Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

  He’d been watching me. He’d been following me, recording my comings and goings for what looked to be months. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t sensed it somehow, hadn’t once caught him in the act, but I’d never even suspected. It made me feel incredibly vulnerable, like he’d not only stalked me but stolen something important—call it the illusion of privacy.

  It’s strange to see your life laid bare like that, frozen in perfectly focused black-and-white. I hardly recognized myself, and it took me a minute to figure out why. People rarely have their pictures taken without knowing about it, and in nearly every image I’d ever seen of myself I was smiling or at least poised. Here, I was just going about my business, and I realized with a start that this was what I must look like to the rest of the world—short, messyhaired, and serious. Thank God he hadn’t resorted to videotape. At least as far as I knew.

  The whole thing made me want to scream, but it was also absurdly fascinating. There up on the wall was every word I’d written since April, not just the big stories but also the little stuff on potholes and blood drives. Jeffrey Vandebrandt was either a dangerous nutcase or the one and only member of the Alex Bernier Fan Club; more likely, he was both.

  There was nothing particularly threatening about the shrine, beyond its very existence. None of the photos of me were cut in half or had the eyes gouged out. He hadn’t written KILL KILL KILL in his own blood, but maybe he was saving that sort of fun for next semester. There were no pictures of any of the murder victims, which was curious; then I thought with a start that maybe there had been, and once he was done with them he ripped the photos down and started over with the next victim.

  I considered searching the place for evidence linking him to those four girls, but one look at my watch told me I had to get moving. I walked out of the bedroom, and I’d made it halfway across the living room when the door opened.

  There, gaping at me like I was the last person on the planet he expected to see, was Jeffrey Vandebrandt.

  He was under five feet tall, and he couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred pounds. He had blue eyes, and short, spiky black hair, and the worst acne I’d seen since junior high. The picture didn’t add up to very much of a threat, but after what I’d seen in the apartment I was a lot more worried about the guy’s brain than his brawn.

  He didn’t say anything, just stood in the doorway with his mouth open. I didn’t move either, mostly because I was scared stiff, and as the seconds ticked by I had the absurd image of the two of us as duelists at the OK Corral. Unfortunately, I wasn’t nearly that well armed; I had the rape alarm in one pocket and my Mace in the other. I was more than willing to use them both.

  The silence stretched on for what seemed like an hour until finally I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Who are you?” He didn’t answer. I probably should have kept my mouth shut, but at the time it didn’t even occur to me. I mean, it was obvious that there was no way I was going to talk my way out of the apartment, and the direct approach was the only thing I could think of.

  “Why have you been following me?” I said. “And why the fuck do you have all those pictures of me in your bedroom? Am I supposed to be next?”

  He still didn’t answer, just kept staring at me with those beady blue eyes. He closed his mouth and opened it again, but no sound came out.

  “Come on, answer me. Why are you stalking me?”

  Again with the mouth closing and opening. Finally, his voice came out, slow and high-pitched. “I…” He stammered as though the words just wouldn’t come. “I…”

  “You what?”

  “I l-l-l…”

  I watched as he tried to get the words out. If he had a stutter, it was the worst one I’d ever heard.

  “I l… I l-l-l…”

  He seemed furious at himself all of a sudden. His face was turning red, and he was smashing one balled-up fist into his leg hard enough for it to really hurt.

  “I l… I l-l-l… I l-l-l… love y-y-you.”

  Now it was my turn to stare at him with my mouth open. “You love me?”

  He nodded. It made me so angry I forgot to be scared.

  “You love me?” He nodded again. “You crazy jerk.”

  And then, for no good reason that I can think of, and with a calm I still can’t explain, I walked across the room and punched him in the nose.

  Mad has told me more than once that in a world of weird chicks I am the weirdest of all. What he found when he came running into the apartment ten seconds later did nothing to change his mind. There I was, standing over Vandebrandt in the closest I ever get to a fury. Our suspected serial killer was on the floor, clutching his bleeding nose and blubbering like a baby.

