Distemper (7 page)

“ ‘Sleeping with the enemy,’ you know, it’s an expression. It was a joke. A really bad one.”

“Oh. Right.”

“So do you want a Guinness or don’t you?”

He cocked an eyebrow. “No strings attached?”

“Huh?”

“Just a beer and nothing else?”

“What, are you afraid I’m gonna jump your bones? Those Boston chicks must be pretty hot.”

“Come on, I didn’t mean…”

“Oh, I get it. You’re afraid I’m going to pump you. I mean for info.”

“Crossed my mind.”

“Oh, Christ, Cody. I was just trying to be nice, say thanks for you coming by to protect our virtue.”

“No digging about the case?”

“Not unless you want to unburden yourself.”

“You got Guinness stout?”

“How the hell do I know?”

I got him a bottle out of the fridge from Emma’s private stock, and we sat on stools at the kitchen counter. “Where is everybody?
I thought you lived with a whole houseful.”

“Steve is out counting the little birdies, which is where he is most nights. Emma is disporting herself with my friend Mad,
and the other two just took off for the vet library. That’s everybody.”

“It’s good there are so many of you. Safer.”

“I guess. What about you, Detective? Do you live alone?”

“Yeah. And since you’re serving me the good stuff you could call me Brian.”

“Wait, I thought you lived with your mother.”

His bottle stopped an inch from his lips. “Now
that’s
a crock. Where did you hear that?”

“Apparently from someone who didn’t know what he was talking about.”

“For the record, I live
near
my mother. I do not live
with
my mother.”

“It’s an important distinction.”

“I’ll say.”

“You know, it totally freaks me out you thought I was in high school.”

“It was the cuts and bruises. They made you look vulnerable. The pigtails didn’t help.”

“I have
got
to stop dressing like Buffy the Vampire Slayer.”

“Who?”

“Never mind. So I hear your wife left you.”

“Are you always this shy?”

“Always.”

“Where’d you hear about my wife?”

“Sources. Hopefully, more reliable than the other one.”

“Well, that much is one hundred percent true.”

“What happened? She didn’t like being a cop’s wife?”

“No, she loved being a cop’s wife. Loved it so much, she traded up. Dumped me for my lieutenant.”

“Isn’t that—I don’t know—unethical? On his part? Can’t he get in trouble?”

“He might, but only if I made a stink. Which I didn’t.”

“You just did the honorable thing and retreated to a nothing police department in the middle of nowhere.”

“I don’t hate it here. I already told you, my mom lives in Gabriel.”

“You didn’t grow up here, did you? You sure don’t sound like it.”

“Me? No way. I grew up in Southie. That’s South Boston.”

“I know what Southie is. I grew up in Western Mass. The Berkshires.”

“Another world out there.”

“We all root for the Yankees and plot secession.”

“And we’d just as soon have you fall off into New York.”

“No kidding. How did your mom end up here?”

“After my dad died, she married a guy who got a job running the grounds department at Benson. He died last year, so she was
by herself. But she had her friends here, and her church, and she didn’t want to move. So here I am.”

“Doomed to be bored off your ass.”

“Hardly. Not now, anyway.” He picked up the paper from where he’d dropped it on the counter. I’d assumed it was that day’s,
but it turned out to be from Tuesday. My story had run above the fold under the headline
POLICE IDENTIFY SECOND VICTIM
. I’d filed it ten minutes before deadline Monday night, then fallen asleep on the couch in the managing editor’s office.
Cody unfolded the paper and shook his head. “How the hell did you pull this off?”

“What do you mean? How did I get you to talk?”

“You did not ‘get’ me to talk. I did the only logical thing under the circumstances. Pissing off the local daily
is very shortsighted. It feels good at the time, but when you need a favor two weeks later, it comes back to bite you on the
ass. I meant, how did you get these pictures? And how did you get all these people to talk to you—her roommate, her boyfriend,
her
parents
, for God’s sake?”

