Gimm half listened to Mencken’s ramblings as she scanned about the yard, the driveway, the street, looking everywhere but toward Granger’s open garage. After Mencken paused for a breath, Gimm turned toward him, thanked him again for his help, and warned the man against glancing into Granger’s garage on his way back inside, as it was a most unpleasant scene—a horrible scene—and one that he would not soon forget.
Mencken stood a moment longer; his navel peeking out below his sweatshirt like a bashful groundhog checking for its shadow. He looked a bit gloomy, realizing he’d just been dismissed by the female cop. But Mencken heeded her warning and shuffled back into his unit without a single glimpse.
Gimm hadn’t meant to be curt with Good Samaritan Mencken. He’d been very helpful, but she couldn’t stand to hear another word about Scott Granger.
A minute later, Wabs was at her side. “He’s dead. Nothing I could do. I think Granger was gassing the dog for whatever fucked-up reason, but the carbon monoxide seeped into the kitchen and did him in as well.”
“Fine by me,” Gimm said. “Poetic justice.”
Officer Wabiszewski said nothing.
Gimm turned around and looked back toward Granger’s garage, back toward the motionless mound of blankets and fur. She could now hear the ambulance off in the distance, dopplering closer. She ran a sleeve across her eyes and … oh my God … there was movement.
“Wabs,” she said, grabbing her partner’s shoulder.
Wabiszewski spun around, spotted what his partner was seeing. “What the hell?”
She thought it could have been a trick of light and shadows at first. The makeshift bed itself appeared to squirm and jostle, and then the scene became clear as the lone puppy wiggled out from the pile of blankets and pillows, tumbled down the side, and meandered erratically toward the driveway, walking on four wobbly legs, heading toward the two police officers.
Gimm’s jaw dropped.
Unbelievable.
She took quick steps toward the garage and then squatted down as the puppy approached her.
“It’s okay, Honey Bear,” Officer Gimm said, holding out a hand. The little dog licked at the police officer’s finger. Gimm took the puppy into her arms. “It’s okay, Honey Bear,” she said again, scratching behind the dog’s ears. “It’s going to be okay.”
A moment later, the ambulance arrived.
CHAPTER 3
“The lady cop keeps calling back, Mace.” Paul Lewis was the executive director of CACC—Chicago Animal Care and Control. “Says she works long hours but wants us to know she’ll take the golden retriever if no one else will.”
I nodded.
“I told her the dog-whisperer was stopping by today.”
“Oh God, Paul,” I said, cringing, “don’t call me that.” I’d known Paul for several years. We moved about in the same canine community. I own a dog training school, and maybe half my income comes from doing work for the city.
“It gives you an air of mystique.”
“It makes me sound like a dick.”
“There is that.”
“So what the hell happened?” I asked, having only received the nutshell version about the maltreated golden retriever puppy over the phone.
Paul handed me a photocopy of his typed notes. “I got this mostly from the woman that had been staying at the townhome and, of course, from the police report.”
Half a dozen bullet-pointed paragraphs took up the bulk of Paul’s sheet. I’ve witnessed him give PowerPoint presentations and am aware of his fondness for emphasizing words and phrases or, if he gets really excited, bold-facing and italicizing and underlining entire sentences—sometimes even complete paragraphs. And, if Paul’s had his two cups of morning coffee, he’ll toss in those arrow bullets and make each of them the size of Mount St. Helens. Today’s composition employed a copious amount of bold text with only a smattering of underlined nouns.
I wanted to ask why he felt the need to short-sheet italics but instead followed along in Paul’s handout as he walked me through the highlights.
“The puppy’s previous owners—for all of a week—were a single mother and her six-year-old son. The woman was a secretary at the same company where this jackass Granger had worked. Her and her boy had been living in a small condo with her sister—evidently, not much fun. She and her son had a two-month wait on an upcoming rental home and should never have moved in with the jackass, but the woman and Granger had hit it off at work. They’d been dating. Once she and her son moved in, everything went to hell. Turned out Granger was a classic Jekyll and Hyde—reserved and pleasant during the workday or on dinner or movie dates, but he drank to inebriation when at home. And the more he drank, the more bent out of shape he seemed to get with them … with the world … the universe. Toys left on the family room floor spelled a nightlong harangue, a bottle of face cream on the bathroom countertop turned into an endless tirade.”
