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I stood, hitting my head on a coat hanger on the way up. I took a step back and tried to put together what had happened. The closet was next to the room’s door, on the left as you entered. It was the perfect place to wait; anyone entering would step into the room and be a step past the closet before they knew someone was there.
From the closet it was three good steps to the edge of my bed, where Stranger One had so thoughtlessly chosen to die. So: One comes into the room. Two steps out and stabs him—but no. Then the fatal wound would be in the back, not the chest. And One would have had no time to react and draw his knife.
This way, then: One has his knife out already. In fact, he uses it to jimmy the door, which also explained why I’d had trouble opening it with my key. He steps into the room, knife at the ready, every sense quivering and alert—and he sees or hears something in the closet. He pauses, ready for trouble.
In the meantime, Two is waiting in the closet. He assumes that whoever comes through the door will walk past, allowing him to leap out and dispatch them easily. But One has paused just inside the door; Two can’t see who it is or what he’s doing. Freeze frame; nobody moves. Tension mounts. Finally, unable to stand the strain any longer—and perhaps confident of his ability with a knife—One flips open the closet door.
But Two is waiting for him, with his knife ready. One sees this and raises his arm instinctively, leaving a clear target for Two’s knife, which plunges into One’s chest. At almost the same moment, One strikes back. With his arm held high, he stabs down from above, directly into Two’s eye, and his blade enters Two’s brain and kills him almost instantly.
As Two collapses onto the closet floor, One staggers on into the room, three steps to the bed, perhaps unaware that the wound he has taken is also fatal. He sits, and moments later, he joins his adversary in the dark and toasty-warm afterlife—dead so quickly there’s not even time for much blood flow.
Problem solved. Very nice work, Dexter. I now had a good idea of what had happened. It proved once again that my brain was returning to its natural lofty roost. But as satisfying as that was, there was one remaining question:
So what?
What did it matter how this happened? The only really vital piece of knowledge was why it had happened to me, and that might as well be written in Aramaic and sealed in a cave. With only two dead bodies to go by, there was no way I could know why these two had come to my room to die—and that meant that I was just as ignorant about whether they had living friends, who might be on their way up here right now to see what was taking so long.
There was only one piece of that important question that I could unravel, because in general terms there were only two possible explanations for why it happened here, in my room. First, it was entirely coincidental. This was Miami, after all. Random murders happen all the time, and they have to happen somewhere. The killers had simply chosen the handiest room, and that just happened to be mine. I thought about that for nearly a full second before concluding that it was nearly as likely that the sun would come up in the west, and just stay there for a few weeks.
All right, coincidence was laughable, and that led inevitably to the second possibility: The two strangers had deliberately come to my room, knowing it was my room, in order to (a) snoop, (b) kill me, or (c) something I didn’t have enough data to guess. That was more likely—but it also meant that there were two sides in the struggle, and apparently neither side looked on poor mistreated Me with anything approaching Loving Compassion.
I am quite comfortable with the notion that someday, somewhere, I may meet some benighted, unenlightened individual who decides they just don’t like me. Different strokes for different folks, and so on.
Carrying this thought to its logical conclusion, I can even accept that in some distant time and place, one of these people may decide he dislikes me enough to kill me.
But two teams of people? In the same time and place? And both teams finding my existence so distasteful that they break into my room carrying sharp instruments?
Who would want to kill me that much? And what had I done to deserve two separate squads of haters?
Of course, Anderson, or someone lurking in his shadow, was the most obvious suspect. But I could not believe he would approve something that was a major felony. His faults were so numerous they left almost no room for virtues, and he would certainly fool around with misdemeanors, if it served the end of Dishing Dexter. But murder was a bit much, even for him. Even if his victim was somebody who richly deserved to die, what kind of law enforcement officer could possibly countenance murder, even of another killer? It was unimaginable. Besides, he was clearly having too much fun keeping me alive and miserable.
So who did that leave? Who else really had it in for me enough to try to kill me? Could it be some random vigilante? Somebody who was so enraged to see me released that he decided to take things into his own hands? It was possible, but it seemed just a trifle far-fetched. And then to imagine two of them competing to be first to take my scalp…No. It just wouldn’t do.
But there wasn’t anybody else who hated me this much—at least, not among the living. If you could choose from among those I had helped over the edge and into death, you could easily make up two teams—even an entire league. Other than that, though, it seemed impossible. In truth, aside from my recent unwelcome burst of publicity, nobody even knew I existed. I had worked very hard my whole life to keep a low profile. I had worked even harder to be certain that no surviving friends, relatives, or business associates of my Playmates knew who and what I was. Who did that leave?
Without thinking, I sat on the edge of the bed to ponder. My weight caused the body to roll toward the crater in the middle of the mattress, and one of its arms flopped over toward me. If nothing else, it confirmed that the body was freshly killed. It also confirmed that I was still stupid. I got up quickly and moved over to the desk and pulled out the chair.
I sat, and unconsciously assumed an erect upright position. My second-grade teacher, Mrs. Parker, had always insisted that we sit up straight. She said it encouraged a good flow of blood up the spine and into the brain, which would help us think and learn better. We had always laughed at her for this lunatic idea—behind her back, of course; Mrs. Parker had a temper. After all these years, though, it now seemed that she might be right. Because after only a few seconds of sitting up straight in the wooden desk chair, I had an Actual Thought.
I couldn’t possibly figure out who these dead strangers were, not just from looking at them. And if I didn’t know who, I could
n’t tell why. Beyond the fact that it’s always nice to know who hates you enough to kill you, I needed to know who before I could decide what to do about it. And that’s when my Actual Thought spoke to me.
All right, Dexter, it said. Then try to figure out who knew that this was your room.
The list of people who knew I had checked in here was much smaller. I had to assume that Anderson and other interested cops might know. And anybody else who could sneak in the back door of a database could find out, if they wanted to know badly enough. I could have done it myself in under ten minutes, simply by checking for a credit card. The moment I used a card with my name on it my location became public knowledge. And the record would state quite clearly the name and address of the hotel, and then—
I blinked. I had just had another thought, something very significant; I was quite sure of it. I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was there. I rewound my thoughts, marching them by again at a slower speed. I sat up even straighter in my chair as I scanned—and there it was. I don’t know if I found it because I had such excellent posture, but just in case, I sent a little mental thank-you card back through time to Mrs. Parker.
It was indeed quite true that anybody with a computer and half a brain could track me by following what I did with my credit card. But there was a tiny factoid that was even truer.
I hadn’t used my credit card.
Brian had used his credit card.
What had he called it? A “nice anonymous” card. I’d thought nothing of it at the time, so I tried to make up for that lapse now. Brian could not possibly have a credit rating of any kind; he had no fixed address—for that matter, I wasn’t sure he even had a fixed identity. That obviously meant that the card was either fake or stolen. Most financial companies would look on this with very strong disapproval. But as evil and mercenary as they are, most credit card companies stop just a wee bit short of actually killing people who abuse them, even if unwillingly.
Could it be the hypothetical person Brian had possibly stolen the card from? That was a little more likely—but then why were there two of him?
