To Sketch a Thief (5 page)

Chapter 5

W
hen the telephone rang it awakened Rory from a deep, exhausted sleep to the sound of someone snoring. Who on earth was in her bed? As her eyes snapped open, she burst into laughter, waking the snorer, who yawned and thumped his tail lazily against the quilt.

She grabbed for the phone on the third ring, before it went to voice mail. The stranger on the other end introduced herself as Tina Kovack and launched right into the reason for her call, chattering so rapidly that each word was partially swallowed by the next. To Rory’s sleepfogged brain she might just as well have been speaking Swahili as English.

“Excuse me, Ms. Kovack,” she interrupted, “would you please repeat that a bit more slowly?”

“Sorry I’m sorry I was a friend of poor Brenda Hartley’s and I just found out that she’s dead not just dead dead would be bad enough but she was murdered.”

Although Tina was making an effort to speak more distinctly, she’d completely abandoned punctuation, as if she were too agitated to concentrate on more than one speech issue at a time.

“I know, Ms. Kovack, my condolences,” Rory said, sliding out of bed and pulling a cotton robe on over her nightgown. Hobo groaned and stretched out, claiming the vacated pillow.

“How can I be of help?” She headed for the kitchen. She needed a strong cup of coffee and fast.

“I know you’re a private investigator you solved those murders a few months back and I need to hire you.”

Rory filled the coffeemaker and turned it on. “Okay, if you’ll hold for a minute I’ll get to my computer and we’ll set up an appointment.” She made a point of speaking slowly in the hope that Tina would follow her example.

“Oh, okay.” Tina sighed, as if she were disappointed about having to wait the requested minute.

Rory started to have second thoughts about a client who wanted instant results. She hoped it was just the unexpected tragedy of Brenda’s death that had spiked the woman’s anxiety level and dealt her common sense a nasty blow.

She trooped back upstairs to the room that had once been Mac’s study. When she’d moved her office into its new venue in the garage, she’d equipped it with a new computer and transferred the older one out of the living room and into the study again. She sat down at that desk now, pulled up her appointment calendar and took Tina off hold.

It came as no surprise that Tina was ready to get in her car and drive over right then and there. Rory supposed she should be grateful that the woman had at least waited until dawn to call her. After a bit of negotiating they settled on two o’clock that afternoon and Rory supplied her with directions.

When she returned to the kitchen, the recessed lights were flashing and Zeke was filtering into the chair he’d occupied the night before, much like sand filling an hourglass. Rory headed straight to the coffeemaker, with barely a glance in his direction. It wasn’t quite done brewing, but she pulled the carafe out and filled the mug she’d left in the dish rack the day before. Without the carafe there, the dripping coffee splashed onto the metal heating element and sizzled as if scolding her. She’d have to clean it up later, but not having to wait for the coffee was worth it. She stuck the carafe back in place and took her mug to the table. No milk this morning. She needed it black.

“We have a new client?” Zeke asked casually, as if the argument of the previous night had never happened.

Rory took a bolstering sip of coffee before answering him. It bothered her that the marshal could listen in on any conversation she had in the house, even if it was only her side of a phone call. For that matter, she had no way of knowing if he was watching her at any given moment either. As a precondition of their strange living arrangement, she’d exacted his promise to respect her privacy in the bedroom and bathroom. But she really had no way of monitoring how well he kept his word. It occurred to her that a dog might be able to do just that. If Hobo continued to react to Zeke as strongly as he had at their first meeting, he would make an excellent sentry to guard her privacy. Her very own canary in the coal mine. Of course the downside would be putting up with Zeke’s foul moods.

“You out gatherin’ wool somewhere?” Zeke prodded. “Do we have ourselves a new client or not?”

“Could be,” she said, focusing on him. “That phone call was from Tina Kovack, another friend of the late Brenda Hartley’s.”

“I was wonderin’ if we’d get a chance to work that case.” Zeke sounded pleased at the prospect.

“Don’t get too excited. I have a feeling Tina isn’t going to be the best kind of client.”

“I thought the best kind was the payin’ kind.” He smiled. “Success has gone and made you a trifle picky, Aurora.”

