Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m happy for you, Bernier. Nobody deserves a good clock-cleaning more than you, except maybe me.”

  “Shit, Mad. Do you think anybody else knows? Marilyn’ll kill me if she finds out.”

  “Yep.”

  “ ‘Yep, Marilyn’ll kill me,’ or ‘Yep, somebody else knows’ ?”

  “Yep, she’d kick your cute French-Canadian ass seven ways from Sunday. But I think you’re okay. I’m probably the only one who can tell the well-shagged Bernier from the regular kind.”

  “Lucky you.”

  “So you’ll show Cody the note?”

  “Of course.”

  “You’ve got your own personal bodyguard.”

  “What about you? You still saluting the Union Jack?”

  “From time to time.”

  “Jesus, Mad, you’ve been banging Emma for like, what, over a month? For you, that’s like three consecutive lifetimes.” I started humming “God Save the Queen,” and he threw a cocktail peanut at me. “Come on, what’s her secret?”

  “I don’t know. She’s wild.”

  “Wild how?”

  “No comment.”

  “Come on…”

  “Give it up, Bernier. That’s all you’re getting. Now stop trying to change the subject. Be a good girl and show me the fucking note again.”

  I pulled it out and smoothed it on the table between us. “Okay. So what do you make of it?”

  He shrugged. “More of the same, I guess.”

  “Yeah, but it seems so… mean.”

  “You were expecting nice?”

  “No, but what I’m saying is that it’s nothing but mean. It doesn’t try to talk us into publishing his letters. There’s none of that ‘I’m the devil’s disciple’ bullshit. It’s just like, all he wants to do is scare me.”

  “That would seem to be his stock in trade.”

  “No, killing seems like his stock in trade. I mean, as far as we know, he never sent any letters to Patricia Marx. C.A. sure didn’t get any, or I would have heard about it. So why me?”

  “Maybe you’re his mouthpiece.”

  “So you think he doesn’t actually want to kill me, he’s just using me to get people’s attention?”

  “Well, you are kind of a local celebrity around here.”

  “Because of my stupid movie column?”

  “That, plus your byline in the paper every day, and all the media shit that came down last year. Face it. Everybody in this town knows who you are.”

  “So maybe I’m supposed to be his greatest conquest”

  “Or maybe he’s supposed to be yours.”

  “You think he wants me to catch him?”

  “Could be. Besides the crime-scene evidence, those letters are the only clues the cops have, right?”

  “I guess.”

  “So there you go.”

  “That’s nuts. There’s nothing in those letters that gives us the least hint who he is. I mean, he doesn’t give us riddles to solve. He just sort of raves and tries to scare people, specifically me.”

  “What about the dates on them? Could they be, you know, some kind of hint?”

  “There aren’t any dates.”

  “Oh. Well, when did you get them?”

  “Let me think… The first one came in mid-May, the second one around two weeks later, and this new one two weeks after that.”

  “So there’s a pattern.”

  “Kind of. But the first one just came addressed to “Police Reporter,” the second one was mailed to me at the paper, and the third was dropped off here. And the phone call came to my house.”

  “Like he’s zeroing in on you.”

  “That’s one way of looking at it, thank you very much.”

  “Well, look on the bright side. At least he didn’t nail one of the Benson alums over reunions. Then your pal Cody would really have had a mess on his hands.”

  “Yeah, and Wilfred Jr. could kiss his scholarship goodbye.”

  Mad shook the empty pitcher. “The well is dry. You want another G and T?”

  “A little one.”

  “Coming right up,” he said, and took off for the bar. I stared at the note for a while, wrestling with the desire to rip the goddamn thing up into little pieces. Cody probably wouldn’t approve. “Deep thoughts?” Mad said when he got back. He handed me the drink. “Here, have some anesthetic. Works like a charm.”

  “I was just thinking…”

  “No shit.”

  “… about what you said a second ago. About how nobody got killed during reunions.”

