Distemper (34 page)

The gist of it went like this: Amy Sue Gravink came from a middle-class family, with a mother who was a secretary for a petrochemical
company and a father who worked for the Houston building department. They’d seemed like decent people who did the usual suburban
crap—church, PTA meetings, ski vacations, trips to the beach. They’d even gone to high school football games every Friday
night to watch their son play second-string halfback while their daughter waved pom-poms and yelled rah-rah-rah.

So when it happened, it came as a complete surprise. No one could have predicted that good-natured Bob Gravink—a guy who couldn’t
pass a stranded driver without stopping to change the tire—would rip his wife in half with a shotgun before blowing his brains
out. They would certainly never have suspected that when the local cops went to the house they’d find stacks upon stacks of
sadomasochistic pornography. And even when it came out a few weeks later that the feds had been investigating Gravink for
buying kiddie porn over the Internet, people still didn’t believe it—until they heard just what had been found on the family
computer.

Amy Sue Gravink was seventeen when her parents died; her brother Bobby was twenty. The murder-suicide had left them with no
other close relatives and very little money. Their mother hadn’t had a life insurance policy, and their father had voided
his by blowing his own head off. All they had was the house, which would have been hard enough to sell even if Dad hadn’t
set a fire in a halfhearted attempt to erase the evidence.

So they moved back into it. The whole school pitched in to redecorate (presumably, this included cleaning up several gallons
of blood) and help raise money for them to live on. Since Amy was nearly a legal adult, the court declared her an emancipated
minor, and they both finished high school. Her brother was never much of a student—he’d been held back twice in elementary
school—but Amy Sue graduated near the top of her class. She probably could have gotten into any college she wanted to (just
imagine the admissions essay she could have cranked out) but she decided to save money by living at home, working full-time,
and taking two years of community college night school. Then she applied as a transfer student at several universities, all
of which had big-name vet schools.

Then she disappeared.

People thought it was strange that she’d leave like that, so suddenly and without saying good-bye. It smacked of rudeness—and
in Texas, Mrs. Ochoa explained to me patiently, people still care about manners.

They might even have worried about her, if her brother hadn’t explained to everyone that she’d decided to take a little vacation
before starting school. Then she was going to go straight to campus, he said, to try to find a cheap apartment and a good
work-study job. And everybody nodded their heads at that, and said it was just like her to be so responsible.

Then Bobby left too. He said that without his sister around, the house was too big and empty. And since he’d just lost his
job, the best thing for him was to start over somewhere else. He’d closed up the house, paid courtesy calls on the neighbors,
and driven away in his Chevy
pickup with the promise that he and his sister would try to visit at Christmas. That was the last anyone in Sugar-land had
seen of them. And other than a few letters and postcards, it was the last anyone had heard from them, either.

“That’s it?” Bill was saying. “We sent you two down to Texas for a sob story about some Goody Two-shoes and her big lug of
a brother?”

The four of us were sequestered in Marilyn’s office. The door was closed, which only happens when someone has died, been fired,
or announced they’re leaving to work for television. Through the narrow window I could see the rest of the newsroom gaping
as they walked up the stairs, wondering which of the three applied to us.

“Don’t sweat it,” Marilyn said with a nasty smile. “Madison here promised if they didn’t find anything useful they’d pay us
back for the tickets. So how do you want to do it? A lump sum, or ten bucks out of your paycheck for the next couple years?”

Mad returned the smile in kind. “Actually, I think the paper’s gonna end up footing the bill.”

Marilyn put down the numchucks she’d been fingering for the past half hour. “Okay, let’s hear it.”

“Well, if you’d rather,” Mad said, “I guess we can eat the plane tickets and see if Band can get us in down at the
Times
.”

She picked up the numchucks again, this time in not such a playful way. The look on her face said
don’t make me use these
.

