CHAPTER 19

I WOKE UP STANDING AT THE SINK WITH THE WATER running. I had a moment of total panic, a sense of complete disorientation, my heart racing while my crusty eyelids fluttered in an attempt to catch up. The place was wrong. The sink didn't look right. I wasn't even sure who I was—in my dream I had been standing in front of my sink with the water running, but it had not been this sink. I had been scrubbing my hands, working the soap hard, cleansing my skin of every microscopic fleck of horrible red blood, washing it away with water so hot it left my skin pink and new and antiseptic. And the hot of the water bit harder after the cool of the room I had just left behind me; the playroom, the killing room, the room of dry and careful cutting.

I turned off the water and stood for a moment, swaying against the cold sink. It had all been far too real, too little like any kind of dream I knew about. And I remembered so clearly the room. I could see it just by closing my eyes.

I am standing above the woman, watching her flex and bulge against the tape that holds her, seeing the living terror grow in her dull eyes, seeing it blossom into hopelessness, and I feel the great surge of wonder rise up in me and flow down my arm to the knife. And as I lift the knife to begin—

But this is not the beginning. Because under the table there is another one, already dry and neatly wrapped. And in the far corner there is one more, waiting her turn with a hopeless black dread unlike anything I have ever seen before even though it is somehow familiar and necessary, this release of all other possibility so complete it washes me with a clean and pure energy more intoxicating than—

Three.

There are three of them this time.

I opened my eyes. It was me in the mirror. Hello, Dexter. Had a dream, old chap? Interesting, wasn't it? Three of them, hey? But just a dream. Nothing more. I smiled at me, trying out the face muscles, completely unconvinced. And as rapturous as it had been, I was awake now and left with nothing more than a hangover and wet hands.

What should have been a pleasant interlude in my subconscious had me shaking, uncertain. I was filled with dread at the thought that my mind had skipped town and left me behind to pay the rent. I thought of the three carefully trussed playmates and wanted to go back to them and continue. I thought of Harry and knew I couldn't. I was whipsawed between a memory and a dream, and I couldn't tell which was more compelling.

This was just no fun anymore. I wanted my brain back.

I dried my hands and went to bed again, but there was no sleep left in this night for dear decimated Dexter. I simply lay on my back and watched the dark pools flowing across the ceiling until the telephone rang at a quarter to six.

“You were right,” Deb said when I picked up.

“It's a wonderful feeling,” I said with a great effort at being my usual bright self. “Right about what?”

“All of it,” Deb told me. “I'm at a crime scene on Tamiami Trail. And guess what?”

“I was right?”

“It's him, Dexter. It has to be. And it's a whole hell of a lot splashier, too.”

“Splashier how, Deb?” I asked, thinking three bodies, hoping she wouldn't say it and thrilled by the certainty that she would.

“There appear to be multiple victims,” she said.

A jolt went through me, from my stomach straight up, as if I had swallowed a live battery. But I made a huge effort to rally with something typically clever. “This is wonderful, Deb. You're talking just like a homicide report.”

“Yeah, well. I'm starting to feel like I might write one someday. I'm just glad it won't be this one. It's too weird. LaGuerta doesn't know what to think.”

“Or even how. What's weird about it, Deb?”

“I gotta go,” she said abruptly. “Get out here, Dexter. You have to see this.”

By the time I got there the crowd was three deep around the barrier, and most of them were reporters. It is always hard work to push through a crowd of reporters with the scent of blood in their nostrils. You might not think so, since on camera they appear to be brain-damaged wimps with severe eating disorders. But put them at a police barricade and a miraculous thing happens. They become strong, aggressive, willing and able to shove anything and anyone out of the way and trample them underfoot. It's a bit like the stories about aged mothers lifting trucks when their child is trapped underneath. The strength comes from some mysterious place—and somehow, when there is gore on the ground, these anorexic creatures can push their way through anything. Without mussing their hair, too.

Luckily for me, one of the uniforms at the barricade recognized me. “Let him through, folks,” he told the reporters. “Let him through.”

“Thanks, Julio,” I told the cop. “Seems like more reporters every year.”

He snorted. “Somebody must be cloning 'em. They all look the same to me.”

I stepped under the yellow tape and as I straightened on the far side I had the odd sensation that someone was tampering with the oxygen content of Miami's atmosphere. I stood in the broken dirt of a construction site. They were building what would probably be a three-story office building, the kind inhabited by marginal developers. And as I stepped slowly forward, following the activity around the half-built structure, I knew it was not coincidence that we had all been brought here. Nothing was coincidence with this killer. Everything was deliberate, carefully measured for aesthetic impact, explored for artistic necessity.

