Under the Dog Star: A Rachel Goddard Mystery #4 (Rachel Goddard Mysteries)

by Parshall, Sandra

  But Beth was already flinging herself at Soo Jin, hands outstretched to rake fingernails across her face. Soo Jin caught Beth’s wrists and held her at arm’s length.

  “You bitch!” Beth struggled but couldn’t free herself from Soo Jin’s grip. “You told him about Pete, didn’t you? You’re always trying to suck up to somebody, you’re always trying to tear me down. You’re not part of this family, do you hear me? You’re just a dirty little bastard somebody found on the street, your own mother didn’t want you.”

  Soo Jin slammed Beth against the wall. Beth wailed and slid down until she sat in a heap, bawling, her face pressed to her knees.

  “Oh, dear god,” Vicky whispered. She breathed rapidly through bloodless lips. “I don’t know how much more I can take.”

  “Come on and sit down,” Tom said. He glanced at Beth to make sure she was going to stay put, then guided Vicky to the living room sofa. Soo Jin followed.

  Vicky was weeping by the time she sat down. In the foyer, Beth bellowed like an animal being torn apart. Tom looked back at the girl in amazement. He would never have guessed that quiet little Beth Hall was capable of that much passion and rage. Her relationship with Pete was starting to make sense.

  “Tom,” Vicky said, pulling his attention back to her, “do you think the Rasey boy had something to do with Gordon’s death?”

  “I don’t have any evidence against anybody at this point.” Tom sat in an armchair facing her across the coffee table. Soo Jin sat beside Vicky and rested a hand on her shoulder. “I’m looking into the people who had disputes with your husband, just what I told you I was going to do.”

  “That business with the Rasey boy was so long ago,” Vicky said. “It’s been months, and Beth hasn’t seen him since then.”

  Soo Jin snorted. Vicky and Tom both looked at her. “You don’t think that’s true?” Tom asked.

  Soo Jin leaned forward to speak quietly. “They never broke up. They’re still seeing each other, and obviously they’re still talking.”

  “Why didn’t you tell us?” Vicky said.

  “How do you know what’s going on?” Tom asked Soo Jin. “You’ve been away at school.”

  “I do come home for visits,” Soo Jin replied, lifting her chin as if defying him to contradict her. “And I hear Beth on the phone with him, making plans to sneak out—”

  “Shut your mouth, you bitch!” Beth yelled from the foyer. She scrambled to her feet and charged toward the living room.

  Tom leapt up and caught her as she came through the doorway. “Whoa, whoa.” He gripped her shoulders. “Settle down.”

  “Get your hands off me! You don’t have any right to touch me.” Beth twisted her shoulders and Tom released her. Instead of going after Soo Jin, she subsided into tears, gasping out her words. “You can’t believe all those lies. Everybody’s trying to come between us.”

  “Will you talk to me about it?” Tom asked. “Give me your side of the story?”

  Beth raised her head and threw a defiant look at her mother and older sister. “Yeah, I’ll tell you the truth. Then you’ll see how stupid it is to blame Pete for anything.”

  “Vicky? Is it okay with you if I talk to Beth privately?”

  She waved a hand as if she barely had the strength to lift it. “Use the family room.”

  Tom followed Beth down the corridor. They entered a room dominated by a wall-mounted HDTV that looked about six feet wide. On the other walls hung dozens of framed photos of all the Hall kids at various ages. Tom took an upholstered chair and Beth collapsed onto the brown leather couch, sniffling. He handed her his handkerchief. “You must still be in shock after finding your father that way.”

  Her head bowed, Beth answered in a shaky whisper, “It was horrible. The way he looked, lying there with—” Her hand went to her throat. Fresh tears filled her eyes. “Poor Daddy.”

  “Your father was murdered, Beth, and I have to do my job and investigate everybody who had a grievance against him. From what I hear, he didn’t approve of you dating Pete Rasey, and they argued about it.”

  “Pete didn’t do anything to my dad! He wouldn’t.”

  “Okay, I get that. But I need to know exactly what happened between them.”

  Slumped on the sofa, Beth stared toward the window as she thought. From somewhere outside, Tom heard the faint, raspy whistle of a white-throated sparrow, a harbinger of winter.

