Distemper (13 page)

“And since the cops have had weeks to scour every report of every missing girl in the U.S. and Canada, she wasn’t one of them.”

“That’s what I’m thinking.”

“So if the cops couldn’t find her, how can two lazy drunks do any better?”

“Come on, Mad, we’re just free-associating. Don’t you want to play?”

“Do I have to watch you drink another goddamn Missouri sour?”

“It’s Midori, and why yes, I’d love another one. Thanks very much.”

He rolled his eyes and waved to Mack. “Okay, I’m listening.”

“Let’s think about this logically for a minute. Why in the world would a girl like our victim not be reported missing?”

“You want me to answer that?”

“Please.”

He rubbed the back of his neck. “All right. Okay.
Lemme see here. Well, what if she’s all alone in the world? No family, no friends, no job, no nothing. There’d be nobody to
miss her.”

“Sure, but let’s face it. Even the guys who collect cans on the Green have at least one friend who’d worry about them if they
disappeared. This girl had resources. She wasn’t dressed like some transient.”

“What if they weren’t her clothes?”

“Man, I never thought about that. What if that’s true? But wait. She wasn’t starving or anything, and the description said
her teeth had been straightened. Doesn’t a few thousand dollars worth of braces mean she was at least middle class?”

“Maybe she hit the skids.”

“Yeah, but let’s not forget that this guy seems to have a pattern. His victims are physically similar, and the second girl
was no hooker. She worked at the Gap, for Pete’s sake. You can’t get more middle class than that.”

“How come all my ideas get shot down?”

“Sorry. I’m just trying to be logical. It doesn’t come naturally.”

“Well, you’re probably right anyway. Which brings us right back where we started.”

“How does a regular, decent girl fall off the radar?”

We thought about it for a while. It was getting on nine o’clock, and the lull following the after-work crowd was ending as
Bessler students straggled in the door in twos and threes. Several of the girls sized up Mad with looks so brazen they seemed
to come from another, sexier planet than the one I live on. These days, the only things I can summon up that much lust for
come topped with melted cheese.

“I got it,” Mad said. “How about this: what if she wasn’t the only victim? What if her family was offed too? There’d be nobody
to report her missing.”

“And also nobody to report that a whole
family
had gone missing?”

“Oh. Right. I didn’t think about that.”

“Minor detail.”

“This is no fun. Why don’t we do this on company time? Why are we wasting valuable booze-and-babe time?” He leered at a gaggle
of flat-chested blondes drinking screwdrivers at one corner of the bar. One of them caught his eye and gave him a look that
I’d swear said
lose the chunky brunette and come on over
.

“Okay, I’m no match for your sloth. Have a lovely evening. But would you do me a favor and at least make sure her fake ID
looks
convincing? Maybe the judge will be more sympathetic if you card her before you bang her.”

“Don’t worry about me, sister. It only takes two to tango, and I’ll make sure she has nothing to complain about afterward.
No witnesses, no case.”

I got up to leave and was halfway down the window seat steps when I stopped cold. “Wait a second.”

“Get lost, Bernier. You’re cramping my style.”

“No, listen. What if that’s it?”

The blonde was looking at him. He was looking back. “Huh?”

“What if there were no witnesses? What if the person who would have reported her missing was the one who killed her?”

That got him. “Jesus. You think?”

I sat back down. “It’s one way that might explain things.”

“A damn nasty way.”

“Yeah, but not a particularly surprising one. Crazy killers make good copy, but statistically a woman is a lot more likely
to be killed by her husband than by some stranger.”

“Could it really happen, though? Wouldn’t someone else miss her? Her family and friends?”

“You’d think. It would depend on the circumstances—who’s still alive, how close people are. Take, I don’t know… Melissa. Her
parents are both dead. She hates her brother’s guts. Let’s say I want to off her. I tell everybody, ‘Oh, Melissa had a meltdown
and went to stay with her relatives in Greece for a while.’ Would they buy it?”

