by Kevin Hearne
The Boston sat down, ears laid back, and trembled all over. Poor little guy! He was scared. Atticus communed with him silently for a while, and it did take a bit longer than talking to me because the Boston probably only knew a few words and phrases like “sit” and “no” and “who’s a good boy?” Atticus had to do everything through pictures and emotions and sort through it.
“Says his name’s Starbuck,” Atticus said finally.
“No, I’m pretty sure he’s named after the first mate of the Pequod. The Starbucks coffee chain is named after the same character.”
“That’s the one. He was the first mate to Captain Ahab and pretty much the only character on the ship who gave a damn about animals and thought they were being cruel to the white whale.”
“Which story?”
“Well, that’s…whoa.”
“Yes, I do. The coincidence is kind of spooky.”
“Let’s not leap to conclusions yet. Starbuck thinks Verity’s not well. He’s very hungry and thirsty, says he hasn’t been fed in a while, and his water bowl’s dry.”
Atticus rose and peered across the room we were in, which I guessed would be called a parlor or sitting room, into the next one, which looked like it might be a kitchen. The old bacon smell came from there, but so did the decay. The source of the pungent cinnamon apple potpourri, unfortunately, was quite near the door on a fancy little table. It was in a decorative glass bowl to hold decorative smells for the infamously weak noses of humans.
“I’m going to go check on her,” Atticus said. “Stay here with Starbuck, please. Make friends. Say hi to his ass for me.”
I wagged my tail and did my best to look friendly to Starbuck, even though he must think I was way too big to be allowed in his home. Curiosity got the better of him and he gave me a couple of query sniffs before rising and moving to my back end. I let him go first, and then it was my turn. He did come across as stressed out and agitated but certainly not a mean fellow. And his wee belly growled with hunger. He needed a snack as soon as possible, or maybe half a cow would be better. I wished I could talk to him like I could to Orlaith and reassure him that food would be on the way soon, but unfortunately that wasn’t possible. I’d be sure to remind Atticus that he was hungry though, because my Druid never lets his hounds go hungry like that.
Damn it, Atticus’s voice cursed in my head. She’s dead, all right. And it wasn’t natural causes, either.
Because there’s a tranquilizer dart sticking out of her left shoulder.
Not directly. She probably had a heart attack or some other reaction to the drug and that’s what did it. Or else she just fell and cracked her head, but I don’t see any blood.
Yeah, come on through to the kitchen.
I trotted in there, Starbuck trailing afterward, and found Atticus kneeling down in the kitchen next to the sprawled body of Verity Boone-Sutcliffe, who had thin, wispy white hair on her head and a pair of thick glasses all askew on her face. She was wearing a long white dress with blue flowers all over it and a black wool sweater on top, unbuttoned. No blood, like Atticus said—I couldn’t see or smell any—so she’d broken her fall at least that much.
Her face had lots of age wrinkles in it but you could tell she had earned them from smiling instead of scowling. She was a bit chubby, as older humans get sometimes when they stop running like they used to when they were kids, but not hugely overweight. And just like Atticus said, she had a tranquilizer dart sticking up out of her left shoulder.
Atticus shrugged and said aloud, “Maybe he only had the one dart. Or maybe Starbuck attacked him. Maybe he just took off, especially if he knew he’d killed her. I don’t think he expected to find Verity awake and walking around. But I do think you’re right that this was done by the same person that kidnapped the other hounds. Your average burglar doesn’t break and enter people’s homes with a tranquilizer gun, and it doesn’t appear that the place has been robbed or even searched. No, they came here after Starbuck, but Verity got shot instead, and her old heart couldn’t take the strain. I don’t think they intended to kill her, but she’s dead all the same.”
Atticus sighed. “That’s a problem. We really should call the police and let them take care of this. But it’s going to cause quite a bit of trouble for us if we do.”
“I can, but then what’s going to happen to Starbuck?”
“We can feed him now—I’ll look for some chow right away. But if we take him, then we will be guilty of kidnapping.”
“Stud fees.”
“The authorities wouldn’t look at it that way. We broke in here, and if we take Starbuck and don’t report the murder, then it’s a crime.”
