Who Let the Dog Out? (2 page)

“I’m not saying we can’t handle it, but—”

“Andy, if he takes the GPS collar off and then leaves with the dog, we could lose him. Let’s go; you can call the cops on the way if you want.”

We head for my car, and I call Pete Stanton as we drive. Pete is a Paterson Police captain, and a very good friend of mine. I reach him on his cell and tell him what’s going on.

“So what do you want from me?” he asks.

“To meet us there, arrest the bad guy, do your job, protect the public. That kind of thing.”

“Willie can handle it,” he points out.

“That’s what I’m afraid of.” Willie has been known to be somewhat protective of our dogs. If this guy has hurt Cheyenne, Willie might impose the death penalty on him. “What else have you got to do?”

“Not much; I’m just trying to apprehend a murderer.”

There was a local murder last week, and the suspected perpetrator, Eric Brantley, has eluded capture despite an all-out manhunt. He is accused of killing his business partner with a well-placed bullet in the back of the head.

“The only way you’re going to catch him is if he comes in voluntarily and surrenders,” I say. “And even then you’ll probably screw it up. Come on, this won’t take more than twenty minutes.”

“You’re a pain in the ass, you know?” Pete asks.

“I am aware of that.” I’m also aware that Pete could never turn me down for anything, since it was just a few months ago that I successfully defended him when he was wrongly accused of murder. I am ridiculously wealthy, mostly through inheritance, so I didn’t charge him for the defense. Therefore he will owe me until the end of time, and I intend to take advantage of it for even longer than that.

I give him the address, and he agrees to meet us there. We’re going to get there before him, but we can decide how to handle things when we arrive.

The house the GPS leads us to is modest and a little run-down, but no more so than the others in the neighborhood. This is not a wealthy area; most of the residents are honest, hardworking people who struggle to make ends meet. I never thought of them as a particularly dog-thieving group.

There is still daylight left, so the fact that there seem to be no lights on in the house is not particularly significant. Nor is the fact that there is no car in the driveway; there are plenty of cars parked on the street, and one of them could be the car that brought Cheyenne here.

We park and get out of the car. Willie starts toward the front porch of the house, showing no hesitation whatsoever.

“Let’s wait for Pete,” I say.

“We don’t need Pete.”

“I’m sure that’s true, but there’s no downside to waiting. He’ll be here in five minutes, and it’s not like they can leave without us seeing them.”

“Come on, Andy. I want a shot at this guy. He won’t tell the cops why he did it.”

“He won’t tell us either.”

“Oh, yes he will,” Willie says, and I believe him.

But I convince him to wait, and my job is made easier by the fact that Pete pulls up within two minutes. He gets out of the car, and we update him on the little that has happened so far.

Pete frowns at the indignity of having to deal with this as he starts up the steps. Willie is right up alongside him, and I’m a couple of paces back. I’d just as soon wait in the car, or even better, at home, but I’m actually not that afraid. Unless there’s a Russian battalion setting up an ambush in that house, Pete and Willie can handle this.

Pete rings the bell, and immediately a dog starts barking.

“That’s Cheyenne,” Willie says, immediately.

“How do you know that?” Pete asks.

“I recognize the bark,” Willie says, but I think he’s lying. There’s nothing about the bark that is distinctive, and we’ve only had Cheyenne for a few days. Besides, when one dog barks at the foundation, they all do, so I doubt he’s ever heard Cheyenne’s bark when it wasn’t drowned out by all the others.

The barking stops, but no one comes to the door. Pete rings the bell again, which restarts the barking, but once again fails to turn up any humans.

“Nobody here,” Pete says.

“Cheyenne’s here,” Willie points out. “Let’s go in and get her.”

“You’ve got probable cause for a robbery,” I point out to Pete. “The stolen merchandise is barking.”

He turns to Willie. “How do you know it’s your dog?”

“Because it’s MY dog. So I know her bark.”

Pete rings the bell again, with the now predictable result … more barking, but that’s it. After a few moments, he takes out his gun, which I assume is proper procedure when entering a crime scene in this fashion.

