Nothing To Sniff At (Animal Instincts Book 5) (2 page)

I explained the situation to Michelson, and he put Barkley up on the examining table. He began with a fairly routine examination, the type I’d seen vets do on Bruno and Bess for ages. Barkley was less than cooperative. He licked Michelson a few times and then abruptly rolled over and offered his belly for a rub. When he didn’t get what he wanted, he tried to jump down from the table until we held him in place.

The vet stopped the examination at this point. Michelson rubbed his chin for a long moment and then looked at me. “I have a very simple diagnosis why Barkley isn’t sniffing drugs for Officer Brate. This beagle isn’t Barkley.”

I looked down at the dog, but I had no frame of reference in which to determine if he was lying or not. Unless they’re yours, dogs tend to look somewhat alike. “How do you know?”

Michelson pointed to Barkley’s belly. “For starters, Barkley was neutered as a puppy. I did it myself. You don’t want a drug dog to be distracted by his love life. That’s not a good thing at all. This dog hasn’t been fixed. Those things don’t grow back on their own. This is a different dog.”

I nodded. All of my pets were appropriately fixed, but I’d seen the misery that some people had from not fixing their pets. The owners forgot that these were animals, who possessed animal instincts. Unless you planned to breed the dog for show or breeding, you didn’t want all of those instincts popping up at inconvenient times.

Michelson apparently read what was going on in my mind and answered. “The markings are amazing. I could see why Brate would have mixed them up, but this is not a neutered dog, not by a long shot.”

I started to open my mouth, and Michelson nodded. “If you want to know my opinion, this dog probably came from the same litter as Barkley or is a close relative of Barkley. There’s no way that this resemblance is a coincidence. This switch was done to try to get away with passing one dog off as the other. If you hadn’t brought him here, no telling how long it would have been before someone figured out that this wasn’t your dog.”

The words “your dog” made me cringe, because right now, I had a dog who was not police property and with no known address in my custody. I did not like the thought of how this could end up. While I liked the dog immensely, I did not want a third dog. I’d adopted Bess after finding her at the scene of a puppy mill, but she’d been a Corgi like my other dog and desperately in need of care. This Beagle’s barking would drive me and my other pets crazy. Two dogs were a handful. Three dogs would be a nightmare for me. I wanted to get him back to Officer Brate’s custody as soon as possible.

I took the dog off the table. Michelson agreed to bill the police department, and I decided to drop this dog off with Brate. Maybe he could give me a timeframe of when this might have happened. Plus it would give me a chance to return the pet to him.

Brate was in the station when I returned with the dog. He met me at the door, and we went outside to walk non-Barkley. While the mid-November wind was cold, I understood that he didn’t want others to hear what was going on.

“So what did you find out? What did Michelson say?” he asked, as soon as we’d turned the corner from the station.

“This isn’t Barkley,” I said matter-of-factly.  “He’s a doppelganger, if you can use that to talk about dogs, but your dog is missing. This little guy hasn’t been neutered. Barkley has.”

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.