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He feels like he's being marched to his execution. With the way things are going, that will certainly happen sooner rather than later.
What will they tell Debra?
The polished wooden trophy box is on the table in front of Lundy and Matthews and some other nameless feds. There is one rolling chair positioned for Dexter.
It almost feels like a betrayal, for all the slides helped him to manage the chaos and bloodthirst in his body, they were here to make sure he could never do so again. Never feel relief from the blood pressing, trapped in his head.
"Please, sit down," Matthews says. Dexter sits. Everyone else is standing. He feels child-size, being looked down upon by all others, trapped. Probably some FBI interrogation technique to make him powerless.
"I'm sure that you've heard we have a suspect in the Bay Harbor Butcher case," Matthews starts, Lundy just watches, and so do the rest of the feds. They look like vultures in their suits, standing above and surveying him like they would a soon-to-be-dead animal.
He's handed white latex gloves.
"Put them on,"
His hands move of their own accord, putting on the gloves with more muscle memory than anything else. His gaze darts between Lundy and Matthews. He just wishes that they would get it over with.
"We now have the evidence to back it up. We need answers, now." Matthew has never been an intimidating figure before.
"Open it," Lundy instructs, Dexter does. Carefully pulling the box from its evidence bag and setting it down in front of him, front edges parallel with the front edge of the table. He snaps open the closure and lifts open the lid.
And just as every other time he'd opened the box he runs his fingertips down the slides, from the first in the back to the newest in the front. There are 46 drops of blood. 46 lives reduced to a spot of red on a glass slide. And several more reduced to memories.
More than 46 times he'd seen blood spread beneath plastic wrap and felt something.
It's beautiful. Grotesque, horrifying monsters transformed into a neat collection of little red dots in a line.
The beauty, calm, and satisfaction it gives him is tinged with bitterness this time. His slide collection was not meant for the glare of precinct lights and the gaze of strangers, or the gaze of friends for that matter.
"Explain it to us," Lundy says, genial but surely that's all an act to keep decidedly doomed Dexter on edge. His box of trophy slides sitting not in the cold shadows of his air conditioning unit but on the table under the light and scrutiny of the FBI and Miami Metro.
"My trophies," the words leave his mouth and he knows that he is the one to have said them, but he feels like an afterthought in the action. Like he's watching everything unfold distantly, but it's him in the chair. And it will be him getting the lethal injection. Everything comes to an end, especially dear Dexter.
"Yours?" Lundy asks, tilting his head. He looks mildly confused, Matthews looks outraged.
Well, shit.
They didn't know before, and thanks to his surety that they had found him out he'd revealed himself.
Damned Dumbass Dexter.
The idea of being single-handedly brought down by Vince Masuka seems a lot less embarrassing at this point. Better to be caught fair and square by forensic evidence than to admit your own guilt when you weren't even a suspect.
Harry's code may as well have been for nothing. He just got himself caught in one of the stupidest ways possible.
Why couldn't he have just grown up to be a drug addict? Then he could at least blame his poor judgment on substance abuse.
"If they're yours what were they doing cleverly hidden in the trunk of Sergeant Doakes's car?"
So that's where they got them, it seems that Doakes wasn't above breaking and entering.
"He's been tailing me since the ice-truck killer took Deb," what is the point of lying now?
"And why is that?"
"He knew something was off about me, that I was hiding something."
Matthews swears, turning away, disgusted.
"What were you hiding?" Lundy still seems intrigued, but there's recognition there too, he knows that Dexter isn't lying.
"This," With the word he feels like he has violently ripped the mask from his face, he feels raw and exposed. Dexter gestures to his trophies. 46 blood slides, that like him, are not used to the glare of the light.
"Jesus Christ, what would your father think?" Matthews demands.
"I am what Harry raised me to be," he answers. He knows what Harry guided him to be, he knows what his role is in the world. There is calm in him, maybe it is dread, or whatever comes after dread. He has already signed his death sentence, at least now it will be over.
No more hiding.
No more pretending.
He had finally taken the mask off, no more chaffing.
