Jeff Lindsay - Dexter Is Delicious

ALSO BY JEFF LINDSAY

Darkly Dreaming Dexter

Dearly Devoted Dexter

Dexter in the Dark

Dexter by Design

DOUBLEDAY

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2010 by Jeff Lindsay

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

www.doubleday.com

DOUBLEDAY and the DD colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lindsay, Jeffry P.
Dexter is delicious : a novel / Jeff Lindsay.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Morgan, Dexter (Fictitious character)Fiction. 2. Forensic scientistsFiction. 3. Serial murderersFiction. 4. PoliceFloridaMiamiFiction. 5. Miami (Fla.)Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.I51175D48 2010
813.54dc22
2010013405

eISBN: 978-0-385-53236-5

v3.1

For Hilary, as ever.

Contents

Acknowledgments

It would not be possible to write these books without the generous help of some wonderful people who work in forensics. In particular I would like to thank Samantha Steinberg, Sharon Plotkin, and Lisa Black. If I got something wrong, its because I didnt ask them.

I am also grateful for the continued support of my U.S. editor, Jason Kaufman, whose wise guidance and patient encouragement with these books have been essential, and very much appreciated. And Dexter would never have happened at all without my agent, Nick Ellison; thank you, Saint Nick.

As always, life support and general well-being were provided by Bear, Pookie, and Tink, who make it all worthwhile.

ONE

T HIS PART OF THE HOSPITAL SEEMS LIKE FOREIGN COUNTRY to me. There is no sense of the battlefield here, no surgical teams in gore-stained scrubs trading witty remarks about missing body parts, no steely-eyed administrators with their clipboards, no herds of old drunks in wheelchairs, and above all, no flocks of wide-eyed sheep huddled together in fear at what might come out of the double steel doors. There is no stench of blood, antiseptic, and terror; the smells here are kinder, homier. Even the colors are different: softer, more pastel, without the drab, battleship utilitarianism of the walls in other parts of the building. There are, in fact, none of the sights and sounds and dreadful smells I have come to associate with hospitals, none at all. There is only the crowd of moon-eyed men standing at the big window, and to my infinite surprise, I am one of them.

We stand together, happily pressed up to the glass and cheerfully making space for any newcomer. White, black, brown; Latin, African-American, Asian-American, Creoleit doesnt matter. We are all brothers. No one sneers or frowns; no one seems to care about getting an accidental nudge in the ribs now and again, and no one, wonder of all, seems to harbor any violent thoughts about any of the others. Not even me. Instead, we all cluster at the glass, looking at the miraculous commonplace in the next room.

Are these human beings? Can this really be the Miami I have always lived in? Or has some strange physics experiment in an underground supercollider sent us all to live in Bizarro World, where everyone is kind and tolerant and happy all the time?

Where is the joyfully homicidal crowd of yesteryear? Where are the well-armed, juiced-up, half-crazed, ready-to-kill friends of my youth? Has all this changed, vanished, washed away forever in the light from yonder window?

What fantastic vision beyond the glass has taken a hallway filled with normal, wicked, face-breaking, neck-snapping humans and turned them into a clot of bland and drooling happy-wappys?

Unbelieving, I look again, and there it is. There it still is. Four neat rows of pink and brown, tiny wiggling creatures, so small and prunish and uselessand yet it is they who have turned this crowd of healthy, kill-crazy humans into a half-melted splotch of dribbling helplessness. And beyond this mighty feat of magic, even more absurd and dramatic and unbelievable, one of those tiny pink lumps has taken our Dark Dabbler, Dexter the Decidedly Dreadful, and made him, too, into a thing of quiet and contemplative chin spittle. And there it lies, waving its toes at the strip lights, utterly unaware of the miracle it has performedunaware, indeed, even of the very toes it wiggles, for it is the absolute Avatar of Unawareand yet, look what it has done in all its unthinking, unknowing wigglehood. Look at it there, the small, wet, sour-smelling marvel that has changed everything.

Lily Anne .

Three small and very ordinary syllables. Sounds with no real meaningand yet strung together and attached to the tiny lump of flesh that squirms there on its pedestal, it has performed the mightiest of magical feats. It has turned Dexter Dead for Decades into something with a heart that beats and pumps true life, something that almost feels, that so very nearly resembles a human being

There: It waves one small and mighty hand and that New Thing inside Dexter waves back. Something turns over and surges upward into the chest cavity, bounces off the ribs and attacks the facial muscles, which now spread into a spontaneous and unpracticed smile. Heavens above, was that really an emotion? Have I fallen so far, so fast?

Yes, apparently I have. There it goes again.

Lily Anne .

Your first? says a voice beside me, and I glance to my leftquickly, so as not to miss a single second of the spectacle on the far side of the window. A stocky Latin man stands there in jeans and a clean work shirt with M ANNY stitched over the pocket.

Yes, I say, and he nods.

I got three, he says, and smiles. I dont get tired of it, either.

No, I say, looking back at Lily Anne. How could you? She is moving her other hand nowand now both at the same time! What a remarkable child.

Two boys, he says, shaking his head, and adds, and at last, a girl. And I can tell from the tone of his voice that this thought makes him smile and I sneak another glance at him; sure enough, his face is stretched into an expression of happy pride that is nearly as stupid-looking as my own. Boys can be so dumb, he says. I really wanted a girl this time, and His smile stretches even wider and we stand together for several minutes in companionable silence, contemplating our bright and beautiful girls beyond the glass.

Lily Anne .

Lily Anne Morgan. Dexters DNA, living and moving on through time to another generation, and more, into the far-flung future, a day beyond imaginationtaking the very essence of all that is me and moving it forward past the clock-fingered reach of death, sprinting into tomorrow wrapped in Dexters chromosomesand looking very good doing it. Or so it seems to her loopy father.

Everything has changed. A world with Lily Anne Morgan in it is so completely unknown: prettier, cleaner, neater edges, brighter colors. Things taste better now, even the Snickers bar and cup of vending machine coffee, all I have had for twenty-four hours. The candy bars flavor was far more subtle than I had known before, and the coffee tasted of hope. Poetry flows into my icy cold brain and trickles down to my fingertips, because all is new and wonderful now. And far beyond the taste of the coffee is the taste of life itself. Now it is something to nurture, protect, and delight in. And the thought comes from far out beyond bizarre that perhaps life is no longer something to feed on in the terrible dark frenzy of joy that has defined me until this new apocalyptic moment. Maybe Dexters world should die now, and a new world of pink delight will spring from the ashes. And the old and terrible need to slash the sheep and scatter the bones, to spin through the wicked night like a thresher, to seed the moonlight with the tidy leftovers of Dexters Dark Desiring? Maybe its time to let it go, time to let it drain away until it is all gone, vanished utterly.