by Susan Conant
All Shots
Dog Lover’s Mysteries by Susan Conant
A NEW LEASH ON DEATH
DEAD AND DOGGONE
A BITE OF DEATH
PAWS BEFORE DYING
GONE TO THE DOGS
BLOODLINES
RUFFLY SPEAKING
BLACK RIBBON
STUD RITES
ANIMAL APPETITE
THE BARKER STREET REGULARS
EVIL BREEDING
CREATURE DISCOMFORTS
THE WICKED FLEA
THE DOGFATHER
BRIDE AND GROOM
GAITS OF HEAVEN
ALL SHOTS
Cat Lover’s Mysteries by Susan Conant
SCRATCH THE SURFACE
Gourmet Girl Mysteries by Jessica Conant-Park and Susan Conant
STEAMED SIMMER DOWN
SIMMER DOWN
All Shots
A DOG LOVER’S MYSTERY
Susan Conant
THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.
Copyright © 2007 by Susan Conant.
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Conant, Susan, 1946–
All shots / Susan Conant.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-4295-5610-2
1. Winter, Holly (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women dog owners—Fiction. 3. Dog
trainers—Fiction. 4. Cambridge (Mass.)—Fiction. I. Title
PS3553.O4857A79 2007
813'.54—dc22 2007020308
To Lynne and Dan Anderson
in memory of their beloved Stocker,
Ch. Grey Czar’s Blue Chip Stock
(December 31, 1993–August 2, 2006),
the perfect malamute.
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Many thanks to Alaskan malamute Benchmark Heart’s Desire and to Heart’s devoted breeder-owner-handler, Phyllis Hamilton, for appearing in this book. Special thanks to Phyllis for talking with me about blue malamutes. I am also grateful to the late Jim Hamilton and to his delightful blue malamute, Benchmark Excalibur, called Steely Dan. Thanks, too, to my own malamute, Django (Jazzland’s Got That Swing); to his breeder, Cindy Neely; and to Roseann Mandell and Geoff Stern; and to Jean Berman, Jessica Fry, Loulie Kent, Pat Sullivan, Margherita Walker, Anya Wittenborg, Suzanne Wymelenberg, and Corinne Zipps.
All Shots
CHAPTER 1
I returned home on that wet September afternoon to find in my driveway a Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glide, a luxury road machine with power, pizzazz, and personality. It was outfitted with a myriad of snazzy features and accessories: heat shields, foot-boards, hardbags, compartments, racks, carriers, and a heavily padded seat with backrests for both driver and passenger. The chrome and the silver and the black leather glistened in the mist. The beast had a tinted wind deflector for a forehead, a big headlight muzzle, and for eyes, smaller lamps so clear and alive that they almost seemed to return my gaze, thereby confirming my sense that the two of us, the Harley and I, had not simply met before but knew each other in some deep and even mystical way. My soul mates, you see, are Alaskan malamutes, the ultimate canine touring models, Heaven’s Devils, all power, pizzazz, and personality, the Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glides of purebred dogdom. Even so, what in Hells Angels was this vehicular malamute doing in my driveway?
My name is Holly Winter. I live at 256 Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ZIP code: 02138; the right one, as it’s said, presumably by virtue of being shared with the alma mater of Ted Kaczynski, whose name is intoned in awed tones around here not because he was the Unabomber but because he was a Harvard math major. After all, how much intelligence does it take to be a psychotic multiple murderer? But to graduate from Harvard with a degree in mathematics? That takes brains. Cambridge, my Cambridge.
The Harley had a Maine license plate. I grew up in God’s Country, the beautiful state of Maine. My father and my stepmother lived there, but Buck and Gabrielle never left home without their dogs, so the bike definitely wasn’t theirs. I ruled out my husband on the grounds that he, too, would never buy a vehicle that failed to provide room for his dogs. Besides, he was canoeing in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. With him were two of our five dogs: Lady, his pointer, and India, his German shepherd bitch, bitch being a good, clean word in the dialect of the dog fancy, meaning, as it does, female, unless preceded by the words son of a, in which case it means the same thing in the dog world as it does everywhere else. So, as the owner of the Harley, Steve was out. A Harvard classmate of my cousin Leah’s? A few Harvard students had motorcycles, the men presumably to show that Harvard men could be real men, too. And the women? In a few cases, maybe to prove the same thing. Leah, with her red-gold curls, would’ve looked even more spectacular than usual on the Harley, but she, too, would’ve rejected any mode of transport that excluded big dogs, and in any case, she was chronically broke.