We were at a construction site because it was necessary. He was making his statement as I had told Deborah he would. You got the wrong guy, he was saying. You locked up a cretin because you are all cretins. You are too stupid to see it unless I rub your noses in it; so here goes.

But more than that, more than his message to the police and the public, he was talking to me; taunting me, teasing me by quoting a passage from my own hurried work. He had brought the bodies to a construction site because I had taken Jaworski at a construction site. He was playing catch with me, showing all of us just how good he was and telling one of us—me—that he was watching. I know what you did, and I can do it, too. Better.

I suppose that should have worried me a little.

It didn't.

It made me feel almost giddy, like a high-school girl watching as the captain of the football team worked up his nerve to ask for a date. You mean me? Little old me? Oh my stars, really? Pardon me while I flutter my eyelashes.

I took a deep breath and tried to remind myself that I was a good girl and I didn't do those things. But I knew he did them, and I truly wanted to go out with him. Please, Harry?

Because far beyond simply doing some interesting things with a new friend, I needed to find this killer. I had to see him, talk to him, prove to myself that he was real and that—

That what?

That he wasn't me?

That I was not the one doing such terrible, interesting things?

Why would I think that? It was beyond stupid; it was completely unworthy of the attention of my once-proud brain. Except—now that the idea was actually rattling around in there, I couldn't get the thought to sit down and behave. What if it really was me? What if I had somehow done these things without knowing it? Impossible, of course, absolutely impossible, but—

I wake up at the sink, washing blood off my hands after a “dream” in which I carefully and gleefully got blood all over my hands doing things I ordinarily only dream about doing. Somehow I know things about the whole string of murders, things I couldn't possibly know unless—

Unless nothing. Take a tranquilizer, Dexter. Start again. Breathe, you silly creature; in with the good air, out with the bad. It was nothing but one more symptom of my recent feeble-mindedness. I was merely going prematurely senile from the strain of all my clean living. Granted I had experienced one or two moments of human stupidity in the last few weeks. So what? It didn't necessarily prove that I was human. Or that I had been creative in my sleep.

No, of course not. Quite right; it meant nothing of the kind. So, um—what did it mean?

I had assumed I was simply going crazy, dropping several handfuls of marbles into the recycle bin. Very comforting—but if I was ready to assume that, why not admit that it was possible I had committed a series of delightful little pranks without remembering them, except as fragmented dreams? Was insanity really easier to accept than unconsciousness? After all, it was just a heightened form of sleepwalking. “Sleep murder.” Probably very common. Why not? I already gave away the driver's seat of my consciousness on a regular basis when the Dark Passenger went joyriding. It really wasn't such a great leap to accept that the same thing was happening here, now, in a slightly different form. The Dark Passenger was simply borrowing the car while I slept.

How else to explain it? That I was astrally projecting while I slept and just happened to tune my vibrations to the killer's aura because of our connection in a past life? Sure, that might make sense—if this was southern California. In Miami, it seemed a bit thin. And so if I went into this half building and happened to see three bodies arranged in a way that seemed to be speaking to me, I would have to consider the possibility that I had written the message. Didn't that make more sense than believing I was on some kind of subconscious party line?

I had come to the outside stairwell of the building. I stopped there for a moment and closed my eyes, leaning against the bare concrete block of the wall. It was slightly cooler than the air, and rough. I ground my cheek against it, somewhere between pleasure and pain. No matter how much I wanted to go upstairs and see what there was to see, I wanted just as much not to see it at all.

Talk to me, I whispered to the Dark Passenger. Tell me what you have done.

But of course there was no answer, beyond the usual cool, distant chuckle. And that was no actual help. I felt a little sick, slightly dizzy, uncertain, and I did not like this feeling of having feelings. I took three long breaths, straightened up and opened my eyes.

Sergeant Doakes stared at me from three feet away, just inside the stairwell, one foot on the first step. His face was a dark carved mask of curious hostility, like a rottweiler that wants to rip your arms off but is mildly interested in knowing first what flavor you might be. And there was something in his expression that I had never seen on anybody's face before, except in the mirror. It was a deep and abiding emptiness that had seen through the comic-strip charade of human life and read the bottom line.

“Who are you talkin' to?” he asked me with his bright hungry teeth showing. “You got somebody else in there with you?”

His words and the knowing way he said them cut right through me and turned my insides to jelly. Why choose those words? What did he mean by “in there with me”? Could he possibly know about the Dark Passenger? Impossible! Unless . . .

Doakes knew me for what I was.

Just as I had known Last Nurse.

The Thing Inside calls out across the emptiness when it sees its own kind. Was Sergeant Doakes carrying a Dark Passenger, too? How could it be possible? A homicide sergeant, a Dexter-dark predator? Unthinkable. But how else to explain? I could think of nothing and for much too long I just stared at him. He stared back.

