Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  “Look, all I have is dirty hands.” I showed him my palms, filthy from crawling around in the backyard. It really was all I had to show for my brief stint in captivity. Unbelievable.

  But Chief Hill made me sit for an exam with the paramedics anyway, and when they were done he put me in the front seat of his official car and drove me back to town.

  “Alex, for the love of Mike, what were you doing out there?”

  “I thought I was going out for an interview. He tricked me.”

  “Gravink?”

  “No, it was David Loew. You know, the head of the Benson Animal Anarchists.”

  “That long-haired hippie creep? He was in on this?”

  “I can’t believe it. But he’s involved somehow. He’s got to be.”

  I explained how I’d gotten suckered out to the house, and when I was finished the chief pulled the microphone from the dashboard and barked orders into it. Since Bobby Ray Gravink was way too dead to be prosecuted, I had a feeling the ax was going to fall hard on David Loew. And although there was no way Bill would let me, I was unhinged enough to have a few fantasies about covering the trial myself. The execution too.

  “You want to tell me what happened in that house?” the chief was saying. “Or would you rather let it sit awhile?”

  “Aren’t I going to have to, you know, make a formal statement anyway?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Then I guess I’d rather do it all at once.”

  “However you want to play it. You’re one tough little girl, you know that?”

  I let that sink in for a while, then thought about something else. “Chief, am I going to be in trouble?”

  “For killing Gravink? Mayor’s gonna pin a medal on you.”

  “No, I mean… I really shouldn’t be telling you this. But I think I shot him, like, eight times.”

  “Six. Cody still carries a revolver. Thirty-eight special. Six shots max.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “You telling me you think you used excessive force?”

  “He was down. I kept shooting.”

  “I really shouldn’t be telling you this either, Alex. But good for you.”

  “Chief, I tried to shoot him in the head. The only reason I didn’t was I was out of bullets.”

  He laughed out loud. After all that had happened, the sound seemed completely foreign. “Like I said, you’re one tough little girl.”

  We were getting into town, and when I expected him to go in one direction, he went in another. “Where are we going?”

  “Hospital.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I gotta warn you, Alex. Cody didn’t look so hot when they took him out of there. Had to jump-start his heart. Wasn’t breathing on his own.”

  “But he’s still alive?”

  “They would have radioed me if he wasn’t. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up. It might be an ugly wait.”

  “Then why aren’t you trying to talk me out of it?”

  “I had a feeling you might have a little bit of an interest in how our Cody makes out.”

  So we’d been fooling exactly no one. Big surprise. “But how did he get out there? How did he find me?”

  “I can’t say, ‘cause I don’t know,” the chief said. “But with any luck, you can ask him yourself.”

  It’s rather ironic, and the subject of no little teasing on my part, that Cody is alive today for no better reason than that he’s a big Irish lug. That, and the fact that whatever else Bobby Ray Gravink was, he was a meticulous dispenser of lethal drugs. The dose in that hypodermic had been precisely calibrated to dispatch a young girl of 108 pounds. Cody weighs in at more than twice that—but minus the medical intervention, it still would have killed him. He owes his life to the paramedics in the Walden County Sheriff’s Department, and I guess I owe my life to him.

  The atmosphere at the hospital was a cross between a throne room and a madhouse. It’s not every day that a Gabriel cop nearly gets killed in the line of duty, and it seemed like everyone in the whole county who wore a uniform (including the postmen and the meter maids) showed up to pay their respects. I was pretty much a fixture at the proverbial bedside, and I was kind of astounded at the deference I got from everybody—not because I was the hero cop’s best girl, but because I’d been the one to pull the trigger on the son of a bitch. It had never occurred to me that killing somebody could win you so much respect. Perhaps that’s why it’s such a popular activity.

  As for the newspaper, the general consensus was not again. There I was, smack-dab in the middle of another mess, and it was up to Bill and Marilyn to figure out how to play it. Mad won some big AP award for all the stories he wrote; he had five bylines the next day, a Monitor record. Plenty of other reporters kept calling, appealing to my sense of collegial goodwill to cut them some slack. But in the end I only gave one outside interview, and it was to an old friend of mine named Gordon Band.

  “You know,” Cody was saying to me on his last afternoon in the hospital, when we’d finally gotten rid of everybody. “My recall of what happened after I walked into that room is pretty hazy. But I have this strange feeling that maybe there was a pretty girl there telling me not to die.”

  I sat down on the edge of the bed and kissed the top of his head. “There might have been.”

  “And this same girl was saying all this stuff about how much she loved me.”

  “You were hallucinating.”

  “I was?”

  “Must’ve been the drugs.”

  “Ah.” He pulled me down across him and kissed me. “Well, I’ll have to hope for another near-death experience one of these days.”

  “You know, Cody, if you’re well enough to talk about these daydreams of yours, maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me how the hell it was you found me out there.”

  “I’ve been avoiding it.”

  “I noticed. How come?”

  “Because I feel like an idiot. I let that amateur bastard get the better of me.”

  “From what the doctors said, it was a pretty goddamn lucky shot on his part. If he hadn’t jabbed you right in the heart with that thing, you might not have even felt it for a while. You sure as hell wouldn’t have conked out on me like that.”

