by Liliana Hart
In the middle of the row, Mrs. Lutz halted, her arms extending to the side. Lucie jerked to a stop, watching as Mrs. L.’s mouth slow-oh-oh-ly eased open.
Lucie followed Mrs. L.’s gaze and stared down at the crate’s door.
The very open door.
Mrs. L. whipped around, squatted and ping-ponged left and right, dodging people in the row trying to see through the crowd.
“Mrs. L.?”
Behind Lucie, Tim leaned forward, cocking his head.
“Otis?” Mrs. L. called. “Come, boy. Here, boy.”
“He got out,” Tim said.
Mrs. L. spun back, gripped both of Lucie’s arms. “Help me. Please. The crate was secure. I made sure before I left him.”
“Okay,” Tim said, ever the experienced and unruffled detective. “Don’t panic. You were only gone a minute. He has to be here.”
Lucie slid out of Mrs. L.’s death grip and squeezed her hand. “We’ll find him. He’s such a rascal, he probably slid the bolt open.”
Mrs. L. nodded.
“Let’s split up,” Tim said. “Luce, you cover this side of the room. Mrs. Lutz, you take the middle and I’ll take the other end.” He hopped up on Otis’s bench and scanned the room. “The three other doors are closed. Chances are, he’s still in here.”
He let out an ear-pulverizing whistle that quieted the humans but sent the dogs into a howling frenzy that should have made the walls crumble.
Lucie stuck her fingers in her ears and stared up at her hunky detective. “Guess that backfired on you, fella.”
Tim waited a few seconds for the noise to subside and cupped his hands around his mouth. “Folks! We have a missing dog. Please look around you. His name is Otis. Otis! A bulldog wearing a Hawaiian print shirt. Grab him if you see him.”
He hopped down, his big body moving easily.
“Thank you,” Mrs. Lutz said.
“No problem. Now, ladies, let’s go find a dog.”
* * *
Tim hauled ass to the far side of the room. As usual, a date with Lucie proved interesting. Only she could take him to a dog show with literally hundreds of dogs and her client winds up being the troublemaker.
As much as he knew he should run screaming from Lucie Rizzo and her mobbed up family, he couldn’t do it. Couldn’t pull himself away. Something about the petite powerhouse with a Notre Dame MBA and a desire to be more than Joe Rizzo’s kid did him in.
In a big way.
Which meant getting caught up in her fiascos.
Concentrate.
Otis. Couldn’t be far. He reached the wall and made a right into the row, checking crates and getting strange looks from people as he went.
“Are you looking for that dog?” an older woman resembling Cruella Deville asked.
“Yes,” Tim said. “Otis. The bulldog in the Hawaiian shirt.”
The woman huffed. “I cannot believe he’s loose.”
Great. Dog show snooty. “Well, by loose if you mean he’s not in his crate, yeah, he’s loose.”
The woman turned to the man beside her. “Amateurs.”
Okay, Cruella. Let’s dial it back a notch. Tim checked himself. Locked his jaw for a solid five seconds. As a detective he saw all kinds of crap, and people with crummy attitudes ranked right up there on the most-commonly-seen list.
He gave Cruella the famous O’Brien I’m-going-to-be-nice-but-you-are-pond-scum look. “Ma’am, have you seen him?”
“You people should keep control of your animals.”
You people? What the hell? They had a missing dog and this woman, a dog lover, he presumed, wanted to pass judgment rather than help.
Go to guns. As much as he hated doing it, not to mention he couldn’t get answers, he’d fast track this thing. Keeping his gaze on the snooty woman, he reached into his pocket, the woman’s eyes tracking his movements as he pulled out his wallet.
And badged her.
The woman’s eyes bulged.
Yeah. Much better.
“Lady,” he said, “you are wasting my time. I’m looking for an eighty-five pound bulldog wearing a Hawaiian shirt. How hard can it be for you to tell me that yes, you have seen him or no, you have not?”
“No,” the man beside her blurted. “I’m sorry.”
“Thank you.”
Tim moved on, stopping to check each crate, asking folks if they’d seen Otis, but nada. No Otis sightings.
