Shepherd's Crook (10 page)

twenty-eight

I squared my shoulders
and walked to within speaking range of the two men. The skinny one's threatening gesture had confirmed my assessment of them as thugs, and a strange brew of fear and anger was whooshing through my veins. They might scare me, but I wouldn't let them scare me off.

“What are you doing?” It was a silly question, since Ray's truck door was open, and it was now obvious that they had jimmied the storage room door as well.

“Just out for a walk,” said Skinny. He had eyes too pale to be called blue and a ragged scar from
jaw-hinge
to nose.

“In Ray Turnbull's truck?”
Shhh, Janet. Don't be foolhardy.
“This is private property,” I said, surprised at how firm my voice sounded, “I've already called the police, so I think you'd better leave.”

Skinny's buddy slammed the truck door and turned toward me, hands in his pockets. Jay stood up and stepped between me and the men, and I could almost feel his muscles tense through the air
between us. The fat man glanced at my dog, then back at me. “You own this place?” I guess I expected him to have a Joe Viterelli sort of voice, low and gruff, but he sounded more like Porky Pig. “Cuz if you don't, maybe
you
the one better leave.”

“I have the owner's permission to be here.”
Sort of. I would have if I had called him.
“And I'm sure you don't.”

Fatman seemed to consider that, but Skinny let out a goofy laugh and turned deadly serious. “Maybe we should have a little chat, long as we're all here together.” Before I could ask what on earth we would chat about, he continued. “Where's your friend, what's her name these days? Summer?”

Summer?
Of course it made sense they knew her, or at least knew who she was, if they knew Evan and Ray, but what did he mean about her name? “I have no idea. I haven't seen her since Sunday.”

“Know where we can find her?” It was the fat one, and I realized with a start that he had edged into a position slightly behind me, although well out of reach.

“As I said, no idea.” I had just pulled my phone out and was trying to decide whether to call
9-1
-1 or Hutchinson when it rang and I answered. “Ah, Detective Hutchinson. Good timing … Remember those two men I mentioned?” The goons glanced at one another while I kept talking. “They're here at the crime scene …” I turned my gaze past Skinny to the road. “Yes, I see you … Good, you can talk to them when you get here.”

Both men turned their heads toward the road. It was empty but for a black SUV approaching in the distance. Skinny tipped an imaginary hat at me before they climbed into their gray sedan and drove away, and I restarted my lungs and spoke into the phone again. “You still there?”

“What's going on? Are you okay?” It was Tom.

I filled him in.

“I think you should get out of there.”

A giggling fit took me, but I managed to say, “I scared them away.”

“You're sure they're gone?”

“I watched them drive away. I'm fine.” Silence. “Really, everything's fine. Jay and I are going to walk around the property and then I'm outta here.” I promised to call when I left.

I let Jay off his leash and started down the narrow
grass-studded
dirt lane that skirted the field. Jay trotted ahead but never got more than fifty or so feet away before he checked in with me. We had been walking for five minutes or so when he stopped short ten yards in front of me, head high, ears forward, body still. The cornrow stubble ran at a right angle to the lane and blocked my view of whatever had his attention. He glanced at me, then turned, crouching slightly, muscles tense. I scanned the field but saw nothing other than the broken gold of last year's crop. Then something moved. I caught bare glimpses as something black rose above the
chopped-off
stalks and disappeared. Again.

Bonnie
.

twenty-nine

Jay leaped out of
his crouch and raced into the field, and I started to run toward the spot where he had started. Then a scream, and an explosion of black against the pale blue sky. I stopped and swore.
Crows.
I walked on to where I could look down the row to where Jay was now sniffing something, his back end turned toward me. More dead things, I thought, stepping into the field. The ground was borderline muddy from the rain earlier, and globs of heavy clay glued themselves to my shoes. I stopped, debating whether to continue or retreat.

I called my dog, and he looked over his shoulder at me. “Come,” I called. He looked at the thing on the ground, but turned and came running. “Good boy,” I said, scratching his ear and squinting to make out what was so interesting to dogs and birds. My heart did a little flip when I saw that it, too, was black. I ignored the muck and walked on. Jay trotted ahead, again blocking my view. He stooped, turned toward me with something in his mouth, and trotted back. As he closed the distance, the object in his grasp became clear, and I whispered, “Thank God.” Jay sat in front of me and dropped the dead crow at my feet. We left it there, and as we resumed our walk on the
grass-strewn
lane, I recalled reading that crows and other corvids mourn their dead. I felt a tinge of guilt for having crashed the funeral.

