Distemper (17 page)

“Well… thanks.”

“You’re welcome.”

“Can we start over here? Can I rewind and ask you how you are, without all the hollering this time?”

“Sure.”

“So how are you?”

I cracked a grin to match his. “Still shitty.”

“I guess that’s to be expected.”

“Good answer.”

“I’m sorry about your roommate.”

“I’m sorry I trampled your crime scene.”

“Okay, we’re even.” He took a deep breath. “How are the rest of your roommates doing?”

“Marci left for home, but you probably already heard that from the cop watching the house.” He nodded. “She was pretty crazed.
Kept talking about how it was supposed to be her, that maybe the guy took C.A. by accident.”

“I doubt this guy does anything by accident.”

“That’s what I told her, but she still felt like it was all her fault.”

“Sometimes guilt is as good a way to cope as any.”

“Wise man.”

“You see a lot of it in my line of work. Guilt, I mean.”

“Listen, can I get you something to eat? It’s strange, but I’m actually hungry all of a sudden.”

“You sure you don’t mind?”

“I’d kind of enjoy it. Cooking’s the only thing that keeps me out of the shrink’s office.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“Maybe an omelet. Nothing fancy.”

“Sounds fine.”

“Don’t you have to go back to the cop shop?”

“I’ve been there for two days straight. I’m off until tomorrow morning.”

“What about Zeke?”

“He’s been at my mom’s. But it’s nice of you to ask.”

We went into the kitchen, and he sat on a stool at the counter while I pulled eggs, onions, mushrooms, tomatoes, and a block
of cheddar cheese out of the refrigerator. I put the teakettle on the stove, diced the onion and saut? it in olive oil while
I sliced the mushrooms and shredded the cheese.

“Can I talk while you cook? There’s something else I need to tell you.”

“Sure.”

“It’s about the phone call you got.”

I stopped in mid-slice. “Are you about to ruin both our appetites?”

“I hope not. Listen, Alex. We traced the call to a cell phone belonging to a philosophy professor at the University of South
Dakota.”

I stared at him. “The killer is a
philosophy
professor?”

“No. First off, it’s a woman. Plus, she was two thousand miles away when the girls were killed. She had nothing to do with
any of it.”

I threw the sliced mushrooms in with the onions and stirred. “So what gives?”

“Last fall, the professor was at Benson for a conference. Three days of debating whether the universe exists, or some such
junk. Anyway, she used her cell phone while she was here. Our best guess is that it was cloned.”

“So why didn’t she report it stolen?”

“It doesn’t work like that. I don’t understand the particulars, but the techies tell me that you just have to be within a
few hundred yards of the phone while it’s working. You use a device to read the code number, and then you can program any
old cell phone so you can make calls and somebody else gets the bill. Bad guys love them, because they’re untraceable. And
when the owner realizes what’s up and tells the phone company, zap, they just ditch it and clone another one.”

“Nice racket,” I said, and cracked four eggs into a bowl.

“I’ll say.”

“Why don’t they make the phones so you can’t mess with them?”

“They keep trying, and the bad guys just keep figuring out ways to outsmart them. That’s one thing that’s strange about this.
The professor had the latest technology, the most sophisticated encryption around for general use. Don’t ask me why she needed
it in South Dakota, but that’s what she had. And according to the manufacturer, this is the first time it’s been cloned. They’re
not happy about it.”

“And you think the killer copied this lady’s phone while she was in Gabriel?”

“More likely, he bought it from someone who did. It would take a lot of technical know-how.”

“So it doesn’t really help you, does it?”

“Sure it does. It’s finally something we can run with. If we can track down whoever cloned that phone…”

“He might be able to lead you to the killer.”

“Exactly.”

I put the onions and mushrooms aside and poured the beaten eggs into the pan. “Can I ask you a question?”

“Shoot.”

“Why are you telling me all this?”

“I figure I owed you one.”

“For yelling at me the other day? I didn’t really blame you, you know.”

