I drove home quickly, and checked my answering machine. There was one automated message urging me to buy a new set of tires before it was too late, which seemed ominous enough, but no message from Debs. I made coffee and waited for the thump of the morning paper against my door. There was a sense of unreality to the morning that was not entirely caused by the aftereffects of the champagne. Engaged, was I? Well well. I wished that I could scold myself and demand to know what I thought I had been doing. But the truth was that, unfortunately, I hadn’t been doing anything wrong; I was entirely clothed in virtue and diligence. And I had done nothing that could be called spectacularly stupid-far from it. I had been proceeding with life in a noble and even exemplary manner, minding my own business and trying to help my sister recover her boyfriend, exercising, eating plenty of green vegetables, and not even slicing up other monsters. And somehow all this pure and decent behavior had snuck around behind me and bitten me on the ass. Never a good deed goes unpunished, as Harry used to say.
And what could I do about it now? Surely Rita would come to her senses. I mean, really: ME? Who could possibly want to marry ME?! There had to be better alternatives, like becoming a nun, or joining the Peace Corps. This was Dexter we were talking about. In a city the size of Miami, couldn’t she find somebody who was at least human? And what was her rush to get married again anyway? It hadn’t worked out terribly well for her the first time, but she was apparently willing to plunge right back into it again. Were women really this desperate to get married?
Of course there were the children to think about. Conventional wisdom would say they needed a father, and there was something to that, because where would I have been without Harry? And Astor and Cody had looked so happy. Even if I made Rita see that a comical mistake had happened, would the kids ever understand?
I was on my second cup of coffee when the paper came. I glanced through the main sections, relieved to find that terrible things were still happening almost everywhere. At least the rest of the world hadn’t gone crazy.
By seven o’clock I thought it would be safe to call Deborah on her cell phone. There was no answer; I left a message, and fifteen minutes later she called back. “Good morning, Sis,” I said, and I marveled at the way I managed to sound cheerful. “Did you get some sleep?”
“A little,” she grumbled. “I woke up around four yesterday. I traced the package to a place in Hialeah. I drove around the area most of the night looking for the white van.”
“If he dropped the package way up in Hialeah, he probably drove in from Key West to do it,” I said.
“I know that, goddamn it,” she snapped. “But what the hell else am I supposed to do?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But doesn’t the guy from Washington get here today?”
“We don’t know anything about him,” she said. “Just because Kyle is good, doesn’t mean this guy will be.”
She apparently didn’t remember that Kyle had not shown himself to be particularly good, at least in public. He’d done nothing at all, in fact, except get himself captured and have his finger nipped off. But it didn’t seem politic for me to comment on how good he was, so I simply said, “Well, we have to assume the new guy knows something about this that we don’t know.”
Deborah snorted. “That wouldn’t be too hard,” she said. “I’ll call you when he gets in.” She hung up, and I got ready for work.
CHAPTER 17
AT 12:30 DEB STALKED INTO MY MODEST RETREAT OFF the forensics lab and threw a cassette tape on my desk. I looked up at her; she didn’t seem happy, but that really wasn’t much of a novelty. “From my answering machine at home,” she said. “Listen to it.”
I lifted the hatch on my boom box and put in the tape Deb had flung at me. I pushed play: the tape beeped loudly, and then an unfamiliar voice said, “Sergeant, um, Morgan. Right? This is Dan Burdett, from uh- Kyle Chutsky said I should call you. I’m on the ground at the airport, and I’ll call you about getting together when I get to my hotel, which is-” There was a rustling sound and he obviously moved the cell phone away from his mouth, since his voice got fainter. “What? Oh, hey, that’s nice. All right, thanks.” His voice got louder again. “I just met your driver. Thanks for sending somebody. All right, I’ll call from the hotel.”
Deborah reached across my desk and switched off the machine. “I didn’t send anybody to the fucking airport,” she said. “And Captain Matthews damn sure didn’t either. Did you send somebody to the fucking airport, Dexter?”
“My limo was out of gas,” I said.
“Well then GODDAMN it!” she said, and I had to agree with her analysis.
“Anyway,” I said, “at least we found out how good Kyle’s replacement is.”
Deborah slumped into the folding chair by my desk. “Square fucking one,” she said. “And Kyle is…” She bit her lip and didn’t finish the sentence.
“Did you tell Captain Matthews about this yet?” I asked her. She shook her head. “Well, he has to call them. They’ll send somebody else.”
“Sure, great. They send somebody else, who might make it all the way to baggage claim this time. Shit, Dexter.”
“We have to tell them, Debs,” I said. “By the way, who are them? Did Kyle ever tell you exactly who he works for?”
She sighed. “No. He joked about working for the OGA, but he never said why that was funny.”
“Well, whoever they are, they need to know,” I said. I pried the cassette out of my boom box and put it on the desk in front of her. “There has to be something they can do.”
Deborah didn’t move for a moment. “Why do I get the feeling they’ve already done it, and Burdett was it?” she said. Then she scooped up the tape and trudged out of my office.
I was sipping coffee and digesting my lunch with the help of a jumbo chocolate-chip cookie when the call came to report to the scene of a homicide in the Miami Shores area. Angel-no-relation and I drove over to where a body had been found in the shell of a small house on a canal that was being ripped apart and rebuilt. Construction had been temporarily halted while the owner and the contractor sued each other. Two teenaged boys skipping school had snuck into the house and found the body. It was laid out on heavy plastic on top of a sheet of plywood which had been placed over two sawhorses. Someone had taken a power saw and neatly lopped off the head, legs, and arms. The whole thing had been left like that, with the trunk in the middle and the pieces simply trimmed off and moved a few inches away.
And although the Dark Passenger had chuckled and whispered little dark nothings in my ear, I put it down to pure envy and went on with my work. There was certainly plenty of blood spatter for me to work with, still very fresh, and I probably would have spent a cheerfully efficient day finding and analyzing it if I hadn’t happened to overhear the uniformed officer who had been first on the scene talking with a detective.