  Mad looked from me to Vandebrandt and back again. Then he pulled out his flask, tipped his head back, and shook the few lingering drops of Bacardi into his mouth. “Seems like you’ve got everything under control.”

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  “Our boy here gave me the slip. I came back up to save you.”

  “Oh.”

  “Do I need to save him?”

  “Call the cops.”

  “Where’s the phone?”

  “Take your pick. They’re all over the place. No wait, I’ll do it myself.”

  Mad kept an eye on Vandebrandt while I called Cody on his cell phone. It was something like one in the morning by then, but from the background noise I could tell he was in his car, either on his way to notify the latest victim’s family or on his way back from the dirty deed. He was in the midst of telling me that he didn’t have time to talk when I finally got it through to him that it wasn’t a social call. I explained what was happening, and the anger I could hear in his voice even over the scratchy connection made me think that maybe Mad was going to have to save me after all.

  Cody got there about fifteen minutes later, just as the firemen were nosing around the ashes in the hallway. We’d spent the last quarter of an hour getting our stories straight—Vandebrandt huddled in the corner while Mad coached me on how we’d seen some drunken student waving a pack of flaming Dunhills—but by the time Cody showed up it was obvious he’d squared things for us somehow. He shook hands with the fire lieutenant, who mumbled something about getting one of his men to clean up the mess, and I gathered they were going to chalk the whole thing up to the usual student hijinks. Personally, I doubted Cody was going to let me off the hook that easily.

  But at the moment, yelling at me was hardly the first thing on his mind. His expression segued from irate to downright bewildered as he took in the sniveling suspect and his collection of electronic toys. Without elaborating, I cocked my head toward the bedroom door. Cody went in, and when he emerged he looked at Vandebrandt with a new flavor of rage. “Do you like to stalk women, Jeffrey?” he growled from six feet above the cringing kid. “Do you like to hurt them? Do you want to hurt women you can’t have?”

  If there was a right way to approach Vandebrandt, this wasn’t it. He just went farther into the fetal position, pulling his legs tighter into his chest and rocking back and forth.

  “Why did you do it, Jeffrey? Was it just for the thrill? Or did they make you angry because they wouldn’t give you the time of day?”

  Vandebrandt’s mouth opened and closed like it had before. He looked pathetic, and it made me want to throttle him. “L-l-l…” he started. If he said he loved me again, I was going to punch him even harder. “L-l-l-l…”

  “What? Come on, spit it out, you little freak,” Cody shouted at him. I doubted they endorsed this sort of thing in the department’s sensitivity training manual. “What the hell is it?”

  “L… L-l-l-l…” He seemed determined to answer, probably because Cody seemed equally determined to kick him if he didn’t. L-l-l… Lawyer.”

  “You want a lawyer?” Vandebrandt nodded with an oddly puppyish kind of eagerness. Cody looked down at him in disgust. “Of course you do.”

  Just as Cody was turning away, Vandebrandt reached under his sweats
hirt. Cody must have caught the motion out of the corner of his eye, because in under two seconds he had both the guy’s wrists pinned behind his back with one hand and was holding a small gray box in the other. It turned out to be an electronic address book. Cody let him go with a grunt and tossed the gadget at him. Vandebrandt pushed a few buttons and then handed it back.

  Cody eyed the device, which looked absurdly small in his big mitts. “Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Vandebrandt, Grosse Pointe, Michigan.” He looked back to the suspect. “What do you want me to do with this?” He tried to give the address book back to Vandebrandt, but the kid wouldn’t take it.

  “C-c-c-c…”

  “You want me to call your parents?” Vandebrandt nodded his puppy nod again. Cody shook his head. “Call them yourself.”

  “C-c-c-c…”

  “I said you’ll have to call them yourself, jerk-off.”

