Sire and Damn (Dog Lover's Mysteries Book 20)

by Susan Conant

  Feeling vaguely guilty, I didn’t specify that she was a psychiatric service dog. Want to hear my reasons? Zara’s psychiatric difficulties were a personal matter that she alone had the right to disclose. Izzy’s specialty was irrelevant; the disappearance of any service dog merited immediate attention. Despite all the good publicity given to service dogs for veterans and others with post-traumatic stress disorder, the stigma of mental illness might make the search for Izzy low priority.

  Okay, were these merely rationalizations and not reasons? I hoped then and hope now that they were reasons. Here’s the kind of thinking I feared: if your problem is only in your head, why rush to get your service dog back? Only? As in only a dog? Only: the ultimate diminishment. If Izzy’s task had been to see or to hear for Zara, or to predict seizures or a dangerous drop in blood sugar, I’d have said so; it would never have occurred to me to do otherwise. Was I as guilty as everyone else of only thinking?

  Rita’s signature tapping on the back door jolted me out of my reverie. Without preamble, she said, “In case you wondered, I’m keeping Vicky out of the way. Whatever’s going on, Zara will be better off without her. So, what is going on?”

  I filled her in and finished by saying, “Zara’s convinced that Izzy’s been stolen. I think she’s probably right.” After hesitating, I added, “She says that someone’s been following her. Well, she says that she’s had that sense.”

  “She’s never been paranoid before. Not that I know of. I don’t know what to think.”

  “Maybe Quinn will have some ideas. If you can just keep Vicky away, that’ll help. Where is she?”

  “At home.”

  “And MaryJo?”

  “She and Monty are there, too.”

  “Really?”

  “There’s a big literature on the responses of disturbed people to real calamities—fires in mental hospitals, that kind of real crisis. Interestingly, those kinds of external emergencies sometimes produce surprisingly practical, rational responses. That seems to be what’s going on with Vicky.”

  “She isn’t having hysterics?”

  “In one sense, yes. She’s heavily invested in this new image of herself as someone who’s been shot. In fact, she wanted to hear all about the great-grandfather who owned the gun. Oh, the drama!”

  “In a way, that’s good, Rita. What if Vicky refused to be in the same room with MaryJo?”

  “Then maybe Vicky would move to a hotel. If only! No, she’d probably insist on inflicting herself on you.”

  I had to smile. “It’s not going to happen.”

  Quinn and Zara emerged from the living room. He had an arm around her shoulders. “Zara would like to go upstairs. We’re declaring it a mother-free zone. Doctor’s orders.”

  Zara managed a token smile as they left.

  “Quinn is going to be a good father,” I said.

  Rita was smug. “Yes, I know.”

  Quinn returned in almost no time, and seconds after he’d closed the kitchen door, he had to open it again to admit the shooting victim herself, who paused dramatically, pointed a finger at a chair, and announced, “That’s where I was gunned down.”

  “How are you doing?” I asked flatly.

  Vicky swept a hand to her throat. “I am putting up a brave front. In that spirit, I am treating MaryJo—my very own personal Bonnie Parker—to a manicure and a pedicure and possibly a massage at Soignée, and I wondered whether the two of you and Zara would like to come along.”

  Rita’s face fell. “Aunt Vicky, that’s supposed to be my treat. In case you’ve forgotten, Quinn and I are getting married in three days, and Soignée is—or was—going to be my treat for the day before the wedding, my girls’ day out.”

  “Well, we can just go back again!”

  “And get manicures and pedicures all over again? The day after tomorrow?”

  Instead of standing by helplessly and watching the quarrel escalate, I intervened. “Vicky, thank you, but we have a crisis here. Izzy is missing.”

  “Who?”

  Quinn said, “Izzy. Zara’s service dog.”

  “Service dog! Let me tell you something. There is nothing basically wrong with Zara. She just loves making a fuss over nothing. She always has. And she loves embarrassing people, especially me, with that dog and its silly costume. Quinn, I’m surprised that she’s fooled you. Aren’t you supposed to be a psychiatrist?”

  “I am a psychiatrist. I know mental illness when I see it.” Quinn’s delivery was deadpan.

