Distemper (41 page)

I dropped the gun and felt Cody’s neck for a pulse, but couldn’t find one—not that I really knew where to look. I thought
he was still breathing, maybe just faintly, so in what was probably not the best medical treatment, I shook him. Then I shook
him harder, yelled at him, tried to bully him into waking up. I called his name over and over as I sat there crying on the
ugly linoleum. I told him that he was going to be all right, that he’d saved my life, and that tough as I am, I couldn’t stand
having two men I loved die in a single year.

T
HAT’S HOW THE COPS FOUND ME
. C
ODY MUST HAVE
called for backup before he came blazing in there, because within two minutes guys in bulletproof vests were swarming all
over the place. I heard one of them yell
officer down
, and the next thing I knew people were pushing me aside to get to him. There were ambulances, and guys shouting into walkie-talkies,
and at some point Chief Hill showed up and took me outside. He handed me my purse, and told me they’d found my car in the
barn behind the house, where Gravink must have moved it after he locked me up, and that he was going to have one of his men
drive it into town for me.

Then I saw a body bag being wheeled out through the front door, and I nearly keeled over. “Cody…”

“It’s not Cody,” he said, grabbing me before I could hit the ground. “That’s Gravink. Alex, did you hear me? That’s
Gravink
.”

“Where’s Cody?”

“On his way to the E.R.”

“He saved my life. The girl’s too.”

“I know. Try to calm down. Here, let the EMTs take a look at you.”

“I’m fine.”

“The hell you are, young lady.”

“Look, all I have is dirty hands.” I showed him my palms, filthy from crawling around in the backyard. It really was all I
had to show for my brief stint in captivity. Unbelievable.

But Chief Hill made me sit for an exam with the paramedics anyway, and when they were done he put me in the front seat of
his official car and drove me back to town.

“Alex, for the love of Mike, what were you doing out there?”

“I thought I was going out for an interview. He tricked me.”

“Gravink?”

“No, it was David Loew. You know, the head of the Benson Animal Anarchists.”

“That long-haired hippie creep? He was in on this?”

“I can’t believe it. But he’s involved somehow. He’s got to be.”

I explained how I’d gotten suckered out to the house, and when I was finished the chief pulled the microphone from the dashboard
and barked orders into it. Since Bobby Ray Gravink was way too dead to be prosecuted, I had a feeling the ax was going to
fall hard on David Loew. And although there was no way Bill would let me, I was unhinged enough to have a few fantasies about
covering the trial myself. The execution too.

“You want to tell me what happened in that house?”
the chief was saying. “Or would you rather let it sit awhile?”

“Aren’t I going to have to, you know, make a formal statement anyway?”

“Yeah.”

“Then I guess I’d rather do it all at once.”

“However you want to play it. You’re one tough little girl, you know that?”

I let that sink in for a while, then thought about something else. “Chief, am I going to be in trouble?”

“For killing Gravink? Mayor’s gonna pin a medal on you.”

“No, I mean… I really shouldn’t be telling you this. But I think I shot him, like, eight times.”

“Six. Cody still carries a revolver. Thirty-eight special. Six shots max.”

“That’s comforting.”

“You telling me you think you used excessive force?”

“He was down. I kept shooting.”

“I really shouldn’t be telling you this either, Alex. But good for you.”

“Chief, I tried to shoot him in the
head
. The only reason I didn’t was I was out of bullets.”

He laughed out loud. After all that had happened, the sound seemed completely foreign. “Like I said, you’re one tough little
girl.”

We were getting into town, and when I expected him to go in one direction, he went in another. “Where are we going?”

“Hospital.”

“Thanks.”

“I gotta warn you, Alex. Cody didn’t look so hot when
they took him out of there. Had to jump-start his heart. Wasn’t breathing on his own.”

“But he’s still alive?”

“They would have radioed me if he wasn’t. I just don’t want you to get your hopes up. It might be an ugly wait.”

“Then why aren’t you trying to talk me out of it?”

“I had a feeling you might have a little bit of an interest in how our Cody makes out.”

So we’d been fooling exactly no one. Big surprise. “But how did he get out there? How did he find me?”

“I can’t say, ‘cause I don’t know,” the chief said. “But with any luck, you can ask him yourself.”

It’s rather ironic, and the subject of no little teasing on my part, that Cody is alive today for no better reason than that
he’s a big Irish lug. That, and the fact that whatever else Bobby Ray Gravink was, he was a meticulous dispenser of lethal
drugs. The dose in that hypodermic had been precisely calibrated to dispatch a young girl of 108 pounds. Cody weighs in at
more than twice that—but minus the medical intervention, it still would have killed him. He owes his life to the paramedics
in the Walden County Sheriff’s Department, and I guess I owe my life to him.

The atmosphere at the hospital was a cross between a throne room and a madhouse. It’s not every day that a Gabriel cop nearly
gets killed in the line of duty, and it seemed like everyone in the whole county who wore a uniform (including the postmen
and the meter maids) showed up to pay their respects. I was pretty much a fixture at the proverbial bedside, and I was kind
of astounded at the deference I got from everybody—not
because I was the hero cop’s best girl, but because I’d been the one to pull the trigger on the son of a bitch. It had never
occurred to me that killing somebody could win you so much respect. Perhaps that’s why it’s such a popular activity.

As for the newspaper, the general consensus was
not again
. There I was, smack-dab in the middle of another mess, and it was up to Bill and Marilyn to figure out how to play it. Mad
won some big AP award for all the stories he wrote; he had five bylines the next day, a
Monitor
record. Plenty of other reporters kept calling, appealing to my sense of collegial goodwill to cut them some slack. But in
the end I only gave one outside interview, and it was to an old friend of mine named Gordon Band.

