Dexter in the Dark, page 17
There were two squad cars at the university ahead of me, and the four officers had already cordoned off the area around the Lowe Art Museum and pushed back the growing crowd. A squat, powerful-looking cop with a shaved head came over to meet me, and pointed toward the back of the building.
The body was in a clump of vegetation behind the gallery. Deborah was talking to someone who looked like a student, and Vince Masuoka was squatting beside the left leg of the body and poking carefully with a ballpoint pen at something on the ankle. The body could not be seen from the road, but even so you could not really say it had been hidden. It had obviously been roasted like the others, and it was laid out just like the first two, in a stiff formal position, with the head replaced by a ceramic bull’s head. And once again, as I looked at it I waited by reflex for some reaction from within. But I heard nothing except the gentle tropical wind blowing through my brain. I was still alone.
As I stood in huffish thought, Deborah came roaring over to me at full volume. “Took you long enough,” she snarled. “Where have you been?”
“Macramé class,” I said. “It’s just like the others?”
“Looks like it,” she said. “What about it, Masuoka?”
“I think we got a break this time,” Vince said.
“About fucking time,” Deborah said.
“There’s an ankle bracelet,” Vince said. “It’s made of platinum, so it didn’t melt off.” He looked up at Deborah and gave her his terribly phony smile. “It says Tammy on it.”
Deborah frowned and looked over to the side door of the gallery. A tall man in a seersucker jacket and bow tie stood there with one of the cops, looking anxiously at Deborah. “Who’s that guy?” she asked Vince.
“Professor Keller,” he told her. “Art history teacher. He found the body.”
Still frowning, Deborah stood up and beckoned the uniformed cop to bring the professor over.
“Professor…?” Deborah said.
“Keller. Gus Keller,” the professor said. He was a good-looking man in his sixties with what looked like a dueling scar on his left cheek. He didn’t appear to be about to faint at the sight of the body.
“So you found the body here,” Deb said.
“That’s right,” he said. “I was coming over to check on a new exhibit-Mesopotamian art, actually, which is interesting-and I saw it here in the shrubbery.” He frowned. “About an hour ago, I guess.”
Deborah nodded as if she already knew all that, even the Mesopotamian part, which was a standard cop trick designed to make people eager to add new details, especially if they might be a little bit guilty. It didn’t appear to work on Keller. He simply stood and waited for another question, and Deborah stood and tried to think of one. I am justly proud of my hard-earned artificial social skills, and I didn’t want the silence to turn awkward, so I cleared my throat, and Keller looked at me.
“What can you tell us about the ceramic head?” I asked him. “From the artistic point of view.” Deborah glared at me, but she may have been jealous that I thought of the question instead of her.
“From the artistic point of view? Not much,” Keller said, looking down at the bull’s head by the body. “It looks like it was done in a mold, and then baked in a fairly primitive kiln. Maybe even just a big oven. But historically, it’s much more interesting.”
“What do you mean interesting?” Deborah snapped at him, and he shrugged.
“Well, it’s not perfect,” Keller said. “But somebody tried to recreate a very old stylized design.”
“How old?” Deborah said. Keller raised an eyebrow and shrugged, as if to say she had asked the wrong question, but he answered.
“Three or four thousand years old,” he said.
“That’s very old,” I offered helpfully, and they both looked at me, which made me think I ought to add something halfway clever, so I said, “And what part of the world would it be from?”
Keller nodded. I was clever again. “ Middle East,” he said. “We see a similar motif in Babylonia, and even earlier around Jerusalem. The bull head appears to be attached to the worship of one of the elder gods. A particularly nasty one, really.”
“Moloch,” I said, and it hurt my throat to say that name.
Deborah glared at me, absolutely certain now that I had been holding out on her, but she looked back at Keller as he continued to talk.
“Yes, that’s right,” he said. “Moloch liked human sacrifice. Especially children. It was the standard deal: sacrifice your child and he would guarantee a good harvest, or victory over your enemies.”
