Distemper (27 page)

“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 sweatshirt. 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.’ ”

V
ANDEBRANDT’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 latest 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?”

Cody sighed and draped his arm around my waist. “He didn’t. He was probably just raving. He knew there’d be another murder
sooner or later, and whenever it happened he’d just factor that into his next threat.”

“What a whacko.”

“Alex, I’d deny this in a court of law, but I think he’s a genuine lunatic.”

“He’s not the only one in town.”

Cody’s arm tightened. “You know, just because Vandebrandt’s not our guy doesn’t mean you should go taking any stupid chances.
There’s still some nut out there killing women. I don’t want you going out alone at night—not to walk the dog, not for anything.
Got it?”

“Yeah, I got it.”

“Promise me.”

“Jesus, Cody, I feel like I promise you the same thing
every fifteen minutes. But okay, I promise I won’t go out alone at night. You don’t have to convince me. I’ve seen this guy’s
work myself, you know.”

“I know. We’ve both seen enough to choke on.”

There was a catch in his voice that made me think the past forty-eight hours had gotten to him more than he was letting on.
I rolled on my side to face him nose to nose. “Did you have to break it to Lynn Smith’s boyfriend?”

“Her father and stepmother out in Groton. They were the next of kin.”

“Was it awful?”

“Very.”

“Do you want to talk about it?”

“No.”

“You don’t feel like talking about the case at all, do you?”

“Not one damn bit.”

“Fair enough.”

“You know, Alex, there’s something I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said after a minute. “That painting’s not real, is it?
It’s a copy, right?”

He gazed up at the oil painting that takes up an entire wall of my bedroom. It depicts a woman in the fragile light of an
empty apartment, and it’s just about the loneliest thing you can imagine. It’s also the first thing I see when I wake up every
morning, which is probably not healthy.

“No, it’s real.”

He stared at me, then back at the painting. “It’s a Hopper, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.”

He gave a low whistle. “It must be worth a fortune.”

“Probably. It was a gift.”

“From who?”

“I got it after Adam died. Call it a consolation prize. Or maybe the spoils of war.”

“Shouldn’t it be in a museum or something?”

“Probably.”

“You don’t feel like talking about it, do you?”

“Not one damn bit.”

“Well, fair enough then.”

“Do you want a back rub?”

“What?”

“A back rub? You’ve heard of it?”

“Yeah, but it’s been a while since one’s been offered.”

“Roll over.”

“You know, you don’t have to give me a back rub just to get me to shut up about the painting.”

“I know. I just sort of feel like it.”

“Then I’d be a fool to resist.”

He turned over on his stomach and I produced my various massage aids. I’m not much of a hippie, but I still live in a town
where you can’t swing a dead cat around your head without hitting an aromatherapist, so I’ve collected my fair share of oils
and unguents. Cody snickered as I lit my lavender relaxation candle, but he shut up once he realized the thing smelled pretty
good. I poured some orange-scented massage oil on his back and dug in. His muscles were tight, but considering the pleasant
state of his torso, it wasn’t what you’d call work.