Dexter in the Dark | Page 7

And a short consultation with th e Passenger convinced me that someone
who mounted his souvenirs on walnut plaques would certainly dispose of the
leftovers neatly.
The ranch was an excellent possibility, but a quick trip to the old place
revealed no traces at all. It had clearly been abandoned for some time; even the
driveway was overgrown.
I dug deeper: Zander owned a condo in Maui , but that was much too far away. He
had a few acres in North Carolina—possible, but the thought of drivin\
g twelve
hours with a body in the car made it seem unlikely. He owned stock in a company
that was trying to develop Toro Key, a small island south of Cape Florida. But a
corporate site was certainly out of the question—too many people might wander in
and poke around. In any case, I remembered trying to land on Toro Key when I was
younger, and it had armed guards strolling about to keep people away. It had to
be somewhere else.
Among his many portfolios and assets, the on ly thing that made any sense at all
was Zander’s boat, a forty-five-foot Cigarette. I knew from my experience with a
previous monster that a boat provided wonderful opportunities for disposing of
leftovers. Simply wire the body to a weight, flip it over the rail, and wave
bye-bye. Neat, clean, tidy; no fuss, no muss, no evidence.
And no way for me to get my proof, eithe r. Zander kept his boat at the most
exclusive private marina in Coconut Grove, the Royal Bay Yacht Club. The\
ir
security was very good, too good for Dexter to sneak in with a lock pick and a
smile. It was a full-service marina for the terminally rich, the kind of place
where they cleaned and polished your bowline when you brought the boat in. You
didn’t even have to fuel up your own boat; just call ahead and it would be ready
for you, down to chilled champagne in the cockpit. And happily smiling armed
guards infested the grounds night and day, tipping their hats at the Quality and
shooting anyone who climbed the fence.
The boat was unreachable. I was as certain as I could be that Zander was using
it to dispose of the bodies, and so was the Dark Passenger, which counts for
even more. But there was no way to get to it.
It was annoying, even frustrating, to picture Zander with his latest
trophy—probably bundled neatly into a gold-plated ice chest—calling cheerfully
ahead to the dockmaster and ordering the boat fueled, and then strolling
nonchalantly down the dock while two grun ting Wackenhuts put the chest on board
his boat and waved a respectful good-bye. But I could not get to the boat and
prove it. Without this final proof, the Harry Code would not allow me to
proceed.
Certain as I was, what did that leave me? I could try to catch Zander in the act
the next time. But there was no way to be sure when that would be, and I

couldn’t watch him all the time. I did have to show up at work now and then, and
make my token appearances at home, and go through all the motions of maintaining
a normal-seeming life. And so at some point in the next weeks or so if the
pattern held, Zander would call the dockma ster and order his boat prepared, and—
And the dockmaster, because he was an efficient employee at a rich man’s club,
would make a note of exactly what he did to the boat and when: how much \
fuel he
put in, what kind of champagne, and how much Windex he used on the windscreen.
He would put all that in the file marked “Macauley,” and store it on his
computer.
And suddenly we were back in Dexter’s world again, with the Passenger hissing
certainty and urging me to the keyboard.
Dexter is modest, even self-effacing, and certainly aware of the limits of his
considerable talent. But if there was a limit to what I could discover o\
n the
computer, I had not found it yet. I sat back down and went to work.
It took me less than half an hour to hack into the club’s computers and find the
records. Sure enough, there was a thorough service record. I checked it against
the meetings of the board of Zander’s favorite charity, One World Mission of
Divine Light, which was