Distemper (35 page)

T
HE ARGUMENT OVER WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THIS INFOR
mation lasted quite some time. It largely happened around me, because very frankly I had no idea of what to say. Nobody else
did either—not really—but that didn’t stop them from shouting at each other for over an hour. The truth was that when we went
down to Texas, the most we were hoping for was confirmation that the first victim really was Amy Sue Gravink. We sure as hell
never expected to track down some dog-loving crazy man who might very well be responsible for the deaths of four women. And
counting.

So what were we going to do with everything we’d found out? Should we at least run what we had on the victim, since it was
based on a dozen solid interviews in her hometown—including four people who said they’d bet their life the police sketch was
indeed Amy Sue? Should we run
everything
, including the stuff on her missing brother and how he’d been trounced out of a job for excessive dognapping? Or should we
turn it all over to the
police, smile nicely, and let them tell us how far to bend over?

And if we didn’t hightail it over to the cop shop and spill our guts—if another girl died while we played ethical parlor games—were
any of us going to be able to live with ourselves?

Maybe at a bigger paper, it would have been an easy call—although to this day I’m not quite sure what that call should have
been. I mean, it gives me a stomachache just to think about the breast-beating that must have gone on at the
Times
and the
Post
over whether to publish the Unabomber manifesto. And at the jolly
Gabriel Monitor
, we may have been used to wrangling with the cops (and the mayor, and the Benson administration, and every other local entity)
over kibbles and bits of information, but we were most definitely
not
used to having somebody’s life riding on the outcome.

The trouble was, none of the options were particularly appealing. We’d done the legwork, and it didn’t sit right to hand everything
over to the cops—particularly since we’d done that very thing so damn much lately. But we prided ourselves on being at least
marginally decent human beings, so we knew we couldn’t ignore the fact that we’d stumbled into something that might be vital
to the case. Sure, the cops would track it down eventually. I had faith in Cody, and not just because I was (quite literally)
in bed with him. But his investigation could still take weeks. How many bodies would there be by then?

“… to do right by us? Alex?” I looked up to find the three of them staring at me. “Wake the hell up,” Marilyn was saying.
“I asked you a question.”

“Uh, sorry. What?”

“Cody. I said can you trust him to give us the exclusive or can’t you?”

“Oh. Gee, I don’t know…”

“The hell you don’t. Mad says you’ve had closer dealings with him than anyone.”

I gave him the evil eye. Just exactly how much had I missed? “Well, sure. I mean, I’ve been covering the story and all…”

Marilyn slammed her fist on the desk so hard her Munson baseball jumped out of its holder and rolled onto the floor. “Spare
me the waffling. Come on, Alex, make the call.”

“Why do I always have to make the call on this? Can’t somebody else make the call? Like somebody whose roommate didn’t get
killed?”

She had the good grace to look a tad sheepish. But just a tad. “Point taken. It’s my goddamn decision anyway. I suppose I’m
just looking for absolution.”

“Absolution?”

“Permission to roll over and get fucked.”

“Don’t take it so hard,” I said, picking up the ball and tossing it to her. “After all, this isn’t exactly a normal situation.”

“Somebody let me know if we ever have one of those,” Bill snorted from his corner, “so I can drop dead from the shock.”

“All I meant was, maybe we’re no more prepared to cover some serial killer than the Gabriel cops are to catch him.”

“Bullshit,” Mad said. “Who the hell tracked down this Bobby Ray Gravink? Us, that’s who. And I’ll be damned if…”

There was a knock on the door then, and Lillian stuck her head in. “There’s a young woman on the phone for Alex,” she said.
“I offered to take a message, but she was quite insistent. And, I might add, somewhat less than cordial.”

When I picked up the phone, I realized that Lillian had once again defended her crown as the queen of understatement.

“How
could
you?” my tipster from the Ag school admissions office was shrieking into my ear. “You gave me your word, and then you went
right ahead and told the cops, you goddamn lying
bitch
.”