  “P-p-pl-pl…”

  “Oh, for Chrissake…” Cody pulled out his cell phone and dialed. It took a long time for the person to answer, no surprise since it was after midnight in Michigan. “Yeah, is this Mr. Wallace Vandebrandt? Mr. Vandebrandt, this is Detective Brian Cody of the Gabriel Police Department. No, don’t worry, your son is all right. Well, physically he’s fine but he’s in a lot of trouble. He wants you to get him a lawyer. What are we charging him with? Well, stalking, for starters. And he’s under suspicion for… What’s that? Hello?” He put the phone away and stared down at Vandebrandt.

  “What happened?” I asked.

  “He hung up.”

  “Why?”

  “I have a feeling that our friend Jeffrey here is a very bad little boy.”

  “No shit. But what did his father say?”

  “Well, when I told him he was being arrested for stalking, he said exactly two words.”

  “What?”

  “ ‘Not again.’ ”

  21

  VANDEBRANDT’S FATHER MUST HAVE CALMED DOWN AND made some phone calls, because by the next morning an extremely high-priced lawyer was downtown demanding a bail hearing and screaming that the whole case against his client was based on an illegal search. That much was going to be up to a judge. After all, the cops had entered the apartment without a warrant—but in response to a complaint by a civilian, namely me. From what Cody told me, the case was going to hinge on the issue of victim’s rights. New York’s stalker law is one of the toughest in the country, and the D.A. was gambling that me tracking down my harasser landed on the legal side of vigilante, if just barely.

  It didn’t hurt that Vandebrandt had a record, and a pretty goddamn twisted one. Whatever he did as a child was sealed by the state of California, but it must have been enough to prompt a judge there to try him as an adult for another offense at the tender age of fifteen. California also takes its stalkers seriously, and apparently the presiding judge in Orange County was no pussycat. Vandebrandt had been convicted of harassing four teenage girls, for which he’d served six months in jail. Then the family must have moved to Ohio, because the other item on his record was one thousand hours of community service for a misdemeanor harassment charge in Cincinnati.

  The way Cody explained it, Vandebrandt’s M.O. was depressingly consistent: he was obsessed with women connected to high-profile crimes. In California, it was the survivors of a drunk-driving crash that killed a bunch of kids on a school bus; in Ohio, it was two tellers who’d been on duty when their bank was robbed and a guard was shot. And in Gabriel, of course, it was yours truly—the lucky girl who found a corpse.

  Between a copy of his probation report from California and a pleading phone call Cody got from the kid’s mother, the details of Vandebrandt’s little hobby were floating to the top of the cesspool. Apparently (at least according to his shrink), he had elaborated fantasies about rescuing the women. But—and this is the part I think is a bunch of crap—he also felt powerless, and envied the men who’d had the guts to hurt them in the first place. So at the same time that he adored his targets, he also felt compelled to scare them half to death, to keep them in a state of perpetual hysteria so they’d need him even more.

  Or something like that. It gave me a headache just thinking about it.

  His mother swore he’d never hurt anyone, but it was hard to rationalize that with the way he’d hounded us. He’d only been a high school sophomore when he’d sent four of his classmates elaborate drawings of their friends’ dead bodies and called them as much as fifty times a day. In Ohio he had, among other things, sent the pretty young bank tellers wads of Monopoly money dipped in his own blood. I was starting to think I’d gotten off easy.

  “Jesus,” I said to Cody, “why did these people ever let their psycho kid go off to college?”

  “His mom said they thought he was all better.”

  “Fat chance.”

  We were lying in my bed, naked and exhausted. Unfortunately, we weren’t tired from anything more entertaining than a very long day of dealing with the fallout from Jeffrey Vandebrandt, and naked only as a result of having thrown our clothes on the floor. On top of working on the murder investigation, Cody and his cops had been gathering evidence on Vandebrandt for the D.A., who was just salivating to indict the kid.

