by Becky Clark
That definitely sounded like Peter.
“Can you tell me where I might find your nephew?”
She pointed to the sidewalk. “Coming along now.”
I followed the direction she pointed and saw a young man with three school-aged girls in tow. As soon as they got to the gate, they burst through it and ran for the play structure yelling and putting dibs on their favorite activities.
“Where’s that dog? Why ain’t you walking him?” she asked her nephew.
“Ran away. Seems he don’t like playing dress up.”
I groaned. Back to square one.
“This lady lookin’ for him.”
He winced. “Sorry. He just bolted before I could get a leash on him. Cute little bugger too. Hope he’s alright.”
“Me, too. Was it around here somewhere?” I hoped Peter hadn’t run out onto busy Colfax Avenue.
He pointed. “I live over that way. On Walnut. Ain’t seen him since yesterday.” He saw my face and again said, “Sorry.”
“Thanks anyway.” I gave them both my number in case Peter came back to either of them.
I almost asked what, if any, connection they had to the Braid, but reminded myself I didn’t care and it might change their behavior toward me. But it sure didn’t seem like the Braid mentioned me to them. He either didn’t care if I found Peter on my own, or didn’t think it would be possible.
I turned and left them, moving the direction the nephew had pointed. I didn’t hurry, though, worried what I might find. I decided it wouldn’t hurt to ask people I passed if they’d seen him. Five people in a row said they hadn’t, three ignored me completely, and one homeless guy called me “Mom” and tried to kiss me.
But the next lady told me she had, in fact, seen a dog in a Bronco cheerleading outfit running down the street yesterday. She didn’t notice the breed, but confirmed it was pretty small. I followed the route she figured he took, after thanking her profusely.
“Hope you find it,” she called after me. “But next time, afford that dog some dignity.”
I didn’t give up despite the fact that Peter probably wouldn’t still be out here today if he’d been running around yesterday. I slowed my pace, trying to think like a pug. A flash of color in the gutter caught my eye. Wishing I had a stick, I cautiously poked it with my foot, knocking off a smashed Starbucks cup.
My heart sunk. A tiny orange and blue cheerleader's outfit. I toed it one more time, as if by doing so I could magically conjure Peter wearing it, standing in front of me.
I heard the squeal of brakes and an angry horn. I saw a brown blur race through the busy Colfax traffic and down an alley.
“Pete! Peter O’Drool!” I couldn’t cross the heavy traffic in the middle of the street here, so I ran to the nearest intersection and jabbed the crosswalk signal until the light changed. I ran across, following the blur that could only have been Peter. I kept calling his name, but he didn’t come back to me. I wasn’t sure where he went, but I kept searching.
I turned a corner and there he sat on the sidewalk, eating half a bagel.
Relief flooded my body and tears flowed. “Peter! I’m so glad to see you!” He ignored me, intent on his street food. I knelt next to him and tried to pick him up, but he grabbed his bagel and danced out of reach.
I took a couple of steps toward him, coming up behind him. I scooped him up with one arm and held the bagel in his mouth with the other. “I’m not going to take it away. Eat the whole thing if you want. I just want you.” I rubbed my cheek on his head.
“Oh, my gosh! Rambo!” A twenty-something girl with a neck tattoo ran toward me, holding out her arms. “Thank you for catching my dog!” She tried to take Pete from my arms but I held tight.
“This isn’t your dog.” We played tug-of-war with him.
“Yes, it is.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Yes. It IS!”
“No. It’s NOT!”
We had a standoff, four hands on Peter, four eyes boring into each other. Pete continued to snarfle on his bagel, oblivious to the confrontation.
“Prove he’s yours,” I said.
The girl let go. “Okay. C’mon.” She jerked her head at me.
I followed her, matching her pace, but then I slowed. Why did she agree so quickly? Was she leading me into a trap? Was she a cohort of the Braid? With every step I got more paranoid. I hugged Pete tighter, feeling watched. Head on a swivel, I scanned as we walked, seeing danger everywhere, jumping at shadows.
