Howl Deadly

by Linda O. Johnston

“Some stuff on guys in federal penitentiaries with the initials J.D. who’ve been released lately. And one who escaped.”

  “Did any—” I had to be careful how I phrased this, since I’d promised Dante not to divulge what he’d said. Even though there hadn’t been much substance to it. “Did any come from an interesting background, not what you’d anticipate of a guy who went bad?”

  I heard her laugh. “If you mean, did any come from places other than gang ghettos, the answer is yes. You can’t always generalize where crooks come from, Kendra. Many come from where you’d expect—hard childhoods, broken homes, the wrong kinds of cronies. But sometimes people just want to find an easy way to get rich and think they can pull it off. Or they have hot tempers, and attack or kill someone else. Whatever. Anyway, I’ll e-mail you what I found—sanitized a bit, of course.”

  Which meant I wouldn’t be able to tell which Web sites she had hacked into. Not that I cared. Her form of redacting didn’t generally erase anything of importance to me.

  “Thanks, Althea,” I said, and absolutely meant it.

  In this day of instant communication, I wasn’t disappointed. An e-mail from her appeared almost as soon as we’d hung up. I downloaded it onto my computer and started sifting through it.

  There was a Jerry Davis who had been sentenced to a year for getting mad and destroying a public mailbox. I assumed there was more to the crime than that, but in any event he had recently been released.

  Juan Dorez had been sentenced for helping his cousin sneak into the U.S. without appropriate immigration papers. He, too, was out now.

  Jack Daniels—gee, another common name like Jon Doe’s—had been convicted of counterfeiting money. He was a definite maybe, since something like that could be trumped up by those in authority, but somehow that didn’t sound like it.

  But then I got to two who sounded like actual possibilities. Jamison Dubbs was convicted of conspiracy in a federal racketeering matter, sentenced to seven years in the low-security Federal Correctional Institution at Lompoc, California, and recently placed on parole. And Jesse Dryler had been convicted of tax evasion and had escaped from the Federal Correctional Institution in Terminal Island, California.

  These were two guys I had to research further. Could one have created the new identity of Jon Doe, along with a scheme to get back at Dante and Brody for snitching to federal government superiors who monitored the agency for which they worked? That was what Dante had suggested.

  I stared at the names on my computer. I’d Google these guys, see if I could find anything more about them.

  Like what agency they might have worked for, and whether it was the kind for which Dante and Brody might have worked as well. And whether the agency still existed, and if anyone else had been outed for illicit activities, and—

  Hold it, Kendra.

  Oh, yeah, I’d follow these strings to see if I could tie anything up. Only I absolutely hoped I’d be wasting my time on a useless dead end.

  Since if one of these was truly Jon Doe—an alumnus of a government agency that had once employed Dante and Brody—and had come after them in retaliation for a perceived wrong, that could mean one or both of them could be guilty of murder.

  I decided to do a little digging at home tonight—then hurry out to HotWildlife as soon as I could the next day, to help Dante dig into other possible suspects.

  And hope we were immediately successful in solving the murder. Together.

  With an as yet unidentified third party the person of absolute interest in this case.

  Chapter Twenty-one

  MAYBE I SHOULD have backed off and gone to bed. But I spent another hour attempting to learn anything else useful about the two J.D.s on my radar: Jamison Dubbs and Jesse Dryler.

  And found nearly nothing.

  I wanted to zero in on Jesse Dryler. First of all, tax evasion could have been trumped up by agency apes he worked for. Plus, he’d escaped.

  But then again, the conspiracy theory circling Jamison Dubbs gave me pause. His path into and out of prison sounded potentially less controversial than Dryler’s, so if he was his higher-ups’ scapegoat, they’d been somewhat gentler with him.

  A con who’d escaped seemed more likely to me to go after those he blamed for sending him to prison—like Dante and Brody.

  But whichever one it was, the guy was now as dead as—well, Jon Doe.

  I felt a shiver go through me. So who had warned me off with a note on my windshield? Not Dante or Brody. They’d both know that attempting to scare me wouldn’t get me to back off.