Finally he shook his head, without looking away from me. “One of these days,” he said. “You and me.”

“I'll take a rain check,” I told him with all the good cheer I could muster. “In the meantime, if you'll excuse me . . . ?”

He stood there taking up the entire stairwell and just staring. But finally he nodded slightly and moved to one side. “One of these days,” he said again as I pushed past him and onto the stairs.

The shock of this encounter had snapped me instantly out of my sniveling little self-involved funk. Of course I wasn't committing unconscious murders. Aside from the pure ridiculousness of the idea, it would be an unthinkable waste to do these things and not remember. There would be some other explanation, something simple and cold. Surely I was not the only one within the sound of my voice capable of this kind of creativity. After all, I was in Miami, surrounded by dangerous creatures like Sergeant Doakes.

I went quickly up the stairs, feeling the adrenaline rushing through me, almost myself again. There was a healthy spring in my step that was only partly because I was escaping the good sergeant. Even more, I was eager to see this most recent assault on the public welfare—natural curiosity, nothing more. I certainly wasn't going to find any of my own fingerprints.

I climbed the stairs to the second floor. Some of the framing had been knocked into place, but most of the floor was still without walls. As I stepped off the landing and onto the main area of the floor, I saw Angel-no-relation squatting in the center of the floor, unmoving. His elbows were planted on his knees, his hands cupped his face, and he was just staring. I stopped and looked at him, startled. It was one of the most remarkable things I had ever seen, a Miami homicide technician swatted into immobility by what he had found at a crime scene.

And what he had found was even more interesting.

It was a scene out of some dark melodrama, a vaudeville for vampires. Just as there had been at the site where I had taken Jaworski, there was a stack of shrink-wrapped drywall. It had been pushed over against a wall and was now flooded with light from the construction lights and a few more the investigating team had set up.

On top of the drywall, raised up like an altar, was a black portable workbench. It had been neatly centered so the light hit it just right—or rather, so the light illuminated just right the thing that sat on top of the workbench.

It was, of course, a woman's head. Its mouth held the rearview mirror from some car or truck, which stretched the face into an almost comical look of surprise.

Above it and to the left was a second head. The body of a Barbie doll had been placed under its chin so it looked like a huge head with a tiny body.

On the right side was the third head. It had been neatly mounted on a piece of drywall, the ears carefully tacked on with what must be drywall screws. There was no mess of blood puddling around the exhibit. All three heads were bloodless.

A mirror, a Barbie, and drywall.

Three kills.

Bone dry.

Hello, Dexter.

There was absolutely no question about it. The Barbie body was clearly a reference to the one in my freezer. The mirror was from the head left on the causeway, and the drywall referred to Jaworski. Either someone was so far inside my head they might as well be me, or they actually were me.

I took a slow and very ragged breath. I'm quite sure my emotions were not the same as his, but I wanted to squat down in the middle of the floor beside Angel-no-relation. I needed a moment to remember how to think, and the floor seemed a great place to start. Instead, I found myself moving slowly toward the altar, pulled forward as if I was on well-oiled rails. I could not make myself stop or slow down or do anything but move closer. I could only look, marvel, and concentrate on getting the breath to come in and go out in the right place. And all around me I slowly became aware that I was not the only one who couldn't quite believe what he was seeing.

In the course of my job—to say nothing of my hobby—I had been on the scene of hundreds of murders, many of them so gruesome and savage that they shocked even me. And at each and every one of those murders the Miami-Dade team had set up and gone on with their job in a relaxed and professional manner. At each and every one of them someone had been slurping coffee, someone had sent out for pasteles or doughnuts, someone was joking or gossiping as she sponged up the gore. At each and every crime scene I had seen a group of people who were so completely unimpressed with the carnage that they might as well have been bowling with the church league.

Until now.

This time the large, bare concrete room was unnaturally quiet. The officers and technicians stood in silent groups of two and three, as if afraid to be alone, and simply looked at what had been displayed at the far end of the room. If anybody accidentally made a small sound, everyone jumped and glared at the noisemaker. The whole scene was so positively comically strange that I certainly would have laughed out loud if I hadn't been just as busy staring as all the other geeks.

Had I done this?

It was beautiful—in a terrible sort of way, of course. But still, the arrangement was perfect, compelling, beautifully bloodless. It showed great wit and a wonderful sense of composition. Somebody had gone to a lot of trouble to make this into a real work of art. Somebody with style, talent, and a morbid sense of playfulness. In my whole life I had only known of one such somebody.

Could that somebody possibly be darkly dreaming Dexter?