Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  “Christ, I don’t even know where to start. We tried to work the story on the plane, but man…” I took a deep breath and a swig of diet Snapple lemonade. “Okay, about the letters. Turns out they were typed—which wasn’t, quote ‘at all like Amy Sue.’ I guess she had beautiful penmanship or something, I don’t know. But three different people told us they thought it was weird the letters were typed. The postcards too.”

  “Postcards from where?” Marilyn asked.

  “The Philly area. One from the city, one from Gettysburg, another one from Hershey. And that’s not all. In the letters, she said how she was so psyched she was going to U Penn. But we checked, and there’s no Amy Sue Gravink enrolled, and none coming in the fall either.”

  “Holy shit.” Marilyn leaned back in her ratty leather chair and put her feet up on the desk. “Keep talking.”

  “That’s not the half of it. We did a little checking on her brother Bobby. Seems he was kind of a weird egg. Was on the football team in high school and did a couple of musicals, but still managed to avoid making any friends. Never had a girlfriend—or a boyfriend either, for that matter. We stopped off at the community college Amy Sue went to, and it turns out he started there two different semesters, but he couldn’t hack it. He had a few different jobs, but he didn’t hang on to them. And then there was this thing where he got fired.”

  “Fired from where?”

  “He got canned,” Mad interjected, “from the Houston SPCA.”

  “Holy shit,” she said again, louder this time.

  “He was working as some kind of technician’s assistant,” I said. “I think he took a couple of training courses and worked his way up from janitor or something. Anyway, it was the longest he ever stayed in one job. But get this. He got canned because…”

  “Lemme guess,” she said. “He was torturing the poor little animals.”

  “Just the opposite. He was liberating them.”

  “What?”

  “He was taking the ones who’d been scheduled for euthanasia, pretending he’d done it and sent them to the incinerator. But he really took them out to the country somewhere and set them free. I guess they nabbed him after animal control brought the same old dog in three different times.”

  “So he was a dog lover. So what? You’d probably do the same damn thing.”

  “She probably would,” Mad offered. “But from what the shelter people told me, this dude was a couple orders of magnitude crazier than Bernier even. And when they canned him, he went nuts and tried to trash the place. Ran around letting all the animals out of their cages. Real mess.”

  “They call the cops?”

  “Nah. They didn’t want the bad PR. He’d probably confiscated a hundred dogs, and I seriously doubt he let ‘em all loose. Trust me, the inside of his house looked like a fucking kennel.”

  “How would you know?” Bill asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Just how the hell would you know?”

  “Uh, let’s just call it an anonymous source.”

  “Fine,” Marilyn said. “Just so long as we don’t call it breaking and entering.”

  He somehow managed to keep a straight face. “Oh, no. Perish the thought. That would be wrong.”

  “And this house you didn’t go into,” I said. “It might have looked like what, precisely?”

  “Well, speaking theoretically, it might have had dog food stacked up, muddy paw prints, fur all over the place. That kind of thing.”

  “I take it this was your idea of following your nose?”

  “So let me get this straight,” Marilyn interrupted. “The dad goes on his killing spree. Little Amy Sue puts her life back together and soldiers on, but the brother’s so traumatized he starts liberating dogs for a living?”

  “Well,” I said slowly, “actually, the thing may not have been as straightforward as that.”

  They must have gotten the gist from my tone of voice, because their eyes widened simultaneously. Mad just sat there with a little smirk on his face, enjoying himself way too much.

  “I tracked down one of the cops who worked the murder-suicide,” he said after a suitably dramatic pause. “Apparently, there was some doubt about how it all went down. The cop was just talking from his gut, off the record, but he told me he thought there was something wrong with sonny boy from the get-go. Said he didn’t have any evidence to back it up, and there were plenty of folks who’d swear he was a goddamn choir boy. But he would have bet the farm the kid was involved somehow.”

  “Are you telling me,” Marilyn said, “that this guy killed both his parents and got away with it?”

  Mad shrugged. “The cop wouldn’t go that far. All I’m telling you is he thought the whole thing didn’t smell right.”

  “But why would he do it? It doesn’t sound like there was a lot of money in it for him.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “But one thing we found out was that a few weeks before they died, they had the family dog put to sleep. I guess he was getting old and had some heart condition. Neighbors talked about it like it was just another tragic element to throw on the trash heap. But what if it’s more than that?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, we know the son was obsessed with animals. Maybe it made him furious.”

  “You may not realize this, but it’s not a capital offense to put down a dog.”

  “Maybe to him it is. And then there was this weird thing about the yearbooks.”

  Marilyn looked from me to Mad like she didn’t know which one of us to strangle first. “Yearbooks? What yearbooks?”

  “After I talked to Mrs. Ochoa, I figured we’d want to get pictures of these guys, right? So she took me to the school library and showed me the yearbooks, so I could snap some black-and-whites. And when I looked through them, I found every single one of their pictures had been cut out. Really neatly, like with a knife.”

  Mad threw a manila envelope on the desk. “I got these pictures from the Chronicle. It’s not much. One of them’s from around the time the parents died, human interest shit. The other was shot at a football game, but Gravink wasn’t a great player, so they just got him in the background. They’re both profile shots, and pretty damn grainy. Can’t say as it’d help you recognize him on the street.”

