Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  “Can I talk while you cook? There’s something else I need to tell you.”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s about the phone call you got.”

  I stopped in mid-slice. “Are you about to ruin both our appetites?”

  “I hope not. Listen, Alex. We traced the call to a cell phone belonging to a philosophy professor at the University of South Dakota.”

  I stared at him. “The killer is a philosophy professor?”

  “No. First off, it’s a woman. Plus, she was two thousand miles away when the girls were killed. She had nothing to do with any of it.”

  I threw the sliced mushrooms in with the onions and stirred. “So what gives?”

  “Last fall, the professor was at Benson for a conference. Three days of debating whether the universe exists, or some such junk. Anyway, she used her cell phone while she was here. Our best guess is that it was cloned.”

  “So why didn’t she report it stolen?”

  “It doesn’t work like that. I don’t understand the particulars, but the techies tell me that you just have to be within a few hundred yards of the phone while it’s working. You use a device to read the code number, and then you can program any old cell phone so you can make calls and somebody else gets the bill. Bad guys love them, because they’re untraceable. And when the owner realizes what’s up and tells the phone company, zap, they just ditch it and clone another one.”

  “Nice racket,” I said, and cracked four eggs into a bowl.

  “I’ll say.”

  “Why don’t they make the phones so you can’t mess with them?”

  “They keep trying, and the bad guys just keep figuring out ways to outsmart them. That’s one thing that’s strange about this. The professor had the latest technology, the most sophisticated encryption around for general use. Don’t ask me why she needed it in South Dakota, but that’s what she had. And according to the manufacturer, this is the first time it’s been cloned. They’re not happy about it.”

  “And you think the killer copied this lady’s phone while she was in Gabriel?”

  “More likely, he bought it from someone who did. It would take a lot of technical know-how.”

  “So it doesn’t really help you, does it?”

  “Sure it does. It’s finally something we can run with. If we can track down whoever cloned that phone…”

  “He might be able to lead you to the killer.”

  “Exactly.”

  I put the onions and mushrooms aside and poured the beaten eggs into the pan. “Can I ask you a question?”

  “Shoot.”

  “Why are you telling me all this?”

  “I figure I owed you one.”

  “For yelling at me the other day? I didn’t really blame you, you know.”

  “For a lot of stuff. For not trying to print the detail about the dog collar, for one thing. For not insisting on running the letters when we didn’t know if it was the right thing to do.”

  “You’re welcome. But the reasons you’re grateful also happen to be the reasons I’m turning into a crappy journalist.”

  “Who says?”

  “I say. I seem to be lacking that killer instinct these days.”

  “Alex, you’re right in the thick of this. You can’t be expected to treat it like a normal day at the office. You found the second body, for God’s sake. Then you had to see your roommate like that…”

  “And why is that? Just tell me that, Cody. Why do you think it is that it was my roommate who ended up dead, after I was the one who found the body? Why am I getting notes and fucking phone calls? How did this bastard know when to call me, like he knew the minute I walked in the door?” I was losing my grip all of a sudden, and I couldn’t stop. “Why is there a goddamn police cruiser parked outside my house? Why am I so goddamn fucking scared?”

  Cooking and hysteria are not a good combination. I tried to flip the omelet, which I can usually do in one flick of the wrist, and it ended up half in the pan and half on the stove. The part that fell into the gas burner caught on fire, and I had streaks of raw egg dripping down the front of my T-shirt. “Oh, shit.” I tried to rescue the omelet, but since I forgot to turn off the burner I only succeeded in singeing my fingers.

  “Jesus, Alex, what did you do to yourself?” Cody grabbed my wrist and ran my hand under the cold water. I was crying then, and not just because my fingers hurt. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Don’t cry. Come on. It’ll be okay.” I was really losing it, and Cody could tell. He patted my hair like I’d seen him do to Zeke, cupped my face in his hands, and murmured things that were supposed to sound comforting. “Take it easy, Alex,” he said. “Just breathe. I promise, everything’s going to be fine. We’re going to find this guy.”

  “But… But…”

  “But nothing. I don’t care who this son of a bitch thinks he is. We’re going to put him away.”

  “But…” I cast about for what I was going to say and wound up with nonsense. “But I ruined your omelet.”

  He stared at me like I was truly nuts. Then he just up and laughed, more deeply than I’d ever heard him laugh before. “You’re right. It’s a capital offense.”

  I felt myself starting to calm down. Unfortunately, when the hysteria moved out it left a hole that filled up with old-fashioned humiliation. I may even have blushed. “I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

  He was still laughing. “You’re lucky I don’t slap the cuffs on you.”

  I turned away, ostensibly to clean up the stove but actually because it was the closest thing to crawling into a hole that was presently available.

  “Alex? Can I ask you something?” he said after several minutes of silence. I turned around, and there was something in his eyes I hadn’t seen before. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it intensity. “After your… After Adam died. Have you been with anyone else since that happened? Are you with anybody now?”

  I wasn’t even tempted to give him the standard answer, which goes something like this: Are you out of your mind? Considering my track record, I’d just as soon get me to a nunnery.

  “No.”

  “Good.”

