Distemper (9 page)

I mention all this because in what turned out to be a brief lull between the discovery of the second body and the third, I
got caught up covering the latest social action up on the hill. This time, the hot topic was animal rights, and the protest
forces were hitting it from all angles. They’d stormed a trustee meeting, demanding that Benson divest from companies that
do animal testing. They’d raided a mink farm forty miles away. They’d trashed a bunch of labs up at the vet school and, over
at the Ag school, liberated some cows from the experimental dairy herd. So far, nobody had been arrested, and the talk was
that the group had some friends on the inside who helped
them get into the buildings and avoid security. It wasn’t much and it certainly wasn’t violent, but it was enough to have
anybody even remotely involved in animal experiments feeling itchy. An entomologist I knew even put triple locks on her office
because she was terrified the “loonies” (her word) would try to free her tarantula collection. And, she lamented, only half
of them were poisonous.

But unlike most campus causes, this one seemed to have a fair number of opponents among the student body itself. Benson has
world-class animal science departments, and their grants pay a lot of people’s salaries. Plus, there are plenty of grad students
(and undergrads too) up there for the sole purpose of doing the very things that the so-called Benson Animal Anarchists object
to, whether it’s dissecting frogs or twiddling with equine DNA. It didn’t help that of the five hundred animals they’d freed
from the shackles of the mink farm, almost all of them died (either run over by cars or eaten by their closest friends) and
one of the liberated cows wandered into the road and caused a near-fatal accident.

Maybe because their profile wasn’t what they might have wanted—or because graduation was coming up and most of the group was
off to law school—they decided it was time for something more dramatic. So there I was, hauled out of bed at seven on a Wednesday
morning a week and a half before Memorial Day, watching the campus police try to unlock the front doors of the biology building.
Gabriel is an eight-to-four town, and there was already a crowd of office workers, professors, and early-bird students waiting
to get inside. Through the glass doors, I could see four beleaguered-looking people in lab
coats who’d apparently been trapped there overnight, and it didn’t look like they were going anywhere soon. The handles of
the back doors had been chained together with titanium bike locks, and in front the door locks had been glued shut with the
industrial-strength stuff abortion protesters use to close down clinics. From what I could tell, there was no opening them
without a battering ram. It was going to be a long day.

Melissa was wandering through the crowd snapping pictures, wearing the photo-safari vest that makes her look like Meryl Streep
in
Out of Africa
. The campus cops were not happy. At least nobody was chanting.

“Hey there, Miss Alex,” she said. “What do you make of this spectacle?”

“Drag. Nobody’s chained to anything.”

“Not yet.”

“Get any good shots?”

“Fat cop with a hacksaw.”

“Pulitzer time.”

“I wonder what they’re after.”

“All of bio’s in this building, so take your pick. I’m betting fetal pigs.”

“Heads up. Here comes the flack brigade.”

I turned around and saw the new vice president for university relations and two of his assistants coming our way. Phil Herzog
got hired after his predecessor was shipped off to minimum-security work camp for drunk driving. The new guy was considerably
less of a jerk but every bit as unhelpful. That part is inevitable, though: our job is to report the news, and his is to filter
out all the bad stuff and leave us with the vanilla-pudding dregs that
make parents and donors sleep at night. It’s not what you’d call a mutually satisfying relationship.

Melissa slipped off, leaving me to deal with Herzog and his crew on my own. But when they were twenty feet away and closing,
they and everyone else in the crowd stopped to stare at the line of marchers coming down the middle of the main campus street.
There were only about two dozen of them, but they’d already jammed up what passes for rush-hour traffic around here. They
were making some horrible noise, and it took me a minute to realize it was coming from four boom boxes playing recorded sounds
of screaming animals, presumably at the slaughter. Lovely.

The campus cops started barking into their walkie-talkies, calling for backup before they were drowned out by the animal screams.
The marchers finally drew up in front of the building and spread themselves at various points on the front steps with the
precision of a ROTC drill team. As it turned out, there was a good reason they weren’t chanting. They had their mouths covered
with duct tape, which made for dramatic effect but was going to hurt like hell when it came off, and they were wearing identical
T-shirts that said
STOP VIVISECTION
.

That was it. They all just stood there and stared straight ahead with those horrible recordings blaring one on top of the
other, out of synch and sounding like teatime at the abattoir. I caught sight of my friend Nicky from the NPR station in Binghamton,
who was trying to set sound levels on his recorder, and he gave me a look that translated as
what am I supposed to do with these nutbags
? I shrugged back. Nothing happened for a couple of minutes, and I was wondering how long the standoff could
possibly go on when one of the campus cops had enough. He was a guy in his fifties, red-faced from carrying an extra sixty
pounds, and as he stepped from behind me I heard him say four words crowded into one.

“Sonofabitch.”

He ran up to the closest kid with a tape player and went to pull it out of her hands, but she held on. He might have chosen
a woman because he thought she’d be easier to handle, but if he did he chose wrong. He tried to grab it again, and she wrapped
her arms around it tighter, all the while staring straight ahead. He tried to pick her up and the radio along with it, but
she collapsed into a heap on the steps and became total deadweight; somebody had obviously given them a primer on civil disobedience.

“Turn off that goddamn noise!” he shouted, and was about to move on to the next nearest protester when two other campus policemen
intercepted him. They talked to him for a minute and the three of them seemed about to walk away when the first cop threw
them off, whirled around, and rushed a skinny kid perched on one of the middle steps. He took a swing at him but the kid was
too fast, and when the punch didn’t connect the cop lost his balance and nearly toppled over. But he recovered and grabbed
the radio with more agility than you’d think he could manage, lifted it over his head, and pitched it down the stairs. One
out of four screaming pigs went quiet, and most of the crowd looked like they wanted to kiss the guy.