“Here’s the thing,” I said. “We still think Amy Sue Gravink’s our victim.” Bill and Marilyn opened their mouths, but I waved
them off. “I know, I know—what
about the letters they sent back to Sugarland? The short answer is we think it was a dodge. All the stuff we just told you
was what we got from this Ochoa lady. Well, we did a bunch of other interviews, made the rounds of all the neighbors and coworkers
and friends we could dig up. We also made a trip to the morgue down at the
Chronicle
. The big picture turned out to be a whole lot less wholesome.”

“Less wholesome,” Marilyn said, “than a kiddie porn collector who kills his wife and blows his own head off?”

“Christ, I don’t even know where to start. We tried to work the story on the plane, but man…” I took a deep breath and a swig
of diet Snapple lemonade. “Okay, about the letters. Turns out they were typed—which wasn’t, quote ‘at all like Amy Sue.’ I
guess she had beautiful penmanship or something, I don’t know. But three different people told us they thought it was weird
the letters were typed. The postcards too.”

“Postcards from where?” Marilyn asked.

“The Philly area. One from the city, one from Gettysburg, another one from Hershey. And that’s not all. In the letters, she
said how she was so psyched she was going to U Penn. But we checked, and there’s no Amy Sue Gravink enrolled, and none coming
in the fall either.”

“Holy shit.” Marilyn leaned back in her ratty leather chair and put her feet up on the desk. “Keep talking.”

“That’s not the half of it. We did a little checking on her brother Bobby. Seems he was kind of a weird egg. Was on the football
team in high school and did a couple of musicals, but still managed to avoid making any friends. Never had a girlfriend—or
a boyfriend either, for that matter. We stopped off at the community college
Amy Sue went to, and it turns out he started there two different semesters, but he couldn’t hack it. He had a few different
jobs, but he didn’t hang on to them. And then there was this thing where he got fired.”

“Fired from where?”

“He got canned,” Mad interjected, “from the Houston SPCA.”

“Holy
shit
,” she said again, louder this time.

“He was working as some kind of technician’s assistant,” I said. “I think he took a couple of training courses and worked
his way up from janitor or something. Anyway, it was the longest he ever stayed in one job. But get this. He got canned because…”

“Lemme guess,” she said. “He was torturing the poor little animals.”

“Just the opposite. He was liberating them.”

“
What
?”

“He was taking the ones who’d been scheduled for euthanasia, pretending he’d done it and sent them to the incinerator. But
he really took them out to the country somewhere and set them free. I guess they nabbed him after animal control brought the
same old dog in three different times.”

“So he was a dog lover. So what? You’d probably do the same damn thing.”

“She probably would,” Mad offered. “But from what the shelter people told me, this dude was a couple orders of magnitude crazier
than Bernier even. And when they canned him, he went nuts and tried to trash the place. Ran around letting all the animals
out of their cages. Real mess.”

“They call the cops?”

“Nah. They didn’t want the bad PR. He’d probably confiscated a hundred dogs, and I seriously doubt he let ‘em all loose. Trust
me, the inside of his house looked like a fucking kennel.”

“How would you know?” Bill asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just how the hell
would
you know?”

“Uh, let’s just call it an anonymous source.”

“Fine,” Marilyn said. “Just so long as we don’t call it breaking and entering.”

He somehow managed to keep a straight face. “Oh, no. Perish the thought. That would be wrong.”

“And this house you didn’t go into,” I said. “It might have looked like what, precisely?”

“Well, speaking theoretically, it might have had dog food stacked up, muddy paw prints, fur all over the place. That kind
of thing.”

“I take it this was your idea of following your nose?”

“So let me get this straight,” Marilyn interrupted. “The dad goes on his killing spree. Little Amy Sue puts her life back
together and soldiers on, but the brother’s so traumatized he starts liberating dogs for a living?”

“Well,” I said slowly, “actually, the thing may not have been as straightforward as that.”

