Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  I pounded out the story, called Cody back to confirm everything, and filed it with Bill. He read it with speed-bag jabs of his pinkie on the SCROLL DOWN key and slapped on a headline: VET STUDENT REPORTED MISSING. “Fine. Get out of here. And, Alex?” I stopped. “Sorry about your friend.”

  For Bill, that was a Hallmark card wrapped in a valentine. “Thanks.”

  I met Cody in the back parking lot. He was sitting on the hood of his car, smoking a cigarette. “Give me one of those goddamn things.”

  “Alex, believe me, you don’t want to…” I shut him up with a look, and he even held out his lighter.

  “Let’s go. The student paper office is just down the street. They aren’t owned by the university, you know. They’re independent. That’s why they don’t suck.”

  “I’m not taking you anyplace until you promise me one thing.”

  “Okay, I swear I won’t take up smoking again forever.”

  “Not that. Jesus, Alex, look at this place.” He gestured at the Monitor parking lot, with its Hoffa-era loading dock, Dumpsters, delivery trucks, and trailer full of spare parts for the pressroom. If some crazy killer wanted to play hide and seek, this was the place for it. “Promise me you won’t come out here alone at night. When you leave work, I damn well want you to have an escort. Get someone from the paper to walk you to your car. Drive with your doors locked. Call home first to make sure someone’s there. If no one is, call the cops.”

  “Deal.”

  “You swear?”

  “What did you expect me to do, argue? I’m not stupid, and I’m definitely not suicidal. I’m as attached to living as the next guy.”

  “Okay. Let’s go.”

  We waited while they scanned C.A.’s picture at the Benson Bugle, then dropped it off in the mailbox at the TV station. “They’ll take a shot of it to use on the air in the morning. We can get it back then if we need it.”

  “You really thrive under pressure, don’t you?”

  “Let’s just say I work well on deadline.”

  “Where to now?”

  “That’s it. Unless you count how badly I need another drink.”

  “Then let’s go scare one up.”

  “You must think I’m a total lush.”

  “Doesn’t it go with the job?”

  “Supposedly. But don’t they need you back at the cop shop?”

  “I’m in first thing in the morning. We’ve got people looking for her, but there isn’t a whole lot you can do overnight. You can’t exactly go knocking on people’s doors at one A.M. asking if they’ve seen her. And if I don’t get some sleep I’m not going to be any good to anybody.”

  “Then you can just drop me home.”

  “Probably should, but the truth is I’m wide awake. And anyway, I think we both could use some winding down.”

  I looked at my watch. “Bars close in twenty minutes.”

  “Your place?”

  “Everybody’s either crying or drunk. I don’t think I can deal. I just feel like I need a couple of hours to…”

  “Not think about death?”

  “How did you know?”

  “Occupational hazard. How about we go to my place then?”

  “Won’t that be a little… weird?”

  “Sleeping with the enemy again? Unchaperoned?”

  “Sounds silly when you put it that way.”

  Cody lived on the top floor of what used to be a big one-family house six blocks from the police station, on the outskirts of what passes for the ghetto around here. The house was well kept up, though, and the yard was free of forty-ouncers, possibly because it was surrounded by a spiky wooden fence.

  “We ought to be quiet. Landlords have little kids.”

  He unlocked the door at the top of the stairs to reveal a comfy-casual living room with an overstuffed couch, a matching chair, and stacks of newspapers overflowing the coffee table. It took me a second to realize there was also a very fluffy gray-and-white dog by the door; he was sitting there so quietly, I hadn’t even noticed. “This is Zeke?” I let him sniff my open hand. “What a hunk.” I bent down and kissed him on the snout, leaving a pucker of brick lipstick on his muzzle. “Doesn’t he move?”

  “Zeke, okay,” Cody said in the commanding voice they teach you in dog school, and that I’d never been able to manage. The dog stood up, did a yoga stretch, and followed us into the kitchen. “Want a beer? I don’t think I have any wine in this place.”

  “Do you have anything stronger?”

