Rottweiler Rescue

When Dianne Brennan volunteers as a foster home for Rottweiler Rescue, she knows the job won’t be easy. Still, she doesn’t expect it to be murderously hard!

Yet murder is what Dianne faces when she takes a dog to meet an adopter, finds the adopter dead and sees the killer leaving the scene.

Worse, although Dianne cannot identify the murderer, he begins stalking her with deadly intent. Sheriff’s investigators are convinced the killer is a member of the victim’s family. Dianne knows he will be found where the victim worked — in the world of dog shows and dog people.

Can she keep herself and her dogs safe long enough to prove she is right? Can Dianne and her Rottweilers collar the killer?

Letting go is the hardest
part. The dogs come from shelters, from homes that no longer want them, from vets or kennels where they are left by owners who just disappear.

You take them into your home, love them and teach them, then one day you drive to the new home, make nervous small talk with the new owners, and leave. No matter what else it is, it’s a betrayal.

The first time was the worst. Betty was small for a Rottweiler, still thin from the starvation and neglect that had brought her first to a municipal shelter and then to our rescue group. After only a month with me, she believed
I
was her adoptive home.

Dusk was falling when I left Betty. Maybe if I’d never looked back..., but I did. The image of her there, clearly outlined through the darkening night by the house lights, nose pressed against the front window of her unfamiliar new “home,” has never faded with time.

Other foster homes say this is the best part, the goal achieved, a time of joy. Not for me.

A quick glance in the rearview mirror at my silent passenger diverted my thoughts from Betty and the foster dogs who had come after her. The big Rottweiler rode quietly behind me, gazing calmly out the window.

We were nearing the end of a thirty-minute drive, but he showed no more interest in the children playing in a yard we passed than he had in joggers, cyclists, or even other dogs. The back windows were down several inches, but so far as I could tell he had not reacted to the earthy smell of pastured horses at the beginning of our journey or to the yeasty perfume of a doughnut shop near the halfway mark.

The high school that was a marker in my detailed directions appeared on the left. With an effort I forced my attention away from the dog and concentrated on street signs and turns. The address I was looking for was one of the thousands of new houses in the subdivisions spreading south and east from Denver, making seas of roofs where once there had been seas of prairie grass.

Stonegate had more charm than many other developments, with some variety in house styles and outside finish. The sculpted green belts that wound around the subdivision were studded with pine trees and featured wide sidewalks already in use by early morning dog walkers and joggers.

Spotting the number I wanted, I parked my car across the street from the house so that the shade of an ash tree fell across the front seat. The August day was going to be in the nineties long before noon, and morning cool was already giving way to oppressive heat.

Moving slowly and without enthusiasm, I got out, opened the back door, and snapped a leash on Robot’s collar.

“Come on. Let’s go see your new home,” I said.

He kept his head turned away from me and didn’t move until I tightened the leash slightly, then he jumped from the car. Crossing the street, he lagged several feet behind me like a teenager embarrassed to be with a parent.

Opening the gate to Jack Sheffield’s backyard finally lifted my mood. The six-foot cedar privacy fence would keep a dog safe, and the lush green lawn shimmering in morning sunlight would hold cool air throughout the day in the tree-shaded areas. A mower roared nearby, filling the air with the sweet scent of new mown grass.

Maybe Susan McKinnough, head of Front Range Rottweiler Rescue, was right. Susan was the one who had dubbed the dog now following me “the Robot” because of his unnatural behavior. She wanted a special kind of home for a dog that had been so abused he had withdrawn from the world, and she considered Jack Sheffield special.

I closed the gate, followed the walk around the side of the house then along the edge of a low redwood deck toward the center steps. The sound of a sliding glass door meant Jack had been looking for me, eager to meet his new dog.

I glanced up and started to greet him. “Hi, I’m Dianne Brennan, I....”

The figure that came out of deep shade near the house into the bright light at the edge of the deck was swathed in black from the ski mask on his head to his ankles. White running shoes stood out under the black apparition. He stopped at the deck’s edge, staring at me as intently as I stared at him.

As I stood and gaped, my mind struggled to accept the obvious — this wasn’t Jack Sheffield, and something was terribly, dangerously wrong.

Jack was shorter and slighter of build. And he didn’t have colorless eyes so cold they made my stomach curl. Because I was staring into those eyes, as mesmerized as any hapless mouse by a snake, I saw the change in them when he decided what to do about me.

The glint of sun on metal broke the spell. I tore my gaze from his eyes and saw the knife, saw him raise the gloved hand holding it toward me.

Before he moved, before I could turn to run, Robot walked forward. He looked up at the figure in black with the same calm indifference he had shown to sights through the car window.

No sound came from him, his hackles were not raised, his posture had none of the stiff-legged signs of canine aggression. He just stood there, a hundred and twenty pounds of unwanted rescue Rottweiler between me and a man with a knife who had just decided to kill me.

The man on the deck was the one who ran, ran across the deck away from the dog and me. He jumped from the deck, crossed the lawn in a few strides and swung up over the fence effortlessly.

