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“Oh, well,” I said.
He stared at the papers some more, trying to make them behave, but it didn’t seem to work. “Well, shit,” he said at last. “I guess it was a long shot.”
Nobody argued with that. Robert leaned over and tossed the papers on Deb’s desk, shuffled his feet, crossed his arms, uncrossed them, and then stood up straight. “Well,” he said. “I, uh, I should go get ready. For my interview.” He smiled. “Put on a clean shirt, do the hair, you know. For the photographer. So …” He looked at Deborah and then at me, possibly waiting for us to object. When we didn’t, he shrugged and said to me, “So all right. I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Bright and early,” I said.
He pointed a finger-gun at me and dropped his thumb. Pow. “Bright and early,” he said. He nodded at Deborah, gave Jackie a half glance, and then sauntered out the door.
Nobody said anything for a few moments. Jackie picked up the papers Robert had thrown down and studied them. She frowned. “Funny,” she said.
“What?” I said.
She shook her head. “Oh, nothing,” she said. “It’s just … I mean, it sounds like I’m doing a diva: ‘It’s all about me!’ And I’m not, so … forget it.”
“I can’t forget it if you don’t tell me,” I said.
Jackie crossed her arms across her chest and gave me a kind of rueful smile. “Dexter, it’s nothing,” she said, and while I was still pondering the realization that this was the first time she’d called me by my name, she went on. “I mean, it’s just a stupid coincidence. When Robert said the dates, it’s just … I was there, on those dates. Working on a couple of films. New York in September, Vegas in June.” She shook her head and waved the papers dismissively. “Like I said, just forget I said it.” She uncrossed her arms and slapped her thighs. “So,” she said, looking at Deborah. “What’s our next move?”
Deborah might very well have answered her, but if she did I didn’t hear it. Because as I watched Jackie swing her head toward Deborah, golden hair flipping with the movement, something clicked in the Deep Shadows of Dexter’s Dark Closet, and I looked down at the pictures in my hand, both of them so very similar, and then—
All light is gone and I am answering the urgent rattle of black wings and I climb on and lean into it and let them lift me up on a dark wind and we soar up and up and up into a black night sky, up far above, up to where we can see, and we rise and circle faster and faster until we are there in the cold and starless sky and we look and then it is there, a single bright scarlet patch of the landscape below that is as clear and sharp and unavoidable as if it was illuminated by a dozen noonday suns—and I see them. And we swoop down into the red-tinged light and I am with them again, with the women in the pictures, standing above them and watching them twist and bulge out against their bonds, and every one of their muscles locks and every inch of skin, every nerve, every bone, screams in pain and it does not even slow me; it drives me instead to new and more exciting things, and I begin to do them to her and she turns away so she will not see what I am going to do and she must see it, she must see me, she must watch, because that is why I am doing this, that is what this is all about, it is about her seeing me, and so I grab her by her hair, that perfect golden hair, and I pull her head around and see her face—
—and it is the wrong face.
And that makes me furious, and I yank her hair even harder, that almost-perfect golden hair, the not-quite-right hair that is so close and looks so very much like hers but it is still not her hair and the face is not her face and it is just not right anymore even though I picture her face instead as I finish but when I look down at what I have done I can feel it all drain away be
cause it is not right, it is not her, and a bright flash of rage runs down from the top of my skull and all the way down my arm and I pick up the knife, the cold impersonal knife, and I slash at that face, that so very wrong face, because it is not—
“Oh,” I said, and my eyes pop open to the fluorescent light of Deborah’s office, and no matter how hard I try to push it away and find a way not to believe it, the things I saw do not change. Even in the harsh and ugly light of the office the picture is the same, and even worse, I now see Deb and Jackie staring at me uncertainly, as if they had been watching me urinate on a busy street. “Oh, um,” I say. “It’s, you know. I just thought of something.”
“What?” Jackie said, sounding very unsure of what she was asking, and as if she was deliberately mocking me and mocking my vision, she flipped her hair around and over her shoulder—her hair, her perfect golden hair.…
“It is you,” I told her. “I mean, it really is about you.”
Jackie blushed and fidgeted with her hair. “That’s not, I mean …”
But Deborah cut right across Jackie’s modest dithering. “What do you mean, it’s about her?” she demanded. “What are you saying?”
“That’s why he did it,” I said, and I realized that I was still feeling the bat-wing rush of my interior flight with the Passenger and I was not actually making real-time sense. I took a deep breath and slapped the photos onto the desk beside Jackie. “The hair is like yours,” I said. “They both have a similar kind of figure. The same locations at the same time as you.” I looked up and locked eyes with Jackie, and she stared unblinking back with a small flicker of fear growing in those violet eyes. “And then the knife slash across the face, the rage—because it’s the wrong face. Because it isn’t you.”
I watched the long and elegant muscles in her throat move as she swallowed and then began to slowly shake her head. But as much as I wanted to be wrong, I knew that I was not.
“It’s you,” I said. “He killed them because they looked like you.”
EIGHT
FOR A FEW MOMENTS THERE WAS UTTER SILENCE IN Deborah’s office. Debs just stared, and Jackie simply sat there clutching white-knuckled at her hair, lips slightly parted, looking very pale, and apparently not even breathing. “I, I, how can, um …” she said.
“Where the fuck does that come from?” Deborah said.
“It, um—it just makes sense,” I said.
“Not to me,” Deborah said.
“I don’t think …” Jackie said faintly. “I … I don’t know if …”
Deborah pushed her chair back against the desk, making a noise that seemed horribly loud all of a sudden.