  But what if one of their previous employers had decided to eradicate the guy who’d been their scapegoat? Maybe they’d attempted to get him to back off from seeking revenge against his prior coworkers, he’d told them to go to hell, and they’d made sure he went there instead. And then they didn’t want someone like me to butt in and find out who they were. If so, that warning could mean that Jon Doe’s fate awaited me, too …

  Beside me on the floor, beside my tiny home desk, Lexie started to stir. “Time for our last constitutional of the night?” I asked, needing to get my mind off this nasty stuff.

  She barked her assent, so we went out for a walk. On my property. I have to admit, with all this research, and after the note on my windshield, I felt rather spooked.

  But did that stop me from continuing my investigation the next day? No way! I’d simply have to stay alert.

  First, though, before Lexie and I started our trek to HotWildlife and our escapade to watch Dante’s back, I made some calls. The first was to Rachel, right next door. She bounded onto the lawn with Beggar a minute later. “You could have just rung the bell,” she said. “My dad’s out of town, as usual.”

  “I just wanted to confirm again, before I leave, that you can handle all my pet-sitting this week, starting in the morning. With Wanda, of course.” She was next on my list to call.

  “I told you yesterday I’d do it.” My young friend’s pretty face started to pout. “And, no, I don’t have any auditions scheduled for this week. The last one I went on, well, the producers are still thinking about who they want. And of course the next Animal Auditions season won’t start for a few weeks—and I love the doggy scenario we decided on. So, yes, I’m on board. You can trust me.”

  “You know I do.” I gave her a hard hug, then smiled at her. “But you also know I’m nervous and even a little compulsive when it comes to ensuring that my pet charges are taken care of.”

  “I know.” She was also smiling now. “That’s what makes you such a great sitter, Kendra. But it’ll be okay. Go ahead and find that mama wolf, and whoever killed Jon Doe. Then you can come back and take over everything—because I’m convinced I’m going to land a great TV or film role really soon.”

  Her huge-eyed optimism was nearly contagious, and I felt a whole lot better about everything, especially when Wanda, too, reassured me about all the pet-sitting she’d do for me this week.

  I was in an amazingly great mood when Lexie and I got on the road fairly soon after that. I was on a week’s vacation. With Dante. Sort of.

  The quicker we figured out where mama wolf had gone and who had killed Jon Doe, the sooner I’d be able to relax. Or at least I’d be able to, once the proper parties were arrested.

  I speeded up and set my cruise control, still carefully checking the road around me to ensure I was driving safely.

  Lexie was blocked in the back seat for her safety. I was in good shape to get to HotWildlife and Dante without incident.

  But … I could only hope that the answers would be easily ascertained first thing. It wasn’t like they’d popped out at me the last couple of times I’d been there.

  And I still needed more specifics on the two Jon Doe suspects—preferably without pointing to Dante or Brody. But maybe I could get Dante to be more disclosing about J.D.’s identity and his own past if I showed that my sources could get to the bottom of who he was and what he’d done if I worked on them enough.

&nbs
p; And so, I called another of those sources as we got on the freeway. “Hi, Ned,” I said. “How’s it going?”

  “I wondered when you’d call, Kendra,” he said, not sounding especially happy to hear from me. “Did you hear from Frank Hura? I’m a little surprised that he’d talk to you about this, but I’m beginning to think the guy’ll gloat to everyone he can think of when it suits him.”

  “Gloat? About what?”

  Ned paused, then said, “So you haven’t heard from him?”

  “’Fraid not. But I’d love to hear what he told you.”

  A loud sigh, one I heard plainly. And then, “Well, it’s about the real identity of Jon Doe.”

  “No kidding?” Heck, here I was, working so hard to figure it out, and the best I’d done so far was narrow it down to two guys who’d served time in federal prisons.

  On the other hand, it wasn’t as if I worked in law enforcement and had easy access to all pertinent databases.

  “So who was he really?” I attempted to sound nonchalant, even though Ned would know otherwise.

  “Well, he didn’t exactly tell me.” Damn! Or maybe good. Maybe this was simply a ploy between cop types to annoy one another. “But he did give me some interesting background.”

