All Shots (14 page)

When I’d dropped Strike back at the clinic, I returned
to my car and called Kevin Dennehy on my cell phone. He absolutely had to talk to Mellie, who lived right near the scene of the murder and who must have known the victim. As a cop, he needed to question her; and as a Cambridge insider, he was in a far better position than I was to find out what should and should not be expected of her. Mellie, who had been taking care of Strike, must know something about the “girl” who’d left the malamute with her. Until now, I’d simply accepted Francie’s statement that Mellie had special needs, and everything I’d observed about Mellie had confirmed Francie’s original statements. Yes, Mellie took things literally. Yes, she seemed conscientious and sweet. She was fearful of authority and deeply religious. And she certainly loved dogs. But what did I really know about her? About her abilities, her strengths, her limitations? About what she would or would not do? Or what she might or might not have done. Someone at dog training had mentioned her parents: Father McArdle had promised Mellie’s parents that he’d look out for her. Mrs. Dennehy had known them, Kevin had told me. Kevin himself would know something about Mellie’s parents or could easily find people who’d known them well. Had Mellie’s parents been people who’d have had a gun in the house?

After leaving Kevin an urgent message, I drove back to Loaves and Fishes, this time to run in and grab some food, as I should have done before returning Strike. I’d known that I was low on milk and that I’d need something to eat before leaving for the rally match. The weather was cool, so I could safely have left Strike in the car. The inefficiency was unlike me. I felt scattered. If I could just talk to Kevin, I’d have a sense of handing over responsibility. Then I’d spend the evening with Leah and the dogs. My love for my human and canine family would calm me, and the almost mystical fusion I’d experience in working with Rowdy would restore my focus. Throughout my life, whenever I have had the sense of losing myself, of not being myself or not being entirely who I am, I have become whole again by giving myself up to a dog I love. When I become half Rowdy and he becomes half me, when I am united with this dog I adore, that’s when I am fully myself. My route to that union, and Rowdy’s, too, I think, is teamwork. The obedience exercises, the familiar structure, the attention to tiny details, the concentration visible on Rowdy’s face and audible in my voice, the hard-earned effortlessness with which we move as one, all of it becomes my most powerful version of prayer and my most reliable source of renewed faith and redemption.

So, I intended to breeze through Loaves and Fishes. Besides milk, I needed roast beef, some for the sandwich I’d have instead of a real dinner, some for Rowdy’s what-a-good-boy treat after the rally event. Loaves and Fishes, I should mention, is not some little gourmet shop but a big, crowded supermarket with departments for fish, meat, and cheese, its own bakery, a deli, and, of course, the sushi bar where Dr. Ho was reputed to have picked up his, ahem, take-out. It was at the deli counter, near the innocent yet, to my mind, infamous sushi bar that I encountered the other Holly Winter. By “encountered,” I do not mean that I sought her out. On the contrary, if I hadn’t been waiting for the pound of sliced roast beef that I’d asked for, I’d have avoided her by walking away. It was she who accosted me. In fact, I thought for a second that she was going to ram me with her cart, but she brought it to halt and said, “Fancy seeing you here.”

Ridiculous! Loaves and Fishes is a place where you see everyone. I might as well have been in front of the Coop in Harvard Square. Or, now that I think of it, on the sidewalk on Mass. Ave. in front of Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage. But what was her implication? That I belonged in a junk-food warehouse? Or that there was something suspect about my being where she was?

“Fancy seeing
you
here, too,” I said.

“Strange coincidence.”

“The world is full of coincidences,” I said, without adding anything about my canine-cosmological belief that the apparent meaninglessness of any co-occurrence results from a failure to see what the co-occurring elements actually have in common, namely, dogs. But did I really want to argue with a statistician about probability or correlation? I wouldn’t have minded. My religious beliefs, however, are private. I didn’t feel like sharing them with an infidel.

“You just so happen to be here, to have my name, and to have found the body of a woman who stole my identity.” Holly Winter, the other one, spoke with the distinctive air of believing herself to possess secret knowledge.

I was determined not to get in anything even remotely like a shouting match. Almost whispering, I said, “You haven’t been harmed, and I’m tired of your insinuations. I did not steal or try to steal your name or your identity. It happens to be my name, too,” I said. “It’s the one I was born with.”

As an aside, let me issue a plea: if you give birth to a girl whose last name is going to be Winter, please do not call her Holly. My parents had an excuse: their previous experience in bestowing appellations had consisted exclusively of selecting registered names and call names for golden retrievers.

