Unique - Act I (iii) - Vandal
Act I (iii)- VandalThe kids are always happy to see me, and they should be. I'm good at this.
Cody comes running up. "Dexter!" he yells. I grab him and swing him up and around and he giggles. Astor runs up too, but she hangs back at the last second, remembering that she's supposed to be the cooler, older sister.
"Guess what mom said we could have for dinner?" she says instead.
"Hmm," I muse, "Was it...sushi?"
"Eww," says Cody, still dangling upside down over my shoulder.
"No, gross," Astor says, "Sushi is raw fish," she informs me.
"You learn something every day," I reply.
"We're having pizza," Cody says.
"It's in the freezer," Astor adds. I take that as my cue. I head into the house, Cody still swinging over my shoulder. He laughs. It's such a pure sound, an innocent sound that it sometimes amazes me.
It shouldn't be part of my world- and yet here I am.
I set Cody down once we're inside. Astor enters behind us. I make a face. Into the dragon's lair. "Why don't you guys go get that pizza out?" I tell the kids. "I'll be there in a second."
They leave. I return to my quest.
"Mrs. Grosser?" I call. I find her in the living room. She grumbles something at me and then struggles out of the chair. She's one of Rita's neighbors, an old woman whose face has caved in on itself, like a peach that's rotted and withered in the sun.
I try to imagine Rita looking as disgusting as that and can't.
"You're late," she says, hobbling closer.
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Grosser," I say. Being polite to nasty old women is one of those social rules I follow because it's necessary. I'm not sure how or why such a rule came about. The world would be better without them.
She ignores me. "I told her- I told her I could watch them until 5. Five, I said.” Her tone has turned grating, into the sulky, petulant whine of a child. Her eyes are small and hard in the deep caverns of her face. "I'm an old woman," she tells me. "People always try to take advantage of me."
I glance over at the wall clock. It shows five minutes past the hour. I look down into her face, right down into the beetle eyes. "I'm sorry, Mrs. Grosser," I repeat. She sniffs.
"That's not enough. Punctuality is a virtue," she scolds.
"Murder has a tendency to upset schedules."
She glares at me. "It's not a laughing matter. I have things to do."
I wonder if she was ever married, or if the 'Mrs.' is just an affectation. She's definitely the type to have poisoned a husband or two.
I entertain the fantasy for a second before repeating,"I'm sorry, Mrs. Grosser," again. It's the magic phrase. It doesn't exactly vanquish her, but apparent acquiescence is the only way to get her to leave.
She glares again, but doesn't deign to respond. She hobbles out the door, still muttering under her breath. I shut it behind her and back into the living room.
The kids are stationed in front of the TV. Now's my chance. I walk back outside and grab the file on Dean Winchester out of my car. My fingers practically tingle with anticipation. It's like Christmas, secrets waiting to be revealed... I take a seat at the table and open the file with all due care and reverence.
The first thing I see are the photos the St Louis Metropolitan Police Department so helpfully provided. The first is of a woman who had been beaten to death. The second is of Dean Winchester's bloody corpse.
It's going to be interesting reading, though not as interesting as whatever the file the FBI kept on Dean would be.
As inconvenient as it is, I don't have access. Just a dozen files from police departments across the country from before Winchester hit the big times and ended up on the FBI’s most wanted list. That, and about thirty pages of news articles on the crimes I’m unable to access. Sending out a request on NLETS is not an option. Nor is the NCIC. The last thing I need is the FBI inquiring about the sudden interest in a dead fugitive. It's not paranoia. Dean had been a priority for the FBI, which had fruitlessly tracked him and his brother across the country in a nation-wide manhunt. Wherever they went, death (and certain sharp-eyed federal agents) soon followed. When Dean Winchester supposedly went, he took a police station and several FBI agents- including the lead agent on his case - with him. The dead agents ensure that the case has been flagged half a dozen times and more- anything even tangentially connected to Dean or what happened in Colorado will set off all their little federal bells and whistles.
I'm going to skip the repeat. The FBI are nothing if not tenacious.
