Distemper (29 page)

“You can’t imagine.”

“Yes, I can.” She stared at me with big open eyes, and I decided to tell her the whole truth. “The same person who killed
Patsy… He killed one of my roommates too. Her name was C.A.”

“Oh, God. That’s such a weird coincidence, that we should run into each other in the stupid Gap.” There was a chair just outside
the hall of dressing rooms, and she sank into it as though it were all too much to think about standing up. “But maybe it
isn’t a coincidence, is it? That you’re here, I mean.”

The girl was no dummy. She was smart, and she was friendly, and I couldn’t think of a reason to dodge her. “No. We came up
here hoping to talk to some of Patsy’s friends.”

Her delicate brow furrowed in confusion. “And go shopping?”

“Always.”

She smiled a little. “Yeah, me too. Shopping makes me feel good.”

“What’s your name?”

“Kim.”’

“Kim Williams?” She nodded. “I’m the one who talked to you on the phone. My name’s Alex Bernier.”

She chewed on my name for a minute. “I read about you in the paper. You found Patsy’s body, didn’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“That must have been pretty awful too.”

I got a flash of a girl lying dead in the woods, naked, angry red marks across her neck. The memory was worse now that I knew
her name. “It was the most horrible thing I ever saw.”
Until I saw C.A. with her guts cut open
, I added to myself, and decided to spare her.

“Alex,” she said, leaning over in the chair and staring down at her pink high-tops, “can you tell me what’s going on?”

“I wish I could, but I just don’t know.”

“All these girls are dying, and the police don’t even seem to have a clue.”

“They thought they had something to go on, but it turned out to be the wrong guy. Now I think they’re just trying to… regroup,
I guess.”

“How?”

“I’m not sure. I heard they might have another lead, though. That’s kind of why we wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“Well, this might sound kind of random, but do you think there’s any way Patsy might have had a dog?”

“Jeeze, you’re like the third person who’s asked me that”

“Oh, yeah?”

“First the cops asked about it, and I told them about how Patsy wanted a dog, how she’d even gotten permission from our landlady.
She was just starting to save up for the pet deposit. Two hundred bucks.”

“And somebody else asked about it too?”

“Some reporter from the
New York Times
came in yesterday asking all these questions.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Nothing. He was a total jerk. Like, when he first walked in and I asked if I could help him, he said he wouldn’t shop at
a mall if his life depended on it.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Nope. And you should have seen how he was dressed, like some college professor.
Ugh
.”

She had to be talking about Gordon, but it hardly sounded like him. I mean, Gordon hates malls with a passion, but I couldn’t
believe he’d blow an interview like that. Maybe the desperation was making him sloppy. Odd.

“Kim, do you know what kind of dog Patsy wanted to get?”

“One of those Dobermans. She promised me it wouldn’t be mean or anything, though. I’m not real great with dogs, but I thought
a puppy would be okay—maybe that way I could get to know it before it got all big and scary.”

“Why did she want a Doberman? For protection?”

“No, I don’t think she really cared what kind she got, she just wanted a dog. The Doberman was supposed to be a surprise for
her boyfriend. He’s crazy for them.”

“I don’t get it. If it was for him, why was she okaying it with your landlady?”

“Oh. It’s ‘cause he lives in the dorms at S.U., and there’s no pets. They were talking about maybe moving in together next
year, though.”

“Where was she going to find it? A shelter?”

“Oh, no, I think she was going to buy it from a breeder somewhere.”

“Do you know which one?”

“What difference does it make?”

“Probably none. I was just wondering.”

“Well, I don’t know. I wasn’t real interested. Patsy asked me if I wanted to go help her pick out a puppy sometime but I didn’t
think I could tell them apart.”

You poor ignorant twit
. I was on the verge of informing her that people who don’t like dogs have no right to
take up oxygen when Mad finally emerged from the dressing room.

