Brate stopped walking. “I don’t understand. How could that have happened?”
I raised an eyebrow at him. “That’s exactly what I was going to ask you. When was the last time you used Barkley for a drug sniff that worked. Has he been anywhere or done anything without you?”
“Three days ago,” was the officer’s reply after much thought. “It had to have been him three days ago. Barkley sniffed out a heroin shipment in a warehouse. That had to have been the right dog.”
“So what’s happened since then? Has he been out of your sight?”
He gave me an exasperated look. “Of course he’s been out of my sight. I don’t watch the dog all day every day. How could I? But he’s usually here at the station if he’s not at my home. He doesn’t come into contact with all that many strangers. He stays back by the offices in the police station. He’s got a crate, but most days he can wander around the station without someone watching him. The guys all like him and treat him like royalty. He’s pretty spoiled as dogs go.”
I looked at him. He was genuinely upset. His breathing was a bit ragged, and for a large-sized police officer, I wondered if he might cry over this. He couldn’t be that good of an actor. I knew that he was telling the truth. So if Brate hadn’t swapped dogs, someone else had, and likely someone else who had access to the police station.
“He’s inside at home during the day if I don’t think we’re going to need him for any upcoming investigations. So here would be the more likely place for a switch. I’m single and only my mother has a key to my place. I doubt that a drug cartel got to her.”
I cleared my throat, since I was going to probably be stating the obvious to him, but given his rather emotional state, I figured it was best to start at the beginning. “So possible motives for someone to take Barkley.” I ticked off my fingers. “One, Barkley is a very valuable dog and was stolen for the money. Unlikely.”
Brate snorted, but didn’t respond otherwise.
“Two, Barkley knew something or could tell something that would damage someone. This one seems kind of likely, based on what he does. He finds drugs and dead bodies, which in most cases are directly tied to crimes. Hiding Barkley would avoid discovery and allow the perps to escape detection.” I threw in a word I’d learned from Detective Green and hoped he was impressed with that.
I ticked off my ring finger. “A third reason could be that someone wanted to embarrass you. You’d said something about Erie County police enjoying your troubles with the drug bust. Could they be behind something like this?”
“Yeah,” Brate said. “They were laughing about it, but I don’t know if they’d actually go to these lengths to prove they were better. It was a dangerous situation for that. The perps could have gotten away with it – that’s a large price to pay for a joke.”
“So number two seems like the most likely scenario then. If the perps wanted to get away with something by removing Barkley from the case, I think that finding him and seeing what he knows is the best solution. If they swapped dogs to begin with, I’m thinking that they had a plan to swap them back at another point. If they’d just wanted to remove him, they could have shot him without all this trouble. So keeping a low profile about the matter must be a part of the plan.”
“How am I supposed to track everyone who came in and out of the station in the past three days? That’s a lot of work to do. We get hundreds of people a day.”
“I hate to point this out to you, but most people don’t come into the station carrying a beagle that looks like Barkley. This had to be done at a time when few people were here. Otherwise the risk of getting caught would be too great.”
He narrowed his eyes as he realized my implications. “You’re talking about someone on the force here. Great, now I’ve lost my dog and I’m uncovering a scandal in the department. I’ll be everybody’s new best friend here.”
I nodded at him. I wanted to be as upfront as I could be about this. “You have to be aware that this could be brought to light. It’s not pretty.”
“Geez,” he said, rubbing at his eyes. “Can’t you find a less obvious way to look for my dog? One that doesn’t involve questioning all the guys in the department?”
I nodded. “I was thinking of going at it from another angle. Someone had to replace Barkley with another dog. I was going to visit the breeder that raised Barkley and see what he can tell us. Michelson mentioned that it was likely from the same litter or same parents. We can trace it from there.”
Brate looked at me, a pained expression on his face. “I don’t want to ask you this, but are you willing to do this? I don’t want to investigate this myself. What if someone sees me? I don’t want word to get out that I lost a valuable police dog. It could mean my career. Not to be rude, but nobody much cares a about a guy who claims to talk to dogs.”
I nodded. I figured as much. He had come to me in the first place without the department’s approval. So getting the dog back was still a top-secret mission, and he was desperate enough to use the services of a man he didn’t believe. When you’re in dire need, you’ll clutch at any straw, I thought.
Brate gave me the information for the breeder. Fortunately, he was closer to Toledo than Port Clinton, so I’d have no trouble getting to see him quickly. It would be on my way back to town. Brate and I shook hands, and I headed for home.
I’d learned that word travels fast in the police departments, so it wasn’t a big surprise that Detective Green showed up a short time later at my home, sniffing for details harder than Barkley ever could. She was also better at it than the Beagle who was being passed off as the drug dog.
“Hi,” she said coyly, walking into my house without an introduction. I’d found her to be very to the point over the almost year we’d known each other. She assumed that since we dated and I answered the door that she was welcome. She was right, but it was always a bit disconcerting. My family was all secrets and innuendo.
“Hi to you,” I replied. I’d decided that I wasn’t going to be forthcoming with information about another police department. I didn’t think Officer Brate would appreciate the news getting out that he’d lost an expensive sniffer dog.