As sweet as that sounds, there is so much he's losing with this freedom. He almost wishes he'd taken beloved brother Brian's offer. He could have been free from the mask and the law.
But he killed the only person who'd ever understand him, the only one that could look at the monster and share in it. In the blood and the ritual and the emptiness.
He couldn't regret saving Debra though. She would hate him, but he could never kill her. Harry clipped his wings, he could never fly free, killing whoever he pleased like Brian. Even with the cage of the mask slipping open he could never escape the code.
He almost wishes that he'd tried to convince Brian to leave Deb alive, run off with his brother without killing her. But he isn't sure that Brian would have ever agreed to leave part of the family that stole Dexter away from him without the punishment of death. He wasn't sure how long Brian could carry him, he wasn't sure if he would ever grow back those flight feathers that Harry had taken. He had been a baby bird with a broken wing, nursed back to health as a housepet, perhaps he could never be wild and free like Brian.
Certainly not now, that the little bird was being placed in a different cage.
Harry raised him to be a successful and undetectable serial killer. But he'd always known, sooner or later, he'd be caught and be given the death that he deserves. And even if Harry never knew, Dexter did, that he, himself would be the last victim of Harry's code.
"Harry Morgan raised you to be a serial killer?" Lundy asks, curious. He must be thinking about whatever Deb told him about Harry, filtering this knowledge in to better understand why Harry did not pay much of any attention to Deb, and why he shielded her from the crime scenes and other cop-related things that he brought into their lives.
"Yes," Decter responds, meeting Lundy's gaze with his own dead eyes.
It's quiet.
Dexter closes the box of slides, snapping the latch shut and placing it back into the evidence bag with care. He removes the gloves, placing them on the desk in front of him, his jaw itching with distaste, it would be better, nicer, to have a trash bin to put them into but if he makes a move for it one of the feds will probably shoot him.
"If you've already placed on APB on Doakes, I'd recommend recalling it, you've already caught your monster." Dexter says, looking to Matthews.
"So you're confessing?" Lundy has yet to have any emotional reaction venturing from the realm of mild.
"Normally I would help you place the blame on whatever scapegoat is provided, but that ship sailed as soon as I told you that these trophies are mine," Dexter admits. He wasn't sure what they expected, if they thought he would fight until he was violently killed while they arrested him. He isn't sure what he thought he would have done either. He thought that at least wouldn't confess before they had any hard evidence against him.
He complies as a nameless fed cuffs his wrists.
"Stand," Matthews scowls, Dexter stands.
Matthews and Lundy lead the procession, Lundy to his front left and Matthews his front right. The nameless feds follow him, walking him through the bullpen towards the interrogation rooms.
For the first time in twelve years, Dexter walks trough his workplace without the mask, and for the first time, his coworkers finally see the monster that they thought they knew.
He is walking towards certain death, but at least he is free from the mask. At least he doesn't have to pretend to be anything more than a hollow, empty thing that desperately tried to fill itself with a fake life and relationships and the blood of fellow killers.
For the first time in twelve years Angel, Vince, and the rest of Miami Metro get to see what Doakes had sensed. The killer among them. They're quiet, like the dead. He has some idea of what will come after the quiet. Disgust, hatred, feelings of betrayal.
Lundy and Matthews break off to head towards Lieutenant LaGuetra's office.
He's being led down the narrow hallway when he hears Deb.
"What the fuck is going on?!" she screams, someone probably pulled her back to keep her from running after him.
And it hurts. Deb will know the truth he'd tried to shield her from for so long. Deb will hate him. He knew this too would come, but he didn't know it would hurt so much. He didn't know how much more empty the pain would make him feel.
He doesn't struggle or resist. Dexter Morgan sits at a metal interrogation table on a cold metal chair.
Death is closing in around him, slowly, certainly. A new prison to keep him, but somehow he still feels free.
He wonders what Brian would have done if he had been apprehended by the police. Probably something violent. He would go down in a bloody, messy blaze of glory, and he would bring down as many as he could to keep his freedom. But then again, Brian had been so careful in planning it all, if he hadn't come back to kill Deb he probably would have gotten away. But Brian was dead, killed by his baby brother.
