Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  “I remember during SEAL. training, we were on a long night swim, and the guy I was buddied with doubled up in pain all of a sudden and started to drown. It was his appendix. He was a really strong swimmer, stronger than I was, but he was in so much pain he couldn’t keep himself afloat, and I tried to help him but he was just dragging me down. I tried to talk to him, get him to calm down, but he was terrified. And it was me or him, and I finally had to wrench myself away. I’ll never forget the look he gave me, like I was the one who was killing him. But I didn’t know what else to do. If I tried to get him back to shore, we were both going to drown. But if I just stayed there, he was going to die anyway. So I swam like hell to try to get help, but I knew what we were going to find when we got back.” He paused, and I got the feeling he was living the whole thing over again in his head.

  “That was the first time I ever saw a dead body, except for my father’s funeral. If I’d known there were going to be so many since then, I’m not sure what I would have done—maybe gone to work on Wall Street or some damn thing. It seems like a long time ago, and since then I think I’ve seen every possible version of death. You were talking about death before, and I guess my first reaction was that despite everything you went through last year, you have no idea of the depth and the breadth of it—how, when you do the sort of work I’ve done, you get to feel more at home with the dead than you do with the living.

  “Both my dad and my stepfather died of cancer, so I’ve watched people die of natural causes, and honestly it’s no easier than by accident or by violence. Any way you think about it, it seems so goddamn senseless. I’ve seen people who died because they worked in a convenience store, or because they welshed on a bet, or because they cheated on their wife, or because they were on the wrong road at the wrong time, or because they were wearing the wrong color shirt in the wrong neighborhood, or because somebody wanted their car, or because their dad got drunk and threw them against the wall a little too hard.

  “Those are the reasons people die in my world, Alex. They’re all clich?because they keep being true. Most people kill for the same predictable reasons they always have. You’ve got your seven deadly sins and that’s pretty much it. People kill for money, or lust, or anger, or passion, or maybe just revenge.

  “But this is different. I’ve read about cases like this, where some psycho is killing just for the pure pleasure of it. And it’s the hardest thing in the world to solve because all the things you’d normally look for, all the connections that bind the killer and the victim together and led to the murder in the first place, none of that applies. The rules you’ve always followed go out the window. So here I am, this hotshot from a big-city PD, and everybody’s looking at me like I should know what I’m doing. But you know what? I have no goddamn idea. I keep studying cases like this, about the Jeffrey Dahmers and Ted Bundys and Son of Sams of this world, and you know what’s the only common denominator? The bodies. Before those bastards got caught, dozens of people got killed. It was almost by definition—that in order for you to catch them, they’d have to kill so many times that it got old. They got sloppy, and they slipped up, and they finally got themselves caught. They overlooked a witness or one of their victims got away, and it was the beginning of the end.

  “And that’s what I’m afraid is going to happen here, Alex. I’m afraid that this goddamn thing has barely started. I’m afraid that this guy has ambition, that between the letters and the murders he’s showing us that he’s bound and determined to make a name for himself. And the thing I’m afraid of most is that I’m not good enough to stop him, and neither is the FBI, and there’s going to be a whole morgue’s worth of bodies before this is over.”

  I could tell from Cody’s voice that he wasn’t looking for an answer, didn’t expect me to buck him up with some crap about how he was big and strong and could fight the bad guy with one hand tied behind his back. The truth was that he was probably right, and we both knew it. His voice had gotten raspy at the end, so I handed him the water glass from the table on my side of the bed. Then we lay in the dark together, the only sounds coming from the ceiling fan and Zeke’s snoring.

  “Alex,” he said a while later. “Are you scared?”

  “Do you think I should be?”

  He put his arm around me to pull me next to him, and I realized we hadn’t touched the entire time he’d been talking. “No. I told you before I’d protect you. That goes double now.”

  “My hero.” I kissed him, but he didn’t kiss me back. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m just thinking.”

  “About what?”

  “About what happened to C.A. And when it might happen again, and whose parents I’m going to have to tell next.”

  “Don’t think about it. You’ll drive yourself crazy.”

  “Good advice. Unfortunately, I don’t feel capable of taking it right now.”

  There was something new in his voice, and it sounded so odd it took me a while to place it. “Brian…” I said finally. His first name felt strange on my lips. “Are you scared?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t think I’ve ever been so scared in my whole life.”

  “Scared of what?”

  He pulled me on top of him then, and when he answered he spoke so softly I wasn’t sure he wanted me to hear. “I’m terrified,” he said, “of letting somebody else drown.”

  17

  AFTER C.A.’S DEATH, THE POWERS THAT BE AT BENSON finally started acting like they gave a damn. Now, the reason for this wasn’t quite what you’d think. Sure, they were upset that they’d lost one of their own; C.A., unlike Patricia Marx or Jane Doe, was a bona fide, matriculated Benson student, and that made her death more than a matter of institutional hand-wringing. It meant that the university was going to have to deal with the inevitable parental hysteria, and a certain number of students were bound to do what Marci did—flee.