  “Yeah, but the way things played out, I’d be dead right now if it weren’t for you.”

  “Cody, if it weren’t for me, you never would have been caught off guard in the first place. And if you hadn’t come barging in there, I’d be dead right now.”

  “So you think we should call it even?”

  “Let’s shake on it.” We did. “Okay, now spill it.”

  He leaned back against the pillows. He was in good shape for a guy who’d been on a ventilator four days ago, but he still looked like hell.

  “After that girl Justice disappeared, the pressure on the department was unbelievable. I never saw anything like it before, not even in the navy. We had people camped out, senators calling us—the mayor pretty much pitched a tent in the goddamn squad room. We were running interviews up at the vet clinic, still trying to pretend it was some investigation about stolen medical equipment so Gravink wouldn’t get tipped off. Finally, we thought we had him. Five different people ID’ed the picture as a lab tech named Peter Anderson.”

  “And that’s how you found me?”

  He shook his head. “It was a dead end. We had them pull Anderson’s documentation, and it was all fake. The address he put on his application was a post office box, and that’s where he had his paycheck sent. We searched high and low for a Peter Anderson, and we turned up four of them, none of whom were our guy. So we figured he had to be living under yet another name.”

  “Couldn’t you just grab him when he came into work?”

  “We would’ve loved to. But the day Justice disappeared, he called in and said he had to leave town because of a death in the family. Pretty bad joke, huh? But I got to thinking. Granted, we only had the photocopies of his ID from his file at the clinic,
but the stuff looked top-notch. From what I hear the human resources people up on campus are no dummies. They’ve got a big labor relations school up there, and last thing the university wants is to get caught hiring illegal aliens.”

  “Right. So?”

  “So like I said, I got to thinking. If you planned to get into mischief in this town, and you needed fake papers so good there wasn’t much chance your cover would get blown, where would you go?”

  I gaped at him. “No way.”

  “You got it. I went out to the county lockup and had a little chat with Jeffrey Vandebrandt.”

  “And he talked?”

  “Not at first. But when I informed him that if he’d helped Bobby Ray Gravink escape justice it would make him an accessory to murder, it got his attention.”

  “Isn’t that stretching it a little?”

  “Lucky for us, Vandebrandt’s no lawyer. Within five minutes he was singing like Rosemary Clooney. Told us the same guy who’d hired him to make fake papers in the name of Peter Anderson also bought another set for an Alan Johnson.”

  “How did he afford it? Vandebrandt’s fakes must have cost a bundle.”

  “Same way he afforded everything else.”

  “Which is?”

  “Easy. After he killed his sister, he took all the money she saved for college.”

  “Son of a bitch.”

  “You said it. So once we had Johnson’s name, we put every guy we had on it, checking utility bills and rental agencies, that type of thing. But my instincts were telling me that wherever this guy was, it had to be out in the country somewhere. He’d need privacy, and if he really was keeping all those dogs he stole he’d have to have someplace to put them. So I went out to this little office in Etna that posts places for rent out in the sticks. Johnson’s name was in their records. That’s when I called for backup, then broke about fifty regs by going in there before it showed up.”

  “It’s a damn good thing you did. Gravink was about to stick that needle in Justice.”

  “You would have stopped him.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know. But I just know you would have.”

  “I think you’re giving me a lot more credit than I deserve. I’m a big chicken.”

  He gave me a look that said yeah, right. “You might not even want to hear this,” he said a while later, “but since we’re coming clean on everything, Jeffrey Vandebrandt told me something else when he was spilling his guts. He’s been in your house.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Do you remember I told you that along with all the high-tech crap we found in his apartment, there was also some makeup?”

  “I guess.”

  “Well apparently, part of the thrill of his little hobby was seeing his targets up close and personal. So one night, right after your name was in the paper for finding Patricia Marx’s body, he dressed up as some senior citizen and knocked on your front door.”

  “You’re kidding me. I don’t even remember.”

  “He said there was a big party going on. Anyway, he never even saw you. One of your roommates answered the door, and with all the people around he lost his nerve. Said he pretended to be looking for the previous owners.”

  “Jesus Christ. How long did you say they’re locking him up for?”

  “Not sure yet.”

  “Let me ask you something else, Cody. Do you think Vandebrandt knew what Gravink was up to?”

  He gave me a long, assessing look. “You smart chicks are so sexy.”

  That made me laugh. “You sound like Mad.”

  “Where is he, anyway?”

  “He wanted to come by, but he figured you had enough to handle with the admiring hordes. He sends his regards. Wants to buy you a Guinness when you’re up to drinking it.”

  “Sounds damn good. I’ve just about had it with ice water and Jell-O.”

  “So what do you think?”

  “About Vandebrandt and Gravink? Good question. I never asked the kid straight out, but my gut tells me he knew, even if he didn’t know he knew.”

  “It takes one to know one?”

  “Exactly. Maybe that’s why he had such a compulsion to stalk you, even though his parents thought he was cured. He’d actually met the guy in the flesh, so he felt like he owned a part of it. Or maybe I’m just full of it.”