And now Brian would be the only one of Dexter's blood family who hadn't been arrested.
A family of escalating crime. Both parents drug addicts, and both sons killers.
And soon they would all be dead. Only little Dexter left to die.
If there is an afterlife, he hopes that he will get to see his mother and Brian. Maybe Joe Driscoll as well. And Harry and Dorris. He thinks that Brian will be the only one pleased to see him. Who knows what Joe or his mother would think of him. He certainly doesn't know. But there isn't any use in worrying, he cannot take any of it back, and he doesn't want to.
He killed because he needed to, he targetted people who deserved death. His conscience is clear.
Dexter doesn't worry as he sits in the interrogation room. There is nothing much to worry about, his fate is already decided. It is out of his hands. And that in and of itself is such a relief.
As raw and exposed as he feels, he also feels exhilarated and finally at ease. A certain sort of refreshing feeling, like the feeling of a cool breeze on skin that had just been freed from a sticky, sweaty shirt.
He can breathe as himself and nothing more.
He does not mind waiting now. He has already confessed. There isn't any danger waiting for him in the coming interrogation.
If he were human he might care about how him being... himself would hurt his coworkers. But he has few emotional attachments to others.
He feels a little bit guilty for how this will affect Rita and the kids, but maybe it won't affect them that badly since the Lila experiment thoroughly fucked that up.
Perhaps what happened with Lila was for the best, Rita and the kids were already distanced from him. The shrapnel from his reveal shouldn't travel too far.
LaGuerta's face is pinched when she comes in. Lundy is behind her with a neutral expression. The camera feed is no doubt being watched by the whole precinct on the grainy TV set. His coworkers crowded around a screen to try to figure out how they missed the monster of Dexter Morgan and why they had missed it.
"Did you really kill them?" she asks, hoping it isn't the truth, Dexter tricked her well.
"If you mean the eighteen bodies in the field morgue, yes, I did," Dexter answers, knowing that his eyes are as dead as his many victims.
"Fuck!" She whispers, pinching the bridge of her nose and squeezing her eyes shut. "The blood slides, they're your trophies, yes?"
Dexter nods.
"So, every one of those slides is a person that you killed?" LaGuerta is making a valiant effort not to take his killing personally. After all, she stood up for him to her friend, Sgt. James Doakes.
"Yes,"
"You said that your father raised you to be a serial killer," Lundy speaks, breaking the direction of the conversation. LaGuerta blanches.
Dexter feels sorry for Debra, not only will she be betrayed by her brother, but by the father she looked up to so much.
"How exactly did he do that?" Lundy sounds intrigued like he'd been surprised, that he didn't think there were people out there like Harry Morgan.
"He taught me how to shoot, how to use knives, how to overpower someone and take them by surprise, what a cop looks for at crime scenes, how to chose and create a kill room. Harry gave me the code,"
"The code?" LaGuerta asks betrayal and confusion weighing down the tone of her voice.
"Harry's set of rules for how I should exist."
"He encouraged you to be a killer?" LaGuerta responds, tilting her head, trying to figure him out, trying to figure out why Harry would do it.
"He said that if I was going to grow up to be a killer anyway he could at least direct my knife for good,"
"You were going to be a killer anyway?"
"I've had fantasies about killing people since I was seven,"
"When did you first kill?" Lundy asks.
"When I was 20, 1991,"
"How many people have you killed?" LaGuerta asks, and Dexter can tell that she really doesn't want to know the answer.
"Fifty-eight," He says, wondering how disgusted Vince and Angel were with him at this moment. It was a shame, he liked them. If he was capable of friendship they would be his friends.
LaGuerta swears, stands and leaves. She looks sickly. Disgusting detestable Dexter.
"There are only 46 trophies," Lundy prompts, pulling out a small box of animal crackers as the door shuts behind Lieutenant LaGuerta.
"I didn't start taking trophies until my eighth victim, one slide has the blood of a father and son killing duo, I had to use Valarie Castillo's to frame her dead husband, and I didn't intend to kill Ken Olsen when I broke into his home,"
"That still leaves one," He was hoping Lundy wouldn't be able to do the numbers that quickly.
