Work Text:
A foot was found on an office park bench next to a hotel parking lot. Another piece of Tony Tucci presumably, the most recent puzzle left by the Ice-Truck Killer.
The realization falls through his stomach with a heavy thud when he’s only a block away from the crime scene.
He knows where the foot was left. He knows this place.
He hasn't been back here in a long while, decades.
The severed foot is wearing a soccer cleat, sitting next to a soccer ball.
The last time he was here, this was still a soccer field. Not an office park. There wasn't an office building.
The last time he had been here, he was only ten years old. Just another boy at soccer practice.
July 1981. . .
Harry had taken at least a few photos of him practicing here. Practicing on the Blue Marlins youth soccer team. Before... what happened that summer.
The Ice-Truck Killer knows. He knows that the photos from the album aren’t nostalgic fond memories, but a lie.
It's a chilling certainty that's washing over him. His new nighttime playmate knows.
He must know what happened to Dexter here, in the parking lot 400 ft to the right of this bench. He must know; it was on the news, there was probably at least one Newspaper telling his story. What little they knew back then.
It’s not as if he knows any more than they had, all he can remember is before, and then after. Harry picking him up, Dorris and Deb hugging him tightly when he got home. Deb climbing into his bed in the middle of the night for weeks because that’s what she did when she had nightmares, and she was still so small and scared that any minute he’d disappear again.
Because she wanted to be there in case he had nightmares too. He doesn’t remember if he did have any. Most of the after blurred together.
But he remembers that the dark of his bedroom was easier with Deb there, to remind him that he was home, that he was safe.
He remembers everyone asking him questions. He doesn’t remember what they were. He doesn’t remember what happened, not really.
He remembers big arms, holding him off the ground, a large hand over his mouth, he remembers not being able to breathe. And whenever he tried to remember more-
“No one’s paying you to goddamn stare,”
He flinches back into his body, back into the present. It is just Doakes, blunt and unfriendly as always. It would probably be odd to thank the man, but he almost wants to.
Blue sky, clouds above him, fresh (polluted) Miami air. He's not trapped.
He’s not a kid anymore. He isn't ten years old. (He should have grown out of this, gotten over it).
“I thought Angel was taking point on this case, Sergeant?” he asks, pushing down the unease.
Doakes doesn’t respond. He looks away from the limb, up to his hostile coworker. The man is looking over his shoulder, towards the parking lot. That parking lot.
Curiosity and investigative instinct make his head turn to follow the Sergeant’s line of site. Even if something else in him screams that he shouldn't.
Two men with a large, dark van. One waves. (Had the man that took him owned a van like that?) (Or had he simply been thrown in the backseat of a normal car, or even the trunk?)
“They friends of yours?” he asks, focussing on the breeze on his face and the fact that he isn’t ten years old. They aren't here for him.
“Nevermind that, worry about this," the Sergeant gestures to the foot.
Dexter nods, listing off all immediate observations letting his work take his focus not-
He shakes himself. Not the time. He has work to do.
“Clean cut, again, almost surgical, between the tarsus and metatarsus, probably hasn’t been here for more than an hour,” he tries to tunnel his vision onto the foot, onto the bloody open wound of the ankle. Not on the soccer cleat, not on the soccer ball, and not on the green grass behind it.
“There’s blood,” The Sergeant points, “Guy gives us body after body with no blood, why’s he switching it up now?”
“He has some message that’s more important than his ritualistic need to drain the blood,”
“What is it?” That’s a good question. If only he could focus on it.
“I don’t know,” Blue sky, a light breeze through his hair, he isn’t ten years old. He doesn’t know why the killer had chosen this spot.
Was it because of what happened to him here?
“Well who’s he sending it to?”
“I can’t tell you that either,” his throat isn’t actually closing up, but it sure feels like it is.
The Sergeant says some other scathing comment before stalking off. Dexter forgets to hide his relief at that.
Here, of all places, he does not appreciate someone hovering over his shoulder.
