“That’s practically cheating,” I said. “So the real question is, why did it take you so long?”
“He lives in some shit-hole place in Tennessee,” Deborah said. “I couldn’t get anybody local to go check, see if he was still there.”
Jackie beamed at me. “So I checked Facebook,” she said. She gave Deborah a fondly amused glance. “Your sister didn’t know anything about it.”
“I heard of it,” Deborah said defensively. She shook her head with disbelief. “But shit. It’s fucking nutso. People put any fucking thing on there.”
Jackie nodded at Debs. “I showed her how it works, and we found him. Patrick Bergmann, Laramie, Tennessee. With pictures, and postings about where he is.” The smile dropped off her face. “Um,” she said slowly, “he’s here. In Miami.”
“Well,” I said, “but we already knew that.”
Jackie shrugged and seemed to pull herself into a smaller shape, abruptly making herself look like a lost little girl. “I know,” she said. “But it kind of … I mean, I know this is stupid, but—to see it on Facebook? That kind of makes it more real.”
I’m sure that Jackie was actually making sense—just not to me. Facebook made it more real? More real than the tattered body of the young woman in the Dumpster? Of course, I am not, and never will be, a fan of Facebook. It can be a very helpful way to track people I am interested in interviewing in connection with my hobby, but the idea of a Dexter page seems a little bit counterintuitive. Attended University of Miami. Friends: None, really. Interests: Human vivisection. I’m sure I would get plenty of friend requests, especially locally, but …
Still, I suppose the important point was that it was, in fact, more real for Jackie. It was hard work to guard somebody from a determined psychotic killer, and if the guardee didn’t believe in the reality of the threat, it was even harder.
So for once, Facebook proved to be practical. Better, it also gave us a photo of our new friend Patrick. Like I said, it was practically cheating.
“Could I see his picture?” I said.
Deborah’s mouth twitched into a slight smile, and she handed me a sheet of paper from her desk. It was a printout of a picture from Facebook and it showed a guy in his twenties, squatting down beside a deer. The deer looked very, very dead, and the guy looked just a little too happy about it. I have seen enough Hunting Trophy pictures to know what they are supposed to look like: Noble Beast settling into Eternal Rest while the Mighty Hunter stands beside it, clutching his rifle and looking solemnly proud.
This picture was nothing like that. To begin with, the deer was not merely dead; it was eviscerated. The body cavity had been opened up and emptied out, and the Mighty Hunter’s arms were covered with its blood almost up to his shoulders. He held up what looked like a bowie knife and smirked at the camera, a coil of intestines at his feet.
I tried to focus on his face, and as I studied his features the Passenger muttered sibilant encouragement. Patrick Bergmann was not an awful-looking person—wiry, athletic build, dirty-blond hair in a shaggy cut, regular features—but something about him was not quite right. Beyond his obvious enjoyment of the horrible blood-soaked mess he wallowed in, his eyes were open just a little too wide, and his smirk had an unsettling feeling to it, as if he was posing naked for the first time and liking it. His face was saying, just as clearly as possible, that this was a portrait of the real Him, his Secret Self. This was who he was, somebody who lived to feel the blood run down his blade and crouch in the viscera piled at his feet. I did not need to hear the Passenger chanting, One of Us, One of Us, to know what he was.
I tuned back in to the conversation as Deborah said, “Which means we gotta tell Anderson about this, too. I mean, we got an ID, an actual fucking photo.…” She held up both hands, palms up: portrait of a helpless detective. “I can’t sit on that,” she said.
Jackie looked dismayed, and then she actually wrung her hands. I had always thought “wringing your hands” was only an expression, or at most something actors did in old movies—but Jackie did it. She lifted both hands chest-high and shook them from the wrist, and I very clearly thought, Wow. She’s wringing her hands.
“Isn’t that kind of, oh, you know,” Jackie said, “pushing our luck?”
“You gave Anderson your file already?” I said.
Deborah nodded. “First thing this morning,” she said.
“And what happened?”
She made a face and then added, rather grudgingly, “Just like you said. He stuck it in a drawer—didn’t even wait for me to leave the room.”
“Well, then,” I said. “This shouldn’t be a problem.”
“Yes, but, I mean,” Jackie said, and she looked very worried, “it’s his name, and picture, and everything. Even Anderson can’t ignore that.”
Deborah snorted. “Man could lose his own ass in a chair,” she said.
“It’s just, the rest of the cast gets here today and tomorrow, and then we start shooting and—I mean, it’s my career,” Jackie said.
Debs looked dubious. “It’s your life, too,” she said. “That counts for something.”
“My career is my life,” Jackie said. “I’ve given up everything for this, and if I lose this show, too …” She took a ragged breath and grabbed her left hand with her right, squeezing them together. “I’m just worried, I guess.”
“I got no choice,” Deborah said. “I got to pass it on to him.”
“But he’ll ignore it,” I said. “And in the meantime, we will find Patrick and keep you safe.”
Jackie gave me a smile of gratitude that made me feel four inches taller.