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Patrick is not here.
In the middle of the day, in our only small window of opportunity, Patrick has wandered away where he should not be. He has spoiled everything.
We fight down the ornery urge to give the tent a spiteful kick, and just to be completely safely thorough we move past the tent to the water, listening very carefully for any soft snoring or rumbling from inside the tent. There is nothing, no sound, and we are thinking very unhappy thoughts as we kneel down and perform our watery pantomime one more time.
Just to be very sure, we stand up and turn too fast, pretending to stumble, and giving the tent a hearty “accidental” thump. There is no response from inside.
“Sorry!” we say in a loud official voice, and we wait for an answer. “Hello? Anybody home?” Again there is no response.
It is definite. Patrick is not here.
And although we loiter for another twenty minutes, performing meaningless tricks with the clipboard, he does not return, and we finally have to admit that staying any longer would be highly suspicious, and we must pack up our toys and admit the painful obvious truth:
We have crapped out.
We thread our way back through the camp, pausing twice to scribble bad words on the clipboard, and then climb back up onto the causeway and trudge to the car in a weary, bitter, very unhappy sheen of sweat. We try very hard to think positive thoughts, to come up with some small scrap of something that will make this whole hopeless trip seem like anything other than a complete waste of time. And finally, as we thread our way through the traffic at the end of the causeway, one tiny glimmer of optimism leaks through all the cranky sludge, and we sigh and accept it as the very best we can hope for:
At least there is now time for lunch.
I had a quick lunch alone in a restaurant on Calle Ocho, a new place that had opened so recently that the waitress was still polite. The food was good. I topped it off with a cafecita and then drove slowly and thoughtfully back to the office. I wondered where Patrick had gone. He knew he could not get to Jackie in daylight. If he was keeping the schedule I thought he was, this was his sleeping time, and he should have been lounging there in his tent in peaceful repose. Of course, it was possible that he had run out of buffalo jerky and gone to a convenience store to get more. But after all my preparation, and my endless dithering about doing it quickly and in daylight, it was oddly deflating to come away from the afternoon with nothing to show for it except a small spot on my shirt from some spilled black beans.
Now I would have to sit around for another hour with Robert and Renny and pretend to be mild and patient—and then I would still have to go down to the meeting with Cody’s teacher. That conference had seemed like a good idea when it was my excuse for slipping away, and my alibi. Now it began to seem like a great deal of dull niggling scut work, pointless and annoying posturing with an elementary school teacher, someone who could never understand Cody nor his difficulty in adjusting. The teacher would want to discuss ways to help Cody make a happy accommodation to his new grade, and strategies for success in fitting in, and the teacher could not hear the truth, would not believe it even if I spoke in plain one-syllable rhyming words accompanied b
y bright crayon-colored illustrations. No teacher in any school in the Dade County public school system could ever understand the simple unvarnished truth.
Cody would never adjust, never be happy, and never fit in.
Cody was not, and never would be, a normal healthy boy who wanted to play ball and tease the girls. Cody wanted other things that the school system could never give him, and his only chance of being well adjusted was to learn how to get them, and how to pretend to be human, how to live by the Harry Code—and all those things he had to learn from another monster: me.
The things Cody wanted, needed, are frowned upon by the intolerant society in which we live, and we could never explain it, not any part of it, not at all. And so we would sit with the teacher and dither and dance and exchange fake smiles and grandiose clichés and pretend to feel hope for a bright and shiny future for a boy who would unstoppably grow into a Dark Legacy already written in blood instead of chalk. And thinking about how I must unavoidably avoid this truth with the teacher and instead spend forty-five minutes mouthing cheerful brainless New Age buzzwords with someone who Really Cared made me want to ram my car into the Buick filled with blue-haired ladies from Minnesota that chugged along on the road beside me.
But it was all part of maintaining my disguise as Proud Papa Dexter, and there was no way around it. At least I had the evening to look forward to after that: lollygagging on a chaise longue with Jackie and eating strawberries as the sun set. It would almost make the frustration and annoyance of the rest of the day worthwhile.
And I thought again of what it might be like if only I could live Jackie’s lifestyle full-time: no teacher conferences, no housepainting while standing in a mound of fire ants, no squalling and screeching and dirty diapers. Nothing but eternal vigilance in a bejeweled setting. It was a fantasy, of course, nothing more than a way to soothe the grumpy beast within after its day of disappointments. But it was a very good fantasy, and lingering inside it was good enough to put a very small smile on my face by the time I got back to my office.
The smile, as tiny as it was, lasted until I got almost to my chair, when I ran into Vince Masuoka, headed out at full speed as I was trying to head in. We collided forcefully, and because I am larger than Vince, he bounced off me and into the doorframe.
“Ouch, my elbow!” he said, quickly straightening and rubbing his arm where it had banged against the frame. “Got another one!”
“Another elbow?” I said. “Big deal. Everyone has two.”
“Another body!” Vince said, straightening up and continuing his headlong rush out of the lab, pausing only to call over his shoulder, “The eye-fucker! He’s killed another girl!” Then he was gone down the hall, leaving me to stand at the door and stare after him and realize that I now knew what Patrick had been doing this afternoon instead of sleeping in his tent. And very oddly indeed, I really and truly wanted to go along and see what he had done.
I went on into the lab. Robert and Renny were both there, standing uncertainly together and looking as if they didn’t quite know what their characters would do when the eye-fucker struck again, and didn’t really want to hear anybody tell them.
I told them anyway. “Let’s go,” I said.
They both blinked at me like uncertain owls. “Go?” Robert said. Renny licked his lips.
“Crime scene,” I said. “Nothing like it for learning about crime scenes.”
They looked at each other like they were both hoping the other would come up with a really good way to suggest we go for coffee instead, but neither of them did, and so we followed Vince downstairs and out of the building.
EIGHTEEN
THIS TIME THE BODY HAD BEEN LEFT IN A DUMPSTER ON THE docks in Coconut Grove, near City Hall, just half a mile or so across the water from the Grove Isle Hotel, where I was staying with Jackie. I could see the high-rise profile of the hotel quite clearly as I got out of the car, standing tall above the painfully bright glare from the water.
The yellow perimeter tape was already up, with two uniformed cops in front of it, standing with that solid, meaty stance that cops everywhere seem to fall into instinctively when they put on the uniform. Even Deborah had stood like that back in the days when she wore the blue to work. Their eyes swiveled toward me, and I stepped forward, reaching for my ID.
