Stalking Susan

by Julie Kramer

  She cleared up the mystery of how Garnett arrived on the scene so fast: he’d given her his cell phone number for emergencies.

  “He told me to call him if your dog wouldn’t stop barking. He told me to call him if your dog stopped barking suddenly. He also told me to call him if things seemed too quiet.”

  I had a feeling her calls wouldn’t be high priority for him any longer. I had dialed his number a few minutes before her visit, but he must have been screening me. I simply left a message, “I’m sorry,” and hung up.

  “You’re a good neighbor.” I gave her a quick hug. “I’m lucky to have you nearby. You better live to be a hundred.”

  “You keep my life interesting,” she said. “At my age, that’s worth something.”

  I was walking her home just as Malik and Shep ran up the sidewalk. Both had muddy feet. Cockleburs stuck in Shep’s fur.

  “Nice doggie,” Mrs. Fredericks said. “But where have you been playing?” She tried yanking a few prickles out, but I pulled him back so he wouldn’t accidentally knock her over and break her hip. I figured Toby could brush him later.

  Malik refilled Shep’s food and water dishes; by the time we got to Channel 3 we were two hours late.

  “Really? You made rhubarb bread for the newsroom?” Noreen seemed skeptical about my excuse for being tardy, but helped herself to a still-warm slice anyway.

  Back at my desk, I listened to two voice-mail messages. Neither from Garnett.

  The first message was from my mom, wanting to know if I would be home for Thanksgiving. She needed to calculate how big a turkey to have Dad kill. I liked a farm holiday dinner as much as the rest of the family, but she knew from past sweeps that I could never commit until the last minute. My dad got on the line next. “Don’t tell me you got to work ’cause you need the money. You need money like sheep need wool.” A strange analogy since he raised cattle. Unfair too—I hadn’t used the money excuse since college.

  The second call came from a low-level source at the Minnesota Attorney General’s Office, suggesting I check with the Minnesota Veterinary Board but not mention where I got the tip.

  So I dialed the vet board, bluffing a bit, and said I’d like to be connected to the person handling the Dr. Petit investigation. Instantly the receptionist transferred me to a female voice.

  “Hello, I’m calling about Dr. Petit,” I said, purposely deciding to be vague.

  “Are you a patient?” she asked.

  “Do you mean my dog?” I thought of Lucky and Shep and wondered if it was stretching things to call them mine. “One of them was a patient and one of them still is.”

  “What’s your name?”

  Now we were on tricky ground. Journalists aren’t supposed to lie, and I hated being tripped up on such an obvious question. I pondered answering “Riley Boyer,” but that really wasn’t fair, because I had never used my husband’s name before.

  By now I had paused so long the voice on the other end was suspicious. “Who is this?”

  I mumbled my name really fast. That just seemed to make her edgier. “Riley Spartz,” I finally admitted and got the reaction I expected.

  “Are you that snarky TV reporter?”

  The conversation disintegrated after that. No closer to answers after good-bye than I had been prior to hello.

  My AG source was no help. She’d simply overheard one end of her boss’s talk with the vet board boss and realized that the investigation was expanding. The same second I hung up, my phone rang.

  Garnett? Not Garnett. Toby.

  He was mad because I’d left Shep so dirty. He was also mad because he had to take all his animals to be revaccinated. He had stopped to pick up Shep on the way, and now he was going to be late because he had to clean up the big dog first. “Thanks a lot, Riley!”

  I apologized for Shep’s dirty coat. “But I don’t understand about the vaccinations.”

  “The Minnesota Veterinary Board called me this morning,” he explained. “Apparently Dr. Petit watered down all his vaccines so all my pets have to get shots again and may need to be quarantined for two weeks.”

  “Just your pets, or all people’s pets?”

  “All the pets that were patients of Dr. Petit. We’re supposed to bring them down to the vet board office today.”

  Now I knew what new direction the investigation was taking.

  “Toby, wait for me!”

