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CLUMP.
It really is a bit melodramatic to say that we all froze, but there it is-we did. They both looked up at me and I
looked back at them and we all forgot to breathe.
CLUMP.
The sound was getting closer and it was very hard to remember that we were in police headquarters and
perfectly safe.
"Dexter," Astor said in a slightly quavery voice.
"We are in police headquarters," I said. "We're perfectly safe."
CLUMP.
It stopped, very close. The hair went up on the back of my neck and I turned toward the door as it swung slowly
open.
Sergeant Doakes. He stood there in the doorway, glaring, which seemed to have become his permanent
expression. "You," he said, and the sound was nearly as unsettling as his appearance as it rolled out of his
tongue-less mouth.
"Why yes, it is me," I said. "Good of you to remember."
He clumped one more step into the room and Astor scrambled off her stool and scurried to the windows, as far
away from the door as she could get. Doakes paused and looked at her. Then his eyes swung back to Cody, who
slid off his stool and stood there unblinking, facing Doakes.
Doakes stared at Cody, Cody stared back, and Doakes made what I can only call a Darth Vader intake of breath.
Then he swung his head back to me and clumped one rapid step closer, nearly losing his balance. "You," he said
again, hissing it this time. "Kigs!"
"Kigs?" I said, and I really was puzzled and not trying to provoke him. I mean, if he insisted on stomping around
and frightening children, the least he could do is carry a notepad and pencil to communicate with.
Apparently that thoughtful gesture was beyond him, though. Instead he gave another Darth Vader breath and
slowly pointed his steel claw at Cody. "Kigs," he said agian, his lips drawn back in a snarl.
"He means me," Cody said. I turned to him, surprised to hear him speak with Doakes right there, like a
nightmare come to life. But of course, Cody didn't have nightmares. He simply looked at Doakes.
"What about you, Cody?" I said.
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"He saw my shadow," Cody said.
Sergeant Doakes took another wobbly step toward me. His right claw snapped, as if it had decided on its own to
attack me. "You. Goo. Gik."
It was becoming apparent that he had something on his mind, but it was even clearer that he ought to stick with
the silent glaring, since it was nearly impossible to understand the gooey syllables that came from his damaged
mouth.
"Wuk. You. Goo," he hissed, and it was such a clear condemnation of all that was Dexter, I at last understood
that he was accusing me of something.
"What do you mean?" I said. "I didn't do anything."
"Goy," he said, pointing again at Cody.
"Why, yes," I said. "Methodist, actually." I admit that I deliberately misunderstood him: he was saying "boy" and
it came out "goy" because he had no tongue, but really, one can only take so much. It should have been painfully
clear to Doakes that his attempts at vocal communication were having very limited success, and yet he insisted
on trying. Didn't the man have any sense of decorum at all?
Happily for all of us, we were interrupted by a clatter in the hallway and Deborah rushed into the room.
"Dexter," she said. She paused as she took in the wild tableau of Doakes with claw upraised against me, Astor
cringing against the window, and Cody lifting a scalpel off the bench to use against Doakes. "What the hell,"
Deborah said. "Doakes?"
He very slowly let his arm drop, but he did not take his eyes off me.
"I've been looking for you, Dexter. Where were you?"
I was grateful enough for her timely entry that I did not point out how foolish her question was. "Why, I was
right here, educating the children," I said. "Where were you?"
"On my way to the Dinner Key," she said. "They found Kurt Wagner's body."
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THIRTY-THREE
D EBORAH HURLED US THROUGH TRAFFIC AT EVEL Knievel-over-the-canyon speeds. I tried to think
of a polite way to point out that we were going to see a dead body that would probably not escape, so could she
please slow down, but I could not come up with any phrase that would not cause her to take her hands off the
wheel and put them around my neck.
Cody and Astor were too young to realize that they were in mortal danger, and they seemed to be enjoying
themselves thoroughly in the backseat, even getting into the spirit of things by happily returning the greetings of
the other motorists by raising their own middle fingers in unison each time we cut off somebody.
There was a three-car pileup on U.S. 1 at LeJeune which slowed traffic for a few moments and we were forced
to cut our pace to a crawl. Since I no longer had to spend all my breath suppressing screams of terror, I tried to
find out from Deborah exactly what we were racing to see.
"How was he killed?" I asked her.
"Just like the others," she said. "Burned. And there's no head on the body."
"You're sure this is Kurt Wagner?" I asked her.
"Can I prove it? Not yet," she said. "Am I sure? Shit yes."
"Why?"
"They found his car nearby," she said.
I was quite sure that normally I would understand exactly why somebody seemed to have a fetish for the heads,
and know where to find them and why. But of course, now that I was all alone on the inside there was no more
normal.
"This doesn't make any sense, you know," I said.
Deborah snarled and hammered the heel of her hand on the steering wheel. "Tell me about it," she said.
"Kurt must have done the other victims," I said.
"So who killed him? His scoutmaster?" she said, leaning on the horn and pulling around the traffic snarl into the
oncoming lane. She swerved toward a bus, stomped on the gas, and wove through traffic for fifty yards until we
were past the pileup. I concentrated on remembering to breathe and reflecting that we were all certain to die
someday anyway, so in the big picture what did it really matter if Deborah killed us? It was not terribly
comforting, but it did keep me from screaming and diving out the car window until Deborah pulled back into the
correct lane on the far side of U.S. 1.
"That was fun," said Astor. "Can we do that again?"
Cody nodded enthusiastically.
"And we could put on the siren next time," Astor said. "How come you don't use the siren, Sergeant Debbie?"
"Don't call me Debbie," Deborah snapped. "I just don't like the siren."
"Why not?" Astor insisted.
Deborah blew out a huge breath and glanced at me out of the corner of her eye. "It's a fair question," I said.
"It makes too much noise," Deborah said. "Now let me drive, okay?"
"All right," Astor said, but she didn't sound convinced.
We drove in silence all the way to Grand Avenue, and I tried to think about it by myself-clearly enough to come
up with anything that might help. I didn't, but I did think of one thing worth mentioning.
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"What if Kurt's murder is just a coincidence?" I said.
"Even you can't really believe that," she said.
"But if he was on the run," I said, "maybe he tried to get a fake ID from the wrong people, or get smuggled out
of the country. There are plenty of bad guys he could run into under the circumstances."
It didn't really sound likely, even to me, but Deborah thought about it for a few seconds anyway, chewing on her
lower lip and absentmindedly blasting the horn as she pulled around a courtesy van from one of the hotels.
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