“Cut the Aurora crap, you know I can’t stand it.”

“Probably why I’m so partial to it.” His mouth stretched into a full-out grin.

During the few months Rory had known Zeke, she’d learned that he could be charming when he wanted to be, a rough, frontiersman kind of charming. But at that moment she wasn’t interested in being charmed or won over, especially with the question of Hobo still hanging in the balance.

“Where’s the mutt?” he asked, as if he’d read her mind.

Rory pushed back from the table, thankful that that wasn’t one of the abilities he’d picked up in exchange for his mortal body.

“He’s sleeping,” she said, going to the counter to top off her coffee. She didn’t bother reminding him that the dog actually had a name. If he wanted to refer to him as “the mutt,” she would let him. Dealing with Zeke she’d learned to pick her battles, and that one simply wasn’t worth fighting.

“Yesterday must have been awful for him,” she said instead. “I wish there was some way to explain it all so that he could understand.”

“Animals get death better than you think,” Zeke said. “Whys and hows don’t matter to them ‘cause they can’t change what is. People are the ones who need to dress it all up with rules and ceremonies.”

“Look who’s the pet psychologist,” Rory said, leaning back against the counter.

“That there’s just one of those newfangled words you like so much. Say what you like, but I’ve owned my share of dogs and horses and I know what I know,” Zeke said. “Animals adapt fine to just about anything.”

Hobo chose that moment to come racing down the stairs, his nails clicking like an old typewriter on the hardwood. Zeke’s experience notwithstanding, Rory was pretty sure the dog had panicked when he awoke and didn’t see her there. It was perfectly reasonable to assume that he was afraid of losing a second master and caretaker in less than twenty-four hours.

A moment later Hobo careened into the kitchen, lost traction on the ceramic tile and wound up running in place like a cartoon character. Coffee sloshed out of Rory’s cup and onto her bathrobe as she flattened herself against the counter to get out of his way. Zeke burst into a hearty laugh that spooked Hobo into losing his balance and executing a belly flop. All four legs splayed, he slid across the room and crashed into the back door.

Rory set her mug on the counter and went over to try to help him to his feet. But at ninety pounds he was pretty much on his own. After a few abortive attempts, he managed to pull himself upright. He gave Rory’s face an appreciative lick, while keeping a wary eye on his nemesis at the table.

When the marshal made no threatening moves in his direction, Hobo risked turning his back on him. He looked pointedly at the door and woofed. He couldn’t have been any clearer if he’d actually spoken his request, and it occurred to Rory that it was easier to communicate with the dog than with the marshal. She unlocked the door and let Hobo outside, glad that Mac had had the backyard fenced for the Labrador retriever he’d intended to buy before death changed all of his plans.

She watched Hobo make a spirited but clumsy dash for a squirrel, who scampered up an oak tree to safety. Pleased to have secured the yard from trespassers, he went on about the business of spreading his scent and asserting his claim to the property.

“You can’t be serious about keepin’ that dog,” Zeke grumbled, the amusement gone from his voice.

Rory turned away from the door. “I haven’t decided yet,” she said. When she was growing up her mother would tell her to sleep on a difficult decision, as if the right answer would be magically apparent by morning. But somehow Rory had never developed the knack. Last night had been no different. She’d fallen asleep as soon as she’d crawled into bed and if she had reached a decision while she slept, it had vanished along with her dreams when the phone rang.

She went to the sink, wet a paper towel and wiped ineffectively at the coffee stains on her robe while she thought about what to say next.

“I think a trial period, maybe a month or so, would be the fair thing to do,” she said finally and with as much authority as she could muster, given that the idea had just occurred to her. She wasn’t even sure if it qualified as a decision or just procrastination. She balled up the paper towel and tossed it into the garbage can under the sink.

“Fair to who?” Zeke asked sourly. “Did you ever think that maybe being around me is traumatic to old Hobo there? Maybe you’re not being fair to
him
.”

Rory didn’t have an immediate answer for that. She’d been so focused on Zeke’s objections that she hadn’t thought much about what Hobo’s objections might be.