  “What did you have in mind?”

  “I’d sell my soul for a gin and tonic.”

  “I think I can swing that. No limes, though.” He held up a plastic lemon.

  “Primitive, but adequate.”

  He mixed me a drink, let the dog out, and opened up a Sam Adams. We sprawled on the couch, and he lit us each a cigarette. “When this pack is empty, we’re both through. Agreed?”

  “When you catch this bastard, we’re through. How’s that?”

  “Dangerous thing for me to say—‘I’ll clean up my act when this case is over.’ Because there’s always another case, so there’s always another excuse to keep up the bad habits.”

  “But this is the first time you’ve even thought about quitting. Hardly a string of broken promises.”

  “Good point. All right. It’s a pact.”

  We sat there for a while without talking, just listening to the Eagles on his stereo. The gin and tonic didn’t turn out to be half bad, even with the faux lemon; you have to respect a guy who keeps Tanqueray and Schweppes around the house. Maybe Cody was more civilized than I’d figured.

  “Cody, listen. I don’t really want to talk about C.A. Not talking about it seems very much the point right now. But there’s something I wanted to tell you. And before I do, let me just make it clear that you don’t have to tell me diddly if you don’t want to. I’m not trying to dig here. But let me ask you one thing off the record. Have you ID’ed the first victim yet?”

  He seemed to be debating whether or not to tell me anything. Finally he just said, “No.”

  “And you’ve checked all the missing persons reports for the U.S. and Canada? And runaways that would have been the right age?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, Mad and I were brainstorming at the bar tonight, trying to figure out how that could possibly be—how a girl you’d think would have friends and family could just disappear without anyone reporting her. And we were thinking—you’ve probably thought of this already—but we were wondering whether she might have been killed by the same person who would have filed the report in the first place. I mean, how else can you explain a person just getting… misplaced like that? How could there be no one left to miss her?”

  “That’s what we’ve been trying to figure out. Off the record.”

  “So maybe once you figure out who she is, you’ll also know who he is.”

  “It’s possible. And I think we’d better change the subject.”

  Then the doorbell rang. “Who could that be at this hour? Jealous girlfriend?”

  “Jealous boyfriend.” He jogged downstairs, opened the outer door, and came back with Zeke.

  “Do not tell me the dog rang the doorbell. How the hell did you teach him that?”

  He grinned. “Basic training principles. Positive reinforcement. Discipline. And a whole lot of hot dogs.”

  “He’s fantastic.”

  “Zeke, sit.” The dog did. “Lie down.” He did that too, then rolled over, begged, gave both paws, and spoke. Cody looked absurdly proud.

  “Show-off. Does he play dead too?”

  “Never. He has his dignity.”

  “You can leave that jar of biscuits there? And he won’t eat them all?”

  “Of course not.”

  “And where’s all the dog hair, anyway? Doesn’t he shed?”

  “I brush him. And he’s not allowed on the furniture. He sleeps on his bed in the corner.”

  “Wow. My dog would co
nsider this a fascist state.”

  “You just have to establish who’s the alpha male. Want another drink?”

  “God yes.” He went back into the kitchen, and I stretched out on the floor with Zeke. “Does he really sleep in the corner all night? All by himself?” Cody didn’t answer. “Or is there an occasional breakdown in discipline?”

  “My ex didn’t care for dogs in the bed,” he said from the other room. “Or anywhere near her, for that matter.”

  “Jesus, Cody, how did you end up with this chick?”

  “I was young and stupid.”

  “You still didn’t answer my question. Does Zeke really get exiled to the living room?” He came back and handed me my drink, filled up to the very brim. “Well?” He wouldn’t look me in the eye.

  “Okay. Maybe, once in a while…”

  “He sleeps with you every night, doesn’t he?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Cody, you big softy. Words can’t express how much I approve.”

  “My sheets smell like his feet.”

  “What could be better?”

  “You are one strange lady. You drunk enough yet?”

  “Not quite.”

  “Are you going to drink all my gin?”

  “I might.”