“The guy had them living on eggshells.”
“And pins and needles.” Paul continued, “But the puppy was the final straw. Early last week the woman and her son had brought home—with Granger’s approval for crying out loud—this golden retriever puppy. The woman’s sister worked at a veterinary clinic, so the two of them had come up with the grand scheme of breeding the pup’s mother with a stud dog in order to sell the puppies off, bank some much-needed cash, as well as keep one for her son. You know how puppies are born with their eyes shut and ear canals closed—basically blind and deaf during those first weeks of life. And Illinois law stipulates a puppy shall not be separated from its mother until the pup has attained the age of eight weeks. Therefore, at exactly the eighth week mark, the woman and her son brought a little golden-furred package to Granger’s townhome, setting the puppy up in Granger’s previously pristine, debris-free garage. According to her, you’d have thought they had burned his place to the ground.”
“She should have moved back in with her sister.”
“She’d already made up her mind to run out the clock until her rental unit commenced and then get the hell away from the guy. Her observations over the course of the past month had evolved from,” Paul glanced down and quoted directly from his notes, “You sure do drink a lot to You really ought to ease up a bit to I think you have a problem to, finally … You can be a mean drunk. As you can imagine, everything came to a head the other night, culminating in Granger kicking at her son.”
“What a gem.”
“Anyway, that was all she wrote,” Paul said. “The woman bundled up the boy, stuffed him and a suitcase into her car, and made it clear to Granger they were finito. Though she’d packed in a hurry, it’d been implied that she’d be back for the rest of their gear as well as the puppy first thing in the morning … after the jackass had sobered up.”
“Which clearly never happened.”
“You know the rest,” Paul said, “but the woman shared some dime-store psychiatry with me. Granger never talked about his past, but she believes he’d suffered some emotional or physical abuse as a child … and it warped his psyche. Instead of seeking therapy, Granger self-medicated—he drowned his hurt in alcohol,” Paul concluded, dropping his notes on his desk. “I guess after they’d vamoosed, Granger got it in his inebriated skull that he’d show her a mean drunk she’d never forget.”
While Paul brought me up to date on the golden retriever puppy I’d come to visit, I sat in his guest chair and steamed, like veggies in a pot. I didn’t give a damn about Granger’s childhood. In my book, cruelty to animals merits the death penalty. If I had my druthers, we’d hang the Grangers of this world in the village square like Christmas ornaments. And if this particular jackass hadn’t managed to punch his own ticket—had not Darwined himself out of existence—I’d have driven to Forest Glen and popped him in the mouth.
“So what about the woman and her kid?” I asked. “Why aren’t they taking the golden?”
“She feels awful about that night, said it was her fault leaving the puppy alone with t
he lunatic, but they were heading to a hotel. Never thought he’d do anything like that and—well, the woman and her son have been through a difficult situation, are currently in-between homes, and therefore no doggie.”
“Can’t blame her, I guess.”
“I got the sense she hadn’t told her son what really happened. They’d been through a bad enough ordeal, and she probably doesn’t want to heap more trauma on the poor kid.” Paul shrugged. “Said she would get another puppy from the original litter when they move into more permanent housing, probably let the kid believe it’s the same dog. I suspect she’s afraid, after what occurred, that the dog has special needs or is brain damaged or something.”
We left Paul’s corner office and headed toward the south side of the building, where the kennels were kept. Chicago Animal Care and Control was a fifty-four-thousand-square-foot facility on South Western Avenue. CACC acts as a shelter and can house over five hundred animals in separate kennels at any given time. It’s also the command center for Paul’s squadron of animal control officers, with a fleet of nearly twenty CACC trucks and an extended van equipped for off-site adoptions and vaccination clinics.
