Distemper (4 page)

“Seen it, done it, been there. You know that. I’ve covered enough crazy killers, thank you very much.”

“One’s your limit?”

“Yep.” I stared out Mad’s window, which still had the outlines of fall leaves crusted on the outside. It had been nearly a
year since Adam Ellroy died, and since Mad and Gordon and I nailed the killer. Nearly a year since I lost the only guy I’ve
ever really loved, and I just barely escaped with my life. I was in no hurry to start dating again.

“So where to?”

“Huh?”

“You okay?”

“Fine.”

“Where am I taking you? Home or into battle?”

“Home. I want to see my dog.”

He parked on the street in front of my house, came around to open my car door, and before I knew what he was up to he’d swept
me off my feet and into a bridegroom’s carry like something off the cover of a Harlequin. He stood at the front door trying
to figure out how to turn the knob and be manly at the same time when it opened from the inside and Shakespeare came running
out. “Alex, you’re home!” Marci said, a little too brightly even for her. “We cut class to make sure you were okay.”

Mad dropped me on the couch, the dog jumped up on my lap, and about two seconds later I figured out what was up. C.A. was
there too—she actually had lipstick on—and Emma came out of the kitchen, carrying a pitcher of martinis on a tray and wearing
something best
described as a sarong. I’d told them I didn’t need a ride from the hospital, since Mad was picking me up. They’d been lying
in wait, and they looked like a bunch of cats who’d just been handed a really good-looking ball of string.

Have I mentioned that Mad is a total babe? We’re talking six-foot and change, obsessive gym goer, Nordic parentage, the whole
thing. Truly, he’s hard to walk down the street with. Sometimes I think that regular access to Mad is the main reason the
girls let me live with them. Steve too.

“Oh, Jake, it was so very kind of you to collect Alex,” Emma said. “And I thought you didn’t have manners in this country.”

“My pleasure.”

“Sit down,” C.A. said. “Ya wanna drink?” For her, this was Martha Stewart.

“You know it,” he said, and Emma handed the glasses around.

“It’s eleven o’clock in the morning,” I said.

“The cocktail hour,” said Mad.

“Don’t you have to work?”

“I worked yesterday
and
the day before, thanks to you. Today’s my day off.”

“Well what about me? Don’t I get a glass?”

“Oh, sweets, you can’t drink,” Emma said. “You just came out of hospital.”

“How do you know? You’re a goddamn veterinarian. How do you know I can’t drink? What am I, a terrier?”

“It can’t be good for you.”

“But what if I want one?”

“Do you?”

“No. But a girl likes to be considered.”

They turned their collective gaze back to Mad, who was in pig heaven. “That’s such an interesting car you have out there,”
Emma said. “Such humble transport for a graduate of Harvard
and
Columbia Law School.”

Mad smiled his wolf smile. “Stickers came with the car.”

Emma didn’t even look fazed. “Why, Jake, you
urchin
.”

“So, Mad, what ya benchin’ these days?” C.A. asked. “Two? Two-ten?”

“Two-thirty.”

“No kiddin’?”

“How about you?”

She turned to Marci. “What do you weigh?”

Marci’s eyes narrowed. “One-twelve.”

“One-twelve.”

Mad cracked up. “You wanna give me another go?” He rolled up his sleeve and leaned his elbow on the coffee table; C.A. did
the same. Emma clapped her hands and made a happy little chirping sound.

“I have
got
to find my own apartment,” I said to no one in particular. “And did I mention I have two broken ribs and a sprained wrist?
Thirty-two stitches too. And a headache.” When there looked to be no end to the arm wrestling, Marci came over.

“Listen, Alex,” she said. “There was something I wanted to ask you. About… what you found in the woods.”

I stared at her. If C.A. had asked the question I wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised, but Marci is the last person
who’d want to hear the gory details. “What do you want to know?”

“It’s, um… the girl. When you found her, what did she look like?”

