I had just settled myself back into my own little nest when the phone rang. Instantly, Lily Anne began to cry, and Rita said, "Oh, Jesus," which was quite shocking coming from her.
There was never any real doubt who it would be, calling at this hour. Of course it was Deborah, calling to tell me of some hideous new emergency and make me feel guilty if I didn't instantly leap out of bed and run to her side. For a moment I considered not answering-after all, she was a grown woman, and it was time she learned to stand on her own two feet. But duty and habit kicked into gear, combined with an elbow from Rita. "Answer it, Dexter, for God's sake," she said, and at last I did.
"Yes?" I said, letting the grumpiness show in my voice.
"I need you here, Dex," she said. There was real fatigue in her voice, and something else as well, some trace of the pain she had been showing lately, but it was still an old refrain, and I was tired of the song. "I'm coming to pick you up now."
"I'm sorry, Deborah," I said with real firmness. "Work hours are over and I need to be here with my family."
"They found Deke," she said, and from the way she said that I knew I didn't want to hear the rest, but she went on anyway. "He's dead, Dexter," she said. "Dead, and partly eaten."
TWENTY-FOUR
Itis a well-worn truth that cops grow callous, A cliche so tattered that it is even common on television. All cops face things every day that are so gruesome, brutal, and bizarre that no normal human being could deal with them on a daily basis and stay sane. And so they learn not to feel, to grow and maintain a poker-faced whimsy toward all the surprising things their fellow humans find to do to each other. All cops practice not-feeling, and it may be that Miami cops are better at it than others, since they have so many opportunities to learn.
So it is always a little unsettling to arrive at a crime scene and see grave and shocked faces on the uniforms holding the perimeter; even worse to slide under the tape and see ace forensic geeks Vince Masuoka and Angel Batista-No-Relation standing pale and mute to one side. These are people who find the sight of an exposed human liver a rare opportunity for wit, and yet whatever they had seen here was apparently so horrific that it had failed to tickle their funny bones.
All cops grow a layer of unfeeling in the presence of death-but for some reason, if the victim is another cop the layer of callus splits and the emotions run out like sap from a tree. Even if it's a cop that nobody cared for, like Deke Slater.
His body had been dumped behind a small theater on Lincoln Road, beside a pile of old lumber and canvas and a barrel overflowing with plastic trash bags. And it lay on its back, rather theatrically, shirtless, with hands folded over chest and clutching the shaft of what looked to be a plain wooden stake, pounded into the approximate area of his heart.
His face was set in a tight mask of agony, presumably caused by the stake slamming through living skin and bone, but it was quite clearly Deke, even with the chunks of flesh gouged out from his face and arms, the teeth marks visible from ten feet away. And even I felt a small twinge of pity for the man as I stood and looked down on all that was left of my sister's annoying and ridiculously handsome ex-partner.
"We found this," Debs said, standing at my shoulder and holding up a plastic evidence bag with a sheet of plain white paper in it. There was a red-brown stain of dried blood on one corner, but I took the bag from her and looked: On the paper was written a short message, in a large and ornate font that could have come from any computer printer in the world. It said, He disagreed with someone who ate him.
"I didn't realize cannibals were so clever," I said. Deborah stared at me, and all the soft despair she had been fighting with lately seemed to settle on her face and begin to smolder.
"Yeah," she said. "It's pretty funny. Especially to somebody like you who enjoys this kind of thing."
"Debs," I said, looking around me to see if anybody might have overheard. There was no one in immediate earshot, but judging by her face, I doubt she would have cared.
"Which is why I need you here now, Dexter," she went on, and now there was definitely fire in her voice as it rose higher and louder. "Because I have run out of patience with this shit, and I have run out of partners-and Samantha Aldovar has run out of time and I need to fucking understand this shit-" She paused and took a deep, ragged breath before going on in a quieter tone. "So I can find these assholes and put them away." She poked me in the chest with her finger and got even quieter, without losing any intensity. "And that is where you come in. You"-poke, poke-"put yourself into your trance, or talk to your spirit guide, or get your Ouija board, whatever it is you do"-and she poked me with each syllable-"and-you-do-it-now."
"Deborah, really," I said. "It isn't that simple." My sister was the only living person I had tried to talk to about my Dark Passenger, and I think she deliberately misunderstood my clumsy description of the whispered not-quite-voice that lurked in the basement just under consciousness. Of course, it had helped me in the past with some good guesses, but Debs apparently pictured it as some kind of dark Sherlock I could summon up at will.
"Make it that simple," she said, and she turned away and walked back toward the yellow-tape perimeter.
Not terribly long ago I had thought of myself as lucky to have family. Now, in one night, I had been ignored by my wife and children, replaced by my brother, and shoved into a late-night session of impossible expectation by my sister. My loving family-I would have traded them all for one decent jelly doughnut.
Still, I really was on the spot, and I had to try. So I took a deep breath and tried to put away all my brand-new emotions. I laid down my kit and knelt beside the ravaged body of Deke Slater, looking carefully at the wounds on the face and arms, almost certainly caused by human teeth and showing some dried blood-which meant the wounds had been made while his heart was still pumping. Eaten alive.
There were traces of blood starting where the stake punctured the chest and running all over the exposed torso, indicating that he had also been alive briefly after they had pounded it in. Probably the blood had soaked his shirt, which was why they removed it. Or maybe they just liked his abs. That would explain why several mouthfuls of them were missing.
Around the teeth marks on the stomach wounds there was a faint brown stain: I didn't think it was blood, and after a moment I remembered the stuff we had found in the Everglades. The party drink, made of ecstasy and salvia. I reached behind me and got some collection tools out of my kit, swabbing carefully at the brown spots and then placing the swab in an evidence bag.
I looked higher, up by the chest wound, and then to the hands gripping tightly around the wooden stake: not a lot to see there. A plain piece of wood that could have come from anywhere. Under several of the visible fingernails I could see something dark, possibly collected in a struggle-and as I looked and tried to analyze it by sight, I realized I was behaving exactly like Dark Sherlock, and it was a waste of time. The rest of the forensics team would swoop in and do all this better than I could hope to do with the naked eye. What I needed and what Deborah expected from me was one of my special insights into the twisted and wicked minds that had come up with this particular way to kill Deke. Always before I had been able to see these things a little clearer than the others in forensics, because I was twisted and wicked myself.