Where the hell had the dog gone? And worse, they were losing time. Tim checked his watch. Ten minutes blown getting through the row. Who knew where Otis could be by now?
But all the damned doors were closed. He had to be here. Had to be.
Tim’s phone alerted a text. Lucie’s ringtone. Still moving, he snatched the phone from his pocket and checked her message. No Otis on her end either.
That left the middle. Mrs. Lutz’s search area.
He doubled back and found Lucie waiting by Otis’s still-empty crate with Mrs. Lutz.
Mrs. Lutz’s dark eyes were wild with a mix of panic and desperation. He couldn’t blame her. Her husband had just been carted off to prison and now her beloved dog was gone.
Of all the nonsense he faced in a day, missing dogs got to him. Dogs, in a lot of ways, couldn’t help themselves. They faced a world filled with cruelty and wacked out abusers. A dog like Otis—pampered and loved—loose on the streets of Chicago?
He’d get eaten alive.
And for the owners? Total devastation. Hell, the day he’d met Lucie, he’d seen it on her after one of her charges had gotten dogjacked.
Mrs. Lutz brought a shaky hand to her mouth. “My baby.”
Tim touched her arm. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. He’s here somewhere. We’ll find him.”
A woman broke through the crowd dragging with her a kid of about eight wearing baggy jeans and a Captain America T-shirt. The boy’s shaggy dark hair had a major static problem and his scowl could melt steel.
“Excuse me,” the woman said. “Are you the folks looking for Otis?”
“Yes!” Mrs. Lutz said. “Do you have him?”
“No. I’m sorry. But my son thinks he saw him.”
Finally. A witness. Tim stepped forward. “Where?”
She pointed to the back exit. “He went through that door.”
* * *
Lucie gaped at the woman. “As in, he left the room? By himself?”
A vision of Otis bounding into the main gym, all eighty-five pounds of him charging into the ring where well-mannered, highly poised purebreds showed off their perfect appearance, flooded Lucie’s mind.
Panic in full attack, she gripped Tim’s arm. “Oh, my God. He could be crashing the show.”
The kid shook his head. “No. He went with someone. Some lady.”
The room did a loop-the-loop, throwing her off balance, and she tipped backward. Tim grabbed her before she went over, pulling her to his side and supporting her weight.
“I’ve got you.”
Poor Otis. That lovable, pain in the butt that drove her to near madness when he refused to go outside in the rain, who’d made a game of sitting in front of the door, blocking it so she had to shove it open with his dead weight against it, was gone. Stolen from a room filled with people.
The room looped again and Lucie squeezed her eyes closed. Fought for balance and calm. Anything that would settle her raging mind.
Because falling apart wouldn’t help Otis.
Mrs. Lutz held her hands out. “What lady?” she asked, her voice a stretched like wire struggling to remain intact.
The kid shrugged. “Don’t know. I was sitting on the floor playing my game.”
Tim badged the woman, probably to let her know he wasn’t some crazed dog show stalker, and squatted to eye level with her son. “What did the lady look like?”
Again the kid shrugged and Lucie nearly screamed. But Tim, bless his hunky self, stayed calm. Still squatting, he linked his hands together and nodded.
“Was her hair dark like
your mom’s? Or maybe red like mine?”
The kid pointed at Mrs. Lutz. “Like hers.”
A blonde. Not exactly a slam-dunk identification, but a start.
“And what was she wearing? Jeans?”
The kid shrugged again and Tim patted his shoulder. “Okay, buddy. Thanks.”
Tim stood, asked the kid’s mother for her contact info in case he had more questions and tapped the number into his phone.
As the kid and his mom walked off, Tim faced Lucie and Mrs. Lutz. “We know he’s out of the room. You two go out there and start looking. I’m gonna hit security.”
“Okay,” Lucie said. “Good idea. Maybe they can help us search.”
Tim pointed to the camera above the emergency exit. “Or maybe there’s video that’ll show us who we’re looking for.
Chapter Two
Fifteen minutes later, after wandering the halls surrounding the auxiliary gym, Lucie received a text from Tim telling her to get her butt to the security office.
