The Blue Garou (Detective 'Cadillac' Holland Series Book 1)

by H Hiller

  “Since today. It was supposed to be a surprise birthday present from Tyshika. She picked it up on the Northshore a couple of hours ago.”

  “Well I guess the surprise worked.”

  The fiancée did not react if she heard me at all. Bumper did flinch and started to say something, but he hesitated. This might have been because of his confusion over my possible rank because of the way I was dressed. My clothes certainly cost more than those of anyone else he had spoken with this evening.

  “So are you guys going to shoot the dog or what? Because I will if need be.” The bodyguard’s heavy revolver was in a shoulder holster which was exposed now that he had opened his jacket.

  “We were just discussing that. Can you tell me if the dog was at all aggressive towards either of you?”

  “It's a trained attack dog, man. It’s aggressive towards everyone.”

  “The opposite should be true. It should have protected your boss from an attack instead of attacking him.” I avoided making any comment on his own dereliction of duty.

  “Look, her cousin works at the kennel and trains guard dogs for a living. He wouldn’t give us a dog he thought would do this. This animal is just nuts. Shoot it.”

  I assured the pair that NOPD had the situation in hand and walked back to where the detectives were beginning to trickle away. The arrival of DEA and FBI brass and Agents had probably suggested that there was going to be a jurisdictional turf battle about any investigation.

  “How are they going to get the dog out?” I asked Avery as I returned to the group, which now included SAC Michael Conroy of the local FBI office. I could not remember ever seeing him at a murder scene before. Tulip was still at Avery’s side as well. She continued to object to any discussion of killing the dog.

  The SWAT commander had been reached by phone and had summarily refused to shoot any dog in front of the bank of news cameras set up and waiting for something interesting to happen. The K-9 unit had also distanced itself.

  “There has to be a better idea than shooting the dog!” my sister now shouted in anger. The detectives and patrolmen around us did not share her view, and seemed to generally favor putting the dog down over simply turning the creature loose in the crowd.

  “I can’t think of one good reason to stop them,” Chief Avery responded just as loudly and then led us both aside. “I do agree that the dog may prove more useful alive than dead if someone trained it to kill Lynley. But, unless one of you has an idea, I’d say that removing it from the vehicle alive seems impossible.”

  The three of us stood there, studying the vehicle and the problem inside, while everyone else continued to kick around ideas on how to shoot the dog. Something had to be done before the vehicle could even be processed as a crime scene. This was likely going to be a dead-end case for any detective that drew it and would probably be closed as a dog attack here and now. The assembly of law enforcement representatives seem to agree that justice, long delayed, finally came to Biggie Charles Lynley.

  “I’ll tell you what. If your sister has convinced you that this is anything more than a dog mauling, you can pursue it. You just have to go arrest the suspect.”

  I could tell that Avery was barely able to hide his glee at having come up with a means of passing any blame and bad publicity for what happened next to the State Patrol instead of his own department. Even Tulip agreed that there were but two likely scenarios here. The first was for the dog to be shot while still in the vehicle and lose any value in proving Biggie’s death was anything but a dog mauling. The second was that the dog would attack anyone trying to remove it from the SUV. That someone would now be me.

  “I have never done a murder investigation and you know it.”

  “I’ll watch over your shoulder. What are the odds this is ever going to wind up in court anyway?” There was no reason to believe the district attorney’s office would want to do anything but pin a medal on anyone I might prove had killed someone as loathsome as Biggie Charles Lynley. Tulip told us we needed to hurry up as the three of us were already late to dinner.

  “Fine, I’ll take the case, but we’ll both probably regret this.” Tulip gave me a peck on the cheek and hugged Avery, who then reluctantly agreed to open the Land Rover’s rear driver’s side door so I could capture my suspect.

