A. A bank parking garage.

Q. Where is it supposed to be on the show?

A. Somewhere in Miami.

Q. When did we see it on the show?

A. In Episode 12 (the season 4 finale), "The Getaway".

After tracking down Dexter and confronting him on his job at the police department - and threatening his family - Arthur Mitchell (the Trinity Killer), leaves, smugly confident that he has bluffed down his opponent.

Dexter, enraged that he has put his family in danger, is determined to kill Trinity immediately.

So he follows him out to the parking lot and then pursues him in his car as Trinity drives away.

Along the way, as Dexter weaves through traffic to avoid losing Arthur, he accidentally clips another car, knocking off its side mirror.

Eventually, Trinity stops, when he pulls into the parking garage of Stafford Bank.

Dexter lies in wait for him, and when he returns, he knocks him out with a syringe and throws him in the back of his van.

In the process, he discovers a large amount of cash in an envelope, and realizes that Arthur was planning to get out of town, and wanted to withdraw all of his money from his bank account - leaving his family destitute.

But just as he is about to finish off Arthur, the guy who was driving the car Dexter clipped shows up with the police in tow.

Dexter, not wanting to be caught with the unconscious Arthur, stashes the cash on top of a garage lamp, then goes to talk to the guy and the cops.

That conversation does not go well.

When he tries to get the cops to go easy on him because he's a fellow cop, they're having none of it.  And the guy makes matters worse by recording the conversation on his phone camera, causing Dexter to lose his cool and smash the guy's camera.

As you might expect, the cops react by taking him down and dragging him off to jail, leaving the unconscious Arthur in the van.

Later, Dexter is released when Rita comes to get him, and he heads back to the bank parking garage.

But it's too late. Arthur is gone.

Dexter retrieves the hidden money (planning to return it to Arthur's family) and begins a long hunt to track down Trinity once and for all.

Q. What is it actually in real life?

A. A parking garage next to a theatre & convention center.

Q. Where can I find it in real life?

A. This parking garage is located at the Long Beach Convention & Entertainment Center. The official address of the center is 300 Ocean Boulevard, Long Beach, CA.

But this particular parking garage entrance (shown on the show, and in the photos below) is actually located on the south side of Seaside Way, across a driveway from (east of) the center's Terrace Theatre, at the south end of S. Hart Pl., between Elm & Locust.

Seaside Way is a small east/west street that runs between Ocean Avenue and Shoreline Drive.

The parking garage entrance seen on the show faces west. Dexter parks his car on the west side of the road/driveway that runs along the west side of the garage. He then runs southeast across that road, to reach the garage.

They put up a fake sign, reading "Stafford Bank", above the garage entrance. It covered a real sign reading "Public Parking". (However, that original sign is visible in the shot of Dexter running across the road.)

The blue ocean mural briefly glimpsed in the background is the giant Wyland Whaling Wall, painted on the outside of the round Long Beach Arena (which shares the Center with two theatres and the Convention building). It lies to the south of the parking garage.




I shot the photos below in December 2009.



The top photo shows the parking garage entrance where Trinity entered:




The middle photo shows the area where Dexter ran from his car to the garage, in pursuit of Trinity:




And this third photo shows the Wyland mural on the side of the Long Beach arena, glimpsed behind Dexter:






Here is an aerial photo. And here is a map link.

Q. How the heck did you figure out where it was?

A.  This was fairly easy. We caught a glimpse of the Wyland ocean mural in the background, and if you know Long Beach, that is an unmistakable landmark. So the only question was: where is that parking entrance in relation to the mural? It was a matter of triangulating a few of the buildings seen in the background (including the International Tower) to draw a line that ran right to the theatre parking garage.

Then, of course, I went there in person to shoot the matching photos you see above.