“Fair to everyone,” she said, although with less conviction.

Zeke shook his head. “Okay, let’s not talk about what’s fair, let’s talk about the truth. The truth is that you’ve been trying to decide if
you
want to keep the dog, not what’s best for him or me. You probably don’t even realize it. Hell, I suspect you’ve even got yourself bamboozled into believing that you’re bein’ evenhanded.”

“Oh, right, and you’re the very model of being honest with yourself,” Rory said tightly. “After more than a hundred years, you still haven’t made peace with yourself so that you can move on.” Even as she said the words she realized she’d crossed some invisible line, but she couldn’t bring herself to apologize or back down. When she was being pushed into a corner, she couldn’t help but push back harder.

Zeke’s jaw clenched, causing the bones and veins of his face to stand out. His eyes narrowed like a sniper homing in on a target. “You have no idea what you’re talking about,” he shot back at her. “And you’re a fool if you think you know me.”

“Know you? How can I know you, if you refuse to tell me anything?” Frustrated, Rory almost threw her coffee mug at him, but she stopped herself in time. He wouldn’t have felt it anyway and she would have been stuck cleaning up the mess. Instead she thumped it down sharply in the sink.

“You want to know something about me?” Zeke snapped. “Then start by keepin’ your word and figure out who killed me!”

“I’ve tried and you know it.” She’d found articles about his death in the archives of the local newspapers, but they’d provided little useful information and led to more questions than answers, none of which Zeke had been willing to discuss with her.

“You found out I was shot to death in this house. Why, thank you kindly, ma’am, but I was already in possession of that information.”

“Who was John Corbin?” Rory demanded, locking eyes with him to make it clear she had no intention of backing down. If she was going to have an angry ghost on her hands, she might as well try to harvest some information from the ordeal. “Was John Trask using the alias John Corbin when he was on Long Island?”

“How are you gonna hone those detecting skills of yours if I just provide you with all the answers?” he asked wryly, some of the venom gone from his tone.

Rory kept her guard up. She’d never known him to capitulate so easily. “If you actually
had
all the answers, you wouldn’t need me to figure out who shot you,” she pointed out. “And I seriously doubt I’m going to have many cases in which everyone involved is dead and gone, along with their entire generation.”

“I daresay you never expected to have this case either and yet here you are.”

She took a deep breath and gave herself a time-out for a silent count of ten. “If you really want me to make any progress,” she went on evenly, “you’re going to have to give me something more to go on.”

“Corbin was Trask,” Zeke said, his tone heavy with exasperation. “Does that suit you?”

Rory ignored the question since it was only meant to goad her. “Then it seems pretty cut-and-dried. Trask knew you were after him, so he killed you before you had the chance to arrest him.”

“There you go jumpin’ to the wrong conclusion.”

“Meaning?”

“Meanin’ I know for a fact that he didn’t do it.”

“Really? And how can you be so sure of that?”

“I had him square in my gun sights—right there in front of me—when I was shot in the back.”

“I see,” Rory murmured, trying to wedge this new piece into the puzzle. Someone else had been in the room that day. She couldn’t see any reason for Zeke to have been hoarding this information, except as a means of controlling her and what she ultimately discovered about his death. And that made no sense, unless there was a part of him that wasn’t all that keen to learn the truth after all. Since she wasn’t equipped to psychoanalyze him, she focused on containing the rage that was frothing up inside her like magma in a volcano. Easier said than done.

“I cannot believe you didn’t tell me this before!” Her words rose in an angry crescendo in spite of her efforts.

“You think this is easy for me? This isn’t easy!” he responded, shouting her down. “To you it’s just history. But it was my life. It was my damn life!” He vanished before she had a chance to respond.

Rory was momentarily stunned by the emotion she’d ignited in him. She’d had glimpses of his dark side before, but she’d never heard the pure, sharp anguish that riddled his anger now. Still, one thing was certain, he wasn’t the only injured party and she was getting pretty tired of losing every battle simply because he up and left the arena.

“Maybe I should keep Hobo and send you off to the pound,” she yelled to the empty room.