  I was now trapped into being the guy who got to arrest a murderous pit bull on live television. The thought of acting like I was going to do so and then shooting it in self-defense came to mind. This was not really an option because my sister was going to tell people about tonight and cast me as either her hero or as a dog killer. I stripped off the white dinner jacket and silk tie I was wearing and handed them to Tulip, telling her to bury me in them if this turned out poorly. I then borrowed a ballistic vest from one of the patrolmen and a set of heavy coveralls and jacket, as well as a helmet with a face shield, boots, and leather gloves, from the bemused firemen. What I really wanted was one of the training suits from the canine unit, but all they offered me one was one of their long-handled animal control snares so this hasty improvisation was going to have to work. I was going to have to rely on how quick the fire department could be with a fire hose because I did not have free hand to hold a pistol. My only hope would be if they could knock the dog off me before I was added to the beast’s dinner menu.

  I would like to describe the way I bravely wrestled the murderous animal into submission and awed the crowd, but I can’t. Avery opened the rear driver’s side door and pressed himself against the front wheel well. The crowd took a collective breath as the door opened, and gave a massive laugh in relief when nothing happened. I looked through the open door and found the dog was now calmly licking its victim's face, which was frozen in an expression of unimaginable terror. The dog had a metal choke collar on, with the heavy leather leash still attached. All I could think to do when I saw the grisly sight was to whistle for the dog to come to me.

  The dog gave me a quizzical look and then simply walked across the bloodied interior and jumped down to sit at my feet. I could tell the breed only by the square shape of the head. The dog’s fur was matted in crimson. He shook himself, spraying blood on everything in a ten foot radius. I exchanged wry grins with Avery. I thanked him for his assistance before turning to the crowd and taking a deep bow to their greatly amused, and quietly relieved, applause. I then marched the four-legged murder suspect to the fire truck.

  Avery handed my borrowed costume back to its owners while I held the dog steady for the Crime Lab technician to photograph it and take swabs of the matted blood on its fur. The first question in the investigation came to mind as one of the firemen washed the blood from the dog’s fur with buckets of water. The coat of short hairs had been dyed a very deep indigo blue, so dark I could not make out the dog’s actual fur color. The technician came and took more photos and wrote down my email address to send me copies of the pictures.

  “Okay, there's your dog, Tulip. Want to hold his leash?” She did not.

  “I’ll call Animal Control in Algiers and see if they can keep him until he can be evaluated,” Tulip offered. We were making up a plan as we went along. “I do some pro bono work for one of the pit bull foster groups and they may be able to help.”

  “Let me know if you need anything else,” Avery said and walked off to smooth the feathers he was going to ruffle when he explained I was going to be investigating the dog’s attack as a homicide instead of his assigning the case to one of the NOPD detectives.

  Everybody had thought this to be a dog attack an hour ago, and nobody had wanted to deal with the dog just ten minutes ago. Now that this had become The Blue Dog Murder Case everyone was going to want a piece of it. The news photographers and tourists were now busy focusing on the exposed interior of the Land Rover. That gory tableau was never going to be broadcast or see the morning paper. The dog had viciously ripped the fat man wide open at the crotch and neck.

  “So, tell me what kind of evaluation is necessary for a pit bull that quite obv
iously ripped a three hundred pound Black man apart like something from a horror movie,” Avery wondered as he came back to where I was standing alone with the dog while the crime lab techs took more photos and blood swabs from its fur. “Crazy is crazy and knowing why it’s crazy isn’t going to matter, right?”

  “I guess they can rule out anything biological that might have triggered the attack. If it wasn’t sick then something else had to make it attack.”

  “Even if you figure out someone planned the attack, what are you going to do with a healthy and sane dog that kills people?” Avery barely caught himself before he started to pet the quiet canine sitting between us.

  “I guess we’d have to find it a new home,” Tulip grinned at Avery. “Say, don’t you have a birthday coming up?”