"...He wasn't a trophy to me." He remembers the dinner flatware, how Brian had been angry, disappointed, even pitied him. How he'd said that Dexter's life was a lie, that Deb would never accept him. It had hardly been three months and it felt like an eternity and also like only yesterday. He remembers sitting, curled in the corner crying as Brian bled out like all of his victims.
"Why not?" Lundy inspects an animal cracker, it's an elephant.
Dexter cannot answer. He knows why, at least a little bit. Brian was his big brother Biney. He was too much for Dexter to be able to reduce him to a cheap drop of red on a stolen glass slide purchased in bulk. Brian's death was necessary, but he... the decision to kill him had to be made. And Brian's life was not a thing that Dexter could stomach cheapening. He had hardly stomach going through with it, he couldn't have treated Brian like any other lowlife killer.
"Was he special?" Lundy asks, in a way that means he already has the answer, but still isn't rhetorical. It's uncomfortable having someone read him so well. Only Harry and Brian had been able to do that. "Why was he special?" Lundy asks, finally eating the elephant.
"Why does it matter? I've already confessed to 58 counts of murder," Dexter does not snap. He is allowed some scraps of privacy. He is a private creature afterall, it's how he's survived this long.
"Touchy subject," Lundy observes, biting the head off of a second animal cracker, it was either a camel or giraffe.
The universe worked in some sick fucking ways. Some seriously fucking awful and horrible ways. As if not catching onto being engaged to a serial killer wasn't enough.
Her fucking brother was confessing to the crimes of the Bay Harbor Butcher.
He said he killed almost 60 people. Fuck.
Jesus, Mary, and Holy Fuck.
60 fucking people.
Dexter. Who never even smoked.
Dexter, who was a big fucking dork and bowled for Fuck's sake!
He probably didn't even drink until he was 21, knowing him. But that was just it wasn't it? She didn't know him. He'd never let her get close.
Just like Dad never wanted to spend time with her, talk to her. He only wanted to bond with Dexter.
Dexter who was apparently everything Dad stood against.
But he said Dad knew. So how much of her brother was a fucking lie? How much of her father was a lie? How much bullshit has she fallen for over the years?
And how long did the universe take to set up this sick fucking joke?
She was officially the worst detective in the world. She could never get promoted to detective, she'd almost married a serial killer only to turn around and find out her brother has been one since he was in fucking medical school.
Debra Morgan needed some alcohol. The stronger the better. At this point she was considering the isopropyl shit Masuka kept stocked in the geek lab.
Dad fucking knew. Dad fucking taught him.
No wonder why he'd never had time for her. He'd been training the biggest and most successful serial killer in fucking history.
Had she not been allowed to go on hunting trips because Dad was teaching him to fucking hunt people?
Debra didn't want to think about it anymore. Any time thinking about it was already too fucking much.
Her brother was a fucking serial killer. And her Dad, who preached to them about the value of human life had apparently taught Dexter how to get away with murder.
"What did Mike Donovan do?" Lundy asks with narrowed eyes and a slight grin. A hunter reeling in his prize, and like Dexter, what he hunts are killers. But he is not an apex-predator like Dexter, he's more like animal control. He hunts and captures the predator and locks it up in a private or state-sponsored cage.
"He raped and killed three little boys from church choirs," Dexter knows that his prey, his victims deserved to be on his table, to be sacrificed to the needs of the Dark Passenger and dearly deranged Dexter.
"Mary Franklin?" Now that's a name he hasn't heard in a long while.
The kill Harry personally approved. The go-ahead 20-year-old Dexter wasn't sure at the time that he'd ever get. And she thought she was doing good, but she targetted the wrong group, she went after those who might want to die, and not those who deserved to end.
"She worked as a nurse at a hospital and used her position to overmedicate patients and kill them by morphine overdoses,"
"You do your research huh?" It's a rhetorical question, Lundy knew from the second he arrived to eighteen sets of remains that his killer had known each and every victim enough to put them together in the cold depths of the ocean.
"I do," Dexter acknowledges.
