Distemper

by Beth Saulnier

Genres: Mystery

Synopsis

A serial killer declares hunting season in an upstate New York university town. The killer wants to keep the young reporter, Alex Bernier, well-informed, both as a journalist and as a potential victim. After a career-making murder case that proved personal bad news, sharp-witted journalist Alex Bernier swears she's going to report stories, not make them. Then a serial killer declares hunting season in her eccentric upstate New York university town and is only too happy to keep Alex, the reporter covering the case, personally in his twisted loop. To stop him, Alex must face off against an attractive police detective, a ruthless New York Times reporter, and a tech-happy student voyeur. But as she races through a maze of bewildering leads, she doesn't know her rabidly clever subject is out to kill her story -- permanently.

Release date: February 28, 2002

Publisher: Grand Central Publishing

Print pages: 403

Sample

THEY FOUND THE FIRST BODY IN APRIL, WHICH IS WHEN things tend to turn up around here. The sun came out for the first time in six months, the top crust started to melt, and
some poor bastard cross-country skiing in his shirt-sleeves saw her foot sticking out of the snow. He’d practically skied right
over her, he told the newspaper later, and that seemed to upset him most of all—the thought that if he’d looked away for a
second, he might have run her down, and desecrated her more than she’d been already.


But he didn’t. He caught sight of her two yards in front of him, and he said that he never thought it was anything other than
a corpse. He didn’t think it was a doll, or an animal—whatever it is people usually say. He was just skiing along, minding
his own business and thinking it was a great day to be alive, and the next thing he knew he had to make himself fall over
sideways to avoid running over a dead girl.


The man was a scientist, an associate professor of
chemistry with a cool head and a woolly beard, and he had the presence of mind not to touch anything. He just picked himself
up out of the snow, hustled back to his Volvo, and called the cops on his cell phone. He waited for them, because he knew
he’d have to show them where the body was, and by the time the police got through interviewing him six hours later he was
wishing to holy hell he’d gone rock climbing instead.


But for that first few minutes, as he was watching the police stretch yellow tape for fifty feet in each direction, he felt
like he ought to stay, as though he owed her that much. He’d found her, and finders were keepers, and although his wet socks
were telling him to get into the squad car, something else made him stand there in the trampled slush until he saw her face.


He never did see it, in the end. First the cops had to wait for the ambulance, then the detectives, then the medical examiner.
At some point a sergeant noticed him standing around and told him he’d better go downtown and make a statement. By the time
the skewing sunlight hit the body, the chemistry professor was down at the police station, and the cops were impounding his
skis.


It was just as well, he’d say whenever someone asked, because he wouldn’t have wanted to see her after all. There was a reason
he hadn’t gone to medical school, had gone into academia instead, and it had a lot to do with not having to look at women
left under the snow for three months, naked and nearly frozen solid. It had been a bad winter, nasty even for upstate New
York, and judging from how much snow was under her and how much was on top they figured she’d been there at least since February.
They found her clothes folded nearby: blue jeans
lined with polar fleece, dark green turtleneck, wool sweater with pewter buttons, homemade mittens, red rag socks, calf-high
work boots, panties, underwire bra sized 32-B. It was all there, nothing missing, nothing even torn.


The first thing they noticed about the body itself was that the knees were scraped and bloody, as though she’d been praying
on cement. Then they saw that the palms of her hands were the same, bruised and raw, and they wondered if maybe she’d tried
to crawl for her life. There was no purse, no jewelry, no identification at all. She was a girl in her late teens or early
twenties, with straight teeth and good skin. She was apparently healthy, until someone intervened. She was naked, and she
was dead, and she was found outside a town where there are fifteen thousand others just like her.