  But as far as Benson was concerned, it could get a lot worse: If another student got offed, the school might get a reputation as Murder U. When people think of the University of Florida at Gainesville they still think of dead coeds, and that sort of thing isn’t good for the endowment. And what was worse, it was happening during what was traditionally Benson’s finest hour—that lyrical interlude between graduation and reunions, when the campus is at its prettiest (thanks to all the square yardage of bluegrass they truck in from Kentucky) and there are very few students around to ruin it all. The rabble-rousing seniors—including most of the Benson Animal Anarchists—were safely graduated, and it would be months before the new crop got sufficiently organized to cause trouble.

  In two short days, five thousand alumni would descend on campus, decked out in Benson togs from stem to stern, and the university would wine and dine them for seventy-two hours straight. They’d row on the lake and sing songs and play rugby against undergrads paid to let them win, and when it was all over they’d be so overcome with emotion they’d whip out their checkbooks and say here, take it all.

  It was a sacred process with a long and illustrious history. The university had no intention of letting some serial murderer mess everything up, particularly since it was highly unlikely that he was an alumnus.

  So it was no surprise when Benson’s president, an ill-tempered old Brit who stands five-five in his Bruno Maglis, called Chief Hill up to his office for a royal audience. I only heard about it third-hand, of course—from a very amused Detective Cody, who was new to the vicissitudes of town-gown sniping—but apparently the president fed the chief lots of Walker’s shortbread before informing him that if anybody died before the last teary-eyed alum blew out of town, Hill’s son Wilfred Jr. (who was enrolling next fall on a baseball scholarship) was going to fail every course he took.

  The politics of town and gown are complex, but as far as most of Gabriel is concerned, Benson is only truly benign three weeks a year: between Christmas and New Year’s, when the entire university shuts down for vacation; between graduation and reunion, when the stude
nts are gone and everyone on campus is madly cleaning up for the alums; and between the end of summer session and the start of fall semester, when the maintenance men spend the week hiding all the nice flowers before the students come back. The latter is the most bittersweet of all, because although there’s a lot of good parking and the restaurants have no lines, we all know that within a matter of days we’ll be descended upon by hordes of clueless newcomers, asking directions in Long Island accents and then driving the wrong way down one-way streets anyway.

  Townies like me usually treasure every one of those glorious days of peace and tranquillity. But this time, I would’ve just as soon been crowded elbow to elbow with topless sorority girls. There was something eerie about the quiet, like the town had curled itself up into a ball and rolled into the lake. Or maybe it felt like everybody was holding their breath, girding themselves for another girl to die, and although nobody wanted it to happen the waiting was pretty awful in and of itself. There had been no more letters to the newspaper, and no phone calls other than the one I got the day C.A.’s body was found. I couldn’t understand why the letters had dried up, but I hoped to hell it wasn’t because we’d had our chance to placate the killer by printing his crap, and we’d blown it.

  It didn’t help that the outside media was finally starting to sniff around our little burgh. Call me a hypocrite, but as far as I was concerned this sucked any way you looked at it. People were used to locals like me chasing them around with a notebook, but camera crews from the network affiliates made everybody feel like they were living in the middle of a war zone. Plus—and I swear this isn’t just the usual print-versus-TV griping—half the coverage was just downright wrong. One station somehow calculated the body count at five. Another one mixed up the victims and said Patricia Marx was the vet student and C.A. worked at the Gap (which, considering her notorious lack of fashion sense, made Emma laugh and cry at the same time). The CBS guys from Binghamton managed to snag “an exclusive interview with one of Cathy Ann Keillor’s roommates.” This was quite a mystery to us since we were fairly sure that whoever this person was, she didn’t live with us.

  As if that weren’t bad enough, one of the tabloid crews put two and two together and, recalling my own personal brush with eternity, chased me around for three days trying to do a piece entitled “Gabriel: City of Death.” I thought about snipping our cable wire as an act of civil disobedience, but Emma pointed out that we wouldn’t be able to watch Two Fat Ladies on the Food Network, and that was the end of that.

  Back at the Monitor, the mood was pretty grim. Bill had gone apoplectic when he found out Gordon was in town covering the story for the Times, to the point that he finally lost control of his beloved tennis ball and broke a window. The sudden preponderance of reporters made the pickings slimmer for everybody, and before long all the usual sources dried up, even for the locals. People were just sick to death of answering questions, and I can’t say I blamed them.

  Fortunately for Wilfred Jr.’s academic future, reunion weekend came and went without another corpse. It did, however, offer me the pleasure of writing the usual alumni drivel, cranked out in yet another effort to convince the Benson community to buy more than twenty lousy papers a day. The university flacks were just as happy to have something other than a dead vet student on our front page, and they went out of their way to come up with cutesy little stories for me. Thus, I spent part of one Saturday listening to old white guys reminisce about their glory days (for a piece on an oral history project the Benson archive was running) and the rest of it watching slightly younger white guys sing Judy Garland songs in drag (for a story about the annual alumni comedy show, which you apparently have to be very, very drunk to appreciate).

  By the time the weekend was over I needed a drink myself, so Monday night after work I went down to the Citizen hoping to find someone to complain to. Imagine my joy to discover Mad in the window seat, hefting Mol-sons with none other than Gordon Band.