  “So what?”

  “Well, I was just thinking about these letters I got—three, spaced two weeks apart.”

  “And?”

  “And you got me wondering about Benson—not just reunions, I mean the whole end of the semester.”

  “What about it?”

  “Maybe it’s just a coincidence. But you know, the first letter came just as classes were ending. And then there was nothing during the two weeks of reading period and exams, and then another letter. And then nothing during the next two weeks, when most of the students are gone, and then I get this one right as summer session is starting.”

  “What about the phone call you got?”

  “It was a couple of days before graduation.”

  “So how does that fit in?”

  “I’m not sure, but I think by then you can only stay on campus if you’re a senior.”

  “So you think this guy is a senior in college? Seems like a stretch.”

  “Bundy was a law student. Smart and crazy aren’t mutually exclusive.”

  “You should know.” I stood up, and Mad grabbed my arm. “Where are you going? Come on, Bernier, you don’t have to get pissed at me.”

  “I’m not. I’m just calling Cody.”

  Mad smirked. “Business or pleasure?”

  “Oh, shut up, Mad. You know damn well it’s both.”

  18

  NOBODY’D BETTER THREATEN BRIAN CODY’S MOTHER. I say this because, judging by his reaction to my latest note, he’d probably shoot first and ask questions later. As it was, he just about put his fist through a wall—and I was just some girl he’d been dating on the sly for a couple of weeks. Clearly, the guy had a slightly overdeveloped protective streak.

  I’d called him on his cell, and not five minutes later he’d come barging into the Citizen to pick me up. He and Mad exchanged manly glances, sizing each other up, and I guess neither one of them came up wanting because in the end they shook hands so hard their fingers turned white. Cody relieved Val of responsibility for my well-being and took me home, where Shakespeare and Tipsy vied for his attention and gave up when they realized he was in no mood to pet anybody, me included.

  “Okay, tell me again,” he was saying. I opened my mouth to protest and he cut me off. “I know we’ve been over it twice already, but humor me.”

  I was lying on the couch with all forty-something pounds of Shakespeare stretched out on my middle. Tipsy was curled up on the floor, and Cody was pacing. “Like I said before, I spent most of the weekend up on campus covering reunions. I stopped here around five to let the dogs out and then I went to the Citizen to look for Mad. He was already there with Gordon, so…”

  “And who’s Gordon again?”

  “Like I told you, he’s a reporter for the New York Times. He worked for the Monitor for a while, but now he’s back in the city. He’s just up here covering the case.”

  “And he found the note? Are those bastards planning on printing it?”

  “I wouldn’t let him see it,” I said, trying not to ponder the trouble I’d be in if Cody found out how much I’d already spilled to Gordon. “He just went to get me a drink, and the bartender said he’d found it under the door when he opened at four. The envelope was sealed.”

  “You know him? The bartender, I mean?”

  “Mack? Sure. He owns the place. Used to be a radio reporter once upon a time. The Citizen is kind
of a journalists’ hangout—most of the Monitor newsroom, people from the weekly paper, a lot of radio guys, the local TV crew.”

  “You go there a lot?”

  “More than is probably good for me.”

  “Do you have any idea how whoever wrote the note would know you’d be there tonight?”

  “No. I mean, I didn’t even know I’d be going there. It was just a spur of the moment thing. But I’m probably there four nights a week, so the odds were pretty good.”

  “Okay, let’s assume that the note was written by someone who’d seen you there before, who knows you spend a lot of time there. Can you think of anybody who’s bothered you? Maybe someone you caught staring at you once too often?”

  “No, I… Well, there was a couple of drunk guys one night who came into the bar to admire, my um… my chest.”

  “Did you get their names?”

  “Hell no.”

  “Did they threaten you?”

  “Nah, they were harmless. Drunk and harmless. I really don’t think it’s connected.”