  “What if I take advantage of you?”

  “I’ll take my chances, Boy Scout.”

  12

  FOUR DAYS WENT BY, AND NOTHING. NO SIGN OF C.A., AND no sign of her dog either. We’d even run a picture of Nanki-Poo as a second-day story—“vet student and pooch still missing,” that sort of thing—but so far none of the calls to the hotline had panned out, at least as far as I knew. I hadn’t asked Cody if they had any leads, but I had a feeling if they did, he’d break protocol and tell me.

  There was some good news, though. The animal-rights story died down for a while, which helped me hold on to my sanity for the time being. With my roommate missing and creepy letters coming to my newsroom cubbyhole, I wasn’t sure I could handle more pictures of fetal pigs. Mad and I were supposed to be covering the murders together (him officially, me not), but Bill had an attack of humanity and sent me out on a few quick-hit stories. I did a piece on some Benson students who were building bicycles out of spare parts and giving them to needy kids, and one on a guy who does a cable-access show on the JFK assassination (one conspiracy theory per episode), and another on a cop who was retiring after twenty years of directing rush-hour traffic at Gabriel’s most hated intersection, a notorious eight-road snarl nicknamed The Octopus.

  That Tuesday, I wasn’t working on anything much more exciting. My assignment for the day was a piece on a couple battling the landmarks preservation commission for the right to fix half the roof on their house. The roof was white, and part of it was leaking, but the commission told them if they replaced it they could only do it in the “historically faithful” color now required of the whole preservation district, which was dark brown. (The white roof had, apparently, been put on during those crazy fifties.) The couple wanted a variance so they could fix the roof. The commission told them to go to hell, so they were appealing. My original story, by the way, included the phrase “Oreo cookie” to describe one possible architectural outcome.

  I was looking up the number of the head of the city planning office when the scanner went off. “Emergency control to Gabriel monitors. Report of a body in Blue Heron Wood, approximately a quarter mile southeast of the main entrance. Subject is a female Caucasian, appears to be…”

  The announcement just stopped, as though the dispatcher had been cut off. I’d been sitting on top of that scanner for nearly four years, and I’d never heard it happen before. Sure, sometimes the dispatchers trip over their own tongues and start over, but this sounded like the microphone had actually been snatched from her.

  “Mad, did you hear what I just heard?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It’s C.A. It’s got to be.”

  “Take it easy, Alex. Don’t jump to…”

  “Did you ever hear anything like that? They found another body. There’s no way they’d want that over the regular dispatch radio. The announcer must have screwed up, and somebody grabbed the mike.”

  He didn’t try to argue with me. “I’ll tell Bill.”

  We ran out to the parking lot and jumped in my car. My left wrist was getting better, but it was still weak and I didn’t dare drive too fast. Blue Heron Wood is Benson’s ornithology preserve, thirty acres of land five miles from central campus. There’s a study center overlooking a pond, and trails that intertwine throughout the property. It’s one of the few parklike areas around Gabriel that doesn’t allow dogs, because they’d scare off the birds. I’d spent a fair amount of time there, though, because the trails are perfect for cross-country skiing—and, well, I brought Shakespeare anyway.

  “Where are you going?” Mad asked when I drove past the road leading to the main entrance. “You missed the turn.”

  “No point in trying to go in the front door. Cops’ll be all over the place. We won’t get within five hundred yards.”

  We took a left a mile farther and skirted the preserve’s outer edge. Blue Heron is much wider than it is deep, and by parking along the road on the far side we’d be just as close to the location the dispatcher had described as we would have been by going in the front.

  We started hiking in, picking our way around the gopher holes and fallen trees. The undergrowth was dense, and nobody seemed to have done any previous bushwhacking that might have helped us out; most people crunchy enough to visit the preserve have the good manners to follow the signs and stay on the trails. Worse, we really weren’t dressed for it. It was the warmest day of the season so far, and I was wearing a short-sleeved mini-dress with brown leather sandals whose major fashion statement was clunky two-inch heels. Mad was wearing his usual uniform of khakis and a blue oxford, but his footwear—his only vice, if you don’t count booze and women—consisted of an expensive pair of black wing tips with leather soles, which were getting ruined.

