Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  30

  ZEKE CAME HOME TWENTY MINUTES AFTER CODY LEFT, and he seemed so happy to see me I didn’t have the heart to leave him in the empty apartment. So I scribbled a note that I’d taken the dog to my place to play with Shakespeare, drove home, and called Mad. Then I crawled into bed, and when I woke up the two dogs were curled next to each other in a yin-yang pattern, which was just about the cutest thing I’d ever seen.

  When I got to the paper, Bill was already at one of the layout computers mocking up the next day’s page one—a good ten hours earlier than usual. They’d obviously already heard. Unless the killer turned himself in before deadline, there was no doubt about what the lead story was going to be.

  “Nice of you to show up,” Bill said.

  “It’s nine-thirty. The last thing I heard, this was still an A.M. paper.”

  “Madison’s been here since seven.”

  “Bully for him. Who do you think tipped him off last night?”

  Bill stopped messing with the mouse. “How’d you find out so soon?”

  “Reliable source.”

  “Who?”

  “Anonymous reliable source. Don’t worry about it. It was legitimate, am I right?”

  “Yeah. Mad just got back from the house. Family’s going crazy.”

  The family in question was the Kingman-Finkelsteins, some of Gabriel’s most celebrated loudmouths. I’d been covering them for years, chronicling their crusades for social justice at home and abroad. The father, Joe Kingman, was a Benson law professor who’d helped convince the university to found one of the nation’s first Peace Studies programs during the early seventies—or, more accurately, helped drive the administration batty with protests and takeovers until it finally gave in. Mom was Shayna Finkelstein, an antihunger activist who’d chucked a career as a nutrition researcher to start soup kitchens and food banks around the country. They were always good for a quote on topics ranging from welfare cuts to CIA recruiting to the skyrocketing price of quinoa.

  I’d done a profile of Joe Kingman last summer when he’d been named to a vacant seat on the Gabriel city council, and I’d spoken to his wife as recently as the week before. But the first time I’d ever met the family was shortly after I got on the city beat, when the council was debating whether or not to revive Gabriel’s moribund curfew law. It’d been discovered during a routine review of the city ordinances, and the cops (who’d had no idea such a thing existed) started licking their chops at how handy it would be in making the streets safe from slackers.

  It sounded sensible enough. No one under the age of sixteen could be out after eleven o’clock without an adult, except for a list of special circumstances about a mile long. There were exceptions for going to and from arts events, sports games, errands for their parents—just about everything but drug deals and drive-bys.

  Still, a few people promptly went nuts. What everyone on the council (even the serious lefties) thought was going to be a routine thing turned into a month-long debate. Protests were duly conducted, petitions circulated, open meetings held. By the time it came to a vote, fifty kids and their parents stormed the council hall to exercise their fundamental right to shout in public. And the most eloquent of them all—the one who gave a speech on the beauty of walking the city streets at two A.M. to commune with the wholesome quietude of Gabriel—was Justice Kingman-Finkelstein.

  She was fifteen years old at the time, a sophomore at Gabriel High who’d been agitating for change (energy-saving lightbulbs in the gym, vegan food in the cafeteria) since she was in the third grade. She was tall and pretty, with long legs and light brown hair that flowed down her back. She was more poised than most people twice her age, and when the votes were counted the anti-curfew people won 8–2.

  And now, two years later, she was gone.

  She was about to start her freshman year at Benson, where she planned to major in labor relations. Justice (yes, the name on her birth certificate) was staying with her parents during a break from a summer program in grassroots union organizing when she disappeared. She’d been out running with the family dog at dusk, and she didn’t come home. Her parents might not have been concerned at first—might have figured she was chasing her inner child around campus and lost track of time—if her dog hadn’t wandered home alone three hours later.