  The verbal bullet didn’t even graze Vicky, who demanded, “And just where is my daughter?”

  Rita answered. “Upstairs in my old apartment.”

  “I’m going to go get her and make her stop this ridiculous mental hypochondria.”

  Vicky started toward the door, but Quinn got there first. Grasping Vicky’s elbow, he ushered her out. With a nod to me, Rita followed.

  chapter twenty-one

  Here’s proof that I’m only half malamute: a purebred would never have forgotten to eat lunch. When Steve got home, I belatedly noticed that I was famished. A purebred malamute wouldn’t have left the bag from Eastern Lamejun in the car, either. On the contrary, a malamute would’ve ripped open the bag, the boxes, and the plastic bags and devoured the lamejuns, the pita, and everything else except possibly the olives right there in the car. It may be just as well that I’m half human. Malamutes have no respect for gracious living.

  Although Steve had stopped at McDonald’s on the way back from the hardware store, he accepted my offer of a second lunch. Sammy is Steve’s first malamute. I felt happy to recognize a sign that Steve was already experiencing the effects of migratory malamute DNA.

  He and I were sitting on the towel-padded benches of our picnic table. Lady and India were conducting the sort of olfactory investigation of the yard that dogs enjoy in damp weather. Sammy and Rowdy, being malamutes, were conducting an optimistic study of our lunch, which consisted of lamejuns heated in the oven, spread with yogurt, and rolled up. The dogs were too well trained to leap up and steal the food out of our hands or off the table, but a long stream of saliva descended from Sammy’s mouth, and Rowdy was eyeing the paving stones in the hope of snatching dropped morsels before Sammy got them.

  After checking on Zara, I’d given Steve an update. Now, at his insistence, I provided a detailed account of the events preceding and immediately following Izzy’s disappearance.

  When I’d finished, he said, “Let’s start with what we know. Not what we think. What we know.”

  “I understand the difference.”

  He smiled. “Okay. Frank Sorensen tried to steal Izzy. He lived in or had lived in Waltham. That same day, that evening, he broke into Rita and Quinn’s house. And—and—until earlier that day, Zara and Izzy had been staying with Rita and Quinn. While Frank was in the house, robbing the house, he was hit with a poker. He stole some sterling silver and some drug samples. At the same time, Willie disappeared and then ended up at Enid Garabedian’s house. In Watertown. Right near the Waltham line. Frank ended up dead. His body was found in the Charles near Watertown Square.

  “Today, Zara was knocked over and Izzy disappeared not all that far upriver from the Watertown dam. Izzy is a service dog, but when you and Zara called her, she didn’t come. Would you say that she has a reliable recall?”

  “By my extreme standards, a really reliable recall means that the dog comes every single time no matter what.” I repeated: “No matter what.”

  “India.”

  “Your India. My Vinnie.” Vinnie was my last golden retriever. “Our other dogs? In the ring”­—the obedience ring—“Rowdy and Kimi are reliable. Loose in the woods if a deer runs by? No. That’s why I keep them on leash. Lady? Typically, she’ll run to you or to India whether you call her or not, so that’s not exactly a recall. Sammy?”

  Hearing his name, Sammy lifted his great head and eyed Steve, who laughed. “The roulette-wheel brain. Where it stops, nobody knows, right, Sammy? You know, Holly
, he’s a beautiful dog. Aren’t you, Sammy?”

  “Of course he is,” I said. “He looks just like Rowdy.”

  “Izzy? How’s her recall?”

  “She’s less reliable than India or my Vinnie, but by normal standards, yes, Izzy comes when she’s called in spite of ordinary distractions. Today, I think that she couldn’t.”

  “I think so, too. Look, Holly, all these things are no coincidence. Frank Sorensen tried to steal Izzy. He burgled Rita and Quinn’s house and probably took Willie.”

  “Willie had been at Angell until that day. Izzy and Zara had been staying at Quinn and Rita’s.”

  “And someone actually has stolen Izzy. Then there’s the Waltham and Watertown connection. “

  “More than that. Waltham near the Watertown line, Watertown near the Waltham line, everything near the river.”

  “No coincidence,” he repeated.

  “Steve, you know what I think about coincidence.”