“About Melissa? You bet. From you? Sure.”

“From someone
close
to her, right?”

“Right. But what about the, you know, corpus delicti?”

“You make sure there’s no easy way to identify her. As far as I know Melissa has never been fingerprinted, so you probably
couldn’t ID her that way. You dump her someplace she might never be found, or at least not for a while. You do it far away
from home, so it’s unlikely that even if she is found and the media runs a sketch like we did, there’s no one around who would
recognize her.”

“Which would mean that both the killer and the first victim don’t come from upstate New York, or even anywhere in the Northeast.”

“If my little theory is right.” I caught Mad peering over my shoulder toward the bar. “She still there?”

He shook his head. “I guess she wasn’t interested in a three-way.”

“Poor dear.”

“Hold on a minute, Bernier. Oh, fuck, I can’t believe you got me interested in this. But I think you’re blowing off a major
point—like the, you know,
physical evidence
. I mean, don’t forget what this guy did to her. He strangled her with a dog collar, for Chrissake. He probably made her walk
on a goddamn leash. He left her naked with all her clothes folded next to her. Those are not the actions of some guy who wants
to smoke his wife so he can shack up with his secretary.”

“I’m not saying it wasn’t a crazy person, Mad. I’m just saying maybe it was a crazy person she knew.”

“Man, and I thought
I
was a sick bastard.”

“Because you’re a skirt-chasing alcoholic? Come on, Mad. Your neuroses are relatively benign. This guy puts nuts like us way
on the sunny side of normal.”

“Nice of him.”

“You know, I wonder if we’re onto something with all this.”

“Think you should share it with your buddy Cody?”

“I’m sure it’s already occurred to him.”

“Do I detect a note of admiration?”

“He’s a decent cop.”

“But is he any good in the sack?”

“Do you have any idea how old that joke is getting?”

“Sorry. I’m not at the top of my form.”

“Riddle me something else. Are we saying that this guy killed someone he could cover up and then, like, branched out? Came
here to dump the body and started murdering strangers? Just for the fun of it? And wrote letters to the paper just to scare
people even more?”

“Damned if I know.”

“Jesus, Mad. If we’re anywhere near right, he started off as an amateur, and he’s turning into a pro.”

We stayed there in the window seat for a while, mulling the nasty possibilities over and over again. None of it put me in
the mood to take any stupid chances, so when it came time to leave I used the bar phone to make sure someone was home, just
like the cops had told me to. The machine answered.
You have reached Steve, Emma, Marci, C.A., Alex, Tipsy, Nanki-Poo, Shakespeare
… I hung up. The message was in Steve’s voice, calculated to fend off mashers, but it actually made us sound like his harem.
I gritted my teeth, put a finger in my other ear so I could hear over Roger Daltry singing “Pinball Wizard” at top volume,
and dialed the police station for an escort. It felt like I was thirteen years old again, asking Dad to pick me up at the
Cinema Four.

I sat back down next to Mad, who was in no shape to drive anybody anywhere. Five minutes later there was a rap on the window,
and I turned to find Cody on the Green, motioning at me to come out. He didn’t look happy. “I think my ride’s here,” I said,
and pecked Mad on the cheek. He waved me off and went back to his pitcher. When I got outside, I saw that Cody was wearing
his jeans and leather jacket ensemble, so he wasn’t still on duty. “What are
you
doing here?”

“You know, every time we run into each other, that’s the first thing you say.”

“I meant, are you supposed to be my escort? And how did you get here so fast?”

“I was on my way out of the station house when you called. Alex, we need to talk.”

He sounded more serious than I’d ever heard him,
which was quite an accomplishment considering his flair for gravitas. “What’s going on?”

“Where’s your car?”

“Behind the
Monitor
. But I know better than to drive after three drinks.”

“I’ll take you home then.”

