Puppy Mills, Puppy Kills (Animal Instincts Book 3)

by Chloe Kendrick

  So there was a million dollars lying around somewhere. I thought it ironic that Allison had been concerned about seven thousand and here I was now looking for a million dollars. Yet Zook had apparently been unworried enough to have left it on the property.

  My first thought was that he’d hid it in the pit, but on reflection, I doubted that theory. The police might have found it when they excavated the body. Also it would not have been easy to get at when you needed it. Zook would likely have wanted his money around him, near enough to get at it, but unobservable to the casual visitor.

  I spent about an hour reviewing what I knew of the farm and the grounds. I couldn’t come up with an idea for where he might have hidden the money. Then a thought struck me. He would not have left town without the money. It didn’t matter where he’d hid it while he was accumulating it, so long as he’d taken it with him when he left the farm.

  I was fairly certain that the police in Green Springs had not found the money. It would have been huge news for a small town to find one million in cash in a murder victim’s car. Even if they could keep it out of the news, I would have heard of it through Detective Green.

  I opted to call the police in Green Springs to tell them what I’d learned. The sheriff came to the phone after I passed through a variety of secretaries and deputies.

  “Yeah, what do you want?” His voice was hoarse and hard. I suspected that with two homicides in his jurisdiction that he wasn’t getting a lot of sleep. The pressure would likely be strong to solve the cases as soon as possible.

  “I had a question for you. It’s going to sound stupid, but I need to know.”

  “Did a dog tell you this?” The smokescreen of good will was gone too. Since I knew that Wayne had paid for my services more to confuse the situation rather than to get real assistance, he and I both understood I’d been sent to hinder the investigation, not help it. That would not make a great slogan for my business, if people started using it as a joke more than a legitimate service.

  However, he had left me with an easy opening. “I did spend the morning with some of the dogs at Saved by the Bell. They told me that Zook had stacks and stacks of green paper. I was wondering if you’d found any money when you found the body.”

  The sheriff took a minute to speak. I waited quietly, not wanting to push this man’s buttons. I might need to ask him something else before I arrived at an answer. “I checked the inventory of the car. There were three bags in the trunk. No sums of cash were found in those pieces. So no, we didn’t find any money.”

  I thought of the bag that I’d come across when I’d arrived at the farm. It had been a well-worn, flowered piece of luggage, one of those rolling suitcase contraptions. The wheel had been stuck on the corner of the floor mat. My breath caught to think that I could have so cavalierly picked up a million dollars in a suitcase and pushed it into the back seat of the car. I’d never encountered anywhere near that much money in my life. My hands shook for a second, thinking of that money so close and so far.

  I wondered what the killer would have done when they saw that sum of cash. Perhaps this case was not about abused dogs, but cash all along. Stacks of cash that could not be traced to anyone or anything. It had made me greedy just to think of it; I couldn’t imagine what touching it would be like.

  “I think you need to start looking for a large sum of cash. It will contain at least seventy one-hundred dollar bills,” I said, thinking of Allison’s cash for the Sealyham. “By my estimation of what the dogs told me, I would put the total at about one million.”

  “Dollars?” he asked. His tone sounded even more incredulous than when he’d asked me if I’d heard this from a dog. “You meant to tell me that one million dollars US cash is missing, and you’re just now telling us.”

  I cleared my throat. “Like I said, I just talked to the dogs today. It’s not like I was holding back information. Puppy mills are a cash-only business. It’s not like you take Visa for something you don’t want noticed. Who wants to put “bought an abused dog” on their next credit card statement?”

  The sheriff took a deep breath. “You’re right about that. I didn’t’ realize that the money was so good for selling dogs. I’m shocked.”

  “Zook didn’t sell mutts. He sold top-of-the-line dogs with impeccable breeding, just covered up as puppy mill dogs. If he’d behaved like other upscale breeders, most of his money would have gone into facilities and care. This way he could produce the same quality of dogs without all the overhead. All of that money would go directly to him. Since he was leaving town, I would think he’d take that money with him. He wouldn’t leave that kind of cash lying around for the police to find.”

  “That’s probably true. Well, at least we know what to look for. You described the luggage so we can be on the lookout for it. But even in a town like Green Springs, that is even if the money is still here, finding a single suitcase is going to be a needle in a haystack. We can’t go everywhere there may be enough room for a suitcase and look. I can’t even imagine the manpower for that.”

  I hung up the phone feeling good that we’d come so far, and yet I knew that without more concrete information, the police wouldn’t get anywhere with this. There were too many places to hide and too much ground to cover. Anyone could have taken the cash and hidden it. After all, Zook had kept it hidden for months.

  Chapter 8

  Even though Wayne had been skeptical of my work, he had told me that he wouldn’t expect a refund on my work on this case. However, his attitude towards me made me feel somewhat bolder. I texted Detective Green and asked if she wanted to go to dinner that evening. Wayne’s comments had been a slap in the face to me; I’d thought that I was hiding, but in fact, I’d made myself noticeable by my techniques.

  Green’s return text consisted only of “??”