She didn’t belong here, though, at least not officially. Benson University likes to keep track of its undergraduates, since
having them drop dead is bad for business, and nobody anywhere near her description had gone missing. A sophomore had wigged
out in the middle of a chemical engineering exam—just started screaming and bolted—but he was male, and anyway they found
him living in a yurt outside Buffalo a couple of weeks before the girl’s body turned up. There was a junior whose sorority
sisters called the police when she didn’t come back after winter break—but she was black, and the dead girl was white. No
one from the town had been reported missing. So the conventional wisdom around here (or at least the gossip) was that she
must have come from somewhere else, willingly or otherwise.


It’s hard to describe what happens to a place when a dead girl is found. You know somebody had to put her
there, and to do it that somebody must have been among us, if only briefly, and for that space of time no one was safe. You
start to wonder if maybe you had passed this person in the hardware store while he was buying duct tape; if you were behind
his Chevy while she was tied up in the trunk. You go to the supermarket and the contents of every man’s shopping cart feels
like physical evidence. (Is that Diet Pepsi for him or his prisoner? Is buying eight dozen Ring-Dings legal proof of insanity
in New York State?)


If you’re a woman, you realize that but for a bit of blind luck it could have been you. It could have been one of your friends,
or your mother, or the lady who does your manicure, or the girl in your class you can’t stand but wouldn’t want that to happen
to; you realize you really wouldn’t wish it on your worst enemy. You wonder what you would’ve done if it had been you, whether you would have been able to use
your brains or your muscles or some other edge to save yourself, and in the end you figure that you would, since anything
else is unthinkable. You fantasize about interceding when the dead girl was dying, imagine yourself saving her and killing
him, and going on the TV news to say you’re no hero, you’re just glad you got there in time. You think about buying a gun.


When they found that first body up on Connecticut Hill, the town didn’t actually panic, not yet. People tend to believe just
what they want to, and we wanted to believe it was a one-shot deal. Back then it was easy to think that maybe the girl had
a fight with her boyfriend that turned ugly, and he’d panicked and left her body in the middle of nowhere. Or maybe she’d
been responsible for her own death—had crossed the wrong person, or
threatened to tell some guy’s wife that they were having an affair, and he killed her to shut her up.


That’s what we said when we talked about it, which was just about constantly. No one really bought the stories, though; they
were all too easy, and not nearly horrible enough to fit the evidence. The police didn’t say a whole lot, but the rumors started
soon enough, and within a few days everyone in town knew what clothes she’d been wearing, and how they’d been folded neatly
beside her, and how her hands and knees were all scraped up, and that there were strange marks on her neck shaped like diamonds.
It was hard to think that could have been done to her by a boyfriend, or anyone who’d ever cared about her at all.


If we’d been in a different sort of place, one that didn’t have social consciousness hemorrhaging from every crack in the
pavement, everyone might have been satisfied with gossip and low-grade fear. But folks around here believe in action, because
it’s the only thing that keeps us warm in the winter, and sure enough someone up on campus organized a meeting. As is the
tradition here, they advertised it by chalking RALLY FOR WOMEN’S LIVES on various spots on the sidewalk, and before you could blink someone else went around and turned all the Es in WOMEN into Ys.


“Do you think they’ll ever catch him?” my roommate Emma asked in her Masterpiece Theatre accent. “Or will it remain un crime insoluble?”


We were stretched out in the living room of our house on the outskirts of downtown, a Victorian of the dubious structural
quality that landlords are willing to rent to three veterinary students, one ornithologist, and an underpaid
reporter. There were twelve of us altogether, if you count the three dogs and four cats. Marci is from San Diego and all of
four-foot-eleven in her Keds; C.A. is an army brat who has, on more than one occasion, made good on her threat to bench-press
Marci. They’re both third-year vet students and the workload means they’re hardly ever home. Emma, who comes from London and
never lets anyone forget it, did vet school in the U.K. and is here for a fellowship in radiology. Steve, our token guy, is
an ornithologist who studies night migration. I’m still not clear on what this is, but it seems to involve lots of time in
the woods, freezing his butt off and wearing headphones.