Fortunately for me, the elusive Mr. Winchester was extraordinarily well-traveled. The Interstate Identification Index had him flagged for felonies in a dozen different states. And local police departments are always so accommodating when it comes to requests from Miami Metro. There's none of the posturing and dick-measuring of the usual inter-agency requests- the case is closed, after all. There's no fame or glory or credit to claim, and even if there were... there's enough distance involved that the usual territoriality doesn't kick in. They can still play the heroes to the local news, if anything comes of it.
Best of all- most won't remember tomorrow that the information was even requested. Why should they? It's one more file in a sea of paperwork.
Some of our fellow police departments were even kind enough (or lazy enough) to forward complete files, not just the pages pertaining to the cases I'd requested. So many crimes the FBI certainly overlooked- all the lesser misdemeanors. To a less discerning eye, they seem unimportant, even (and especially) the early ones, just the expected proof of the standard profile: minor crimes escalating into major ones.
I guess they can't all be like Special Agent Lundy.
Lucky for me.
I flip past the initial photos down into Dean Winchester's past. The death of his mother in the fire, the suspected child abuse, the nomadic lifestyle. And crime. Vandalism, petty theft, loitering, credit card fraud, criminal mischief, destruction of property, grave desecration, misdemeanor arson. It reads like rap sheet of an ambitious juvenile delinquent. A little more varied and unusual than most- but no drugs, assaults, robberies.
Just the sort of thing that would get overlooked. There are plenty of kids like that out there, falling through the cracks of the system, lashing out at the world in a myriad of petty ways. Yet even here, my mystery man shines with the subtle signs of the exceptional, as his more recent history makes clear.
Amidst the wild variations of his crimes he returns, again and again, to fire and death. It's almost a message, tattooed on the world in ink of kerosene and grave dust. It's gone unheeded, unrecognized.
But not by me.
It almost makes sense as a way to dispose of a body- it's certainly harder to recover forensic evidence. The corpses, though, are rarely of his own making. Some of them predate his birth by a century, while others seem so chosen at random that there's very little chance his path ever crossed theirs except for when he decided to disturb their eternal slumber. I've heard that everyone needs a hobby. Certainly my own extra-curricular activities are equally...specialized.
I'm surprised the FBI never made the connection. Perhaps they did. But it didn't tie to the crimes most likely to catch the FBI's attention - the robbery, fraud, and murders- just the kind of thing that gets noted and overlooked.
Especially when the suspect fits the standard profile with only a tiny bit of finessing. White male, between the ages of 25 and 50, unstable home life, abusive father, early trauma. Child's play to construct a narrative of lesser crimes escalating into major ones; vandalism, arson, robbery, torture, murder... Child's play, and equally facile.
There's no set pattern of escalation here. There's no pattern at all, at least to the untrained eye.
Where anyone else would see amateurish and tiresome thrill-seeking, I see art. There's nothing petty here. Most who cross my table are small people, clinging to tawdry justifications for their crimes. Killing in plebeian ways for plebeian reasons- the same uninspired drudgery that carries them through daily life. There's no artistry in that.
This man...he's playful. He's killed, as at least some of the bodies in my little stack of folders attest. But he's not like me. He's not like anyone. Killing isn't the culmination for him. He shifts around, sometimes as neat and meticulous as I am, and other times messy and spontaneous. Hero and villain in turn. It's sheer artistry, unconstrained creativity. The occult trappings come and go, though some of the more sensationalist reporters based whole slews of articles on them, and at least one hack writer used it as fodder for his novels. They've missed the point. For him, the occult trappings are a theme, not a rule. Almost like a message. It's not always present: He uses it and abandons it with the flair of a master.
I flip through some more pages, fanning them out across the table.
His brother is a piece of the puzzle I can't quite place. Stanford educated, bright future, and a clean record, up until the day his girlfriend- perhaps fiancee- died in a mysterious fire. A fire with striking similarities to the one that claimed his mother, and just shortly after his brother re-entered his life. Pulled from the flames by the same brother- the timing of that too convenient to be anything but contrived- and then he's on the road, not just a witness to his brother's crimes but a participant.
Though not, it seems, the instigator.
It'd be easy to jump to conclusions about trauma-induced psychotic breaks, but I doubt that's the case. It doesn't fit, not exactly. What is he- accomplice, victim, mastermind...audience? Dean's performance- maybe it's not for the world. Maybe it's for one person. Maybe that’s why he went to such lengths to pull Sam back into the fold.
