Distemper (24 page)

“What? But that’s right in the middle of…”

“It gets worse. The body was found by the groundskeeper’s nine-year-old son.”

“Jesus.”

He flipped open his phone again and called for a radio car to be sent to guard my house. He waited with me until the cop arrived,
not saying anything, just standing there holding one of my hands between his big beefy ones.

“What is it, Cody? There’s something you’re not telling me. I know there is.” He didn’t look at me, just shifted his gaze
from his shoes to the door and back again. “Come on. You know I’m going to find out soon enough. Don’t make me stay here imagining
something even worse.”

“There…” He cleared his throat. “There was another… mutilation. The eyes. The coroner hadn’t made it to the scene yet, but
this time it looks like it was premortem.”

It took a second for his words to sink in. The image made me want to scream, but I figured it wouldn’t put him in a better
mood. I just put my arms around him and hugged him hard. “Be careful out there, Cody.”

“I will,” he said, and he was gone.

I picked up the phone to tell Bill about the latest body so he could squeeze something onto page one before deadline, only
to realize that I wasn’t supposed to know about it in the first place.
Rats
. I curled up on the couch with Shakespeare on one side of me and Tipsy on the other, and thought about how this relationship
stuff was more complicated than I’d bargained for. Then I thought about the girl in the dugout, and my problems didn’t seem
particularly huge. It did occur to me, however, that if
there were ever a time for smoking it was now, and I was about to hunt for Emma’s Dunhills when the phone rang. I stared at
it for a while, thinking about the call I’d gotten the day the last body was found. Then I remembered to check the caller
ID, and saw Mad’s number.

“Hey, Bernier, what took you so damn long?”

“I’ll tell you later.”

“Listen, come on over here. We’re gonna run down a couple of leads.”

“What leads?”

“I got to thinking after you called me, so I tracked down the head of double-e. He gave me some names of kids he thinks might
be up to jacking cell phones.”

“You called the chairman of the electrical engineering department at this hour? I’m surprised he didn’t hang up on you.”

“Nah, he’s a big alchie since his wife dumped him. When he’s not in the lab, he lives in a booth at Sammy’s. I just went around
the corner and rousted him. Only cost me a couple of boilermakers.”

“He really gave you names?”

“He owed me one. Besides, I just told him it was for a science story.”

“And you want to go up to campus now?”

“It’s not even eleven. The natives are still plenty restless. So get your ass in gear.”

Not half an hour ago I’d had no desire to go prowling for clues. Now I could barely stand the idea of staying home alone,
kept awake by visions of an eyeless girl lying in a baseball dugout. I was sure of something else too: Cody wasn’t going to
like it one bit. I was already starting to draft my tirade about how I didn’t try to stop
him from doing his job, and he damn well wasn’t going to stop me from doing mine.

It was a pretty speech, filled with brilliant insights about lingering patriarchy in the post-feminist age. However, the truth
is I was hoping he’d never find out.

“Okay,” I told Mad, “but you have to come and get me. I promised Cody I wouldn’t go out by myself. Besides, if I do the cop’ll
follow me.”

“I’ll be there in…”

“Hold on a second. My call waiting just beeped.”

I clicked over to the other line, but no one was there. I was about to click back over to Mad when I caught the faint sound
of someone singing. I said “hello” a couple of times, and the sound got louder. Finally, I heard it well enough to make out
the song.

It was a man’s voice, one I recognized from his last call.

He was singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

B
Y “A COUPLE OF LEADS,”
M
AD MEANT ELEVEN
. H
E
picked me up in his Volvo (which had logged more miles in the past two months than in the previous two years), tossed me
a copy of the Benson student directory he’d swiped from the newsroom, and told me to start looking up names. “Listen, Bernier,”
he said as we drove up the hill toward campus. “I’m still up for this, but don’t you think you ought to tell Cody about that
phone call?”

“I’ll tell him.”

“What are you waiting for?”

“He’s got his hands full at the moment. They found another dead girl.” I told him the gory details I’d gotten from Cody. “He
just about lost it when he saw that note from the Citizen. He doesn’t need to hear about my phone stalker right now.”

“Aren’t
you
the gutsy one.”

“Hardly. At this point, I don’t even have the cojones to stay in my own house, even with a cop out front. I mean, the guy
clearly knows where I live.”

“What about Emma?”

There was a catch in his voice I couldn’t remember hearing before, at least when he was sober. “Jeepers, Mad, are you getting
all soft on her?”

“Shut the fuck up.”

“Sensitive….”

“Look, do you know where she is or don’t you?”

“I tried calling her at the clinic but she wasn’t up there.”

“Don’t you think you ought to warn her not to hang around your house by herself?”

“I left her a note.”

“Where the hell is Steve, anyway?”

“Haven’t seen him in days. He’s been kind of crazed since the whole mess up at Blue Heron. Plus I’m starting to think there
might be another birdman in the picture.”

“That was more than I needed to know.”

“Hey, I bet she’s playing darts someplace. After we’re done nosing around campus, what say we check a couple of the bars up
there?” He grunted. I took it as a yes. “Listen, do you really think it could be some engineer who’s been doing all this shit?”

“How do I know? You just asked me to find somebody who could clone a cell phone.”

“Well, Cody seems to like the idea that this guy’s some evil genius.”

“No offense, but I think he’s full of it. Right now, we’re hunting down a bunch of geeks in their dorm rooms. Best case scenario,
we find whoever sold the phone to your gentleman caller.”

“You think?”

“I deal with these gearheads on a regular basis. Most of
them are pretty brilliant, but they’re not what you’d call threatening. Wussy is more like it.”

