So that meant that as long as the SA could believably present me as a pedophile, it was ipso facto proof that I was also a murderer. And of course, once I was perceived as a murderer, it was just common sense to believe I was a pedophile, too. Most people find circular logic oddly compelling, even reassuring. I had testified in enough courtrooms; I could see it going that way as clearly as if it was unfolding in front of me.
All right, then: Taking the ipso facto as prima facie, it stood to reason that if I was
not
a pedophile, I was also not a murderer.
Quad erat demonstrandum.
And that meant that if I could provide reasonable doubt—if I could prove, for example, that Robert Chase was the real pedophile—then I should be in the clear. Robert actually
was
the pedophile in this case. But thinking about things the way I was, reflecting on them as evidence, taking into account legal procedure and precedent, had already pushed my brain into a groove of wily, multifaceted paranoia where nothing was as it seemed. And so I actually had to pause and reflect for just a moment, because the fact that Robert really was a pedophile made it seem like a disadvantage to present him as one. Dealing with our legal system will do that to you. You begin to doubt your own existence unless you have very specific instructions from the judge.
Happily for me, I shook the mood off quickly. Since I knew Robert was guilty, I also knew I could find a way to prove it. I am not being conceited; I am very good at finding things, especially when my precious irreplaceable skin is on the line. If proof existed, I would find it. I tried to cap that thought with another Latin tag, but apparently my teachers had failed to provide me with one I hadn’t used yet. Oh, well; there was really no point in being angry at them, even for such an important failure.
Illegitimi non carborundum,
I suppose.
I had been forcibly inflicted with Robert’s company for several weeks, while he learned to “be me” for the part he was to play in the pilot, the doomed TV show that had brought all this fecal matter raining down on my undeserving head. In that time, he had almost certainly said a few things that might give me a place to start looking. I thought back over everything I remembered hearing him say, and unfortunately it was a fairly small file. Not what he had said—he’d blathered almost nonstop. The problem was what I
remembered
him saying. There had been so much drivel, and it had been so annoying, I had tried very hard to shut him out, to
not
hear what he said, since it was mostly fatuous, vacuous, and even flatulent.
By the time I finished my
café con leche,
I had come up with a grand total of very close to zero significant leading remarks. In fact, it really came down to just one thing: He’d taken a weekend trip to a “private resort” in Mexico. Knowing what I now knew about Robert, I would bet that it was a resort designed especially for someone with his whimsical tastes in romantic partners. But of course, I would have to find the place, based just on his remarks.
…Except, wait a minute. He had actually gone there, by airplane. That meant that there would be a paper trail, and even better, a
data
trail. The airline would have kept a record, and so would both U.S. and Mexican customs and the credit card company. Setting aside false modesty for the moment, I have to admit that I am very good at getting into a database where I am not wanted. With that many options, I could almost certainly find a few excellent clues about the location of Robert’s Club Ped.
But then I would have to go down there to find absolute proof, which was very dicey indeed. In the first place, such places tend to regard prying in a rather unfavorable light, and also tend to express their unfavorable opinion of the pryer in very vigorous, usually fatal ways.
And in the second and more important place, Mexico was a foreign country with a different language and very different customs. I couldn’t simply go down there and flounder around until I saw a gaggle of heavily made-up ten-year-olds marching into a closely guarded compound. And that raised another problem with the whole Mexican Adventure: What kind of proof could I hope to find? The whole thing began to seem more and more tenuous the more I thought about it.
Surely there must be something else? Out of pure reflex I lifted my little porcelain coffee cup, even though I’d completely drained it several minutes ago. But it may be that there were fumes left in the cup, or that the
café con leche
was particularly strong today. In any case, as I absentmindedly sipped at the empty cup, I had a sudden flash of memory. I remembered the doomed TV show’s director—Vic Something?—saying that he’d heard all the rumors about Robert and chose not to believe them. If Vic had heard rumors, others would have heard them, too. In my far too brief stay in the swinging swirling world of show business, I had learned that what we peasants call “Hollywood” is, in reality, a very small and tight-knit town. One drunken remark can echo around that unpleasant little community for years, and I was quite sure that someone else would be able to tell me something helpful about Robert and his wicked ways.
Of course, things being what they were, Hollywood was nearly as inscrutable as Mexico. But at least I knew one or two residents of that bright and brittle world, and I could hope that they would remember me as “poor Jackie’s boyfriend,” rather than “the pedophile/killer.” And if I could confront them face-to-face, I could give one of my justly famous impressions; Grieving Boyfriend should be easy. I’d seen it often enough on the afternoon dramas I used to study.