I hear the door click open. I shuffle the papers back into the file and look up. It's Rita, of course. The mysteries of Sam Winchester will have to wait until tomorrow.
"Don't tell me you didn't save me any pizza," she calls, and the kids come running. "Mom," they say, "Mom," trying to outdo each other in a bid for her attention. She listens to them in turn, and smiles at me over their heads, tired and happy, her skin aglow.
She'd do anything for her family.
I wonder if that's the connection I'm missing, the key to the Winchesters.
Maybe it's time to revisit my brother's old stomping grounds.
***
Saturday: The holy grail of all normal people. They spend their lives chasing after it, week after week, counting down to their deaths in units measured in weekends. As if Saturdays are something unique and special, an actual break from the drudgery of their weekday lives. They celebrate the weekends as being the only time they are truly free, only to fill them back up with variations on the same routines...
...like pancakes.
I scoop another spoonful of batter and dump into the frying pan. Bubbles bloom across the surface, a testament to my cooking prowess. I slice the spatula across the surface of the pan, cutting in under the batter just as it firms up. One smooth twist of the wrist and the other side is free to fry in the sizzling butter.
They're always perfect.
“How much longer?” demands Cody, standing on tip-toe and trying to see into the pan.
“Just another minute, buddy,” I say. He's wearing his favorite pajamas again. There's nothing here to mark this weekend out from any other.
Rita turns back from the coffee pot, her cup full. She holds it up under her nose and inhales long and slow. “Go sit at the table, Cody. Don't pester Dexter.” There's something sleepy and satisfied about her tone. He does as she asks and goes back to his plate on the table. He's watching me. I pick up the pan and walk over to the table. I gently slide the pancake out onto a plate and push it over to him.
It's dead-center on the plate, a small bit of perfection soon destroyed as Cody tears into it. Syrup pools in the middle, dripping down his fork as he tears it apart.
His sister looks at him crossways and makes a face.
Rita catches my eye. “Little savage,” she says, a wry smile on her lips. She raises her voice. “You'd think they'd been raised in a barn,” she says, arching her eyebrows in significant fashion.
Cody stops and looks up at her, wide-eyed. A fleck of syrup is smeared across his chin. She walks over and ruffles her hair. “Just try not to get it everywhere, sweetie.” She pats him on the head and moves away, reclaiming her coffee from the counter.
I move the bowl into the sink and begin to fill it with water. Astor gets up from the table and walks over, setting her now-empty plate down on the counter next to me.
“What do you say?” Rita chides.
Astor glances up at her mother, then over at me, caught by this small impropriety. Rita's been on a manners crusade of late, though I'm not sure why. Some sort of maternal urge spurred on by pregnancy hormones, maybe.
“Thank you, Dexter,” Astor said, and the words are awkward in her mouth, as if the formality is something foreign.
“You're welcome,” I say. She glances back at her mother, who smiles and says, “Why don't you go get dressed?”
Astor scampers off. Cody watches her go, his mouth still full, syrup still dribbling down his chin.
I turn back to the dishes. “Just bring your plate when you're done, buddy,” I call back over my shoulder.
“Let me get the dishes, Dexter.” Rita drapes her arms around me from behind, her belly pushing into my back, then adds, “You sure you can't take today off?”
I turn and detach her, then shrug in a reluctant fashion. “Duty calls.”
She shakes her head. “You should learn to play hooky.”
“I'm not sure the department would approve.”
“Probably not.” She smiles and she steals a quick kiss. She tastes like coffee and her lips are sticky with syrup. “You're a good man, Dexter Morgan.”
If only she knew. “Not...that good.”
She smiles wickedly...or at least what passes for wicked for her. “I'm counting on it. I've got....plans,” she whispers.
And so do I. But I doubt they'll coincide.
“I'll probably be late,” I warn her.
“I'll wait up,” she mouths, and smiles broadly. It's as bright as sunshine. There's no darkness in her.
I leave, and the taste of her still lingers on my lips, clashing with the minty remnants of mouthwash.