“Oh—hey, that’s right.” Atticus clambered to his feet and started opening cupboards in the kitchen. He found a box of dog treats in one and tossed one each to me and Starbuck. There was also a smallish bag of high-end formula kibble in there, and he poured some into a bowl for Starbuck and then filled up his water dish as well. The Boston drank his fill first, then attacked the kibble. I shuddered at the horror of dry food and remembered that Atticus was going to make me a grilled bratwurst later. With Starbuck’s needs taken care of for the moment, Atticus returned to the problem of what to do next.
“I think we’ll call the police and then ask if we can take care of Starbuck until someone in Verity’s family claims him. The problem will be the timeline.”
“It is. See, we just met Earnest Goggins-Smythe and Algernon this morning. And then we talked to Ted Lumbergh in Bend and Delilah Pierce in Bellingham before coming here to Portland.”
“So we shouldn’t have been able to do all that in one day. Especially the part where we said goodbye to Delilah Pierce in northern Washington and then discovered the body of Verity Boone-Sutcliffe less than an hour later in Portland.”
“Sixty minutes.”
“It’s not enough, trust me. And I have to think about what to tell the police about who I am and what I do and why I’m snooping around in this affair.”
“You need an actual license to be a private investigator. They’ll check up on that and know I’m lying.”
>
Atticus nodded. “That’s not a bad idea. Wouldn’t need a license to be a consultant. They would ask me what kind of consultant, though. Maybe I could call myself an animal rights advocate or something. And if I go get some cards made real quick, that would help with the timeline a tiny bit. I could cook up a story, print a card or two, then come back and call this in. It’s not like she’ll be more dead in an hour.”
Atticus searched through the house and found several useful things. He found a framed Grand Champion certificate on the wall providing the full name of our new Boston terrier friend: “Verity’s Boy From Nantucket Starbuck,” which apparently confirmed for Atticus that he was named after the Moby Dick character and not the Viper pilot. And he found a collection of harnesses and leashes hanging on hooks in the hallway, which he promptly attached to me and Starbuck so that we could exit the house and prepare a cover story for the police.
We had to do this sort of thing often so I was used to it. Atticus couldn’t just go around telling people the truth—that he was five billion years old or something like that, and he was a Druid who could shift planes via a network of trees rooted and bound to Gaia, the heart of all worlds. He specifically showed me Terminator 2 to illustrate what would happen to him if he tried to tell the truth.
“See, Oberon?” he said. “If I tell people the truth about who I am and what I can do I’ll wind up like Sarah Connor. Strapped down to a bed, injected with all kinds of chemicals, and random dudes licking my face for no reason. After that it’s all explosions and massive property damage because uninvited lickings just make you want to burn the whole world down. So I have to lie.”
We jogged south together until we got to Broadway, a street full of cars and businesses completely out of tune with the quiet neighborhood of Irvington. Atticus bought a new burner phone first and bought some minutes for it. Then he found one of those print shops and left me and Starbuck loosely tied up outside while he ducked in to create and print a few fraudulent business cards, putting his new phone number on them and charging his phone while he was at it. He was only gone for ten months or so and Starbuck and I enjoyed plenty of attention from people passing by.
Cards in hand, Atticus jogged with us back to the house and he called the police on his new phone—he still had his other one but he was keeping that off with the battery removed. He fetched a couple of snacks for us inside and then we waited together on the front porch.
He explained to the officers who arrived first that he’d been asked to look in on Verity by a friend, Delilah Pierce, discovered the door open, and found the body that way. He’d been very careful not to touch it or move anything, except to feed the dog and put him on a leash and wait outside.
The officers let us stay on the porch until a detective arrived, and then Atticus had to go over everything again. The detective flashed a badge at him as she took the steps in black leather boots and her eyes flickered at me, wondering if I was a threat or not. She had long dark hair and her lips were pretty dark too, though I didn’t know if that meant they were red or actually some shade of black. Probably red because I think black lipstick was supposed to be a warning that the person was liable to be a cat person, though I might not be remembering that right. Her skin was kind of dark compared to Atticus’s and she smelled like hot pepper sauce, which is not bad at all for a human. I’ve smelled much worse.
“Detective Gabriela Ibarra, Portland PD,” she said. “Are you the man who called in the murder?”