“What do you think, Bernier? Do these make me look like I have an ass?”

“Mad, you know damn well you have the flattest butt known to man. You could cook pancakes on it.”

Kim watched as he peered at himself in the three-way mirror at the end of the hall. “Wow, you’re right,” she said. “I’ve never
seen those pants hang that way before. It looks kinda weird.”

“It’s his only physical flaw. Drives him insane.”

“I’ll tell him to try the ones with the pleats.”

She consulted with Mad over the dressing-room door, and a minute later he came out wearing a new pair that, remarkably enough,
made it seem like he had something happening in the posterior region.

“They look pretty good, huh?” he said as he surveyed his backside from various angles.

“And guys think
we’re
vain,” I said to Kim. “Go figure.”

“What color is this?” Mad called from down the hall.

“Honey mustard,” she said.

“What else do they come in?”

“Chocolate, olive, and, um… stone.”

“Does this place take credit cards?”

Kim stared at Mad like he’d just emerged from his flying saucer. “Uh, of course. All the majors.”

“Tasty,” he said. “I’ll take one in every color.”

W
E HAULED OUR PURCHASES OVER TO THE MALL COFFEE
shop, the kind of place where they sell beans scented like raspberries and caramel side by side with a dizzying variety of
mugs depicting Impressionist paintings. We snagged a white metallic table outside the entrance, and I left Mad there while
I went in to find some coffee he wouldn’t throw back in my face. I settled on something Sumatran, which the clerk swore was
the strongest they had, plus a copy of the Syracuse newspaper and a hazelnut biscotti big enough to choke a pig.

When I got back, Mad was perusing his loot with a beatific expression. “Do you realize that I won’t have to buy another pair
of pants again for…” He did some calculations in his head. “For the rest of my life?”

“Yeah, as long as you’re still a thirty-four waist.” He shot me a dirty look. “What am I thinking? You’ll be buried in them.”

“What you got there?”

“Hazelnut cookie. Twice-baked and crunchy-licious.”

“Junk food.”

“Hazelnuts have protein.”

“Right,” he said, and broke off half. Then, with no attempt at concealment, he produced his flask and topped off his coffee.

“What the hell is that?”

“Whiskey. Want some?”

“No, I’m good.”

“What do you want with the Syracuse rag, anyway?”

“Classifieds.”

“What for?”

“A hunch.”

I found the section and looked for the heading
PETS
(
FOR SALE
). What I found was nauseating to a mutt-lover like myself: a long column of ads for purebred dogs, with prices ranging from
two hundred dollars to over a thousand. There were five ads hawking AKC registered Doberman pinschers, and I circled them.

“Four hundred dollars for a
dog
?” Mad said when I handed him the page. “Is that nuts or what?”

“It’s canine eugenics. Don’t get me started. Some people live for it, though.”

“Why do we care?”

“Patricia Marx wanted to buy a Doberman.”

“But I thought she never got it.”

“That’s what everybody says. I just want to do a little checking.”

“Why?”

“On the off chance we may come up with a decent story for tomorrow.”

“About what? ‘Third girl had a dog too’? Isn’t that kind of lame?”

“Think about it, Mad. It might be the key to everything. I mean, two women nabbed while they’re walking their dogs could be
a coincidence. Three is, well… it’s a pathology. And it’s a hell of a better story than ‘Cops still stumped,’ which is our
other option.”

“Don’t you think Band tried this already?”

“Maybe. He seems a little whacked, though, kind of scrambling around. He might not’ve thought of it.”

“Okay, but you have to promise that if we do scoop the little bastard, I’m the one who gets to rub his nose in it.”

“The pleasure’s all yours.”

We moved over to a circular bank of pay phones and divided up the list. I’d called two of the breeders with no luck when I
heard Mad give a war whoop from his side of the kiosk. He emerged a minute later, holding up a napkin covered in his scrawl.

“Jackpot,” he said.

“What’d you find out?”