  Ned proceeded to fill me in on some stuff that sounded like the little that Dante had already revealed: Jon Doe was actually a guy Dante and Brody had worked with at some government agency before they had blown the whistle on the whole lawbreaking group. Doe was the scapegoat and went to prison, et cetera.

  Only … well, the upshot was a whole lot different than what I wanted to hear.

  “Hura believes that Doe, or whoever he was, planned his revenge on Dante for a long time. Maybe he hoped to get Brody with it, too. He found out what Dante was up to these days, got himself some successive jobs with wildlife sanctuaries, and waited for his opportunity to get Dante—probably kill him. Only, his disguise wasn’t as good as he hoped. Dante recognized him, and killed him first. End of Doe and of the story, except for what’ll now happen to Dante.”

  I slammed on the brake pedal reflexively, wanting to stop the direction of this ugly flow of information. Not that causing an accident would do that, of course. I glanced into my rearview mirror. Fortunately, the driver behind me was smart enough not to be tailgating. Even so, I no longer felt as if I was driving safely. I carefully pulled into the slow lane and started crawling along with the flow of traffic there.

  “But, Ned,” I soon said, glad I was still speaking hands-free. “Even if that is the situation and Dante did kill the guy, it was self-defense.”

  “Not necessarily.” I already knew what Ned was about to say. “If Doe had attacked Dante and Dante fought him off, sure. If Dante simply figured out who he was and killed him before Doe got to him first … well, that defense isn’t likely to work. Anyway, I’m fairly sure that Hura is just lining his ducks in a row and is about to arrest your buddy Dante.”

  I GOT OFF the freeway soon thereafter for a potty break at a fast food restaurant. A cup of coffee. And a few minutes to stop shaking. Maybe.

  Poor Lexie, in the back of my Escape, obviously sensed my mood. I tried to calm her, too, by taking her for a nice walk.

  While I was stopped, I tried calling Dante. I wanted to check up on him. Warn him.

  Hear his voice before he was incarcerated.

  But although I did hear his voice, it was only in a voice mail message. I left a brief, cheerful request for him to call me … as I wondered where the heck he was.

  I called Megan Zurich to see if he happened to be with her, but he wasn’t. I told her I would see her soon, since I would be in the area.

  I didn’t hear back from Dante for the rest of the drive. As I pulled into the HotWildlife parking lot, though, my cell phone resounded in its hands-free incarnation.

  I pushed the appropriate button to respond, not even glancing to see if the caller ID said it was him. “Hi,” I said, knowing I sounded relieved. “Look, I have some things to talk to you about, and—”

  But it wasn’t Dante’s voice that suddenly sounded. I didn’t recognize it at all, possibly because it sounded metallic and disguised.

  “You don’t listen to warnings, Ms. Ballantyne,” it said. “That means I’ll have to take action. One more chance to get your nose out of the matters going on at HotWildlife, or you’re going to be in the same condition as Jon Doe. Soon.”

  Chapter Twenty-two

  WELL, HELL. I especially hate menacing communications. Threats. They remind me of just how vulnerable I really am.

  Sure, somehow I seem fated to investigate deaths happening all around me. But I’m not like all those plucky women you see on TV or in films who know every aspect of self-defense, and can use their skills to kick weapons out of an assailant’s hand on a moment’s notice.

  I can aim an appropriate kick at a guy’s most sensitive areas when I have to. But here, with notes on my windshield and anonymous intimidating phone calls … I admit it, I was scared.

  Still sitting in my Escape, doors locked and Lexie unhappily attempting to get attention in the back seat, I called Dante again. He looked as if he could fight off angry hordes. If not, he could pay someone else to do it. But once again, I got his voice mail.

  Where was he?

  I wasn’t going to accomplish anything out here except additional stewing, so I snapped Lexie onto her leash and we headed swiftly for the gate into HotWildlife. The parking lot was far from full on this Tuesday morning, and no other person was out there but me. I kept looking everywhere, on full alert.

  I didn’t recognize the volunteer at the entrance. She didn’t recognize me, either, and had to call Megan to get me through without paying.