  “Good?”

  “Yeah.”

  I won’t try to fib. I’d sensed the chemistry all along, but I’d mostly put it down to the high-tension situations in which we’d always met. It hadn’t really occurred to me that he might be tuned into it too, or that he might do something about it. Also, I’d never been attracted to a redhead in my life. Despite these issues, Detective Brian Cody leaned over, put a hand on the back of my neck, and kissed me. Very softly, in fact.

  I might have slapped him across the face and called him a rat for taking advantage of a girl on the downside of crazy. I might have filled him in on my plans for the convent. Instead I kissed him back, openmouthed and hard, with the kind of gusto you get from spending an entire year sleeping with no one but a forty-pound dog.

  He was a good kisser, there was no denying it. You can always tell when you’re kissing someone who you have no business locking lips with—the rhythm’s all wrong, and you wind up clashing teeth and drooling on each other. It wasn’t like that. His mouth was warm and strong, and it kept coming up against mine just when you’d want it to. We kept going like that for a while, and I half hoped and half dreaded that Emma was going to walk in and bust us up. But that sort of timing only happens on nighttime soaps, and in the end Cody and I had to stop kissing and deal with each other.

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Wow is right.”

  “Where did that come from?”

  “I’d say, wherever it’s been loitering for the past several weeks.”

  “Oh.”

  “I’d probably better go,” he said, but made no move to go anywhere.

  “Don’t you want your omelet?”

  “No, I don’t want my damn omelet. What I want is to drag you back to my apartment and rip your clothes off.”

  “Really?”

  “Real
ly.”

  “My bedroom’s closer. Just upstairs.”

  He looked slightly shocked. But only slightly. “What about your roommate?”

  “She’s very discreet. And besides, she’s on the first floor.”

  “Are you serious?” I kissed him, long and hard, and it really set him off. The next thing I knew, he had me bent so far backward over the stove I was practically lying in the omelet pan. “Are you sure this is what you want?” he said against my lips. “Are you sure this is a good idea?”

  I pulled away from him, but only long enough to grab his hand and lead him to the staircase. “Probably not,” I said. “But you know what I’ve been realizing lately? Life is too fucking short.”

  14

  THEY SAY WHEN YOU FALL OFF A HORSE, YOU’RE SUPPOSED to climb right back on. Now, I don’t mean this as some sly description of what Detective Cody and I were up to in the boudoir, but rather in reference to the far less alluring subject of my mountain bike. For obvious reasons (sprains, stitches) I hadn’t gotten back on the thing since the day I fell off it, cracked my head open, and landed in the arms of a certain member of Gabriel’s finest. Frankly, I didn’t care if I ever saw it again. But three hundred bucks is a lot to blow on something you used exactly six times. And besides, if I didn’t bike I’d have to take up jogging again or my pizza habit was going to return me to my college-era physique. This was not tempting.

  So on Saturday, to prove to myself that my biking career wasn’t totally over, I drove to the Y to spend what I hoped would be a very few minutes on the Lifecycle. It was the first time I’d left the house since we saw Marci off, and just going outside felt good. It had rained off and on all day Friday, and when I went out the sky was still that shade of gunmetal gray that inspires so many Gabrielites to contemplate their own demise. The police car didn’t follow me—driving three miles to the gym in daylight was deemed insufficiently dangerous to my person—and on the way up the hill I got this weird jolt of giddiness, like a teenager breaking curfew.

  Or maybe like a kid who’d been at the cookie jar for eight hours straight. Because that was how long Cody and I had desported ourselves in my bedroom, pausing only to make the omelet that had gotten me into so much trouble in the first place. When we finally ate it off a tray in bed with a stack of English muffins, some clementines, and a Hershey bar, he was wearing my Walden County SPCA T-shirt, and I was wearing nothing.

  He hadn’t spent the night, since there was a uniform parked outside who was probably already wondering what the hell Cody had been doing there all day. He wanted to, though, and that in itself was good for a girl’s self-esteem. I guess neither one of us wanted our little interlude to be over, because we were having so damn much fun. He was a different guy for those eight hours, funny and sweet and all fired up, and maybe we both knew that once we went our separate ways that would be that. We finally called it a night at eleven, after doing the deed more times than I’m willing to admit. Suffice it to say that when I climbed on the Lifecycle two days later, I was not what you’d call entirely comfortable.

  So there I was at the Y, pedaling away at a pace that would inspire Jake Madison to compare me to his grandma. I was listening to my beloved Edith Piaf mix tape on my Sports Walkman, which had survived its trip over the handlebars strapped to my back. I wondered whether I should write a letter to Sony, maybe get myself into one of those testimonial ads. Hi, my name is Alex Bernier, and I’d like to say that if you’re ever flying down a mountain being chased by a serial killer, your Walkman won’t let you down. You may not survive, but your Sony will!

  I was contemplating what a career in advertising might pay when someone poked me in the arm. I looked up from the handlebars, and there was Gordon Band. He was moving his lips, but what he was saying sounded very much like the lyrics to “La Vie en Rose.” I pulled off my headphones.

  “… and can you please lose those goddamn…”

  “Huh?”