  It was slow going, but after twenty minutes of slogging we got to the spot I’d been aiming for. There was nothing in sight—no cops, no ambulance, and certainly no body. I looked around, trying to get my bearings.

  “I thought you knew where you were going,” Mad said, sitting on a log to inspect his shoes. When he got up, there was a muddy streak on the seat of his khakis. I decided not to tell him.

  “I haven’t spent much time here when it wasn’t winter. It looks different with leaves on the trees. But the trail has got to be around here somewhere.”

  “Look, Alex, maybe this isn’t such a great idea. They must have sealed off the park by now. If the cops catch us, we’re going to be in deep shit. I’m still not off the hook with those goons for punching out that cash machine…”

  “Go back if you want. I just have to know if it’s her.”

  “Aren’t you going to find out soon enough?”

  “I thought you were dying to see a dead body. Now’s your chance.”

  “Maybe I’m not so hot for it after all.”

  “I’m going ahead. You can do whatever you…”

  “Shh. I think I heard something.”

  We listened for a minute. “I don’t hear…”

  “Shut up,” he whispered, and pointed off to our left. “Over there.” I still didn’t hear anything, but I crouched down next to him. We were at the edge of a small clearing, and the long grass tickled my naked legs. “Look.” Sure enough, off in the distance were two people in dark blue windbreakers with yellow lettering on the back. I couldn’t read it from that far away, but I knew what it said: GPD.

  “They’re searching,” I whispered back. “They can’t have found anything yet.”

  “You don’t know that. They might be sweeping for evidence.”

  “So what do we do?”

  “Try not to get caught.” I crept forward, glad I’d worn my brown dress instead of the fuchsia; at least I had some decent camouflage. “Al
ex, where are you going? Get back here.” I pretended not to hear him. “Would you just stay put? Oh, Christ,” he growled, but I heard him follow.

  “Listen,” I said when he caught up. “I think I know where we are. There’s a trail off to the right that winds around the edge of the pond and goes back to the main parking lot. It’s like the main drag.”

  “So let’s stay the hell away from it.”

  “No, let’s take it. Think about it. The body’s got to be deep in the woods, just like the other ones. The main trail is the last place the cops’ll be. And besides, if we run into them, we’re just two people taking a walk.”

  “Just two reporters taking a walk through a crime scene. Right. They won’t suspect a thing.”

  We made our way through the dense woods without speaking. Birdcalls filled the silence despite our intrusion, or maybe because of it. I wondered if the preserve’s rightful owners were warning each other of interlopers, and what their calls might have sounded like when a killer was dumping a dead human being in the birds’ backyard.

  After a couple of wrong turns, we finally found the trail. We walked along for ten minutes without running into anyone, when Mad stopped. “How far away from the main entrance did the dispatcher say the body was?” Mad asked.

  “A quarter mile.”

  “That’s what I thought. We should be around there by now, and there’s nobody.”

  I glanced around, trying to make out landmarks through the trees. “Shit, Mad. I think I sent us in the wrong direction. We’re probably back close to the car.”

  He gave an exasperated sigh. “Then let’s turn the fuck around.” We retraced our steps to where we’d found the trail and kept going in the right direction.

  “Hold on,” I said. “I have to stop for a sec.” I sat on a flat rock and dug out a pointy twig that had lodged itself between my foot and the sandal.

  “I’ll be right back. I just want to see what’s around the corner.” He took off down the path. The forest was quiet once his footsteps faded; even the birds had taken a break. I sat there inspecting my foot for splinters, and wondering what the hell I was doing in the woods looking for my roommate’s corpse. Why couldn’t I wait for the cops to report the identity of the body? Did I feel guilty because of the disaster over the letters, which had seemed so lame but obviously weren’t? Or was I just hoping that it would turn out to be another girl—somebody else’s roommate, instead of mine?