I’d only lived with them since January, when their fifth roommate took off for a research job down South. I’d been looking
for a place since my housemate Dirk and his boyfriend Helmut had their commitment ceremony and moved in together. I know they
felt guilty about kicking me out, but it was really Dirk’s place, and besides it’s bad karma to get in the way of true love.
(I even let him have custody of our cats.) They found me my new spot through Steve, who’s Helmut’s ex, so it’s all very symmetrical.
I didn’t even have to carry a box. I just threw my dog Shakespeare in the car, and three hunky guys moved all my stuff. Life
could be worse.


“Of course they’ll catch him,” C.A. said. “What else have the cops got to do all day? They’ll solve it, they’ll convict him,
and ten years from now after he’s been living like Bill Gates on the taxpayers’ dime, they’ll finally get around to frying
the son of a bitch.”


“Do you kiss your mother with that mouth?” Marci said. “And you know they don’t fry them anymore. They
give them the needle, like a schnauzer. It’s veterinary science’s contribution to the justice system.”


“You Yanks do cherish your capital punishment,” Emma said from my BarcaLounger, where she was letting her dog Tipsy lick gin
and tonic off her fingers. He’s a standard poodle she got from the animal shelter when she moved here, and named him in honor
of her lush of an ex-husband.


“You know, Ems, I seem to recall that at the end of all those Agatha Christie mysteries, they took the killer out and hanged
him by the neck ‘til he was dead, so there’s no need to go all civilized,” Steve said.


Emma tossed back the rest of her drink. The dog looked depressed.

“So has anybody heard anything else about the murder?” C.A. asked, sounding like she was enjoying it more than decency allowed.
“How about you, Alex? You read the newspaper. Come on, you are the newspaper. What’s the scoop?”


“Nothing new,” I said. “Just a rehash. City editor’s going nuts. They still haven’t ID’ed her. They’re checking missing persons
for the whole Northeast. Ontario too.”


“I can’t believe they don’t even know who she is,” C.A. said. “Wouldn’t you think they’d at least have figured out that much
by now? She was out there for months. Someone must have missed her.”


“You’d think,” I said. “But maybe she wasn’t from anywhere around here. The cops said they have to keep widening their investigation,
which means exactly nothing.”


Emma plucked the newspaper from the coffee table.
“She was rather pretty too. Pity.” After the body was found, a police artist did a color sketch of the girl. She stared out
from beneath the Gabriel Monitor’s masthead like something not quite dead but not really alive either, as though whoever drew her didn’t dare add any sort of
expression that might have confused someone who could identify her. She had long, straight brown hair with bangs just above
her eyebrows, a smallish mouth over a pointy jaw, indistinct cheekbones, very large brown eyes. None of the features were
particularly remarkable, but they added up to a kind of sweetness. The description said she was five feet tall and 105 pounds.
When she was alive, people probably called her “perky.”


“She remind you guys of anybody?” C.A. asked.

“You think you know her?” I asked.

“Damn straight.”

“For real?” I was halfway out of my chair to call my editor. If we broke the ID of the girl, Bill would give me his firstborn.

“Look at those eyes. The totally vacant expression. Dye the hair blond, add a couple of pounds, age her a little, and who’ve
you got?” C.A. jumped off the couch with her brassy brown curls waving around like garter snakes and snatched the paper from
Emma. We stared back at her. “Hello. Hell-o, guys. Are you guys out to lunch or what? Take a look at her. It’s our very own girlie girl. It’s Marci all over again.”


Marci opened her mouth, let it stay like that for a minute, then shut it again.

“Christ, C.,” Steve said. “One of these days you’re gonna make me forget I’m a fuckin’ gentleman.”

“What? What’d I say?”


“Really, Cathy Ann,” Emma said. “That was quite uncalled for. Particularly the crack about the weight.”


“But just look at the…”

“Quit it,” Steve said. “I’m serious. She’s about to bawl.”

“OK, kids,” I said. “Can we calm down? She didn’t mean it. She’s just being a smart-ass. Come on, let’s have another drink
and…”


“She’s right.” The four of us stopped and stared at Marci, who was nose to nose with the newspaper.

