Distemper
Authors: Beth Saulnier
“THE FIRST THING I SAW WAS HER SHOES
, laid atop a stack of clothing. There was something plaid under them, but that’s all I remember, because the next thing I
saw was the girl herself.
“I screamed my head off, before something made me clamp my hand over my mouth. The scene was so obviously fresh. 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.
A noise shook the trees and a branch snapped. It sent me running, snagging my tights on the undergrowth, and sprawling over
a log. As I scrambled back up I could hear something behind me, but I was afraid to look back. Five seconds later I was on
my bike, coasting faster and faster, the trees whipping by in a blur. 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….”
RELIABLE SOURCES
“[A] fresh, fast-paced, funny, and suspenseful series debut…. Alex Bernier is a smart, engaging heroine.”
—Judith Kelman, author of
After the Fall
and
Fly Away Home
“A complex and engaging mystery with a not-exactly-fearless young reporter who has our sympathy even as we enjoy watching
her troubles get worse.”
—Thomas Perry, author of
The Butcher’s Boy, Shadow Woman
, and
The Face-Changers
Reliable Sources
Distemper
WARNER BOOKS EDITION
Copyright © 2000 by Beth Saulnier
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including
information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may
quote brief passages in a review.
Warner Books, Inc.
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First eBook Edition: October 2009
ISBN: 978-0-7595-2692-1
Contents
the people and animals of the Tompkins County SPCA
and to the memory of Duncan
a noble canine
Brian Collins, DVM
for helping me tell my tail from my snout
Jimmy Vines
for still being the best agent a girl could have
Bill Malloy
for being a great editor and an all-round
ubermensch
David Gibson
for the gift of time
Paul Cody
for getting me started
and Nikita, Elizabeth, Shardik, Magritte, Austen,
and the
real
Shakespeare
for being such good dogs (most of the time)
T
HEY FOUND THE FIRST BODY IN
A
PRIL, 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.