Chapter 58

Leaving Eddie twitching and moaning on the basement floor, Dexter rushed out through the back door. He didn’t want to get hemmed in by the cops, though he was increasingly confident that, with his growing invincibility, a squad of armed police officers would have failed to stop him. He hurried mostly because he finally knew where his wife had gone, and he couldn’t wait to get her.

Outdoors, racing across the back yard, Dexter invoked the cloak of invisibility as easily as a man wriggling a finger. Exercising the talent no longer required an intense act of will.

He leaped over the fence at the perimeter of the yard, which placed him on the fringe of a neighborhood park. He had left his car, the Mustang he’d taken from Tanisha, parked around the corner on a quiet, elm-lined residential street. News of her murder had probably gotten out by then, so he’d taken care to switch her license plate with a tag he’d found from another vehicle.

Back behind the wheel, Dexter dug Eddie’s Blackberry out of his jacket pocket. He’d kept the PDA after he’d swiped it from the punk, knowing that it would come in handy later.

Before he’d been incarcerated, he’d used a Blackberry that the firm had loaned to him. But that had been an earlier model, and didn’t have all the bells and whistles that this gadget boasted. This one had email capabilities, Bluetooth, web surfing, the works.

Using his thumbs, he opened the web browser and did a Google search on “Hyde Island.”

Several hundred results appeared on the small display. Several of them referenced the state of Georgia, and in a few he saw a phrase that mentioned a barrier island.

He remembered the beach photo he’d seen hanging on a wall in his wife’s house. It had meant nothing to him at the time, and he’d overlooked it.

Now, he realized that it had meant everything.

“Very clever, girl,” Dexter said. “For once, you surprised me.”

He clicked on a page that included the barrier island phrase, and was rewarded with a tourism site for Hyde Island, a barrier island off the southeastern coast of Georgia. The comprehensive site included a ferry schedule and driving directions from Atlanta. The trip would take four-and-a-half hours.

The clock in the lower right-hand corner of the display indicated that it was a few minutes past noon. A ferry had left for the island a short while ago, and the last boat for the day would leave the mainland at four-thirty in the afternoon.

Dexter smiled at the serendipity of his situation.

If he drove fast, he had just enough time to catch the day’s last boat.