“For a lot of stuff. For not trying to print the detail about the dog collar, for one thing. For not insisting on running
the letters when we didn’t know if it was the right thing to do.”

“You’re welcome. But the reasons you’re grateful also happen to be the reasons I’m turning into a crappy journalist.”

“Who says?”

“I say. I seem to be lacking that killer instinct these days.”

“Alex, you’re right in the thick of this. You can’t be expected to treat it like a normal day at the office. You found the
second body, for God’s sake. Then you had to see your roommate like that…”

“And why is that? Just tell me that, Cody. Why do you think it is that it was
my
roommate who ended up dead, after
I
was the one who found the body? Why am I getting notes and fucking phone calls? How did this bastard know when to call me,
like he knew the minute I walked in the door?” I was losing my grip all of a sudden, and I couldn’t stop. “Why is there a
goddamn police cruiser parked outside my house? Why am I so goddamn fucking
scared
?”

Cooking and hysteria are not a good combination. I tried to flip the omelet, which I can usually do in one flick of the wrist,
and it ended up half in the pan and half on the stove. The part that fell into the gas burner caught on fire, and I had streaks
of raw egg dripping down the front of my T-shirt. “Oh,
shit
.” I tried to rescue the omelet, but since I forgot to turn off the burner I only succeeded in singeing my fingers.

“Jesus, Alex, what did you do to yourself?” Cody grabbed my wrist and ran my hand under the cold water. I was crying then,
and not just because my fingers hurt. “Oh, come on,” he said. “Don’t cry. Come on. It’ll be okay.” I was really losing it,
and Cody could tell. He patted my hair like I’d seen him do to Zeke, cupped my face in his hands, and murmured things that
were supposed to sound comforting. “Take it easy, Alex,” he said. “Just
breathe. I promise, everything’s going to be fine. We’re going to find this guy.”

“But… But…”

“But nothing. I don’t care who this son of a bitch thinks he is. We’re going to put him away.”

“But…” I cast about for what I was going to say and wound up with nonsense. “But I ruined your omelet.”

He stared at me like I was truly nuts. Then he just up and laughed, more deeply than I’d ever heard him laugh before. “You’re
right. It’s a capital offense.”

I felt myself starting to calm down. Unfortunately, when the hysteria moved out it left a hole that filled up with old-fashioned
humiliation. I may even have blushed. “I throw myself on the mercy of the court.”

He was still laughing. “You’re lucky I don’t slap the cuffs on you.”

I turned away, ostensibly to clean up the stove but actually because it was the closest thing to crawling into a hole that
was presently available.

“Alex? Can I ask you something?” he said after several minutes of silence. I turned around, and there was something in his
eyes I hadn’t seen before. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it intensity. “After your… After Adam died. Have you been
with anyone else since that happened? Are you with anybody now?”

I wasn’t even tempted to give him the standard answer, which goes something like this:
Are you out of your mind? Considering my track record, I’d just as soon get me to a nunnery
.

“No.”

“Good.”

“Good?”

“Yeah.”

I won’t try to fib. I’d sensed the chemistry all along, but I’d mostly put it down to the high-tension situations in which
we’d always met. It hadn’t really occurred to me that he might be tuned into it too, or that he might do something about it.
Also, I’d never been attracted to a redhead in my life. Despite these issues, Detective Brian Cody leaned over, put a hand
on the back of my neck, and kissed me. Very softly, in fact.

I might have slapped him across the face and called him a rat for taking advantage of a girl on the downside of crazy. I might
have filled him in on my plans for the convent. Instead I kissed him back, openmouthed and hard, with the kind of gusto you
get from spending an entire year sleeping with no one but a forty-pound dog.

He was a good kisser, there was no denying it. You can always tell when you’re kissing someone who you have no business locking
lips with—the rhythm’s all wrong, and you wind up clashing teeth and drooling on each other. It wasn’t like that. His mouth
was warm and strong, and it kept coming up against mine just when you’d want it to. We kept going like that for a while, and
I half hoped and half dreaded that Emma was going to walk in and bust us up. But that sort of timing only happens on nighttime
soaps, and in the end Cody and I had to stop kissing and deal with each other.