  Vandebrandt’s past explained why he’d gone after me, and the police inventory of his apartment went a long way toward figuring out how. Cody told me that they’d found not only the gizmo he’d rigged to clone cell phones, but a whole high-tech studio for forging documents, from passports to driver’s licenses to social security cards. He said it was one of the most sophisticated operations he’d ever seen—he seemed rather amused that I couldn’t believe such a thing could exist in little old Gabriel—and that Vandebrandt’s only hope for shaving a few minutes off his sentence was to cop to all the sales he’d made and ID the buyers. The police also found the device he’d used to alter his voice, and the techies were in the midst of deconstructing the souped-up scanner he’d used to listen to the cop-to-cop chatter—and which allowed him to follow my comings and goings via the officers who were guarding me. There was even some tacky theatrical makeup; on top of everything else, apparently little Jeffrey considered himself a master of disguise. And yes, he’d even been thoughtful enough to keep copies of the letters he sent me on his hard drive.

  “His mom was awful upset,” Cody said into his pillow. “She seemed like a nice lady too.”

  “So what did she have to say about what he did to me?”

  “That he couldn’t resist.”

  “What?”

  Cody rolled over onto his back and spoke to the ceiling. The movement disturbed Shakespeare and Zeke, who were curled up together at the foot of the bed. It was a new stage of intimacy, having Cody’s dog over here, and although I liked Zeke it was all rather terrifying. “She seemed to think it was incredibly rotten luck,” Cody was saying. “Of all the places her son could go to school, he had to end up on a campus where a bunch of women were killed. She said it was way too good for him to resist.”

  “Too good?”

  “Her words.”

  “So what’s going to happen to him?”

  “He’s going to jail.”

  “For how long?”

  “Not long enough.”

  “At least he’s kicked off campus for good.”

  For obvious reasons, Vandebrandt had neglected to mention his past foibles to the Benson admissions office, and the university was already taking steps to expel him for falsifying his application. Justice is rarely that swift on a college campus, but the administrators knew better than to drag their feet or they’d have to answer to the Benson Feminist Alliance, which was already sharpening its knives and spoiling for some civil disobedience.

  While Cody had been busy over at the cop shop, I’d had the pleasure of ghostwriting a page-one story on Vandebrandt’s arrest for Wednesday’s paper, and then watching Mad slap his own byline on it in the name of journalistic detachment. But of course, that piece had only run below the fold; the main story was about the la
test murder victim. The police had released her name Tuesday morning and we’d both run around like crazy all day trying to cover it.

  She was called Lynn Smith. It was a plain name for a plain girl who had an equally plain job serving meals in a university dining hall. She lived with her fianc?a Benson janitor, in one of the outlying trailer parks that serve as affordable housing around here. Mad had tracked him down to get quotes for the story, and Melissa had somehow talked him into posing for a picture outside their trailer. It ran with the piece, along with a copy of their formal engagement photo from the mall portrait studio, and you only had to take one look at the guy in front of the trailer decorated with plastic flowers and butterflies to know his heart was broken.

  Sometimes I understand why people hate the media.

  “Alex?” Cody said softly, propping himself up on one elbow. “Vandebrandt’s not our guy.”

  “I know. I knew the minute I saw him. He’s no killer. He’s more like a parasite.”

  “Good word for it.”

  “I still want to beat the crap out of him.”

  “Take a number. Besides, you already did a pretty good job of it. You broke his nose, you know.”

  “Good. Let me know when it heals and I’ll break it again.”

  “You’re sexy when you’re trying to sound tough.” He kissed me, then ran his hand up my side. I pulled his head down and kissed him back for a while.

  “You know,” I said a couple of minutes later, “you were right all along.”

  “About what?”

  “When we first got those crazy letters, and you thought they weren’t really from the killer, you were right. And that means that our not running them had nothing to do with C.A.’s death.”

  “That’s true. Does it help?”

  “Yeah. But where did Vandebrandt get off making threats about killing people? I mean, how did he know that there’d be another murder to prove his point?”