I rubbed my arm. “So they’re just going to drop it? I mean, as far as I’m concerned?”
Deborah snorted. “Actually, they’re kind of hoping you’ll just go away and not make any fuss about them handing your children to a kidnapper. Right out of their own front door, too. Fucking idiots.”
“Oh,” I said. Oddly enough, I hadn’t even thought of that. It really did seem like the sort of thing they might hope would just disappear. “So they’re happy with Crowley, even though he’s gone?”
“Yeah,” Debs said. “Blanton may not look like much, but she knows her job. She found a hotel maid who saw somebody and got a description. Thirties, stocky, short beard?”
“That’s him,” I said.
“Uh-huh. So this guy was helping his drunk friend out of the service elevator on your floor. Except the maid said he looked a little too drunk—like dead drunk—and he had one of those pirate hats covering his face, like they found in your room?”
“Suite,” I said reflexively.
She ignored me and shook her head. “The maid didn’t want to say anything; she’s from Venezuela, scared to lose her green card. But she gave a good description. And two of the cooks saw them coming in from the loading dock, too. Also, the waiter at breakfast confirms that you were with your family in the dining
room at the time, so …”
I thought about it, nursing a tiny spark of hope as it grew into a glimmer. It was unlike Crowley to be so sloppy, but I suppose he had been surprised by Hood and had to improvise. I had a quick mental picture of the two of them trying to follow me at the same time and tripping over each other; comic hijinks result, leading to the hilarious bludgeoning death of Detective Hood. Maybe Crowley had panicked, maybe he had just been riding his luck and feeling invincible. I would never know, and it didn’t really matter. Somehow, he had gotten away with it. Nobody had seen him kill Hood, and nobody had stopped him when he moved the body into my room. But of course, people see only what they expect to see, and precious little of that, so the only surprise was that anybody had noticed anything at all.
But the true marvel was that I could see a real live light at the end of what had been a very long, very dark tunnel. I breathed a tentative sigh of relief and looked at my sister, and she looked back. “So I’m off the hook in Key West?” I said.
She nodded. “It gets better,” she told me. “Fucking Doakes really shit the bed this time.”
“I hope it was his own bed,” I said.
“He’s supposed to be in Admin, not out working a case,” she said. “Plus, here he is in Key West, which is way out of his jurisdiction. And,” she added, raising her good hand, the one with no cast, in the air and making a very sour face, “the Key West cops have made a formal complaint. Doakes tried to bully them into holding on to you, and he intimidated witnesses, and …” She paused and looked off into the distance for a moment. “Fuck,” she said at last. “He used to be a pretty good cop.” She actually sighed, and it pained me to see her feeling sorry for someone who had spent so much time and effort making me miserable.
But there were, after all, more important matters at hand. “Deborah,” I said. “What about Doakes?”
She looked up at me with an expression I couldn’t quite read. “Suspended, without pay, pending investigation by Professional Compliance,” she said.
I really couldn’t help myself, and I blurted out, “That’s wonderful!”
“Sure,” Deborah said, a little sour. She continued her silent funk for a few more seconds and then shook herself out of it. “What the hell,” she said.
“What happens back home?” I said. “Am I still a person of interest to the investigation?”
Deborah shrugged. “Officially you are,” she said. “But Laredo has taken over the case, and he’s not a dope. You’ll probably be back at work in a few days.” She looked at me. It was a hard look, and there was clearly something on her mind, but whatever it was she didn’t say it. She just looked, and then finally turned away to stare at the front door. “If only,” she said, “there was …” She hesitated, cleared her throat, and went on slowly. “… just a little bit of evidence, so … Then you’d be home free.” A fat man in plaid shorts came in the front door, followed by two small blond girls. Deborah seemed to find them interesting.
“What kind of evidence, Debs?” I said.
She shrugged and watched the fat man. “Ah, I dunno,” she said. “Maybe something that showed that Hood was bent. You know. So we can see he was not clean, not really a good cop. And maybe why he tried to put it on you.”
The fat man and his entourage disappeared down the hall, and Deborah looked at the cast on her broken arm where it lay in her lap. “If we could find something like that,” she said, “and keep your name out of the thing in the Tortugas, who knows.” She looked up at me at last, with a small, very strange smile. “We just might get away with it.”
Perhaps there really is some kindly, doting Demigod of Darkness that watches over the truly wicked, because we actually did get away with it—at least the first part. The Thing in the Tortugas caused a little fuss in the press, and there was some mention of the anonymous hero who had saved the old man’s life. But nobody actually knew the hero’s name, and witnesses’ descriptions of him were so vague they could have been six different randomly selected strangers. It was too bad, because it turned out that the old man really was important, and he owned several TV stations and quite a few state legislators.
There was some confusion about what had happened to the very bad man who had attacked the old guy. The woman who lost her bikini gave a good description of Crowley, and it matched up with what the Key West cops had, so it was clear that this terrible felon had killed a Miami cop and then tried to steal a boat and flee, probably to Cuba. Whether he had ended up in Havana or someplace else was not clear, but he was gone. He was listed as officially missing, wanted, and he went onto a few assorted lists. But no one really missed the missing person, and these are hard times, with dwindling budgets, so there was not a great deal of money and effort spent trying to find him. He was gone, nobody cared, and The Thing in the Tortugas was soon pushed out of the news by a triple nude decapitation involving a middle-aged man who had once been a child star on TV.
We really were getting away with it. If only one last small miracle could somehow discredit Hood, my coworkers would welcome me back to work with open arms and joyous smiles, and life would return to its wondrous banal predictable everyday boring bliss. And the day after I returned from Key West, Deborah called to inform me that a forensics team would be going to Hood’s house the next morning. We just had to hope that something helpful might turn up.
And it might. It very well might. It might be something so very helpful that the entire case would vanish in a puff of malodorous smoke, and Dexter would go from a shabby felon slinking out of his office, to a real live martyr, a victim of gross injustice and wicked defamation of character.
But was it really possible that something like that might turn up?
Oh, yes, quite possibly it might. In fact, it might be a great deal of Something Like That, things that might be so very damning that they cast doubt not just on the case against me, but on Detective Hood himself, and his right to wear Our Proud Uniform, and to walk among the Just, so absolutely damning that the department would want the whole thing to disappear quickly and quietly, rather than risk a huge and stinking blemish on its proud reputation.
In fact, it might be that the forensics team will come into the vile, smelly little hovel where Hood had lived, and stare around in disgusted wonder at the heaps of garbage, dirty dishes, filthy discarded clothing, and they will marvel that a human being could actually live like this. Because the place just might be a truly nauseating mess—why, I can almost picture what it might look like.