  “What is he doing here?” I said by way of greeting.

  Mad looked nonplussed. “Buying me pitchers.”

  “How nice of him. Hope you’ve got one hand on your notebooks.”

  “Come on, Alex,” Gordon said. “Sit down and have a drink.”

  “You’re lucky I don’t punch you in the nose.”

  Mad leaned back in his chair and looked from me to Gordon and back again. He was clearly amused. “There is just not enough love in this room.”

  “Come on, Alex, sit down, will ya? I’ll buy y’a drink.” Gordon was slurring his words a little. It was the closest to drunk I’d ever seen him.

  “On the Times expense account?”

  “O’ course.”

  “Then I want a very large gin and tonic, with two limes, and it better be made with Tanqueray, not that bar-pour crap.”

  “Ya got it.”

  He stood up, tottered a little, then went off toward the bar. I took the chair farthest from his. “How’d you have the lousy luck to run into him?”

  “He walked in here an hour ago.”

  “The snake.”

  “What the hell is up with you two? Lovers’ quarrel?”

  “Hush your mouth.”

  “This sure is a night to remember. You’re bitchy, he’s crocked… Who needs pro wrestling? I’m plenty entertained.”

  “Mad, I told you what he did to me. That man is a professional weasel.”

  “Who among us isn’t?”

  “Yeah, but he’s better at it than we are.”

  Gordon returned from the bar with my drink and a white business envelope. He put them both on the table in front of me.

  “What’s that?”

  “Bartender said he found it under the door when he opened.”

  I held the envelope up to the nearest light source, which was the Rolling Rock sign in the window. Under the greenish glow I saw my name typed across the front. I opened it.

  I know where you live.

  I know where you work.

  I know where you sleep.

  I know who your friends are.

  I can find you anywhere.

  I didn’t say anything. I just picked up my drink and tossed back as much as I could in one swallow.

  “Shit, Bernier, what’s up?” Mad said. “What the hell are you reading?”

  I hoovered the rest. “Nothing.”

  “Nothing my ass. Man, even I don’t drink like that. Not unless it’s tequila.”

  Across the table, Gordon seemed to be making an effort not to grab the paper out of my hand. He also seemed to have sobered up remarkably. “What was in the envelope?” he said, with the faux nonchalance I’d heard him use on many a hapless interview. “Anything interesting?”

  “None of your goddamn business.”

  “It’s from him, isn’t it?”

  “No.”

  “Come on, Alex, you’re a really bad liar. I can tell you’re upset. It’s all over your face.” I folded the note back up and put it in the envelope. “If it’s another threat, you gotta report it to the cops.”

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “Where’s your police escort, anyhow?” Mad interjected. “I thought they were supposed to be on your back twenty-four seven.”

  I cocked my head toward the window and the two of them peered out at the uniform standing on the other side of the Green. Val is one of those jolly, overweight cops who always seems about six months short of retirement. It’s his job to keep the Green safe from bums and hackeysackers, which he accomplishes with aplomb by boring them all silly with stories about Korea. On his days off, he visits elementary schools dressed as McGruff the Crime Dog.

  Mad saluted the cop through the window. “You’ve got Val guarding your life? I hope you brought your Mace.”

  “It’s just while I’m in here. The other guy handed me off to him. I guess they figure I’m safe in a crowd.”

  “I hope they’re right.” Mad plucked the envelope from my hand and read the note before I could grab
it back. The muscles in his jaw tightened. “When they find this son of a bitch, I am personally going to beat the shit out of him.”

  “That’s very chivalrous of you, but take a number. You can have him after I rip his balls off with my fingernails.”

  “Would you please let me see that?” Gordon looked like he was going to spontaneously combust. I’d forgotten he was there.

  “No can do,” I said, and tucked the letter into my purse. “You’re playing for the other team now. You wanted it, you got it.” Gordon didn’t say anything. He just stood up, stuck out his tongue at me, and left. Through the green glow of the plate-glass window, I watched him shove his hands into his pockets and hustle down the street. “Damn, those New Yorkers are rude.”

  Mad reached for the pitcher and refilled his mug. “You didn’t exactly roll out the welcome wagon.”

  “He’s a fink.”

  “You ever gonna get over it?”

  “Yeah, after I make him squirm for a while.”

  “You dames scare me. Men just throw a couple of punches, bleed a little, no hard feelings.”

  “You’re much more evolved.”

  He leaned back and stretched his feet out on the chair Gordon had vacated. “Alex, what the fuck is going on?”

  “I told you, Gordon…”

  “Screw Gordon. I’m talking about you. You’re getting death threats and you don’t even seem to care.”

  “What do you want me to do, start blubbering right here in the bar? Of course I care. It scares the shit out of me. I’m just trying to figure out what to do.”

  “Easy. Give it to the cops.”

  “I’m planning on it.”

  “You mean the next time you bang Brian Cody?”

  I stared at him. “How did you know?”

  “Lucky guess.”

  “Seriously, Mad. How the fuck did you know?”

  “I know you. I know what you’re like when you’re getting laid—and, more to the point, what you’re like when you’re not. Let’s just say you have a certain rosy glow. He must be pretty good.”