  THREE

  Chief Avery very reluctantly agreed to stand guard over the pit bull while I went to get my car. The way the dog was grinning at him made him nervous. I was lucky that a dog kennel I had bought for a previous case was still in my garage. The Chief of the Homicide squad remained at the scene with Avery and Tulip. NOPD’s detectives had voiced a collective willingness to write the death off as an animal attack and mocked the idea of a murder investigation but Tulip remained unapologetic about having raised her objections.

  I was back within a matter of minutes and took the leash from Avery. He walked with me to my Cadillac CTS-V sport wagon. I had just purchased the vehicle but was going to have to risk the dog shaking off more blood since my other car was a Cadillac two seat convertible. The dog stepped into the kennel as soon as I pointed to its open door.

  “I have informed our Homicide squad, the FBI and the DEA that you are looking into this officially and not just to pacify your sister. Homicide and the Feds are ready to close the case, so getting any sort of cooperation might be tricky. What do you think should be done first?” Avery helped me lift the kennel into the car once I had the dog secured.

  “We should make sure they process the vehicle as though it really is a murder scene. That car is probably going to give me the only clues I'll get.” I realized Avery was quizzing me like a rookie patrolman. “I’m sure a lot of people wanted Biggie Charles dead. I need to expand the list of suspects beyond the dog, which I doubt had much of a motive.”

  We both looked at the dog in its new kennel and I sensed Avery was ready to agree that the dog had likely not acted alone. Humanizing the critter for a second, I thought the next step in an assassination would be for whomever wanted the dog to kill its master to now be the loudest voice advocating its death. The short list of suspects consisted of the fiancée, the bodyguard, and the cousin that had trained the dog. I was most likely looking at a combination of at least two of these people, but I was not interviewing any of them this evening. My immediate task was to quarantine the dog at the LA/SPCA facility across the river in Algiers as quickly as possible. My mother might forgive me for missing most of my dad's birthday party if I at least made it back in time for the cake cutting.

  The LA/SPCA had built a new animal control center on the West Bank following Hurricane Katrina. The bright modern structure replaced their previous facility located beside the Industrial Canal in the Upper Ninth Ward. That cinder block animal warehouse had filled with flood water and would have drowned every animal there had they not been evacuated in the last hectic hours before the storm hit.

  “I'm bringing a dog in for quarantine, Steve,” I told the after-hours receiving clerk when he answered the buzzer on the rear door. I read his name on the badge over the left breast pocket of his polyester khaki shirt. Steve was a young man of about twenty with a crew cut and a diamond earring in his left earlobe. The look on his face when he peered into the dog kennel changed to the face of someone wishing this had happened on a different shift.

  “Is this the one the cops just called about?” Killer dogs traditionally arrived in the company of uniformed police officers, not shaggy-haired detectives wearing Armani and driving a Cadillac. That I had a badge and gun under my jacket was not going to assuage this young man's qualms.

  “Yes,” I said as I let the dog out of its transport kennel and took hold of its leash.

  The dog was not pulling on the leash, but had actually laid down. It had sat up in the dog cage for the entire fifteen minute drive, seemingly very interested in its surroundings but not in the least interested in me personally. “The dog is evidence in a homicide and it’s definitely the cause of death. We need a toxicology screen run to see if maybe drugs caused the dog to attack. It’s a trained attack dog, so something triggered the incident. Make a note that I am to be the only detective with access to it.”

  “Let's get him cleaned up a bit more and we’ll draw some blood. You won't get the lab results for a day or so.”

  Steve led the way through the neutrally painted hallways to a room set aside for quarantined animals. Steve was so practiced in his actions that I knew he had handled a lot of animals before this. He allowed the dog to sniff his hand before he reached over to replace the dog’s metal collar with a nylon one and a metal lead. Steve made a disparaging remark about metal choke collars as he handed me the collar and heavy leather lead.