“Well, then, I think we can look forward to a very good harvest this year,” I said, but neither one of them appeared to think that was worth even a tiny smile. Ah well, you do what you can to bring a little cheer into this dreary world, and if people refuse to respond to your efforts it’s their loss.
“What’s the point of burning the bodies?” Deborah demanded.
Keller smiled briefly, kind of a professorial thanks-for-asking smile. “That’s the whole key to the ritual,” he said. “There was a huge bull-headed statue of Moloch that was actually a furnace.”
I thought of Halpern and his “dream.” Had he known about Moloch beforehand, or had it come to him the way the music came to me? Or was Deborah right all along and he had actually been to the statue and killed the girls-as unlikely as that seemed now?
“A furnace,” said Deborah, and Keller nodded. “And they toss the bodies in there?” she said, with an expression that indicated she was having trouble believing it, and it was all his fault.
“Oh, it gets much better than that,” Keller said. “They delivered the miracle in the ritual. Very sophisticated flummery, in fact. But that’s why Moloch had such lasting popularity-it was convincing, and it was exciting. The statue had arms that stretched out to the congregation. When you placed the sacrifice in his arms, Moloch would appear to come to life and eat the sacrifice-the arms would slowly raise up the victim and place it in his mouth.”
“And into the furnace,” I said, not wanting to be left out any longer, “while the music played.”
Deborah looked at me strangely, and I realized that no one else had mentioned music, but Keller shrugged it off and answered.
“Yes, that’s right. Trumpets and drums, singing, all very hypnotic. Climaxing as the god lifted the body up to its mouth and dropped it. Into the mouth and you fall down into the furnace. Alive. It can’t have been much fun for the victim.”
I believed what Keller said-I heard the soft throb of the drums in the distance, and it wasn’t much fun for me, either.
“Does anybody still worship this guy?” Deborah asked.
Keller shook his head. “Not for two thousand years, as far as I know,” he said.
“Well then, what the hell,” Deborah said. “Who’s doing this?”
“It isn’t any kind of secret,” Keller said. “It’s a pretty well-documented part of history. Anybody could have done a little research and found out enough to do something like this.”
“But why would they?” Deborah said.
Keller smiled politely. “I’m sure I don’t know,” he said.
“So what the hell good does any of that do me?” she said, with a tone that suggested it was Keller’s job to come up with an answer.
He gave her a kindly professor smile. “It never hurts to know things,” he said.
“For instance,” I said, “we know that somewhere there must be a big statue of a bull with a furnace inside.”
Deborah snapped her head around so that she faced me.
I leaned close to her and said softly, “Halpern.” She blinked at me and I could see she hadn’t thought of that yet.
“You think it wasn’t a dream?” she demanded.
“I don’t know what to think,” I said. “But if somebody is doing this Moloch thing for real, why wouldn’t he do it with all the proper equipment?”
“Goddamn it,” Deborah said. “But where could you hide something like that?”
Keller coughed with a certain delicacy. “I’m afraid there’s more to it than that,” he said.
“Like what?” Deborah demanded.
“Well, you’d have to hide the smell, too,” he said. “The smell of cooking human bodies. It lingers, and it’s rather unforgettable.” He sounded a little bit embarrassed and he shrugged.
“So we’re looking for a gigantic smelly statue with a furnace inside,” I said cheerfully. “That shouldn’t be too hard to find.”
Deborah glared at me, and once again I had to feel a little disappointed at her heavy-handed approach to life-especially since I would almost certainly join her as a permanent resident in the Land of Gloom if the Dark Passenger refused to behave and come out of hiding.
“Professor Keller,” she said, turning away from me and completing the abandonment of her poor brother, “is there anything else about this bull shit that might help us?”