“Hey, hold on a second…”

“How could I have been stupid enough to trust you people? Christ, I knew better. If I go to jail because of this, I swear
to God I’m going to…”

“Look, I know you’re upset. But I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh,
sure
you don’t.”

“No, I really don’t. Can you please just calm down and tell me what’s going on?”

“Why the hell should I ever tell you anything else
ever
?”

“Well, don’t I even get a chance to defend myself?”

There was a long pause, and I was afraid she’d hung up on me yet again. But then I heard her give an exasperated groan and
say something nasty about my mother. “As if you didn’t
know
,” she said, “the cops were all over our office this morning.”

“Doing what?”

“Trying to find Amy Sue Gravink’s file, interviewing
everybody about what they remembered about her. Now how do you suppose they found out about that, huh?”

“Well, I…”

“You ratted on me, didn’t you?”

“No, as a matter of fact I didn’t.”

“So how come the cops were all over my office? And how come there’s a goddamn
New York Times
reporter asking us all kinds of questions?”

Oh, shit
. “Look, I know you’re not going to believe me, but I didn’t tell a single person outside this newspaper.”

“Yeah, right…”

“And what’s more, I’ve been down in Texas for the past three days, so I’ve hardly…”

“Texas?” The word seemed to pull her up short. When she spoke again, she sounded a lot less angry. “You went down there looking
for Amy Sue?”

“That’s right.”

“Well… what did you find out?”

“Nothing for sure. But it’s probably her.”

“Oh.”

“Listen, just for the record, I really didn’t tell the cops about your phone call. They must have gotten her name on their
own somehow. Like, could somebody else from your office have recognized the picture too?”

She thought about it for a minute. “I don’t know. Maybe one of the other secretaries.”

“Or it could have been somebody else on campus who met her when she visited. I mean, over twenty thousand people would have
seen that sketch last week.”

She contemplated the magnitude of this fact for a while, and when I finally got off the phone with her I
went back to Marilyn’s office. The boss was still playing with her numchucks, and I hoped she wouldn’t be inclined to strangle
the messenger. “Remember our high-level intellectual discussion about what to tell the cops? Well, fuck it. They already know.
And what’s worse, so does Gordon.”

These tidings put the newsroom into something of a tizzy. Gordon knew about Amy Sue Gravink, either through his own digging
or a tip from one of his police sources, and it was just a matter of time until he found out everything that had happened
in Texas. He could file his story on the ID tonight (if he hadn’t already), and although Cody might try his manly magic on
the
Times
editors, I didn’t think for a minute that it would work. Cops riffling through a Benson admissions office—not to mention
the
Monitor
nosing around, which whatever stringer the
Times
got to do the Sugarland interviews was bound to hear about—hardly made for a hush-hush situation. I was willing to bet that
Amy Sue Gravink’s face was going to be staring out from the front page of the next day’s Metro section, damn it all.

That meant we had to run with it, or look like complete morons by breakfast. So Mad and I hunkered down to finish the story.
It turned out to be forty inches long, covering the whole sordid tale of what happened to Amy Sue’s parents, how she’d persevered
(cue the violins) and gone to night school and applied to college—complete with quotes from her teachers and neighbors about
what a plucky little thing she was. It talked about her brother’s trouble in school, and how his teachers always said he
wasn’t really dumb but just wasn’t any good at, quote, “book learnin’.”

What the story didn’t suggest, of course, was that he might have killed his sister, and his parents to boot. That was just
speculation, based on nothing more solid than circumstantial evidence and the off-the-record hunch of a single policeman.
Even if Mad and I had wanted to put our bylines on something that flimsy, the paper had no desire to wind up in libel court.
We just hoped Gordon didn’t come up with something better in time to make his deadline.

Eventually, and no matter how I tried to procrastinate, the moment came when one of us had to call up the police for comment.
Now, if this had been a relatively normal situation, the call might have gone one of several ways. The cops could have just
said “no comment”; they could have gone postal and tried to talk us into holding the story,
New York Times
be damned; they could have confirmed they were looking into the possibility that Amy Sue was the first victim (for my money,
the most likely scenario); or they could have positively identified her, assuming they’d had the time to find her dental records
and notify whoever passed as her next of kin, sans her brother.