  Marilyn glanced at them, then handed them to Bill. He stared at them for a full minute before speaking. “Are you jokers trying to tell me that you think I’m looking at a picture of our serial killer?”

  “Yep,” Mad said.

  I shot him a dirty look. “We have no idea. All we know is what we told you. Amy Sue Gravink is gone. She’s not home, she’s not at Penn, and she looks a hell of a lot like a girl in the Gabriel city morgue. Her brother is missing too—and he lied about her going off to college. He may or may not have had something to do with killing his own parents. He sure as hell has a history of weird behavior—specifically, being obsessed with dogs.” I paused to see if Bill and Marilyn were following. They seemed to be. “The woman I got the tip from in the first place said Amy Sue seemed scared of something. What if she came up here to get away from her brother? And what if he found her?”

  Marilyn’s a tough cookie, but even she looked horrified. “Why would he want to kill his own sister?”

  “Who knows? Maybe she figured out what really happened to their parents.”

  “That only applies if it really wasn’t just a murder-suicide like everybody thinks. And even if he killed his sister—good Lord, tortured and strangled her like that—why would he go killing those other women too?”

  “That one’s easy,” Mad said in a voice that sounded cold even for him. “He must really be enjoying himself.”

  The words were unpleasantly familiar. “That’s just how Cody put it,” I said. “From one victim to another, as the violence was escalating, that’s just what he said. That the killer was having a goddamn good time. Too good to stop now.”

  Bill looked positively sick. If he weren’t black, he would have turned gr
ay. “Son of a bitch,” he said, then tried to shake it off with a joke. “Aw, come on. It can’t be this Gravink guy. Everybody knows serial killers and assassins all have to have three names. You know, John Wayne Gacy, Mark David Chapman. It’s a rule, right?”

  “If he hadn’t been southern-fried, Ted Bundy would probably argue with you,” I said. “But just for the record, Gravink’s real name is Bobby Ray.”

  27

  THE ARGUMENT OVER WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THIS INFORmation lasted quite some time. It largely happened around me, because very frankly I had no idea of what to say. Nobody else did either—not really—but that didn’t stop them from shouting at each other for over an hour. The truth was that when we went down to Texas, the most we were hoping for was confirmation that the first victim really was Amy Sue Gravink. We sure as hell never expected to track down some dog-loving crazy man who might very well be responsible for the deaths of four women. And counting.

  So what were we going to do with everything we’d found out? Should we at least run what we had on the victim, since it was based on a dozen solid interviews in her hometown—including four people who said they’d bet their life the police sketch was indeed Amy Sue? Should we run everything, including the stuff on her missing brother and how he’d been trounced out of a job for excessive dognapping? Or should we turn it all over to the police, smile nicely, and let them tell us how far to bend over?

  And if we didn’t hightail it over to the cop shop and spill our guts—if another girl died while we played ethical parlor games—were any of us going to be able to live with ourselves?

  Maybe at a bigger paper, it would have been an easy call—although to this day I’m not quite sure what that call should have been. I mean, it gives me a stomachache just to think about the breast-beating that must have gone on at the Times and the Post over whether to publish the Unabomber manifesto. And at the jolly Gabriel Monitor, we may have been used to wrangling with the cops (and the mayor, and the Benson administration, and every other local entity) over kibbles and bits of information, but we were most definitely not used to having somebody’s life riding on the outcome.

  The trouble was, none of the options were particularly appealing. We’d done the legwork, and it didn’t sit right to hand everything over to the cops—particularly since we’d done that very thing so damn much lately. But we prided ourselves on being at least marginally decent human beings, so we knew we couldn’t ignore the fact that we’d stumbled into something that might be vital to the case. Sure, the cops would track it down eventually. I had faith in Cody, and not just because I was (quite literally) in bed with him. But his investigation could still take weeks. How many bodies would there be by then?

  “… to do right by us? Alex?” I looked up to find the three of them staring at me. “Wake the hell up,” Marilyn was saying. “I asked you a question.”

  “Uh, sorry. What?”

  “Cody. I said can you trust him to give us the exclusive or can’t you?”

  “Oh. Gee, I don’t know…”

  “The hell you don’t. Mad says you’ve had closer dealings with him than anyone.”

  I gave him the evil eye. Just exactly how much had I missed? “Well, sure. I mean, I’ve been covering the story and all…”

  Marilyn slammed her fist on the desk so hard her Munson baseball jumped out of its holder and rolled onto the floor. “Spare me the waffling. Come on, Alex, make the call.”

  “Why do I always have to make the call on this? Can’t somebody else make the call? Like somebody whose roommate didn’t get killed?”

  She had the good grace to look a tad sheepish. But just a tad. “Point taken. It’s my goddamn decision anyway. I suppose I’m just looking for absolution.”

  “Absolution?”

  “Permission to roll over and get fucked.”

  “Don’t take it so hard,” I said, picking up the ball and tossing it to her. “After all, this isn’t exactly a normal situation.”