  I told her to meet me at Mancy’s Steakhouse, one of the nicer places in Toledo. It wouldn’t be as expensive as she would think, since I knew the owners. Their lab had been depressed, and I’d talked to it. I’d provided some ideas for improving its mood and the lab had perked up quickly.

  If I was going to do this, I planned on doing it right. I gave myself a haircut, more of a buzz cut than a style, but the longer unkempt look was definitely gone. I did the best that I could with my wardrobe and found a button-down shirt that matched my pants. I was nearly presentable to the outside world.

  She showed up at 6:30 and walked past me once before she recognized me. I nearly laughed, but part of me wondered if she’d really just grown used to my shabby ways.

  “I thought you were supposed to be able to track people. You’re not doing a very good job of it,” I said with a smile.

  “You could give a woman a warning that you’re doing something drastic. I’m impressed with the look, but if I may, you should probably get it cut by a professional next time. It’s hard to go from long to short without help – and I’d say that to anyone, not just you.”

  She’d actually made an effort too. She wasn’t wearing a pants suit, which seemed to be her de facto uniform for her work. She was wearing a dress tonight and when I thought she wasn’t looking, I checked out her legs once or twice. I felt incredibly awkward, as though I was on a first date at age 15 rather than an adult who was on a first date and unaccustomed to it.

  The waiter sat us at a table and left us with the menus. “I know your budget and I know that talking to pets is not going to make you a millionaire. So I’m guessing here that the owner’s St. Bernard had a problem with drooling. You talked to him and got him to accept himself for who he was, and the owner feels in your debt. How did I do?”

  I raised an eyebrow. “Too close for comfort, but the details are wrong. What are you having?”

  She pointed to one of the steaks. I was planning on getting a larger steak, not because I was hungrier but because I’d take the leftovers home to my two dogs. I knew that I’d lost the battle, because I thought of “Number 32” as mine now. There was no giving her back, even if I
wanted to.

  The waiter brought wine for us. Sheila sipped hers while eyeing me over the top of the glass. “So what brought all this on? I really and truly hope that you didn’t do all this to impress me. That’s not a good way to start something.”

  I shook my head. Sheepishly, I told her about my talk with Anthony Wayne and his dual confessions of calling the police and hiring me as a diversion. “It just made me look at things in a new light. I saw how others saw me, and I knew that if my real goal was to fly beneath the radar, perhaps trying to fit in, rather than stand out, might be a better strategy.”

  Green’s eyes were wide. “You learned all that about the case, and you came away with personal enlightenment. I don’t suppose you told the Green Springs police about this, did you?”

  “No, I couldn’t see the purpose. Even though Wayne had meant to do wrong by filing a false police report, it turned out that his report was true. I didn’t think that a DA would want to try to pursue that. It would look too much like punishing the person who tipped you off. Plus he could easily change his story. Then what?”

  She sighed. “Yeah, you’d be surprised at how often that happens. People tell their friends one thing and the police another. This case is frustrating. We need some facts to hold onto.”

  I told Green about my discovery about the money and its disappearance. She took a sip of wine to mask her surprise, but I could tell that she was impressed. “That’s a lot of motive right there – and you were close enough to touch it. I can’t imagine what a million dollars would be like.”

  “So what would you buy with that much money?” I asked. We’d started to skate into our familiar territory of discussing crime, and I didn’t want tonight to end up merely a rehash of what had happened with the murder.

  She paused and gazed across the room. “I’m not sure that I’d buy anything.” She used air quotes on ‘buy,’ and I was impressed that she’d actually used them correctly. Maybe both of us were capable of change.

  “Then what would you do with all that money? Let it sit in a bag in the living room?”

  She stared off into the distance. “Maybe I’d redecorate the house. But I like my job, so I’d keep that. And I like where I live, so I’d stay there. Just wouldn’t do much with it. What about you?”

  I thought about it as well. I’d asked the question out of a hope to change the direction of the conversation, but I hadn’t thought out my own response. “Clean up the house. Pamper the dogs. Maybe hire someone to find my sister.”

  Green opened her mouth to say something, but she stopped and looked around instead. I knew that she’d been going to ask me about my sister’s police file but had stopped herself given the tone of the evening. “Where’s our waiter?”

  Almost as if on cue, a waiter came up and brought our meals to us. I was surprised because this man was tall and lanky where our original waiter had been shorter and more compact. “What happened to the other waiter?” Green asked, always suspicious of changes to a pattern.

  He smiled. “Jack had some difficulties with another patron, so the manager asked me to step in and help. Is there anything else I can get you?”

  I looked at the waiter and then at Sheila Green. I made an internal determination: should I keep quiet and enjoy a nice meal with a pretty woman or should I say what was on my mind? I thought of Sheila and her personality. I knew she’d want me to say what was on my mind.

  In the end, the choice wasn’t even mine. She read my expression and said, “What is it? You have something. I can tell.”

  “I think I know who the missing woman is.” I’d expected some sort of response, but we were both eyeing our steaks.

  Despite our table talk, I was hungry, and she was too. Sheila dug into her meal and finished chewing before she spoke again. “Who was it?”

  “I don’t know her name, but I know who she is.”