“Who’s right?” Steve said. “Not C.A. C.A.’s never right. Trust me on this. I’ve done studies.”


Marci shook her head hard. “No, she’s right. Look at the drawing. Look at it…”


“Nonsense,” Emma said, taking back the paper. “It doesn’t look a thing like… Oh, dear.”

“Well, so what?” I said, plopping down on the couch next to Marci. “So you look like her. So what? I mean, clearly it’s creepy
and all…”


“Don’t you get it?” Marci said with a little croaking sound. “These people, they have types. What if whoever killed her is
still around here? What if he likes girls who look like… like us?”


“Whoever did it is long gone by now,” I said. “And besides, maybe that drawing doesn’t really look like her. It could be a
bad likeness, right?”


“You know, maybe you’re…” Marci started just as the phone rang and sent us hunting for the cordless. Emma found it first.

“Ahoy-hoy,” she said, and listened for a minute. “I beg your pardon? Oh, no. Certainly not… Yes, I see. But I assure you…
But really, there’s no need. She’s very
much safe and sound. She’s right here in this room, so you see… Really, sir, there’s no need to take that sort of tone… Oh,
very well.” She put her thin white hand over the receiver. “Marci, it’s, um, it’s for you.”


“Who is it?”

“It’s, well, it’s… the police.”

She shot up off the couch but didn’t take a step forward. “What do they want?”

“Hmm… How to put this? Well, darling, the fact is they want to make sure you’re alive.”

“Oh, my.”

“Just as you say. Apparently, they have received eight phone calls in the past three hours identifying you as the body in
the woods based on that dreadful sketch. I told them you still have a pulse, but they remain unconvinced. So you tell them.”
She crossed the room and delivered the phone.


“Uh, hello? Yes, this is Marci Simmons. Detective who… ?” She walked off to the kitchen with her finger in one ear and the
phone in the other.


“So what did I tell you?” C.A. said. “If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’.”

“Do you think there’s any way she might be right?” Steve asked. “Do you think there’s some guy out there who likes…”

“Look,” I said. “If I were Marci, I’d be creeped out too, and so would anybody else. But I’m sure the truth is a hell of a
lot less interesting.”


“Don’t you wonder what she went through?” C.A. said, apropos of nothing. “I mean, don’t you think about it? What exactly happened
to her?”


“I try not to,” Emma said.


“Well I’ve been thinking about it a lot, wondering how he grabbed her or whatever, you know.”


“How very morbid.”

“No, I know what she means,” I said. “I’ve been thinking about it too—trying to decide whether she did something stupid, drove
around with her car doors unlocked maybe.”


“Or hitchhiked,” C.A. said. “Or let the wrong guy into her apartment to read the meter.”

“Or parked next to a van,” I said.

“Good God,” Emma said. “Do they teach this sort of thing in high school?”

“Try sixth grade,” C.A. said.

“Dreadful country.”

“So you’ve remarked,” I said as Marci came back in. “What’d the cops say?”

“Half my first-year anatomy class called to ID me. A couple of people from tap class too. Which is pretty stupid since they
know I was alive and well as of last Sunday.”


“Are you okay?”

“No.” She sat back down on the couch and one of her three cats jumped heavily from the arm onto her lap. Marci didn’t even
notice, which is quite an accomplishment since Frank—a black-and-white tuxedo cat named after Sinatra—is fifteen pounds if
he’s an ounce.


“Come on, what did the cops say?” Steve prodded.

“That there’s nothing to worry about.”

“So there you go.”

“They said there was no reason to believe it wasn’t… what did they call it? ‘An isolated incident.’ And her looking like me
was just a coincidence, and I’m not in
any danger, and anyway I wasn’t the only girl on campus who got misidentified.”


“That should make you feel better,” I said.

“Yeah, but it doesn’t. I guess I… I don’t know. Sympathize with her more.”