  He grinned. “The infamous Holly Winter theory that coincidence doesn’t exist.”

  “Not at all! The theory—the fact—is that if you trace back apparent coincidences far enough, you’ll find that that they’re intimately connected by a common thread and that the thread is invariably—”

  “—dogs.”

  “—the unifying force in this otherwise random and senseless universe. Would you like some coffee?”

  We cleared the table, made coffee, and returned to the yard with our mugs.

  Resuming where we’d left off, Steve said, without conceding the universal truth of my so-called theory, “In this case, the shared element happens to be­—”

  “—dogs. You see?”

  “No. One dog. Izzy.”

  “What about Willie?”

  “They’re both black dogs.”

  “But he’s a Scottie!”

  “A black Scottie. A black dog. And one small geographic area. But there’s something else that jumps out.”

  “Frank Sorensen is dead. Why do I have to keep saying that? He tried to steal Izzy, but he did not rise from the dead and steal her today. You want fact? What we know for sure? Frank Sorensen was not Jesus.”

  He ignored me. “If the unifying theme is Izzy, then Frank Sorensen had an accomplice.”

  “His brother,” I said. “Gil. Or someone else.”

  “Why would someone­—anyone—want to steal Izzy?”

  “Money. That’s the obvious reason. Ransom. Zara could obviously pay it. But why here? In Cambridge? And—”

  “Let’s slow down. Why don’t you review what you know about Izzy.”

  “Zara got her from a shelter.”

  “Zara says she got her from a shelter.”

  “Good point, Steve. Yes. Okay, you can tell to look at Izzy that she’s a quality dog. Horrible phrase. That she’s from a show kennel. She’s not from working lines, and she’s no pet-shop Lab. Dogs from show lines do end up in shelters. Not all that often, but they do.”

  He nodded.

  “She’s not microchipped, and that’s odd. Zara hasn’t chipped her because she’s afraid that chips cause cancer—”

  He sighed. “They—”

  “Of course they don’t. But most shelters routinely microchip. And you know what else is strange? I just realized this. Adopters who really love their dogs usually remember everything about adopting them. The typical happy adopter has a long, detailed story about noticing the dog on a website or first hearing about the dog, looking at other dogs, choosing this one—or feeling chosen—and so on.

  “So, wouldn’t you expect Zara to have a long story about adopting Izzy? I’d expect to hear all about going to the shelter, seeing other dogs there, realizing that Izzy was special, and so on. But all Zara has ever said to me is that Izzy came from a shelter. She’s never even said which shelter it was.”

  Steve nodded. “Back to Zara’s money.”

  “Well, that I do know about. Rita told me. The story is that Zara’s grandfather on her father’s side was a Wall Street type, an investment banker. He had tons of money. And when he died, he left it all to Zara and to her father, Dave. His wife, Dave’s mother, was already dead, and Dave is an only child, and Zara is, too, of course. “

  “His only grandchild.”

  “Yes. And Zara got more than Dave did, presumably because Dave didn’t need it. He’s some kind of high-powered lawyer. So, Zara got a lot of money, some of it in a trust fund and some it left to her outright. Anyway, in terms of ransom, she could obviously pay it. She doesn’t brag about being rich, but she has a condo on the Upper West Side. And the car.”

  “The Benz,” Steve said with a wicked smile.

  “Thank you, Quinn. Yes, the Benz. I gather that she bought it during a manic phase when she first had Izzy. She didn’t say manic, but that’s what she meant, and then it turned out to be the perfect dogmobile, so she kept it.”

  “Holly, when Frank Sorensen tried to steal Izzy, how would he’ve known? How did he even know who Zara was? Never mind that she could pay ransom. If that was what he was after.”

  “Facebook?”

  “Her Facebook page doesn’t say she’s rich. And it doesn’t seem like he was a social-network kind of guy. A small-time crook like that?”

  “Maybe he networked with other small-time crooks. For all we know, there’s a Small-Time Crooks Facebook page. We could become fans! Sorry. This isn’t a good time for frivolity. Seriously, almost everyone his age is on Facebook, and Zara probably accepts every Friend request she gets.”