So, when I let myself into the kitchen, I half
expected to find Leah there with a classmate whose early and middle adolescence had been exclusively devoted to conforming to the highest expectations of the Harvard Admissions Committee and who was now staging a belated, if normal, adolescent rebellion by becoming the reincarnation of James Dean. My cousin was, however, nowhere in sight. Seated at my kitchen table was a big, tall, handsome man with strong features that made him look like Michelangelo’s statue of Moses and thus like Charlton Heston as Moses, too, but with the broad forehead, the oversized eye sockets, and the prominent nose of the marble version. The biker lacked the horns of Michelangelo’s Moses, of course, and if he was playing Moses at all, it was a beardless Moses at age thirty or so, a Moses with dark curly hair. It’s possible that my brilliant dogs discerned the resemblance. Having evidently cast themselves as the children of Israel stunned by the wondrous sight of the tablets, Rowdy and Kimi had prostrated themselves before the man, which is to say that they were on their backs with their white tummies exposed and their white snowshoe paws waving in the air. The pose ordinarily represents nothing more than a demand for a belly rub, but it’s important never to underestimate Kimi, whose accomplishments in a previous existence probably include a degree in mathematics from that place down the street. In fact, my first thought about how the biker had entered my house was that Kimi had let him in. Impossible! It was, I feared, remotely possible that she had figured out how to open the back door, but I was sure that she hadn’t learned to unlock it. My second thought was that the uninvited visitor—intruder?—had found the key that I kept hidden under one of the trash barrels. Equally impossible. Absolutely no one but me knew about it. Even Steve didn’t know.
“Holly Winter?” the man asked. “Hope I didn’t startle you.”
“Not at all,” I said. “I habitually walk into my house to find strange men in black rain gear dripping puddles onto the floor. The phenomenon bothered me at first, but I’m used to it now.”
He rose and extended a big mitt of a hand. “Adam.”
What came to mind was the palindrome: Madam, I’m Adam. It even put a nervous little smile on my face. “Madam, I’m Adam,” I said as I shook his hand. “A palindromic visitor.”
The dogs were now on their feet and had their dark almond-shaped eyes fixed on me. People who don’t train dogs often say, “Don’t your dogs love you! They watch you all the time.” My dogs certainly do love me, but the adoring gaze that always returns to my face is a carefully trained behavior.
“The girl with the red hair told me to wait inside,” the man said. “Out of the rain.”
Leah. Who else? Who else would’ve given free run of my house to a strange man who’d arrived here on a motorcycle in the rain but who couldn’t be expected to wait outdoors?
“She left,” he added. Rising to his feet, he said, “You have something for me.”
My principal employer, Dog’s Life magazine, does not send couriers to pick up my columns. Still, if I had anything whatever for anyone at all, it was bound to be something or other about…
“Something about dogs?” I asked. “About malamutes?”
“You haven’t heard from Calvin?”
The Calvin I knew well was a miniature schnauzer. “There must be some misunderstanding,” I said.
“Holly Winter,” he said.
The dogs sensed my relief even before I let my breath out. “You’re looking for the other Holly Winter,” I said. “She lives in Cambridge, too. We’ve had mix-ups before. That’s what this is about. You’ve got the wrong one.”
As if I’d released them from an obedience exercise, Rowdy and Kimi stirred a little. Rowdy meandered to the big water bowl and drank. Just as casually, Kimi moved her eyes from my face to the back door. I often had the uncanny sense that she could read my mind, but at the moment, I was practically reading hers. Domestic dogs, having evolved with us, are hardwired to follow the human gaze: they look where we’re looking, and they check out objects of our attention. As if acting on my desire to show Adam the door, Kimi took a few steps toward it. I nearly laughed.
