Chapter 44

The patio door opened into the kitchen. Dexter closed the door behind him.

The little dog was nowhere to be found. It had gotten the hell out of dodge, apparently. Smart mutt.

He stood on the threshold for a couple of minutes, letting everything sink in. Trembling with a degree of excitement that he rarely felt.

Four years of obsessing about his wife. Four years of imagining how it would feel to get his hands on her again. Four years of dreaming about the terror he’d see in her big, pretty eyes as he choked the life out of her.

He had tracked her hundreds of miles, and now stood in her new home. So close. He could smell her scent in the air, like a bouquet of flowers recently removed.

It gave him a tremendous erection.

But mingled with the scent of his wife was the manly smell of him, her illegitimate husband. His jaws clenched.

He crunched across the shards of glass he’d knocked out of the window pane and walked deeper into the house, bearing the crowbar in one gloved hand like a baton. He swiped an apple off the counter and bit into it. He’d eaten a gigantic meal that morning, but anticipation was stimulating his appetite.

Thick shadows lay everywhere around him. Rain drummed on the roof, tapped the windows like insistent fingers.

It was a roomy home. Big kitchen with Corian countertops, stainless steel appliances, an island, and a large eating area. Hardwood floors in the entry hall. Dining room and living room furnished with nice pieces. A home office with a desk, comfortable chair, computer, and filing cabinet. A two-story family room with microfiber sofas and chairs, and a large, flat-screen television bracketed by shelves full of DVDs like The Color Purple, Love and Basketball, and Friday.

The rooms were painted an array of colors, soft reds and greens and earth tones. There was no clutter—the place was as clean as if a crew of maids had visited that morning.

Other than the cleanliness of the house, everything repulsed him. It reeked of a woman’s touch. A house was a man’s castle, and should have been decorated as such. His wife had decorated their downtown Chicago condo to fit his tastes—not hers.

This guy, Joshua, obviously was a pussy to let a woman take over the house.

Worse than the girly interior decorating were the pictures. They were everywhere. Photos of his wife. Photos of her posing at her wedding with her illegitimate husband. Photos of people that he took as their family and friends. A photo of a beach somewhere.

It disgusted Dexter. She’d taken all of these pictures after she thought she’d gotten rid of him. They were a shrine to her unfaithfulness to their marriage.

There were no recent pictures of her family, however, which supported her aunt’s claim that she didn’t know where her niece had gone. Looked like his wife had relocated and hadn’t told her new man anything about her true past.

Dexter would be happy to give him the 411.

A staircase led to the second level. He ascended the steps, entered the room on the left.

A study with a desk, a bookcase displaying dog figurines and more despicable pictures. It opened into a sparsely decorated jack-and-jill bathroom. The bathroom led to another room that had a simple futon and a small television; a guest bedroom.

He re-entered the hallway and headed toward the doorway at the end, idly scraping the crowbar across the wall as he walked, leaving an ugly black smear on the cream paint.

 The master bedroom. King-size bed draped in wine-colored sheets, and a thick, matching comforter. Classic, cherry wood furniture: nightstands, armoire, wide dresser with an oval mirror. More of those goddamned photos.

Dexter set the crowbar on the dresser, and slid out a drawer.

He spat when he saw the contents: silky red lingerie.

The motherfuckin bitch!

He slammed the drawer shut so hard that the dresser and attached mirror shuddered. He saw his visage in the mirror—lips peeled back to show his teeth, nostrils flared, fire flashing in his eyes—and realized that he had lost his composure. He’d wanted to lurk in the shadows, play it cool until the illegitimate husband arrived, and then pounce on him like a mountain lion—but the thought of his wife prancing around the bedroom in lingerie as she prepared to fuck this guy was too much for him to take.

He grabbed the crowbar.