“You really want to know?” She nodded. “She was naked, and her tongue was lolling out of her mouth…”

“Stop. Oh, God, that wasn’t what I meant. I mean, what did she
look
like? Did she look like me? Like the other one did?”

I thought about it for a minute. I wasn’t sure how to answer her. Nobody who died like that could ever really look like someone
alive. But I knew what she was asking. “She was about our age. Mid-twenties, you know, and white. But don’t worry, Marce.
Other than general stuff like that, she didn’t look like you.”

“Phew. That makes me feel better. I’m not sure why, but it does. I didn’t really think some… maniac was hunting me, not logically
anyway. It’s all so silly, isn’t it? But that other girl really had me all spooky, and when I heard about the second one I
didn’t know what to think. Thanks, Alex.”

She pecked me on the cheek and practically skipped across the room to watch Mad finish off C.A. Even on his day of chivalry,
he wasn’t about to let some dame beat him. The two other girls looked positively feral with glee, and even C.A. didn’t mind
losing. “Victory is mine,” he said. “And now which of you lovely ladies wouldn’t mind getting the champ-een another drink?”

I sat there watching them, feeling the ache creep farther into my cranium. I’d had plenty of death last summer, and now it
looked like a killer of a very different kind had set up housekeeping. He was out there somewhere,
and he liked to turn live women into dead ones, and although no one had had the nerve to use the words “serial killer,” it
was just a matter of time.

But that wasn’t the only thing on my mind as I stroked Shakespeare’s silky snout. Yes, I’d been terrified when I found the
body. I might even have been within feet of the killer, and within seconds of becoming girl number three. But there was something
else. As frightened as I was, I had to admit that for the first time in nearly a year I actually felt alive. I’d spent the
past eight months living in a netherworld between I’m-okay and everything’s-fine. I hadn’t gone on a movie date, hadn’t slept
with anyone, hadn’t even cried about Adam too much because after the first few weeks even my well had run dry.

But I knew for sure that when I was running through the woods, when I was flying down the hill and pedaling back to town,
I wanted to live. I wanted to pick up whatever pieces I had left, try to fit them together and make some sense of my life.
I wanted to get back into the game. I just wasn’t entirely sure how to go about it. And I was more than a little freaked out
to realize that the only thing to shake me out of the doldrums had been the very thing that put me there. To wit: someone
else’s demise.

How creepy am I?

I was thinking about all this as I sat there, listening to the four of them drink and giggle and flirt. But I was also pondering
another thing as well: I’d lied. The truth was, the second dead girl did look like Marci. Maybe even more than the first.

W
ORD TO THE WISE: IF YOU HAVE A SPRAINED LEFT WRIST
, don’t try and drive a Renault Encore with a stick shift and no power steering. If I’d sprained my right one, it would have
been impossible. Either way, I didn’t have much choice but to take my own car, since Mad showed no inclination to stop snorting
martinis with my roommates. I got to the
Monitor
around one and found the newsroom was its usual charming self. As I walked in from the back staircase past the darkroom I
heard O’Shaunessey, the world’s loudest sports editor, reaming out one of the photo interns. “I don’t give a goddamn rat’s
ass if it’s art. I told you to shoot the goddamn fucking football game, not the motherfucking thrill of victory on the quarterback’s
grandmother’s goddamn fucking face. You didn’t get one single goddamn picture of the goddamn
game
. What am I supposed to run tomorrow?
Shut
your mouth. If you say ‘art’ another son of a bitching time I swear I’m gonna…” It went on like that for some time. I kept
walking. With O’Shaunessey, it ends as quickly as it
starts. He’d be buying the kid a beer by the end of the night.