Saturday: In this I'm no different from anyone else, trading one routine for another. Looking forward to it, finding comfort in it. That's what routines are for. It's about security. It makes the world seem... predictable. Safe. I'm not playing it as safe as I should. Not sticking to the routine. It's...liberating.
“You're getting sloppy,” Harry says from the passenger seat, “Don't justify it, son.”
“It's a calculated risk,” I say, not taking my eyes from the road. “They never stay anywhere for very long.”
“Is that really it?” His stare would bore a hole through a wall.
“I'm taking precautions.”
“You're taking short-cuts. You're too eager. Keep your head in the game, Dexter.”
I take the next exit. “I am,” I say, because he's wrong. I'm not unprepared. At the end of the ramp, I look over, but he's vanished again.
His words still seem to echo. I'm going right to the edge, pushing the boundaries of the Code...it’s dangerous. But then flexibility has also always been my stock in trade.
I turn the car down a wide and empty road. It looks like something out of a movie- the huge and deserted thoroughfare, the fallen signs, the dark traffic lights...and the empty, skeletal towers.
There was time in Miami when suitable spots to safely exercise my own unique talents were in short supply. Abandoned warehouses didn't last long- culled from the herd by sharp-toothed developers and transformed into high rise condos. I managed. I'm very adaptable. It required more planning, more time, and a certain agility when it came to scheduling around the workmen’s schedules. There’s a certain charm in a crime scene that erases itself.
Times have changed. There's a glut of half-finished and wholly abandoned condo complexes in Miami- felled by the financial crisis, like so many other things, including my departmental budget. The buildings molder away like so many corpses, empty and quiet. This whole development would have been extremely public, once upon a time. Not anymore. It'll be a decade before the lawyers figure out how to divvy up the remains. The press has taken to calling them the Ghost Towers. It's an irony I can appreciate, and an opportunity I can't pass up. It's a buyer's market, after all, and that includes buildings with those formerly hard-to-find concrete floors, shuttered windows, and unlit parking garages... in areas so depressed even the gangs have given up.
Location, location, location, as any realtor will tell you. And this one is one of a kind in its perfection- generic perfection, something suitable for last minute necessity. Covered windows and boarded-up doors... No one ever comes here. The building has a recessed loading area, not easily visible from the road. That's where I park. The click of the door latch seems muted in the bright Miami sun. I head towards the unfinished glass entrance around the front. It has been covered with several large pieces of plywood layered on top of the each other, more for show than anything else- meant to keep the weather out more than vagrants or vandals or me. It's easy work for a man with a crowbar. The nails pull free with a crack that makes the boards shake. The first board swings down and hits the ground, and the sound reverberates, a hollow echo from inside the building. I do the same to the other side, leaving a four foot by eight foot gap, like the entrance to a cave- dark and foreboding. A troll's cave.
I duck inside. The interior is gloomy, but enough light leaks in from outside and from less-perfectly cut windows for me to see that this place is exactly what I need. Free of clutter, easy to clean. It's all bare concrete. They all are. There's even a makeshift workman's table in one corner, draped in copies of blueprints, just waiting to be elevated to a higher purpose. It's the perfect monster's lair. Lucky me.
I head back outside to get the plastic sheeting and the duct tape. I’m on a tight schedule. I get the kill room ready- draped in plastic, table at the center, a few battery powered lights ready and in position. When I leave, I make sure the entrance is once again covered by the board. I can’t have anyone disturbing the space, no nosy nancies poking around. This is going to have to be quick...and clean. There will be no opportunities for fine tuning or correction. It’s an oddly exhilarating feeling. Like a performance without a dress rehearsal, even if it is all for an audience of one.
Maybe this is why Dean does it. Why he’s so mutable, why he keeps his brother close.
...Accomplice, victim, mastermind, audience. It's a question I need to answer. The newspapers tended to forget Sam when they weren't speaking of the brothers as if they were some singular, two-headed monster. His criminal record is far less telling: No sign of any sealed juvenile records, nothing to indicate that he was active during his time at Stanford. Clean right up until the return of his brother and even then marred only by crimes primarily linked to Dean. In this my esteemed colleagues at the FBI were probably right: Dean's the key. But they've missed out by ignoring Sam's side of the equation. The bond between them is nothing normal. Sam has been an active, willing participant in Dean's crimes, even if he isn't driven by the same needs. That goes beyond the usual limits of fraternal loyalty.