“Yes,” Atticus said. “Connor Molloy.”
“Okay if I ask you a few questions, Connor?”
“Sure.”
She flipped open a little note pad and clicked a pen. “How did you know the victim?”
“I didn’t. I was asked to look in on her by a friend of hers in Washington, Delilah Pierce. She hadn’t heard from her in a couple of days and got worried.”
“How did you get in the house?”
“The door was open. I looked in when there was no answer but a barking dog. He sounded stressed.”
“The dog sounded stressed?”
“Yes. I’m a trainer and an investigator of sorts.”
“What kind of investigator?”
“May I give you my card?” He withdrew one of the cards he’d just printed and extended to her with two fingers. She took it and flicked her eyes down to the type. “Says here you’re a dog trainer and animal rights advocate.”
“That’s right. I’ve been looking into a series of abductions throughout the Pacific Northwest.”
“Dog abductions?”
“Yes. I’m worried that these animals are being abused. Delilah Pierce, Verity Boone-Sutcliffe inside, and other professional trainers on the same regional online forum have all lost AKC Grand Champions in recent months. Just last week, a man down in Eugene had his boxer shot with a tranquilizer like the one used on Ms. Boone-Sutcliffe.”
“And the boxer was abducted?”
“No, he wasn’t a Grand Champion. The standard poodle in the same house was, however, and the poodle was taken.”
Atticus went through the facts with the detective and when she tried to zero in on when everything happened, exactly, he shrugged and got vague. “I don’t know exactly,” he said, and would say things like “Earlier,” or “a while ago.” She didn’t like that very much, but at least she had a bunch of names to check out and that forum to investigate. And a solid motive to pursue: Some humans make money when they let their hounds get busy.
“Thank you,” she said when he’d answered all her questions, and looked at his card again. “Is this number current if I need to reach you?”
“Yes. One question before you go. May I keep Starbuck with me until one of Ms. Boone-Sutcliffe’s family comes forward to claim him? I’d rather he didn’t suffer any more stress than he already has, and he’s happy with my wolfhound.”
Detective Ibarra looked at me and then at Starbuck, who was sitting right by my side, his tongue hanging out happily. “Sure, I don’t see why not,” she said, and extended a card of her own. “I’ll be in touch, but please call if you turn up anything else.”
“Will do.”
We were free to go and Atticus took us south again toward the busy Broadway street.
“We can’t. I don’t know Starbuck well enough yet to shift with him. If he were to lose some of his personality or memories because of my ignorance I’d feel terrible. It shouldn’t take long to get to know him better, but I’m not there yet. So we have to go home the slow way. We have to actually rent a car.”
“Maybe a midsize then.”
Atticus reinserted the battery on his older phone, looked up a rental place with it, and we jogged over there. He let me and Starbuck stop and smell whatever we wanted and pee on it too because there was no hurry now. We were done investigating for the day and would resume in the morning.
Once on the road in some kind of SUV, me n’ my new buddy Starbuck hung our heads out the rear window and let our tongues flap in the wind while Atticus called up Earnest Goggins-Smythe on his new phone and told him about Verity. He should expect a call from Detective Ibarra in Portland, and he should make sure to tell her that Detective Callaghan in Eugene was supposed to be looking into things too. And then he asked if he and Algy might be able to meet us sometime tomorrow in the same dog park where we’d met them that morning. “I might have some additional questions for you and maybe Algy and Oberon will get along a bit better this time now that they’ve been introduced. We’ll keep an eye on them.”
Earnest said he’d be around since he was a software developer and worked at home anyway, so he’d be able to meet us whenever we needed. That vague date made, we
stopped in Eugene for a break, and he called Granuaile.
“Oh, good, you’re home,” he said. “Oberon and I have been adventuring today. We’ll have a guest staying with us for a while. His name is Starbuck.”
The road home from Eugene was sixty miles or something like that, Atticus said, but since it was kind of twisty and you had to go slow, it took longer to drive and it was past dark when we finally got home. Driving is so much slower than shifting planes. Starbuck and I curled up in the back seat and napped for most of it, I think, so we were ready for good times when we arrived at the homestead, and I got to introduce the wee doggie to Orlaith.