Chapter 6

A
t one forty-five Rory stopped in the bathroom to run a comb through her hair and apply a bit of lip gloss. She lingered for a minute, somehow still surprised by the adult woman who was staring back at her from the mirror. In the family, it was generally agreed that she had her mother’s sculpted cheekbones and her father’s straight nose and determined chin. But no one could figure out where she’d gotten the wide hazel eyes, with their blackringed irises, that her aunt Helene swore she’d pay good money to have herself. Rory had grown up imagining that one day a stranger with the same eyes would come to their door and introduce herself as a long-lost cousin. Smiling at the memory, she turned out the light. It was time to meet Tina Kovack.

She walked out the kitchen door with Hobo at her side. Leaving him alone in the house where Zeke might pop up at any moment seemed too much like animal cruelty. Besides, Tina Kovack had been a friend of the deceased, so the odds were that she already knew Hobo and probably wouldn’t object to having him there for the duration of their meeting.

As they crossed the backyard to her office, she wasn’t at all surprised to find Tina already pacing up and down the driveway. Rory had no intention of asking her how long she’d been waiting, nor was she going to apologize for that wait. It was still well before the time of their appointment and Tina was going to have to respect certain boundaries if Rory was going to take her case.

When she’d first considered having the office built on her property, rather than renting space in town, she’d written out a list of the pros and cons of each option. The only major con on the list was the fact that clients would know where she lived and might feel they had the right to intrude upon her private life. Based on their conversation that morning, Tina Kovack might well be the poster child for exactly that sort of problem.

Tina’s face lit up when she saw Rory and Hobo coming. She hurried back up the driveway to meet them at the office door. Rory immediately recognized her as one of the women in the group photo on Brenda Hartley’s mantel. She looked to be in her late forties, and she was tall, close to six feet at least, with the body of a one-time athlete that was just starting to go to seed. Her spandex tank top showcased a small potbelly and a bulge of excess fat beneath her bra line in the back.

Tina dropped to her knees in the grass beside Hobo and threw her arms around him. “Hobo, sweetie boy!” She kissed him loudly on the snout. “I had no idea you were here!” Hobo responded by happily slathering her cheek with saliva. Tina didn’t seem to mind in the least.

She looked up at Rory. “One of the neighbors told me she’d seen him get into a car with some stranger. I’m so glad that he’s okay. It’s bad enough that Tootsie’s missing. She’s one of mine, you know. Oh goodness, I’m sorry, where are my manners?” She stood up and thrust out her hand. “I’m Tina.”

Rory shook her hand, marveling at how much more coherent Tina sounded. She was still speaking fast, but certainly within the normal range and she was actually pausing for punctuation. There was every reason to believe that her phone call had been a simple aberration brought on by stress.

Rory unlocked the door and ushered her and Hobo inside. Apart from her desk and chair, the office was furnished with a small, brown leather love seat and matching armchair that sat at right angles to one another with a glass and chrome side table between them. The walls were painted a soft cappuccino and were bare except for her framed PI license and an eight-by-ten close-up of her with Mac at the circus when she was eight years old. She’d debated displaying something that personal in an office setting, but decided that the only criterion that mattered was that she wanted it there. Although there were still odd moments when looking at the picture made her sad, she’d mostly come to a place where it just stirred up sweet memories and buoyed her spirits.

Hobo immediately made himself at home on the love seat, curling up with a grunt. Based on the fur Rory had seen on Brenda Hartley’s couch, he was clearly accustomed to the finer things in life. He was going to need some retraining if she decided to keep him, or other, less dogfriendly clients would wind up with ninety pounds of drool and fur in their laps, and she might well lose their business.

Tina passed up the armchair and folded herself into the narrow space beside the dog. “I hope you’re going to keep him. You are going to, aren’t you?” she asked, stroking his back as she spoke. Hobo sighed contentedly.

“I’m not sure. He’s a lot of dog and even though I have an office right here, I’m not always around.” Plus, Hobo and her ghost hadn’t hit it off very well. But she refrained from saying that aloud.