“Yeah, but who knows if wussy equals harmless? Maybe they’re filled with nerdy rage.”

He pulled into the last space in a vast campus lot and shifted in his seat to look at me. “You know,” he said thoughtfully,
“that may be the single stupidest thing you’ve ever said.”

“Really?”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. Maybe I ought to write it down.”

I flipped through the campus directory, where Mad had highlighted the names he’d gotten from the department chair. There were
four grad students and seven undergrads, with addresses all across campus and its environs.

“Man, couldn’t he have narrowed it down a little?”

“He picked eleven people out of a department of four hundred.”

“What did you tell him, anyway?”

“That I was doing a story on companies who hire students to try to crack their security.”

“And he fell for it?”

“He was pretty drunk.”

“Yeah, and he’s gonna be pretty pissed when he finds out you rooked him.”

“Lucky for me he won’t remember it in the morning.”

We set off toward a particularly hideous sixties-era dorm, which (were its roof only painted orange) could easily be taken
for the HoJo’s motor lodge. The building housed two of our suspects, but those first two tries didn’t bode well for the rest
of the night; neither one was home. We moved on to another dorm fifty yards away but a hundred
years different in style, a classic brick-and-ivy job with heavy square-paned windows fit for a Victorian heroine. There,
our third target opened the door wearing pajamas with big blue teddy bears on them. When he found out Mad wanted to talk to
him about cell phone technology, he invited us in and fed us double-stuffed Oreos with chocolate milk.

“Better warn your friend Cody about that one,” Mad said as we hoofed down four flights to the first floor. “That boy is Public
Enemy Number One.”

“Hey, it was your source who gave us the name.”

“Maybe he was drunker than I thought.”

“And maybe we’re just wasting our time.”

“Since when are you such a quitter?”

“I’m not. I just don’t have a whole lot of confidence in your loopy friend back at Sammy’s.”

“Believe me, he’s one smart son of a bitch. He just happens to be a stinking drunk. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.” We got
to the next dorm. “Okay, who are we looking for here?”

I consulted the book. “Dong-Hyuk Kim.”

“You gotta be kidding me.”

“Says here his nickname’s Freddy.”

We climbed to the second floor and found Kim’s room. We knocked, and after a minute a very pretty blond girl answered the
door wearing a sheet. “Fuck,
you’re
not the pizza,” she said, and slammed it again.

Mad and I stared at the closed door. He raised his fist to knock again, then changed his mind and walked away. “I must be
losing my touch,” he said.

“How so?”

“First time a cute college chick ever accused me of not being a pizza.”

“Cheer up. There’s always Viagra.” He gave me a wounded look. “Where to next?”

“You tell me.”

I scanned the list.

“You want to get the hell away from the dorms, maybe try some apartments?”

“Can’t get any worse.”

We walked across campus to the adjacent student ghetto. Even on a Monday night, the place was hopping. Music blared out of
the bars, which made up just about every other storefront in a three-block radius of the university. The sidewalks were sticky
and the smell of sour beer wafted out of the doorways, constituting whatever is the opposite of aromatherapy.

“Christ, this place makes me feel old.”

“Come on, Bernier. Didn’t you ladies cut loose at Vassar?”

“No.”

Mad breathed in deeply, like he was savoring the fresh mountain air. I was in danger of puking. “You know, maybe I should
think about moving up here…”

“It would be the end of you.”

I dragged him away from the center of Collegetown toward what passes for the residential area—a strip of ramshackle buildings,
each with at least one disintegrating couch on the front porch. Two of the grad students we were looking for roomed together
in one of them. We found the apartment, only to be told by their neighbors that the two guys were back on campus working in
the nanofabrication lab. We were batting zero.

“Remind me why we’re doing this again?” Mad said as we passed another row of bars. “Because, you know, I could really use
a drink…”

“So could I. This is humiliating. How’s about we try a couple more and say fuck it?”

“For real?”

“We can always try again tomorrow.”

We went to the next address, which was only a half block away. It was the newest building in the neighborhood, opened just
the previous fall, and by student standards it was a luxury high-rise. It had six floors (the very limit of the local building
code), and every apartment had its own high-speed Internet connection and laundry to boot. The place was called the Hilltop
Arms, and the name was fairly accurate. It had the highest security—or more accurately, the
only
security—of any building in Collegetown. This meant that on weekdays, a so-called doorman sat at the front desk, actually
some kid doing his math homework. At night and on weekends, visitors had to be buzzed in by one of the residents. The whole
arrangement wouldn’t faze someone from the big city, but for Gabriel it was Fort Knox.

“Christ, Bernier,” Mad growled. “Why didn’t we come here first?”

“I didn’t recognize the address.”

“Didn’t you do a story on this place?”

“Yeah, back when it first opened.”

The Hilltop Arms had been the object of much mockery when it was being built. But the developer was laughing all the way to
bank, because all the apartments were rented within a month—even at more than twice the going rate. The place turned out to
be hugely appealing to
faraway parents who heard “New York” and thought “Harlem.” The vast majority of residents came from OPEC nations, and parked
their BMWs and Range Rovers in the underground garage.

Mad took in the arched glass entryway and brass-potted plants with disgust. “What a dump.”

“How do you figure?”

“Why would you want to live up here if you’re going to lock out all the local color?”

“You’d rather be in one of those places with the broken bottles out front?”

“Wouldn’t you?”

“How are we going to get in? Just buzz the guy?”

“Doesn’t seem too smart.”

“So what now?”

He winked at me and started pushing buttons at random. Eventually, someone answered and Mad leaned into the intercom. “Somebody
order a pizza?” They hung up. Mad tried a few more times, and finally someone buzzed us in. We took the elevator to the sixth
floor.