The Purloined Poodle by Kevin Hearne
A Grisly
(Not Gristly!)
Discovery
The next person to interview was Julia Garcia in Tacoma with the Italian greyhound. I ignored so many interesting trees and fire hydrants on the way there only to find out that she wasn’t home.
Told you it wouldn’t always be easy.
Delilah Pierce, who lives in a town called Bellingham. She had Grand Champion French bulldogs.
Bellingham turned out to be a leafy little place just a few miles south of the Canadian border. Atticus shifted us to a fresh-smelling forest surrounding Lake Padden. It had just finished raining when we got there, the ground all soft and springy underfoot. Delilah lived nearby in a big old house on Broad Street with vines creeping up the sides.
Her kids—a boy and a girl—promptly draped themselves all over me once Atticus assured them I was friendly. They smelled like marshmallows and stinky cheese. Delilah didn’t want me in the house, though—not only was I kind of muddy, she had two more Frenchies in there, yapping away, and thought it would be best if we talked on the porch. She sent the boy in to fetch some drinks and we all sat down, I to be petted by the girl, and Atticus to interview Delilah. He smiled a lot and did his charming human thing, telling her about Ted and Earnest and how he was trying to track down what happened to all the abducted hounds.
“Are you with law enforcement?”
“I’m a private investigator,” Atticus said, laying down a lie slicker than a polished marble floor. “Earnest hired me.”
Atticus found out that all her Frenchies had been drugged to sleep just like Ted Lumbergh’s down in Bend, and I thought that was interesting. Why had Earnest’s boxer been shot with a tranquilizer dart instead? Were we dealing with two different criminals, or the same one that recently decided to up their game? That might have been a mistake though. Dart guns had to be traceable, didn’t they, as well as tranquilizers capable of being injected that way? I’m pretty sure you can’t go to the supermarket and pick up some nice liquid animal tranquilizers. You have to get them from a veterinarian. But I’d have to ask Atticus to confirm all that. It seemed to me that spiking treats would be much tougher to trace back to a perpetrator because the evidence quite literally turned to poo.
I lost some bits of their conversation after that because the boy returned, delivered cans of soda to the big people, asked Atticus if he could feed me, and then came over with a bag of snacks. They were peanut butter bombs and the kids giggled their heads off as I licked my chops at the sticky stuff. Infuriating food, peanut butter. Can’t say no to it, and yet it’s so difficult to eat.
Atticus turned his line of questioning to what the dog trainers’ online forum was like and if she posted often and I tuned some of that out, but I heard him ask, “Has anybody stopped posting all of a sudden?” and that sounded interesting. Delilah’s answer definitely was.
“Well, yes,” she said, “I’m a bit worried, in fact. There’s a friend of mine who lives down in Portland who has Boston terriers—they’re so similar to Frenchies that we see each other at shows quite often. She posted most every day but hasn’t for the past couple, and I texted her a few hours ago and she hasn’t replied. I know that there could be all sorts of rational explanations—she’s on a cruise, she lost her phone, or any number of things—but she’s a bit older, you know, and living alone, so I worry.”
“What’s her name?”
“Verity Boone-Sutcliffe. Charming English lady who still takes her tea in the afternoon.”
“And she has a Grand Champion Boston terrier?”
“Yes. Wickedly smart fellow.”
“Does she have any others?”
“No, just the one dog.”
“And like you—and Ted, Julia, and Earnest—she had this information about her dog publicly available on the forum?”
“Yes, she did.” Her hand flew to her mouth. “Oh, now you have me really worried.”
“Well, I’m heading down that way because our next stop is in Hillsboro—Gordon Petrie’s Airedale, you know. Maybe I can just knock on her door and make sure she’s okay?”
“If you do, will you let me know?”
“Of course. Might you have her address?”
We took our leave soon after that, me still trying to get peanut butter out of my mouth as we trotted back to Lake Padden. Atticus twisted his head around to make sure no one was in earshot, and then he talked to me out loud.
“Oberon, the timeline worries me here, so I want to go through it with you.”
“Linear time. Each one of these abductions, after the first one, took place about four to six days apart. Jack was abducted about a week ago, right?”
“No, that’s a week.”
“Delilah just told us that she hasn’t heard from Verity for two days. She has a Grand Champion Boston terrier. And two days ago would be five days after Jack was abducted.”
“It’s possible. Thought we might drop in on her next, like I said, instead of going to visit the guy in Hillsboro with the Airedale.”
