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And worse than the tedium, worse than the chill spreading through his bones and deep into his very center, Dexter must stand in all this dripping rain-soaked misery and maintain an expression of shocked concern on his face. This is never an easy expression to get right, and I can’t really summon the urgency tonight, wallowing as I am in my blank misery. Every two minutes I find the necessary expression slipping away, replaced by a more natural look of soaking-wet annoyed impatience. But I fight it off, rearrange my features to the appropriate mask, and soldier on in the dark, wet, and endless evening. Because in spite of my cloudy disposition, I need to get it right. We are not looking at some nasty little drug dealer who got what he deserved. This is no headless wife caught in unfaithful performance by a temperamental husband. The body in the Crown Vic is one of us, a member of the fraternal order of Miami cops. At least, it seems to be, from what we can tell by glancing casually through the car’s windows at the shapeless blob inside.
And it is shapeless, not because we cannot see it clearly through the windows—unfortunately, we can—and not because it has slumped down into a relaxed sprawl and curled up with a good book—it hasn’t. It is shapeless because it has, apparently, been hammered out of its formerly human shape, slowly, carefully, and thoroughly bludgeoned into a blob of shattered bones and bruised flesh that no longer resembles even a little bit anything that might be called a person, let alone a sworn officer of the law.
Of course, it is terrible to do such a thing, even worse to do it to a cop, a peacekeeper, a man with a badge and a gun whose only purpose in life is to stop such things from happening to everyone else. Squishing a cop like that, so slowly and deliberately, is an extra-awful affront to our well-ordered society, and it is a dreadful insult to every other brick in the thin blue wall. And we all feel outrage—or at the very least, we present a reasonable facsimile. Because this kind of death has never been seen before, and even I can’t imagine who, or what, could have done it this way.
Someone, or something, has spent a tremendous amount of time and energy smashing Detective Marty Klein into a glob of jelly—and worse still, outrageous beyond measure, they’ve done it at the end of a long day’s work, when dinner is waiting. No punishment is too severe for the kind of animal who would do this, and I truly hoped that terrible justice would be served—right after dinner and dessert, over a cup of dark coffee. Possibly with a small biscotti or two.
But it’s no good; the stomach growls, and Dexter is drooling, thinking of the sublime pleasures of Rita’s cooking that wait for him at home, and therefore not keeping his facial muscles locked into the required expression. Someone is bound to notice and wonder why Detective Klein’s dreadfully battered corpse would make anyone salivate, and so with a major effort of my iron will, I realign my face again and wait, pointing my somber scowl at the puddle of rain growing around my sopping shoes.
“Jesus,” says Vince Masuoka, suddenly materializing at my side and cranin
g his neck to see past the yellow rain suits and into the car. He wore an army surplus poncho and looked dry and contented and I wanted to kick him even before he spoke. “It’s unbelievable.”
“Very close to it,” I said, marveling at the iron control that keeps me from attacking him for his ninny-hood.
“That’s all we need,” Vince said. “A maniac with a sledgehammer and a hard-on for cops. Jesus.”
I would not have brought Jesus into the discussion, but naturally I’d had the same thoughts as I stood there turning into a small piece of Florida’s aquifer. Even when someone was beaten to death, we had never before seen it done so savagely, so thoroughly, and with such maniacal focus. Among all the annals of Miami crime fighting this was unique, unmatched, brand-new, never seen before—until this evening, when Detective Klein’s car had appeared on the shoulder of I-95 at rush hour. But I saw no point in encouraging Vince to make any more witless and obvious remarks. All clever conversation had washed out of me in the steady flow of the rain pouring into my clothing through my flimsy jacket, so I just glanced at Vince and then returned to concentrating on maintaining my solemn face: furrow the brow, turn down the mouth—
Another car slid to a halt beside the patrol cars already parked there on the shoulder, and Deborah got out. Or to be more formally correct, Sergeant Deborah Morgan, my sister, and now lead investigator on this new and dreadful case. The uniformed cops glanced at Debs; one of them did a double take and nudged the other, and they moved aside as she stalked over to look inside the car. She was shrugging on a yellow rain jacket as she walked, and that did not endear her to me, but she was, after all, my sister, so I just nodded at her as she passed, and she nodded back. And her first word seemed carefully chosen to reveal not merely her command of the scene, but a picture of her true inner self as well. “Fuck,” she said.
Deborah looked away from the mess in the car and turned her head toward me. “You got anything yet?” she said.
I shook my head, which caused a small waterfall to roll down the back of my neck. “We’re waiting for you,” I said. “In the rain.”
“Had to get the sitter,” she said, and shook her head. “You should have worn a poncho or something.”
“Gosh, I wish I’d thought of that,” I said pleasantly, and Debs turned back to look at the leftovers of Marty Klein.
“Who found it?” she said, still staring through the Crown Vic’s window.
One of the officers, a thick African-American man with a Fu Manchu mustache, cleared his throat and stepped forward. “I did,” he said.
Deborah glanced at him. “Cochrane, right?”
He nodded. “That’s right.”
“Tell me,” she said.
“I was on routine patrol,” Cochrane said. “I spotted the vehicle in its present location, apparently abandoned on the shoulder of Interstate 95, and recognizing that it was an official vehicle, I parked my patrol unit behind it and called in the tag. Receiving confirmation that it was indeed a police vehicle signed out to Detective Martin Klein, I exited my patrol vehicle and approached Detective Klein’s vehicle.” Cochrane paused for a moment, possibly confused by the number of times he had said “vehicle.” But he just cleared his throat and plowed on. “Upon arriving at a point where I could make a visual surveillance of the interior of Detective Klein’s vehicle I, uh—”
Cochrane stumbled to a stop, as if he wasn’t sure what the correct word might be in report-ese, but the cop beside him snorted and supplied the missing word. “He hurled,” the other cop said. “Totally lost his lunch.”
Cochrane glared at the other cop, and harsh words might have been spoken if Deborah had not called the men back to their purpose. “That’s it?” she said. “You looked inside, threw up, and called it in?”
“I came, I saw, I blew chunks,” Vince Masuoka muttered beside me, but happily for his health Deborah didn’t hear him.
“That’s it,” Cochrane said.
“You saw nothing else?” Debs said. “No suspicious vehicle, nothing?”
Cochrane blinked, apparently still fighting the urge to punch his buddy. “It’s rush hour,” he said, and he sounded a little testy. “What’s a suspicious vehicle in this mess?”
“If I have to tell you that,” Debs said, “maybe you should transfer to code enforcement.”
Vince said, “Boom,” very softly, and the cop beside Cochrane made a choking sound as he tried not to laugh.
For some reason, Cochrane didn’t find it quite so amusing, and he cleared his throat again. “Lookit,” he said. “There’s ten thousand cars going by, and they’re all slowing down for a look. And it’s raining, so you can’t see anything. You tell me what to look for and I’ll start looking, all right?”