  The Kingman-Finkelsteins immediately called the cops, the very folks who’d hauled them away in plastic handcuffs so many times before. The next morning, with still no sign of Justice, their house had been turned into a command center. From what Mad said, it sounded like every liberal activist in Gabriel had shown up to help print posters, work the phones, or just pray. I made some lame crack about a candlelight vigil, whereupon Mad informed me there was already one set for that night.

  The press releases started hitting the fax machine at ten-thirty. Justice’s parents had always been masters at working the media, and getting their daughter back was the most important campaign they’d ever been on. They were clearly determined to get her name and face out there, maybe in the hope that whoever took her might think of her as a human being rather than a piece of meat. They issued statements about Justice, about the family, even about the damn dog. Although they’d already given Mad an interview at their house, they came right to the phone when I called to ask a few more questions. They even got Chief Hill himself to give a speech on their front steps; it was covered not only by local TV but affiliates from the three networks, Fox, and CNN. The Kingman-Finkelsteins had been cultivating their media contacts for two decades, and now they were calling them in.

  Mad was writing the mainbar about the apparent abduction—that’s what the cops were calling it—and I was working on a sidebar profile of Justice. I chronicled her various bouts of activism over the years, got a few quotes from her teachers and friends, did a break-out box on all the awards she’d won. The whole thing would have been enough of a tearjerker even without the coup de grace: her dog was terminally ill.

  His name was Karl (as in the father of modern socialism), and he was a racing greyhound she’d adopted through a group based in Gabriel that saves them from the track. He’d been with the family since he was three, but after he turned six last spring he’d been diagnosed with cancer. He had a tumor in his left front leg, and when the vet wanted to amputate, Justice said no; it wouldn’t have saved the dog’s life anyway, just bought him a little more time. So she did her homework and started treating him herself. She cut all the preservatives out of his diet, bought homeopathic remedies at one of the co-ops, even found an acupuncturist in town who was willing to work on him.

  The vets were amazed at how well he did. They’d given him two months to live, and four months later he was still running around—apparently fast enough to get away from whoever had abducted his owner. The tumor was still growing, though, and sooner or later the cancer would spread to his internal organs and he’d have to be put down.

  But the doctors had to admit that this time, alternative medicine had done a hell of a lot more for him than they could have. And yes, those doctors worked at the Benson vet clinic.

  I put all of this at the end of my profile of Justice, but I wasn’t sure that even Bill would have the stomach for something that shameless. (Stupid question; of course he did.) But what happened with Karl seemed important for another reason: it broke the pattern. As far as we knew, this was the first time one of the dogs had gotten away.

  No one had any way of knowing how that might affect what happened to Justice. Would it somehow make her captor less willing to kill her? Or—and as far as I was concerned, this was by far the more likely—would it piss him off so much, he’d strangle her even sooner?

  Was she already dead?

  We debated these options across the newsroom with a surprising lack of sarcasm. Journalists can joke about anything—and I mean anything—but for some reason getting our rocks off over the imminent demise of some poor hyphenated teenager was beneath even us. Go figure.

  I was putting the finishin
g touches on my story, waiting for the phone to ring with one last quote, when in walked David Loew. He was dressed the same as always, in a PETA sweatshirt, jeans, and canvas sneakers, all of which had holes in them; I was starting to wonder if he owned any other clothes. But his hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail and his beard was trimmed, and that much (plus the conspicuous lack of what we townies call “the crazy eyes”) put him in the top one percent of his social group, appearance-wise.

  “How are you, Alexandra?” he said in that weirdly formal way of his. David Loew is a very polite guy—so polite, you almost don’t notice he’s talking about blowing up labs and throwing pig’s blood on people. “I received your message,” he was saying. “Do you still need to speak to me?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “Why don’t we go someplace quiet?” I took him back to the library, a closet-sized room where we archive old articles. It has a phone and exactly one chair, but it’s the only place in the newsroom (besides the darkroom) where you can lock the door. Legends abound about staffers who have supposedly gotten lucky in the library, and whether such action took place during actual working hours. And no, I haven’t.