  “Mom and Dad never gave Pete a chance,” Beth said at last. “All they’ve ever done is criticize him. They don’t like his father or the place his family lives in or him being a football player. Dad thinks athletes are stupid, so Pete must be stupid to spend his time throwing a ball around.”

  “How long have you and Pete been dating?”

  “We don’t date. He can’t come here and pick me up and take me somewhere for a date. We’ve always had to sneak around.”

  “All right, how long have you been involved with him?”

  “Why do you want to know? Are you going to ask me whether we have sex? You want all the details?”

  This girl was trying his patience, but Tom did his best to keep his voice level. “Just answer my question. I’ve explained why I have to look into this.”

  Beth was silent a moment, scraping a fingernail back and forth on the sofa arm with enough pressure to leave an indentation in the leather. “A year. I’ve been involved with Pete for a year.”

  “Have you witnessed any arguments between your father and Pete?”

  She nodded. “But it wasn’t Pete’s fault.”

  “What happened?”

  “We were just hanging out this summer. We drove down to the river, we took some food and had a picnic, and we were just hanging out. My dad tracked us down, and all of a sudden he was just there, and he grabbed Pete and started pushing him around and yelling at him and saying he’d kill Pete if he ever came near me again.”

  “What were you and Pete doing when your father showed up?”

  “I told you, we were just hanging out.”

  Tom gave her a long look, his eyebrows raised skeptically.

  Beth tried to hold his gaze with the glare of a stubborn child, but after a few seconds she gave up and averted her eyes. “We were making out, okay? Is that what you want to know?”

  “Did you both have all your clothes on?”

  The girl’s face flamed, her smooth pale skin turning blotchy red. Instead of answering the question, she blurted, “Dad had no right. Pete loves me. Dad had no right to come between us.”

  “You say he was pushing Pete around? What did Pete do? How did he react?”

  “Well, how do you think? He had to defend himself. He wasn’t going to just take it.”

  “So they had a fistfight? They were hitting each other?”

  Beth inhaled a deep breath, expelled it in a huff, and nodded. “They both had bloody noses. It was so stupid. And it was all Dad’s fault.”

  “You said your father threatened Pete. How did Pete react to that?”

  She caught her bottom lip in her teeth, clearly reluctant to tell Tom the truth.

  “Beth? Did Pete threaten your father too?”

  “Neither one of them meant it. It was just, you know, guys saying things when they’re mad.”

  She hadn’t looked directly at Tom since she began talking about the confrontation. He had a feeling he’d pushed her as far as she was willing to go, and if he forced anything more out of her he couldn’t be sure it was the truth. Now that he’d seen another side of her, a depth of rage he would never have imagined, he had to revise his approach. This was a girl with strongly conflicting feelings about her father.

  One of the first things Tom had learned years ago as a detective on the Richmond police force was that family members had to be considered suspects in any murder until they were proven innocent. A spouse wanting out of a soured marriage. A kid infuriated by a controlling parent. But until a few minutes ago, he’d been blinded by Beth’s usually meek manner. Pete Rasey could have gon
e after Gordon Hall in retaliation for trying to come between him and Beth, but maybe he hadn’t planned the attack alone. If he needed to know exactly when Hall was outside in the dark, vulnerable to a surprise assault, only someone inside the Hall family home could have given him the information.

  Someone like Hall’s angry daughter.

  Chapter Nine

  The full moon hung high in the sky when Rachel and Tom set out in his pickup. Rachel felt jittery, not dreading the search and capture so much as what would come afterward. The dogs hadn’t been on their own for long, and odds were that most of them could be re-socialized, but those that resisted contact with people… She hated euthanizing healthy animals and didn’t want to think about it.

  “Are you sure we’re going to the best place?” she asked Tom. “Haven’t the dogs been seen in a lot of different parts of the county?”

  “Yeah, as far as I can tell they aren’t sticking to one territory. And they don’t seem to be stopped by the river and the creek. We’ve even had complaints from Rocky Branch District, and a situation’s got to be pretty bad out there before anybody invites the cops to handle it.”