The rest of our reconnaissance was uneventful and unrewarding, and I felt sadness drop over me like wet wool. I stared at the ground as I trudged toward my van.
What else can go wrong?
I wondered. No sign of Bonnie. Her owner dead, apparently not by his own hand after all. And the joy of bringing a new puppy into our lives—
our
lives, I acknowledged—dampened by the city council's arbitrary pet limit. We now exceeded it, and Tom had two weeks to get out of his house. Under normal circumstances, we would just move forward and figure it out. But Councilman Martin's arrival next door made our situation anything but normal. One thing I knew for sure was that if the bill passed, Tom and I would rehome ourselves before we'd rehome any of our animals.

“Janet!”

The voice startled me out of my walking stupor. Giselle stood between my van and her own car watching Jay and her Maltese, Precious, say their doggy hellos.

“What are you doing here?”

“Same thing you are, I guess?” Giselle picked Precious up and I stroked the little guy's cheek. “I got out of class and thought we could take another look around for the dog. We walked around inside the building,” she waved a hand toward the long pole building, “and the pens and arena.” She heaved a long sigh. “I don't even know that dog, but I'd like to think someone would look for Spike if something happened to me.”

I felt my forehead crinkle. “Who's Spike?” As far as I knew, Giselle had just one little dog, and he had just one horrifying name. Precious.

Giselle's carefully applied blusher deepened a shade and she giggled. “Oh, Homer says Precious is a ridiculous name for a dog, especially a boy.” The little white dog in her arms let out a sharp
yip
, and I wouldn't be surprised if he agreed with Homer Hutchinson. “He's been calling him Spike, and, well …”

“Spike's a fine name,” I said, gripping Giselle's arm, “but tell me!”

A funny little smile took hold of Giselle's mouth, and when she looked into my eyes, bright lights were dancing in hers. “We had, umm, kind of a date?”

“Ha! That's great!” My sense of calendar time kicked in, and suddenly I was confused. “Wait. That was yesterday …”
It was, wasn't it? “
I just gave Hutch your phone number …”

“He called me yesterday and we, umm, met for dinner.” She let out a long sigh and added, “He brought me flowers.” Once she started talking, Giselle let the story rip, and by the time she finished, my cheeks hurt from grinning. “He didn't leave until almost midnight. And tonight …”

A whoop that seemed to come out of my mouth cut her off. “Tonight? This is great, Giselle. I'm so happy for both of you.” I'm not much of a matchmaker and I would never have thought to put the two of them together, but in retrospect, they were perfect for each other.

“Me too,” Giselle said. We
girl-chattered
a bit more, and then she shifted to a less cheerful topic. “So I guess someone knocked that man …”

“Ray.”

“Yes, Ray. Someone hit him, you know, his head, with something and then hanged him, and apparently he had a record, a police record? And I guess he was a gambler so maybe that's why …”

“Hutch told you all this?” That seemed odd to me. The investigation was very new, and in my
not-as
-
limited-as
-
I-would
-like experience, the police didn't share many details with civilians.

“Not exactly?” Giselle has obviously not completely conquered her habit of speaking in questions when nervous. “I heard him on the phone, I mean, he didn't really know I could hear because I came back from the bathroom and … I heard a little?”

Jay was lying near the fence, and as I gazed at him, I thought about how he had always been happy to see Ray when we went to the Winslows' place. In fact, all the dogs liked the man, including his own, and I tend to trust canine and feline assessments. To Giselle, I simply said, “Ray wasn't the friendliest guy around, but I never picked up any, I don't know, ‘bad guy' vibes. Are you sure Hutch was talking about Ray?”

“Pretty sure?” said Giselle. “I mean, who else could he have meant? He said, ‘So it wasn't suicide,' and then he listened for a while, and then … I don't remember exactly what he said, but something about getting a copy of the records from the Reno police and then he said, ‘picked the wrong bookie,' and then he saw I was back and he cut off the call.”

“What about the sheep?” But even as I asked, I knew it might make sense. Summer had quoted a price of four hundred dollars a head for Rambouillets. The twelve missing sheep could go for almost five grand. Not a great fortune, but for a man in debt it might be significant. Could Ray have stolen and sold the sheep after all?

The wind was beginning to blow the heat out of the remaining light, so I suggested we call it a night and get together in a few days for coffee. Just as we turned toward our cars, my phone rang. Giselle was looking over the top of her car at me, her head tilt a question mark.

Goldie's first words were unintelligible, and when I began to understand, my pulse jumped. “We're at the vet's office. Can you meet me here?”

“What's happened? Totem?”