That couldn’t be good news.
She entered the venue’s makeshift security office, a barely ten-by-ten room off the main gym that was more than likely a coach’s office during the week.
A guy in a beige golf shirt and black pants sat at the desk in front of a laptop. He couldn’t have been much older than Lucie, maybe late twenties with wavy dark hair. Thin, wiry build.
The polar opposite of Tim who stood behind him, arms crossed, peering over his head.
Without taking his eyes from the screen, Tim waved her to his side. “This is Kurt. He’s handling security for the event. He found the blonde on video and we have guards at all exits. If they see Otis or the woman they’ll grab ’em. Kurt this is Lucie. She’s a friend of the owner’s.”
“Hi,” Kurt said. “Where is the owner?”
“I left her downstairs. She’s upset, so I told her to keep looking for Otis while I ran up here. Just trying to keep her busy.”
Tim pointed at the laptop. “Take a look.”
Four black and white images of the auxiliary gym and all those doggie stalls split the screen. Kurt zoomed in on the image in the upper quadrant.
“It starts here,” he said.
On the video, Mrs. Lutz stood behind Otis’s crate while reading something on her phone. A few seconds passed and she stowed her phone in her purse, looking down at the crate then left and right.
“Based on the time stamp,” Tim said, “I think this was when you texted her.”
On the upper quadrant, Mrs. Lutz bent to check the crate’s door before walking off.
“Now watch the upper right quadrant.”
Five seconds after Mrs. Lutz wandered away, a woman, a blonde wearing boots and a dark sweater marched right up to Otis’s crate, opened it and hooked a leash on him.
Of course, Otis, being Mr. Social, didn’t even put up a fight. No biting, no barking—no help! Someone is trying to dogjack me!—no alert of any kind.
And with the activity in that room, all those people distracted with their phones or getting their own dogs ready for the show, no one flinched.
The woman though, she was a pro. A real calm cookie. Nothing about what she’d done looked off. She simply looked like someone taking her dog from his crate.
Done.
That fast, Otis was under her control.
Lucie’s stomach didn’t just seize, it wrenched into a tight ball.
“Luce?”
She rolled her lips in, set her hand across her chest and fought the immense pressure trapping her air.
“Luce,” Tim repeated.
She looked up. Rock solid Tim O’Brien. The man who in the months since she’d met him had proven he could handle all sorts of things without losing his cool.
“Tim, I will die if anything happens to that dog.”
“That’s why nothing will happen to him.” He faced her, set his hands on her shoulders. “The place is locked down. She’s not getting out of here with him unless she goes through a window.”
“The windows don’t open,” Kurt said.
Lucie went back to the laptop and the video of the woman leading Otis to a door. Just to the right, the little kid who’d been playing his game glanced up.
Thank God for that boy or they wouldn’t even know where to begin looking.
“I’m totally buying that kid a donut.”
“He might deserve two. Kurt, are there cameras outside that room? Can we track her movements?”
Kurt went to work on the keyboard then started clicking links. On the third try, a shot of a crowd-cramped hallway popped up. “Dang it.”
“What?”
“This is the hallway, but look.” He clicked another link and tiled two screens on his monitor. “This is her leaving the room. This is the hallway outside the room.”
Tim leaned in. “I don’t see her.”
“There’s a blind spot when you come out the door on that side. If she kept to the wall…”
“Crap,” Tim said. “She could be anywhere in the building.”
“Yes, sir.”
Tim waggled a finger at the screen. “Let’s saddle up here. Can you print me a couple of stills of that woman? And what about flashing Otis’s picture and the one of the kidnapper on the jumbo screen in the main gym? Get everyone looking for them. Someone’ll notice him in that Hawaiian print shirt. While we’re doing that, you keep looking through these videos. Try different cameras. Maybe another one picked her up.”
He turned back to Lucie. “Don’t freak. We’ve got this. In ten minutes, we’ll have him back.”
* * *
“Okay,” Tim said, “listen up.”
Lucie, Joey, Ro and Mrs. Lutz huddled around him, the offensive line about to hear the play from their quarterback. Only the play calling was happening in a not-so-quiet corner of a corridor between the main and auxiliary gyms.