“Maybe
you
should take him,” Rory suggested, feeling an unexpected tug at the thought of losing him. That did not bode well. If she kept him much longer she’d be hopelessly bonded to him. “He seems really happy to be with you there,” she pointed out with as much enthusiasm as she could muster.

“The trouble is I have twelve dogs now and there are more on the way.”

Rory didn’t know how to respond to that. Maybe Tina wasn’t quite so sane after all.

“I’m a breeder.” Tina laughed. “I’ll bet you were thinking I was a nutcase. Like some old spinster lady with a hundred cats. Of course I’m not old, at least not by today’s standards, and I’m not a spinster, and I don’t particularly like cats, but you know what I mean.”

Rory tripped over her words as she tried to assure the woman that she’d thought no such thing. If she’d been prone to blushing like her mother, she would have been beet red by now.

“Not to worry,” Tina insisted, explaining that she enjoyed watching people’s faces when she told them how many dogs she had. Sometimes she even fudged the number to get a better reaction.

“So you breed Maltese,” Rory said, recovering her poise. It didn’t take a detective to figure that out, but Tina seemed impressed anyway. “Did Brenda Hartley buy her Maltese from you?”

Tina bobbed her head. “I’ve bred some champions. I used to do the whole show circuit thing too. It just got to be too hectic and time-consuming. So now I mostly stick to breeding them. I still get a kick when I hear that one of my pups has won a show. The truth is,” she said, lowering her voice as if she were afraid that someone might overhear her, “they always feel like they’re mine, even after they have another home. It’s actually a bit hard for me to part with them at all. But if I didn’t, I think my husband Joe might just walk out the door and never come home again.”

Rory squelched the desire to whisper back that she was pretty sure Joe wasn’t hiding out in the bathroom or the garage with his ear to the door. Instead she said, “Why don’t you tell me what I can do for you.”

“Right, sorry, I tend to go off on tangents. Especially when I’m nervous. You probably have a lot of other appointments and important sleuthing to do. Do you call it sleuthing? Anyway, are you aware of all the dog abductions on the island, especially in Suffolk County, over the past few months?”

Rory remembered reading about the crimes, but since she didn’t have a dog at the time, she hadn’t paid close attention to the news coverage.

“Thirty-two puppies and dogs, all purebloods, stolen from breeders and pet stores as well as from individual owners. No, wait, what am I saying? It’s thirty-three now counting Tootsie.”

Rory tried to interrupt to ask why she was counting Tootsie in with those that had been stolen, but Tina was going full throttle and apparently nothing short of a brick wall was going to stop her.

“Every one of the missing dogs was reported to the police, but not one of them was ever found. Including my George and Gracie.” Tears welled up in her eyes. She tried to blink them back, but one escaped and trickled down her cheek. “Well, maybe they’ll take us more seriously now that Brenda’s been murdered,” she said, wiping her cheek dry.

“I think you need to back up a few steps there,” Rory said, jumping in before Tina could get her second wind. “What makes you so sure that Brenda’s death was even related to the dog thefts?”

“Tootsie’s missing,” she said as if that were all the proof anyone needed.

“So was Hobo, until I found him wandering around. Whoever killed Brenda left the front door open.”

Tina shook her head. “I just know it had to do with Tootsie. I just know.”

It occurred to Rory that Marti Sugarman had voiced the same concern. It wasn’t necessarily a logical conclusion, but then the two women were so focused on dogs that they were probably inclined to see everything in dog-related terms.

“With all due respect,” Rory said, “it’s far more likely that her death was the result of a botched burglary or even an argument that got out of hand.”

“Well, there you go—Tootsie is probably worth more than anything else in Brenda’s house, Ms. McCain. A lot more. So you can call it a botched burglary or a botched dog abduction, but it’s really the same thing.”

“I see your point,” Rory conceded, although she wasn’t quite ready to abandon the theory that Tootsie saw the open door and took off to see the world. “But without more information, we can’t ignore the possibility that an unrelated issue led to Brenda’s death.”

Although Tina shook her head firmly to indicate that she was inclined to do just that, she refrained from continuing the debate.