He reaches for the door handle, and seems surprised to find that it turns and the door opens. “Wait here,” he says, which I am quite happy to do.

Willie is less inclined to follow the order, and when Pete enters the house, Willie is right behind him, leaving me alone on the porch. Alone is not my favorite state of being in situations like this, so I belatedly join the procession.

There is a staircase directly across from the door, off the foyer, and since I’m a few seconds late, I don’t know whether Pete and Willie went into the room to the left of the staircase or the room to the right. I’m about to call out to them when I hear a bark, which is clearly to the left. So that’s where I go.

Huge mistake.

Cheyenne stops barking when she sees me. She is sitting on the floor about five feet from a recliner chair in what probably passes as the den, with a leash still around her neck. The room has a sofa, a table with a small TV resting on it, and the chair.

In the chair is a dead body. As a criminal attorney, I have seen way more than my share of them, both in photographs and sometimes in person. While I don’t make it a practice to rank them, it’s safe to say that this is not one I am soon going to forget.

The victim looks to be in his forties, well built, dressed in jeans and a Syracuse University sweatshirt. My guess would be that he’s about six feet tall, but it’s hard to tell because he’s sitting down, and mostly decapitated. His throat has been sliced, and his head hangs to the side, only partially connected to his torso. His hands are behind him, probably tied behind the chair, but I’m not about to go back there to find out.

No one is going to have to feel for a pulse to know that this guy is history, and establishing time of death is not going to be a problem, because before I turn away I think I can see that the blood is still flowing.

It’s hard for me to accurately take in the scene, because I’m trying to do it while gagging, screaming, and running out of the room. As I’m leaving, Pete and Willie have heard me and are running in. They’re going to understand my reaction soon enough; there’s no reason for me to stop and explain it to them.

I run out on the porch and try to take deep breaths and avoid throwing up. I haven’t thrown up since I was a kid, and just the memory of how awful it was makes me want to throw up. I can hear Pete yelling something inside the house, but I can’t tell what it is.

Moments later, Willie comes out with Cheyenne on the leash, and he hands it to me. “Keep an eye on her,” he says, and when I take the leash he goes back into the house.

So I’m left on the porch, simultaneously retching, gasping, panicking, and holding a leash. Fortunately, I’m a multitasker.

It’s less than five minutes before the police cars start to arrive, and there must be ten of them. Pete comes out to talk to two of the officers. Pete is a captain in robbery/homicide, so I assume he’s in charge, and just consulting.

He hasn’t said anything to me since we discovered the body, but when he sees me still on the porch, he comes over. “You and the dog should wait over there,” he says. “You’re going to need to give a statement.”

“You know everything I know.”

He nods. “We have to get it all on paper.” Then he points to Cheyenne. “Too bad he can’t talk.”

“She.”

“What?”

“She’s a female. Her name is Cheyenne.”

“Thanks,” he says, with a slight frown. “That’s just the kind of information we need.”

“What’s the victim’s name?” I ask.

“According to his driver’s license, Gerald Downey. You know him?”

I don’t, and I tell him so. Then, “Any evidence of a break-in?”

Pete frowns again. “You conducting a formal investigation? Or maybe looking for a client?”

“No chance. My last client was such a pain in the ass, I’m retired.” Since Pete was my last client, the dig isn’t that subtle.

“The back door was open; that could have been the point of entry, and it’s possible the perpetrator took off that way when we showed up. The wound was very fresh.”

“I noticed,” I say. “And after our statements, we can take Cheyenne back to the foundation?”

He nods. “Yeah. I don’t see her as a suspect. Maybe you can represent her in a civil suit.”

Crime scenes take forever to process, and when the crime is murder, then “forever” understates the case. It’s almost three hours before Willie and I give our statements and are cleared to leave.

Willie has Cheyenne’s leash, and he comes over and says, “I’m going to take her home with me, just in case.”

“Okay.”

“You get a look at the guy’s face?” he asks.

“Not really.… Once I saw it wasn’t attached to his neck, I didn’t really focus on it.”

“I did; he came in yesterday. Said he was interested in adopting a dog.”

