Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  “Pardon?”

  “Up at the vet hospital. Alex and Mad said you were going to tell them something.”

  “Oh, of course. I’d utterly forgot.” She drained her drink, put the glass down, and sat up straight. “Alex called and asked me to see if a particular dog had been brought in for ear cropping. Beastly thing. We’ve done away with it back home, you know. In any event, I looked into it. What was the name again? Ah yes—Cocoa Marx.”

  “Cocoa marks?” Cody looked to her empty glass as the most likely source of her babbling. “What’s a…”

  “Cocoa was the dog’s name. It’s how we keep track of patients. The pet’s name, then the family name, just like a person. You can’t just put ‘Fido,’ or you might get mixed up. Do you have any idea how many dogs named ‘Aristotle’ there are in this town?”

  “But there’s only one Shakespeare,” I offered.

  Emma looked at me pityingly. “I neutered two last week.”

  “Oh.”

  She raised her glass and wiggled it at Mad, who got the message and went to get her a refill. “As I was saying, Alex asked me to look into the matter of Cocoa Marx, and I discovered that the dog had indeed been brought in for an ear bob.”

  “The surgery was done?” Cody asked.

  “It was. And according to our records, the owner paid cash and picked the dog up the next day as scheduled.”

  “Do you know what time of day?”

  “I wrote it down. It’s in my handbag. Would you be so kind… ?” Cody handed it to her. “Everything’s done by computer, so we can tell the exact time the dog was checked out. It says here that it left at 8:47 P.M. on May 18th.”

  “You’re open that late?”

  “We have evening hours until nine on Thursday. Most of the local vets do.”

  “Patricia Marx worked at the mall in Syracuse until seven-thirty that night. She must have driven straight here to pick up the dog. As far as we know, it’s the last time anyone saw her alive.”

  “How very disturbing,” Emma said, and promptly downed half of her second martini.

  “No offense,” Cody said, “but do you think you could lay off the sauce until you’re done telling me everything? I kind of need you sharp right now.”

  “She’s fine,” Mad said, looking awfully proud. “Emma can handle her liquor better than I can.”

  “You see, Detective,” Emma said, raising her glass, “I am English.”

  “I’m very happy for you. Now, would you mind telling me what else you know? It might be important.”

  “Certainly. As I was saying, Alex asked me to look into whether Patricia Marx’s dog had been treated at the hospital. And while I was doing so, I had a thought. I entered Lynn Smith’s name, and sure enough, there it was.”

  “Are you sure it’s the right Lynn Smith?” Cody asked. “It’s a fairly common name.”

  “This Lynn Smith had a dog named Harley. Am I right?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Well then, this Harley Smith was in a bad way. He was a nine-year-old boxer mix, and blind as the proverbial bat.”

  “Was?”

  “I assume they’d have put him down by now.”

  “He was sick?”

  “Not as such. But he had bad cataracts, and it had gotten to the point where he was completely blind. We could have operated on him and restored his sight, at least partially, but the owners couldn’t afford it. Quite a shame, really.”

  “How much would it have cost?”

  “Oh, in the area of eight hundred to a thousand dollars, I should expect. And that’s a bargain. It would be more at a private clinic.”

  Cody rubbed his reddish stubble, deep in thought. “So both Patricia Marx and Lynn Smith had dogs that were patients at the Benson vet clinic. I’ll be damned.”

  Emma looked at him as though he were dense even for an American. “Don’t forget Cathy Ann. She brought Nanki-Poo to the clinic as well.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “Just as you say.”

  “Tell me something. Did all three of these dogs have the same veterinarian?”

  Emma shook her head. “The clinic doesn’t work that way. Patients don’t have a particular vet per se. You might see the same person on two different occasions, but it would just be a coincidence. Different doctors and students rotate through, so who you get is the luck of the draw. That’s how a radiologist like me gets the pleasure of snipping testes all the bloody day long.”