I considered pivoting and taking off the opposite direction, but with an armful of Peter, I wouldn’t beat this girl in a foot race. I saw how fast she ran up to us. And if she, alone or with the Braid, was using Peter to lure me, then he was still in danger. No way would I let go of him.
Maybe I could prove he was Peter, rather than having her prove he was Rambo.
I stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “Wait. I don’t know where we’re going, but how ‘bout I prove this is Peter O’Drool right here.” I tapped my foot on the cement.
“We’re just going there.” She pointed at a run-down apartment building.
“Regardless.” I bobbled Peter while digging out my phone. She held out her arms to hold him, but I clutched him tighter. I scrolled through a series of photos of Peter I’d marked as favorites over the years, including the one I used for his Missing Dog poster.
She shielded the phone from the glare of the setting sun and swiped through them. “Cute,” she finally said. “But not Rambo.”
Peter looked up, finished with his bagel. The girl traced the perfect inverted Vs formed by the wrinkles over his eyes and the single ridge above them. Using two fingers, she enlarged one of my photos of Peter and traced the two upside-down Ys on Peter’s forehead.
My eyes darted between the dog in my arms and the dog on my phone. She was right. This was not Peter. Plus, his face and fur were darker than Peter’s. The world began to get filmy. I used my shoulder to angrily brush away the tears that had sprung to my eyes.
I handed Rambo back to his owner.
She laid a hand gently on my forearm. “I’m sorry.”
My mouth felt mushy. “Have you seen another pug around here?”
She shook her head, nuzzling Rambo. She must have seen my face redden and lip start quivering because she stopped loving on her dog. “Check the park.” She gestured with Rambo. “You find stray dogs there all the time. Lots of good trash, isn’t there, big boy?” She spoke in baby talk to Rambo, who responded by belching in her face.
I didn’t think I could reassemble my heart there on the sidewalk and began to walk in the direction of the park. I had to double back to find it, but soon enough I was trudging through the grass. I picked up the stick I’d wished for earlier and used it to rustle bushes. All that accomplished was scaring up some quaking rabbits who froze before darting past me.
I plopped onto a bench and called Peter’s name a few times, but I doubted he was here. I pictured him shimmying out of the cheerleading uniform and being so thrilled to be rid of it, he ran right into traffic. I closed my eyes against the dreadful image.
What are the other possibilities? Maybe animal control picked him up? Some kind person collected him up off the street, took him to a vet to see if he’d been micro-chipped, and they were in the process of contacting Don and Barb at this very moment?
I held tight to that image as I made my way back to my car.
My stomach churned. I trudged along the sidewalk taking deep breaths until I got to my car, bumping into people I never even saw. I probably looked like a street junkie. Downcast eyes. Dejected. World-weary.
If I’d only said no to that stupid event with Lapaglia none of this would have happened. Peter would still be safe with Barb and Don, Lapaglia wouldn’t have come to Denver, the Braid wouldn’t have used Peter as leverage over me. Maybe Annamaria would still be alive.
I couldn’t stop thinking about Peter all the way home. Where was he? I couldn’t bear to look up toward B
arb and Don’s apartment when I got there. They would have called me if he’d been found. I kicked off my shoes and fell into bed, exhausted.
Ozzi texted but I responded with a terse, “In bed” before shutting off my ringer.
I slept like I had dengue fever. Tossing and turning, kicking the covers to the floor, punching my pillow. I dreamed of Peter, his stubby legs trotting through our neighborhood, around the Lost Valley Resort, in front of the Brickhouse Tavern in Nebraska. When his face morphed into the ghost face of Annamaria, I woke with a jolt, my chest heaving.
It was the middle of the night, but I took a cool shower anyway.
Afterward I sat at my kitchen table bundled up in my chenille robe, hands wrapped around the warmth of a cup of herbal tea. I couldn’t get the morphed image of Peter and Annamaria out of my mind. The tea wasn’t helping. I left it on the table and shuffled to my office in the spare bedroom of my apartment.