  “Somebody let me know if we ever have one of those,” Bill snorted from his corner, “so I can drop dead from the shock.”

  “All I meant was, maybe we’re no more prepared to cover some serial killer than the Gabriel cops are to catch him.”

  “Bullshit,” Mad said. “Who the hell tracked down this Bobby Ray Gravink? Us, that’s who. And I’ll be damned if…”

  There was a knock on the door then, and Lillian stuck her head in. “There’s a young woman on the phone for Alex,” she said. “I offered to take a message, but she was quite insistent. And, I might add, somewhat less than cordial.”

  When I picked up the phone, I realized that Lillian had once again defended her crown as the queen of understatement.

  “How could you?” my tipster from the Ag school admissions office was shrieking into my ear. “You gave me your word, and then you went right ahead and told the cops, you goddamn lying bitch.”

  “Hey, hold on a second…”

  “How could I have been stupid enough to trust you people? Christ, I knew better. If I go to jail because of this, I swear to God I’m going to…”

  “Look, I know you’re upset. But I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh, sure you don’t.”

  “No, I really don’t. Can you please just calm down and tell me what’s going on?”

  “Why the hell should I ever tell you anything else ever?”

  “Well, don’t I even get a chance to defend myself?”

  There was a long pause, and I was afraid she’d hung up on me yet again. But then I heard her give an exasperated groan and say something nasty about my mother. “As if you didn’t know,” she said, “the cops were all over our office this morning.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Trying to find Amy Sue Gravink’s file, interviewing everybody about what they remembered about her. Now how do you suppose they found out about that, huh?”

  “Well, I…”

  “You ratted on me, didn’t you?”

  “No, as a matter of fact I didn’t.”

  “So how come the cops were all over my office? And how come there’s a goddamn New York Times reporter asking us all kinds of questions?”

  Oh, shit. “Look, I know you’re not going to believe me, but I didn’t tell a single person outside this newspaper.”

  “Yeah, right…”

  “And what’s more, I’ve been down in Texas for the past three days, so I’ve hardly…”

  “Texas?” The word seemed to pull her up short. When she spoke again, she sounded a lot less angry. “You went down there looking for Amy Sue?”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well… what did you find out?”

  “Nothing for sure. But it’s probably her.”

  “Oh.”

  “Listen, just for the record, I really didn’t tell the cops about your phone call. They must have gotten her name on their own somehow. Like, could somebody else from your office have recognized the picture too?”

  She thought about it for a minute. “I don’t know. Maybe one of the other secretaries.”

  “Or it could have been somebody else on campus who met her when she visited. I mean, over twenty thousand people would have seen that sketch last week.”

  She contemplated the magnitude of this fact for a while, and when I finally got off the phone with her I went back to Marilyn’s office. The boss was still playing with her numchucks, and I hoped she wouldn’t be inclined to strangle the messenger. “Remember our high-level intellectual discussion about what to tell the cops? Well, fuck it. They already know. And what’s worse, so does Gordon.”

  These tidings put the newsroom into something of a tizzy. Gordon knew about Amy Sue Gravink, either through his own digging or a tip from one of his police sources, and it was just a matter of time until he found out everything that had happened in Texas. He could file his story on the ID tonight (if he hadn’t already), and although Cody might try his manly magic on the Times editors, I didn’t think for a
minute that it would work. Cops riffling through a Benson admissions office—not to mention the Monitor nosing around, which whatever stringer the Times got to do the Sugarland interviews was bound to hear about—hardly made for a hush-hush situation. I was willing to bet that Amy Sue Gravink’s face was going to be staring out from the front page of the next day’s Metro section, damn it all.

  That meant we had to run with it, or look like complete morons by breakfast. So Mad and I hunkered down to finish the story. It turned out to be forty inches long, covering the whole sordid tale of what happened to Amy Sue’s parents, how she’d persevered (cue the violins) and gone to night school and applied to college—complete with quotes from her teachers and neighbors about what a plucky little thing she was. It talked about her brother’s trouble in school, and how his teachers always said he wasn’t really dumb but just wasn’t any good at, quote, “book learnin’.”

  What the story didn’t suggest, of course, was that he might have killed his sister, and his parents to boot. That was just speculation, based on nothing more solid than circumstantial evidence and the off-the-record hunch of a single policeman. Even if Mad and I had wanted to put our bylines on something that flimsy, the paper had no desire to wind up in libel court. We just hoped Gordon didn’t come up with something better in time to make his deadline.

  Eventually, and no matter how I tried to procrastinate, the moment came when one of us had to call up the police for comment. Now, if this had been a relatively normal situation, the call might have gone one of several ways. The cops could have just said “no comment”; they could have gone postal and tried to talk us into holding the story, New York Times be damned; they could have confirmed they were looking into the possibility that Amy Sue was the first victim (for my money, the most likely scenario); or they could have positively identified her, assuming they’d had the time to find her dental records and notify whoever passed as her next of kin, sans her brother.

  None of these possibilities would have made me break a sweat. But in the present situation there existed a whole galaxy of much uglier options, which included having Detective Brian Cody hate me for the rest of my life or (what’s worse) never sleep with me again.