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She snorted. “With the amount of hard evidence we got on this guy, nobody’s going to give a shit how it feels, Dex,” she said. “Why don’t you lighten up and enjoy a good day’s work?”
I’m sure it was excellent advice, but I could not take it. Even though I had no familiar whisper to feed me my cues, I had to say something. “He doesn’t act like he’s lying,” I said, rather feebly.
Deborah shrugged. “He’s a nut job. Not my problem. He did it.”
“But if he’s psychotic in some way, why would it just burst out DEXTER IN THE DARK
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all of a sudden? I mean, he’s thirty-something years old, and this is the first time he’s done anything? That doesn’t fit.”
She actually patted my shoulder and smiled again. “Good point, Dex. Why don’t you get on your computer and check his background? I bet we find something.” She glanced at her watch.
“You can do that right after the press conference, okay? Come on, can’t be late.”
And I followed along dutifully, wondering how I always seemed to volunteer for extra work.
Deborah had, in fact, been granted the priceless boon of a press conference, something Captain Matthews did not give out lightly. It was her first as lead detective on a major case with its own media frenzy, and she had clearly studied up on how to look and speak for the evening news. She lost her smile and any other visible trace of emotion and spoke flat sentences of perfect cop-ese. Only someone who knew her as well as I did could tell that great and uncharacteristic happiness was burbling behind her wooden face.
So I stood at the back of the room and watched as my sister made a series of radiantly mechanical statements adding up to her belief that she had arrested a suspect in the heinous murders at the university, and as soon as she knew if he was guilty her dear friends in the media would be among the first to know it. She was clearly proud and happy and it had been pure meanness on my part even to hint that something was not quite righteous with Halpern’s guilt, especially since I did not know what that might be—or even if.
She was almost certainly right—Halpern was guilty and I was being stupid and grumpy, thrown off the trolley of pure reason by my missing Passenger. It was the echo of its absence that made me uneasy, and not any kind of doubt about the suspect in a case that really meant absolutely nothing to me anyway. Almost certainly—
And there was that almost again. I had lived my life until now in absolutes—I had no experience with “almost,” and it was unsettling, deeply disturbing not to have that voice of certainty to tell me what was what with no dithering and no doubt. I began to realize just how helpless I was without the Dark Passenger. Even in my day job, nothing was simple anymore.
104
JEFF LINDSAY
Back in my cubicle I sat in my chair and leaned back with my eyes closed. Anybody there? I asked hopefully. Nobody was. Just an empty spot that was beginning to hurt as the numb wonder wore off. With the distraction of work over, there was nothing to keep me from self-absorbed self-pity. I was alone in a dark, mean world full of terrible things like me. Or at least, the me I used to be.
Where had the Passenger gone, and why had it gone there? If something had truly scared it away, what could that something be?
What could frighten a thing that lived for darkness, that really came to life only when the knives were out?
And this brought a brand-new thought that was most unwelcome: If this hypothetical something had scared away the Passenger, had it followed it into exile? Or was it still sniffing at my trail?
Was I in danger with no way left to protect myself—with no way of knowing whether some lethal threat was right behind me until its drool actually fell on my neck?
I have always heard that new experiences are a good thing, but this one was pure torture. The more I thought about it, the less I understood what was happening to me, and the more it hurt.
Well, there was one sure remedy for misery, and that was good hard work on something completely pointless. I swiveled around to face my computer and got busy.
In only a few minutes I had opened up the entire life and history of Dr. Gerald Halpern, Ph.D. Of course, it was a little trickier than simply searching Halpern’s name on Google. There was, for example, the matter of the sealed court records, which took me almost five full minutes to open. But when I did, it was certainly worth the effort, and I found myself thinking, Well, well, well . . .
And because at the moment I was tragically alone on the inside, with no one to hear my pensive remarks, I said it aloud, too. “Well, well, well,” I said.
The foster-care records would have been interesting enough—not because I felt any bond with Halpern from my own parentless past. I had been more than adequately provided with a home and family by Harry, Doris, and Deborah, unlike Halpern, who had flit-ted from foster home to foster home until finally landing at Syra-cuse University.
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Far more interesting, however, was the file that no one was supposed to open without a warrant, a court order, and a stone tablet direct from the hand of God. And when I had read through it a second time, my reaction was even more profound. “Well, well, well, well,” I said, mildly unsettled at the way the words bounced off the walls of my empty little office. And since profound revelations are always more dramatic with an audience, I reached for the phone and called my sister.
In just a few minutes she pushed into my cubicle and sat on the folding chair. “What did you find?” she said.
“Dr. Gerald Halpern has A Past,” I said, carefully pronouncing the capital letters so she wouldn’t leap across the desk and hug me.
