Distemper (40 page)

I’m not saying I’m any smarter than his other victims. But I’d been thinking about the case for weeks, and I had another girl
there to warn me. But I’m convinced—dead
certain—that the only reason I’m alive today is that I never said a single word.

He treats people like dogs. He treats dogs like people. He tortures people and rescues dogs. People are bad dogs. Real dogs
are good dogs. Or something. What the hell
?

It was a long shot, but it was the only chance I had. So I put my head down, raised my eyes in as pleading a look as I could
muster, and barked at him.

Yes, barked. As in woof-woof, ruff-ruff, yip-yip. I also panted, and gave him my goddamn paw. And I was so fucking scared,
I didn’t even have the good sense to feel stupid.

But it worked.

“You’re a
good
dog,” he said, and stuck his fingers through the cage to scratch me on the head. “Good dog gets a cookie.” He went over to
a jar on the counter, pulled out a gigantic Milk Bone, and stuck it through the chain link. I stared at it for a minute, then
took it out of his hand with my teeth and dropped it on the floor. This didn’t seem to piss him off too much (it was, after
all, extremely doglike), but it didn’t take long for me to realize that he was waiting for me to eat it.

When you’re a vegetarian, people ask you lots of stupid questions. Chief among them is this: “If you were stranded on a desert
island and the only thing you had was a case of Jimmy Dean sausage, would you eat it?” And the answer is: “Of course I’d eat
it, you numbskull. If I were in a plane crash in the Andes with a bunch of dead soccer players, I’d eat them too.”

I’d never actually had an opportunity to test this theory. But there I was in a cage, staring at cookie made out
of dehydrated pig snouts and God only knows what else. I almost made the (possibly fatal) mistake of picking it up with my
hands. But I remembered in time and picked it up with my teeth. Then I gagged that sucker down with all deliberate speed.

The biscuit was crunchy, gross-tasting, and very, very dry. It made me incredibly thirsty, and when Gravink shoved a bowl
of water through the slot at the bottom of the cage I didn’t have to pretend to lap it up.

This seemed to satisfy him. He scratched me behind the ears again, told me to be good while he was gone, and walked out. I
heard the door lock behind him. Then I gave him the finger.

Okay, think, Bernier. The guy is insane. It’s only a matter of time before he notices you don’t actually have a tail. You
have to get out of here, and you have to take Justice with you
.

I tried the cage, which was depressingly solid. I checked all the hinges, and thought that maybe I could unscrew them if I
had enough time. But when I reached for my trusty Spyderco penknife, I realized it was on my key chain in my purse, which
Gravink had not been kind enough to incarcerate with me. I tried to figure out if I had anything useful, and the only thing
I could come up with was the zipper on my new Gap warm-up jacket. I was too scared to take the jacket off, in case Gravink
walked in and caught me using an opposable thumb. So I stretched the zipper tab to the corner of the cage, stuck it into the
screw head, and started turning. At first it wouldn’t budge. But then it gave, and after a whole lot of sweating and chipped
fingernails I got the first screw out. One down, seven to go.

I was only on the second one when I heard a key in the door, and in walked Gravink. He was holding a leash in one hand and
a collar in the other, and what he said gave me equal parts terror and hope: “Do you want to go out and play?”

He opened the cage door, and for a second I considered making a break for it. But then I realized that at least one of the
other girls must have tried to get away, and failed. And if I didn’t outrun him, there was no way I could fight him off. He
was around six feet tall with wide shoulders, big arms, and a thickish neck. Given his proportions, it was odd how much he
looked like his petite sister. He had a surprisingly delicate nose on that big spud of a head, and his cupid’s-bow mouth might
have been lifted straight from the police sketch of Amy Sue.

Truth is, he didn’t look much like a killer to me. Just goes to show you what I know.

He put the collar on me. For a second I was terrified that this was it—that I’d just let him put the instrument of my demise
around my neck without even fighting back—but he didn’t seem interested in killing me at the moment. He even put two fingers
under the collar to make sure it wasn’t too tight, then snapped the leash on and pulled it gently. I followed him across the
floor on all fours, which wasn’t too bad; the linoleum was smooth, and for whatever reason he hadn’t decided to strip me.
Yet.