“Wow,” I said.

“Wow is right.”

“Where did that come from?”

“I’d say, wherever it’s been loitering for the past several weeks.”

“Oh.”

“I’d probably better go,” he said, but made no move to go anywhere.

“Don’t you want your omelet?”

“No, I don’t want my damn omelet. What I want is to drag you back to my apartment and rip your clothes off.”

“Really?”

“Really.”

“My bedroom’s closer. Just upstairs.”

He looked slightly shocked. But only slightly. “What about your roommate?”

“She’s very discreet. And besides, she’s on the first floor.”

“Are you serious?” I kissed him, long and hard, and it really set him off. The next thing I knew, he had me bent so far backward
over the stove I was practically lying in the omelet pan. “Are you sure this is what you want?” he said against my lips. “Are
you sure this is a good idea?”

I pulled away from him, but only long enough to grab his hand and lead him to the staircase. “Probably not,” I said. “But
you know what I’ve been realizing lately? Life is too fucking short.”

T
HEY SAY WHEN YOU FALL OFF A HORSE, YOU’RE SUPPOSED
to climb right back on. Now, I don’t mean this as some sly description of what Detective Cody and I were up to in the boudoir,
but rather in reference to the far less alluring subject of my mountain bike. For obvious reasons (sprains, stitches) I hadn’t
gotten back on the thing since the day I fell off it, cracked my head open, and landed in the arms of a certain member of
Gabriel’s finest. Frankly, I didn’t care if I ever saw it again. But three hundred bucks is a lot to blow on something you
used exactly six times. And besides, if I didn’t bike I’d have to take up jogging again or my pizza habit was going to return
me to my college-era physique. This was not tempting.

So on Saturday, to prove to myself that my biking career wasn’t totally over, I drove to the Y to spend what I hoped would
be a very few minutes on the Lifecycle. It was the first time I’d left the house since we saw Marci off, and just going outside
felt good. It had rained off and on all day Friday, and when I went out the sky was still
that shade of gunmetal gray that inspires so many Gabrielites to contemplate their own demise. The police car didn’t follow
me—driving three miles to the gym in daylight was deemed insufficiently dangerous to my person—and on the way up the hill
I got this weird jolt of giddiness, like a teenager breaking curfew.

Or maybe like a kid who’d been at the cookie jar for eight hours straight. Because that was how long Cody and I had desported
ourselves in my bedroom, pausing only to make the omelet that had gotten me into so much trouble in the first place. When
we finally ate it off a tray in bed with a stack of English muffins, some clementines, and a Hershey bar, he was wearing my
Walden County SPCA T-shirt, and I was wearing nothing.

He hadn’t spent the night, since there was a uniform parked outside who was probably already wondering what the hell Cody
had been doing there all day. He wanted to, though, and that in itself was good for a girl’s self-esteem. I guess neither
one of us wanted our little interlude to be over, because we were having so damn much fun. He was a different guy for those
eight hours, funny and sweet and all fired up, and maybe we both knew that once we went our separate ways that would be that.
We finally called it a night at eleven, after doing the deed more times than I’m willing to admit. Suffice it to say that
when I climbed on the Lifecycle two days later, I was not what you’d call entirely comfortable.

So there I was at the Y, pedaling away at a pace that would inspire Jake Madison to compare me to his grandma. I was listening
to my beloved Edith Piaf mix tape on my Sports Walkman, which had survived its trip over the handlebars strapped to my back.
I wondered
whether I should write a letter to Sony, maybe get myself into one of those testimonial ads.
Hi, my name is Alex Bernier, and I’d like to say that if you’re ever flying down a mountain being chased by a serial killer,
your Walkman won’t let you down. You may not survive, but your Sony will!