“I just talked to a guy in Cortland. He said he and his wife sold Patricia Marx a male Doberman puppy on…” He looked at his
notes. “The date works out to less than a week before she died.”

I stared at him. “That was way too easy.”

“Easy? Are you kidding me? Alex, we just got our first break on this story in
three months
.”

“Good point. So let’s go talk to them.”

“They’re on their way out. Said we could drop by at three. So since it only takes half an hour to get there, that gives us”—he
checked his watch—“two hours to kill.”

“We should probably call Bill and tell him what we’re up to. What do you want to do after that?”

“I was wondering,” he said, “do you think they sell shirts here too?”

We got back to Gabriel around five, after an hour-long stop at a Cortland farmhouse with a row of chain-link kennels out back
and a big wooden Doberman out front. There, we’d learned that in the waning days of her life, Patricia Marx had bought a twelve-week-old
puppy she’d named Cocoa. The dog had been the runt of his litter, too small and with too many brown markings to ever be shown,
and the breeders had despaired over unloading him. They’d offered him for the bargain price of a hundred dollars, and Patricia
had jumped at it—particularly when they said they’d keep him until she could square things with her landlady.

So, we’d asked them, what had become of the dog? The last time the breeders saw him was when Marx had picked him up to take
him to the vet. When she didn’t bring him back, they figured she’d just taken him home to Syracuse. And when she’d died, they’d
clucked at the tragedy of it all and never even thought to contact the cops.

“Explain this to me again,” Bill was saying. “Why did the mutt have to go to the vet?” With everybody crowded into his office
trying to hear—O’Shaunessey, Marshall, Wendell, Melissa, Lillian, et al—it was turning into an impromptu staff meeting.

“The good news is he was going for a checkup,” I said. “The bad news is he was also getting cropped.”

“Cropped?”

“Yeah, it’s a goddamn purebred vanity thing. They lop off the poor dog’s tail a couple of days after it’s born.
Then, when it’s about three months old, they box his ears so they stand up. Some people think it’s cute, some think it’s downright
inhumane. It’s actually illegal in some places.”

“Like New York?”

“Like Australia.”

“Okay, so where did the dog go for this ear-chopping?”

“Well, the girl didn’t have a whole lot of money, so the breeder sent her to the cheapest place around.”

“Which is?”

“She took him,” Mad said, with a pause for dramatic effect, “to the Benson veterinary clinic.” It was something that finally
tied Patricia Marx to Gabriel, and Mad seemed gratified by the gasp he got from the assembled masses.

Bill scratched his head with a chopstick. “If this cropping is so controversial, how come they do it over there?”

“It’s not
so
controversial,” I said. “I mean, not like cloning body parts or anything. Most people don’t give a damn. You don’t actually
do the dog any serious harm. It’s just unnecessary surgery, that’s all. Besides, Benson is a teaching hospital. The cropping
is pretty much an accepted thing, so I guess they have to train the vet students to do it. The ones who don’t want to can
probably opt out.”

“So did the dog have the surgery or didn’t it?”

“We don’t know. I have a call in to a friend of mine at the clinic. Hopefully we can find out what happened.”

“Your deadline’s in less than five hours.”

“You don’t say.”

“Don’t be a smart-ass. Just get me the story.”

“Do we have enough to run with as is?”

He grunted. “Be nice to get more. But go write up what you’ve got and let me take a look.”

“Under whose byline?” The onlookers, who could smell an argument coming, took this as their cue to exit.

Bill leaned back in his chair and put his feet on a pile of press releases he keeps at the perfect height for maximum comfort.
“Madison’s. Whaddaya think?”

“Isn’t this getting a bit ridiculous?”

“Works for me,” Mad interjected.

“Yeah, no shit,” I said. “But isn’t it a little crazy to have me running around interviewing people, and then when the sources
read the story there’s somebody’s name on top they’ve never even met?”