And perhaps the coffee really wasn’t as good as I’d thought a minute ago, because in the midst of feeling slyly smug about my anticipated acting, I remembered that I was not supposed to leave town, and that made it just a little harder to get face-to-face with somebody on the West Coast. I was back to the legendary Square One.
So I sat for a few more minutes, trying to think, and realizing only that I was still not as good at it as I used to be. Maybe I never really was. I’d probably just been stumbling along wrapped in a cloud of ignorant luck, unaware that there was a huge storm of Retribution trailing along behind me. It had caught up to me at last, and I wasn’t going to think myself out of it.
Happily for the tatters of my self-esteem, when I was just about to think up some wonderful new adjectives for Self-Deluded Idiot, I pulled myself back from the bleak landscape that I was suddenly finding far too comfortable.
Misery is a weakness,
I told myself sternly,
and you can’t afford it right now.
There were things to do, people to see, and no time at all to sit and mope. I looked at my watch; it was almost four. I could still get back to my hotel room before the worst of the rush-hour traffic turned the roads into a homicidal crawl.
I paid my check and headed out the door.
R
ush hour started anyway when I was only about halfway home. I thought about it that way, “home,” out of some kind of strange mental reflex. Of course, the first part of the drive was the same one I used to take going home from work, back in the Golden Days when I actually had a home. And a job. One way or another, I would have a home again someday, either in a nice little house or in the Big House. But the idea of a job was starting to seem odd—especially a job working alongside all the people who were trying to frame me now. I wondered whether I would ever go back to work there.
In any case, the traffic had slowed to a vile-tempered crawl long before I got off the Palmetto Expressway and came down onto South Dixie. I tried, but I couldn’t make myself relax and get into the true spirit of it, honking and flipping people off. It just didn’t seem worth doing. I’d always enjoyed it in the past, but now…I wasn’t enjoying anything lately. Not getting out of jail, or Kraunauer’s suits—nothing at all. It was very disturbing, but on the list of Dexter’s Big Problems—Survival, Freedom, Life Itself—I couldn’t rank it very high.
Nevertheless, that was what I was musing about when I finally got to the hotel: Why couldn’t I take pleasure in anything? Had it been too long since I’d had a chance to unwind and enjoy a quiet evening with a Special Friend and a roll of duct tape? I tried to remember the last time and couldn’t. Patrick Bergmann, the idiot redneck who’d been stalking Jackie Forrest, didn’t really count. Smacking somebody with a boat hook in broad daylight just wasn’t the same thing as really taking time to get to
know
a person, really
expressing
myself in a pointed way, getting a New Friend to Open Up and share his feelings—muffled by a gag, of course. Some of those feelings were quite loud and shrill, and it wouldn’t do to bother the neighbors.
But how long had it been? It seemed like an awful long time ago. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time. That was even more disturbing. I tried harder, but my memory wouldn’t cooperate, no matter how much I furrowed my brow. And finally, I couldn’t think about anything else but trying to remember, and as I turned into the hotel parking lot, I was so busy flogging my memory that I almost didn’t see the police car parked at the lobby entrance.
Almost—at the last moment I did, in fact, see the patrol car, and I had absolutely no doubt that their presence at this hotel was no coincidence. They were here because they’d discovered that this was Dexter’s Secret Hideaway. I didn’t know if they were here to observe, to hassle me, or to rearrest me, but I didn’t look favorably on any of those choices, so I drove calmly around to the rear of the building and found a parking spot near the Dumpster, where they couldn’t see me getting out of the car.
I sat for a moment with the engine off. It was unlikely that they were here to arrest me—there was only one unit, which meant two uniformed officers. If they came for me—
when
they came—there would be several of those, plus a couple of motor-pool cars filled with detectives, and probably a satellite truck or two from the TV stations. So they were probably here just to watch, or to prod me a bit. But the smart thing to do was still to avoid the cops altogether; my morning chat with the two gendarmes in front of my house had proved that amply. So I got out of the rental car, locked it carefully—I knew well that Anderson was not above planting something incriminating—and used my room key to slip in the back door of the hotel.
I took the stairs up to the third floor, not really a hardship for me—although I found that I was actually breathing a little heavily by the time I passed the second floor. It reminded me forcibly that I had been sitting in a cell without my evening jog for much too long a spell. I would have to start again soon, or risk losing all my hard-won fitness.
