Dexter in the Dark | Page 6

tax records I uncovered, the fa mily ranch appeared to be unoccupied

and idle, which clearly meant that wherever he was taking his dear dirty
friends, it was not to a healthy and happy life of country labor.
Even better for my purposes, wherever they went with their new friend Zander,
they were going barefoot. Because in a special room at his lovely Coral Gables
home, guarded by some very cunning and expensive locks that took me almost five
full minutes to pick, Zander had saved some souvenirs. It’s a foolish\
risk for a
monster to take; I know this full well, since I do it myself. But if someday a
hardworking investigator comes across my li ttle box of memories, he will find no
more than some glass slides, each with a single drop of blood preserved upon it,
and no way ever to prove that any of them is anything sinister at all.
Zander was not quite so clever. He had sa ved a shoe from each of his victims,
and counted on too much money and a locked door to keep his secrets safe.
Well really. No wonder monsters get such a bad reputation. It was just too naive
for words—and shoes? Seriously, shoes, by all that’s unholy? I try to be
tolerant and understanding of the foibles of others, but this was a bit much.
What could possibly be the attraction in a sweaty, slime-encrusted,
twenty-year-old sneaker? And then to leave them right out in the open like that,
too. It was almost insulting.
Of course, Zander probably thought that if he was ever caught he could count on
buying the best legal care in the world, who would surely get him off with only
community service—a little ironic, since that was how it had all started. But
one thing he had not counted on was bein g caught by Dexter instead of the
police. And his trial would take place in the Traffic Court of the Dark \

Passenger, in which there are no lawyers—al though I certainly hope to catch one
someday soon—and the verdict is always absolutely final.
But was a shoe really enough proof? I had no doubt of Zander’s guilt. Even if
the Dark Passenger hadn’t been singing ar ias the entire time I looked at the
shoes, I knew very well what the collection meant—left to his own devices,
Zander would collect more shoes. I was quite sure that he was a bad man,\
and I
wanted very much to have a moonlight discussion with him and give him some
pointed comments. But I had to be absolutely sure—that was the Harry Code.
I had always followed the careful rules laid down by Harry, my cop foster
father, who taught me how to be what I am with modesty and exactness. He\
had
shown me how to leave a crime scene clean as only a cop can, and he had taught
me to use the same kind of thoroughness in selecting my partner for the dance.
If there was any doubt at all, I could not call Zander out to play.
And now? No court in the world would convict Zander of anything beyond
unsanitary fetishism based on his display of footwear—but no court in the world
had the expert testimony of the Dark Passe nger, either, that soft, urgent inner
voice that demanded action and was never wr ong. And with that sibilance mounting
in my interior ear it was difficult to stay calm and impartial. I wanted to
claim Zander for the Final Dance the way I wanted my next breath.
I wanted, I was sure—but I knew what Harr y would say. It wasn’t enough. He
taught me that it’s good to see bodies in order to be certain, and Zander had
managed to hide all of them well enough to keep me from finding them. And
without a body, no amount of wanting it would make it right.

I went back to my research to find out where he might be stashing a short row of
pickled corpses. His home was out of the question. I had been in it and had not
had a hint of anything other than the shoe museum, and the Dark Passenger is
normally quite good at nosing out cadaver collections. Besides, there was no
place to put them at the house—there are no basements in Florida, and it was a
neighborhood where he could not dig in the yard or carry in bodies without being
observed.