“Were you?” I asked Holly Winter. “Born with it?” The effort to keep my voice low was beginning to wear me down.

“You make it sound like a genetic disease,” she said.

The comeback made me uncomfortable, sounding as it did like exactly the kind of thing I might have said myself. Glancing at the top of the glass deli counter, I saw that my package of roast beef was ready. The conversation, if you could call it that, was going nowhere. I picked up my package and walked away.

Holly Winter dials a number in Arizona and is almost
surprised to have someone answer, a man with a rough voice who coughs loudly. Representing herself as an attorney calling from a law firm in Boston, she states, without giving her name or the firm’s name, that she is trying to trace the heir to a substantial amount of money. Had I been making such a call, I’d have invented names for myself and for the fictitious law firm: “Attorney Charlotte Dickens here,” I might have said. “With Black and Lodge.” Or in rebellion against the media-free movement, I might have presented myself as Barbie Thomas of Toynbee and Trainer. But I’m not the one making the call. She is. On the one hand, she displays no imagination. On the other hand, she knows when to keep her mouth shut. In fact, she listens.

Eventually, she says, “Maine?” She realizes that her tone makes it sound as if she has never before heard of the state of Maine or as if Maine were some exotic place on a distant continent: “Belarus?”

Having jotted a number down on a scrap of paper, she ends the conversation and immediately dials a number that begins with an area code I dial all the time: 207. Maine. A mechanical voice informs her that she has reached the number she just dialed. She hangs up.

She then turns to Google.

Google. The World Wide Web. Fondness for it. We have more in common, she and I, than I like to admit.

She first does exactly what I’d do—she enters the 207 number—but gets no results. Her next try—Maine meth OR methamphetamine—yields many results, in fact, a plethora. She opens a few Web pages and scans for information. Like me, she is a fast reader, in part because she skims material that she already knows. For instance, she doesn’t need to read every word about Maine’s long border with Canada. She changes her search: dogs meth OR methamphetamine. Here, I cannot refrain from pointing out that using the operator OR between synonyms is unnecessary and, to my eye, clumsy. I’d use a tilde: dogs ~meth. But no one is looking over her shoulder. Specifically, I’m not. In other words, we are not competing. Still, what she discovers is something I could have told her, namely, that drug dealers have been known to smuggle their goods through U.S. Customs in the digestive tracts of dogs. And, as is incidental to her search and to my story, in the innards of human beings, too.

She picks up her phone and calls the police.

When I got home, another fragment fell in place
.
Strike.
Mellie had been told that the dog’s name was Strike. She’d also been told, as far as I could tell, that Strike was a husky and that she had been spayed. If I wanted my dogs to respond to names other than their real ones, I’d pick names that sounded at least somewhat similar: India would pose a problem, as would Rowdy, but Lady could become Baby, Kimi could be Ginny, Sammy could be Ranny. Miss Blue. Strike. Streak. Indeed, Blue Streak. Grant’s kennel name? Rhapsody. Her registered name? Rhapsody’s Blue Streak. I’d have put money on it. I’d have lost. I took a quick look at the Alaskan Malamute Registry Pedigree Program and practically hit myself over the head. I should’ve known! I, who considered myself an expert on canine nomenclature, had failed to predict the perfectly predictable, which was that in registering his dogs, his
malamutes
, the world-class
woo-woo-woo
-ers of the dog world, he’d substituted—you guessed, huh?—
woo
for
blue
. The dogs he’d bought from Minnie Wilcox and Debbie Alonso bore their kennel names, Snosquall and Crevasse: Snosquall Rhapsody in Woo and Crevasse Midnight Woo, as I’d have discovered if I’d searched for owners named Grant instead of for dogs with blue names. How like me to have focused on dogs rather than on people! How stupid! Anyway, the dogs of his own breeding included Rhapsody’s Sky Woo and Rhapsody’s Rhythm N Woos. Rhapsody’s Woo Streak wasn’t in the database, which had information on dogs that had been bred and had thus had their names published in studbooks, and dogs with names published elsewhere. Lots of malamutes weren’t in the database. The absence meant nothing. Streak was Rhapsody’s Woo Streak. I finally knew who she was.