"So, that case you fudged up the blood work on, was that really a product of being overworked?"
"No, it wasn't a mistake, I needed a kill,"
"How many times have you sabotaged a police investigation?"
"Ten to twenty times, mostly on your case against me, though,"
"Understandable, you don't seem the type to want to be caught,"
"That's because I'm not,"
"But you still did," Lundy's little grin is a mockery, trying to goad something out of demented Dexter.
"In my defense, I'd thought that you'd already caught me, my trophies were missing and you had them, I was escorted in to see them with my boss's boss and the lead FBI personnel on the case," Dexter explains, the secrecy of the new evidence had helped their case more than they thought it would.
"You would let us chase down an innocent man?" Lundy should not be surprised by that, Dexter is a creature of survival afterall.
"Harry's first rule; don't get caught," Dexter answers.
"I just don't get it, how could it be Dexter?" Vince Masuka mutters, leaning against Detective Batista's desk.
"Amen to that, brother," Angel sighs, sitting down heavily.
"He was just a vanilla nerd, and he wasn't even violent or have a belief system,"
"And I thought I was feeling sick when we confirmed it had to be one of us," Angel has his face in his hands.
"Well, 'one of us' was still distant enough that it could be someone who wasn't our friend," Vince bites back, lamely.
"Was he our friend?" Angel asks.
"Angel, bro, I do not want to think about that," Vince looks green. He's going to be sick.
"I hear you," Angel adds.
"Fuck, I don't even wanna know how Morgan is taking this,"
"Don't remind me, can you even imagine having your only family turn out to be a killer?" Angel continues, he and Masuka both unaware that the officer they were discussing was in hearing-range, in the precinct's kitchenette.
"It's bad enough with what happened with the Ice-Truck Killer," Masuka adds.
"I'm praying that someone can give her a break from all this," Batista shakes his head.
Deb closed her eyes, pulling another two or three samoas from the purple girl scout box. At this rate, she was going to eat the whole thing. But why the fuck should she care about that? She was probably going to spend the rest of her life on the treadmill trying to escape sleepless nights and the knowledge that her brother, her brother, was a killer.
Dexter, who Dad didn't even let get into fights. Dex didn't even smoke.
Dex who always wanted to comfort her, even if he never knew how to do it. Dex who never had the right words but always tried anyway.
Dex who held her hand and let her wake him up whenever she had a nightmare. Dex who tried to help her with her homework even though she'd just screamed at him and told him she wished Dad had never brought him home.
Dex who tried everything to be a good brother even if Debra kept telling him that he wasn't really a part of their family.
Dex who was always part of the family, always her brother, no matter what she'd said.
Deb chokes another cookie down, feeling disgusted with herself and so unbelievably alone and blind.
Debra never comes to visit him or question him. And Dexter knows somewhere, deep down, that this was how things would go down.
That Deb would never associate herself with him again when she finally knew what he was.
That was why Harry forbid it.
As her big brother, Dexter had to protect Debra. Even from himself.
He knew that it would suck. But he hadn't known the horrible ache that his emptiness would take on.
He feels... lost.
He sits alone and doubts the code, Harry's teachings.
He wishes that Harry had tried to make him normal instead of just teaching him how to pretend.
What did you call an actor that so badly wanted to be the mask he put on?
A million profilers will and psychologists will study him inside and out to explain why he kills. But he doesn't care about that.
The only question he's ever cared about is; will I ever feel normal? Will there come a time where I don't feel the need to kill? Is it possible for him to feel something other than empty like a shattered window pane with jagged sharp edges surrounding a dark abyss?
He sees a few things when he closes his eyes. first the sight of his mother's blood everywhere the whir of a chainsaw and children screaming and crying. Second, Brian quietly bleeding out and the burn in his throat of guilt and sorrow. And Deb, looking at him with disgust and betrayal.
And when he opens his eyes he understands why Jeremy Downs did it.
Aching of emptiness, wanting to be whole, knowing it is unobtainable.
It technically isn't against the code.
Even if Dexter's victims weren't innocent.
Killing 58 people had consequences. There needed to be consequences.
Hopefully, the state of Florida knew that.