“Perfectly natural. You’d be crazy if you didn’t. But you know what? Pretty soon they’re going to catch the guy and send him
someplace where he’s dating guys named Spike. You’ll see. It’ll all be over in a couple of days.”


I was trying—and let’s face it, failing—to sound tough. But the truth was that the whole situation got to me, like it got
to all of us. I’d seen death before, up close and personal, but it didn’t make it any less frightening. The dead girl in the
snow was about our age, could have fit right there in our living room. The thought of her made us feel both stronger and more
fragile. More than anything, she made us think about how lucky we were just not to be her.


We stayed up absurdly late that night talking about it, maybe a little bit scared to go to sleep because of what we might
dream. And we might have stayed just a little bit scared if there hadn’t been another dead girl, then another and another.
And we might have had more midnight talks, thinking of the whole business in the third person, if I hadn’t found the second
body myself.




IT WAS A SATURDAY NEAR THE END OF MAY, JUST OVER SIX weeks after the chemistry professor’s ski trip from hell. I’d picked up my mountain bike from its spring tune-up the night
before and gotten out the door at nine; my housemates were all still unconscious or snuggled up with whoever they’d gone to
bed with. In upstate New York, May is not to be confused with summer (sometimes it can’t even be confused with spring), and
I was wearing my heavy Vassar sweatshirt and a pair of biking tights. I’d only recently traded halfhearted jogging for halfhearted
mountain biking, and it was the first ride of the season. My muscles were flaccid from not enough time on the Lifecycle over
the winter, so even though I’d promised myself twenty miles I knew within two minutes that I’d be lucky to do ten. Since we
live downtown in the flats between three hills, I had exactly one choice of where I could head without doing some serious
uphill. I wound my way on back roads until I got to Route 13, the
kind of fast-food and chain-store strip that hulks at the edge of every American town, and headed south.


I kept on the main drag for a while and turned off onto a country road that degenerated to dirt after a couple of miles. When
I say mountain biking, I really mean road biking with fat tires and eighteen gears, but I usually try to go off into the woods
a little just so I can say I did. There’s a nice gentle trail about fifteen minutes away, wide without too many rocks and
roots to send a girl to her doom, and it’s just about my limit. Before I swung onto the path, I remember thinking that I was
probably going to regret it. This turned out to be one mother of an understatement.


It was a sunny morning, which is unusual for Gabriel (affectionately known as the place clouds go to die). There was bright
light coming through the trees, dappling the ground and making it hard to distinguish the hazards from the dirt. Even though
it was chilly enough to make me comfy in my sweats, there was a hint of afternoon heat; every soccer mom in town would be
poised for a flower-planting frenzy.


The path rose gently at first, with occasional muddy ruts and crisscrossing tracks that showed I wasn’t the first biker out
there that season. I had my Walkman on, which the traffic law says you’re not supposed to do but I couldn’t possibly exercise
without, and as the grade got sharper I was listening to Ben Folds Five and sweating hard.


Ever since it happened, I’ve wondered how everything would have turned out if I hadn’t decided to stop when I did. It was
all so arbitrary. I wanted to quit sooner, but didn’t; I could have kept riding longer, but I didn’t do that either. “Alice
Childress” ended, and since the song was
the only thing keeping me going, I stopped and got off. I leaned the bike against a tree and pulled the water bottle off its
rack, and as I took a drink I saw something glinting in a patch of sunlight about twenty yards off. To this day I don’t know
what made me walk over for a closer look; maybe after what had happened the month before, I already knew what I was going
to find. But then again, I kind of doubt that; knowing myself, if I had any idea what was out there, I would have climbed
right back on my bike and fled.


The first thing I saw was her shoes, laid atop a stack of clothing. The shiny thing was the buckle on her Mary Janes, which
were all the rage that spring, when every college woman seemed obsessed with dressing like Lolita. There was something plaid
under the shoes, but that’s all I remember, because the next thing I saw was the girl herself. They talk about death being
a peaceful thing, but there was nothing peaceful about this, and nothing natural, either. Her eyes were bugged out and her
tongue was lolling out of her mouth, all splotched and purple. She was stark naked, with big breasts that rolled to either
side and made her look not only vulnerable but invaded, as though someone had taken her life and her dignity at the same time.