  I rinsed the collar’s tags in a hand sink so I could read them There was little harm in doing this as the cleaning removed very little of the blood on the collar itself. There was an engraved metal tag with the name TAZ, the dog's veterinary tags and city license, and a yellow tag for its microchip.

  Steve and I would have liked to have given the poor beast a proper bath and to have removed the blue hair dye from its coat, but I needed to be sure that the forensic team had what they needed before I mucked about with the evidence. Steve approximated the dog's age at almost three, making it nearly fully grown. I left the building still wondering the reason for the dye job, and why Tyshika hadn’t just bought Biggie a puppy for his birthday.

  Three years is a lot of time to trace in a dog's life. The dog may have been trained and sold, and perhaps then returned and sold again. There could prove to be such large gaps in its life that I would never be able to establish an accurate history. The likelihood that Taz had a secret attack trigger nobody knew about was going to make handling the dog risky. I followed Steve and the dog to a room with a couple of other cages, both housing dogs that had also recently attacked humans. All of these dogs faced a certain death sentence unless their time in quarantine showed some reason beyond their own control for their attacks.

  I considered a variety of murder scenarios while I drove back across the river. The fiancée might have wanted to kill Biggie based on some real or imagined insult, but that would have meant kissing off her only means of support. There is a long tradition of bodyguards turning on their masters, but there is usually some sort of profit in doing so that eluded me in this case. I could not imagine what the guy who trained the dog might have had against Biggie, and I wouldn’t think selling killer dogs would help the kennel’s reputation. There was the tantalizing lead that two of the suspects were related, but this could just prove to be a coincidence. I found myself as lost on the matter of likely suspects as I was on a plausible motive. Biggie being gunned down in a drive-by shooting would have made more sense and offered a more traditional route to finding his killer. Someone being imaginative and original about this murder had only made my first murder investigation all the more complicated.

  FOUR

  I returned to the bistro much more concerned about my mother’s disapproval than I was about why dogs kill their owners. This evening’s dinner party was a cornerstone of my mother’s way of handling my father’s disappearance. She refused to listen to even the suggestion that we might never know what occurred. Her steadfast opinion was that something explainable was simply delaying his return, and had done so for just over four years. The presence of his entire family and the empty chair at the head of the table were used to underscore her position on the matter to her children and guests.

  The guest list this evening included Chief Av
ery and select Chiefs of other New Orleans police and fire districts who had been my father’s peers and friends, three or four Federal officials and a couple of judges my father had known socially, my mother’s favorite city councilman, my father's literary agent, a few businessmen who contribute heavily to the charities with which my mother occupies her days, and anyone else she needed to fill out the table. Mother used the introduction of new people as an excuse to exclude from her social circle anyone with whom she had grown bored, or who had made the mistake of letting it be known that they thought my father was dead and not simply missing for so long. My mother’s view is that if Ralph Holland is dead to them then that offender is dead to our family. Mother bases her conviction that my father is still alive primarily on email exchanges she has with a paid online psychic who keeps telling her that his soul “has not crossed over.”

  I found my business partner standing at the bar when I dashed through the door and headed for the staircase to the second floor banquet room. I took this as a very bad sign. The chef should have been in the kitchen overseeing the four course meal my mother was making us pick up the tab for, unless I had already missed the dinner.

  “Am I too late?” I asked Tony so I would know what reception to expect upstairs.

  “Your mother delayed service for an hour. They just cleared the salad course.”

  “Have a drink,” Ryan Kennedy suggested and took a sip of his own. Ryan is one of our best regulars. He comes from a socially prominent East Coast family which followed the time-honored practice of packing its homosexual son off to the South on a generous allowance. He still speaks with a faintly East Coast-Brahman accent and was once the Quarter’s most sought after caterer. He is retired now, but unable to enjoy himself because of the increasingly debilitating ailments which plague him. His hand shook just slightly from the Parkinson’s and the glass of Marquis de Perlade champagne was only going to exacerbate his diabetes. “I have things to discuss with you.”