“So why were you at Port Clinton today?” She used air quotes around “Port Clinton.” Her rather odd use of the finger actions was one of the things I found endearing. I never knew just what to make of it. Was she doubting that there was a Port Clinton or was she merely letting me know that my story would be suspect if it didn’t match the rumors she’d already heard.
“I don’t remember saying that I was,” I answered. I knew that while she was happy to see me, this was not a mere social visit. She wanted details, especially as they applied to another police department in Ohio. She was possessive about her police work. In talking to her, I saw that she compartmentalized her life. She had her work and her personal life, and they never met unless it was absolutely necessary. Me working for the Port Clinton police would not fall in the necessary category, so I’d crossed a boundary with her.
“Oh, I think someone at the station mentioned it.”
While she never spoke of it, I had to wonder how the other detectives and officers took the fact that she was dating someone who claimed to talk to animals. While she strongly suspected that I was a fraud, she’d never caught me in a lie – and never caught me stating anything incorrect that an animal said to me. So it wasn’t the credibility factor that would be a bother.
However, I had gained a certain notoriety from solving crimes with — and for — the police. I suspected that this caused some animosity from some of the officers. They wouldn’t like the fact that I had shown them up in detecting crimes. I normally wasn’t one to hog the credit, so I had made some of the TPD and other jurisdictions look good. Yet the police would feel a certain sense of inadequacy in losing out to a guy who claimed to talk to pets.
However, Sheila never seemed to mind. She tolerated my claims that I talked to animals, and she was relatively open in sharing how to think about
investigations and next steps. She’d even gone so far as to make suggestions on how to improve my investigative skills, so that I could continue to talk about what the animals said to me. It was likely her training that had me going to a breeder to find dogs who looked like Barkley. She thought along those pathways.
“They want me to talk to their police dog about some matter. I haven’t done it yet, but I’m sure I’ll take a new client any time that I can get one.”
She sighed. “Griff, the only problem with that story is that your new clients are never simple. Before you know it, dead bodies will be falling from the lamp posts, and you’ll get hurt thinking you can do this all by yourself. It’s not a good strategy.” She sat down on the couch as she lectured me.
“This seems pretty straightforward,” I lied. It had already blossomed from a case of sniffing to a case of dognapping with a clever idea of swapping dogs. My current thoughts suspected that drugs might be involved as well as well as police corruption. It could end up as any number of crimes by the time I was done. It was anything but straightforward.
She looked around my living room. “Have you called the number on your sister’s phone log? I know you said that it had a name listed, but you haven’t done anything with this. I had to pull a few strings, which was not easy to do since I know that Siever is looking over my shoulder these days.” She did this sometimes as a good investigator. She’d switch subjects and circle back to the original subject later.
I glanced over at the dining room table where the phone log sat on top of a stack of papers. “I will. It’s been ten years so I’m not in a huge hurry to investigate this. It won’t pay my bills. This talk with the sniffer dog will pay a few bills.”
“Don’t let it sit too long,” she offered. I knew that my ability to let a matter stew for a few days while I puzzled over the implications of the outcomes drove her crazy. She was the type to charge in full speed, where I was more likely to consider all the outcomes before starting. The mess with my sister had more outcomes than I could get my head around.
In all honesty, I had expected to receive another call from my mother about the matter. She’d actively tried to block my investigation of my sister’s disappearance. I wasn’t sure why. Susan’s disappearance over a decade ago had destroyed our family. One day Susan had been there, happy and alive; the next day, she’d left a hole in our family where she’d been. Supposedly, she’d been meeting a boy from school at the movies, but she’d never shown up there. For years I’d blamed myself for not sounding the alarms after getting the first phone call from her date, but now I had started to let that go. In looking at the police report, I’d discovered that she hadn’t taken her keys or her phone, which made me think that perhaps she hadn’t been taken against her will after all. The moves seemed very premeditated, a sense that she wouldn’t need these things again so why take them? The police had been involved, but they’d uncovered no leads. She was never heard from again.
My father had drunk himself into an early grave. My mother, who had never been the most social of women before the disappearance, became a recluse. She rarely left the house these days. She just sat at home and allowed shipping companies to bring her the purchases she made online. What she couldn’t get online, she requested me to deliver.
My brother couldn’t take the notoriety of the situation, and he moved across the country to get away from sorrowful stares and gossip. He hadn’t wanted to live his life as the brother of that missing girl, Susan Fitzpatrick; he’d married and found a career in Denver, and I knew that he would never come back to live in Toledo.
I had stayed here in Toledo and found my own ways to cope. My sister had been lively and vivacious – and taken. So in order to remain alive and safe, I decided to be nothing like her. I dressed in thrift shop specials and had rarely cut my hair. I’d let my grass grow up around the house, camouflaging it from any people who might want to do me harm. I wanted to be invisible or as close to it as possible. I wanted to be the type of person that no one would ever dream of taking. I wanted to protect myself from Susan’s fate.