He started toward the next radio, his face even redder than before, but all of a sudden he stopped and just keeled over, splat.
The EMTs—who always seem to be lurking on the sidelines at such occasions—leaped into action,
giving CPR and loading him into an ambulance. The protesters never even looked. I was starting to write the lead in my head.
A Benson University public safety officer collapsed during a campus protest in front of a blockaded Dew Hall Wednesday morning.
Student activists, clad in identical anti-vivisection T-shirts and wearing duct tape over their mouths, stood around like
a bunch of twits while the old guy croaked
.

The dean of students showed up with a megaphone and talked about how the protesters’ concerns would be addressed, but first
they had to disperse and let them free the people locked inside the building. It was a lovely speech, but nobody could hear
it over the recorded screams of animal torture. The vice president for research picked up the megaphone and started calling
for “civil discourse,” but by then the Gabriel city cops were involved and there was no more Mr. Nice Guy. Working in pairs,
they handcuffed the protesters with plastic strips and carried them to a bus, which whisked them away, boom boxes and all.
So much for getting some quotes.

The doors were still locked by the time I left an hour later; they finally had to bring in a glazier from the buildings and
grounds department to cut through one of the glass panes and let the people out. Herzog had told me that they were going to
charge the perpetrators with unlawful imprisonment, vandalism, and malicious mischief. But since there was no way to prove
that the protesters had anything to do with sealing up the building like a giant brick Tupperware, in the end all they got
hit with was disorderly conduct—and only the four kids with the noisemakers, at that.

I was in the newsroom working on the story and eating
a bagel with green olive cream cheese when Mad came over and deposited an envelope on my desk. It was addressed to “Police
Reporter.”

“Guess who dropped us a line.”

“Junior’s Aunt Thelma?”

“I hope not. Open it.”

It was one typed page, single-spaced with no margins—the format of choice for raving lunatics with something to share. For
years, we’ve been getting letters from God that start like this: “This is the Lord your Savior, speaking to you through my
earthly son, Jethro.” Return address, Texarkana.

This one was obviously different. For one thing, there were no typos, nothing crossed out or whited over. And for another,
it was signed
The Devil’s Disciple
. The text went like this:

You think I have only killed two but there are many many more. They thought they could look down on me but I am the one. I
am in control. I decide who lives and who dies. I have the power. I will determine when to be merciful and when to take my
vengeance on the ones who have disobeyed.

They cannot hide from me. I watch them in secret as they walk pretending they do not fear me. But I can smell it. They are
afraid of me and they should be. In my mind I can see them under me, and my hands around their necks, and I watch as
the life God gave them is taken away by something much much stronger.

They lock their doors at night. They huddle together and hope I will go away. But I will stay until my destiny is fulfilled
and my job is done. How many will there be? How many does the master crave? That is the question and only I know the answer.

I will act again soon.

I dropped the paper on the desk like it was crawling with cockroaches. Even insect-free it gave me the willies. “Is this what
I think it is?”

“Looks like it.”

“You think it’s for real?”

“Like I’m the expert?”

I read through it again. It was less scary the second time around. “You know what, Mad? I don’t know if I buy it.”

“Huh?”

“It sounds to me like whoever wrote this has been watching too goddamn many
X-Files
.”

“You mean it’s a fake?”

“It’s just so, I don’t know… predictable.”

“You’re criticizing a serial killer for bad writing?”

I shrugged. “What are we supposed to do with this thing?”

“Damned if I know. Bill’s out, so let’s ask the boss.”

We knocked on the managing editor’s office and she opened the door wearing her dojo whites, sweaty from practicing tae kwon
do kicks. Nobody messes with Marilyn,
and not just because she has a black belt. Mad handed her the letter and repaired to the corner to do combinations on the
punching bag that was still swinging from the ceiling. She read the page in under five seconds. “Motherfuck.”

Mad kept hitting the bag. “My” [
pow
] “words” [
pow
] “exactly.”

“Oh, crap.” She picked up the phone. I flopped down on her office couch and she threw a cappuccino-flavored PowerBar at me.
“Chief Hill, please. Marilyn Zapinsky from the
Monitor
. It’s important.” He came on the line right away. Impressive. “Chief, you might want to send one of your boys over here.
There’s something you ought to see. It’s a letter purporting to be from the killer. Might be a crock, but I figured we’d play
it safe. What? No, I haven’t made any decisions about printing it yet… Whoa. It came to
my
newsroom, mister. If I want to run the goddamn thing I’ll run it. I called you up in the spirit of cooperation. Huh? Evidence,
schmevidence. I can photocopy this sucker faster than you can zip up your fly.” She listened again. “Why, that’s
much
nicer. Tell him to come right up to my office. And good day to you, sir.”

She hung up and I bowed my head. “Mistress Marilyn, I kneel in adoration of your power.”

“It’s all in the attitude, sister.”

“That man would pay big money to have you walk on his back with spike heels.”

“He can’t afford me.”

“So who’s he sending?”

“Your hero, Detective Cody.”

“Oh, joy.”

“And a prints guy.”

“What for?”

“They’re dusting us for elimination prints. Apparently we should have known better than to handle the letter. We’ve probably
smeared it all to hell and destroyed their evidence. But they’re going to check it anyway.”

“Why do I doubt the killer would do us the favor of running his mitts all over the thing?”

“Because you have common sense. But these guys are cops, and we have to make allowances. Now be a good girl and go xerox this
thing before the stormtroopers get here. Five copies should do the trick. No,” she called after me, “make that ten.”