My Sunshine

by Catherine Anderson

  Tucker arched a dark eyebrow. “We’re not talking about a corporate position here. She’s a kennel keeper, for God’s sake. Who’d want her job?”

  Taking care not to spill his drink, Isaiah shifted on the chair to fish in his coat pocket. He drew out a folded piece of paper. “Your guess is as good as mine.” He handed the paper to his brother. “But facts don’t lie. Have a look.”

  “And this is?” Tucker began to scan the printout. “Dates, times? I’m not following.”

  “That was faxed to me a while ago by the night person at our security company. Whenever anyone turns the alarm at the clinic on or off, Harris Security receives a signal via the phone line, and it’s recorded in a computer log.”

  “I remember something about that.” Tucker’s voice rang with weary impatience. “And this is im-portant because . . . ?”

  “That’s a record of all our alarm activity this week. If you’ll notice, someone disarmed and rearmed the system on Monday night at eight, almost an hour before Laura got there. Also notice that, according to that record, Laura successfully disarmed and rearmed the system just before nine. Less than thirty seconds later the alarm went off. Pay attention to the cause that’s listed, please. It says ‘perimeter breach.’ That means the alarm was properly reset and someone opened a door or possibly a window to make it go off.”

  Tucker studied the first few lines of the printout. “If she disarmed and rearmed the system correctly, why the hell did she open an outside door and set off the alarm?”

  “She didn’t. The alarm went off as she was heading into the kennels.”

  “So she says.”

  An image of Laura’s sweet face moved through Isaiah’s mind. “Don’t accuse her of lying, Tucker. Making a mistake I can handle, but not out-and-out lying.”

  “A little sensitive, aren’t you?”

  “Right now I’m just royally pissed off. Look at the damned readout. It speaks for itself. Someone else was already in the building that night when Laura got there.” Moving his drink to the arm of the chair, Isaiah rested a boot on his knee. “Think, Tucker. At night, when you visit the clinic and plan to stay for a while, what procedure do you follow with the alarm?”

  “I unlock the door,” Tucker said, his tone laced with sarcasm. “Then I immediately relock it. After that’s done, I hurry over to the console, enter our user code, and turn off the system. When the light turns green, I reenter our user code and rearm the system by hitting three.”

  “And when you leave?”

  “I go through the whole process again to exit the building.”

  Isaiah inclined his head at the printout. “Exactly. Just before eight o’clock, a full hour before Laura entered the building, someone disarmed and rearmed the system. There is no record of that being done again before Laura arrived.”

  “That doesn’t necessarily mean that the person remained in the building. Maybe someone forgot something, Isaiah. I’ve disarmed the system and raced into my office for a file or research book before I rearmed the system and left.”

  “Did you make it to your office and back to the alarm console in less than ten seconds?” Isaiah countered.

  Tucker considered the printout again. Then he whistled softly. “Damn, you’re right. Whoever went in at eight reset the alarm three seconds later.”

  A cold sensation moved over Isaiah’s skin. “That’s right. Nobody could run inside for something and reset the alarm in less than three seconds. The pattern you see there is congruent with the pattern that occurs when someone enters the building at night, planning to stay for a while.”

  “Why would anyone hang around in the middle of the night if they weren’t working a shift?”

  “To trip the alarm after Laura entered the building and make her look like an incompetent imbecile.”

  Tucker’s eyes darkened to a turbulent gray. “Did she see anyone in the building?”

  The question told Isaiah that Tucker was beginning to believe him. “No, but she did hear a crash in one of the offices while she was talking on the phone. Unfortunately, in all the confusion, she didn’t think much about it and never went to investigate.”

  “My paperweight,” Tucker whispered.

  “Your what?”

  “My paperweight,” he said more loudly. “That big ceramic bull Mom got me for Christmas last year. On Tuesday morning I found it on the floor in a hundred pieces. I thought one of the cleaning crew had knocked it off my desk and left it there, not wanting to get in trouble.”

  “It’s possible, I guess. But it’s more likely that the crash Laura heard was the paperweight being knocked from your desk.”