I have a handful of friends I consider close, of which Paul is front and center. He likes dogs and, as far as I can tell, there are only two kinds of people in this crazy world of ours—those who like dogs … and assholes. Paul has about ten years on me; he’s pushing forty, is a good Catholic boy, and has either four or five kids—forgive my mental block, but I’m a guy—that are in either grade school or junior high. Paul’s wife, Sharla, is one hell of a cook as Paul’s expanding waistline can attest. As head of CACC, he always sports a suit and a tie, whereas you’ll never catch me out of a pair of jeans, hiking boots, and, usually, a fresh T-shirt. Paul is what you’d call well-groomed, never a five o’clock shadow and every hair on his salon-cut head perfectly in place. On the other hand, I’m lucky if I remember to break out the Gillette twice a week or finger comb my thatch of brown after a morning shower.
“So you’re going to make the pitch,” Paul said as he held open a metal door leading into one of the facility’s numerous corridors that were lined with kennels. Chicago Animal Care and Control housed predominantly dogs and puppies, cats and kittens, but the occasional coyote or raccoon would also be listed among its alumni.
“I’m going to make the pitch,” I replied.
The kennel rooms contained five-foot-high cages on both sides of a lengthy hallway that smelled of fur, dog food, piss, and cleansers. Each cage was a four-by-four-foot square with four inches of tiled concrete on each side and a cement wall running along the back—there had never been a prison breakout. A rectangular slot at the bottom allowed food and water dishes to be slipped inside. In front of the cages ran a narrow trough, all of three inches deep, that emptied into drains and made hosing out the kennels an easier task.
I’d once made an offhand comment regarding the jail-like look of CACC’s kennel rooms that had sent Paul into a huff, and I wound up on the receiving end of a ten-minute lecture on annual budgets and the dire need for volunteers. Today, I spotted a volunteer at the far end of the corridor, checking on the animals and filling bowls from a tin watering can. A dinged and dented mop bucket awaited use at a faucet station at the halfway mark in the kennel passageway—it was just a matter of time before it became a sought-after item.
The corridor was alive with the sounds of snarls, growls, and barks mixed with whines, yaps, and periodic yelps—an off-tune Von Trapp family gone canine. It wasn’t as shrill as it was on other days when I’d visited the facility, perhaps a notch more boisterous than some. Whenever Paul guilts me into pulling a volunteer shift, I have the ability to tune out the noise, or, more often than not, I crank some Lynyrd Skynyrd on my earbuds.
Dogs evolved from wolves tens of thousands of years ago. In fact, the domestication of wolves set the whole shebang in motion, but somewhere along the way canine linguistics hit a fork in the road—with dogs barking while wolves continued to howl or keep quiet. Sure, wolf cubs bark, but mature wolves know that if danger is present, they should just shut the hell up and stay hidden until the threat has passed. Whereas man’s best friend tends to bark at threats until they go away.
I once caught a show on TV where they mumbled something about being able to interpret six different emotions per the sound of a dog’s bark—you know, anger, fear, happiness, whatnot—but I suspect there are many more.
CACC’s newest arrival was located in the second kennel on the right, the first dog nearest the door, likely per Paul’s instructions. Plastic sheaths were affixed to the center of each cage at gut level. These clear casings made it easy for Paul’s crew to slide in a slip of paper containing vital statistics on the guest du jour—name, age, weight, sex, shots, temperament, you name it. The vitals on today’s visitor referenced the puppy’s age at nine weeks and a few days, but none of the other fields had been filled in.
I unzipped my duffel bag, removed a yoga mat, and unrolled it in front of the kennel cage, making exceedingly certain it dippeth not in the runoff trough, as I knew firsthand what nasty biological waste flowed down that tainted river. Working with dogs can get painful on the knees, so gear like yoga mats and a set of carpenter kneepads are my tricks of the trade. I spread out on my stomach in front of the cage, eye level with the kennel’s newest resident, while Paul crossed his arms, leaned against the metal door, and watched.
