Distemper (39 page)

Was she already dead?

We debated these options across the newsroom with a surprising lack of sarcasm. Journalists can joke about anything—and I
mean
anything
—but for some reason getting our rocks off over the imminent demise of some poor hyphenated teenager was beneath even us.
Go figure.

I was putting the finishing touches on my story, waiting for the phone to ring with one last quote, when in walked David Loew.
He was dressed the same as always, in a PETA sweatshirt, jeans, and canvas sneakers, all of which had holes in them; I was
starting to wonder if he owned any other clothes. But his hair was pulled back in a neat ponytail and his beard was trimmed,
and that much (plus the conspicuous lack of what we townies call “the crazy eyes”) put him in the top one percent of his social
group, appearance-wise.

“How are you, Alexandra?” he said in that weirdly formal way of his. David Loew is a very polite guy—so polite,
you almost don’t notice he’s talking about blowing up labs and throwing pig’s blood on people. “I received your message,”
he was saying. “Do you still need to speak to me?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why don’t we go someplace quiet?” I took him back to the library, a closet-sized room where we archive old
articles. It has a phone and exactly one chair, but it’s the only place in the newsroom (besides the darkroom) where you can
lock the door. Legends abound about staffers who have supposedly gotten lucky in the library, and whether such action took
place during actual working hours. And no, I haven’t.

I gave Loew the chair and sat on the librarian’s desk. Then I handed him the picture of Bobby Ray Gravink that Cody had left
in his apartment, and which I’d taken.

“Do you recognize this guy?”

He studied the picture for a long time, then raised his head. “No,” he said. “I do not.”

“Are you sure?”

“Who is this person?”

“His name is Bobby Ray Gravink. Does the name ring a bell?”

“No. Should it do so?”

“Probably not. It’s a crazy idea anyway.”

“How so?”

“Did you hear about what happened to Justice Kingman-Finkelstein?” His face was blank. “You know her, don’t you?”

“Of course. She is a fellow traveler.”

“Right. Great. Well, she was abducted last night. Probably by the same person who killed those other four girls.”

That seemed to get to him. “And you believe this Mr….”

“Gravink.”

“This Mr. Gravink had something to do with this?”

“He may have a whole hell of a lot to do with it. Anyway, the cops want to talk to him.”

“And you now work for the police?”

“Oh, come on, you know I don’t work for the cops any more than I eat at Sizzler. I just wanted to know if you recognized him.
I said it was a long shot.”

“Isn’t that convenient?”

“What?”

“Isn’t it convenient that when the police look for someone to blame, they invariably choose a person whose ideals are different
than their own? Someone who is out of the so-called mainstream?”

I was tempted to remind him that anybody who killed four women was plenty out of the mainstream to begin with, but I decided
it wasn’t the right approach. “David, I really don’t think this guy’s a patsy. Trust me on this.”

“Just as you say.”

“And you really don’t recognize him? I know the picture’s pretty grainy…”

“I do not. May I go now?”

“Sure.”

He opened the door, then stopped. “Will you be attending our action next week?”

“Um, which one would that be?”

“Our two days of hunger to honor the millions of animals slaughtered each day to satisfy the blood lust of the human minority.”

“Oh. That one. Sure.”

He walked out, leaving me to ponder how much fun it was going to be to hang out on the Green for a couple of hours to watch
people
not eating
. Whoopie.

Our package on the disappearance of Justice Kingman-Finkelstein ran the next morning, and the papers sold out downtown within
two hours. Since the
Monitor
is way too cheap to do another press run, the circulation director sent his office staff around to the outlying areas to
liberate extra copies from the vending boxes, and those sold out too.

The entire city was on edge, waiting for the word that her body had been found. Her parents said on TV that they refused to
believe their daughter wouldn’t come back safe and sound, but volunteers were combing the woods anyway. No one could remember
a worse time, not even when cops were cracking heads open during the Vietnam War. Four women were dead, and the stress of
it had settled on the skinny shoulders of one seventeen-year-old girl. No one said it out loud, but there was this feeling
in the air that if she didn’t survive, part of Gabriel was going to die along with her.

I hadn’t seen Cody for a day and a half, only gotten a quick phone call from him late the previous night. I could tell from
his voice that the stress was starting to get to him, and I thought of the night he’d told me about the SEALs and how he was
afraid of letting someone else drown. But that was what was happening now—the clock running on Justice’s life, and no way
for him to save her.

It was all I could think about—all anyone could think about—and as I sat at my computer typing in background for one of the
follow-up stories, I started having these
awful daydreams about how the next day’s headline would read.
LOCAL GIRL STILL MISSING. FIFTH VICTIM FOUND IN WOODS. FBI TAKES OVER CASE; HUNKY COP LEAVES TOWN
. There was no newsroom betting pool for this one, but even if there were,
COPS CATCH CANINE KILLER
would have been a hundred-to-one long shot.

I got sick of thinking about it, and I was on my way out of the newsroom for a bagel when the secretary yelled that I had
a phone call. I went back upstairs, and found David Loew on the line. The first thing he did was apologize for waiting so
long to call.

“I’ve had time to consider it,” he said, “and I think that perhaps I was mistaken.”

“About?”

“I think perhaps I do recognize the man in your photograph.”

“You do? What’s his name?”

“I cannot tell you over the phone. You are well aware of my feelings on government surveillance.”

“Right. Well, I’ll meet you on the Green in ten minutes.”

Then he told me he couldn’t get into town because his bike was busted, and asked me to come out to his place. He gave me directions
to a house five miles out of town, and I drove out there for the interview.