  The mention of Rocky Branch District brought to mind another worry that Rachel couldn’t shake. She knew Tom’s day had been long and exhausting, and she didn’t want to drag him into an argument, but she had to ask. “What happened to the dogs you rescued from fighting operations in Rocky Branch District?”

  Tom was silent for a long moment. The dashboard lights cast a faint glow over his strong features, making Rachel think of an Indian warrior or chief. “All of them were put down right away.”

  “So they weren’t rescued. They were killed. And if you find a new dogfighting operation, those dogs will be destroyed too.”

  “There’s nothing else that can be done with them. They aren’t like the dogs we’re going after now. They’ve never been pets. They’ve been trained to be vicious.”

  Rachel had plenty to say about this attitude, which she considered cruel and ill-informed, but she would leave the discussion for another time. Instead, she asked, “Who did the procedures? Did Joe do it at the shelter?”

  “No, actually he refused to. Almost got fired for it, but he stood his ground.”

  Rachel’s generally good opinion of the animal warden took a giant leap toward admiration. “So who did it?”

  “Jim Sullivan.”

  Why am I not surprised? She let it drop, and they rode in silence for a few minutes.

  Tom was the first to speak again. “The pack’s been showing up on the Atkinson farm every night around this time. Atkinson runs them off, but he doesn’t have a gun so he doesn’t fire shots to scare them. I think that makes a difference. It might take them a few nights to get the message, but they usually figure out that a gun means it’s not worth the risk.”

  “Mmm.” Rachel started chewing a fingernail, realized what she was doing and dropped her hand to her lap. “Is Ethan Hall going to be problem for Holly and me? Will he try to stop us from rehabbing the dogs?”

  “I think he’s calming down. He saw what was done to Thor. That’s proof that a person was behind Dr. Hall’s death. I think he’ll lose interest in the feral animals and focus on pestering me to move the murder investigation along faster.”

  Rachel hoped Tom was right, but she didn’t have much faith in anybody’s willingness to let go of a firmly held misconception. Especially not one that was shared and reinforced by many other people. “I had four calls this afternoon from clients who wanted to talk me out of trying to help those dogs. They were all people whose pets have disappeared, and they actually believe the pack killed their pets and ate them. If they’ve killed as many other animals as people are claiming, they’ll be too fat to run and we won’t have any trouble catching them.”

  Tom laughed. “The foxes are getting a free ride these days. They can take all the chickens and ducks they want, and the dogs’ll get the blame.”

  “Maybe there really is some evil cosmic influence at work.” Rachel leaned forward and studied the star-flecked sky. “You can’t even see the dog star this time of year, can you? For most of the night, anyway. I think Sirius rises right before dawn. It’s up there all day, but we can’t see it.” The echo of Mrs. Barker’s words sent a shiver through her: There are evil forces at work in Mason County. They surround you, but you are unable to see them.

  “I’m not interested in the position of a star,” Tom said. “All I care about is getting those dogs out of the landscape. There’s Joe up ahead.”

  The animal warden’s van sat on the shoulder of the narrow county road, its emergency blinkers flashing on and off.

  They pulled alongside the van and Rachel powered down her window. Leaning across her, Tom called to Joe, “Follow us over to the Atkinson place.”

  When they drove up to the farmhouse, Ken Atkinson clomped down his front steps to greet them. “Hey,” he said when he reached Tom’s truck. “I sure appreciate y’all coming out. Them dogs have been in my hen house three nights in a row. I ain’t seen them so far tonight, but I reckon they’ll be here.”

  “Are they killing chickens?” Rachel asked.

  “Not yet. I don’t give ’em a chance.” He ran a roughened hand over buzz-cut gray hair that looked like a remnant of another era. “I hear a ruckus and I run right out. I find eggshells all over the ground. They’d get around to the chickens if I didn’t show up fast enough. Go on, you’d better get set up. They’ve been coming right around this time of the evening.”

  Tom and Joe drove across the small farm and parked in the deep shadow behind the barn. Joe had the tranquilizer dart gun loaded and ready, aimed out the window of his van toward the hen house.

  Half an hour passed. Rachel wondered if they were wasting time that might be better spent driving around looking for the dogs.