“That’s not my story. The cop reporter wrote it.”

“Do you think for a minute I believe that frightened adolescent wrote this?”

“Okay, you got me. We co-wrote it. And if you really want to know, the photo on the jump page came from her high school yearbook.
That’s a no-brainer. We just sent the photo intern to the local library. The one that ran on page one—that posed sort of glamour
shot—we got that one from her boyfriend. He kept it in his wallet.”

“But why do people let you invade their privacy like that? That’s what I can’t understand. If I was that poor girl’s boyfriend,
I would never talk to you people in a million years.”

“Most people think they’d feel that way. But when push comes to shove, they’d rather talk about something than just sit on
it.”

“I don’t buy it.”

“Then maybe you’re the one person out of a hundred that can handle silence. Most of us can’t. It makes my job a lot easier.
I bet it does the same thing for yours.”

“Food for thought.”

“Fact is, most people
need
to talk about themselves. Makes them feel like they’re worth something.”

“Only if they’ve got something to prove.”

“And you don’t?”

“I’m not real big on spilling my guts.”

“So why’d you tell me about your wife and all?”

“Damn good question.” He thought about it for a minute. “I guess… because you asked so straight. Frontal assault.”

“The best kind.”

“But there’s a big difference between talking over a beer and spilling personal stuff to the newspaper. It’s not like my lousy
marriage is going to end up in print.”

“You hope.” He shot me a startled look. “Relax, Cody. I’m just joking. And for the record, though it’s absolutely, positively,
and completely none of my business, it sounds to me like that wife of yours was a flake and a half.”

“You’re not wrong.” He drank down the rest of his beer. “All right, let’s take a look around this place.” He got up and went
straight for the front door. “What you have here is a lock so cheap any two-bit break-in artist could pick it. Which doesn’t
much matter, because anyone with a brick could break the glass, reach in, and turn the latch. What you want is a Medeco lock,
the kind you can deadbolt from the inside with a key. They cost a mint, but when you move out you can take it with you. And
you don’t want to leave the key hanging in the lock, or you’ve defeated the purpose. Got it?” I wrote it down. He surveyed
the house, and, in the end, calculated eight separate points of entry that any idiot with a stepladder and an urge to maim
could use to get at us. Put security bars on the first-floor windows, he said, and plant prickly bushes underneath them. Close
and lock the ones on the second floor, since it wouldn’t take much to climb the trellis to the garage roof and get in that
way. Have the landlord fix the broken light fixtures outside the back door. Install motion-sensitive floodlights. Et cetera,
et cetera.

“Sounds like living in a prison.”

“It’s living in the real world.”

“How about you just catch this guy?”

“We’re working on it.”

“He’s crazy, isn’t he?”

“I don’t believe in crazy. I believe in evil. How else do you describe someone who kills women, and leaves them lying in the
woods like some sort of…”

I thought of what I’d found on Saturday. “… sacrifice?”

“Exactly.”

“Do you have any leads at all?”

“A few. And you know I can’t say anything.”

“What if I promise to be a good little girl and keep my mouth shut?”

“You wouldn’t know how.”

“Look, I’m not asking you as a reporter. I’m asking you as the poor schmuck who found Patricia Marx in the goddamn woods.”
I stared him right in his baby greens, and for a minute I thought he was going to open up. Fat chance.

“I’d better get going before I say something I’ll regret later. You’re damn good at what you do. Too good for my taste.”

He moved toward the front door, fast enough to upset the unfortunately named Tipsy and Nanki-Poo. They lunged for him, and
I grabbed them by their collars again to give him enough time to get out. After informing the dogs that they were both very
bad indeed, I followed him outside and shut the door behind me. “Sorry about that,” I said, and reached out to shake his hand.

“I don’t mind. Like I said, they’re good guard dogs.” He went to shake, but all of a sudden he grabbed my wrist
and held it up to the light. For a minute I thought he was going to try some gentlemanly hand-kissing thing, but he was just
trying to get a good look at my palm. He stared at it, and rubbed at the marks that were already fading.