I’m not proud. I screamed my head off, before something made me clamp my hand over my mouth to shut myself up. In retrospect,
maybe I was clued in by the fact that the scene was so obviously fresh. She was clean, not covered with leaves or mud; it
had rained the previous night, but her clothes didn’t look wet. Some instinct told me that she’d been put there in the past
few hours—minutes
even—and that meant that whoever did it could still be there.


I spun around, checking out every direction, but I couldn’t see anyone. That didn’t mean anything, though; off the bike path,
the woods are thick with old-growth trees big enough for two people to hide behind. He—they—could be anywhere, waiting to
swap one victim for another. I stared down at the body, picturing myself lying there in her place, with my sweatshirt and
tights and sports bra folded…


A noise—a bird or an animal or something way worse—shook the trees and a branch went snap. Whatever it was, it sent me running,
snagging my tights on the undergrowth. I was trying to watch where I was going and look around at the same time, and it didn’t
work; I went sprawling over a log and landed on all fours. As I scrambled back up I was sure I could hear something behind
me but I was afraid if I looked back it would be all over. Five seconds later I was by my bike. I forced myself to wait long
enough to turn it around before I jumped on and went barreling down the hill.


If I’d had time to think about it, I would have realized that even if someone was chasing me, there was no way he could catch
me on foot when I was going twenty miles an hour, but all I could think of was getting away. I was coasting faster and faster,
the trees whipping by in a gray-brown blur, my helmet swinging lamely from the handlebars where I’d left it when I got off.
I must have hit a rock, because the next thing I knew I was somersaulting over the handlebars. I landed with a thud, and then
I was no use to anybody.


What happened right after that is sort of hazy, which
the doctor tells me is perfectly normal for someone who flew ass over teakettle ten feet in the air. I was out for a while,
how long I don’t know, but somehow I got back on my bike and drove into town. The police station is on Spring Street, a half-hour
ride from where I fell, and I have a very dim memory of thinking I had to get there. I know I could have just gone out to
the road and flagged someone down, but at the time it never even occurred to me. I rode all the way to the cops, ditched my
bike, and dragged myself inside.


There was a uniformed officer behind a heavy plastic partition. He took one look at me and disappeared, which in my altered
state seemed the height of rudeness until I realized he was coming through a door to my left. Later, I found out he’d taken
me for a battered wife.


“I need to see the police…”

“Ma’am, what’s happened?”

“I need to report… a murder.”

“Let’s have you sit down.”

“No, I don’t want to sit down.” I was swaying on my feet, and everything hurt. “Please, she’s out in the woods. Someone has
to go get her. Don’t you understand? It’s just like the other one. I found her. I found another dead girl in the woods. Please,
you have to go get her.”


The cop got it instantly; after all, we don’t see a whole lot of murders around here. The previous body was hanging over everyone,
and I was telling him there was another. “Can you wait right here?” I nodded, which was a big mistake, since it made the whole
hallway spin and start to fade at the edges. I wanted to sit then, but I was afraid if I took a step I was only going in one
direction, which was down. I heard a door open behind me.



“Miss,” said a man’s voice. “I’m Detective Cody. I need to ask you a few questions.”


I turned around to face him, and that was it. I got a glimpse of reddish hair, and the next thing I knew I was keeling over
in a full-out faint. The last thing I remember is someone catching me before I hit the ground, and the random thought that
whoever he was, he smelled pretty good.


I woke up in the hospital, which was exactly where I belonged. You always see in movies where the hero gets really badly hurt
but he has to go save the world so he refuses to stay in bed and checks himself out against the advice of his doctor. All
I wanted to do was lie under the covers and have some male nurse bring. . .