Still, I did make it all the way up to the third floor without fainting. I peeked through the fire door to make sure nobody in a blue suit was watching. Nobody was. I stepped through and strolled down the hall to my room, thinking that the really clever move here was to grab my stuff, slide back down the stairs, and find a new hotel. I didn’t actually have anything to hide, of course. But if They knew where I was, They would hound me. The fact that They were here now was proof of that. I didn’t want a repeat of my encounter with the pair outside my house, and I didn’t want a cop sneering at me every time I stepped out of the shower. Far easier just to ease on down the road. It would only take a minute to pack, one of the few benefits of having almost nothing. I could go south and inland a bit, find another cheap and anonymous hotel, and then call Brian to let him know.
Wonderful—I had a plan. I stuck the plastic key into the slot on Room 324 and waited for the light to blink green. It didn’t. I tried again, jiggling the handle, wiggling the key. Nothing. Out of nothing more than frustration and spite, I kicked the door. The light blinked green. I left the Do Not Disturb sign in place and strode confidently through the door and into my tiny but free domain. I managed two very nice strides before I looked at the bed and jerked to a halt as abruptly as if I’d been yanked backward by a rope. Not because I’d run out of striding room, and not because there was a cop on the bed.
There
was
somebody on the bed, but he didn’t look like a cop. He was short and stocky and dressed in dirty work clothes. His skin and hair were dark, and his face was scarred and pockmarked, almost as if it had caught fire and somebody put it out with a golf shoe. It was the look of a day laborer hoping for a green card, not a cop. And I really, truly, devoutly hoped he was
not
a cop in disguise.
Because he was also dead.
He lay on the right edge of my bed, one arm crossed peacefully over his chest, and the other dangling over the side. He looked just like he had been sitting on the edge of the bed and then suddenly fell asleep and flopped over. On the floor right under his dangling hand was a wicked-looking folding knife, the kind they call a tactical knife. It had a six-inch blade, and it had been used quite recently, judging by the color of the blood that decorated it.
For what seemed like a very long time I just stood and stared, stupid with shock. I am certainly not a stranger to violent death. I have been around dead bodies in both my personal life and my professional career, and I am not shocked, horrified, revolted, frightened, or dismayed by the sight of an obviously murdered body. Under different conditions, I might even enjoy one from time to time. But to find one here and now, in my room and in my present circumstances, was so calamitous, appalling, and perilous that I could not even think.
I finally became aware that my mouth was dry—I had been gaping, with my mouth hanging open. I closed it hard enough that my teeth made an audible click. I took a deep breath and tried to concentrate; this was no time to dither and gawk. I was a murder suspect, and there was a lobby filled with eager cops below, and here I stood consorting with a dead body in a room registered to me. No explanation I could possibly invent would get me out of this, not even if it was presented by Frank Kraunauer.
Action was required, decisive, effective, and immediate action. First step: Determine who had the audacity to be dead on my bed. I summoned all the shards of my cool analysis and stepped in for a closer look at my new roommate.
The bed around him was still relatively clean and blood-free, which was wonderful news. But the front of his shirt was soaked with the stuff, and it appeared to be coming from a wound in his chest, just left of center, right where the heart is located.
For a moment a little voice nagged at me that something was wrong, and I didn’t get it. Then, quite suddenly, the nickel dropped. This picture didn’t make sense, and not merely because it was in my room. The wound that must have killed him should have spouted a fountain of blood and colored the whole room; it hadn’t. That meant he had died rather quickly. Otherwise the wound would have pumped out a great nasty geyser, enough to soak the mattress and ruin the carpet. The heart stops gushing out blood when it stops pumping. So he had taken the wound, and enough time had passed for the blood to soak his shirt—ten seconds? Maybe a little more, but not much. Then he sat down on the bed and flopped over, dead, heart stopped before it could pump out any more. And that left me with a very interesting question:
How had he died?
I mean, obviously from a wound in the chest, yes—but was I supposed to believe he had stabbed himself? Because I didn’t. And that meant that somebody else had done it.
I looked around the room, hoping for some clue—a matchbook from a strip club, perhaps, or a monogrammed glove. No such luck. But I did notice something else: My closet door was ajar.
I admit that I have my foibles. They are almost all harmless, most of the time. One of these is that, when I check into a hotel room, I always look in the bathroom, then in the closet, and then I close both doors securely. I do this out of mere paranoia, just to satisfy my inner child that nothing is lurking, but I always do it.