  “I said would you please take those goddamn headphones off.”

  “I just did.”

  “Thank you.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Looking for you.”

  “How did you find me?” He looked insulted. “You went to my house and Emma told you I was here. Nothing for a newshound such as yourself.”

  “Can we get out of here?”

  “Sure. Where do you want to go?”

  “Anywhere people aren’t sweating.” Gordon is no fan of exercise, and he has the body to prove it. Jab him in the stomach, and he feels like the Pillsbury Doughboy. “Do you have any idea how anti-evolutionary this is?” He looked around at the spandex-clad legions. “Human beings were not meant to expend energy for no good reason.”

  “It’s lovely to see you too. How long has it been? Four months? We’d given you up for dead.”

  “Sorry.”

  “What are you doing up here, anyway?”

  “I heard what happened. I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

  “Right. And you’re donating a kidney on the way back to Manhattan.”

  “Come on, let me buy you a cup of coffee.”

  “After not answering nine messages? You’re buying me breakfast.”

  We went to a bagel place a quarter mile from the gym, a little gourmet deli that sells so many different kinds of olives, even an urban guerrilla like Gordon feels at home. I ordered a Long Island bagel with chive cream cheese and tomato, half a cantaloupe, and a large cup of the darkest, nastiest coffee they had, and when the time came he opened up his wallet with reasonable grace.

  “So how the hell are you?” I said when we settled into a booth. “You still seeing that radio chick? The one you stayed with when we went down to the city last summer?”

  “You mean the one who dumped me for that asshole from Nightline?”

  “Oops.”

  “Forget me anyway. How are you?”

  “I’ve been better. Once upon a time.”

  “Didn’t you get the message I left with Madison? I’m not the only one who sloughs people off, you know.”

  “Yeah. Thanks. It was nice of you to check up on me. I’m sorry I didn’t call back. Things have been kind of crazy.”

  “There’s an understatement. What’s happening to your little rural paradise, anyway?”

  “You sound like Mad.”

  “Drunk and surly?”

  “Just surly.”

  “So come on, I’m dying here. What the hell is going on?”

  “I don’t feel like talking about it.”

  “You? You always feel like talking about everything.”

  “Yeah, well, this is kind of close to the bone right now.”

  “That bad?”

  “I’m in this up to my ears. It’s fucking d? vu all over again.”

  “Are you okay? Physically, I mean?”

  “I’m still kind of sore. Nothing serious.”

  He took off his little round John Lennon glasses and wiped them with a napkin. “Holy shit, Alex. I just about flipped when I saw your name in that wire story.”

  “I didn’t know you cared.”

  “What kind of a jerk do you think I am?”

  “Don’t tempt me.”

  “So what happened to you, anyway? The AP didn’t have much, and all I could get out of Madison was that you fell off your bike.”

  “Falling off my bike has been the high point of my month.”

  I didn’t elaborate, and after a minute Gordon brought out the big guns. “How about something dessertlike? Want to split one of those big chocolate-chip cookies?” He pointed at the glass case with an expression resembling desire. On Gordon, it looked like a toothache.

  “Worming your way back into my heart through my tummy?”

  “If that’ll work.”

  “Come across with the pastry and we’ll talk.”

  Five minutes later the cookie was history. Gordon and I slouched across from each other in the booth, feet up on the opposite seat. “It’s
weird being back up here.”

  “Just like old times?”

  “I hope not.”

  “Don’t you miss the simple country life? Just a little bit?”

  “No.”

  “Infidel. Heretic. Unbeliever.”

  “I miss you, though.”

  “And well you should.”

  “You look great.”

  “You know, everybody’s been saying that to me lately, in exactly the same tone of voice. They say, ‘You look great,’ but what they really mean is, ‘You look like something the cat dragged in and sat on, and I pity you.’ “

  “You sound fried.”

  “I’m positively crispy.”

  “Don’t you think it might help to talk about it?”

  “You’re just dying to hear the gory details, aren’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you better get me another goddamn cookie. Peanut butter this time.”

  He delivered it, and after I washed down half with the rest of my coffee I took a deep breath and started from the beginning. I told him everything that had happened so far, with the exception of my tryst with a certain homicide detective. Gordon must have been following the story pretty closely over the wire, because he didn’t look at all that surprised until I told him about C.A.

  “Cathy Ann Keillor was your roommate?” he said, his eyebrows rising over wire frames. “Holy crap, Alex. Let me get this straight. You found the second body. Your roommate was the third body. And this putz sent you letters and called you at home?”

  “That’s about the sum of it.”

  “So why aren’t you hiding out in… I don’t know, Vancouver or something?”

  “Why Vancouver?”

  “Wherever. Off the end of the planet.”

  “Someplace they don’t deliver the Times?”

  “Right.”

  “Interesting question.” I thought about it for a minute. “Maybe I don’t feel like getting chased out of my own town.”

  “Tough little country girl.”

  “Shut up. Jesus, I don’t know, Gordon. Truth is, once you’ve been as scared as I was last year, it kind of gives you calluses. I don’t think anything could get to me that much anymore, or anyone, for that matter. Kind of makes me sad.”