It was certainly a clever enough remark to be encouraging, and I almost wished I had said it, but it appeared to have no effect on Keller, nor even on Deborah herself, who looked as though she was unaware that she had said something notable. Keller merely shook his head.
“It’s not really my area, I’m afraid,” he said. “I know just a little background stuff that affects the art history. You might check with somebody in philosophy or comparative religion.”
“Like Professor Halpern,” I whispered again, and Deborah nodded, still glaring.
She turned to go and luckily remembered her manners just in time; she turned back to Keller and said, “You’ve been very helpful, Dr. Keller. Please let me know if you think of anything else.”
“Of course,” he said, and Debs grabbed my arm and propelled me onward.
“Are we going back to the registrar’s office?” I asked politely as my arm went numb.
“Yeah,” she said. “But if there’s a Tammy enrolled in one of Halpern’s classes, I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
I pulled the tattered remnants of my arm from her grip. “And if there isn’t?”
She just shook her head. “Come on,” she said.
But as I passed by the body once more, something clutched at the leg of my pants, and I looked down.
“Ahk,” Vince said to me. He cleared his throat. “Dexter,” he said, and I raised an eyebrow. He flushed and let go of my pants. “I have to talk to you,” he said.
“By all means,” I said. “Can it wait?”
He shook his head. “It’s pretty important,” he said.
“Well, all right then.” I took the three steps back to where he was still squatting beside the body. “What is it?”
He looked away, and as unlikely as it was that he would show real emotion, his face flushed even more. “I talked to Manny,” he said.
“Wonderful. And yet you still have all your limbs,” I said.
“He, ahm,” Vince said. “He wants to make a few changes. Ahm. In the menu. Your menu. For the wedding.”
“Aha,” I said, in spite of how corny it sounds to say “Aha” when you are standing beside a dead body. I just couldn’t help myself. “By any chance, are these expensive changes?”
Vince refused to look up at me. He nodded his head. “Yes,” he said. “He said he’s had an inspiration. Something really new and different.”
“I think that’s terrific,” I said, “but I don’t think I can afford inspiration. We’ll have to tell him no.”
Vince shook his head again. “You don’t understand. He only called because he likes you. He says the contract allows him to do whatever he wants.”
“And he wants to raise the price a wee bit?”
Vince was definitely blushing now. He mumbled a few syllables and tried to look away even further. “What?” I asked him. “What did you say?”
“About double,” he said, very quietly, but at least audible.
“Double,” I said.
“Yes.”
“That’s $500 a plate,” I said.
“I’m sure it will be very nice,” said bright-red Vince.
“For $500 a plate it had better be more than nice. It had better park the cars, mop the floor, and give all the guests a back rub.”
“This is cutting-edge stuff, Dexter. You’ll probably get your wedding in a magazine.”
“Yes, and it will probably be Bankruptcy Today. We have to talk to him, Vince.”
He shook his head and continued to look at the grass. “I can’t,” he said.
Humans are wonderful combinations of silly, ignorant, and dumb, aren’t they? Even the ones who are pretending most of the time, like Vince. Here he was, a fearless forensic tech, actually within inches of a gruesomely murdered body that had no more effect on him than a tree stump, and yet he was paralyzed with terror at the thought of facing a tiny man who sculpted chocolate for a living.
“All right,” I said. “I’ll talk to him myself.”
He looked up at me at last. “Be careful, Dexter,” he said.
CHAPTER 22
I CAUGHT UP WITH DEBORAH AS SHE WAS TURNING HER CAR around, and happily, she paused long enough for me to climb in for a ride to the registrar’s office. She had nothing to say on the short drive over, and I was too preoccupied with my own problems to care.
A quick search of the records with my new friend at the registrar’s office turned up no Tammy in any of Halpern’s classes. But Deborah, who had been pacing back and forth while she waited, was ready for that. “Try last semester,” she said. I did; again nothing.
“All right,” she said with a frown. “Then try Wilkins’s classes.”
