Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  “Then I at least want you to promise that you’ll follow all the security precautions exactly. Keep checking all the doors and windows. Don’t even think about going anywhere at night without a police escort, even if you’re with one of your girlfriends. And stay the hell out of that bar.”

  “You gotta be kidding…”

  “Alex, I mean it. I’ve got enough to worry about without thinking that this guy is sitting on the next bar stool over from you.”

  “Is that all, Detective? Or do you want to put me on house arrest?”

  “Christ, Alex, don’t whine. Can’t you get it through your thick head that I’m just trying to look out for you?”

  “I know you are. Sorry.”

  “Listen, I know this isn’t easy…”

  “It’s okay. I’ll be good. Seriously, and all whining aside, is there anything else you want me to do? Or not do?”

  “Don’t talk to strangers.” He leaned over and kissed me. “And definitely don’t let any crazy men into your house.”

  “Too late.”

  He pulled away and reached into his jacket pocket. “Here, I almost forgot. I brought you a present.” He handed me a bright yellow box a little bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It had a belt clip and a loop of string just wide enough to fit your wrist.

  “Please tell me there’s chocolate in here.” I started fiddling with the string, and he grabbed it back.

  “Don’t pull that out or we’ll both be sorry. It’s a rape alarm. Haven’t you ever seen one of these?” I shook my head. “Lots of women used to carry them in the city, not so much since the crime rate went down. The handle connects to a pin. Yank it out and it makes one hell of a noise. You’re supposed to be able to hear it from two hundred yards.”

  “How do I turn it off?”

  “You can’t. The only way you can stop it is to unscrew the back and take out the batteries.”

  “What’s the point of that?”

  “So the bad guy can’t just turn it off himself.”

  “Oh.”

  “So take it, and carry it so it’s handy. Don’t just throw it in your purse where it won’t do you any good.”

  “Okay.”

  “Do you promise?”

  “Jesus, yes, I promise. Now go catch this guy so I don’t have to carry this ridiculous thing around any more than I have to.”

  “Why does it bother you so much?”

  “Gee, I don’t know, Cody. How’d you like to carry around a symbol of your own physical weakness?”

  “I already do. It’s called a gun.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “Now give me a kiss and wish me luck. Hopefully I can call you tomorrow with some good news for once.”

  I kissed him, and I was still kissing him when his cell phone rang. He answered it, and I could tell from the look on his face that it was the farthest thing from good news that it could get. “Son of a bitch,” he said into the phone. “Where the hell is she?” Other than when he found me staring at C.A.’s corpse, it was the first time I’d seen him lose his cool on the job. When he hung up, he looked like he wanted to throw the phone through the living-room window.

  “There’s another missing girl, isn’t there?”

  He didn’t answer. It was a long time before he stopped staring out the window and looked at me.

  “Worse.”

  “They found another body?” He nodded so slightly I almost missed it. “Already? But how could…”

  “He’s really into it now. He’s gaining momentum. He’s having fun.”

  “Are you okay? You look kind of…”

  He stood up. “I’ll be fine. But I have to go.”

  “Where is she?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

  “Tell me anyway.”

  He didn’t want to, that much was obvious. When he finally spoke, the words came out very slowly. “They found her,” he said, “at the campus baseball field. In one of the dugouts.”

  “What? But that’s right in the middle of…”

  “It gets worse. The body was found by the groundskeeper’s nine-year-old son.”

  “Jesus.”

  He flipped open his phone again and called for a radio car to be sent to guard my house. He waited with me until the cop arrived, not saying anything, just standing there holding one of my hands between his big beefy ones.

  “What is it, Cody? There’s something you’re not telling me. I know there is.” He didn’t look at me, just shifted his gaze from his shoes to the door and back again. “Come on. You know I’m going to find out soon enough. Don’t make me stay here imagining something even worse.”

  “There…” He cleared his throat. “There was another… mutilation. The eyes. The coroner hadn’t made it to the scene yet, but this time it looks like it was premortem.”

  It took a second for his words to sink in. The image made me want to scream, but I figured it wouldn’t put him in a better mood. I just put my arms around him and hugged him hard. “Be careful out there, Cody.”

  “I will,” he said, and he was gone.

  I picked up the phone to tell Bill about the latest body so he could squeeze something onto page one before deadline, only to realize that I wasn’t supposed to know about it in the first place. Rats. I curled up on the couch with Shakespeare on one side of me and Tipsy on the other, and thought about how this relationship stuff was more complicated than I’d bargained for. Then I thought about the girl in the dugout, and my problems didn’t seem particularly huge. It did occur to me, however, that if there were ever a time for smoking it was now, and I was about to hunt for Emma’s Dunhills when the phone rang. I stared at it for a while, thinking about the call I’d gotten the day the last body was found. Then I remembered to check the caller ID, and saw Mad’s number.

  “Hey, Bernier, what took you so damn long?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  “Listen, come on over here. We’re gonna run down a couple of leads.”

  “What leads?”

  “I got to thinking after you called me, so I tracked down the head of double-e. He gave me some names of kids he thinks might be up to jacking cell phones.”

