Dexter's Final Cut by Jeff Lindsay Page A

sorry,” I said. “If it’s too late, maybe we could, um … Is there? Some pork left for me?”
    “Pork?” Rita said. “That isn’t— Oh, of course there’s some pork. I wouldn’t let— It’s in the fridge. But, Dexter, really, you have to be a little more …” She fluttered one hand, and then began to pull off the rubber gloves. “I’ll heat it up for you. But Cody has been wanting to—I suppose we can see the movie tomorrow night, but still …”
    She hustled over to the refrigerator and started taking out the leftovers, and a great sense of relief washed over me. In fact, as the microwave began to heat my dinner and reignite the wonderful aroma, I actually felt smug. After all, I was getting an excellent dinner without having to watch another animated movie about penguins. Life was good.
    It was even better when I finally sat at the kitchen table with my plate and began to ply my fork. There were fried
plátanos
as well as roast pork, and tortellini in a garlic sauce, instead of the more traditional rice and beans. But I lost no time bemoaning the fall of an institution. I set to with a will, and in only a few happy minutes I was sated, and already sliding into the dopey half-asleep state that follows when you add a good meal to a clean conscience. Somehow, I managed to make it onto my feet and stagger to the couch, where I sloshed onto the cushions and began to digest my meal and think profound Friday-night thoughts.
    Because I was in such a deep state of contentment, I pushed away all the nagging disagreeable trivia of the week and concentrated on more pleasant things. I thought about the body in the Dumpster, and it occurred to me that a Dumpster was an odd place to dump a body that had been so thoroughly and distinctively whittled away—especially a Dumpster right there on the edge of the campus, a few blocks from the busiest part of downtown Miami. As I know very well, it is incredibly easy to put a body where it will never be found—especially here in the tropical splendor that I call home. Practically right outside my front door was a delightful aquatic graveyard thatwas nearly bottomless. And then there was the Everglades, with its lovely gator holes, and the scrublands so full of sinkholes—South Florida was truly a corpse disposer’s Paradise.
    There were so many wonderful options for dumping bodies, even for someone with the most limited imagination. And so, in my experience, when the leftovers are placed where they must be discovered, it is usually because discovery is an important part of the entire artistic statement.
Look what I did; can’t you see why I had to do it?
    I did not see, not yet—but just the thought of that word, “see,” reminded me of the most disturbing detail: the semen in the eye socket. There was no mystery about how it got there, but the
why
of it was clearly the most important piece of the puzzle. It was the consummation, the literal climax to the whole event, and understanding what made it necessary was the key to knowing who had done it.
    And as I pondered this in my pork-induced demi-doze, a soft and sibilant voice that had not been fed and so was not at all sleepy whispered one sly question in my inner ear:
Was she still alive when he did it?
    The shock of that thought brought me upright. Had she been alive at the end, when he ripped out one eye? Had she been watching with the other eye as he began his ultimate violation? I tried to picture it from her point of view: the unbearable pain, the shattering knowledge that Things had been done that could never be repaired, the slow and brutal approach of that final ocular indignity—
    Deep in the shadows of Castle Dexter I felt the Passenger jerk upright and hiss an uncomfortable objection. What, after all, was I doing? There was absolutely no point to such a meaningless act of imagination, and I was in very grave danger of trying to feel empathy, a completely human flaw of which I had only academic