“You know,” Cody was saying to me on his last afternoon in the hospital, when we’d finally gotten rid of everybody. “My recall
of what happened after I walked into that room is pretty hazy. But I have this strange feeling that maybe there was a pretty
girl there telling me not to die.”

I sat down on the edge of the bed and kissed the top of his head. “There might have been.”

“And this same girl was saying all this stuff about how much she loved me.”

“You were hallucinating.”

“I was?”

“Must’ve been the drugs.”

“Ah.” He pulled me down across him and kissed me. “Well, I’ll have to hope for another near-death experience one of these
days.”

“You know, Cody, if you’re well enough to talk about
these daydreams of yours, maybe you wouldn’t mind telling me how the hell it was you found me out there.”

“I’ve been avoiding it.”

“I noticed. How come?”

“Because I feel like an idiot. I let that amateur bastard get the better of me.”

“From what the doctors said, it was a pretty goddamn lucky shot on his part. If he hadn’t jabbed you right in the heart with
that thing, you might not have even felt it for a while. You sure as hell wouldn’t have conked out on me like that.”

“Yeah, but the way things played out, I’d be dead right now if it weren’t for you.”

“Cody, if it weren’t for me, you never would have been caught off guard in the first place. And if you hadn’t come barging
in there,
I’d
be dead right now.”

“So you think we should call it even?”

“Let’s shake on it.” We did. “Okay, now spill it.”

He leaned back against the pillows. He was in good shape for a guy who’d been on a ventilator four days ago, but he still
looked like hell.

“After that girl Justice disappeared, the pressure on the department was unbelievable. I never saw anything like it before,
not even in the navy. We had people camped out, senators calling us—the mayor pretty much pitched a tent in the goddamn squad
room. We were running interviews up at the vet clinic, still trying to pretend it was some investigation about stolen medical
equipment so Gravink wouldn’t get tipped off. Finally, we thought we had him. Five different people ID’ed the picture as a
lab tech named Peter Anderson.”

“And that’s how you found me?”

He shook his head. “It was a dead end. We had them pull Anderson’s documentation, and it was all fake. The address he put
on his application was a post office box, and that’s where he had his paycheck sent. We searched high and low for a Peter
Anderson, and we turned up four of them, none of whom were our guy. So we figured he had to be living under yet another name.”

“Couldn’t you just grab him when he came into work?”

“We would’ve loved to. But the day Justice disappeared, he called in and said he had to leave town because of a death in the
family. Pretty bad joke, huh? But I got to thinking. Granted, we only had the photocopies of his ID from his file at the clinic,
but the stuff looked top-notch. From what I hear the human resources people up on campus are no dummies. They’ve got a big
labor relations school up there, and last thing the university wants is to get caught hiring illegal aliens.”

“Right. So?”

“So like I said, I got to thinking. If you planned to get into mischief in this town, and you needed fake papers so good there
wasn’t much chance your cover would get blown, where would you go?”

I gaped at him. “
No way
.”

“You got it. I went out to the county lockup and had a little chat with Jeffrey Vandebrandt.”

“And he talked?”

“Not at first. But when I informed him that if he’d helped Bobby Ray Gravink escape justice it would make him an accessory
to murder, it got his attention.”

“Isn’t that stretching it a little?”

“Lucky for us, Vandebrandt’s no lawyer. Within five
minutes he was singing like Rosemary Clooney. Told us the same guy who’d hired him to make fake papers in the name of Peter
Anderson also bought another set for an Alan Johnson.”

“How did he afford it? Vandebrandt’s fakes must have cost a bundle.”

“Same way he afforded everything else.”

“Which is?”

“Easy. After he killed his sister, he took all the money she saved for college.”

“Son of a bitch.”

“You said it. So once we had Johnson’s name, we put every guy we had on it, checking utility bills and rental agencies, that
type of thing. But my instincts were telling me that wherever this guy was, it had to be out in the country somewhere. He’d
need privacy, and if he really was keeping all those dogs he stole he’d have to have someplace to put them. So I went out
to this little office in Etna that posts places for rent out in the sticks. Johnson’s name was in their records. That’s when
I called for backup, then broke about fifty regs by going in there before it showed up.”

“It’s a damn good thing you did. Gravink was about to stick that needle in Justice.”

“You would have stopped him.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. But I just know you would have.”

“I think you’re giving me a lot more credit than I deserve. I’m a big chicken.”

He gave me a look that said
yeah, right
. “You might not even want to hear this,” he said a while later, “but since we’re coming clean on everything, Jeffrey Vandebrandt
told me something else when he was spilling his guts. He’s been in your house.”

“
Excuse
me?”

“Do you remember I told you that along with all the high-tech crap we found in his apartment, there was also some makeup?”

“I guess.”

“Well apparently, part of the thrill of his little hobby was seeing his targets up close and personal. So one night, right
after your name was in the paper for finding Patricia Marx’s body, he dressed up as some senior citizen and knocked on your
front door.”

“You’re kidding me. I don’t even remember.”

“He said there was a big party going on. Anyway, he never even saw you. One of your roommates answered the door, and with
all the people around he lost his nerve. Said he pretended to be looking for the previous owners.”

“Jesus Christ. How long did you say they’re locking him up for?”

“Not sure yet.”

“Let me ask you something else, Cody. Do you think Vandebrandt knew what Gravink was up to?”

He gave me a long, assessing look. “You smart chicks are
so
sexy.”

That made me laugh. “You sound like Mad.”