  Tucker scanned the sheet of paper again. “The clinic was as busy as Grand Central that night. Look at all the entries around a quarter of ten.”

  “That was me, reprogramming the console to give Laura her own user code.” Isaiah set his drink on the hearth and vacated the chair to crouch beside his brother. He tapped the paper to point out other pertinent entries. “The police left here. This is where I arrived. All this garble was a little later, when I assigned Laura her own user number.”

  “I’m with you,” Tucker said softly. He pointed to some entries farther down. “Is this when you left?”

  Isaiah studied the record. “Ten thirty. Yeah, that was me.” He trailed his fingertip down to another line. “Look at this. Someone disarmed and rearmed the system in quick succession at eleven forty. I think that’s when our mysterious alarm tripper finally left the building. Laura was working in the kennels and laundry room, nowhere near either console, so she wouldn’t have seen the indicator light change colors. She never even realized someone else was there. The dog food bowls in cages three and four were probably switched while she was in the laundry room.”

  Tucker lowered the paper and closed his eyes. “Give me a second to process this.”

  “What’s to process?” Isaiah asked. “It’s as plain as the nose on my face, and that’s pretty damned plain. Someone else was in the clinic that night, and last night as well. It’s not just Laura’s word, which I happen to believe is golden. The entries corroborate her story.”

  Tucker perused the readout again. “Sweet Christ. Someone entered the clinic after Laura left this morning. That dog almost died. Who’d do something like this?”

  For the moment Isaiah was content with the knowledge that Laura had been exonerated, even in Tucker’s estimation. “That’s a damned good question,” he said. “And one we’d better find an answer for pretty damn fast.”

  Tucker sat back, the printout held loosely on his lap. “So Laura didn’t forget to latch that gate after all.”

  “No,” Isaiah agreed huskily. “She left the building at two this morning, right when her shift ended. At shortly after five, someone else went in.”

  Tucker smoothed the printout over his thigh to review the entries again. “Son of a bitch. That poor dog. This makes me want to do murder.” He sent Isaiah a burning look. “Someone deliberately left that cage open and unhooked the fluid bag from the wire, knowing a reverse IV flow would probably occur.”

  “That’s how I see it.”

  Tucker’s jaw muscle started to tic. “I don’t know about you, but I think this was painstakingly orchestrated so Susan would arrive less than an hour later to save the dog.”

  “The aim wasn’t to kill the Lab, Tucker. It was to get Laura canned.”

  “Who could possibly hate her that much?”

  Isaiah could only shake his head. “You’ve got me.”

  Normally a dark, burnished brown, Tucker’s face had gone ashen. “Whoever did this could face legal charges.”

  “We have to catch the person first. I think our chances of doing that are pretty slim.”

  “You think it’s a man—or a woman?”

  Isaiah shrugged. “We have more women working for us than men, but when I try to imagine which one of them it might be, my brain shorts out. As gruff and militant as Susan can be, she’s a kind person, and she s
eems to really like Laura. Trish is an absolute sweetheart, too. And Belinda has worked way too hard to get her certification as a vet assistant to put it at risk.”

  “It could be someone on my team, I guess,” Tucker mused aloud. “Only I can’t imagine who. Everyone in my wing seems to like Laura and think she does a great job.” Tucker frowned slightly. “We can’t rule out the possibility that it could be one of the men in your wing, James and . . . what’s the other guy’s name?”

  “Mike. But neither of them sees Laura all that much.”

  Tucker swirled his drink again. “Never underestimate a scorned man. Laura’s very pretty and likable. Could be one of them has a thing for her. Unrequited love can make people who already have a few screws loose do some pretty off-the-wall things.”

  Isaiah nodded pensively. “I suppose that’s true.”

  Tucker sat farther forward on his chair. “What the hell are we going to do, Isaiah? We could chase our tails for a month trying to figure out who did this. Meanwhile, what’s to stop it from happening again?”

  Isaiah, his thoughts on Laura and how easily a man might fall in love with her, pulled himself back to the conversation. “I’ve already taken steps.”