Sitting at my desk in the dark, I opened my laptop. Something nagged at the periphery of me, some residue from my dreams. I wanted to see that photo of Annamaria at the Dark Dagger Awards with Lapaglia again. I couldn’t bear the thought of scrolling through photos of Peter, but maybe a photo of her would get the disturbing morphed image out of my mind. I scrolled through the website until I came to the photos from the banquet. I saw a couple of different pictures of her. In one, she and Lapaglia were holding hands and looking straight at the camera. In another, she was alone, looking away from the camera, seemingly unaware she was in the shot. She stood in the background, not the focus of the picture, up against a dark curtain.
Something was different, though. I flipped back several pages to the first photo. In that one she’s wearing a black boat neck dress. I could barely tell where her dress stopped and Lapaglia’s black tuxedo began. But in the other picture, she’s wearing a burgundy dress with a plunging neckline.
I went back and forth, squinting at them. There must have been a pre-banquet cocktail party with the nominees and then she had changed her clothes for the ceremony. Or perhaps they were held on different evenings. I searched the pages for captions but there were none. I dragged both photos to my desktop to make it easier to study them side by side.
The burgundy color could be mistaken for black, under certain lighting conditions, but there was no way those necklines were interchangeable. One high, one low. Definitely different dresses.
I zoomed in on the black dress photo, scrutinizing Annamaria. Enlarging the photo pixilated it and turned her a bit fuzzy, but I could see her dark hair done up in a classic chignon.
Next I zoomed in on the photo of her wearing the burgundy dress. Silver earrings hung from her lobes and a matching necklace dropped into her cleavage. Her hair was down in this one, a little longer than shoulder-length, held back on either side by two ornate silver combs. I squinted at the image, enlarging it a bit more, but it was immediately too much. The details became impossible to discern. I stepped it back a notch. Those combs. Something about them. I tried making the image a bit darker and then enlarging it again.
I leaned closer to the screen. I couldn’t be completely sure, but the design on the combs seemed to match the design on Lapaglia’s bolo tie, Martina’s logo, and Tiffany’s necklace.
Was it my imagination? The fuzzy enlargement? The late hour and bad dreams?
I wrestled with it until exhaustion took hold of me and I stumbled back to bed. I did sleep, but it remained fitful and I was glad to wake up.
The first thing I did was study those photos again.
I knew it was early but called Thomas Percy anyway, hoping he wasn’t at work on a train someplace.
He answered on the first ring, trepidation in his voice. “Hello?”
“Thomas? Are you okay? It’s Charlee Russo.”
“Oh. Hi. Sorry. I haven’t been sleeping well. I keep having dreams about Annamaria. And again yesterday I thought I saw her at the market.”
“I’m sorry I woke you.”
“Frankly, I’d rather be awake.”
“This might sound random, but did Annamaria ever wear combs in her hair? You know, the decorative kind?”
He sucked in his breath. “Annamaria never wore jewelry of any kind. Adornments, she called them. She always said baubles detracted from a woman’s inner beauty.”
“Not even when she dressed up?”
“What do you know about that comb? Why are you asking?” He lowered his voice. “They found one at the crime scene.”
It was my turn to suck in my breath. “Can you describe what they found?”
“No. The police have it. What’s this all about?” He spoke louder and quicker.
“I don’t know yet, but I’ll tell you when I can.”
Would Thomas know how Annamaria looked when she dressed up for a fancy awards dinner?
The design on that comb was taking on a life of its own in my mind. Why would it have the same design as Lapaglia’s bolo tie, Martina’s business cards, and Tiffany’s necklace?
It wasn’t random. And Lapaglia was the link.
I called my brother. “Lance, I can’t tell you why right this minute, but can you get me a photo of the silver hair comb the Nebraska cops found at the scene of Annamaria Lapaglia’s murder?”
He made a non-committal noise.
“Can you get it?”
“It would make me a happy camper to know why.” He didn’t sound anywhere near happy camper status.
“You send me that photo and if it shows what I think it’s going to show, then I’ll tell you. Otherwise, it’s just me having a bad night’s sleep.”