“Which one? Cheyenne?”

Willie shrugs. “I don’t know; it never got that far. I asked him where the dog would sleep, and he said he had a doghouse, so I got rid of him.”

“He was probably just checking the place out,” I say.

Willie and Cheyenne leave, and before I go I find Pete and ask him if he’s learned any more about the victim.

“Did I say anything to give you the impression that you and I were conducting a joint investigation?” he asks.

“A guy steals my dog and then gets murdered; I can’t help but wonder if the two are somehow connected.”

“Your dog wasn’t the only thing this guy stole.”

“He had a record?”

He nods. “That’s understating it. Been a thief his whole life, spent a bunch of it doing time. Hasn’t been arrested in the last two years, which is a record for him.”

“What did he steal?”

“Let’s put it this way: I think until tonight dogs were the only thing he hadn’t stolen. Probably had it on his bucket list before he kicked it.” He pauses, then says, “Just got it in under the wire.”

There’s nothing left to be learned from Pete tonight, so I go home to Laurie, who is awaiting my arrival so eagerly that she has fallen asleep with anticipation.

I take Tara and Sebastian for their nightly walk. Tara is a golden retriever and the greatest dog in the history of the universe. Sebastian is the basset hound we adopted as a package deal along with Ricky. It is poor Sebastian’s plight to forever be the second best dog in the house, but he seems to accept it and deals with the humiliation pretty well.

I plan a ten-minute walk, but they appear to enjoy it so much that I extend it to a half hour. When I get back, Laurie has awakened and is sitting up in bed waiting for me.

I had called her from the scene, but now I explain the night’s events in more detail. “You think the murder and stealing the dog are connected?” she asks.

I shrug, which is what I do when I don’t know something. I find that I shrug a lot. “Beats me.”

“You going to look into it?”

“Maybe. I’m curious about it.”

Unfortunately, the conversation doesn’t get any more insightful than that, and finally she brightens up and starts telling me about the rest of the baseball game. “Ricky hit a home run!”

“He did?”

“Well, I’m not sure it’s officially a home run. He hit it about five or six feet toward third base, and then the other team kept throwing the ball away, and he ran all the way around the bases. Then he started going to first again; he thought he could just keep running until they tagged him. It was adorable and he was so excited; I wish you had seen it.”

“Aggressive on the bases, and always looking for that extra edge: that’s what I like to hear,” I say. “I worked with him on that.”

“Don’t tell him I told you about it,” Laurie says. “He wants to tell you himself in the morning.”

“Did you talk to the coach about the right field thing?”

She nods. “I did more than talk. I pointed my gun at him and told him either Ricky plays shortstop or the team will be minus one coach.”

“Perfect. What did he say?”

“He refused, so I shot him.”

“That’s my girl.”

If you are antisocial, far northern Maine is the place for you. Of course, other preferences and characteristics besides not liking to have people around would help as well. You should be rugged, like living off the land, not care very much about eating out and cable TV, and have a healthy disdain for paved roads.

That’s not to say there are no people to be found. There are even a few small towns here and there … mostly there. They are nothing much to speak of; in this area three hundred people represents a bustling metropolis.

But the citizens of these towns are for the most part hardworking, self-sufficient, decent people. And those are the kind of people who occupy Fleming, Maine, population 248. Fleming sits about six miles from the Canadian border.

There is another small community, about twelve miles west of Fleming. Populationwise it’s far smaller, numbering thirty-one people, a third of whom are Americans. It’s not on any map, nor does it have any kind of official government. Its people have only lived there for three weeks, and they have essentially blended into the land, living in caves and camouflaged huts. They don’t have to farm the land: they have their own supplies, enough to last them for another three months.

That is much more than they will need; they will very likely all be dead well before that.

The citizens of Fleming have no idea that this community exists. The people almost never come into town, or make their presence known. They have sent in two of their group, under assumed names and false identities, to get something they hadn’t anticipated needing.

Before long, when they get the word, they will break into units of two and three and travel south. They will take back roads, which is pretty much the only available roads anyway.