There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing about it, so I slid past him and right up beside Vince Masuoka, who crouched in the shade of the Dumpster. “You’re just in time,” Vince said.
“For what?”
“Now the real fun starts,” he said. He jerked his head over to one side. I looked, and about forty feet away I saw Detective Anderson talking to a thin, white-haired man in khaki pants, a pale blue polo shirt, and boat shoes. Even from this distance, the white-haired man looked badly shaken.
“Anderson has a witness,” Vince said. “The old guy is off one of the big sailboats. He saw somebody dump a rolled-up carpet in here and take off in a kayak.”
The kayak gave me pause; did Patrick have a new, Miami-flavored way to get around? Or was it possible that somebody else had done it this time? Feeling a small flutter of uncertainty and rising interest, I stepped past Vince and peeked inside, into the heart of the garbage.
The girl’s body lay on top of a chunk of dirty brown carpet, the kind of ratty, stained carpet you can see in the garbage in any residential area where someone is remodeling. It was partially unrolled, just enough to see the top half of a very bad time, and not enough to hide the other contents of the Dumpster.
It was almost all garbage-no paper or cardboard or plastic wrappings like the last time. This Dumpster was used by the people from the rows of large yachts at the nearby dock, and by anyone who used the fish-cleaning station nearby, and the smell rising up from inside was enough to kill small animals at ten paces. But it didn’t discourage the nearly solid cloud of flies that whirled around the heaps of moist, sloppy rotting leftovers. And, of course, it didn’t have any effect at all on the dead girl who perched naked on top of the putrid mound of decomposing gunk.
It looked like she’d had a very hard time of it. Like the previous victim, this one had been hacked, stabbed, bitten, and clawed with an undisciplined but frenzied abandon, a wild impatience that had left very few patches of visible skin unmarked by trauma.
The state of the blood around the wounds indicated that she had been alive for most of the cuts, gashes, and punches, an entire arsenal of attacks that left the corpse looking like she had spent a week at the Academy of Psychotic Assault.
Once again a large hank of golden hair had been ripped out by the roots, leaving a raw, dark red section of scalp exposed. Under that hair, so very like Jackie’s in color and cut, there was not much recognizable left of the face that wasn’t slashed by fingernails, teeth, and knife blade, but something about the profile tugged at my memory for a second, before I shrugged it off. Of course she looked familiar-she looked like Jackie, just as all the other victims did. That was the whole point of it for Patrick.
I looked a moment longer, but saw nothing helpful, so I stepped back and looked down at Vince.
“Did you find anything?” I asked him, without too much hope-and truthfully, without too much interest, either. I knew who had done it, and I couldn’t be more certain even if Patrick Bergmann had signed his work.
“Just this,” Vince said. He held up a small plastic evidence bag. Inside I could see the outline of what looked like a small bar of soap, the kind of small soap bar hotels leave in the bathrooms for their guests. “You don’t want to know where I found it,” he added happily. I leaned in for a closer look, and through the plastic I could make out the crest and the words “Grove Isle Hotel and Spa” in ornate script.
Vince shook it playfully. “Maybe it’ll help Anderson figure out who the victim is this time,” he said.
I opened my mouth to say that it didn’t seem likely, that Anderson wouldn’t figure it out if he had notarized statements from the killer and the victim, and then I closed my mouth and took a step back and didn’t say anything at all.
Because I knew who she was. I remembered why she looked familiar, and it was not because she looked like Jackie. It was because I had seen her, standing in a hallway and blushing, smiling, pleased with being so very near to her real-life hero, Jackie Forrest.
I rattled the handles of my memory bank and came up with it: Her name was Amila, and she was the maid at the Grove Isle Hotel who had come to clean up the mess on the floor of our suite, and told me she styled her hair to look like Jackie Forrest’s hair, and it got her killed.…
Some small shady something tickled my spine, just a tiny breeze of unease, telling me that someone was watching, and I turned away from the Dumpster and looked, out beyond the pier with its two rows of boats, and into the painfully bright glare of the bay.
Less than fifty yards away, straight out from the end of the dock, a small yellow dot bobbed on the light chop. A paddle rose as I watched, and dipped down to make two small strokes to keep the nose pointed in at us: a double-headed kayak paddle.
Behind the kayak, as if to underline this heavy-handed hint, the Grove Isle Hotel towered up into the bright afternoon sky: the hotel where Jackie and I stayed. The hotel where Amila had worked until Patrick ended her career.
The paddle dipped lazily again, turning the boat slightly sideways so there could be no doubt at all what it was: a kayak. It was the perfect boat for Patrick’s outdoorsy lifestyle. They were light and therefore very easy to steal, and it would certainly be simpler than trying to conceal a dead body on a motorcycle. A quick trip across the half mile of water, dump the body, and then paddle away just far enough to watch the fun.
And of course he would watch. Not merely to see the excitement when his project was discovered-he would also be watching to see who showed up, because Jackie had made an appearance the last time, and he would want to see her when she came to this one, too. Without even thinking about it, I knew how important that was to him: to have Jackie look, and see, and know it could have been her-that it would be her so very soon-and to know he was watching her and waiting to make it happen again, to her.…
But to do it like this was pure hubris. He had taken a huge chance, dumping this body in broad daylight from a small boat. And I was quite sure it was not because he was getting bolder. This kill had come too soon, right on the heels of his last, breaking the pattern and revealing the first rift in Patrick’s mountain-man armor. Because as he got closer to Jackie, as he watched the hotel through all the hours of the night, waiting for a chance-waiting for even a glimpse-his frustration had been growing, eating at him, hitting so hard that his satisfaction from the previous victim had lasted only a few pitiful days. Soon these surrogates would not be enough for him; he had to have Jackie, but he could not get to her, and so he watched and waited and the frustration grew as each day slipped past, repeating the day before, without even the smallest window of opportunity.…
Patrick was getting impatient. He was losing his ability to wait for just the right moment, and feeling the pressure of time racing unstoppably by, with nothing to show for it except a dwindling bank account. By killing the maid now he was trying to push things toward a climax, challenging us to see him so very nearby, daring us to do something, defying us to try to stop him, keep him from doing what he was going to do.
And oddly enough, in those two or three seconds as I squinted into the glare on the water at Patrick in his kayak, following all these little insights as they raced through my brain, I found another small thought burbling up underneath and popping into daylight with the happy snap of a bright pink bubble of chewing gum, and that thought went like this:
All right, Patrick. I accept your challenge.
For a moment I wasn’t really sure what I meant by that, and I blinked, turning away from the glare on the Bay and staring off the dock, back toward the yellow perimeter tape, where Robert stood chatting with the two uniformed cops. No sign yet of Deborah and Jackie, which was all to the good. I looked beyond the perimeter, over the growing crowd of gawkers and into the busy streets of Coconut Grove. The Grove, that happy mecca for Miami’s idle rich, with its high-priced boutiques, quaint shops, and casually posh restaurants. The Grove, where Dexter had lived for so long before his marriage, and where even now, Dexter kept his fishing boat only a mile or so from this very spot-