“No! The missing dog, Bonnie! I found her!”

thirty

Whoever synchronized the traffic
signals on the main roads in Fort Wayne did a bang-up job, because I sailed from the Lahmeyer property to my vet's office on a sea of green lights and whipped into the parking lot twenty-two minutes after Goldie called. Peg, the office manager, had left for the day, and the new receptionist—Amanda according to her name tag—wouldn't tell me which exam room Goldie was in. I was about to start opening doors when Ravi, Dr. Joiner's veterinary technician, led a woman carrying an elderly terrier mix to the checkout desk. I told him why I was there.

“They must be with Dr. Douglas.” He looked at the receptionist and asked, “Which room is the Sheltie in?”

Amanda hesitated, but finally gave up their location. As I opened the
exam-room
door I heard Ravi say, “Very good client and friend of the doctors.” It was true. Paul Douglas had been my vet for years, and his wife and partner, Doctor Kerry Joiner, trained her Pomeranian at Dog Dayz with me and Tom and, well, most of my
dog-crazy
friends.

Goldie was alone in the exam room, twisting the end of a scarf and bouncing slightly on the wooden bench. Jay hopped right up beside her and looked into her eyes. Goldie worked her fingers into the thick silvery fur behind his ears and touched her forehead to his for a moment. When she turned her attention to me, Jay hopped onto the floor and lay down, panting, ears back and eyes
half-closed
.

“Oh, my, I'm glad to see you.” She patted the bench and I sat beside her. “I'm kind of out of my depth here. I haven't had a dog since I was a kid.”

“How is she?”

Goldie let out a long breath and patted her chest before she answered. The lap of her pants was smeared with muck and I picked a burr off the front of her sweater as she began to speak. “The poor little thing. She's just filthy but doesn't seem to be hurt, except her nose. It's bright pink. Sunburn, probably. That's what Dr. Douglas said. He's so kind. He took her in the back to … well, I'm not sure what.”

Goldie's face was flushed so I asked if she wanted some water.

“No, I'm fine.” She patted my leg. “Just, you know, excited and relieved and a bit surprised.”

I was a bit surprised, too. There must have been thirty people looking for Bonnie off and on since Sunday. “So what happened? Where did you find her?”

“My garden club, of all things,” she said. “Not
at
the meeting, but Marjorie Heffernan lives near where your roundup was. Is that right? Roundup?”

“Close enough. So then what?”

“I was driving home, had just passed that place with the big long red building. That's the place, right?” I wondered how Goldie knew that, but before I could ask she said, “They gave the address, well, the road at least, in the news about the man who died, and there was a photo of the building, and I recognized it from visiting Marjorie.”

I nodded.

“I saw something on the berm up ahead, and I slowed down. First I thought it was a cat, but it was a bit too big, and then I saw her tail, and I knew.”

“What time was that?” I couldn't believe that neither Giselle nor I had seen Bonnie.

“I don't know. A little more than an hour ago, I guess.” Goldie glanced at her wrist, but it was bare. “Forgot my watch. But I came straight here.” She lowered her voice and said, “I hope the little dear didn't see … Well, you know, when her owner, Ray, yes? When the poor man—”

The door opened and Dr. Paul Douglas came in, a bedraggled
black-and
-white Sheltie in his arms. The tender area on top of her muzzle just behind the black of her nose almost glowed, it was so pink.

“Janet!”

“Hi Paul. How is she?”

I expected him to set the little dog on the exam table, but he held her snuggled into his chest. Bonnie seemed content there, but her eyes and ears were focused on Goldie, and Goldie was gazing back at her with a look not unlike the ones I'd seen on Giselle's and Hutchinson's faces. They're falling in love, I thought, smiling and a tad relieved. I wasn't sure I could afford to take in an orphan right then, with Councilman Martin on the neighborhood warpath.

Paul's voice drew me back to the room. “She's thin, probably hasn't eaten much for a couple of days. She has a microchip, but it's registered to Ray Turnbull, who I understand is deceased. There's no backup contact.” He set her on the table and rested one hand on her shoulders. With the other he brushed the front of his lab coat and laughed. “As you can see, she's pretty dirty, and,” he lifted her paw to show the tangled feathers, “she's packed with burrs.” Goldie had moved to the exam table and leaned her face toward Bonnie, who gave her a series of quick kisses.

Paul said, “I cleaned a couple of minor cuts on her pads, so I'm sending antibiotics with her.” He hesitated, looking at Goldie and then me. “That is, if one of you …”

Goldie waved him off. “Don't be ridiculous! Of course she's coming home with me.”