We went through another room that had sofas and chairs and orange wall-to-wall carpet, but from my floor-level vantage point
it was impossible to get my bearings. I had no idea where the front door was, and how long it might take to get to it. The
next thing I knew he was
opening a different door, and I was being blinded by sunlight. I had to stop myself from covering my eyes—way too human—and
a second later he’d unsnapped my leash, pushed me outside, and closed the door behind me. When my eyes finally adjusted to
the brightness and I got a chance to look around, what I saw can only be described as a dog utopia.

The yard was huge, a field of grass and wildflowers surrounded by an eight-foot privacy fence. Off to one side, by the house,
was a water trough fed by a garden hose. Where I was crouched the ground was hard-packed dirt, an infield that held the kind
of dog entertainment devices you see in agility trials. There were sawhorses to jump over and tunnels to go through, platforms
of different levels for lounging and a kiddie pool to splash in. All in all, it was the canine equivalent of Romper Room.

My first instinct was to stand up and run for it, but on second thought it seemed like a bad idea. I couldn’t see any break
in the fence where a gate might be—it would be locked anyway—and I was pretty sure that wherever Gravink was, he was watching
me. So I stayed down on all fours, and before too long some of the dogs who’d been off playing in the high grass came over
to check me out. Most of them were wary, but one came running right up to me and licked my face.

Nanki-Poo
.

The name was out of my mouth before I could stop myself, and I hoped to hell our host hadn’t heard me. The dog seemed incredibly
happy to see me, and I had a sinking feeling that he thought it meant C.A. would be coming to get him any minute. He did a
happy little dog
dance. And when he turned his tail to me, I saw that he’d been neutered.

Oh, my God
.

I guess that’s when I started to figure it out, crouched there in the dirt on all fours. And what I saw next did nothing to
shake my suspicion that I’d stumbled onto what was driving Bobby Ray Gravink’s mania. It was an elderly boxer-mix who wandered
over to sniff me. I whispered the name
Harley
, and he started barking and wagging his tail. But here’s the really creepy thing:
he could see
. Someone had performed cataract surgery on Lynn Smith’s dog. And I had a strong suspicion just who that someone was—the same
person who mutilated his owner in some weirdly symmetrical act of revenge.

I stayed out there for a while, looking around and trying to get the lay of the land. Then I realized with a start that Justice
was still in there with him, and God only knew what he was doing to her. So I crawled back to the house and did the most doglike
thing I could think of. I scratched at the door.

He opened it immediately, looking down at me and the rest of the pack with what I could swear was genuine adoration.

This was fucking
nuts
.

“Do you want to come in?” I looked up at him and panted some more. I hoped this meant yes. “Don’t you want to sit outside
with Dr. Daddy?”

If you really want to know, the truth is I’d like to rip Dr. Daddy’s throat open and get the hell out of here
.

I kept this fact to myself and did some more looking and panting. Finally, he went outside and sat on a big wooden bench.
The other dogs followed him, so I did too.
We all settled on the ground around him. It looked like goddamn story time at doggie day camp. Humiliating.

“What
gooooood
dogs you are.” He spoke in that awful singsong voice people use on animals and little babies. I promised myself then and
there I’d never use that tone again—assuming, of course, that I got out of this alive. “You know, we’ll have to go far away
soon,” he was saying. “The bad people are looking for me. But I promise, I’ll take you all with me.”

Oh, goodie
.

“The bad people don’t understand,” he went on. “They think Dr. Daddy does
mean
things. They don’t care what happens to you. All they care about is themselves. They were going to let you suffer and suffer…”
He was starting to get teary, as though the idea of their (our?) suffering was just too much for him to bear. I thought for
the fiftieth time how much I’d like to kill him. But I had to admit that it wasn’t quite as much as it would have been if
he’d been murdering the women
and
the dogs.

“Amy Sue didn’t understand,” he was saying. “She didn’t care when Mom and Dad killed you…” I wondered if he was talking about
the family dog that had been euthanized, and decided it was best not to ask. “She didn’t try to stop them. She didn’t understand
what I had to do. She didn’t want to help. All she wanted was to get away. She was as bad as they were. She was a killer just
like they were. She had to be punished. It was for her own good. She was a
very bad dog
.”

