Dexter's Final Cut Read Online Free PDF Page B

the near side, beside the Dumpster, where some of the sloppier garbage had spilled over onto the pavement. He was gingerly sifting through the filthy glop with his rubber-gloved fingers. He didn’t look happy. “Jesus,” he said to me without looking up. “I can’t breathe.”
    “Breathing is overrated,” I told him. “Find anything?”
    “Yes,” he said, and he was almost snarling. “I found some garbage.” He gritted his teeth and brushed at something that clung to his gloves. “If we get another one like this, I’m transferring to Code Enforcement.”
    I felt a small dark tickle of interest from the Passenger. “Another?” I asked. “Are we likely to get another one?”
    Vince cleared his throat and spit to one side. “Doesn’t look like a casual kill,” he said. “Definitely not a fight with the boyfriend. Jesus, I hate garbage.”
    “What does that mean, another?” Chase asked from his position at my elbow. “Do you mean it could be, like, a serial killer?”
    For a moment, Vince forgot that he was on his knees in garbage, and he beamed up at Chase with sheer adoration. “Hi, Robert,” he said. After a full week of seeing Chase every day, Vince still came close to swooning in his presence. But at least he wasn’t moaning “ohmygod” anymore.
    “So why do you think that?” Chase said. “That, you know, it’s not casual?”
    “Oh,” Vince said. “It’s just, you know. A little bit … baroque?” He waved one hand merrily, sending a small glob of garbage flying through the air and onto my shoe. “Oops,” he said.
    “Baroque,” Chase said thoughtfully. “Like what. You mean, um … what?”
    Vince kept smiling. Nothing Chase said, no matter how stupid, could put a dent in his bright and shiny armor. “Complicated,” Vince said. “Like, you know. He didn’t just want to kill her. He had to
do
stuff to her.”
    Chase nodded, and even in the shadows of the alley, I thought he turned a few shades paler. “What, um,” he said, and he swallowed. “What kind of stuff?”
    “Take a look,” Vince said. “It’s kind of hard to describe.”
    Chase shifted his weight from one foot to the other, clearly wishing he was almost anywhere else. But for my part, I could wait no longer. I would like to say that I felt an urgent sense of duty to the city of Miami, which paid me to investigate these things. But in truth, the weight of my professional obligations was nothing compared to the rising tide of eager whispers from the deepest basement of Dexter’sDark Keep, urging me to peek into the Dumpster and delight in what we might find. So I stepped around Vince to where Angel No-Relation was meticulously photographing the dozens of smudged fingerprints he had found.
    “Angel,” I said. “What have we got?”
    He didn’t look up; he just made a face of terrible disgust and nodded at the Dumpster.
“Mira,”
he said.
    I looked inside. The Dumpster was two-thirds filled with a delightful medley of paper, plastic, and rotting food scraps. Sprawled across the top of the fragrant mess was the nude and mutilated body of a young woman. I stepped forward for a closer look, and even before any of the details registered with me consciously, the picture clicked into focus in a dim dry place inside and I felt the Dark Passenger slither up out of its slumber with a stirring of leather wings and a rising sibilance of not-quite-words, whispering its way up the shadowed staircase from the deepest basement of Castle Dexter and onto the ramparts for a ringside view and softly saying,
Yes, Oh, yes, yes, Indeed
, and with a new sense of respect, I looked very carefully to see what had awakened the Passenger from its dark dreams.
    She was turned half away from me, slipping partway down the slope of the heaped-up garbage, but from what I could see in profile, her death had not been an easy one. A large handful of golden hair on the side of her head had been ripped out by the roots, revealing a partially