  That meant additional time in the open, which I didn’t like at all.

  But Megan gave the go-ahead almost immediately, and Lexie and I dashed through the gate. We went to Megan’s office to see what she knew about Dante’s whereabouts.

  The pretty blond sanctuary administrator appeared awfully tired. She wore one of her standard safari outfits, and barely rose from behind her desk as we walked in. “Hi, Kendra,” she said. “Are you here to help follow up on the lead on our missing wolf?”

  I felt myself blink at her in astonishment. “You have a lead?”

  “Guess you aren’t,” she said, a wry smile on her face. “I assumed Dante would have told you.”

  “Then that’s where he is?” I sank onto one of the chairs facing her. Lexie sat down at my feet, looking up anxiously. Guess my tone told her I was confused, which confused her, too.

  “That’s what I understand.”

  “What was the clue?” Maybe I should dash off to find Dante, and help.

  “That’s the thing,” she said. “I don’t know. No one bothered to tell me, but half the staff took off to look for her … again. I don’t suppose you’d be interested in helping me feed the pups, would you?” She eyed me pleadingly.

  “I sure would!” But first … “Only, please give me a few minutes. I need to make a couple of phone calls.”

  Not that I harbored any hope that calling in the cavalry would help with my latest threat, but I nevertheless took Lexie into an unused office near Megan’s, sat behind the empty desk, and phoned Sergeant Frank Hura. “And you’re back at HotWildlife, prying into official business again?” he demanded.

  “I am back at HotWildlife,” I confirmed, ignoring the rest of his question. “If I come to your station with my cell phone, can you trace who placed the last call to me? There was no caller ID number, and it said ‘blocked.’”

  “Then, gee, it must have been blocked. And I don’t think it’s necessary for us to waste our time trying to figure out how to get around that. So let me give you some advice, Kendra. Go back to L.A. and tell Ned your troubles. Maybe he’ll try the trace for you. But you seem to get your threats here, in San Bernardino County. That should tell you something—like, stay home.”

  “Thanks for the suggestions, Frank,” I s
aid sarcastically, unhappy that our initial amiability had deteriorated this badly. “And for all your hard work attempting to protect a citizen who’s visiting your community. I’m sure we’ll talk again soon.” I hung up.

  And looked down toward Lexie, who attempted to cheer me by standing on her hind legs, front paws on me and tail wagging eagerly. “You’re right, girl,” I said. “I won’t let that dratted detective get to me.”

  I did, however, take an iota of his advice. I called Ned. “We didn’t even get into the Jon Doe-J.D. stuff specifically,” I said after informing him I’d just spoken to Sergeant Hura. “I only told him of the latest threat I received, also in the parking lot of HotWildlife, but this one was by phone. He wouldn’t even try to trace it for me, since the number was blocked. Can your tech guys do that if I give you my number?”

  “Whoa,” Ned said. “Let’s go back to those threats.” Oops. Hadn’t I mentioned the first to him? I’d informed Sergeant Hura, which had gotten me exactly nowhere. And in between, I knew Ned had also spoken with Frank Hura. But their topics of conversation, although related, hadn’t officially included me. I didn’t recall expressly letting Ned know. So perhaps this was the first time he’d heard of the note. It certainly was, regarding the call. “So someone is warning you not to poke your nose in where it doesn’t belong? I hope you got the message, Kendra. I’m not sure what’s going on, but there are obviously complications in this situation—of a kind where I probably couldn’t help you even if I wanted to. That means the answer’s no, by the way. I’m not even going to attempt to get someone to find out that call’s origination. Why don’t you just do as Frank said, and return to L.A. like a good girl?”

  Talk about condescension! I thought Ned and I were better buddies than that by now.

  “Thanks for the advice, Ned.” I didn’t even attempt to insert cheerfulness into my tone. “See ya.” I ended the call.

  So now what should I do? I felt somewhat stuck.

  A knock sounded on the office door. “Kendra?” asked a male voice—which moved me to the edge of my seat, but only for an instant; it wasn’t Dante.