None of these possibilities would have made me break a sweat. But in the present situation there existed a whole galaxy of
much uglier options, which included having Detective Brian Cody hate me for the rest of my life or (what’s worse) never sleep
with me again.

So it didn’t take much for Mad to convince me that since he was supposed to be the primary on the story anyway, he should
be the one to call Cody for comment. I
guess he thought he was going to have a fight on his hands, though I can’t imagine why; if he hadn’t offered, I would not
only have begged, but bribed him with enormous quantities of alcohol.

I couldn’t stand to sit around while he made the call—listening to his half of the conversation and trying to guess what the
hell Cody was saying on the other end—so I went out on a rat run for Mad’s and my dinner. I was standing at the counter in
Schultz’s, waiting for Mad’s turkey on rye and my Swiss cheese delight (which I had proscribed for myself as a tranquilizer
for mounting hysteria), and of course I flashed back to the time I’d eaten there with Cody just a week earlier. I wondered
for the hundredth time how pissed he was going to be when he found out about our nosing around down in Texas, and then I thought
for the hundredth time how he had no right to be mad because I was just doing my job, and I didn’t go telling him he couldn’t
do his, and what was with his sexist attitude anyway?

And then, having worked myself into a frenzy, I realized (also for the hundredth time) that I was upset with him for something
he hadn’t actually said. This did not seem the definition of sanity.

I kept thinking about Cody as I was walking back to the paper, about how what we were up to was probably obvious to everyone
even though we thought we were being so sly. I remembered that time in Schultz’s when I started feeding him—which is a pretty
intimate thing to do, and definitely not standard practice between cops and reporters—and our little debate over vegetarianism
and the Benson animal-rights thing, and how he’d been lots more open-minded than I would have thought.

Something struck me then—call it dog-lover’s intuition. I’m not sure how long I stood there on the Green, gaping like an idiot,
holding two sandwiches and some fat-free chips and two cans of Diet Pepsi. First it all seemed to make sense, then it seemed
ridiculous—as though someone who killed women for fun would make himself that conspicuous. But I couldn’t shake the suspicion
that it might be irresistible to him, that he couldn’t find himself among so many like-minded people and just sit on his hands.
He was, after all, a man of action.

I ran back to the paper, found Melissa in the darkroom, and got some contact sheets from her. Then I went in search of Mad,
who was just getting off the phone. He grabbed the food the minute he saw me and cracked open one of the sodas, which promptly
exploded all over him.

“Christ, Bernier, what’d you do, shake this thing up?”

“I ran all the way back. Listen, I thought of something.”

“And that Kraut bastard better not’ve put mayonnaise on this…”

“Will you shut up and listen to me for a second? I had a brainstorm.”

He put his feet up on the desk and proceeded to unwrap his turkey on rye. “Heaven help us.”

“Okay, it’s like this. What’s the one thing we know about Bobby Ray?”

“He likes to kill chicks.”

“Come on, we don’t know that for sure. But what’s the one thing we do know about him?”

He shoved a quarter of the sandwich into his mouth, chewed a little, then gave me a lovely view of the contents. “I dunno.
You tell me.”

“Come on, play nice.”

He shoved another quarter. “Loser who can’t hold down a job at the dog pound?”

“Argh… You are
such
a jerk. The correct answer is, he’s nuts about animals. Dogs, anyway.”

“So?”

“So if he’s really in this town, he’s not alone.”

“Do you have to be so goddamn oblique on deadline?” I shoved the contact sheets under his nose. “What are those?”

“The shots from the animal-rights protesters. Four rolls’ worth.”

He squinted at them, then at me. “Don’t tell me you think he’s in there.
That’s
your brainstorm? Give me a break, Bernier. You don’t really think he could be that stupid, do you?”

“Well, I thought maybe…”