  “There!” Tom whispered. He pointed. “Look.”

  They appeared out of the dark, emerging single file into a pool of moonlight between trees. Most of the dogs were small to medium sized, but the leader of the pack was a massive black animal with a deep chest and square muzzle.

  “What is that thing?” Tom whispered. “The first one.”

  “Mixed breed,” Rachel said, “but I’m not sure what.”

  An animal that size, if it had a good set of teeth, could easily rip out a grown man’s throat. But Rachel didn’t believe an alpha dog would attack alone. He would always be backed up by his followers.

  The big dog stopped suddenly, and the others paused one by one, spreading out around him. The leader raised his snout, sniffing the air. He yelped, spun around and took off, the rest of the pack following.

  Rachel groaned with disappointment.

  “Christ,” Tom said. “He spotted us.”

  “No, he smelled us.”

  Rachel heard another yelp and saw the shaggy brown dog in the rear of the pack frantically biting at its flank. The other dogs ignored its distress, barreling past it, bumping it as they fled.

  “Joe got it with a dart,” she said. “It’ll go down in a minute.” She already had her door open. When the dog dropped she snatched her medical bag from the floor and jumped out. She sprinted toward the dog, her bag banging against her leg. The rest of the pack had vanished.

  Rachel dropped to her knees, yanked the dart from the animal’s hip, and stuck her stethoscope in her ears. When Tom and Joe ran up, she said, “He’s fine. Let’s get him in a cage before he comes to.”

  Joe carried the limp dog to the van with Rachel walking alongside and supporting the animal’s head. Saliva dripped from its lolling tongue. Joe slid the dog into the van, then he and Tom climbed in and maneuvered it into one of the cages.

  “We gonna try for more tonight?” Joe asked Rachel.

  “They’re so spooked, I think we’re lucky to get one.” She pulled a mini flashlight from her jacket pocket and swept the beam over the tranquilized dog. “Let’s get him over to Holly’s place.”

  Rachel remained in the
van, examining the dog and administering vaccines. It was a male, mixed breed, of medium size. He’d been out here long enough to lose most of his body fat. Under his filthy, matted brown hair, all Rachel felt were bones. “You’re safe now,” she whispered.

  ***

  The cheerful BLUE RIDGE SANCTUARY sign, with its paintings of cats and dogs, couldn’t dispel the sense of foreboding Rachel felt every time she entered the property, nor did all the new construction that was altering the secluded, tree-ringed clearing around the old McClure mansion. She had lived through a nightmare in that house and the nearby woods. Memories still invaded her dreams and shook her awake in the middle of the night.

  When they parked behind the house, Holly and her grandmother, Sarelda Turner, hurried over. Joe flung open the rear door of the van and both women leaned in to see the dog.

  “Oh, wow!” Holly said. “I’m so excited! Our first animal. And we’ve got a place all ready for it.”

  Mrs. Turner, a slight dark-haired woman with skin the same deep olive as her granddaughter’s, announced, “I’m goin’ to get this poor thing a good meal.” She headed into the house.

  Brandon Connolly, out of uniform and dressed in jeans and a sweater, joined Holly. “Hey, Dr. Rachel,” he said, offering his hand to help her out of the van.

  Bright lights from flood lamps mounted on poles lit up the area behind the house. A row of dog runs, built of chain link fencing, stood on ground once occupied by Pauline McClure’s overgrown, abandoned herb and flower garden.

  Brandon took Rachel’s place inside the van and pushed the dog’s cage forward to Tom and Joe. They carried the cage into the first dog run and set it down. Motioning the men out, Rachel opened the cage door and knelt to check the dog’s respiration and heartbeat. When the stethoscope touched its chest, the animal lifted his head groggily, and Rachel’s ears filled with the magnified sound of a low whine.

  “Get out of there now,” Tom said. He stepped into the doorway of the run. “I don’t want you getting bitten.”

  “I’m almost done. He’s not capable of biting anybody right now.” The dog was scared, not hostile, and Rachel saw that as a good sign for his future. Working quickly, she repositioned the stethoscope a few inches to listen to the dog’s lungs.