It was, of course, one of the stupidest things I’ve ever done. Anybody who’s ever seen a horror movie knows that when somebody
says “I can’t talk about it over the phone; come meet me at an abandoned warehouse,” you should make haste in the opposite
direction. All I can say in my own defense is that I’d been dealing with David Loew for months, and I’d never had a reason
to suspect
him of anything worse than zealotry and excessive diction. I certainly had no reason to mistrust him. But then again, if I’d
known I was trusting him with my life, I would have given it more thought than I did—which was none at all.

So that’s how I ended up in front of a house in the country on a sunny afternoon in July. That’s how I knocked on the door,
and found myself face-to-face with Bobby Ray Gravink. And that, in short, is how I very nearly got myself killed.

I
WOKE UP IN A CAGE
. I
MEAN AN ACTUAL
CAGE
, AS IN A BOX
made out of chain link with a lock on the front. I had no clear memory of how I’d ended up out cold, except that it had something
to do with Bobby Ray Gravink and a big smelly rag. But this much I do know: when I woke up, I felt like hell.

To begin with, I had a headache. And I was hungry, having skipped breakfast and been on my way out for a snack when I was
lured to my doom. Also, it wasn’t a particularly large cage, not the kind you could stand up in and yell to the guard that
you’d been framed. No, this was a cage designed for four-legged creatures. It was a dog kennel.

I looked around the room, and wished I hadn’t. There was a stainless-steel table in the middle, and along the walls were jars
and instruments and some smaller cages. The place was a goddamn surgical suite, and it didn’t take long for me to remember
what had happened to the other patients. C.A., with her reproductive organs laid on her
stomach like lunch meat. Lynn Smith, dumped in a baseball dugout minus her eyes.

I had a very bad feeling those eyes were around here somewhere, floating in a jar of formaldehyde. This was probably not going
to end well.

But then I saw something else, something everyone in Gabriel was looking for. It was Justice Kingman-Finkelstein, and she
was across the room, naked and locked in a cage of her own.

I whispered her name, and when she didn’t hear me I said it a bit louder. Her head snapped around, and I saw that her mouth
was taped shut. Even from twenty feet away I could read the terror in her eyes. I called her name again, tried to say some
idiotic crap about how we were going to be okay, but she started shaking her head from side to side with a desperate kind
of violence.

“Where the hell is he?” I said, then remembered she couldn’t talk. “Which direction? Come on, point or something. He could
be back any minute. Where is he?” She shook her head again even harder than before, and made these high-pitched whimpering
sounds. Then I realized her hands were tied behind her back, and she couldn’t point if she wanted to.

I’m not sure how long we stayed there like that, but it didn’t seem like long enough. Because, you see, it’s plenty scary
being locked in a cage by some psycho serial killer. But even that is nothing compared to looking him in the eye.

He walked in wearing a white lab coat with a tie on underneath, and a stethoscope around his neck like Marcus-fucking-Welby.
My initial thought was that he didn’t have the crazy eyes either. He just seemed cold, businesslike,
totally indifferent. He walked over to Justice, and as he approached the cage she threw herself back against the wall and
got as far away from him as he could.

“
Bad dog
.” That’s what I heard him say. I’m not kidding. “Bad dog.” He even said it again. “Bad, bad dog.” And then: “You’ll have
to be punished.” He went over to the counter and reached for what turned out to be a hose connected to the utility sink. He
turned the water on high and sprayed her, and she jammed herself so far into the corner I could see her flesh pressing through
the chain link. I had a feeling I might actually faint sometime soon.

I’m not particularly proud to admit it, but the truth is that I wasn’t thinking much about poor Justice and what she was going
through—what she might already have gone through in the past thirty-six hours. I was across the room cowering in my own little
prison, trying to figure out how the hell I had gotten myself into this mess. And, more to the point, how was I going to get
myself out of it?

I wondered if anybody at the paper had missed me yet, and the awful truth was that they probably hadn’t. No one would really
start worrying until deadline that night, which was hours and hours away. No telling what might happen in the meantime. Actually,
there was plenty of telling. I just didn’t want to think about it.

After spraying Justice for a good five minutes, he turned off the water, coiled the hose neatly, and came over to me. He looked
me up and down with that same oddly detached expression, which for some reason made me furious; it seemed as though someone
who goes to all the trouble of abducting women and locking them in cages should actually give a damn.

But there he was, looking at me like I was a moth on a pin. He did it for quite a while before he spoke to me, and that interlude
gave me plenty of time to go quietly nuts as I crouched there in the metal box, trying to figure out what I could possibly
say or do to get out of this. I thought about everything I knew about this case, this
man
(although, frankly, it was hard to include him in the human race), and I couldn’t come up with a single thing that wouldn’t
leave both myself and Justice as dead as the others.

“Are you a good dog, or a bad dog?”

Hearing his voice up close and personal scared the bejeezus out of me. It was low and quiet, with an underlying Texas twang
that only made it more menacing. I stared at him, at a loss about what to say, when he repeated himself.

“Are you a good dog, or a bad dog?”

I opened my mouth to say something, although to this day I’m not quite sure what it was going to be. I like to imagine that
it would have been something brave—big lies about how the cops were right behind me, and if he didn’t let us go he was going
to wind up with a needle in his arm. Truth is, though, I was probably going to engage in some serious begging. But just as
I was about to speak, I caught sight of Justice out of the corner of my eye. She was shaking her head madly, as she’d done
every time I’d spoken to her. And all of a sudden I got the message:
don’t talk
.