  I gave Loew the chair and sat on the librarian’s desk. Then I handed him the picture of Bobby Ray Gravink that Cody had left in his apartment, and which I’d taken.

  “Do you recognize this guy?”

  He studied the picture for a long time, then raised his head. “No,” he said. “I do not.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Who is this person?”

  “His name is Bobby Ray Gravink. Does the name ring a bell?”

  “No. Should it do so?”

  “Probably not. It’s a crazy idea anyway.”

  “How so?”

  “Did you hear about what happened to Justice Kingman-Finkelstein?” His face was blank. “You know her, don’t you?”

  “Of course. She is a fellow traveler.”

  “Right. Great. Well, she was abducted last night. Probably by the same person who killed those other four girls.”

  That seemed to get to him. “And you believe this Mr….”

  “Gravink.”

  “This Mr. Gravink had something to do with this?”

  “He may have a whole hell of a lot to do with it. Anyway, the cops want to talk to him.”

  “And you now work for the police?”

  “Oh, come on, you know I don’t work for the cops any more than I eat at Sizzler. I just wanted to know if you recognized him. I said it was a long shot.”

  “Isn’t that convenient?”

  “What?”

  “Isn’t it convenient that when the police look for someone to blame, they invariably choose a person whose ideals are different than their own? Someone who is out of the so-called mainstream?”

  I was tempted to remind him that anybody who killed four women was plenty out of the mainstream to begin with, but I decided it wasn’t the right approach. “David, I really don’t think this guy’s a patsy. Trust me on this.”

  “Just as you say.”

  “And you really don’t recognize him? I know the picture’s pretty grainy…”

  “I do not. May I go now?”

  “Sure.”

  He opened the door, then stopped. “Will you be attending our action next week?”

  “Um, which one would that be?”

  “Our two days of hunger to honor the millions of animals slaughtered each day to satisfy the blood lust of the human minority.”

  “Oh. That one. Sure.”

  He walked out, leaving me to ponder how much fun it was going to be to hang out on the Green for a couple of hours to watch people not eating. Whoopie.

  Our package on the disappearance of Justice Kingman-Finkelstein ran the next morning, and the papers sold out downtown within two hours. Since the Monitor is way too cheap to do another press run, the circulation director sent his office staff around to the outlying areas to liberate extra copies from the vending boxes, and those sold out too.

  The entire city was on edge, waiting for the word that her body had been found. Her parents said on TV that they refused to believe their daughter wouldn’t come back safe and sound, but volunteers were combing the woods anyway. No one could remember a worse time, not even when cops were cracking heads open during the Vietnam War. Four women were dead, and the stress of it had settled on the skinny shoulders of one seventeen-year-old girl. No one said it out loud, but there was this feeling in the air that if she didn’t survive, part of Gabriel was going to die along with her.

  I hadn’t seen Cody for a day and a half, only gotten a quick phone call from him late the previous night. I could tell from his voice that the stress was starting to get to him, and I thought of the night he’d told me about the SEALs and how he was afraid of letting someone else drown. But that was what was happening now—the clock running on Justice’s life, and no way for him to save her.

  It was all I could think about—all anyone could think about—and as I sat at my computer typing in background for one of the follow-up stories, I started having these awful daydreams about how the next day’s headline would read. LOCAL GIRL STILL MISSING. FIFTH VICTIM FOUND IN WOODS. FBI TAKES OVER CASE; HUNKY COP LEAVES TOWN. There was no newsroom betting pool for this one, but even if there were, COPS CATCH CANINE KILLER would have been a hundred-to-one long shot.

  I got sick of thinking about it, and I was on my way out of the newsroom for a bagel when the secretary yelled that I had a phone call. I went back upstairs, and found David Loew on the line. The first thing he did was apologize for waiting so long to call.

  “I’ve had time to consider it,” he said, “and I think that perhaps I was mistaken.”

