Jackie smiled encouragingly. “We were waiting for you to close your eyes and, you know,” she said, waving one hand vaguely. “Do that thing where you go inside his head.”
“I’m afraid I won’t fit,” I said, trying not to sound too smug. “This is a small and very ordinary mind.”
Deborah snorted and Jackie said, “Ordinary?! My God, after what he’s done-and you call him ordinary?!”
“That’s right,” I said. “Ordinary, garden-variety, demented, psychotic killer.” I shrugged. “Very predictable.”
“Then predict him,” Deborah said.
“Easy,” I told her. “He’s going to come after Jackie.” And I nodded at Jackie with a reassuring smile.
For some reason, that didn’t seem to reassure Jackie very much. She threw up her hands with an expression of sarcastic relief. “Well, shit, that’s good to know,” she said, shaking her head. “I mean, come after me, that’s great-but didn’t we already know that?”
Deborah, at least, wasn’t quite so far gone that she had to resort to sarcasm. Of course, Patrick wasn’t after her. “How will he do it?” Deborah said.
“Very directly,” I told them. “Nothing subtle, nothing too clever. He’s a hammer, not a scalpel.”
“Well, goddamn it,” Jackie said, “a hammer can sure as hell cave in my skull just the same.”
“Not with me there,” I said, and although I admit it sounded rather boastful, not at all my usual style of modest self-effacement, I really did believe it. “Really, Jackie, this guy is not capable of any real surprises.”
“He surprised the shit out of those three other girls,” she said darkly.
“They didn’t know what he was. And,” I said, trying very hard to sound quietly, modestly confident, “they didn’t have me.”
She looked at me long and hard, her eyes scanning my face for some sign that I had secret superpowers. I don’t think she saw any such sign, but she did seem to relax a little bit. “Well,” she said, and she looked over to Deborah. “I mean, so, um … what?”
“Nothing has changed,” Debs told her. “I got you in daylight; Dexter has you covered all night.”
“Oh, covered,” Jackie said. And she opened her mouth to say more, then closed it again, looked at me, and, for some reason, she blushed.
“I mean …” She trickled off and looked away from me quickly, and for a moment she seemed so flustered that even her masterful use of sarcasm fled her. “Then, okay, so, right.” She nodded a few times and cleared her throat. “All right,” she said at last. “If you’re both so … confident?”
I simply stood there and, since I had no idea what had just gone through Jackie’s mind, I tried to look relaxed and overwhelmingly confident, leaving it to my sister to say, “Yeah, I think so. Dexter is usually right about this stuff.” And then she cocked her head and looked at Jackie thoughtfully. “You want to hire somebody else?” she said.
“Oh, no,” Jackie blurted quickly. “I mean, no. Dexter is very …” She cleared her throat and looked at me, and then looked away. “I trust you. Both of you,” she said.
Deborah continued to regard her with one eyebrow raised, and then at last she started to shake her head. “Well, shit, who’da thunk it,” she said softly, but before she could complete what must have been a very interesting thought, her desk phone buzzed loudly, and she turned away to grab it up. “Morgan,” she said into the receiver. She looked over at me, and then said, “Yeah, I just saw him. I’ll send him right down.” She hung up the phone and gave me a mean little smile. “Robert,” she said. “He’s lonely.” She jerked her head toward the hall door. “Git,” she said.
It didn’t seem quite right that babysitting a somewhat spoiled actor should take my time when there was a killer to catch-especially when it was a killer whose vulgar, pedestrian efforts were giving the craft a bad name-but life in the workforce seldom actually makes sense for the foot soldiers, and my nonsense job was to be with Robert. I gitted.
Robert was right where I’d left him, in the lab. But he was no longer alone. Standing beside him was a pudgy African American man in his mid-thirties, with a shaved head and large horn-rimmed glasses. He had five or six gold and diamond piercings in his left ear, and he wore a worn black T-shirt that said METALLICA in ornate letters, and a pair of baggy, faded madras shorts that hung down much too low. I looked at him, and he looked back blankly. Robert saved us all from what might have been a very awkward social situation by shouting out, “Hey! Jesus, that must have been the dump from hell, huh?”
I am known far and wide for my sophisticated poise and ready banter, but I had no idea what that was supposed to mean, and on top of the difficulty of having a stranger in my space, I’m afraid it had me momentarily at a loss. I just stared at Robert and muttered something like, “Oh, well, you know,” before I remembered that my excuse for leaving him had been gastric difficulty. “Actually,” I amended, “I got kind of sidetracked.”
“Yeah, I figured,” Robert said. “Just kidding. Hey! Look who’s here!” And he nudged the other man forward a step.
“Oh,” I said. “Um, who?”
The African American man rolled his eyes, but Robert said, “He’s just kidding, Renny. Dexter Morgan, this is Renny Boudreaux!”
He pronounced it “boo-drow,” and since I am a man of the world and recognize a French name when I hear one, I nodded to him and said, “Enchanté, m’sieu.”
Boudreaux stared at me and then, with a look of wonder on his face, he said, “Is that French?! Goddamn, you are smooth. I like that. French, that’s- Tell me, Dexter, you ever fuck a black man?”
I really wanted to believe I had misheard him, but he’d said it so loud and clear that there could be no mistake. So I just shook my head and said, “Not yet, no. But the day is young.”
Robert shouted with laughter, but Renny just nodded as if we were having a real conversation, and said, “Uh-huh. Well, you ain’t gonna start with me, motherfucker. So you put your goddamn French back up your ass where it belongs.” He shook his head, eyeing me warily, and said, “French. Shit.”
I have always felt that the Art of Conversation is best served when all the parties involved have some vague idea of what they are talking about, and in this case, I had been left out of the loop. I was beginning to feel like I had wandered into some kind of Surrealist Performance piece-maybe one of those that tries to provoke the audience to some extreme reaction. But at least Robert seemed to be having a good time. He laughed again, a loud and brassy laugh that didn’t sound quite sane, and he pushed Renny toward me one more time.
“Renny is playing Aaron Crait, my forensics sidekick,” Robert said. “You know, in the show.” He winked and added, “Kinda like you and Vince, right?”
I had never thought of myself as having a sidekick at all, and if I did it would certainly not be someone like Vince, and suddenly to think of him in that role took me even further aback. But Robert gave me no time to ponder that uncomfortable relationship; he plowed right on cheerfully.
“Renny hit town this morning and I told him to swing by, ’cause I thought you wouldn’t mind giving him a crash course in forensics, right?” Possibly my mouth was still hanging open, because Robert suddenly looked a little uncomfortable, even a little anxious. “Um, you don’t mind, do you, Dexter?” he said. “Because it’s, you know, I thought it was important. That, you know, we’re all on the same page … So we get it right.” He lowered his voice and spoke confidentially, almost pleadingly. “Just a couple of hours, this afternoon …?”
“Well, I suppose,” I said. I was, after all, required to be at the beck and call of Big Ticket Network in general and Robert in person, and a few hours spent instructing Renny probably wouldn’t hurt.
“Thanks, that’s great, right, Renny?” He winked again, and added, “You’ve probably seen Renny on Leno or something.”
“I don’t watch Leno,” I said.
“Yeah, well, I don’t blame you,” Robert said. “Anyway, Renny does stand-up comedy when he’s not acting.”