  “What kind of steps?”

  “I took the liberty of changing our user code before I left the clinic. The old one is now defunct. If anyone enters the building tonight and tries to disarm the system using the old numbers, the alarm will go off.”

  “Good thinking. What’s our new number?”

  “We used the last four digits of my Social Security number last time. I decided it would be too easy for someone to guess if we used yours this time. Instead I combined the last two digits of the years Dad and Mom were born.”

  “Four-two-four-six?” Tucker nodded. “That’ll work. No one at the clinic knows when they were born. Someone could find out, I suppose, but it’d take some digging.”

  “That was my thought, too.”

  “And what about our employees? If the old code is defunct, how will they disarm the system to enter the building?”

  “I’ve assigned each of them an individual user code.” Isaiah glanced at his watch. “We need to call Susan with hers so she can open in the morning. The others will get theirs tomorrow.” Isaiah drew another sheet of paper from his pocket. “I made you a copy.”

  Tucker accepted the printout. “You never cease to amaze me.”

  “How’s that?”

  “All those brains in a head exactly the same size as mine.” Tucker flashed a quick grin. “You’re always one step ahead of me. Been that way all our lives.”

  In Isaiah’s opinion, Tucker was every bit as smart. He just looked at everything through a broader lens, whereas Isaiah had a tendency to hyperfocus. When confronted with a problem, he couldn’t relax until it was solved.

  “At least no one besides you, me, and Laura will be able to enter or leave the building tonight without setting off the alarm. And as of tomorrow, when we assign the new user codes, everyone will have to finger himself to operate the alarm.”

  “We may never find out who did it,” Isaiah said.

  Tucker nodded in agreement. “The most impor-tant thing is that the animals are safe.”

  And so was Laura’s job, Isaiah thought with an even greater sense of relief.

  Before driving home, Isaiah dropped by the clinic to fill Laura in on his meeting with Tucker. When he entered the kennels she was nowhere to be seen. He moved up the center aisle, glancing into each cage to be sure she wasn’t inside with a canine that needed a cuddle. All he saw was dogs, some happily eating from freshly filled bowls, others asleep on clean bedding. Not even Laura could clean a kennel well enough for someone to eat off the floors, but she came damn close. The cement gleamed in the fluorescent light. The whole place smelled primarily of lemon cleaning solution. The lady was a wonder.

  When Tucker reached the Chesapeake’s cage, he reeled to a stop and stared. The big red dog was on his feet. That morning and again this evening, when Isaiah had administered the injections of testosterone, the Chesapeake had been almost comatose.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  Visibly shaky and weak, Rocky tried to wag his plumed tail and wobbled forward to poke his nose through the wire mesh.

  “Hey, buddy.” Delight swept through Isaiah. He opened the cage and went inside. As he settled his hands on the animal’s silky fur, Rocky sank exhausted to the floor and whined. “You’re still a mighty sick boy.” Isaiah checked the canine’s gums. “You’re getting some color back, though. I can’t believe it. I thought you were a goner.”

  “Isaiah?”

  Laura’s voice startled him. He glanced over his shoulder and smiled. “Hey.” He looked back at the dog. “It worked, Laura. He was dying. Now look at him.”

  She entered the cage and crouched down to join him in petting the weak animal. “I noticed how sick he seemed. What’s wrong with him?”

  “Autoimmune. None of the usual treatments worked. A colleague of mine suggested that I try testosterone injections. He says spayed and neutered animals are deprived of their natural hormones, and that it can affect their health and immune systems.” Isaiah remembered he was talking to a woman with brain damage and broke off. “Sorry. I don’t mean to bore you.”

  Her eyes shone with interest. “I’m not bored. I’ve thought for a long time that fixing dogs and cats might be bad for them. They get so fat and lazy. That can’t be very fun.”

  “It’s not a popular theory in veterinary medi-cine,” Isaiah replied. “I sure as hell wasn’t taught that at vet school, and no vet I interned with ever mentioned it, either. Just the opposite.”