Sick and light-headed with fear, I turned and stumbled back toward the gate, toward my car, other people and safety. My hand was on the latch when I realized I was alone. No dog, no leash in my hand. Robot wasn’t in the yard. He hadn’t chased the man with the knife. The open sliding glass door showed the only place he could have gone.

The smart thing, the safe thing, was to get back to the car and call 911, but what if Robot made whatever had occurred in that house worse? I didn’t waste time calling a dog I knew would not come. I went after him.

A trail of red drops led the way across the wood deck. Only a few steps through the doorway and into the kitchen, Robot was sniffing at the edge of the pool of blood that had spewed from Jack Sheffield’s torn throat and countless other ragged wounds. The dog was already leaving bloody pawprints on the white tile floor. Fighting nausea, I stepped on the end of the leash, picked it up, and pulled Robot out the door.

It took three tries to get the key in the car door with my shaking hand. When the lock finally clicked, I shoved Robot into the already broiling back, got in myself, started the engine, and threw the air conditioner on high. After a few seconds, I locked all the car doors again, reassured by the solid thunk.

For the first time since the killer came out of the house, I stopped reacting and started thinking as I looked out at the quiet, empty street. I thought about responsibility, obligation, and duty. I thought about big black dogs in the heat of a day like this one was going to be, about the little I knew of homicide and police procedure, about the prejudice and blind hate too often shown towards Rottweilers as “killer dogs.” And I thought about those bloody pawprints now drying near Jack Sheffield’s ravaged body.

Finally, with hands still shaking, I dug my cell phone out of my purse and started pushing numbers.

The 911 operator did her best to keep me on the phone, but I disconnected after giving her Jack’s address. I had other calls to make and other things to do before the first sheriff’s deputies arrived on the scene.

When I finished making sure
both Robot and I would be safe no matter what happened next, I called the dispatcher again.

“Now you stay on the line and stay put until the officers are ready to talk to you,” she ordered.

Hours later, I was still staying put. The house and the street around it were a beehive of official activity. Black and white Ford sedans with the blue and gold logo of the sheriff’s department lined the street. News vans nosed in wherever they could.

An ambulance had arrived silently and now waited with open back doors for its grisly burden. Men and women in uniform and civilian dress bustled up and down the sidewalks and around the house. Yellow crime scene tape held eager reporters at bay. Curious neighbors stood in small clumps on lawns and sidewalks of the nearest houses.

I sat on a strip of lawn beside Jack’s driveway in the shade of a young pine. Hours ago, the shade had shrunk to almost nothing, leaving me thankful for the sun screen I’d slathered on in the cool of morning. Now my shade patch was expanding again.

My sandals, loose-fitting denim skirt, and sleeveless white blouse were not only as comfortable as anything could ever be in the intense summer heat, they were helping me blend in with neighborhood lookie-loos.

An official car pulled away from the curb and disappeared around the corner. Attendants loaded a gurney with a telltale black bag strapped tightly in place into the waiting ambulance, which left as silently as it had come.

A tiny hope bloomed brightly in my thoughts. The first deputies to arrive had taken my name and address before ordering me to stay and wait. Maybe all this massive officialdom would just finish whatever they were doing, pack up, and leave. Tomorrow, or even next week, I would receive an official summons to appear for an interview.

That hope quickly died. The next time an officer in the blue-gray uniform of a Douglas County sheriff’s deputy emerged from the house, he headed straight for me. Reporters crowded around, yapping questions like a pack of human terriers.

Under his wide-brimmed hat, the young officer’s tanned face was set in a scowl, and he ignored shouted questions with a maturity beyond his years. He gave them nothing, not even my name.

 “Deputy Horton, ma’am. Would you come with me please?”

“Of course.” I tried to imitate his calm, but the shouting and bodies crowding too close made me hesitate.

As if sensing he might lose me, Deputy Horton took my arm and hustled me through the throng. He let go of me as we ducked under the yellow tape and magically left them all behind.

“It’s even worse than it looks on television,” I said.

“They’re a bunch of vultures. They know we’ll talk to them when we’re ready, and it will be a senior officer, not me, but they do it anyway.” He led the way to the front door.

As I had suspected, the front room of Jack’s house was a formal living room done in decorator pastels. One of the uniformed men in a group across the room turned and came toward us. “Thanks, Horton.” His tone was dismissive, and Deputy Horton disappeared into the interior of the house.

“I’m Lieutenant Forrester, sheriff’s department,” he said. “You discovered the body and called 911, right?”

“Yes,” I said, studying him as he looked down at handwritten notes in a small notebook. He was like me a few years from forty, but unlike me, I thought, on the far side. A sprinkling of gray hairs salted thick, dark brown hair. His square, strong-jawed face was deeply lined, pleasant more than handsome. Then again, maybe scenes like the one in the kitchen had deepened the lines in his face more than the years.

The lieutenant looked up again, and the intensity in his manner and pale blue eyes cranked my already jittery nerves up another notch.

“Now how about telling me what happened, Ms. Brennan.”

I swallowed hard and started my story.

“I had an early appointment with Jack Sheffield — eight o’clock. It was a couple of minutes before eight when I got here, and I went through the back gate, around the side of the house....”