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“Yeah, hey, Dexter,” Renny said from behind me, and I turned to look at him. Robert hurried past us, headed for the two cops by the yellow tape. Like he had last time, he would stand there by the perimeter, joking with the cops, so he wouldn’t have to see the wonderful horror in the Dumpster. But this was Renny’s first dead body, as far as I knew, and he stood uncertainly, licking his lips and glancing longingly at Robert’s retreating back. “Robert says the last one was fucking sick,” he said.
“Well,” I said, “Robert didn’t really get a good look at it.”
“Ran his ass away screaming and hurling chunks, huh?” Renny said, just a ghost of a smile on his face.
“He didn’t actually scream,” I said.
“Yeah, right,” Renny said, looking once more at Robert, and then beyond him to the Dumpster. “Hey, seriously,” he said. “How bad is this gonna be?”
It may not be the very best character reference for me, but I was very eager to see whether this body was indeed the work of Bone-head Patrick, and if there was anything different about it, and I was growing annoyed listening to Renny’s dithering instead of peeking in at the surprise in the Dumpster. So reassurance was not uppermost on my mind. “Oh, it’s going to be very bad,” I said. “Come on; I’ll show you.”
He didn’t move. “Do I really got to look at this shit?” he said.
“Well,” I said, torn between my duty to shepherd Renny and my growing desire to see the waiting wonder, “you really should see what Vince does at a crime scene. I mean, that’s what your character does, right?”
Renny looked at the Dumpster out on the dock, and swallowed. “Yeah, okay,” he said. Then he gave me a hard look and I saw once more the small gleam of some interior Something flaring up. “But I throw up, you cleaning it up.” He took a deep breath, and then moved past me with determination in his pace and steel in his spine, and hopefully not too much in his stomach.
I followed behind Renny until he was ten feet from the Dumpster, and then he stopped dead. “I can see Vince fine from here,” he said.
There didn’t seem to be any point in arguing about it, so I slid past him and right up beside Vince Masuoka, who crouched in the shade of the Dumpster. “You’re just in time,” Vince said.
“For what?”
“Now the real fun starts,” he said. He jerked his head over to one side. I looked, and about forty feet away I saw Detective Anderson talking to a thin, white-haired man in khaki pants, a pale blue polo shirt, and boat shoes. Even from this distance, the white-haired man looked badly shaken.
“Anderson has a witness,” Vince said. “The old guy is off one of the big sailboats. He saw somebody dump a rolled-up carpet in here and take off in a kayak.”
The kayak gave me pause; did Patrick have a new, Miami-flavored way to get around? Or was it possible that somebody else had done it this time? Feeling a small flutter of uncertainty and rising interest, I stepped past Vince and peeked inside, into the heart of the garbage.
The girl’s body lay on top of a chunk of dirty brown carpet, the kind of ratty, stained carpet you can see in the garbage in any residential area where someone is remodeling. It was partially unrolled, just enough to see the top half of a very bad time, and not enough to hide the other contents of the Dumpster.
It was almost all garbage—no paper or cardboard or plastic wrappings like the last time. This Dumpster was used by the people from the rows of large yachts at the nearby dock, and by anyone who used the fish-cleaning station nearby, and the smell rising up from inside was enough to kill small animals at ten paces. But it didn’t discourage the nearly solid cloud of flies that whirled around the heaps of moist, sloppy rotting leftovers. And, of course, it didn’t have any effect at all on the dead girl who perched naked on top of the putrid mound of decomposing gunk.
It looked like she’d had a very hard time of it. Like the previous victim, this one had been hacked, stabbed, bitten, and clawed with an undisciplined but frenzied abandon, a wild impatience that had left very few patches of visible skin unmarked by trauma.
The state of the blood around the wounds indicated that she had been alive for most of the cuts, gashes, and punches, an entire arsenal of attacks that left the corpse looking like she had spent a week at the Academy of Psychotic Assault.
Once again a large hank of golden hair had been ripped out by the roots, leaving a raw, dark red section of scalp exposed. Under that hair, so very like Jackie’s in color and cut, there was not much recognizable left of the face that wasn’t slashed by fingernails, teeth, and knife blade, but something about the profile tugged at my memory for a second, before I shrugged it off. Of course she looked familiar—she looked like Jackie, just as all the other victims did. That was the whole point of it for Patrick.
I looked a moment longer, but saw nothing helpful, so I stepped back and looked down at Vince.
“Did you find anything?” I asked him, without too much hope—and truthfully, without too much interest, either. I knew who had done it, and I couldn’t be more certain even if Patrick Bergmann had signed his work.
“Just this,” Vince said. He held up a small plastic evidence bag. Inside I could see the outline of what looked like a small bar of soap, the kind of small soap bar hotels leave in the bathrooms for their guests. “You don’t want to know where I found it,” he added happily. I leaned in for a closer look, and through the plastic I could make out the crest and the words “Grove Isle Hotel and Spa” in ornate script.
Vince shook it playfully. “Maybe it’ll help Anderson figure out who the victim is this time,” he said.
I opened my mouth to say that it didn’t seem likely, that Anderson wouldn’t figure it out if he had notarized statements from the ki
ller and the victim, and then I closed my mouth and took a step back and didn’t say anything at all.
Because I knew who she was. I remembered why she looked familiar, and it was not because she looked like Jackie. It was because I had seen her, standing in a hallway and blushing, smiling, pleased with being so very near to her real-life hero, Jackie Forrest.
I rattled the handles of my memory bank and came up with it: Her name was Amila, and she was the maid at the Grove Isle Hotel who had come to clean up the mess on the floor of our suite, and told me she styled her hair to look like Jackie Forrest’s hair, and it got her killed.…
Some small shady something tickled my spine, just a tiny breeze of unease, telling me that someone was watching, and I turned away from the Dumpster and looked, out beyond the pier with its two rows of boats, and into the painfully bright glare of the bay.
Less than fifty yards away, straight out from the end of the dock, a small yellow dot bobbed on the light chop. A paddle rose as I watched, and dipped down to make two small strokes to keep the nose pointed in at us: a double-headed kayak paddle.
