Distemper (23 page)

“And he found the note? Are those bastards planning on printing it?”

“I wouldn’t let him see it,” I said, trying not to ponder the trouble I’d be in if Cody found out how much I’d already spilled
to Gordon. “He just went to get me a drink, and the bartender said he’d found it under the door when he opened at four. The
envelope was sealed.”

“You know him? The bartender, I mean?”

“Mack? Sure. He owns the place. Used to be a radio reporter once upon a time. The Citizen is kind of a journalists’ hangout—most
of the
Monitor
newsroom, people from the weekly paper, a lot of radio guys, the local TV crew.”

“You go there a lot?”

“More than is probably good for me.”

“Do you have any idea how whoever wrote the note would know you’d be there tonight?”

“No. I mean,
I
didn’t even know I’d be going there. It was just a spur of the moment thing. But I’m probably there four nights a week, so
the odds were pretty good.”

“Okay, let’s assume that the note was written by someone
who’d seen you there before, who knows you spend a lot of time there. Can you think of anybody who’s bothered you? Maybe someone
you caught staring at you once too often?”

“No, I… Well, there was a couple of drunk guys one night who came into the bar to admire, my um… my chest.”

“Did you get their names?”

“Hell no.”

“Did they threaten you?”

“Nah, they were harmless. Drunk and harmless. I really don’t think it’s connected.”

Cody looked as though he’d like to give them a harmless beating. “Okay,” he said with a sigh. “Anything else?”

“Not that I can think of. I mean, the Citizen’s been kind of a zoo lately. It used to be almost all townies—happy-hour drinkers
who came for the free hot wings, and after they cleared out the media crowd showed up and closed the place. But lately there’ve
been a lot more college students, mostly lug-nuts from Bessler, but some Benson kids too. You wouldn’t think they could find
their way downtown, but they’ve pretty much taken over the place. Sucks for the rest of us.”

“Underage drinkers?”

“Jesus, Cody, don’t go calling the vice squad.”

“I don’t give a damn about that. I just want to know if the bar is lax about proofing, or if we can limit ourselves to suspects
over the age of twenty-one.”

“I’d say anything goes. In this town, a halfway-decent fake ID goes a long way. The cops usually look the other way unless
the D.A.’s running for reelection.”

“So what you’re saying is that the people who see you at the bar regularly are essentially the happy-hour crowd, students,
and other journalists?”

“Well, them and just about anyone who walks by the place. I usually sit in the window seat.” Cody gave a strangled groan.
“Not very helpful, huh?”

“Is there anything else you can think of? Anything else out of the ordinary that happened in the bar?”

“Nothing. I haven’t got a clue.”

“Anytime you might have brought attention to yourself?”

“Not beyond just being my usual loudmouth self.”

“Great.”

“But there’s something else, something I was saying to Mad earlier. It’s about the timing of the three notes.” I told him
about how they coincided to the end of the Benson semester. “What do you think? Could it be related?”

“It could.” He finally sat down next to me. “You know, Alex, that was really good thinking. You wouldn’t make a bad detective.”

“Yeah, I’m a regular Nancy Drew.”

“Think about it. The cell phone that the call came from was cloned from a phone that was used on campus. The bar is becoming
a student hangout. And from what you just told me, you never got a note or a phone call at a time when most of the students
were gone.”

“But what college student nowadays knows how to use a typewriter?”

“The notes weren’t actually typed.”

“Sure they were.”

“Not on an old-fashioned typewriter. It’s a computer font called Courier. It looks a lot like an electric typewriter,
but if you look closely you can tell it’s done on a laser printer.”

“So this guy could have these files sitting on his hard drive somewhere?”

“Only if he’s stupid. But he’s not.”

“What about the phone? Can’t you try and track down who cloned it?”

“We tried. There are only a couple of skells in town that deal in that sort of thing—cloned phones, stolen credit cards, bogus
passports…”

“There’s a market for fake passports in
Gabriel
? You’re joking.”

“A huge market. There are an awful lot of foreign students who’d love to bring their families over here, and a certain number
of them don’t mind breaking the law to do it.”

“Can you blame them?”