Even if Deb could accept what I am, she'd hardly come along in order to pass me that scalpel or to offer her services when it came to getting rid of those pesky bloodstains. Though for a second I can almost see it: “Dex, are you going to fuckin' kill this guy or what? Stop dicking around, you're supposed to meet Rita at the doctor's in an hour.”
Actually, that's a disturbing idea, even for me. I try to shake it off as I head on to the freeway. There's also the question of 'Cas', the mystery man. He's...unexpected, considering the Winchesters' records. There's no trace of him in their histories, but then again it's hard to track a man about whom you know nothing. And yet earlier investigations had concluded that the Winchesters were all but incapable of working that way with anyone else, let alone forming the kind of easy familiarity and dependence I saw in the alley. Dean's connection/collaboration with his brother already marked him out as unusual. And then this new partner in crime- Dean's a man full of surprises. Truly unique. He'll be the crown jewel of my collection. If only I can collect him. It's time to drop in on my new friends, and see if that gets me answers.
* * *The clerk is a greasy, fat old man who wheezes like the neighbor's bulldog. He doesn't look up as I enter the lobby. He's practically paid not to look, just keeps thumbing through a well-creased skin mag. He passes me the register with nicotine-stained fingers and grunts something about check-out. He and I both know it's merely for show: this isn't the kind of place where the guests stay more than a few hours.
I quickly scribble down Smith, Michael, then look over the the other entries. It's full of improbable aliases and even more unlikely addresses and plate numbers. The entry above mine reads Dick, Harry. He's not the only comedian on the list. Standing out amidst all the Does and Smiths are half a dozen names along similarly creative names, along with a couple of rock stars and several former presidents.
I set the register down on the counter, then toss a couple of twenties on top of it. You'd be surprised how many pay by credit card. I'm not sure why they bother with the aliases. Maybe it adds a sense of adventure. I'm content to operate without the paper trail. The clerk will pocket the money before I've even left the office.
He grunts and grabs a set of keys off a hook and tosses them to me. I let them fall to the counter. It's a room number starting with a two.
“No,” I say. “Something on the ground floor, if you've got it.” The point of the room is to keep an eye on the Winchesters, after all.
He shrugs, palms the keys, hands me another set, then turns back to his magazine. I head back outside. Squinting against the light, I look down at the keys. Room 18 it is. I walk along the edge of the parking lot: just a man scouting for his room. And I am. My route takes me by the empty parking spot where I'd previously seen the Winchesters' car...they are or they were a few rooms down from mine. Some apt quirk of fate has given them room #13. Maybe they requested it, wanting an outward sign of the bad luck they seem to carry with them- both for themselves, and for their victims.
The curtains are closed, but they're torn and faded, and I can see someone move behind them. “FUCK!” shouts the someone in the room. The walls are thin. There's a thud that rattles the wall and sends flakes of pink plaster skittering to the ground. “Couldn't just let Cas do his thing, had to take the goddamn car.” the voice trails off into barely-audible invective before picking up again: “What's the point of the goddamn PHONES?” There's a crash, then, followed by more cursing. It's the sound of someone who just watched something important go scattering off in fifteen directions. It's practically an invitation. There's an opportunity here. I glance back at the parking lot, which still is lacking a certain black behemoth. I lean over and bang on the door, three quick knocks.
The door swings open, revealing the giant otherwise known as Sam Winchester. He looks frustrated, as befits a man who seconds ago was beating up defenseless walls. He fills the door frame, as broad and tall as a football player. I'm glad not to be setting my sights on him...at least not yet. His sheer size gives him an advantage that would take a certain amount of planning to overcome.
It'd be a pain in the ass to drag his body anywhere. That's the beauty of the saw: it makes everyone portable.
He's got a duffel bag thrown over one shoulder. It clinks as he shifts his weight, one hand clinging tight to the door frame. It's not the casual, intimidating gesture he was hoping for. His complexion is wan and waxy, giving away the real reason for his grip on the frame: he doesn't trust his own balance.