They must have gotten the gist from my tone of voice, because their eyes widened simultaneously. Mad just sat there with a
little smirk on his face, enjoying himself way too much.

“I tracked down one of the cops who worked the murder-suicide,” he said after a suitably dramatic pause. “Apparently, there
was some doubt about how it all went down. The cop was just talking from his gut, off the record, but he told me he thought
there was something
wrong with sonny boy from the get-go. Said he didn’t have any evidence to back it up, and there were plenty of folks who’d
swear he was a goddamn choir boy. But he would have bet the farm the kid was involved somehow.”

“Are you telling me,” Marilyn said, “that this guy killed both his parents and got away with it?”

Mad shrugged. “The cop wouldn’t go that far. All I’m telling you is he thought the whole thing didn’t smell right.”

“But why would he do it? It doesn’t sound like there was a lot of money in it for him.”

“That’s true,” I said. “But one thing we found out was that a few weeks before they died, they had the family dog put to sleep.
I guess he was getting old and had some heart condition. Neighbors talked about it like it was just another tragic element
to throw on the trash heap. But what if it’s more than that?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, we know the son was obsessed with animals. Maybe it made him furious.”

“You may not realize this, but it’s not a capital offense to put down a dog.”

“Maybe to him it is. And then there was this weird thing about the yearbooks.”

Marilyn looked from me to Mad like she didn’t know which one of us to strangle first. “Yearbooks? What yearbooks?”

“After I talked to Mrs. Ochoa, I figured we’d want to get pictures of these guys, right? So she took me to the school library
and showed me the yearbooks, so I could snap some black-and-whites. And when I looked through
them, I found every single one of their pictures had been cut out. Really neatly, like with a knife.”

Mad threw a manila envelope on the desk. “I got these pictures from the
Chronicle
. It’s not much. One of them’s from around the time the parents died, human interest shit. The other was shot at a football
game, but Gravink wasn’t a great player, so they just got him in the background. They’re both profile shots, and pretty damn
grainy. Can’t say as it’d help you recognize him on the street.”

Marilyn glanced at them, then handed them to Bill. He stared at them for a full minute before speaking. “Are you jokers trying
to tell me that you think I’m looking at a picture of our serial killer?”

“Yep,” Mad said.

I shot him a dirty look. “We have no idea. All we know is what we told you. Amy Sue Gravink is gone. She’s not home, she’s
not at Penn, and she looks a hell of a lot like a girl in the Gabriel city morgue. Her brother is missing too—and he lied
about her going off to college. He may or may not have had something to do with killing his own parents. He sure as hell has
a history of weird behavior—specifically, being obsessed with dogs.” I paused to see if Bill and Marilyn were following. They
seemed to be. “The woman I got the tip from in the first place said Amy Sue seemed scared of something. What if she came up
here to get away from her brother? And what if he found her?”

Marilyn’s a tough cookie, but even she looked horrified. “Why would he want to kill his own sister?”

“Who knows? Maybe she figured out what really happened to their parents.”

“That only applies if it really wasn’t just a murder-suicide like everybody thinks. And even if he killed his sister—good
Lord, tortured and strangled her like that—why would he go killing those other women too?”

“That one’s easy,” Mad said in a voice that sounded cold even for him. “He must really be enjoying himself.”

The words were unpleasantly familiar. “That’s just how Cody put it,” I said. “From one victim to another, as the violence
was escalating, that’s just what he said. That the killer was having a goddamn good time. Too good to stop now.”

Bill looked positively sick. If he weren’t black, he would have turned gray. “Son of a bitch,” he said, then tried to shake
it off with a joke. “Aw, come on. It can’t be this Gravink guy. Everybody knows serial killers and assassins all have to have
three names. You know, John Wayne Gacy, Mark David Chapman. It’s a rule, right?”

“If he hadn’t been southern-fried, Ted Bundy would probably argue with you,” I said. “But just for the record, Gravink’s real
name is Bobby Ray.”