At one end of the city desk, the schools reporter was grilling whatever pour soul was on the other end of the phone. Lillian
is in her early seventies; she came back to the paper two and a half years ago after retirement nearly killed her with kindness,
and picked up her old beat when I moved over to politics. I have to admit she’s way better at it than I was; her interviewing
style is affectionately known as “silent but deadly.” “Now, really, Mr. Superintendent, I understand how you feel. It’s a
terrible position you’re in. My stars, it certainly is a pickle. But what can we do? The charges have been made… Now, sir,
really. I don’t want to pry. But you have children in that school yourself. A third- and a fifth-grader, isn’t that right?
Please put your professional position aside for a moment. As a parent, wouldn’t you want—wouldn’t you
deserve
—some concrete information about what’s going on?” She must be working on the Cub Scout ass-grabbing story. If I knew Lillian,
she’d break him in under three minutes. Someday I have to get her to give me lessons.

My desk is one over from hers. We sit in a block of four cityside reporters, schools and politics across from cops and science.
It may sound odd that at a paper our size we have a full-time science reporter, but academia and research are big business,
and this is a company town. Benson University is the major employer in the county, and every reporter at the paper covers
it in some way. Mad does all the high-tech stuff, I do town-gown, the cops guy covers the various schoolboy antics, and so
on.

When I got to my digs I found that somebody (or probably everybody) had taped a mock-up of Monday’s front
page to one of the poles that do their best to hold up the newsroom ceiling. The original headline had been
SECOND BODY FOUND IN NEWFIELD
with the subhead
FIRST VICTIM STILL UNIDENTIFIED; POLICE WIDEN SEARCH
. This one read
BERNIER FINDS NAKED DEAD CHICK: “WHERE’S THE GUYS AT?” ASKS HORNY NEWSHOUND
. I would have been pissed, if whoever did it hadn’t also left me a very large chocolate cupcake.

I’d just sat down and started peeling the paper off the cupcake when Bill called me into his office. He did this by throwing
a tennis ball at his Plexiglas window and catching it on the rebound, a habit that new hires tend to find alarming. I brought
my cupcake with me. “Bernier, you look great.”

“Is that on the record?”

“Okay, you look like hell.”

“Mad’s sentiments exactly.”

“I was just talking to Junior here about the story.” He jerked his tennis ball toward the kid, who flinched as though he was
going to get beaned. Junior’s real name is Franklin, and his regular expression is Bambi-in-head-lights. He’s got pinkish
skin, and freckles, and patches of acne that wax and wane with his deadlines. There’s a newsroom pool going on how long he’ll
last; my betting slip says September 1.

“What’s up?”

“Cops called a press conference for eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”

“Eight? But that’ll blow our deadline. TV’ll get it a whole day earlier.”

“That’s the idea.”

“They’re not playing nice? What for?”

“Word on the street is they’re twisting in their polyester over you flapping your gums.”

“Flapping my… Give me a break. They didn’t really think I wouldn’t tell you anything. What was I supposed to say? ‘No comment’?
That’s a hoot.”

“Yeah, well, what they expected you to do and what they
ordered
you to do are on two totally different planets, capisce?”

“So good luck me ever getting another cop to open his mouth?”

“You got it. North Pole time.”

“What’s this press conference all about?”

“Word is they’re going to ID one of the vies. Maybe one, maybe both.”

“If the cops are freezing us, how’d you hear that?”

“Mad just called from the Citizen. Picked it up from one of the TV guys. Cameraman said somebody at the cops leaked it to
his producer, dangled a carrot about how they were going to scoop our ass.”

“How did Mad get there? I just left him swilling gin with my roommates.”

“How the hell do I know? He was there with some limey chick.” So Mad and Emma were living it up at the Citizen Kane, the local
journalists’ bar of choice. Fabulous. Well, maybe she could handle him. Or else she’d wind up dumping a pitcher of Molson
over his head, like so many before her. “So it looks like the sons of bitches are yanking our chain,” Bill went on. “I was
going to send out Junior here to get somebody to spill it, but he assures me that there’s not one single cop that’ll give
him the time of day.”

“Well, actually, I…” Franklin began.