He’d worked himself into quite a lather by now. I was worried his head was going to explode, then decided it was fine with
me if it did. But he calmed down eventually, and started throwing a tennis ball around the backyard.
It was retrieved by a frisky young Doberman I assumed to be Cocoa. Its ears were still cropped, but there probably wasn’t
much Gravink could have done about that. I stared at those two perky little points of flesh, and realized they had probably
cost Patricia Marx her life.

After Cocoa came back with the ball for the umpteenth time, Gravink told him “no more,” and started back into the house. I
followed him, because I didn’t want to leave him alone with Justice, but he seemed to take it as a compliment. “You want to
come inside with Dr. Daddy?” he said, and I tried to look all loyal and happy. I never realized being a dog was so much work.

We went indoors, and Nanki-Poo followed as though he didn’t want to let me out of his sight. We passed through what I guessed
was the living room, and since I wasn’t on the leash this time I could go more slowly and look around. The room was cheaply
furnished, and there was grime on the windows that made everything look even dingier. I tried to remember what the house had
looked like from the outside, and all I could think was that it had been pretty ramshackle. But that hadn’t warned me off
at all; there are PhDs around Gabriel who spend the best years of their lives in an Airstream jacked up on cinder blocks.

Gravink held open the door to his ersatz laboratory, and Nanki-Poo and I went in. He told us both to sit, then went to the
cabinet and pulled out a drug vial. He reached into a drawer and pulled out a hypodermic and proceeded to fill it with blue
liquid, measuring the dose carefully. When he was finished he put the vial back on the counter, and it was close enough so
I could read the label.

It was pentobarbital. Nasty nickname: “Blue Juice.”

If I hadn’t lived with three veterinarians, I might have
been in blissful ignorance about just what that was. But as it was, I knew that although pentobarbital is sometimes used as
an anesthetic, when it’s colored blue that means the concentration is only meant for one thing. Euthanasia.

He approached Justice’s cage with the needle and said that nasty mantra of his one more time.
Bad dogs have to be punished
. I started looking around frantically for something to whack him with, something that could knock him out before he had the
chance to turn the needle on me.

Then everything happened at once. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Nanki-Poo’s ears prick up, and he gave one sharp bark.
Then the door to the lab was kicked open, and through it came Detective Brian Cody, scanning the room with his gun in classic
cop fashion.

It would probably have worked out fine if only I hadn’t been there. But seeing me on the floor was the last thing he must
have expected. It took him by surprise, and he hesitated just for a second, so he didn’t see Gravink in the corner behind
him until it was too late. His gun dropped a few inches, and it gave Gravink the chance to grab him. He got Cody in a half
nelson with his left arm, then reached around with his right and jammed the needle into his heart.

Cody stood there for what I will call one of the longest and worst moments of my life. Then his knees started to buckle, and
his eyes fluttered shut. And as he toppled to the floor I’m pretty sure the last thing he saw was me.

What I did next owed more to self-preservation and excessive viewing of cop shows than to any sort of bravery. When Cody fell
his gun fell with him. It slid halfway
across the floor and I grabbed it, faster than I would have thought possible. I have a fleeting memory of hoping the safety
was off, and realizing I had no idea where to find it if it wasn’t. Then I stood up, aimed it at the middle of Bobby Ray Gravink’s
chest, and fired.

It was the first and only time I’ve held a gun in my life. But it seemed to have the desired effect. Gravink was rushing toward
me, and then he wasn’t. He stared down at the hole in his chest and back at me. The look on his face said he couldn’t have
been more surprised if an actual dog had stood up on its hind legs and cold-cocked him. He took another step forward, and
I shot him again.

I’ve always had very little patience for people in movies who think they’ve put the bad guy down, then turn their backs and
get themselves killed. It always seemed to me the height of stupidity and bad taste. If you’ve got the gun in your hand, you
use it. So even as Bobby Ray Gravink lay there bleeding on the ground, I stood over him and emptied the rest of the bullets
into his midsection. And it was something of a disappointment to me that when I raised it to his head for the coup de grace,
all it did was go
click
.