  MALIK AND I stayed across the street in the van while Toby unloaded Shep, Husky, Blackie, and seven cats in various cages in the parking lot behind the Minnesota Veterinary Board building. The board hadn’t mentioned the hamsters, so he had left them home. He and his pets waited in line behind other people with animal companions.

  A freckled man and a black woman in white lab coats were immunizing the pets from a table of syringes. Malik was rolling. I was wired. I walked over to the makeshift clinic.

  “What’s going on?” I asked.

  Immediately the woman recognized me and screamed, “She’s the TV one!”

  By then Malik had a camera in their faces and I was calmly explaining, “You can either look like you care about protecting the public, or you can look like you’re covering up a public danger.”

  The freckled man made a cell phone call and a younger guy in a suit and tie showed up and huddled with them in the lobby for a few minutes. While I waited, the owner of a Saint Bernard crowded me, begging to have his precious poochie put on television so a dog food company could discover him and cast him in a commercial.

  The guy in the suit ventured over, introduced himself as the head of the vet board, and shook my hand. “I understand you’d like to do a story about the diligent efforts we’re making to safeguard the public from the unscrupulous Dr. Petit. We’re happy to cooperate.”

  I pressed record on my tape recorder and Malik pressed play on his camera as he explained how they had suspended Dr. Petit’s veterinary license after the pet cremation story. Trailing in behind the AG investigators, one of their agents had been giving the clinic a routine inspection when she noticed the seals on the vaccines had been broken.

  Dr. Petit hadn’t just watered down the medication; he was using water as medication. Not such big a deal for feline leukemia, unless you’re a cat. But a dangerous deal for rabies vaccinations. That’s why the board was readministering the shots now, and urging owners to isolate their pets if they saw any signs of aggression. In fact, the board had arranged for some kennels to donate space while they sorted things out.

  I called the assignment desk to tell them I had the lead story for that night.

  VET FRAUD EXPANDS…

  PUBLIC THREAT

  POSSIBLE…

  AUTHORITIES SHUT

  DOWN CLINIC…

  OWNERS UNLEASH

  ANGER.

  Next I talked to the producer about time. Newscast producers and reporters have different agendas. I wanted as much time as possible to tell my story. Producers want as many stories as possible in their newscast, which means they want stories told in the least amount of time. Under that formula, a high story count means more than an in-depth story. This kind of conversation normally gets nasty, with me pushing for three minutes and the producer insisting on one minute, ten seconds. But Noreen, feeling a stake in the dog folo and being the big boss, had already paved the way for two and a half minutes. The producer and I did agree on something: Dr. Petit no longer deserved to be called doctor. That would shave a couple seconds off the story.

  I FINISHED MY set piece on the late news. By the time I got back to my desk, my message light blinked and I listened to a tip from a law enforcement source alerting me that the Isanti County Sheriff was investigating Petit for involvement in an underground dog-fighting ring. “I’ll call again if we get close to making a bust.”

  Meanwhile Shep waited at home, locked in my library. Toby was allowing the big dog to be quarantined with me while he monitored the rest of the pack. I wasn’t worried, but Toby insisted he stay in the library until t
he rabies issue was settled. True, Shep enjoyed a good growl, but I attributed that to his contrary nature, not to some disease potentially fatal to him and anyone he encountered with his teeth.

  Back home, I let him out for a quick bathroom break and gave him some rawhide so he wouldn’t chew on my books. I glanced at the calendar over the kitchen sink. November 19, 2007. Cursed in more ways than one.

  Leaving another apology on Garnett’s cell phone, I felt irritated as well as regretful. “There might be enough blame to go around,” I said. “Maybe you should come over and apologize, too.”

  I considered he might be on stakeout, this being the night of the SUSANS anniversary. Habits are hard to break. I looked at the clock. Not yet midnight. I tried to push November 19 out of my mind. For a decade the Susan killer had been quiet. Whether because he was dead, in prison, out of the country, or reformed—who knew? I was anxious that my story might aggravate his interest. I’d left instructions with the assignment desk to call me if the police scanners picked up any homicide chatter. So far, nothing. No dead Susans. I looked at the clock again.