I stared at the golden retriever. Despite the sound and fury of the corridor—signifying territorial disputes, greetings, alarm or fear, boredom or unhappiness—the newest resident lay silent and motionless. The poor thing was in a fetal position at the far end of the kennel. Her food and water bowls appeared untouched. Her head lay on front paws, one eye peeking out in my direction. Poor kid—taken from her mother and siblings, then a turbulent acclimation into a new family, quickly culminating in some nutcase trying to asphyxiate her.
We studied each other for a time.
“Hi, little girl,” I said after a minute. “My name is Mason Reid, but my friends call me Mace. Paul told me all about you, about what happened, which is heartbreaking—a damned shame—and you look like you could use a best friend.”
I took a jar of peanut butter out of my duffel and grabbed one of the numerous Milk-Bone treats that floated freely in the bag. I popped the lid, dipped the small snack in peanut butter, and shoved it into the kennel. I’d done this routine at least a thousand times. It was idiotproof, after all, who could refuse peanut butter plus Milk-Bone?
The puppy didn’t move a muscle.
“I’ll just let that sit there for whenever you feel the need,” I said. “I wish a Scooby snack could heal all wounds, but, sadly, it doesn’t work that way.” I shook my head. “Anyway, it was nice of Paul to give me a call. Paul’s a good guy, even if he plays blackjack like a four-year-old. You won’t believe this, but he once split a pair of tens—a winning hand—even the freaking dealer tried to talk him out of it.”
Still no response and I finished the story about the director of CACC’s defeat at the blackjack table to fill the void.
Paul shrugged and said, “I felt lucky that night.”
“I felt embarrassed sitting next to some guy who would do something like that. Anyway, Paul called because he knows I need a new best friend. You see, I had an English springer named Amie.”
“Pure Prairie League?” Paul asked.
“Yup.”
“But they’re not country.”
“American country rock,” I said. “I don’t only go country. You remember Jude, my Australian shepherd?”
“Great country band, them there Beatles.”
“Paul’s a good guy,” I said again, “but what he knows about country music you could stick in a bug’s nose.” I refocused on the frightened puppy eyeing me from the back of the cage. “Now, Amie was a Mensa-level spaniel, a brilliant sniffer dog, but recently she got sick, renal failure—you know, the kidneys. Amie was only nine. And … well,
now I need a new best friend.”
The retriever’s head had slowly risen by this point, and her two eyes now stared into mine.
“You have eyes that look like heaven,” I said and stared another long second. “Elvira.”
“Statler Brothers?” Paul asked.
“The Oak Ridge Boys made it famous, but it was written by a country gent named Dallas Frazier.” I slipped a forefinger into the cage and pushed the peanut butter treat an inch or two in the golden pup’s direction. “You come home with me and we’ll call you Elvira. You’re a beautiful little girl, and anyone would be blessed to adopt you. You’d score a walk now and again, maybe chase a Frisbee every night. Maybe one of the kids would even sneak you real food, but I suspect you’d also spend a great deal of time in a kennel like this one. Sure, there’s nothing better than dropping a load in the yard and watching your master step in it, but that gag gets old pretty quick.”
The puppy stood up and gave her head a couple quick shakes, as if to blow away the cobwebs.
“However, if you adopted me, Elvira, life would be different. Us two would play a lot of games, lots and lots of games—training games—and I’d toss treats your way every time you learned something new. And we’d master that beautiful-dazzling snout of yours.”
The puppy took a few steps toward me, leaned forward, and licked at the peanut butter treat.
“You’d live with me and a few other friends. You’ll get a kick out of Sue, who thinks he’s King Kong, and I’ve a couple of short-haired farm collies—sister collies, actually—named Delta Dawn and Maggie May. They’ll mother you to death. And guess what else will happen? After our training games, you’ll become an HRD—a human remains detection dog. And you know what we do for a living?”
I slipped my forefinger back into the kennel. She stared up at me for another second, and then she gave my finger a quick lick.
“We find dead bodies.”
PART TWO
The Finders Page 2