  “You called the chairman of the electrical engineering department at this hour? I’m surprised he didn’t hang up on you.”

  “Nah, he’s a big alchie since his wife dumped him. When he’s not in the lab, he lives in a booth at Sammy’s. I just went around the corner and rousted him. Only cost me a couple of boilermakers.”

  “He really gave you names?”

  “He owed me one. Besides, I just told him it was for a science story.”

  “And you want to go up to campus now?”

  “It’s not even eleven. The natives are still plenty restless. So get your ass in gear.”

  Not half an hour ago I’d had no desire to go prowling for clues. Now I could barely stand the idea of staying home alone, kept awake by visions of an eyeless girl lying in a baseball dugout. I was sure of something else too: Cody wasn’t going to like it one bit. I was already starting to draft my tirade about how I didn’t try to stop him from doing his job, and he damn well wasn’t going to stop me from doing mine.

  It was a pretty speech, filled with brilliant insights about lingering patriarchy in the post-feminist age. However, the truth is I was hoping he’d never find out.

  “Okay,” I told Mad, “but you have to come and get me. I promised Cody I wouldn’t go out by myself. Besides, if I do the cop’ll follow me.”

  “I’ll be there in…”

  “Hold on a second. My call waiting just beeped.”

  I clicked over to the other line, but no one was there. I was about to click back over to Mad when I caught the faint sound of someone singing. I said “hello” a couple of times, and the sound got louder. Finally, I heard it well enough to make out the song.

  It was a man’s voice, one I recognized from his last call.

  He was singing “Take Me Out to the Ba
ll Game.”

  19

  BY “A COUPLE OF LEADS,” MAD MEANT ELEVEN. HE picked me up in his Volvo (which had logged more miles in the past two months than in the previous two years), tossed me a copy of the Benson student directory he’d swiped from the newsroom, and told me to start looking up names. “Listen, Bernier,” he said as we drove up the hill toward campus. “I’m still up for this, but don’t you think you ought to tell Cody about that phone call?”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “What are you waiting for?”

  “He’s got his hands full at the moment. They found another dead girl.” I told him the gory details I’d gotten from Cody. “He just about lost it when he saw that note from the Citizen. He doesn’t need to hear about my phone stalker right now.”

  “Aren’t you the gutsy one.”

  “Hardly. At this point, I don’t even have the cojones to stay in my own house, even with a cop out front. I mean, the guy clearly knows where I live.”

  “What about Emma?”

  There was a catch in his voice I couldn’t remember hearing before, at least when he was sober. “Jeepers, Mad, are you getting all soft on her?”

  “Shut the fuck up.”

  “Sensitive….”

  “Look, do you know where she is or don’t you?”

  “I tried calling her at the clinic but she wasn’t up there.”

  “Don’t you think you ought to warn her not to hang around your house by herself?”

  “I left her a note.”

  “Where the hell is Steve, anyway?”

  “Haven’t seen him in days. He’s been kind of crazed since the whole mess up at Blue Heron. Plus I’m starting to think there might be another birdman in the picture.”

  “That was more than I needed to know.”

  “Hey, I bet she’s playing darts someplace. After we’re done nosing around campus, what say we check a couple of the bars up there?” He grunted. I took it as a yes. “Listen, do you really think it could be some engineer who’s been doing all this shit?”

  “How do I know? You just asked me to find somebody who could clone a cell phone.”

  “Well, Cody seems to like the idea that this guy’s some evil genius.”

  “No offense, but I think he’s full of it. Right now, we’re hunting down a bunch of geeks in their dorm rooms. Best case scenario, we find whoever sold the phone to your gentleman caller.”

  “You think?”

  “I deal with these gearheads on a regular basis. Most of them are pretty brilliant, but they’re not what you’d call threatening. Wussy is more like it.”

  “Yeah, but who knows if wussy equals harmless? Maybe they’re filled with nerdy rage.”

  He pulled into the last space in a vast campus lot and shifted in his seat to look at me. “You know,” he said thoughtfully, “that may be the single stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Wow. Maybe I ought to write it down.”

  I flipped through the campus directory, where Mad had highlighted the names he’d gotten from the department chair. There were four grad students and seven undergrads, with addresses all across campus and its environs.

  “Man, couldn’t he have narrowed it down a little?”

  “He picked eleven people out of a department of four hundred.”

  “What did you tell him, anyway?”

  “That I was doing a story on companies who hire students to try to crack their security.”

  “And he fell for it?”

  “He was pretty drunk.”

  “Yeah, and he’s gonna be pretty pissed when he finds out you rooked him.”

  “Lucky for me he won’t remember it in the morning.”

  We set off toward a particularly hideous sixties-era dorm, which (were its roof only painted orange) could easily be taken for the HoJo’s motor lodge. The building housed two of our suspects, but those first two tries didn’t bode well for the rest of the night; neither one was home. We moved on to another dorm fifty yards away but a hundred years different in style, a classic brick-and-ivy job with heavy square-paned windows fit for a Victorian heroine. There, our third target opened the door wearing pajamas with big blue teddy bears on them. When he found out Mad wanted to talk to him about cell phone technology, he invited us in and fed us double-stuffed Oreos with chocolate milk.