  I stood up and went to the window. The hospital has a great view of Gabriel, with the lake snaking up to the city’s edge and Benson looming above. I know it was all in my head, but even from this distance the city seemed different from the Gabriel of a week before—the one that was starting to feel more in tune with the dead than the living.

  “Cody,” I said, still looking out at the landscape, “why do you think he did it?”

  “I don’t know. But from the way you just asked, I have a feeling maybe you do.”

  “I’m not sure. I only spent a couple of hours with him, and definitely not of my own free will. But maybe I got a better look inside his head than anyone who’s still alive—except Justice, and she’s way too traumatized to think about it. But while I was out there, it all seemed to make sense. At least from his point of view.”

  “What did?”

  “Look, I have no idea how he got the way he got—whether some priest diddled him when he was six or what. I don’t know if Jack the Ripper was pissed because some hooker gave him the clap, and in the long run it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. It seems pretty clear that all that S and M shit in his parents’ house was really his, so he obviously had some sick ideas about women. But I do think I know why he picked his victims.”

  “We already know how he found them. They were all in the Benson vet clinic database.”

  “But there’s more to it than that. The women he killed had something else in common. As far as he was concerned, they didn’t deserve their dogs.”

  “What?”

  “I know it sounds crazy, but just listen. Patricia Marx had taken Cocoa in to have its ears cropped, which a lot of people think is inhumane. C.A. hadn’t had her dog neutered even though he was suffering from this prostate disease, just because her family wanted to breed him. Lynn Smith’s dog was blind, and she didn’t scrape together the money to fix it. And Justice shucked off modern medicine completely and treated her dog herself.”

  “And you think he was hunting the women down to punish them?”

  “That too. Once he got going, he obviously messed with them in ways that related to what was wrong with their dogs. Look what he did to C.A., and to Lynn Smith’s eyes. But mostly I think it was to liberate the dogs.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “Maybe. But it doesn’t seem a whole lot more ridiculous than strangling women who were stupid enough to let you in the front door. Or shooting couples in parked cars. Or picking up some guy in a gay bar and eating his…”

  “Point taken.”

  “All I’m saying is, in his criminally insane little universe, he thought he had the moral high ground.”

  “But what about killing his parents? And his sister?”

  “His parents had the family dog put down against his wishes. Maybe as far as he was concerned, it was a capital offense. And as for his sister, he said something about being furious that she hadn’t stopped them from doing it. But the bottom line is probably that after what went down at the Houston SPCA, she couldn’t ignore her suspicions about what really happened with their parents. We know for a fact it was around that time that she started applying to schools far away from Texas. But beyond that, who knows?”

  “Are you telling me some nut job with a high school education performed surgery on these dogs? And he didn’t kill them?”

  “I guess. I mean, it was his obsession since he was a kid, but he knew he’d never have the grades to get into vet school. I don’t know, maybe the frustration helped drive him nuts. Anyway, that house you found me in was chock-full of vet textbooks. What if he was self-taught, spent hours and hours studying his stuff on
his own…”

  “Alex, will you do me a favor?”

  “Sure.”

  “Stop talking about Gravink. Then come over here and kiss me.”

  We were in mid-grapple when he heard someone clear his throat, and looked up to find a mildly amused Chief Wilfred Hill. Cody blushed, but in his condition it only made him look slightly less undead.

  “Didn’t mean to interrupt,” the chief said. “But there was something I wanted you to know before it gets around. David Loew’s dead.”

  A few days ago I’d been planning what I’d wear to his lethal injection, but for some reason the news still didn’t make me want to jump up and down. “What happened?”

  “We’d been hunting for him ever since you told us what he did, but he managed to keep a low profile. Then we got a report of a gorge jumper a couple hours ago, and guess who it was? Did it in front of plenty of witnesses, so don’t go thinking conspiracy theories. Anyway, there was a letter addressed to you in a Ziploc bag in his back pocket. I don’t have a copy for you yet, but I can tell you what it said. You want to know?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Said he couldn’t live with the guilt.”

  “What guilt?”

  “What he said was that when you asked him to ID Gravink at the paper, he lied. He really did recognize him as this guy named Anderson from his bunch of animal freaks. Then he went to the guy and warned him the mean old cops were about to frame him and he better blow town. Said he never even imagined Gravink might actually have done it. As far as Loew was concerned, Anderson was one of their own. And when he told him, I guess Gravink convinced him all he needed was a chance to talk to you and prove he was innocent. So he asked his buddy Loew to get you out there on a sham interview and… well, you know the rest.”

  “But why would he kill himself? I mean, if he didn’t know what Gravink was really up to…”

  “Look, as far as I can tell Loew was as high-strung as they come. What he said in his note was that he’d spent all this time trying to save lives and here he was aiding and abetting a killer. Said if you and Justice had gotten dead it would have been his fault.”

  “But we didn’t.”

  “Yeah, well, seems like that was a minor detail. Guy was a fruitcake.” He turned to Cody. “And by the way, Detective, you’re on disability for a month. If I so much as smell you back at the house before then, you’re out on your ass. Get well soon.” Then he kissed me on the cheek and left.