  Both Cody and Mad shifted in their seats. “So it’s possible,” Cody said, “that they all might have seen the same doctor, at least once?”

  “Possibly. I could take a closer look at the records. As could your investigators, I imagine.”

  “And what about some other connection? An assistant or something?”

  Emma gave a long sigh. I could smell the booze on her breath from halfway across the room. “Difficult to know. One doesn’t keep track of who assisted with a procedure, did a test, that sort of thing.”

  “Could you figure it out from whose handwriting is on the charts?”

  “I’m afraid not. Doctors write up their own notes, fairly impenetrably I might add.”

  “Oh, shit,” I said. “Mad, it’s less than an hour to deadline. We’ve got to file something or we’re dead.”

  He looked at his watch and stood up. “We’d better call Bill. At least now we’ve got something to…”

  “Hold it,” Cody said, in as authoritarian a voice as I’d ever heard come out of his mouth. “You know damn well you can’t print this.” His tone made Mad sit right back down, which was quite a neat trick. “Think about it. It looks like the Benson clinic is the one thing that links these women together. You go breaking the news that the victims took their dogs there, and you blow any chance we have of catching our guy off guard. He knows we’ve made the connection, he knows we’re onto him. He picks up shop and starts killing women someplace else.”

  “The goddamn Times already broke the fact that Smith had a dog,” Mad said. “It’s just a matter of time until Band figures all this out for himself. Why should we let…”

  “Gordon Band doesn’t have access to the same resources, so he’s hardly in a position to dig through patient records. That’s confidential information.”

  “He’ll find out,” I said. “Believe me, Cody, I know him. Sooner or later, he’ll get his hands on all of this.”

  “And how the hell will he do that?”

  “I have no idea. He has his own kind of mojo. But trust me, it works. He may be a little off his game right now, but he’ll dig it up eventually.”

  “And there’s probably no use in trying to talk some sense into him?”

  “None at all.”

  “Even if he knows what it will cost the investigation?”

  “That’ll just make him want to print it sooner.”

  “Sounds like one cold son of a bitch.”

  “Sometimes. Let’s just say he’s the journalistic equivalent of a pit bull.”

  “Then maybe his editors would listen to reason.”

  “They might. Frankly, I have no idea where the Times draws the line between flackery and good citizenship.”

  “Well, I’ll deal with that particular crisis when it comes. Right now what I’m worried about is you.”

  “Come on, Cody…” Mad started, but I cut him off.

  “Look, I’d like to rub Gordon’s nose in it as much as you do. But I have to go with Cody on this one. How are we going to feel if this bastard flies the coop because we went off half-cocked?”

  “Yeah, and I wonder why you’re so eager to agree with…”

  “I think you better shut your mouth. Because if you’re about to say I can’t think straight because of who I’m screwing, I’m going to have to kill you right in front of a cop. And then what’ll become of me?”

  He seemed on the verge of fury, then just decided to drop it. “Oh, fuck. You’re right. Band and his Canine Killer are driving me insane.�
��

  “Since when do you take this stuff so personally?”

  “Christ, I don’t know. Band always rubbed me the wrong way, I guess. Didn’t get to me so much when we were on the same side, but now…”

  “Yeah, I know. I kinda miss him, but mostly I want to wring his neck.”

  “So are we settled on this?” Cody asked.

  “The usual terms,” I said. “We keep Marilyn and Bill in the loop. That way, they know we’re being good citizens, not just incredible dunderheads. If they have a problem with this, they can hash it out with you and the chief. Frankly, I’m just as happy not to be at the top of the food chain.”

  “And when the story breaks,” Mad said, “we get it first.”

  Cody smirked. “An arrangement Alex and I came to quite a while ago.”

  “That’s just as well,” Mad said, picking up the phone and dialing Bill’s direct line. “Because if Alex has to start sleeping with the chief, his wife’s gonna be really pissed. And I happen to know she has a gun of her own.”

