Deviant (31 page)

The cat killer had run off into the trees.

Walt had called 911 and Jeffrey had come sauntering out of the shrubs as if nothing had happened.

“You saved my life,” Danny said.

“We found this near you; it must have fallen out of your jeans,” Walt said, giving Danny a little postcard of the Eiffel Tower painted in watercolors.

Danny didn't get the significance of it and merely nodded. Juanita put it up next to his water jug, where it looked nice.

“There's a whole roomful of people waiting out there for you,” Walt said.

“Like who?” Danny wondered.

“Like cops and a couple of your friends from school and your principal, too.”

“Mr. Lebkuchen?” Danny said, surprised, and then let out a yawn.

“Let them all wait,” Juanita said.

“Yeah,” Danny said, and closed his eyes.

When he woke the next time a nurse was there, reading his chart. “How are you doing?” she asked.

“OK,” he said.

“Would you like anything?”

“Could I get more ice cream?” he wondered.

“Sure.”

Juanita came in with the ice cream and after the ice cream was finished she asked him if he was strong enough to talk to someone.

He said he was.

A woman came in.

She was an FBI agent named Anna Ford. They talked for half an hour. Danny couldn't give her a description and he said that although the killer had spoken to him he hadn't recognized his voice. Anna asked if he might be able to pick it out from a group of samples, and he said maybe. Anna gave him her card and told him that if he remembered anything at all he was to give her a call, day or night.

“You'll catch him, though, won't you?” Danny said as she left.

“We'll do our very best,” she replied. “Copycats—er, no pun intended—are sometimes more violent than the actual perpetrators.”

“What do you mean ‘copycats'?”

“Well, you know, kids or whoever, trying to get some of the limelight for themselves,” Anna said.

“I don't understand. This was the cat killer, I tracked the actual guy,” Danny said.

Anna shook her head. “We have that guy in custody. We got a confession out of him. This must be someone trying to poach on his territory. It's still very dangerous, of course, but don't worry, we'll catch him.”

Danny said nothing until Anna had gone.

“They still don't get it. Nobody gets it but me!” Danny said.

“Don't excite yourself, darling. The FBI are on the case; they'll take care of it,” Juanita said soothingly.

Danny decided to get Mr. Lebkuchen over with next. He came in, warmly greeted Juanita, sat by Danny, and asked if he was OK. He was wearing his coat and his driving gloves and Danny had a feeling that he was in a hurry, that he'd only come because he had to, not because he was genuinely concerned about his welfare.

“So how are you doing, young Daniel?” Mr. Lebkuchen asked far too loudly.

Danny said he was fine. Mr. Lebkuchen told Danny that he was an example of everything that was good about CJHCS and that his parents must be very proud of him. Juanita assured him that they were. Mr. Lebkuchen further explained that whenever Danny was well enough to return to school, they would have a special assembly in his honor.

With a pleading look to his mother, Danny begged Mr. Lebkuchen not to do such a thing and to treat him exactly the same as before.

“I really don't want any special attention or treatment. Please,” he insisted.

“But you're a hero, a very special boy,” Mr. Lebkuchen said, as if he were talking about Pinocchio.

“No, please. I'm just the same kid as last week who was in detention. What I did wasn't heroic. It was stupid. I risked my cat, I let the guy get away, I got Walt involved, and I can't even give the FBI a proper description. I'm a big screwup.”

Mr. Lebkuchen did not reply, but after a moment Juanita asked, “You were in detention, Danny?”

“Yes,” Danny and Mr. Lebkuchen said together.

“Of course,” Mr. Lebkuchen said unctuously, “there will be no more talk of detentions or punishments. Danny will be getting the gold-star treatment from now on and I'll make sure that everyone—”

“No, no, no, no!” Danny begged. “Please. Don't do any assemblies. Give me the detention. No special treatment. Please, Mom, tell him,” Danny said.

“Danny's always been a little introverted,” Juanita said, as if he weren't there. “He, uh, never knew his real father. That might have something to do with it.”

Mr. Lebkuchen smiled. “Yes, we've talked about that. Danny and I are quite close. My father died when I was quite young. It can have an effect on a boy.”

“Oh, I'm sorry to hear that,” Juanita said. “Was he ill or …”

“Yes. I'm afraid so. He had Alexander disease, and unfortunately it's hereditary.”

“Oh, I am sorry,” Juanita said.

There was an awkward silence before Lebkuchen stood up and made his good-byes. “I'm afraid I must be off. I've got an interview with Channel 7 in Denver. CJHCS is being given the governor's award for best school in the state next week,” he said happily.

That's all he cares about, not me, not the madman running around the country killing cats, Danny thought.

“Should I send in your little friends?” Juanita asked after Mr. Lebkuchen had left.

“You might as well,” Danny said.