“Hey, you’re not going to get an INS lecture from me. My grandma used to tell me about signs in stores that said ‘No dogs
or Irish.’ Anyhow, we leaned on the dealers we knew of, but no dice.”

“No one would admit to selling that particular phone?”

“They said they hadn’t even been able to crack the technology.”

“Do you believe them?”

“Yeah. I offered each of them a pass on some other stuff. They would have taken it in a heartbeat if they could’ve given me
a name. One of them tried to bluff but we figured out he was full of it pretty quick.”

“So it’s a dead end?”

“Hopefully not for good. We’re still working on it.
NYPD’s helping, trying to track down the dealers in the city who’d be on the cutting edge, technology-wise.”

“Yeah, but isn’t it kind of a big coincidence that this visiting prof comes to Gabriel, and a few months later her cloned
phone is used here? Or did she go through New York?”

“No. She changed planes in Pittsburgh and flew straight here.”

I thought about it for a minute. “What you said about cutting-edge technology… you know, Gabriel is pretty much ground zero
for cutting-edge technology. Up at the nanofabrication lab, they’re inventing new computer chips as we speak.”

“So?”

“So what if this guy cloned the phone
himself
?” Cody stared at me. “It would explain why you can’t find who sold it to him, right? Wouldn’t it?” He stared at me more.
“What is it? What did I say?”

“Alex, I could kiss you.”

“Oh. Well, what’s stopping you?”

“I’m too busy kicking myself for not thinking of it first.”

“Get over it.”

He put an arm around me and planted a quick kiss on my cheek. “Okay, where do I look?”

“Huh?”

“Where do I find some psycho kid who knows how to clone a cell phone? What department?”

“Damned if I can tell you. Science gives me a headache. But I know who to ask.” I picked up the phone and dialed the Citizen
Kane—whose number, by the way, is listed along with all of our home phones on the official
Monitor
call list. Luckily, Mad wasn’t too far in the bag yet. “Electrical engineering,” I told Cody after I hung up. “Mad says that’s
his best guess.”

“Sounds like a good place to start.”

“So what do you do now? Go up to the Engineering Quad and see if anybody looks like a serial killer?”

“We like to be a little more subtle. I’ll start with the professors, see if they can give us any leads.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing.”

“What do you mean nothing?”

“Alex, this is a police investigation. You have to let us deal with it.”

“But I can help. I know way more people on campus than you do…”

He put his hand on my shoulder. “You don’t know what you’re dealing with. Please, Alex, don’t argue with me. I promised I
wouldn’t let anything happen to you, but you have to listen to me. Just trust me, and I promise I’ll tell you everything after
we catch this guy.”

I opened my mouth to say something, then realized I had no idea what it was going to be. There was no way I could talk him
into letting me tag along. Besides, he was right—he was the cop, and I was the reporter. It was his job to catch the bad guys,
and my job to write about it afterward. And as much as I wanted to do something rather than nothing, I could still see C.A.’s
body whenever I closed my eyes. Bravado aside, I was fairly sure I never wanted to meet the man who did it to her. “Wait a
second, Cody. What about Nanki-Poo?”

“What?”

“C.A.’s dog.”

“Right, of course.” He patted Shakespeare. “Do you think she misses her friend?”

“We’re all kind of depressed around here. Do you think you’ll find him?”

He shrugged. “We haven’t seen head nor tail of him. Oh, God, no pun intended.”

“Do you think he’s dead?”

“I wouldn’t want to bet on it either way.”

“But the odds aren’t good, are they?”

“Alex, there’s no use in…”

“Come on, Cody. Don’t give me a whitewash.”

He shrugged again. He looked as helpless as I’d ever seen him. “Okay, I’ll give it to you straight. The way we figure it,
C.A. must have been snatched when she was out walking Nanki-Poo. The dog probably tried to defend her…”

“He would have. He was really protective.”

“Right, and the killer had to put him down.”

“So where’s the body?”

“He must have gotten rid of it.”

“But he, you know…
displayed
his victims so meticulously. Why would he just get rid of the dog?”