  Cody looked as though he’d like to give them a harmless beating. “Okay,” he said with a sigh. “Anything else?”

  “Not that I can think of. I mean, the Citizen’s been kind of a zoo lately. It used to be almost all townies—happy-hour drinkers who came for the free hot wings, and after they cleared out the media crowd showed up and closed the place. But lately there’ve been a lot more college students, mostly lug-nuts from Bessler, but some Benson kids too. You wouldn’t think they could find their way downtown, but they’ve pretty much taken over the place. Sucks for the rest of us.”

  “Underage drinkers?”

  “Jesus, Cody, don’t go calling the vice squad.”

  “I don’t give a damn about that. I just want to know if the bar is lax about proofing, or if we can limit ourselves to suspects over the age of twenty-one.”

  “I’d say anything goes. In this town, a halfway-decent fake ID goes a long way. The cops usually look the other way unless the D.A.’s running for reelection.”

  “So what you’re saying is that the people who see you at the bar regularly are essentially the happy-hour crowd, students, and other journalists?”

  “Well, them and just about anyone who walks by the place. I usually sit in the window seat.” Cody gave a strangled groan. “Not very helpful, huh?”

  “Is there anything else you can think of? Anything else out of the ordinary that happened in the bar?”

  “Nothing. I haven’t got a clue.”

  “Anytime you might have brought attention to yourself?”

  “Not beyond just being my usual loudmouth self.”

  “Great.”

  “But there’s something else, something I was saying to Mad earlier. It’s about the timing of the three notes.” I told him about how they coincided to the end of the Benson semester. “What do you think? Could it be related?”

  “It could.” He finally sat down next to me. “You know, Alex, that was really good thinking. You wouldn’t make a bad detective.”

  “Yeah, I’m a regular Nancy Drew.”

  “Think about it. The cell phone that the call came from was cloned from a phone that was used on campus. The bar is becoming a student hangout. And from what you just told me, you never got a note or a phone call at a time when most of the students were gone.”

  “But what college student nowadays knows how to use a typewriter?”

  “The notes weren’t actually typed.”

  “Sure they were.”

  “Not on an old-fashioned typewriter. It’s a computer font called Courier. It looks a lot like an electric typewriter, but if you look closely you can tell it’s done on a laser printer.”

  “So this guy could have these files sitting on his hard drive somewhere?”

  “Only if he’s stupid. But he’s not.”

  “What about the phone? Can’t you try and track down who cloned it?”

  “We tried. There are only a couple of skells in town that deal in that sort of thing—cloned phones, stolen credit cards, bogus passports…”

  “There’s a market for fake passports in Gabriel? You’re joking.”

  “A huge market. There are an awful lot of foreign students who’d love to bring their families over here, and a certain number of them don’t mind breaking the law to do it.”

  “Can you blame them?”

  “Hey, you’re not going to get an INS lecture from me. My grandma used to tell me about signs in stores that said ‘No dogs or Irish.’ Anyhow, we leaned on the dealers we knew of, but no dice.”

  “No one would admit to selling that particular phone?”

  “They said they hadn’t even been able to crack the technology.”

  “Do you believe them?”

  “Yeah. I offered each of them a pass on some other stuff. They would have taken it in a heartbeat if they could’ve given me a name. One of them tried to bluff but we figured out he was full of it pretty quick.”

  “So it’s a dead end?”

  “Hopefully not for good. We’re still working on it. NYPD’s helping, trying to track down the dealers in the city who’d be on the cutting edge, technology-wise.”

  “Yeah, but isn’t it kind of a big coincidence that this visiting prof comes to Gabriel, and a few months later her cloned phone is used here? Or did she go through New York?”

  “No. She changed planes in Pittsburgh and flew straight here.”

  I thought about it for a minute. “What you said about cutting-edge technology… you know, Gabriel is pretty much ground zero for cutting-edge technology. Up at the nanofabrication lab, they’re inventing new computer chips as we speak.”