Something bumped Lucie’s leg and she glanced down at a poodle sniffing the hem of her jeans.
At least he wasn’t humping her like some of her clients tended to do.
The dog moved on and Lucie brought her gaze back to Tim. Three minutes ago they’d left the security office and, with Operation Rescue Otis in full swing, she’d texted Joey and Ro, directing them to this hallway to receive their assignments.
They had to find Otis. And the evil woman who’d swiped him.
Had to.
Tim held up a photo so Joey, Ro and Mrs. Lutz could see it. “Lucie has extras of this picture. This is the woman who has Otis.”
Ro gasped, her face stretching tight as her mouth dropped into exaggerated horror. “Someone stole him?”
“Yes.” Lucie handed them copies of the photo. “We grabbed this picture from a security video. She’s a blonde. The picture isn’t great, but she’s wearing boots and jeans.”
Joey studied the picture. “Half the women in here are wearing boots and jeans. One leaf turns and all of a sudden everyone is in boots.”
Her brother. Always with an argument. Lucie made a low growling sound, fought the urge to leap on him and start pounding.
Tim clasped her arm, gave it a squeeze.
“I know,” Tim said. “But you’ll have to weed them out. If they aren’t blonde, move on. According to this photo, she’s wearing a watch on her left wrist. No watch, move on.”
“Thank you,” Lucie said to Tim. “For saving my brother’s life, because I was just about to kill him and my mother would never forgive me.”
Joey snorted and Tim tugged on the end of her ponytail then got back to business. “Security has all the exits blocked. They have limited staff here, but the cops are on the way. We’re losing time. Let’s fan out.”
He flipped one of the flyers over and set it against the wall. Using the pen he’d borrowed from the security office, he drew a map of the building. “There are four hallways surrounding the gym. Two exits to the parking lot on the north and west sides. Ro, you take the left flanking hallway. Joey you take the right. Mrs. Lutz, you handle i
nside the gym. Lucie will take the main hallway near the west entrance. The blonde left the gym via that exit. Any door you see, open it. Bathrooms? Check them all. We don’t have time to screw around.”
Ro leaned into Lucie, got right up to her ear. “Swear to God, if you don’t do this guy soon, I will. So hot!”
Seriously? Could her BFF not focus on the important things?
Tim gave them a hard glare. “You two about done?”
Whoopsie. “Sorry,” Lucie said. “Ro’s fault.”
“You know you want to,” Ro muttered.
The two of them straightened up and Tim turned his attention back to the group at large. “Security is blasting Otis’s and the blonde’s picture on the big screen in the gym.”
“Good,” Ro said. “We’ll find him. And, when we do, I’ll kick that evil witch’s ass. Stealing a dog. What is wrong with people?”
“Believe me,” Tim said, “I ask myself that every day. Everyone clear on their assignment?”
Ro sucked in her cheeks and peeled her lips back. Mean face. “Oh, I’m clear.”
Joey gave her a look. “Listen, Killer, take it easy. I don’t need you getting arrested. Usually, it’s my sister I’m bailing out.”
Ohmygod. Once, it happened. Once! Let it go.
She’d just take it out on the deceitful blonde when they captured her. That woman would be sorry she ever put her hands on Otis.
Tim smacked his hands together. “Let’s roll. And if you find her, text me. And, Ro, please. No ass kicking. Let’s do this right.”
“Dream on, O’Hottie. That bitch is toast. Stealing someone’s pet? That’s crossing the line.”
Ro spun away, her long hair flying. Joey and Tim, being the men they were, watched her curvy, full hips swinging as she tottled down the hallway in her spiked heels. A total man killer.
Lucie? Not so much. Lucie was more the semi-average, cute girl. But one who currently had the attention of a hunky Irish cop.
Giving up on the distraction of Ro’s rear, Tim slapped Joey on the shoulder. “God bless you, brother.”
“Dude, you have no idea.”
Lucie once again rolled her eyes. Men. “Hey! Let’s find our dog.”
Joey and Mrs. Lutz marched off, leaving Lucie and Tim alone in the hallway.
