“Why?”
“Because it’s an Apple,” I said.
Angel shook his head. “Dexter, coño, come on.”
“Thanks, Angel.”
He sighed again and returned to his hands and knees. “I don’t think I like you anymore,” he said.
I went back to my post by the refrigerator, rather pleased with myself. Now I knew why Jackie had been killed. Because if you have an Apple smartphone and an Apple computer, you synch them, so all the data on the phone goes onto the computer. And Jackie had turned on the computer, seen the appointment, and been killed for it.
But if Kathy had kept up with her updates, all that data would have been copied into the cloud, too, which meant that it should still be up there, incriminating appointment and all. But Kathy’s cloud account couldn’t be accessed by anybody else, not without her password. And by taking away the laptop, the killer had made sure that the information was out of reach.
I did not quite pat myself on the back, but I was very pleased. I had figured out almost everything-except, of course, the one tiny, unimportant detail of who the killer was.
I tried to make Renny fit again, and he really did, almost. But finally, I could not believe that anybody with a Passenger could throw up after the simple, relaxing, and often pleasant act of killing somebody.
On the other hand, if I eliminated Renny, who did that leave? Maybe Renny had thrown up because he’d eaten some bad oysters. It had to be Renny-there was nobody else who fit at all. In any case, I certainly had to poke around into his immediate past and see whether he fit. Maybe get Deborah to check into it, and …
Deborah. Apparently she was still not speaking to me, for the most part, and she would not be any easier to approach now, with Anderson leading his clown parade all over everything and flinging her out the door. It seemed unlikely that her ejection from the scene had softened her up so she was ready to forgive and forget.
Still, I had a lead she could use, and she was a cop down to the very marrow of her bones. She wanted to solve this thing-even more since it was Anderson’s case. And it was at least possible that she would want to shove Anderson’s face in the mud more than she wanted to avoid me. It was worth a try.
Of course, I could not try as long as I was standing here beside the refrigerator waiting for Anderson to come back and intimidate me. I needed to be out and about, and so I thought about my curious new position as a Person of Interest. Nobody had actually told me to stay put, don’t leave town, retain an attorney. I had simply stayed around out of the reflexive urge to be useful somehow. Clearly, that was not going to happen-unless giving Anderson something to glare at is considered useful. So I looked around to see if anybody was watching me; nobody was, and I slipped nonchalantly out the door of the trailer.
Deborah was pacing back and forth outside, and she paused to watch me come down the three steps. For a moment I thought she was going to say something, and maybe she did, too. But she didn’t speak. She just shook her head and turned away to resume her pacing.
“Deborah,” I said to her back.
She stopped walking and her shoulders hunched up toward her ears. Then she turned and looked at me with a much more convincing version of the hostile look Anderson had attempted. “What,” she said.
“I think I know who killed Jackie,” I said.
She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then she shook her head. “Go tell Anderson,” she said.
“I’d rather tell you,” I said. “So maybe some good will come of it.”
She looked at me with her head tilted to one side. “You’re not going to bribe me into some goddamn forgive-and-forget Kodak moment, Dexter. You fucked up big-time, and now because of you Jackie is dead and Rita is-what?” she said, and her words got hotter as she spoke. “Did you kill her yet, Dexter? Because that would make sense to you, wouldn’t it?”
“Deborah, for Christ’s sake-”
“It makes more sense than walking away and leaving her alive to fuck things up later, doesn’t it?”
“I didn’t kill-”
“And if you didn’t, now what? You still leave Rita and your three kids, now that you shit all over your brand-new bed? Or do you crawl back and try to pretend it never happened? Because she may take you back-but I don’t know if I will.”
“That’s fine,” I said. “I’ll go tell Anderson.” And because I can play the game, too, I added, “And he will fuck it up, and a killer will get away because you’re too busy having a hissy fit to do anything about it.”
I was very glad to be ten feet away from her, because judging by the look on her face, if I had been close enough, she would have committed a felonious assault on my person, possibly resulting in serious injury. Even from ten feet away I could hear her teeth grinding together.
“Spill it,” she said at last, her teeth still locked tight.
I told her about the phone, and about the computer, and how that meant the same person killed both Jackie and Kathy, and she listened. She didn’t suddenly burst into bright smiles and embrace me, but she listened. When I finished, she looked at me for a moment, and then said, “Okay. So who did it?”
“Renny Boudreaux,” I said. “He had some kind of altercation with Kathy, and she yelled that she would tell everybody next time.”
Deborah looked at me, and then she sneered. I mean, really, an actual sneer, the kind you give somebody pathetic who is beneath your contempt but for whom you feel contempt anyway. “Renny Boudreaux is in New York,” she said. “Doing the morning shows to promote his special. He left yesterday.”
“What?” I said, and I admit I was at least partially stunned.
“New York,” she said. “Everybody on set knows it, and you’d know it, too, if you had read the production schedule instead of spending all your time humping Jackie.”
It seemed like a very low blow, but she wasn’t finished with me yet. “And in the meantime,” she said, moving effortlessly from the sneer back to a very good snarl, “while you dick around and waste my time with stupid bullshit, you still haven’t found Astor.”
I did not actually reel in shock, but her body shots definitely left me a bit wobbly and uncertain. “Well,” I said feebly, “but-”
“Find your girl, asshole,” she said. “Leave this alone. You’ve done enough damage.” And she turned away and stalked toward the far end of the trailer. I stood and watched her, but she paced by me without a glance, as if I was some kind of common and rather dull plant life. I didn’t want to leave this alone. I wanted to grab Deborah by the shoulders and shake her, and tell her it wasn’t my fault; Patrick was dead, and somebody else had killed Jackie and ruined the only shot I’d ever had to climb out of the ooze and into the genuine gold-plated sunshine. And then I wanted to find Jackie’s killer and tape him snugly under my knife and give him a very long time to reflect on what he had done. And I would; I would not leave this alone, forgotten and fumbled away by Anderson’s stone-brained incompetence and Deborah’s bureaucratic indifference.
But as much as it nettled to admit it, Deborah was right about one thing: I did have to find Astor, and that was a more immediate problem than my revenge.
All right: Where should I start? Robert’s trailer was the obvious place, but I had already looked there. Still, that had been almost an hour ago. It was at least possible that they had returned, and if only to carry out my due diligence, I should check it again.
Deborah stalked by one more time without looking at me, and while she was still at the far end of her neurotic sentry march, I crossed over her path and headed toward Robert’s trailer.
THIRTY-THREE
Robert’s trailer was still unlocked, and as I pushed the door open I saw that it was still dim inside, too. Once again I paused just outside and peered both ways, and once again I saw nothing, heard nothing, smelled nothing. I stepped through the door and looked around; still nobody home. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed. I looked in all the corners and closets anyway, because thoroughness is a virtue every bit as important as neatness, and I found exactly the same amount of Nothing as I’d found earlier.