There were surprisingly many of them. Hector, Tony, Cooper, Olivia, Charlie, and Tom. For a kid who didn't make friends easily, Danny suddenly had a lot of friends.

They asked the usual questions. Danny tried to answer some of them, but was too exhausted to explain things well.

The kids talked among themselves. Tony, Olivia, Cooper, and Charlie talked about
The Lion King
, but neither Hector nor Tom had gone so they couldn't contribute much.

When everyone had told him what a cool dude he was and how brave he was, and after Charlie and Tom had shaken his hand too hard and Olivia had kissed him on the cheek, Danny asked the others to leave and give him and Tony a minute.

Juanita hustled them all out and gave Danny an embarrassing smile.

“You too, Mom,” Danny said, and she went with the others.

“What is it?” Tony asked, a little embarrassed herself.

“You left me a message. You said you've got vital information,” Danny said.

Tony's eyes widened with excitement. “There were two things.”

“Go on.”

“I used to get these weird anonymous letters. Crazy stuff. Anyway, I stopped getting them a few months ago and I figured it was just some creepy boy trying to impress me. One of the letters said something about a cat. I don't remember what, exactly.”

“What was in these letters?”

“Oh, I don't know, I threw them all out as soon as I opened them. The last was months ago. They were all crazy stuff. Boy stuff. Space and war and how I was the coolest chick ever.”

“That doesn't really sound like it's got anything to do with this. Except for whatever that cat thing was.”

“No, it doesn't, does it?” Tony said with a little smile. “I didn't think anything more about it. But then while you were sleeping, your mom asked if we knew who Indrid Cold was; you've been babbling about Indrid Cold. The letters I got were all signed Indrid Cold.”

A chill went down Danny's spine and he told her about the note that had lured him to the science room.

“I Googled Indrid Cold,” Danny said.

“Me too,” Tony replied. “It didn't get me anywhere.”

“Me either.”

“Do you think that they're the same person? The cat killer and the letter writer?”

Danny shook his head. “I don't know. When did the letters stop?”

“Before Christmas.”

“And when did the cat killings start?”

“After Christmas?”

“Yeah, January.”

They thought about this for a couple of minutes, but they didn't get anywhere with it. Indrid Cold was probably a boy who had a thing for Tony. Was he also the cat killer? It was impossible to say.

“What was the second piece of information?” Danny asked.

Tony smiled again. “OK, so I was thinking about what you were saying about Mr. Lebkuchen, so I called up Jenny, that's Dr. Precious's secretary—he's our dentist—and I told her that I was Mr. L.'s nurse from Kaiser Permanente and said that we were running a double prescription check to see if his dentist had prescribed him any painkillers. They do that, you know. In case you go doctor shopping. I saw it on
60 Minutes
.”

Danny was flabbergasted. “You did what?”

Tony fumbled in the back pocket of her jeans for a sec, took out a piece of paper, and continued. “So Jenny's pretty trusting, and she comes back on the phone and she's got the list of all the prescriptions he's been taking, and I ask her
to read it back to me and I write them down and thank her and hang up. And then I go to the Internet and look them all up. So he's taking some hayfever medication and he got a prescription of Ambien once—that's a sleeping pill. But he's also taking Zenapax, which is used in the treatment of multiple sclerosis, which is not a fatal disease at all. But he's also taking Teriflunomide, which, combined with Zenapax or a generic equivalent—I'm reading this, by the way—is the only known treatment for adult-onset dysmyelogenic leukodystrophy, or Alexander disease. So the upshot of
that
is that—”

“He's got Alexander disease.”

“Yes.”

“He just told us that. Me and Mom.”

“He did?” Tony said as all the excitement drained from her face.

“Yeah.”

“So it's not a secret?”

“I guess not.”

“So we're sort of back to, uh—”

“Square one,” Danny said.

 

The mountain, always the mountain. The mountain in winter, covered with ice and snow. The mountain in summer, golden in the long twilight. The mountain in spring, dense with wildflowers. For the past 450 days Bob had woken in his narrow cot with the view through his small window of the famous Pikes Peak.

The mountain was never the same, and he appreciated that.

He knew that he was lucky to be in a minimum-security prison with a view. The Supermax prison right next door might as well be on the moon. Its celebrity prisoners exercised in an enclosed yard, the only windows too high to see out of and the temperature controlled so that it was
impossible to tell what time of year it was or even whether it was day or night.

Bob reflected on this as he surveyed the work detail for the day and put another X through the date on his calendar. Only forty-one days to go and then he was free. Then he could rejoin society and travel where he wanted and do what he liked. He had made mistakes early in life and he had been punished for those mistakes, but he was thirty-five years old now and he wanted freedom.

Forty-one days.

In forty-one days he would leave Colorado Springs and never come back. In fact, he thought, he would probably avoid the whole state.