  I experimented taking off my wedding ring, but after a minute or so I put it back on. I curled up on the couch with a good book, actually THE good book, and would have appreciated a warm dog curled up at my feet. I substituted a warm fire and a generous glass of sherry.

  Chapter 13 of the book of Daniel reminded me why the Bible is the best-selling book of all time—it’s full of sex and violence. Definitely rated R.

  A beautiful woman named Susanna is married to an important man. Two judicial elders lust after her and plot to blackmail her into having sex with them.

  She refuses, saying, “It is better for me to fall into your power without guilt than to sin before the Lord.” They publicly accuse her of adultery and testify they saw her with a lover under a tree in her husband’s garden. She is sentenced to death.

  Enter young Daniel. God guides Daniel into questioning the elders separately, out of earshot of each other, but in front of the crowd. He asks them each the same question: Under which tree did you witness the crime? Each gives a different answer, thus sealing their own executions.

  Suddenly I knew what needed to be done and could hardly wait for morning.

  NO SLEEP. MY resolve didn’t mean I knew exactly what I was doing. While I had a clear idea what needed to happen, I had only a vague idea of how to accomplish my goal. So my mind raced past numerous options instead of focusing on a single solution.

  For Susan suspects, I gravitated toward Mayor Skubic for obvious reasons and Chief Capacasa, probably because of that second glass of sherry I drank on an empty stomach. I also contemplated a scenario that involved the mayor as killer, the chief as orchestrating a cover-up. Looking back now, the whole thing seems dotty. But at the time the conjecture made perfect sense to my befuddled brain.

  On some pretext or another I would interview them separately, asking each the same Daniel-like question. Their answers, while seemingly innocuous, would actually prove damaging and decisive. My mind raced more. Best to interview them simultaneously so they couldn’t compare notes. I’d need an accomplice. I could get our political reporter Cara Madden to interview the mayor while I interviewed the chief. Then I’d take her out to dinner to celebrate after the ratings book. I could use some girlfriends other than Mrs. Fredericks in my life. That’s the funny part about being on TV; half the town can know your name and you can still be lonely.

  Okay, occasionally I’m a bitch, and that probably has something to do with my lack of bosom buddies, but in TV it’s hard for reporters to develop friendships with one another. For one thing, we don’t work together. We work most closely with photographers, and they’re usually men. Second, the competitive nature of the job sometimes pits reporter against reporter. We fret over who’s better looking. We fret over who got the lead story that night. We fret over why I only got a minute of airtime and so-and-so got two. We fret over who gets to fill in when the weekend anchor is on vacation. We fret over the perks in our contracts. We fret over who gets the best out-of-town assignments. Instead of becoming friends, we become rivals. But Cara and I had both carved out our own news niches, and I didn’t see her as a threat.

  But what should the key question be? Reducing a heinous crime to a harmless question was the hard part. My mind kept racing. Torn notebook pages with scrawling followed by question marks lay rejected in a crumpled pile by my feet. I fought to stay awake.

  Probably because I now dreaded tomorrow, tomorrow came early.

  A heavy noise hammered my front door. And why not? Nearly every light burned in my house even though the hands of the clock read half past one. I recalled Garnett’s earlier words, “Bad guys never ring doorbells,” and deliberately walked away from the sound, opened the library door, and freed Shep.

  Just in case.

  CHAPTER 30

  One thing I have going for me, I don’t get headaches. A colleague once joked, “You’re a carrier. You give them.” Anyway, my lack of headaches explains the lack of aspirin in my medicine cabinet when Garnett showed up at my door.

  “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” he said.

  That was the closest to an apology I’d ever heard from his lips. While I whispered, “Ryan O’Neal, Love Story, 1970,” he kissed me on the mouth.

  It felt…wistful. Not passionate, but not embarrassing either. Interesting. Until I glanced up and was immediately haunted by the ghosts of Christmas past in the shape of withered mistletoe.

  Conveniently Shep broke us up and nudged Garnett inside.