  “So?”

  “So what if this guy cloned the phone himself?” Cody stared at me. “It would explain why you can’t find who sold it to him, right? Wouldn’t it?” He stared at me more. “What is it? What did I say?”

  “Alex, I could kiss you.”

  “Oh. Well, what’s stopping you?”

  “I’m too busy kicking myself for not thinking of it first.”

  “Get over it.”

  He put an arm around me and planted a quick kiss on my cheek. “Okay, where do I look?”

  “Huh?”

  “Where do I find some psycho kid who knows how to clone a cell phone? What department?”

  “Damned if I can tell you. Science gives me a headache. But I know who to ask.” I picked up the phone and dialed the Citizen Kane—whose number, by the way, is listed along with all of our home phones on the official Monitor call list. Luckily, Mad wasn’t too far in the bag yet. “Electrical engineering,” I told Cody after I hung up. “Mad says that’s his best guess.”

  “Sounds like a good place to start.”

  “So what do you do now? Go up to the Engineering Quad and see if anybody looks like a serial killer?”

  “We like to be a little more subtle. I’ll start with the professors, see if they can give us any leads.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What do you mean nothing?”

  “Alex, this is a police investigation. You have to let us deal with it.”

  “But I can help. I know way more people on campus than you do…”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with. Please, Alex, don’t argue with me. I promised I wouldn’t let anything happen to you, but you have to listen to me. Just trust me, and I promise I’ll tell you everything after we catch this guy.”

  I opened my mouth to say something, then realized I had no idea what it was going to be. There was no way I could talk him into letting me tag along. Besides, he was right—he was the cop, and I was the reporter. It was his job to catch the bad guys, and my job to write about it afterward. And as much as I wanted to do something rather than nothing, I could still see C.A.’s body whenever I closed my eyes. Bravado aside, I was fairly sure I never wanted to meet the man who did it to her. “W
ait a second, Cody. What about Nanki-Poo?”

  “What?”

  “C.A.’s dog.”

  “Right, of course.” He patted Shakespeare. “Do you think she misses her friend?”

  “We’re all kind of depressed around here. Do you think you’ll find him?”

  He shrugged. “We haven’t seen head nor tail of him. Oh, God, no pun intended.”

  “Do you think he’s dead?”

  “I wouldn’t want to bet on it either way.”

  “But the odds aren’t good, are they?”

  “Alex, there’s no use in…”

  “Come on, Cody. Don’t give me a whitewash.”

  He shrugged again. He looked as helpless as I’d ever seen him. “Okay, I’ll give it to you straight. The way we figure it, C.A. must have been snatched when she was out walking Nanki-Poo. The dog probably tried to defend her…”

  “He would have. He was really protective.”

  “Right, and the killer had to put him down.”

  “So where’s the body?”

  “He must have gotten rid of it.”

  “But he, you know… displayed his victims so meticulously. Why would he just get rid of the dog?”

  “Who knows? Maybe he has different rules for humans and animals. Maybe as far as he’s concerned, an animal just isn’t worth bothering with. You probably already know this, but there’s plenty of psychological evidence that serial killers graduate to people after years of killing or torturing animals. The dog probably wouldn’t even interest him anymore.”

  “I’d like to sic a goddamn pit bull on him.”

  “Me too. You want to hear something ironic? Patricia Marx had actually been talking about getting a guard dog—her roommate said she was looking at Dobermans. She even got permission from her landlord. But she never had a chance to do it.”

  “I wonder if it would have saved her life.”

  “I don’t know. C.A.’s German shepherd didn’t seem to make a difference.”

  “That’s true.”

  “Listen, Alex, I have to start following this up. Something tells me we may finally be on the right track here. But I want you to promise me that you’re going to be extra careful. I suppose there’s no use in trying to talk you into going to your parents’ place for a while…”

  “No use whatsoever.”