At least he hadn’t parked in that parking lot. (He still had to roll down the windows of his car when he drove back to the precinct).
(He may not remember whatever car or van he’d been in, but even the thought of what happened makes him feel trapped and slightly claustrophobic).
Then he figures out that Tucci’s alive. (Held captive, being cut apart).
And whatever the message was before, this certainly changed it.
Change, he proposes. It will take three to make a pattern, but none of them have much to go on. Even if Dexter has more.
“How’d you know the park used to be a soccer field?” Angel asks later that afternoon.
“I used to play there, in a youth league,” he answers, trying not to think of the blue uniform (that he’d been wearing when-)
“You okay there?”
“Yeah,” he lies, “Just caught in memories,”
When he’s looked through the photo album back to front three times he opens his laptop again.
Maybe knowing about it will help figure out what the other killer is trying to tell him. The news papers probably knew more about it than he did anyway.
It’s in the archive section of the Miami Tribune. (He wonders when it was that they digitized these).
Missing Ten-year-old Miami Boy Found Safe (1981)
The title reads.
Dexter takes a deep breath and continues.
‘ Early Saturday (July 18th) ten-year-old Miami boy, Dexter Morgan, was found safe and whole in Sunset Corners, a thirty-minute drive from where he’d been abducted from a youth soccer practice Thursday afternoon. Nearly forty hours after he was last seen.
The boy was found hiding in the front garden by a Sunset Corner’s resident at four in the morning when they’d returned home from an early-morning emergency vet visit for their dog.
The resident tried to get the scared boy inside, but instead ended up phoning 911 and sitting on their front step until police showed up.
The resident, who wishes to remain unnamed when we reached out for comment, said that “he was shaking like a leaf, I’m just glad I spotted him, and that the night wasn’t cold, he would've like to froze to death.”
Dexter’s father picked the boy up himself and drove him home safe, as the officers on the scene did not want to scare the poor boy any further, and any attempt by an officer or social worker to get close had the boy trying to run.
The boy was found wearing pajamas, the soccer uniform and cleats he’d been wearing before he was abducted are still unaccounted for.
The Miami Police department, of which both of the boy’s parents are employed, says that there are still no leads as to who may have done this, but they are glad that he is home safe with his family, and that they will do everything in their power to find the person responsible.
The Morgan family has declined to comment or answer questions.
Either way, Miami is happy to know that the boy is home safe, and we hope that the perpetrator is caught soon, for the family’s sake and for the sake of every other child and family in Miami.‘
He closes the tab.
He hadn’t known how long he’d been missing for.
He hadn’t really ever thought about it. He had never wanted to think about it.
He still doesn’t know if knowing that helps.
He is no closer to knowing what it is that the Ice-Truck Killer is trying to tell him.
He is no closer to figuring out the next drop site, and no closer to figuring out what the previous drop sites mean. What significance any of the locations have besides the photos in the Morgan family album taken there.
And he doesn’t want to think about how Tucci is being kept alive just to be cut into pieces for some kind of personal message. (He doesn’t want to think about how Tucci must be feeling, being held captive by a killer).
He doesn’t even know if the office park had been chosen because of what happened July 1981, or despite it. He doesn’t like the uncertainty.
He doesn’t like not knowing.
Dexter isn’t sure if he was right when he assumed that the Ice-Truck killer’s intentions with him were friendly. He doesn’t know anymore. And he doesn’t like it.
He doesn’t know how much longer Tucci can survive this.
(He doesn’t want to think about how that may have been a thought he’d had about himself when he was young).
He doesn’t even know if the other killer thinks he remembers what happened then.
He doesn’t.
And he doesn’t want to.
He doesn’t want to remember and he doesn’t want to try to remember it.
Whatever the message is, he’ll have to figure it out without that.
He hopes that he can figure it out before Tucci is in too many pieces to put back together. Metaphorically at least.
Human beings aren’t puzzles or dolls, their pieces are not made for reassembly. They usually can’t be put back together when they’ve been physically cut apart.