He made that non-committal noise again. “Where do you think I work? Do you think there’s this one big happy police department nirvana where cops from all fifty states sit around eating donuts and waiting for calls to come in so we can solve crimes like on Scooby Doo?”
“No, but I—”
“I work for the Denver PD, Space Case. I’m not a detective. I’m a patrol cop. In Dennnnverrrr.”
“I don’t need a lecture. You could have just said no, you know.” I paused. “Can you at least tell me if you guys picked up Lapaglia?”
“No.” He disconnected.
He sounded awfully grumpy. I probably woke him up, too. Wait. Did he mean they didn’t find Lapaglia or that he couldn’t tell me?
I texted him. Is Lapaglia in custody or not?
Not.
I made coffee and watched it drip into the pot. With each drip I became more and more convinced that the only plausible answer for all this matching jewelry was Rodolfo Lapaglia. He had to be involved in both murders. He was the common thread. And he’s still out there, at least according to my brother, the patrol cop. In Dennnnverrrr.
It was wishful thinking on my part to hope that Lance had some sort of contact with any Nebraska cops. Would have been great, though.
I watched the rest of the coffee finish dripping into the pot. As I filled a cup, a text pinged. I glanced at my phone and sloshed coffee on the floor.
A photo of a silver comb filled the screen. The curlicue design matched. The photo faded.
I lunged for my phone, jabbing at the message icon. I stared again at the comb. No message from Lance, just the photo.
How did you get this? I texted.
An animated gif of the Scooby Doo gang appeared and began dancing.
Twenty-Five
I hated waking up Ozzi, but called him anyway. Maybe he was already awake.
He wasn’t.
“I’m so sorry to wake you up, but I need your help with something. Can I come over?”
When I got there he was looking blurry. I should have brought the coffee. I pushed him gently on to the couch and sat next to him with his laptop open on my lap. “Can we test out your new facial recognition technology?”
Ozzi immediately perked up. He pulled the computer to his lap and opened up a program. He started to explain how it all worked, but I interrupted him. “Go to the Dark Dagger website and pull up the most rece
nt awards dinner.” He opened a new tab. When the page loaded, I pointed to the two photos of Annamaria, the one with Lapaglia and the one with her in the background. “Download those.” He did. “I want to see if these are the same woman.”
He studied the downloads on his desktop. “Of course they are. I can tell just by looking. You don’t need—”
“Humor me.”
He clicked and clacked across the keyboard, running the photos through the magic software. He tried to explain what was happening, but realized he was speaking a language I didn’t understand and stopped. When the program showed the results—100% Match—I felt like I got punched in the belly. I made him test it again, then a third time, asking him to explain each step.
Still, the photos matched. The software he and his team had been working on for so long believed unequivocally that the two women in the photos were the same person.
But I did not.
“Your software is wrong. I know for a fact they are two different women.”
“For a fact?”
“Maybe not a fact fact. But they are.”
“Charlee, I don’t know what to tell you, but—”
“Didn’t you just the other day have some horrible glitch? Maybe it’s still not working.”
He stared off into space. I knew that look. He was working out a problem in his mind. Everything had dropped away, and he was seeing computer code, line by line. Suddenly, he raced for the door. “I’ve got to check something!”
“Oz! You need pants!”
While he got dressed, I got more and more excited that he’d find his software glitch and my theory would be vindicated. I packed up his computer case and handed it to him Dagwood and Blondie-style as he ran out of his apartment.
I ate a piece of toast with butter and jelly while I thought about Lapaglia and his girlfriends. By the time the last bite was gone and I’d licked the sticky from my fingers, I had a plan.
Twenty-Six
First, I called the anonymous tip line again and explained all about the bolo tie, the necklace, and the combs. I omitted details about Martina’s business card for now. Then I left a voice mail for Detective Ming with the same information. I made sure to include and enunciate clearly the phrases, “I know you think I’m crazy, but I’m not,” and “I’m trying my best to be a good citizen.”