In the last few months, due to the ministrations of Sheila Green and my investigation into my sister’s disappearance, I’d begun to change. In a fit of general pissiness, I’d shaved my head and cut my grass. While it could have been a onetime thing, I was beginning to realize that it was a change in me instead. My worldview had changed. It made no difference if I wore Gucci or Goodwill. No one was going to take me. My decision to stay or leave was my own.
Now I had an active lead into my sister’s disappearance, and Sheila wanted me to follow up on it. I understood her point. I had asked her to get the phone log, after learning that she’d left her phone at home the night of the disappearance. It made the act seem premeditated, rather than the random act of a stranger.
The number had been to the Greyhound bus station in Toledo. No one made approximately 15 calls over the course of two weeks to the same bus station without a plan to leave town. Instead of my long-time belief that Susan had been abducted, it now appeared that she’d left of her own volition.
The revelation meant a huge paradigm shift to my world. Instead of thinking that there were evil people in the world who snatch you at a moment’s notice, I now had to rethink my mindset to allow that Susan had left because for whatever reason, she believed that leaving was better than staying. Given the aftermath of her departure, it seemed like a cruel move. I wasn’t sure I wanted to connect with someone who had done so much harm to my family, either by act or by omission. There could have been some point where she’d said, “Hey, I’m alive. Thought you’d want to know.”
Given that she’d likely left because she wanted to, I had to question whether it was in anyone’s best interest to try to find her. She’d be slightly older than me, most likely married with children. I resented that she’d had those things since I’d likely given up my opportunities so far in my life to have those things. The demand for guys who wear thrift shop and don’t cut their hair out of fear was pretty slim.
I wondered how she’d react to talking to me after more than a decade of separation. It would be embarrassing to say the least if I was the reason she’d left. I had no idea what would drive someone to abandon their family. My parents had not been saints, but they fed her and watched over us. While reading the police report, I had uncovered that the police had been called to my house for some domestic disturbances, but I couldn’t imagine that those events were so momentous that she’d had to leave.
Even if I wanted to talk to her, I wasn’t even sure how to find a missing person. She’d have a different name if only by marriage. I had no idea if she’d had a social security number or any other identification which could be used to find her in our interconnected Internet age.
I could tell that Sheila was waiting for me to ask for her help, but I wasn’t to that point yet. This was a very private decision, and I wanted to make it all on my own. I was used to making choices on my own. I still was debating whether or not it would be a good idea to continue this quest. Perhaps I should apply a saying from my own profession: it was best to let sleeping dogs lie.
She could tell that she wasn’t going to get much from me in the way of information on the Port Clinton police mission or my missing sister, so she made her excuses to leave fairly early on. I waited for a while longer to make sure she had really left and jumped in the car to head to the breeder’s house. I didn’t want her to tail me to learn what was going on. I’d tell her when the time was right.
The drive was only about twenty minutes, and I thought about how I’d approach this matter. People expected a person who talked to animals to be psychic as well as communicate with animals. I thought one was pretty good, but they always thought I should know everything before being told. Feeling out of sorts, I just opted to go with whatever presented itself to me when I met the man.
I was glad that Brate had given me the contact information, because the breeder’s name was Michael Johnson. I’m sure t
hat there had to be thousands of them in Ohio, and whatever my “powers” I couldn’t have narrowed a Google search to find him.
I pulled up in front of a rather plain ranch home in the south-western section of Toledo. I was more used to seeing farms and lots of land when it came to breeders. They needed room to let the puppies romp around. The small home surprised me. I wondered if Brate had given me the right address.
I got out and went to the front door. An older man greeted me at the door. He was about my height, but was slightly stooped with fingers that twisted out at painful angles. I wasn’t sure how he’d even operated the door to open it. Even more so, I wondered how he managed to handle a litter of puppies at any one time.
“Mr. Johnson?” I asked.
“Yeah. Who wants to know?” He didn’t look happy to see me, and I wondered again if I had the right address, though it seemed more likely given his acknowledgement of the name. I assumed he had some sort of help with the house and the dogs.
“Officer Brate and Dr. Michelson sent me to see you.” Nothing said official like using the names of police officers in the conversation.
“Huh,” was all I got in return.
“There’s a problem.” I opted to go with the direct approach here. There was no funny business with this man. I would be forthright with him and hope for the best. “Barkley’s been replaced with another dog, and they both thought that you might be of some assistance. The dog is a near match for Barkley which made the doctor think that another Beagle that was sired here might be the stand-in for Barkley.”
“That’s possible,” he conceded. He gave me a small shrug.
“Is there a way to tell if one of the other pups could be the replacement dog? Do you have those kind of records?”
He nodded. “Yeah, I keep good records. Come on.”
He motioned with his hand, and I followed him. We entered the house and went down the long hallway to a bedroom that had been converted into an office. There were several filing cabinets along the far wall and a large mahogany desk was on the wall nearest to us. He sat down there and pulled the computer keyboard to him. He began to type, which was a slow process consisting of a single finger locating and pressing each key.
Nothing To Sniff At (Animal Instincts Book 5) Page 2