  “You might want to refine that before you tell that to anyone in authority. You’re not making a lot of sense at this point.”

  “I know who she is, but I never met her so I don’t have a name. She’s the woman who worked at Saved by the Bell before Allison Graybill.”

  “And she’s missing?” Green punctuated her sentence by filling her mouth with double-baked potatoes. If I was right or even if she just liked my surmise, we’d have to finish our meal quickly and investigate a possible missing person.

  “Allison volunteers at the rescue shelter, and she said that this woman just stopped coming to work a few months ago. That could easily fit the timeframe of the woman who was found in the pit. Allison heard about the Zook farm puppy mill and went out to investigate. She ended up buying a dog there and was hoping to rescue a few more before shutting it down. Why couldn’t this other woman have done the same thing?”

  Sheila now had a small notebook out and was taking notes in it. “So the rescue person finds a puppy mill and wants to shut it down. Zook finds out, kills her, and then puts her in the pit. That could work.”

  “But it doesn’t explain who killed Zook. Someone else had to know about his puppy mill operation and how much it was bringing in.”

  Sheila waved away my comment with a fork still in her hand. “Zook was killed for the money. We have one million motives for his death. Anyone who ever saw a hundred-dollar bill with the man could have known that he was hoarding cash.”

  “Okay, so what do we do now? I mean, what do you do?” I was trying not to take liberties with the new relationship. I didn’t want her to think that just because I’d taken her to dinner that I expected us to become the couple who solves crimes together.

  “Well, I’m going to have to call Saved by the Bell, and get this woman’s name. Then I’m going to have to run some background checks on her to see if she’s done anything since May or June. That should tell us what we want to know.” She made another note in her notebook.

  “I can do the first part for you,” I said, pulling out my cellphone. I had Allison’s cell in the contacts list and I pressed the button to call her.

  “Allison, hi, this is Griff. Do you have a second?”

  “Just a second. I’m busy at the moment. I’m on a date.” I was doubtful of that. It seemed very convenient in terms of its timing. Perhaps she hadn’t taken my rejection all that well.

  “Who was the woman who up and quit Saved by the Bell a few months ago? You mentioned that she’d just stopped coming in.” I crossed my fingers, hoping that her animosity wouldn’t spill over into pettiness about this question.

  “Why do you – oh my God, you think she’s the one in the pit don’t you? I never even thought about that. I guess it could be. No one at Saved by the Bell has heard from her since she left.”

  “Her name?” I repeated, wanting to get off the phone faster than she did.

  “Marianne Martin. I can give you her cell too, if it’s not shut off by now.” She rattled off a series of digits that I wrote on my hand with a pen supplied by Green.

  “Let me know what happens. She was a bit pushy, but I wouldn’t want to see anyone end up like she did.” She hung up without saying another word.

  I gave the information to Green, who then called her station. I wondered what the people at the other tables might think. Here I was with my hand stuck out across the table and instead of holding it, Green was reading it off to the person she’d gotten on the phone. I didn’t care though. This worked for us, and I was glad to be out in public with Sheila.

  She hung up and took a deep breath. “It will be a while before they know anything. They’ll look her up in the system and see if she shows up there. If so, it will be easier. If not, we’ll have to track her down the old–fashioned way. Then we’ll see if she’s been seen by family or friends. I’m wondering why she wasn’t reported missing. That’s rather sad. You’d think that someone would have cared enough to call in a report.”

  “Allison said that volunteers come and go so often that no one thought twice about it. I didn’t either until I realized how easy it would hav
e been to replace one waiter with another or one volunteer with another. That’s what clicked in my mind.” I looked around for the waiter. I hadn’t seen either of the two waiters in a few minutes.

  We’d both eaten with a healthy appetite. I still had some meat left for the dogs, and I wanted a doggie bag for the rest. Both of us were antsy to leave, to look into this latest lead. I looked around again, but didn’t see the waiter.

  “Maybe he left too?” Sheila offered with a roll of the eyes.

  I shook my head. “No, look. That’s his key card right there by the keyboard. He couldn’t do anything here without his key card.”

  I paused. The gears in my brain, which had been so focused on the missing person, shifted and moved into place with almost an audible thud. I knew what Green had wanted me to know from the police file on my sister’s disappearance. The realization came to me with blinding clarity, and it hurt – bad.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “You look like you’re going to be sick. Do you need something?” She was genuinely solicitous, and I made a note to think about that later.

  “The keys. Didn’t leave without them. Susan was supposed to go to the movies to meet that boy, but the inventory of her room and the photos show thather keys were on her desk. So was her phone. She would never have gone out without both of those things. She always took her keys, because otherwise we had to ring the bell to get in. Not the best strategy if you were getting home after curfew.”

  She took a deep breath and looked around for the waiter again. “Hell of a time to figure out what I wanted you to see. Yeah, that struck me right away. Lots of detectives skim through a list of items, but not me. I always look to see what was there that shouldn’t be, and what wasn’t there that should be. Your sister’s keys and phone were a dead giveaway to me.”

  “Of what?” I asked. “What does that mean? She didn’t go? She didn’t take them? Someone brought them back? I don’t get it.”