“What’s the deal?”

“Which dog were you holding with your right hand?”

“Jesus, I don’t know.” I thought about it. “It was Nanki-Poo. The German shepherd.”

“Go get me his collar.”

“Why?”

“Just do me a favor and take it off him.”

I went back in the house, took the collar off the dog, and snapped off the license tags. “Here. Now what’s going on?”

“I’m sorry. I can’t tell you. But I’ve got to take this with me. I’ll give it back.” He started down the driveway.

“Wait. Hold on. What am I supposed to tell C.A.?” I looked down at my hand. The marks were just faintly visible. “Oh, my God.”
I ran after him. “It’s the marks on the girl’s neck. The diamond-shaped marks. She was strangled with a goddamn dog collar.
Wasn’t she?”

“I can’t talk about this.”

“Come on.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he was gone. I locked the door behind him and C.A.’s dog looked up at me, naked and wondering where
his next biscuit was coming from.

“A
DOG COLLAR? A MOTHERFUCKING DOG COLLAR?”

“Ssh. Mad, for Chrissake, can you keep your voice down?”

“Who’s gonna hear in this place?”

“Are you kidding me? Everybody. You know better.”

We were in the Citizen Kane, our favorite spot for bringing journalistic stereotypes to boozy life. It was around nine on
Friday night, and the place was just beginning to fill up. Lately, our turf has been invaded by students from Bessler College,
which is located on the opposite side of town from the behemoth that is Benson. Bessler is a small liberal arts school that
has amazing theater and music departments; too bad the rest of its student body is a bunch of beer-swilling numbskulls. Every
once in a while one of them manages to drink himself right into a coma and the college president has to go to the funeral
and try to keep a straight face. Mad calls it “natural selection.”

“Okay, okay, I’ll be quiet,” he said. “So what the hell happened?”

“I told you. Mr. Hunky Cop was standing in the doorway, and when he saw the pattern the dog collar made on my hand, he got
all hepped up and split. Bat out of hell. Back to the cop shop, I assume.”

“And it was the same pattern as on the girl’s neck?”

“I’m pretty sure. It’s kind of weird. I didn’t think I remembered that much detail; I was scared shitless. But when I saw
the marks on my hand it just sort of flashed back. I could see her lying there with these bruises around her neck.”

“What did they look like?”

“Diamond-shaped, evenly spaced but with sort of a groove at the front. And deep. Angry.”

“Angry?”

“Really vicious. Cut in really deep. Bloody.”

“Why do all the cool things happen to you?”

“Shut up, Mad. It was awful.”

“It’s a guy thing. We love this blood-and-guts shit. I’m thirty-four years old and I’ve never even gotten a peek at a really
interesting corpse.”

“Mad…”

“I know. I’m an asshole.”

“Clearly.”

“Sorry.”

“No problem.”

“You seem to be taking this pretty well, Bernier. You find the stiff, you run for your life, and none the worse for wear.”

“Yeah, right. Two cracked ribs, one sprained wrist…”

“Besides that. You don’t seem any too freaked out.”

“Are you nuts? Of course I’m freaked out. I’m plenty freaked out. It’s just… I don’t know. Nothing could be as bad as last
year.”

“I get your drift.”

“You see the man you love in a body bag six hours after he’s out of your bed, everything’s pretty much a cake walk from there.”

“No shit.”

We sat there for a while, Mad drinking his Molson and me swirling the limes around my gin and tonic. Mad loves to talk, but
he’s also one of the only people I can just sit with and not feel weird. “Oh, fuck, Mad. I still really miss him.”

“I know you do. But it’s okay.”

“How is it okay?”

“It’s okay to miss him, because he was worth missing. That means missing him is the right thing to do.”

“Wow. Mad, that was positively poetic.”