  “How did he know that she existed?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “We need to talk to Zara,” he said.

  chapter twenty-two

  Although we had keys to the apartment, I knocked on the door, and both of us called Zara’s name. I had no reason to believe that she had ever been suicidal. If she were a threat to herself, Quinn would never have agreed to leave her alone; would he? Besides, Izzy had been missing for only a short time. Zara would never, ever desert Izzy, would she? Still, I felt relief when Zara eventually answered the door.

  Steve and I had agreed to confine our questions to the matter of Izzy’s origin. If we so much as mentioned Zara’s overactivity on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and such, we might risk making her feel at fault, as neither of us believed that she was. When I saw how dreadful she looked, I knew that we’d made the right decision. She was alarmingly pale and so shaky that I wondered whether she was taking a medication that made her tremble.

  “Were you asleep?” I asked. “I’m sorry if we—”

  “No. No, it’s okay.”

  We followed her to the living room, which still had most of Rita’s furniture. Without inviting us to take seats, Zara flopped onto the couch and wrapped herself in a blanket. The surest sign that Zara wasn’t herself was the near absence of electronic devices: the only gadget in sight was a single phone that sat on an end table by the couch. Although Zara was a guest in our apartment, I was reluctant to sit down without an invitation, so I stood there feeling like a door-to-door salesperson on the verge of trying to sell her products that she didn’t want.

  Steve, however, took a seat on the edge of the couch right next to Zara and rested a hand on her shoulder. “No calls?” he asked in his low rumble. “No messages?” He could have been examining a badly wounded animal, as, in effect, he was.

  “No.”

  “Zara, there are a couple of things we need to ask you about, a couple of things about Izzy that don’t add up. And I don’t know whether they’ve got anything to do with what’s going on, but we’ve got to explore everything.” Without calling Zara a liar, as I’d have come close to doing, he said, “First of all, microchips. These days, just about any shelter microchips dogs as matter of routine.”

  Zara’s eyes were cast down.

  “Then,” Steve said quietly, “there’s what you can tell about Izzy by looking at her. Correct size. Beautifully proportioned. Wide skull, clean-cut head, good pigment, ot
ter tail, overall look. She’s a breeder dog. But then there’s another thing. You know, Holly and I do malamute rescue, and I see a lot of rescue dogs in my practice, and when an adopter bonds with a shelter dog, I hear a lot about where the dog came from, how the owner happened to get the dog. I hear the stories. But what you’ve got to say about adopting Izzy is just about nothing. So, I’ve got to wonder.”

  Zara shifted around and pursed her lips.

  “So,” Steve finished, “if there’s more you’d feel comfortable telling us, we’d like to hear it.”

  She pulled herself upright on the couch and blew her nose. “I can’t. I’m just not free to say. But you’re right. She didn’t exactly come from a shelter.” Her speech was slow and almost mechanical. “Someone gave her to me. She really did need a new home, though, so she’s a rescue dog. She’s like a shelter dog. I wasn’t lying.”

  Steve nodded. I hoped that Zara would expand on the little she’d said, but she didn’t.

  Eventually, I asked, “Is there anything I can get you? Tea? Coffee? Something to eat? Do you want one of us to stay with you?”

  She refused the offers and said that she just wanted to lie down. Dismissed, we went back downstairs. As soon as we got there, Steve took India and Lady and left for the Charles River trail to hunt for Izzy. “Just in case we’re wrong,” he explained.

  Alone with Sammy and Rowdy, I had a sense of helpless anger. Instead of voicing my frustration and fury to some inevitably judgmental human being, I made a cup of strong coffee, sat at the kitchen table, and addressed the dogs. All dogs are great listeners, but Alaskan malamutes are ideal confessors because they’re in no position to make harsh judgments about others. Given the opportunity, malamutes will steal food off your plate, out of your hands, or even right out of your mouth. They revel in breaking the necks of cute little furry animals. Malamutes not only catch songbirds on the wing but swallow their avian prey whole—feathers, feet, beaks, and all.

  Furthermore, even my own malamutes are capable of breathtaking pettiness: Rowdy and Kimi, the best of canine friends, once had a snarling, if blessedly bloodless, battle over one minuscule morsel of liver biscotti that Rowdy found and Kimi wanted. In case you wondered, Kimi won. The girls usually do.