  “About?”

  “I think perhaps I do recognize the man in your photograph.”

  “You do? What’s his name?”

  “I cannot tell you over the phone. You are well aware of my feelings on government surveillance.”

  “Right. Well, I’ll meet you on the Green in ten minutes.”

  Then he told me he couldn’t get into town because his bike was busted, and asked me to come out to his place. He gave me directions to a house five miles out of town, and I drove out there for the interview.

  It was, of course, one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. Anybody who’s ever seen a horror movie knows that when somebody says “I can’t talk about it over the phone; come meet me at an abandoned warehouse,” you should make haste in the opposite direction. All I can say in my own defense is that I’d been dealing with David Loew for months, and I’d never had a reason to suspect him of anything worse than zealotry and excessive diction. I certainly had no reason to mistrust him. But then again, if I’d known I was trusting him with my life, I would have given it more thought than I did—which was none at all.

  So that’s how I ended up in front of a house in the country on a sunny afternoon in July. That’s how I knocked on the door, and found myself face-to-face with Bobby Ray Gravink. And that, in short, is how I very nearly got myself killed.

  31

  I WOKE UP IN A CAGE. I MEAN AN ACTUAL CAGE, AS IN A BOX made out of chain link with a lock on the front. I had no clear memory of how I’d ended up out cold, except that it had something to do with Bobby Ray Gravink and a big smelly rag. But this much I do know: when I woke up, I felt like hell.

  To begin with, I had a headache. And I was hungry, having skipped breakfast and been on my way out for a snack when I was lured to my doom. Also, it wasn’t a particularly large cage, not the kind you could stand up in and yell to the guard that you’d been framed. No, this was a cage designed for four-legged creatures. It was a dog kennel.

  I looked around the room, and wished I hadn’t. There was a stainless-steel table in the middle, and along the walls were jars and instruments and some smaller cages. The place was a goddamn surgical suite, and it didn’t take long for me to remember what had happened to the other patients. C.A., with her reproductive organs laid on her stomach like
lunch meat. Lynn Smith, dumped in a baseball dugout minus her eyes.

  I had a very bad feeling those eyes were around here somewhere, floating in a jar of formaldehyde. This was probably not going to end well.

  But then I saw something else, something everyone in Gabriel was looking for. It was Justice Kingman-Finkelstein, and she was across the room, naked and locked in a cage of her own.

  I whispered her name, and when she didn’t hear me I said it a bit louder. Her head snapped around, and I saw that her mouth was taped shut. Even from twenty feet away I could read the terror in her eyes. I called her name again, tried to say some idiotic crap about how we were going to be okay, but she started shaking her head from side to side with a desperate kind of violence.

  “Where the hell is he?” I said, then remembered she couldn’t talk. “Which direction? Come on, point or something. He could be back any minute. Where is he?” She shook her head again even harder than before, and made these high-pitched whimpering sounds. Then I realized her hands were tied behind her back, and she couldn’t point if she wanted to.

  I’m not sure how long we stayed there like that, but it didn’t seem like long enough. Because, you see, it’s plenty scary being locked in a cage by some psycho serial killer. But even that is nothing compared to looking him in the eye.

  He walked in wearing a white lab coat with a tie on underneath, and a stethoscope around his neck like Marcus-fucking-Welby. My initial thought was that he didn’t have the crazy eyes either. He just seemed cold, businesslike, totally indifferent. He walked over to Justice, and as he approached the cage she threw herself back against the wall and got as far away from him as he could.

  “Bad dog.” That’s what I heard him say. I’m not kidding. “Bad dog.” He even said it again. “Bad, bad dog.” And then: “You’ll have to be punished.” He went over to the counter and reached for what turned out to be a hose connected to the utility sink. He turned the water on high and sprayed her, and she jammed herself so far into the corner I could see her flesh pressing through the chain link. I had a feeling I might actually faint sometime soon.