She’d been bred by Graham Grant. And owned by…? She’d been tagged with my name. At the risk of immodestly expanding on a matter I’ve already touched on, I have to say that in the world of purebred dogs and especially in the world of malamutes, I am someone. I write for
Dog’s Life.
My articles have appeared there and in other dog magazines. I wrote the text for a book of photographs of the legendary old Morris and Essex dog shows, I’m the author of a book called
101 Ways to Cook Liver
that’s mainly about training with food, and Steve and I were the coauthors of a soon-to-be-published dog-diet book called
No More Fat Dogs.
I showed my dogs, I posted to all of the e-mail lists about malamutes, I did malamute rescue, and in short, I made my presence known. Anyone with malamutes could have known who I was. Graham Grant and I had evidently met at an Alaskan Malamute National Speciality. I didn’t remember him, but even if he’d forgotten meeting me there, he simply had to know my name. When he’d gotten himself in trouble and disappeared, he’d abandoned his dogs. All of his dogs? So it was assumed. It seemed possible that he’d taken one with him, a puppy, an especially promising puppy: Rhapsody’s Woo Streak. Had he sold her to someone? Had someone stolen her from him? The murder victim, the unidentified woman, had been stealing identities; she’d been an identity thief. Had she been a dog thief, too? Exactly what did Mellie know about her? And maybe about her murder? And what did Kevin know about Mellie herself? What could he find out?

With no success, I again tried to reach Kevin at every number I had. The last number was the one he shared with his mother. A Seventh-Day Adventist, Mrs. Dennehy refused to have meat or alcohol in the house, and she’d always felt a little resentful about my willingness to make room in my refrigerator for Kevin’s hamburger and beer. Also, before Kevin got involved with Jennifer Pasquarelli and before I married Steve, Mrs. Dennehy had harbored the suspicion that her son and I were also sharing space that was more hot than cold. Still, to her credit, she’d always been polite and even pleasant to me, in fact, more pleasant than she was to Jennifer, whom she simply couldn’t stand.

“Mrs. Dennehy? Holly. I’m trying to reach Kevin,” I said, “but I haven’t had any luck.”

“That Jennifer! That’s where he is. Pouring oil on troubled waters. She was sent to this training course, and what did she go and do? Sent there to learn to be nice to people, and could she manage that for as much as a week? The little miss could not. Lost that temper of hers, that’s what she did. Stamped her little feet and marched out and got in her car and drove home. And that’s where my Kevin is now. In Attleboro, of all places, trying to help her out. Pearls before swine!”

It was the most uncharitable remark I’d ever heard Mrs. Dennehy make. In fact, so far as I could recall, it was the only one.

“He isn’t answering his cell phone,” I said. “And I don’t have Jennifer’s number.”

“I don’t have it. And don’t want it.”

“I’m very sorry to hear that there’s trouble,” I said. “I won’t bother you anymore. Just, uh, if you talk to Kevin, could you tell him to call me? I have to go out soon. I should be home at nine or so.”

“You’re a good girl,” she said, as if making an implicit comparison. “Kind to animals.”

When we’d said good-bye, it occurred to me that for all of Jennifer’s difficulties in getting along with people, especially the residents of Newton whom she was supposed to protect, she’d never shown any animosity to animals. She was a tiger about the leash law and the pooper-scooper law, but she correctly blamed violations on dog owners rather than on dogs, and, in any case, behavior even bordering on unkindness to animals would’ve driven Kevin off long ago. How he tolerated her impossible attitude toward people was, however, beyond me. If he married Jennifer, he’d spend the rest of his life doing what I suspected he was doing now, namely, to use his mother’s phrase, pouring oil on troubled waters. At a guess, he was talking sense into Jennifer and also trying to talk the people in charge of the training course into giving Jennifer another chance. He might even succeed. While I wouldn’t go quite so far as to call Jennifer a swine, Kevin truly was a pearl among men.

Mindful of the time, I tried to work out a plan. There was no reason to wait for Kevin to question Mellie. In fact, she might speak more freely to me than she would to anyone in authority, even Kevin, and I could pass along whatever she told me. The run-throughs started at six thirty. I’d need to leave Cambridge by about five forty-five. It was now four thirty. The dogs wouldn’t mind eating early, and I could have a quick sandwich, put Rowdy and Kimi in the van, pay a visit to Mellie, get Leah, and arrive at the event more or less on time. I placed a quick call to Mellie to ask whether I could stop in. She said yes. I put the plan into operation: feed dogs; feed self; change clothes, fresh, not fancy; give Rowdy and Kimi a minute in yard; crate them in van; give Sammy five minutes in yard; crate him in kitchen; go!