank stare and a long pause seemed unsuitable, so I filled the gap as best I could. “Um,” I said. “Just, you know—”

“ ‘You know’?” he said, with a mean mimicking tone. “You wanna hear what I know, dickless?”

I didn’t want to hear, of course; Hood couldn’t possibly know anything beyond the third-grade level, except possibly about pornography, and that sort of thing is not really interesting to me. But it didn’t seem politic to say so, and in any case he didn’t wait for me to answer.

“What I know is, your half-ass Hollywood sister shit the bed,” he said, and, completely untroubled by the fact that this image did not really make sense, he repeated it. “She shit the fucking bed,” he said again.

“Well, maybe,” I said, trying to sound meek yet confident, “but there’s actually some evidence that this might be a copycat killer.”

He glared at me, and his jaw bulged out on the sides. It was a very big jaw, and it looked quite able and willing to bite a large chunk of flesh out of me if it had to. “Evidence,” Hood said, as if the word tasted bad. “Like what.”

“The, um, wounds,” I said. “The body is bleeding from two places, and on the other two the skin wasn’t even broken at all.”

Hood turned his head a quarter of an inch to the side and spit. “You’re fulla shit,” he said, and he turned away from me, back to facing Ms. Bromberg. He recrossed his arms, and his upper lip twitched. “Just like your half-ass sister.”

I looked down at my feet, just to be sure his glob of spit had really missed my shoe, and was very happy to see that it had. But it was clear that I would get nothing from Detective Hood except saliva and scatology, so I decided to leave him to his lowbrow musings and go back to looking at all that was left of Camilla Figg.

But as I began to turn away from Hood, I felt a dry, seismic rumble pushing up from a deep and shadowy corner inside, a sharp and urgent shock of warning from the Passenger that Dexter stood in the crosshairs of some hostile scope. Time slowed to a crawl as I froze midturn and searched around me for the threat, and as I looked to the side, off by the yellow tape guarding our perimeter, a bright flash went off and the Passenger hissed.

I blinked, bracing for a bullet, but none came. It was nothing but some gawker taking a photograph. I squinted through lingering blindness from the flash, and saw only the blur of a thick man in a gray T-shirt lowering a camera and turning away to blend back into the crowd. He was gone before I could see his face, or anything else about him, and there wasn’t any visible reason why he had set off my silent alarm. He was not a sniper, not a terrorist with an exploding bicycle. He couldn’t possibly be any real danger at all, nothing but another one of the many unwashed feeding a queasy curiosity about death. Now I was truly being stupid; I was seeing Shadows everywhere, even where they made no sense. Was I slipping completely out of the world of reason and into kaleidoscopic paranoia?

I watched the spot where the photographer had disappeared for a few more moments. He didn’t come back, and nothing came roaring out to kill me. It was just nerves, nothing more, and not my Witness, and I had work to do.

I went back to the Impala, where Camilla’s battered body lay in its final untidy heap. She was still dead, and I couldn’t lose the feeling that somewhere, somebody was watching me, licking his lips, and planning to make me dead, too.

NINETEEN

IT WAS VERY LATE WHEN I GOT HOME, ALMOST MIDNIGHT, AND out of pure reflexive habit I went into the kitchen and looked to see if Rita had left some food for me. But no matter how hard I looked, there were no leftovers, not even a single slice of pizza. I searched carefully, all in vain. There was no Tupperware container on the counter, nothing on the stove, no covered bowl in the refrigerator, not even a Wendy’s bag on the table. I searched the entire kitchen, but I found no sign of anything edible.

I suppose it was not really a tragedy, comparatively speaking. Worse things happen every day, and one of them had just happened to Camilla Figg, someone I had known for years. I really should have been grieving a little bit. But I was hungry, and Rita had left me nothing to eat; to me that seemed vastly more saddening, the death of a great and sustaining tradition, a violation of some unspoken but important principle that had nurtured me through my many trials. No food for Dexter; All was Utterly Lost.

Tags: Jeff Lindsay Dexter Mystery
Source: readsnovelonline.net