  “Better warn your friend Cody about that one,” Mad said as we hoofed down four flights to the first floor. “That boy is Public Enemy Number One.”

  “Hey, it was your source who gave us the name.”

  “Maybe he was drunker than I thought.”

  “And maybe we’re just wasting our time.”

  “Since when are you such a quitter?”

  “I’m not. I just don’t have a whole lot of confidence in your loopy friend back at Sammy’s.”

  “Believe me, he’s one smart son of a bitch. He just happens to be a stinking drunk. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” We got to the next dorm. “Okay, who are we looking for here?”

  I consulted the book. “Dong-Hyuk Kim.”

  “You gotta be kidding me.”

  “Says here his nickname’s Freddy.”

  We climbed to the second floor and found Kim’s room. We knocked, and after a minute a very pretty blond girl answered the door wearing a sheet. “Fuck, you’re not the pizza,” she said, and slammed it again.

  Mad and I stared at the closed door. He raised his fist to knock again, then changed his mind and walked away. “I must be losing my touch,” he said.

  “How so?”

  “First time a cute college chick ever accused me of not being a pizza.”

  “Cheer up. There’s always Viagra.” He gave me a wounded look. “Where to next?”

  “You tell me.”

  I scanned the list.

  “You want to get the hell away from the dorms, maybe try some apartments?”

  “Can’t get any worse.”

  We walked across campus to the adjacent student ghetto. Even on a Monday night, the place was hopping. Music blared out of the bars, which made up just about every other storefront in a three-block radius of the university. The sidewalks were sticky and the smell of sour beer wafted out of the doorways, constituting whatever is the opposite of aromatherapy.

  “Christ, this place makes me feel old.”

  “Come on, Bernier. Didn’t you ladies cut loose at Vassar?”

  “No.”

  Mad breathed in deeply, like he was savoring the fresh mountain air. I was in danger of puking. “You know, maybe I should think about moving up here…”

  “It would be the end of you.”

  I dragged him away from the center of Collegetown toward what passes for the residential area—a strip of ramshackle buildings, each with at least one disintegrating couch on the front porch. Two of the grad students we were looking for roomed together in one of them. We found the apartment, only to be told by their neighbors that the two guys were back on campus working in the nanofabrication lab. We were batting zero.

  “Remind me why we’re doing this again?” Mad said as we passed another row of bars. “Because, you know, I could really use a drink…”

  “So could I. This is humiliating. How’s about we try a couple more and say fuck it?”

  “For real?”

  “We can always try again tomorrow.”

  We went to the next address, which was only a half block away. It was the newest building in the neighborhood, opened just the previous fall, and by student standards it was a luxury high-rise. It had six floors (the very limit of the local building code), and every apartment had its own high-speed Internet connection and laundry to boot. The place was called the Hilltop Arms, and the name was fairly accurate. It had the highest security—or more accurately, the only security—of any building in Collegetown. This meant that on weekdays, a so-called doorman sat at the front desk, actually some kid doing his math homework. At night and on weeke
nds, visitors had to be buzzed in by one of the residents. The whole arrangement wouldn’t faze someone from the big city, but for Gabriel it was Fort Knox.

  “Christ, Bernier,” Mad growled. “Why didn’t we come here first?”

  “I didn’t recognize the address.”

  “Didn’t you do a story on this place?”

  “Yeah, back when it first opened.”

  The Hilltop Arms had been the object of much mockery when it was being built. But the developer was laughing all the way to bank, because all the apartments were rented within a month—even at more than twice the going rate. The place turned out to be hugely appealing to faraway parents who heard “New York” and thought “Harlem.” The vast majority of residents came from OPEC nations, and parked their BMWs and Range Rovers in the underground garage.

  Mad took in the arched glass entryway and brass-potted plants with disgust. “What a dump.”

  “How do you figure?”

  “Why would you want to live up here if you’re going to lock out all the local color?”

  “You’d rather be in one of those places with the broken bottles out front?”

  “Wouldn’t you?”

  “How are we going to get in? Just buzz the guy?”

  “Doesn’t seem too smart.”

  “So what now?”

  He winked at me and started pushing buttons at random. Eventually, someone answered and Mad leaned into the intercom. “Somebody order a pizza?” They hung up. Mad tried a few more times, and finally someone buzzed us in. We took the elevator to the sixth floor.

  “What’s this guy’s name?” Mad whispered as we walked down the hall.

  “Jeffrey Vandebrandt.”

  “What kind of a name is that?”

  “I don’t know, German?”

  We were looking for apartment 6-N, which turned out to be at the far end of the hall. We stopped outside the door, and Mad’s face reflected the same creepy anticipation I was having myself. Above the knob were four separate locks, each of them a Medeco just like the one Cody had made me buy for my front door. Even in Manhattan, it would have been overkill. Here in Gabriel, it was downright strange. And in this particular building, it was ridiculous.

  Mad shrugged and raised his arm to knock, but I grabbed it in midair and dragged him back down the hall.