“I’ll give you her address,” I said. Internet addict that I am, I usually use Web directories, but there was an old phone book in a cabinet under the counter. I pulled it out, looked up the other Holly Winter, scribbled her address on a notepad, and handed Adam the slip of paper. “It’s off Kirkland Street, a left turn off Kirkland. When you leave my driveway, turn right. You have to. It’s one-way. And then turn right onto Concord Avenue. Follow it almost to Harvard Square. Just before the Square, you’ll see the Cambridge Common on your left. After the Common, go left. Get in the middle lane and take the underpass. When you come out of the underpass, turn left and then turn right on Kirkland Street. Then watch the signs. It’s a left turn.”
Like Kimi, I stepped toward the door. Although Adam had done nothing that felt at all threatening, I wanted him out of the house, in part so that I could call Leah and let her know exactly what I thought of her rotten judgment.
Adam thanked me. I opened the door. As he was leaving, he paused briefly. “What kind of dogs are these?”
“Alaskan malamutes,” I said.
“They’re beautiful.”
“Thank you,” I said. “And that’s some motorcycle you have.”
He smiled.
“It’s a Harley,” I said. “I know that. But—”
“It’s a Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glide.”
And that’s how I found out what it was.
Only later did I realize that whereas I’d observed the Harley closely and learned its name, I’d been so startled to discover its rider in my kitchen and so angry at Leah for having let him in and having left him alone in my house that I’d learned almost nothing about him. Him. The Harley rider. The young Moses. The man looking for Holly Winter. Adam. I knew that he drove a Harley-Davidson Screamin’ Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glide with a Maine plate. And I didn’t even know his last name.
Adam: precisely what I didn’t know him from.
CHAPTER 2
As Holly Winter—the other Holly Winter—an, pause, other Holly Winter—another Holly Winter or, in retrospect, yet another Holly Winter—is walking through Harvard Yard toward Quincy Street, a loose dog takes a break from Frisbee to run toward her in what I would undoubtedly have viewed as a friendly manner. To her disgust, the dog not only reaches her but goes so far as to deposit its saliva on her, which is to say that the dog licks her hand.
Yes, what kind of dog? The first question to spring eternal to my dog-hopeful mind—a Finnish lapphund, a Nova Scotia duck tolling retriever, a fascinating mix of let’s guess which wonderful breeds?—never even begins to cross hers. She does not know, she does not ask, she does not care. Rather, once the dirty thing has gone away, she fishes in her purse, extracts a little sealed packet containing a moist towelette, and uses it to decontaminate her hands, thus defending herself against the threat of bacterial, viral, and parasitic disease. Such an extreme reaction! The dog’s tongue, after all, touched only one of her hands, yet she cleans both.
I am tempted to make the rebellious claim that I, in contrast, would have licked the fingers the dog had lapped. Not so. Or not quite so. But it’s quite likely that I’d subsequently have fixed food for myself and happily eaten it without first washing my hands. As it’s said, better after a dog than after a person. The adage, by the way, is one I’ve been accused of misinterpreting. Specifically, I’ve been informed that the point I’m missing concerns the filth of human beings, whose dirtiness is said to exceed even the extreme foulness of dogs. Nonsense! The correct and true point concerns the microbial and spiritual purity of dogs, which is to say, their biological, not to mention cosmic, superiority to human beings.
But Holly Winter would certainly disagree. The other Holly Winter, of course. An other. Another. Yet another.
CHAPTER 3
The moment Leah answered her cell phone, I said, “Now Leah, I’m going to be blunt with you. You can be very high-handed, and I’m used t
o it, but this time, you’ve gone too far. You do not—repeat, not—let total strangers into my house and then just leave them here. I do not expect to arrive home and find bikers sitting in my kitchen, and I don’t like it, especially when you know perfectly well that Steve is away and Rita is away and I am alone in this house and—”
“There was only one biker,” Leah said. “And the dogs were there.”
All three were with me now in the fenced yard, where I was keeping an eye on them while using my cell. Steve was always comfortable letting all five dogs run together, but I was more cautious than he was. For one thing, if they ripped one another apart, I’d be unable to stitch them back together. Steve has a general veterinary practice, but he’s an excellent surgeon. Not that either of us encourages dogfights. As a dog writer and dog trainer, I know a lot about preventing them, and one of my rules is to be exceptionally careful if two of the dogs are intact male malamutes. Intact: unaltered, not neutered, possessed of the full male apparatus required to enter a dog in conformation at an American Kennel Club show. But more about that topic later. In fact, soon. Rowdy and his handsome young son, Sammy, were both entered on Saturday.