  25

  CODY AND HIS MEN—OR, AS HE’D PUT IT, HIS “BUNCH OF Gomer Pyles”—started trying to dig up info on the Benson vet hospital the next day. It was a delicate operation, he told me, because you couldn’t know who to trust; even the most well-intentional source could inadvertently open his big mouth and tip off the wrong person that the police were sniffing around.

  And frankly, they had no idea where to begin. All they knew at that point was that the hospital seemed to be the nexus, the one thing that all the women had in common. That sounded like it narrowed things down considerably, but it still left a hell of a lot of possible suspects. The killer could be someone who worked there full-time. It could be a student (either undergrad or vet), or a professor, or a doctor who rotated through. It could be one of the volunteers who came in a few hours a week to groom and play with the sick animals, sort of the vet version of a candy-striper. But then again, it could be somebody who didn’t even have a direct connection to the clinic— one of the hundreds of people who work in the adjacent buildings and see the pets and their owners in the parking lot, on the sidewalk, or just by staring down at them from their office windows.

  In other words, Cody had his work cut out for him—off the record, at least. But officially, the investigation was pretty much at a standstill, and that meant Mad and I didn’t have a whole lot to write about. Beyond breaking the story about Patricia Marx and Cocoa, we were reduced to rehashing sad tales of the victims, and reminding our readers on a daily basis that it would be a good idea if they locked their doors at night and didn’t talk to strangers.

  Ironically enough, I also did a story on the fact that so many women had gotten dogs for protection, the Walden County SPCA was out of them for the first time in its history; even ratty little wiener dogs and poodles were being snapped up as soon as they came in. (This seemed rather strange, since everyone knew by now that the victims had dogs themselves, and it hadn’t done them a damn bit of good. One woman I interviewed probably summed it up best when she said that regardless of the logistics, she was just too damn scared to live alone anymore.) The piece ran with a sidebar about how the same thing had happened in other cities in similar situations, like Boston during the Strangler case. And as I filed it, I hoped like hell that none of the women decided to bring their new pets to the Benson clinic for a checkup.

  Bill also sent me over to the historical society to research the last time Gabriel had a murder spree, which happened just before the Civil War and involved two maiden aunts who decided people’s tea would taste better with a little hemlock in it. Even from the fading daguerreotype we ran on page three, you could tell they were total loonies.

  Writing these various stories was enough to make me want to chew my own foot off, not so much because they weren’t interesting but because they were so far from what was actually going on. It wasn’t that I thought we’d made a mistake by cooperating with the cops—at least not in theory—but the reality of it was pretty galling for someone who’s as fundamentally nosy as I am.

  Not that Mad had it any easier. True, he did a couple of good pieces on the psychology of serial killers and the like, but he also got saddled with one whopper of an apology story. After the barrage of outrage that greeted our lovely photograph of Marx and Cocoa (including a full page of letters to the editor detailing how much we suck), Mad had to trot up the hill to talk to some Benson sociologist about the media’s prurient obsession with crime victims, or some such; frankly, the whole thing smacked of a nymphomaniac writing about what a shame it is that people like to screw—and running it in Hustler. Anyway, when the story came out I blew it up on the copy machine, wrapped it around a large box of double-chocolate donuts, and left it on Mad’s desk with a note that said EAT ME.

  I was patting myself on the back for this cleverness when my phone rang.

  “Newsroom. Alex here.”

  No one said anything at first, and I was just about to hang up when I heard a woman’s voice, but faintly. “Is this… Is this Alex Bernier?” She pronounced my name wrong, so it ended with “yer” instead of “yay.” I disliked her already.

  “Yeah, this is Alex Bernier. What can I do for you?”

  “Well, it’s about that story you ran, about the missing girl…” She was whispering so efficiently I could barely hear her, but from what I caught she sounded like she wanted to talk about this like she wanted a root canal.

  “What missing girl?”

  The silence went on so long I thought she’d hung up, but then she spoke again, even more quietly than before. “You’re not, uh, recording this are you?”

  “No.”

  “Or… tracing this or anything?”