“Since these dogs are expensive,” Rory said, moving on, “I guess it’s safe to assume there’s a black market for them. Although to be honest and again with all due respect, I don’t really understand why anyone would pay a lot of money when there seem to be more than enough great mutts like Hobo to go around.”

Tina shrugged. “It’s like with anything else—people want what they want and some of them want a bargain to boot.”

“Sounds like the perfect niche business for a motivated thief,” Rory said, thinking out loud.

“Then you’ll take the case?”

“To find the missing dogs?” she asked to be clear.

“Well
my
two, since I’m the one footing the bill. And Tootsie of course. Though I don’t mind if you happen to find the others in the process. In fact, that would be terrific. They certainly all deserve to be rescued.”

“I just need to be sure that you’re not asking me to find out who murdered Brenda, because that’s going to be an extremely active police investigation for the foreseeable future and I can’t get in their way or I could be charged with obstructing justice.”

“I understand. I would never expect you to do anything illegal or anything that would get you in any kind of trouble. I always steer way clear of trouble. Even though I still believe the two cases are one and the same, I’m hiring you to find my two dogs and hopefully in the process shut down this horrible dog abduction ring.”

Rory took a minute to fully consider her decision. She’d never dealt with pet-related crimes or with the world of breeders and pedigreed dogs. But then she’d never had to care for a dog before either, and after one night with Hobo she was already feeling pretty confident in that arena. Besides, whatever she lacked in experience she’d make up for with hard work and some on-the-job training. “Okay,” she said, “we’re going to find your dogs.” She spent the next few minutes explaining her fees, including the retainer she required up front before beginning any case. In return, she would keep Tina updated on her progress and provide her with a written log of all the information she acquired, as well as a line-item list of additional expenses she incurred while pursuing the investigation. Tina wrote her a check on the spot.

Over the next forty minutes Rory took down as much background on the case as Tina could supply. When Tina stood up to leave, Hobo hopped off the couch and followed her to the door as if he expected to go with her. She knelt down so that she could look him in the eye and she cupped his shaggy head in her hands.

“No, boy,” she said slowly, in a tone that was both loving and firm. “You have to stay here for now. I promise I’ll come see you soon. Okay?” She paused a moment as if she were actually waiting for his response. Hobo licked her nose and gave her a single wag of his tail, but his eyes looked glum. He lay down on the carpeted floor with a heavy thud, as if gravity had finally gotten the best of him.

Rory stood to say good-bye to Tina. “I think he’d rather be going with you,” she said, wondering if the breeder would be as good at communicating with ghosts as she appeared to be with dogs.

“He knows me better than he knows you, that’s all,” Tina said, her words speeding up again now that she was talking to Rory. Apparently she had different settings for different species. Rory toyed with the idea of requesting the canine speed the next time they spoke.

“He seemed content when I saw him walking with you before,” Tina went on. “His tail was up and there was a bounce to his step. He’s just all muddled right now. Too many changes. Dogs need to have some constants in their lives in order to feel secure. And once they feel secure, they can be happy.”

Rory nodded, since it was her turn to speak and she couldn’t think of anything to say. After Tina’s little speech, what could she say? And how on earth could she ever abandon Hobo at a shelter?

They’d said their good-byes, and Tina was halfway out the door when a question occurred to Rory. “Do you know Marti Sugarman?”

Tina stopped in the open doorway. “Yes, she bought her Maltese from me. Why?”

“She came by Brenda’s house not long after I got there yesterday. She said she’d been a close friend of hers.”

“Yeah, right,” Tina said dryly. “Maybe once upon a time, but they had a falling-out two years ago. In fact, it was because of Tootsie.”

“I think I need to hear the rest of that story,” Rory said, leaning over to grab the pen and paper off her desk.

“Sure. It’s simple enough. Both women wanted puppies from the same litter. Brenda got her deposit in first, so she got first choice and when the time came, she took Tootsie. Of course her name wasn’t Tootsie yet. Anyway, Tootsie happened to be the only show-quality pup in that litter and Brenda had made it plain that she had no intention of showing her. Marti, on the other hand, specifically wanted a dog she could show. I think you can fill in the blanks from there. I didn’t even know they were on speaking terms again.”