  “He might have rabies,” I warned.

  “I’ll get the shots.”

  The fire was dead, but the room was still comfortable. During the past month Minneapolis residents sampled spring rain, summer sun, and autumn chill. Tonight winter joined the weather team with hefty flurries blowing through the door.

  “Beer?” I offered. “Hot buttered rum?”

  He shook his head. “Water and aspirin. My head is pounding.”

  Tonight he looked old enough to be retired. While I began a futile search for aspirin, acetaminophen, ibuprofen, or any sort of over-the-counter pain reliever, he stretched out on the couch. I came up empty-handed and went back to check if he would settle for a cold rag on his forehead instead. He had dozed off, his face scrunched against a pillow. Exhausted. Unshaven. Appealing in a vulnerable way. Too bad he already had a mother.

  His face felt warm to my touch. I decided to make a run to an all-night drugstore a couple miles away. A sweet gesture on my part, but if I could prop him up, he might be able to help figure out the perfect Daniel question.

  His Crown Vic blocked my garage door, so I grabbed the keys from his coat pocket. As I stuck them in the ignition, I noticed the GPS system and smiled. A high-tech crutch for his directional dilemma. The other homicide detectives had given it to him as a retirement present. Being a reporter means being a snoop, even among friends, so I scrolled through the GPS, checking Garnett’s previous destinations. They were a road map to his day. In some ways, better than a diary.

  Mine was the most recent address; I wasn’t familiar with the previous one, 4801 Minnehaha Ave. S. I recognized Garnett’s, Channel 3’s, the cop shop’s, and the Mall of America’s. I clicked on “4801 Minnehaha Ave. S.” and followed the car’s instructions. I figured a small detour wouldn’t prove too big a delay. Even though the snow was worsening, the air temperature felt relatively balmy.

  “Right turn approaching,” the GPS narrator told me. The windshield steamed up as the wipers wrestled sloppy flakes.

  The car stereo was playing a Roy Orbison CD. I gave Garnett credit for classic rock taste. Country or rap, now that might be a deal breaker.

  “Left turn in one mile.” The annoying computer voice was constant.

  In the background Roy sang about being lonely and knowing heartaches. I joined in the chorus. After all, I knew plenty about those themes.

  “Left turn approaching.” I p
ulled into a road leading to Minnehaha Park, one of the city’s oldest and most popular picnic spots. Damn, suddenly I remembered the lilies at Tim Moreno’s house. Once buried under autumn leaves, now buried under frost and snow. Damn.

  “Maybe tomorrow a new romance…” Maybe Roy had the right idea. Maybe Garnett and I deserved a chance. Maybe that was the sherry talking.

  “Destination on your left.”

  The park closed at ten. I wondered what Garnett had been doing here so late. Probably trying to work up his courage to face me.

  Minnehaha, meaning “laughing waters,” is named for its fifty-three-foot waterfall—another Minnesota reference from Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha. I could hear the creek still running, but it was much too dark and snowy to see any of the park’s natural beauty or historic Native American sculptures. Kids sometimes hang out after hours to smoke and drink, but not in this weather, and that crowd generally didn’t include anyone over thirty unless they were buying the booze.

  The parking lot near the Longfellow House was empty except for a tan SUV in the far corner. My headlights shone on its bumper as Roy sang a mouthful: “If your lonely heart breaks, only the lonely.”

  The license plate read SUSAN.

  CHAPTER 31

  Now Roy Orbison was running scared and so was I.

  A woman was slumped across the front seat of the SUV. Her face pale. Her eyes black. Her body limp. Definitely dead. My tracks were the only ones in the drifting snow.

  Without hesitation I did the right thing: I dialed 911 before calling Channel 3.

  While I waited for police to arrive, I snapped a cell phone picture of the body. Not that it would ever hit air, but just because.

  Cop cars beat our news cruiser to the murder scene by eight minutes. By the time a Channel 3 van rolled into Minnehaha Park, one officer had locked me in the back of a squad car and another had roped off the parking lot with yellow tape.