Deborah snatched them up eagerly. “Great,” she said, and began to read them with ferocious concentration. Jackie watched her, then looked up at me. “Um,” she said.
“You’ll be fine with Debs,” I said. “I’ll see you later.”
“All right,” she said, and I turned away and headed out the door. I would much rather have stayed with Jackie and my sister, especially since I was joining Robert instead. But my duty was clear, so I left them and trudged away down the hall to my cubicle.
TWELVE
I wasn’t really stalling to avoid Robert, but I took my time, sauntering down the hall and savoring the memories of last night’s golden extravaganza. The food, the dark rum, the company-sheer perfection. And I had another evening just like it to look forward to at the end of today’s painful grind. It didn’t seem quite right that someone like me should have it so good, but happily, that didn’t stop me from enjoying it.
I stopped briefly for a cup of coffee and tried to savor that, too, but it proved to be beyond my abilities. The brew smelled like old pencil shavings mixed with burned toast, nothing at all like the ambrosial nectar I’d been sipping only an hour ago. Still, it would probably meet the narrowest legal definition of coffee, and life isn’t perfect-at least, not during the workday. I filled a cup and trudged off to fulfill my Duty.
Robert was waiting for me behind my desk again, but to his very great credit he had brought doughnuts-including a couple of Boston creams this time, and if you give one of these to Dexter, you will find that he is suddenly in a mood to forgive a great deal. We ate doughnuts and sipped the truly awful coffee, and I listened to Robert tell a long and no doubt fascinating story about a crazy British stuntman on a movie he had made many years ago. The point of the story seemed to escape us both, but might have had something to do with Robert facing him down over some obscure point of honor. Whatever it was, Robert enjoyed telling it, and luckily, he was so distracted by his own eloquence that I managed to sneak the second Boston cream out of the box and into my mouth before he noticed.
After the doughnuts were gone, we spent several hours playing with the microscope and learning how to prepare the slides properly. Oddly enough, in spite of the revulsion to blood he’d shown so far, he seemed fascinated with it in its microscopic state. “Wow,” he said. “This is actually very cool.” He looked up at me with a smile. “It’s not that bad when it’s dry and on a slide,” he said. “I mean, I could actually get to like this.”
I could have told him that I felt just the same, that I liked blood in its dried state so much that I had a rosewood box at home with fifty-seven drops of dried blood, each on its own slide, every one a small memento of a very special friend, now departed. But I have never quite believed in this newfangled notion of sharing your thoughts and feelings, especially on such a personal subject, so I just smiled and nodded and handed him a few more sample slides to play with. He went at them eagerly, and we whiled away the happy hours.
Just when I was thinking I should look in the doughnut box to see whether I had missed anything, the phone rang, and I grabbed it.
“Morgan,” I said.
“We got an ID on Jackie’s pervert,” my sister said. “Come on up.”
I looked at Robert, who was happily twiddling the fine-focus knob on my microscope. I could not very well take him along to hear about a stalker he wasn’t supposed to know about. “What about my associate?” I asked.
“Think of something,” she said, and hung up.
I put the phone down and looked at Robert. In spite of being very annoying, he was not really all that stupid, and I had to tell him something plausible. Happily for me, my stomach gurgled, providing a perfect excuse. “That coffee has gone right through me,” I said.
“Yeah, it was pretty bad,” he said without looking up.
“I may be a while,” I said, and he waved a hand at me to indicate that my intestinal issues were none of his concern and he would be fine. I slipped out and hurried away to answer my sister’s summons.
“Patrick Bergmann,” Deborah said when I stepped into her office a few minutes later. It seemed like an odd greeting, but I had to assume she meant that was our stalker’s name.
“That was fast,” I said. “How’d you do it?”
Deborah made a face and shook her head. “The letters,” she said. “He signed them. Even put his address.”
“That’s practically cheating,” I said. “So the real question is, why did it take you so long?”
“He lives in some shit-hole place in Tennessee,” Deborah said. “I couldn’t get anybody local to go check, see if he was still there.”
Jackie beamed at me. “So I checked Facebook,” she said. She gave Deborah a fondly amused glance. “Your sister didn’t know anything about it.”
“I heard of it,” Deborah said defensively. She shook her head with disbelief. “But shit. It’s fucking nutso. People put any fucking thing on there.”
Jackie nodded at Debs. “I showed her how it works, and we found him. Patrick Bergmann, Laramie, Tennessee. With pictures, and postings about where he is.” The smile dropped off her face. “Um,” she said slowly, “he’s here. In Miami.”
“Well,” I said, “but we already knew that.”
Jackie shrugged and seemed to pull herself into a smaller shape, abruptly making herself look like a lost little girl. “I know,” she said. “But it kind of … I mean, I know this is stupid, but-to see it on Facebook? That kind of makes it more real.”
I’m sure that Jackie was actually making sense-just not to me. Facebook made it more real? More real than the tattered body of the young woman in the Dumpster? Of course, I am not, and never will be, a fan of Facebook. It can be a very helpful way to track people I am interested in interviewing in connection with my hobby, but the idea of a Dexter page seems a little bit counterintuitive. Attended University of Miami. Friends: None, really. Interests: Human vivisection. I’m sure I would get plenty of friend requests, especially locally, but …
Still, I suppose the important point was that it was, in fact, more real for Jackie. It was hard work to guard somebody from a determined psychotic killer, and if the guardee didn’t believe in the reality of the threat, it was even harder.
So for once, Facebook proved to be practical. Better, it also gave us a photo of our new friend Patrick. Like I said, it was practically cheating.
“Could I see his picture?” I said.
Deborah’s mouth twitched into a slight smile, and she handed me a sheet of paper from her desk. It was a printout of a picture from Facebook and it showed a guy in his twenties, squatting down beside a deer. The deer looked very, very dead, and the guy looked just a little too happy about it. I have seen enough Hunting Trophy pictures to know what they are supposed to look like: Noble Beast settling into Eternal Rest while the Mighty Hunter stands beside it, clutching his rifle and looking solemnly proud.
This picture was nothing like that. To begin with, the deer was not merely dead; it was eviscerated. The body cavity had been opened up and emptied out, and the Mighty Hunter’s arms were covered with its blood almost up to his shoulders. He held up what looked like a bowie knife and smirked at the camera, a coil of intestines at his feet.
I tried to focus on his face, and as I studied his features the Passenger muttered sibilant encouragement. Patrick Bergmann was not an awful-looking person-wiry, athletic build, dirty-blond hair in a shaggy cut, regular features-but something about him was not quite right. Beyond his obvious enjoyment of the horrible blood-soaked mess he wallowed in, his eyes were open just a little too wide, and his smirk had an unsettling feeling to it, as if he was posing naked for the first time and liking it. His face was saying, just as clearly as possible, that this was a portrait of the real Him, his Secret Self. This was who he was, somebody who lived to feel the blood run down his blade and crouch in the viscera piled at his feet. I did not need to hear the Passenger chanting, One of Us, One of Us, to know what he was.