“Who knows? Maybe he has different rules for humans and animals. Maybe as far as he’s concerned, an animal just isn’t worth
bothering with. You probably already know this, but there’s plenty of psychological evidence that serial killers graduate
to people after years of killing or torturing animals. The dog probably wouldn’t even interest him anymore.”

“I’d like to sic a goddamn pit bull on him.”

“Me too. You want to hear something ironic? Patricia Marx had actually been talking about getting a guard
dog—her roommate said she was looking at Dobermans. She even got permission from her landlord. But she never had a chance
to do it.”

“I wonder if it would have saved her life.”

“I don’t know. C.A.’s German shepherd didn’t seem to make a difference.”

“That’s true.”

“Listen, Alex, I have to start following this up. Something tells me we may finally be on the right track here. But I want
you to promise me that you’re going to be extra careful. I suppose there’s no use in trying to talk you into going to your
parents’ place for a while…”

“No use whatsoever.”

“Then I at least want you to promise that you’ll follow all the security precautions exactly. Keep checking all the doors
and windows. Don’t even think about going anywhere at night without a police escort, even if you’re with one of your girlfriends.
And stay the hell out of that bar.”

“You gotta be kidding…”

“Alex, I mean it. I’ve got enough to worry about without thinking that this guy is sitting on the next bar stool over from
you.”

“Is that all, Detective? Or do you want to put me on house arrest?”

“Christ, Alex, don’t whine. Can’t you get it through your thick head that I’m just trying to look out for you?”

“I know you are. Sorry.”

“Listen, I know this isn’t easy…”

“It’s okay. I’ll be good. Seriously, and all whining aside, is there anything else you want me to do? Or not do?”

“Don’t talk to strangers.” He leaned over and kissed
me. “And definitely don’t let any crazy men into your house.”

“Too late.”

He pulled away and reached into his jacket pocket. “Here, I almost forgot. I brought you a present.” He handed me a bright
yellow box a little bigger than a pack of cigarettes. It had a belt clip and a loop of string just wide enough to fit your
wrist.

“Please tell me there’s chocolate in here.” I started fiddling with the string, and he grabbed it back.

“Don’t pull that out or we’ll both be sorry. It’s a rape alarm. Haven’t you ever seen one of these?” I shook my head. “Lots
of women used to carry them in the city, not so much since the crime rate went down. The handle connects to a pin. Yank it
out and it makes one hell of a noise. You’re supposed to be able to hear it from two hundred yards.”

“How do I turn it off?”

“You can’t. The only way you can stop it is to unscrew the back and take out the batteries.”

“What’s the point of that?”

“So the bad guy can’t just turn it off himself.”

“Oh.”

“So take it, and carry it so it’s handy. Don’t just throw it in your purse where it won’t do you any good.”

“Okay.”

“Do you promise?”

“Jesus, yes, I promise. Now go catch this guy so I don’t have to carry this ridiculous thing around any more than I have to.”

“Why does it bother you so much?”

“Gee, I don’t know, Cody. How’d you like to carry around a symbol of your own physical weakness?”

“I already do. It’s called a gun.”

“Oh. Right.”

“Now give me a kiss and wish me luck. Hopefully I can call you tomorrow with some good news for once.”

I kissed him, and I was still kissing him when his cell phone rang. He answered it, and I could tell from the look on his
face that it was the farthest thing from good news that it could get. “Son of a bitch,” he said into the phone. “Where the
hell is she?” Other than when he found me staring at C.A.’s corpse, it was the first time I’d seen him lose his cool on the
job. When he hung up, he looked like he wanted to throw the phone through the living-room window.

“There’s another missing girl, isn’t there?”

He didn’t answer. It was a long time before he stopped staring out the window and looked at me.

“Worse.”

“They found another body?” He nodded so slightly I almost missed it. “Already? But how could…”

“He’s really into it now. He’s gaining momentum. He’s having
fun
.”

“Are you okay? You look kind of…”

He stood up. “I’ll be fine. But I have to go.”

“Where is she?”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.”

“Tell me anyway.”

He didn’t want to, that much was obvious. When he finally spoke, the words came out very slowly. “They found her,” he said,
“at the campus baseball field. In one of the dugouts.”