“It’s probably nothing,” I said. “Just a routine machete beheading or something.”
Chase goggled at me for a moment. Then he turned pale, gulped, and finally nodded. “Okay,” he said.
I went to fetch my gear, feeling a warm glow of satisfaction at Chase’s obvious distress. As I said, sometimes I am not a very nice person.
THREE
THE BODY WAS IN A DUMPSTER IN AN ALLEY ON THE EDGE OF the downtown campus of Miami-Dade Community College. The alley was dark, even in the midday sun, shaded by the surrounding buildings, and it had probably been even darker at night, when some wicked Someone had chosen the spot for his fun and games, most likely for that very reason. Judging by the condition of the body, that had been a very good idea. The things that had been done to what had once been an attractive young woman were best left unseen.
The Dumpster was at an angle in the back corner of the alley. One side of the lid was propped open, and even from ten feet away you could hear the buzz of the nine billion flies whirling around it in a huge dark cloud. Angel Batista-No-Relation was dusting the outside of the Dumpster for prints. He worked carefully along the top edge, dusting with one hand and waving flies away with the other.
Vince was on one knee on the near side, beside the Dumpster, where some of the sloppier garbage had spilled over onto the pavement. He was gingerly sifting through the filthy glop with his rubber-gloved fingers. He didn’t look happy. “Jesus,” he said to me without looking up. “I can’t breathe.”
“Breathing is overrated,” I told him. “Find anything?”
“Yes,” he said, and he was almost snarling. “I found some garbage.” He gritted his teeth and brushed at something that clung to his gloves. “If we get another one like this, I’m transferring to Code Enforcement.”
I felt a small dark tickle of interest from the Passenger. “Another?” I asked. “Are we likely to get another one?”
Vince cleared his throat and spit to one side. “Doesn’t look like a casual kill,” he said. “Definitely not a fight with the boyfriend. Jesus, I hate garbage.”
“What does that mean, another?” Chase asked from his position at my elbow. “Do you mean it could be, like, a serial killer?”
For a moment, Vince forgot that he was on his knees in garbage, and he beamed up at Chase with sheer adoration. “Hi, Robert,” he said. After a full week of seeing Chase every day, Vince still came close to swooning in his presence. But at least he wasn’t moaning “ohmygod” anymore.
“So why do you think that?” Chase said. “That, you know, it’s not casual?”
“Oh,” Vince said. “It’s just, you know. A little bit … baroque?” He waved one hand merrily, sending a small glob of garbage flying through the air and onto my shoe. “Oops,” he said.
“Baroque,” Chase said thoughtfully. “Like what. You mean, um … what?”
Vince kept smiling. Nothing Chase said, no matter how stupid, could put a dent in his bright and shiny armor. “Complicated,” Vince said. “Like, you know. He didn’t just want to kill her. He had to do stuff to her.”
Chase nodded, and even in the shadows of the alley, I thought he turned a few shades paler. “What, um,” he said, and he swallowed. “What kind of stuff?”
“Take a look,” Vince said. “It’s kind of hard to describe.”
Chase shifted his weight from one foot to the other, clearly wishing he was almost anywhere else. But for my part, I could wait no longer. I would like to say that I felt an urgent sense of duty to the city of Miami, which paid me to investigate these things. But in truth, the weight of my professional obligations was nothing compared to the rising tide of eager whispers from the deepest basement of Dexter’s Dark Keep, urging me to peek into the Dumpster and delight in what we might find. So I stepped around Vince to where Angel No-Relation was meticulously photographing the dozens of smudged fingerprints he had found.
“Angel,” I said. “What have we got?”
He didn’t look up; he just made a face of terrible disgust and nodded at the Dumpster. “Mira,” he said.
I looked inside. The Dumpster was two-thirds filled with a delightful medley of paper, plastic, and rotting food scraps. Sprawled
across the top of the fragrant mess was the nude and mutilated body of a young woman. I stepped forward for a closer look, and even before any of the details registered with me consciously, the picture clicked into focus in a dim dry place inside and I felt the Dark Passenger slither up out of its slumber with a stirring of leather wings and a rising sibilance of not-quite-words, whispering its way up the shadowed staircase from the deepest basement of Castle Dexter and onto the ramparts for a ringside view and softly saying, Yes, Oh, yes, yes, Indeed, and with a new sense of respect, I looked very carefully to see what had awakened the Passenger from its dark dreams.
She was turned half away from me, slipping partway down the slope of the heaped-up garbage, but from what I could see in profile, her death had not been an easy one. A large handful of golden hair on the side of her head had been ripped out by the roots, revealing a partially chewed-off ear.
The visible part of her face was so savagely damaged that her own mother would never recognize what was left. Her lips had been hacked off clumsily, leaving only a jagged red ruin. Her nose was mashed into a flat red pulp, and the visible eye socket was empty.
The rest of her seemed to be just as thoroughly ravaged; her nipple was missing, apparently chewed away like the ear, and her stomach had been slit open right below the navel. I could see at least three wounds that might have killed her, and a dozen more that would have been horrible enough to make death seem like a good idea.
But before I could take more than one quick glance, I heard a dreadful sound behind me, as if someone was strangling a large animal, and I turned to see Chase backing rapidly away with both hands clamped over his mouth, his face turning pale green almost as fast as he retreated. With a feeling of real pleasure, I watched him sprint for the perimeter. It was a common reaction to seeing messy death for the first time, but in this case it was very satisfying. It also left me in peace to take a longer look at a more leisurely pace, and I did.
I scanned the body head to toe, marveling at the thoroughness of the devastation, and the Passenger murmured its appreciation. Someone had spent a great deal of time and effort doing this, and although the results were certainly not up to my high artistic standards, they still showed a certain primitive vigor and abandon that were admirable, even infectious. The technique was clumsy, inefficient, even brutal, but it spoke of a wild experimental joy in the work that was a pleasure to see. After all, so very few of us seem to enjoy our jobs nowadays. Whoever did this clearly did enjoy it. Just as clearly—at least to me—the killer was exploring, seeking something he had not quite found, in spite of a very thorough search.
I took one more long, studious look at the whittled-away remains of the young woman, and I did not need the Passenger’s whispered endorsement to agree with Vince. This might be the very first time Our Perp had done this, but it would not be the last. Things being what they were, it would be a very good thing to catch him before he turned too many more young women into fish bait, and that meant it was time for Dexter to push his mighty brain online and get busy. There was real and compelling work to do, and with Chase in exile at the perimeter tape, I was at last free to do it.