It was a lovely idea, and to prove it, I got an immediate hit: Ms. Connor was in Wilkins’s seminar on situational ethics.
“Right,” Deborah said. “Get her address.”
Tammy Connor lived in a residential hall that was only moments away, and Deborah wasted no time in getting us over there and parking illegally in front of it. She was out of the car and marching toward the front door before I could even get my door open, but I followed along as quickly as I could.
The room was on the third floor. Deborah chose to vault up the stairs two at a time rather than waste time pushing the button for an elevator, and since this left me with not enough breath to complain about it, I didn’t. I got there just in time to see the door to Tammy’s room swing open to reveal a stocky girl with dark hair and glasses. “Yes?” she said, frowning at Deborah.
Debs showed her badge and said, “Tammy Connor?”
The girl gasped and put a hand to her throat. “Oh, God, I knew it,” she said.
Deborah nodded. “Are you Tammy Connor, miss?”
“No. No, of course not,” the girl said. “Allison, her roommate.”
“Do you know where Tammy is, Allison?”
The girl inhaled her lower lip and chewed it while shaking her head vigorously. “No,” she said.
“How long has she been gone?” Deborah asked.
“Two days.”
“Two days?” Deborah said, raising her eyebrows. “Is that unusual?”
Allison looked like she was going to chew her lip off, but she kept gnawing on it, pausing only long enough to blurt out, “I’m not supposed to say anything.”
Deborah stared at her for a long moment before finally saying, “I think you’re going to have to say something, Allison. We think Tammy may be in a lot of trouble.”
That seemed to me a very understated way of saying that we thought she was dead, but I let it go by, since it was obviously having a profound effect on Allison.
“Oh,” she said, and started jiggling up and down. “Oh, oh, I just knew this would happen.”
“What is it that you think happened?” I asked her.
“They got caught,” she said. “I told her.”
“I’m sure you did,” I said. “So why not tell us, too?”
She hopped a little faster for a moment. “Oh,” she said again and then warbled, “she’s having an affair with a professor. Oh, God, she’ll kill me for this!”
Personally, I didn’t think Tammy would be killing anybody, but just to be sure I said, “Did Tammy wear any jewelry?”
She looked at me like I was crazy. “Jewelry?” she said, as if the word was in some foreign language-Aramaic, perhaps.
“Yes, that’s right,” I said encouragingly. “Rings, bracelets-anything like that?”
“You mean like her platinum anklet?” Allison said, very obligingly, I thought.
“Yes, exactly like that,” I said. “Did it have any markings on it?”
“Uh-huh, her name,” she said. “Oh, God, she’ll be so pissed at me.”
“Do you know which professor she was having an affair with, Allison?” Deborah said.
Allison went back to shaking her head. “I really shouldn’t tell,” she said.
“Was it Professor Wilkins?” I said, and even though Deborah glared at me, Allison’s reaction was much more gratifying.
“Oh God,” she said. “I swear I never said.”
One call on the cell phone got us the address in Coconut Grove where Dr. Wilkins made his humble home. It was in a section called The Moorings, which meant that either my alma mater was paying professors a great deal more than they used to, or else Professor Wilkins had independent means. As we turned onto the street, the afternoon rain started, blowing across the road in slanted sheets, then slowing to a trickle, then picking up again.
We found the house easily. The number was on the yellow seven-foot wall that surrounded the house. A wrought-iron gate blocked off the driveway. Deborah pulled up in front and parked in the street, and we climbed out and looked through the gate. It was a rather modest home, no more than 4,000 square feet, and situated at least seventy-five yards from the water, so perhaps Wilkins wasn’t really all that wealthy.
As we peeked in, looking for some way to signal the house that we had arrived and wished to enter, the front door swung open and a man came out, wearing a bright yellow rain suit. He headed for the car parked in the drive, a blue Lexus.
Deborah raised her voice and called out, “Professor? Professor Wilkins?”