“I tried there already. Nobody’s home. That’s why I called for a baby-sitter. So maybe we should call a uniformed…”

“Your roommates are on their way there. Some of them, anyway.”

I stopped in my tracks. “How do you know? What is it? Come on, Cody, tell me.”

“Have you been home lately?”

Another odd question. “This week, not much. Just to sleep and shower. The animal-testing story has had me running all over
the place. Why?”

“I’d left word with the desk sergeant that I was to be informed if anyone filed a missing persons report on a girl who came
even close to fitting the killer’s profile. They just paged me. Something’s come up.” I didn’t have the guts to prod him.
I waited until he started talking again. “One of your roommates filed a report. Seems one of the girls hasn’t been seen since
Wednesday night. Missed class yesterday and today. Her family hasn’t heard from her.”

The three Midori sours started churning in my stomach. “Oh, my God. We were wrong. We must have been wrong. We didn’t publish
that goddamn letter, and he went out and did just what he threatened to do.”

“We don’t know that. There may be a perfectly logical explanation.”

“But your people were supposed to watch her. They were supposed to guard her like they were guarding me. Oh, Jesus, poor Marci…”

“Alex, it isn’t Marci who’s missing. It’s C.A.”

I gaped at him. “C.A.? That’s impossible. No one messes with C.A. She was raised in the army, for Chris-sake. She knows how
to protect herself.”

“Like I said, she could walk in the door tonight. But she’s been gone more than twenty-four hours, and your friend Marci called
the police.”

I felt my shoulder muscles relax. “Marci does have a hysterical side. She’s been known to overreact.”

“That very well may be the case. But there’s something else odd.”

“What?”

“Her dog is missing too.”

I
KNEW SHE’D BEEN ABDUCTED
. I
WAS SURE FROM THE
minute I looked through her stuff, because it was obvious she hadn’t gone willingly. For one thing, her dad’s army duffel
was still on the top shelf of her closet, and none of us had ever seen her travel without it. We couldn’t find any of her
clothes missing except the ones she’d been wearing. And most importantly, her dog’s medication was still in the bathroom cabinet.

“What kind of medicine is it?” Cody asked. All five of us—Steve, Marci, Emma, Cody, and I—were sitting in the living room.
Marci looked as though she’d been crying all night, and Emma was drinking a martini out of a jumbo plastic cup. With Steve
there, it struck me that it was the first time in a long time all of my housemates had sat down together. Then I remembered
C.A. was gone, and I felt like crying myself.

“It’s enrofloxacin,” Emma said. “It’s an antibiotic. Nanki-Poo has prostatitis, so he’s got to take it for three more weeks.”

“Can he live without it?”

“Live? Oh, certainly. But the infection will come back, and then you have to begin the course of treatment all over again.”

“What I need to know is, would C.A. have left this behind? Forgotten it, maybe?”

“I wouldn’t think so. The dog’s been taking it twice a day for three weeks already.”

“Could she have another bottle of it with her?”

Marci shook her head. “It’s expensive. We get a vet student discount, but only one bottle at a time.”

“What kind of car does she drive?”

“Like I told the policeman before, she doesn’t have a car. She rides her bike everywhere.” Marci started sniffling, and Steve
got up to hand her another box of Kleenex. As he crossed the room, I noticed he wasn’t too overcome with grief to check out
the pecs beneath Cody’s plaid cotton shirt.

“We’re going to do everything we can to find her,” Cody said. “We have officers out canvassing, both downtown and up on campus.
We’ve sent out alerts to the surrounding counties. Marci, I want you to know you did the right thing by contacting us immediately.
The earlier we get the report, the more likely it is we’ll find someone. You said her parents were coming into town?”

“They said they were coming the moment we called them,” Emma said. “They were so very certain it wasn’t like her to go off
without a word.”

“Her father’s a colonel,” Steve interjected. “We used to joke about how he was, you know, ‘a full bird,’ because I’m an ornithologist…”
He got up and retrieved the Kleenex.