“Hey, man,” I say. “So, um. You're not Sherry's usual, uh. What happened to Joe? I had a deal with him.”
His brow creases. “Look, man. I don't know who you're looking for, but you've got the wrong room.”
“No, no,” I shake my head. “#14, that's always Sherry.” I crane my neck, trying to see in the room, “She in there?”
Sam shifts, trying to block my view, but I catch a glimpse of an unmade bed and the signs of hurried packing. The room smells of stale sweat and puke, and one of Dean's opaque comments back in the alley suddenly clicks: Sam really should have listened to him. Ceviche is always a risky proposition in Miami's heat, at least in the kind of places the Winchesters are sure to frequent.
“I don't have time for this,” Sam says. He pushes past me and shuts the door firmly behind him. “Look man, the room you want is next door, so do me a favor and fuck off already.” He lurches away, using the stiff-legged stride of a man barely suppressing the urge to run. His balance is a lot more steady than I expected, given the fact that he's still obviously in the throes of food poisoning. Only the slightest shakiness gives him away.
I watch him go. He rounds the corner away from the motel, out of my sight, and I'm tempted to chase after him. But I've got my sights on bigger game, at least for now...and there's far more to be learned inside. It takes me a few minutes to get the door open. The locks are cheap and simple, but too many years of drunks and addicts trying to force the wrong keys in the hole has left it battered and stubborn.
No one questions me. It's not even a disguise- there's no implication of propriety, here. People in places like these tend to employ their own particular brand of selective blindness. You could kill a man in the parking lot and dump his body in the swimming pool, and never worry about witnesses coming forward. Certainly my brother didn't. There's a charm in that, though I'm not planning on testing it anytime soon.
The door clicks and I push it open, slip inside, and shut it behind me. The rooms here are even tackier than I remembered. Maybe it's the red walls. Sunlight leaks through the curtains, reflects off the paint, and casts the room into garish shades. I move through the weird pink twilight and experience a sudden twinge of doubt. There's far less here than I had hoped: a few shirts and jeans hanging off the backs of chairs and on towel racks, dripping on the floor- the leftover of some quick and dirty attempt to do laundry in the bathtub. Couple of toothbrushes, a shaving kit. Half a case of beer.
I move over to the table near the window. It's covered in some of the usual detritus of life on the road: take-out boxes, maps, receipts, and something less usual- newspaper clippings. I hold one up to the light. Flood Leaves 10,000 Homeless. Someone's scrawled “El Nino?” in the margin. I set it back down, then glance over the rest. Earthquake rattles the West Bank. There's a book and passage reference to it, like those used to refer to the Bible. I don't recognize it: the title is in Greek. The others are equally random: massacres in Mexico, fires in Australia, thousands of dead fish on a Spanish beach.
It seems my new friends are more up-to-date on current events than most, something that tells me... not much. I move some of the clippings aside. There's a laptop underneath, but try as I might, I can't get into it. It's not running an OS I'm familiar with- possibly some exotic form of Linux. Not that it matters. Without a password, there's not much I can do with it here. I shut the lid, and spot something I'd overlooked: a sheet of paper, half buried under the newspaper clippings. It was mostly covered in doodles, something which caused me to skip over it earlier. But I've realized something: it's not connected to the newspaper clippings, but the laptop. Someone sitting at the desk had needed something to write on, and he'd torn a page out of a notebook- and not carefully, either.
Beneath a sketch of a car and next to a woman with gravity-defying proportions is a string of numbers and a word written in a far heavier hand: sulfur. There's something familiar about the numbers, and it takes me a minute to place them, because they don't belong here. They're case numbers, and they're ones I've filled in on innumerable forms recently- they all relate to the Canary factory murders.
I turn the paper over, but there's nothing else written on it. I set it aside, then look over at the map. Someone had made a half-assed attempt at folding it up before giving up and tossing it to the far end of the table. I pull it open, unsurprised to find that it's of Miami. Someone circled the location of the Canary factory. There is an X over the nightclub and a third spot about two miles north of it. I'm not entirely sure of the significance. If there is a connection there, it's not one Miami Metro has made. But I'm more interested in the last mark- a place circled three or four times in pen. The ghost towers.
My ghost towers, to be precise.
At least it's convenient.
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