But my closet door was now ajar, which meant that somebody had opened it. It wasn’t housekeeping—the Do Not Disturb sign would keep them away. So it was almost certainly my new and silent friend. It was possible he had searched the room. It was not possible that he had searched the room and then stabbed himself.
And that meant there had been
two
people in my room.
And one of them was in my closet.
I felt my heart leap instantly into high gear and I looked around me for some kind of weapon. Nothing. Perhaps the chair—but wait.
Calm down, dear Dexter, and spend one more moment in beautiful thought.
I did. I took a deep breath—keeping my eyes on the closet door, just in case—and I thought.
If somebody was waiting in the closet to leap out and cause me grievous bodily harm, possibly resulting in death, it would be stupid to wait this long. They would have done it almost immediately after I came in the door, well before I saw the other body and pulled my own weapon—not that I had one. But in principle, you jump the other guy before he figures out you’re there and takes countermeasures. No such thing had happened, and therefore…
Either there was no second stranger in my room—which meant that Stranger One really had stabbed himself—or Stranger Two was still there in the closet. And if he was, in fact, there in the closet, then either he meant me no harm, or he was no longer capable of doing any harm.
Slowly, and with all the caution I could muster, I stepped over to the closet. I listened for a moment and heard nothing. I stepped to one side, reached back, slid the door open, and waited. Ten seconds, twenty, thirty. No shots fired, no charging mastiffs, no flashing blades and cries of,
Kali!
Nothing.
Just as slowly, I peeked around and into the closet, and sure enough, there was Stranger Two.
He lay on one side in an impossibly uncomfortable position, slumped against the back wall of the closet with one arm pinned awkwardly under him and the other tucked behind him, between his back and the wall. His left eye socket was a nasty mess; something very sharp had clearly been shoved into it, far and hard enough to cause his present apparent lack of life. I knelt beside him in the doorway of the closet and looked closer.
Stranger Two was hatched from roughly the same gene pool as Stranger One. He was younger, and perhaps an inch taller, but he had the same olive complexion, stocky build, dark hair—even the same crappy skin. I didn’t need to feel for a pulse to be sure. He was indeed quite dead.
I stood, hitting my head on a coat hanger on the way up. I took a step back and tried to put together what had happened. The closet was next to the room’s door, on the left as you entered. It was the perfect place to wait; anyone entering would step into the room and be a step past the closet before they knew someone was there.
From the closet it was three good steps to the edge of my bed, where Stranger One had so thoughtlessly chosen to die. So: One comes into the room. Two steps out and stabs him—but no. Then the fatal wound would be in the back, not the chest. And One would have had no time to react and draw his knife.
This way, then: One has his knife out already. In fact, he uses it to jimmy the door, which also explained why I’d had trouble opening it with my key. He steps into the room, knife at the ready, every sense quivering and alert—and he sees or hears something in the closet. He pauses, ready for trouble.
In the meantime, Two is waiting in the closet. He assumes that whoever comes through the door will walk past, allowing him to leap out and dispatch them easily. But One has paused just inside the door; Two can’t see who it is or what he’s doing. Freeze frame; nobody moves. Tension mounts. Finally, unable to stand the strain any longer—and perhaps confident of his ability with a knife—One flips open the closet door.
But Two is waiting for him, with
his
knife ready. One sees this and raises his arm instinctively, leaving a clear target for Two’s knife, which plunges into One’s chest. At almost the same moment, One strikes back. With his arm held high, he stabs down from above, directly into Two’s eye, and his blade enters Two’s brain and kills him almost instantly.
As Two collapses onto the closet floor, One staggers on into the room, three steps to the bed, perhaps unaware that the wound he has taken is also fatal. He sits, and moments later, he joins his adversary in the dark and toasty-warm afterlife—dead so quickly there’s not even time for much blood flow.
Problem solved.
Very nice work, Dexter.
I now had a good idea of what had happened. It proved once again that my brain was returning to its natural lofty roost. But as satisfying as that was, there was one remaining question:
So what?
What did it matter how this happened? The only really vital piece of knowledge was
why
it had happened to
me,
and that might as well be written in Aramaic and sealed in a cave. With only two dead bodies to go by, there was no way I could know why these two had come to
my
room to die—and that meant that I was just as ignorant about whether they had living friends, who might be on their way up here right now to see what was taking so long.