Free Dearly Devoted Dexter by Jeff Lindsay

of genetics that I am not fat.
    I was on my third imaginary sandwich when Deborah finally came back to the car. She slid into the driver’s seat, closed the door, and just sat there, staring ahead through the rain-splattered windshield. And I knew it wasn’t the best thing I could have said, but I couldn’t help myself. “You look beat, Deb. How about lunch?”
    She shook her head but didn’t say anything.
    “Maybe a nice sandwich. Or a fruit salad—get your blood sugar back up? You’ll feel so much better.”
    Now she looked at me, but it was not a look that showed any real promise of lunch at any time in the near future. “This is why I wanted to be a cop,” she said.
    “The fruit salad?”
    “That thing in there—” she said, and then turned to look out the windshield again. “I want to nail that—that, whatever it is that could do that to a human being. I want it so bad I can
taste
it.”
    “Does it taste like a sandwich, Deborah? Because—”
    She smacked the heels of her palms onto the rim of the steering wheel, hard. Then she did it again. “GodDAMN it,” she said. “God-fucking-DAMN it!”
    I sighed. Clearly long-suffering Dexter was going to be denied his crust of bread. And all because Deborah was having some kind of epiphany from seeing a piece of wiggling meat. Of course it was a terrible thing, and the world would be a much better place without someone in it who could do that, but did that mean we had to miss lunch? Didn’t we all need to keep up our strength to catch this guy? Still, it did not seem like the very best time to point this out to Deborah, so I simply sat there with her, watching the rain splat against the windshield, and ate imaginary sandwich number four.
     
     
    The next morning I had hardly settled into my little cubicle at work when my phone rang. “Captain Matthews wants to see everybody who was there yesterday,” Deborah said.
    “Good morning, Sis. Fine, thanks, and you?”
    “Right now,” she said, and hung up.
    The police world is made up of routine, both official and unofficial. This is one of the reasons I like my job. I always know what’s coming, and so there are fewer human responses for me to memorize and then fake at the appropriate times, fewer chances for me to be caught off guard and react in a way that might call into question my membership in the race.
    As far as I knew, Captain Matthews had never before called in “everybody who was there.” Even when a case was generating a great deal of publicity, it was his policy to handle the press and those above him in the command structure, and let the investigating officer handle the casework. I could think of absolutely no reason why he would violate this protocol, even with a case as unusual as this one. And especially so soon—there had barely been enough time for him to approve a press release.
    But “right now” still meant right now, as far as I could tell, so I tottered down the hall to the captain’s office. His secretary, Gwen, one of the most efficient women who had ever lived, sat there at her desk. She was also one of the plainest and most serious, and I found it almost impossible to resist tweaking her. “Gwendolyn! Vision of radiant loveliness! Fly away with me to the blood lab!” I said as I came into the office.
    She nodded at the door at the far end of the room. “They’re in the conference room,” she said, completely stone-faced.
    “Is that a no?”
    She moved her head an inch to the right. “That door over there,” she said. “They’re waiting.”
    They were indeed. At the head of the conference table Captain Matthews sat with a cup of coffee and a scowl. Ranged around the table were Deborah and Doakes, Vince Masuoka, Camilla Figg, and the four uniformed cops who had been setting the perimeter at the little house of horror when we arrived. Matthews nodded at me and said, “Is this everybody?”
    Doakes stopped glaring at me and said, “Paramedics.”
    Matthews shook his