  Laura sat beside the Chesapeake. In the spill of light she looked beautiful and cute, both at once. Over a pink knit top she wore an old flannel shirt that was so oversize it nearly swallowed her. Her hair lay in tousled disarray, the shiny wisps tempting his fingertips to touch them. Her mouth, a delicate rose pink, curved sweetly in a Madonna smile.

  “That doesn’t mean all those vets were right.” She sent him an impish grin that dimpled her cheeks. “When they spayed my mom, she had an awful time.”

  Isaiah had never heard anyone refer to a hysterectomy as a spay, and he almost laughed. Then he remembered that Laura couldn’t say hysterectomy, and sobered. It wasn’t the words she said that mattered, he decided. What did matter was that she could comprehend his line of reasoning, be a sounding board, and give him intelligent feedback.

  “Go on,” he urged. “What happened with your mom?”

  She shrugged and wrinkled her nose. “They couldn’t get her hormones right. She gained weight and got cranky. She cried a lot. Hair came on her upper lip and chin. Even on her toes!” She lifted her finely arched brows. “It was pretty bad. When they finally got the dose right, she got better and lost the whiskers. If messed-up hormones could do all that to her, why wouldn’t it be just as bad for a dog or cat?”

  Isaiah nodded. “It’s a foreign concept to me, but you’re absolutely right. Hormones are important.” His were raging at the moment. He wanted to kiss her so badly, he caught himself leaning closer, until her faint perfume teased his senses. Not a good plan. Being friends with her was fine. Taking it beyond that would be exhilarating, but Laura might take it seriously, and he wasn’t ready for anything serious.

  He lowered his gaze to the dog. “It calls for more research. Thank God there are fabulous vets who devote their careers to that. Rocky just might make it, thanks to them. Maybe it’s a fluke. Maybe it’s not. I only know he’s turned around since I gave him the testosterone injections.”

  Laura ran a slender hand over the dog’s glistening coat. “Give yourself some credit. You were willing to take a chance and try the shots.”

  “I couldn’t see how it would hurt.”

  “And it didn’t. He’s getting well.” She leaned forward to look into the dog’s sad eyes. “Aren’t you, Rocky? And it’s all because Isaiah tried something new.”

  It
felt good to talk with Laura like this, he realized. To share his concerns and get some thoughtful feedback. She had some interesting insights. Maybe she couldn’t wrap her tongue around long words any-more, but her mind was as sharp as ever.

  “I dropped by to tell you about my talk with Tucker.”

  Her eyes darkened. “What did he say?”

  “He feels rotten for jumping to conclusions this morning. He’s also mad as hell. He wants to find out who left that gate open and rack his ass.”

  The tension eased from her narrow shoulders. “He believes it wasn’t me?”

  “Absolutely. Those records prove it wasn’t.”

  Before Isaiah left, he did a quick walk-through of the clinic to be absolutely sure no one was hiding somewhere in the building. Silly. Nothing had been done directly to Laura. She would be perfectly safe, and he shouldn’t have felt worried. Only he was. Leaving a kennel gate open wasn’t overtly hostile, but the result definitely had been. No matter how Isaiah cut it, the perpetrator of that act had meant to harm Laura. When Isaiah factored in the pain and suffering of Dusty, a poor, defenseless dog, it made his blood run icy.

  The person who’d left the cage open was an employee at the clinic. It followed that the individual had known in advance that the consequences of his actions would inflict pain and possibly even death on the animal. That was not indicative of someone with a conscience, and Isaiah couldn’t shake his concern that the next prank might be aimed more directly at Laura.

  If it hadn’t been for the fact that assisting him was so taxing for her, Isaiah would have removed Laura from the kennel position immediately and started training her to be his assistant. She’d done a fabulous job when everyone had been off sick.

  Plain and simple, Isaiah didn’t like the thought of her being in the clinic alone at night. Not to mention that he enjoyed being around her and wished he could work with her all the time. He liked the other techs. Trish was a doll, he enjoyed Belinda’s dry sense of humor, and Angela was a whiz with anesthesia. All in all, they comprised a fabulous team.

  It was just that none of them were as fun to be with as Laura.