  Who did she think we were, the CIA? “No, we don’t do things like that.”

  More silence. “I wanted to tell you… Needed to tell you… something. About the missing girl. Not really missing… I mean, the girl they found in the snow last spring.” She paused again, and I decided the best tactic was just to shut up and let her talk. “I know I should have said something back then, but I wasn’t really sure. But then you had her picture—I mean, that drawing—in the newspaper again this week, and I really just thought it had to be…” Something hugely funny must have happened over at the sports desk just then, because the whole corner exploded into chuckles. I stuffed my finger in my ear and hunched over the phone. “… or anything, will you?”

  “What was that again? I’m sorry, I didn’t hear you.”

  “You won’t tell anybody I called, will you? Can this be, um… a secret tip?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “So I can tell you anything and you can’t tell anybody else?”

  I was torn between being honest with her and saying whatever I had to to get her to spill her guts. I opted for the moral high ground. “Well, I can’t tell anybody where I got it from, but that’s not the same as never repeating it. I mean, you obviously have something important you want people to know, right?” I could hear her breathing on the other end, which seemed a good sign that she’d neither slammed down the phone nor dropped dead.

  “I don’t know, maybe I’m just imagining…”

  I summoned up the most gentle motherly tone I’ve got. “Don’t you think you’ll feel better if you get this off your chest?”

  I caught Mad out of the corner of my eye, ripping open the donut box and preparing to bean me with one, but I made some frantic throat-slashing motions and he got the message. “Yeah, I guess,” she was saying. “But I really can’t talk about it…”

  So why the hell did you call me, you loser? “I know it’s hard for you…”

  “Yeah, well, it’s my own fault what happened. I mean, why I can’t… Oh, boy, I’d better start at the beginning. You promised not to tell anybody you talked to me, right?”

  “Right.”

  “Okay, see, I work in an office at Benson. I don’t want to say which one. But when I first saw that drawing, I thought… It seemed l
ike I recognized that girl, that she was the same one who’d come into our office for something one time.”

  I waited for her to say something else. She didn’t. “That’s it?”

  “Um… yeah.”

  I was starting to lose my sense of humor. “You know, that’s really not very helpful.”

  “It isn’t?”

  “Could you be just a tad more specific?”

  Click.

  “Toss me one of those donuts,” I said to Mad as I hung up the phone. “Chocolate takes the pain away.”

  “What happened?”

  “Some squirrelly dame called me trying to tell me who the first murder victim was, and I scared her off.”

  “Nice work.”

  He handed me a donut, and I shoved a quarter of it into my mouth. Then the phone rang again, and Mad stood there smirking as I tried to gag the donut down before whoever was calling me gave up.

  “Urgh,” I said into the phone, hoping it sounded somewhat like a word.

  “Hi, listen, I’m sorry I hung up on you a minute ago.”

  “Oh, uh, no problem.”

  “Well, I was thinking about what you said, and I do want to help them catch whoever killed that girl…” She trailed off again, and this time I really did keep my mouth shut. “I know I already asked you this, but you have to swear you’re not going to give anybody any details about me.”

  “On my honor as a journalist.” Luckily, the woman didn’t know enough to laugh and hang up again.

  “Okay… I work as a secretary in the admissions office at the Ag school. Last fall, this girl came in for an interview to get in as a transfer student. We don’t get too many of those, so that’s mostly why I remember her, but it was also because she seemed really scared. Not just nervous like she wanted to do okay on the interview, but like she was really scared of something or other.

  “So anyway, when that picture first ran in the paper, I kind of thought it reminded me of somebody, but I wasn’t sure who. But then we got back the final list of no-shows—that’s people we admit but who never get back to us to say yes or no—well, there are never very many of those, and this year she was the only one. Usually, it’s just for some simple mistake like we mixed up the zip code on her acceptance letter or something. So I went to look up her application file to try to track her down before she lost her spot, and we didn’t have one. I mean, it was just gone.”