away behind the counter. Still, they were very good sandwiches. I don't know what made them better than all the other
Deborah played with the straw in her shake.
I swallowed. “Debs, if my deadly logic can't cheer you up, and one of Relampago's sandwiches can't cheer you up, then it's too late. You're already dead.”
She looked at me with her grouper face and took a bite of her sandwich. “It's very good,” she said without expression. “See me cheer up?”
The poor thing was not convinced, which was a terrible blow to my ego. But after all, I had fed her on a traditional Morgan family delight. And I had brought her wonderful news, even if she didn't recognize it as such. If all this had not actually made her smile—well, really. I couldn't be expected to do everything.
One other small thing I could do, though, was to feed LaGuerta, too—something not quite as palatable as one of Relampago's sandwiches, though delicious in its own way. And so that afternoon I called on the good detective in her office, a lovely little cubby in the corner of a large room containing half a dozen other little cubbies. Hers, of course, was the most elegant, with several very tasteful photographs of herself with celebrities hanging from the fabric of the partitions. I recognized Gloria Estefan, Madonna, and Jorge Mas Canosa. On the desk, on the far side of a jade-green blotter with a leather frame, stood an elegant green onyx pen holder with a quartz clock in the center.
LaGuerta was on the telephone speaking rapid-fire Spanish when I came in. She glanced up at me without seeing me and looked away. But after a moment, her eyes came back to me. This time she looked me over thoroughly, frowned, and said, “Okay-okay. 'Ta luo,” which was Cuban for
“What have you got for me?” she said finally.
“Glad tidings,” I told her.
“If that means good news, I could use some.”
I hooked a folding chair with my foot and dragged it into her cubby. “There is no possible doubt,” I said, sitting in the folding chair, “that you have the right guy in jail. The murder on Old Cutler was committed by a different hand.”
She just looked at me for a moment. I wondered if it took her that long to process the data and respond. “You can back that up?” she asked me at last. “For sure?”
Of course I could back it up for sure, but I wasn't going to, no matter how good confession might be for the soul. Instead, I dropped the folder onto her desk. “The facts speak for themselves,” I said.
“There's absolutely no question about it.” And of course there wasn't any question at all, as only I knew very well. “Look—” I told her, and pulled out a page of carefully selected comparisons I had typed out. “First, this victim is male. All the others were female. This victim was found off Old Cutler.
All of McHale's victims were off Tamiami Trail. This victim was found relatively intact, and in the spot where he was killed. McHale's victims were completely chopped up, and they were moved to a different location for disposal.”
I went on, and she listened carefully. The list was a good one. It had taken me several hours to come up with the most obvious, ludicrous, transparently foolish comparisons, and I must say I did a very good job. And LaGuerta did her part wonderfully, too. She bought the whole thing. Of course, she was hearing what she wanted to hear.
“To sum up,” I said, “this new murder has the fingerprint of a revenge killing, probably drug related.
The guy in jail did the other murders and they are absolutely, positively, 100 percent finished and over forever. Never happen again. Case closed.” I dropped the folder on her desk and held out my list.
She took the paper from me and looked at it for a long moment. She frowned. Her eyes moved up and down the page a few times. One corner of her lower lip twitched. Then she placed it carefully on her desk under a heavy jade-green stapler.
“Okay,” she said, straightening the stapler so it was perfectly aligned with the edge of her blotter.
“Okay. Pretty good. This should help.” She looked at me again with her frown of concentration still stitched in place, and then suddenly smiled. “Okay. Thank you, Dexter.”
It was such an unexpected and genuine smile that if I only had a soul I'm sure I would have felt quite guilty.
She stood, still smiling, and before I could retreat she had flung her arms around my neck to give me a hug. “I really do appreciate it,” she said. “You make me feel—VERY grateful.” And she rubbed her body against mine in a way that could only be called suggestive. Surely there could be no question of-I mean, here she was, a defender of public morality, and yet right here in public—and even in the privacy of a bank vault I would have been truly uninterested in being rubbed by her body. Not to mention the fact that I had just handed her a rope with the hope that she would use it to hang herself, which hardly seemed like the sort of thing one would celebrate by— Well really, had the whole world gone mad? What is it with humans? Is this all any of them ever thinks about?
Feeling something very close to panic, I tried to disentangle myself. “Please, Detective—”
“Call me Migdia,” she said, clinging and rubbing harder. She reached a hand down to the front of my pants and I jumped. On the plus side, my action dislodged the amorous detective. On the negative side, she spun sideways, hit the desk with her hip, and tripped over her chair, landing sprawled out on the floor.
“I, ah—I really have to get back to work,” I stammered. “There's an important, ah—” However, I couldn't think of anything more important than running for my life, so I backed out of the cubicle, leaving her looking after me.
It didn't seem to be a particularly friendly look.
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 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