“Close to Hillsboro, actually, in Oregon. They have a place there with maple bacon donuts if you want one.”
We shifted out of Bellingham and into Peninsula Park in Portland, which had the distinction of being particularly rosy. We came out next to an old linden tree with mossy, gnarly roots, near a bandstand that faced a huge open field on one side and a huge rose garden and a fountain on the other. The fountain was in the middle of a shallow pool that little kids were splashing about in and shrieking happily. It looked inviting and I wanted to go in there and play a bit, maybe see if there were any rabbits hiding in the bushes, but Atticus said that if I didn’t freak out the kids, I’d freak out their parents because I was supposed to be on a leash.
They won’t know that immediately.
Do you want to find those kidnapped hounds or not?
Sometimes when the opportunity to play presents itself, I forget what I’m supposed to be doing. Atticus says that means I’m squirrelly and almost hurts my feelings. I don’t think that word means what he thinks it means. I am nothing like a squirrel.
Atticus said we had to go through town a bit to get to the address Delilah Pierce gave us for Verity Boone-Sutcliffe. And he wanted a coffee anyway. So we jogged south on a street called Albina for a while and turned left on Alberta, which Atticus claimed would lead him to coffee and me to a meat pie.
You’ll see. When we get to Northeast 18th, there’s a place called Random Order Pie Bar. They have mostly sweet pies, but I’m guessing you’ll like the savory ones with gravy in them. And I can get a pretty decent flat white across the street.
I snerked at him. I’d heard this flat white business before.
Right. Atticus likes to give himself little culinary quests. Always looking for flat whites like they have Down Under, or ramen like you can get in Japan, or when he’s overseas, he looks for tacos and barbecue like you get in the Americas.
I thought of a terrible pun and that was usually good for an extra snack so I said to Atticus,
He groaned and promised me a bonus sausage later. Victory!
The pie bar had a chicken pot pie ready to go and the gravy in it was perfect—so good that it disguised the taste of vegetables in there! And Atticus turned out to be highly amused by the “authentic, free-range, organic yogurt-fed hipster” who made him his flat white. The barista had the oiled beard and thick black glasses going on, the flannel shirt, the skinny jeans and everything—maybe even a liberal arts degree, Atticus said. I love it when he does that—notices things aloud, or in my head, while we’re eating. I learn things and it’s delicious, and I know he’s doing it on purpose so that I associate learning with food, but I don’t care. It’s our thing and it’s fun. And afterward it makes me notice more than just what I can smell, which is probably a good thing when you’re trying to solve a dastardly crime.
Fortified by gravy and coffee and already liking the city, we continued south on NE 18th Avenue toward the Irvington neighborhood. The houses were all different, unlike what I used to see in Arizona, where you saw neighborhoods with the same few models repeated with only minor variations, and that was mostly the plants they had to pee on in the front yard. These Portland houses were built nineteen thousand centuries ago, I think, because Atticus said they were built in the nineteen hundreds to the nineteen-teens. He told me that they were mostly Craftsman homes, full of interesting quirks and additions built in later epochs. They had mature trees towering over the houses, big porches wrapping around them, and quite a few of the properties had cement or stone retaining walls around an elevated lawn, and moss grew on them and even on the steps leading up to the houses. Whole lot of moisture there, Atticus explained, and it did feel like it was going to rain soon. Lots of pride in the homeowners, too, though, if their immaculate lawns were any measure. Moss was allowed to flourish on the outsides of the retaining walls, but no one could bear an unkempt patch of turf. Maybe they had a really serious HOA, like that one episode of the X-Files where a monster ate you if you violated the CC&Rs.
We turned left down Tillamook—a name I noticed because it’s a brand of cheese Atticus buys sometimes—and then right on NE 24th. “Okay, Oberon,” Atticus said, stopping in front of a two-story pale blue house with strips of white wood doing architectural things I don’t know the name of. They were decorative and attractive patterns to humans, I guess. The glass in a couple of the windows was strange and I asked Atticus about it.
“That’s leaded glass. Stained some colors you can’t see. A bit hoity, maybe even toity. All right, plant quiz time. You should know all of these. There’s a grilled bratwurst in it for you if you get them all right. No mustard, just the way you like it. Go.”
Atticus had been teaching me the names of different plants recently instead of simply letting me pee on them. I’m not sure why—I announced once that I just peed on an oleander, thinking he’d congratulate me, but he said I didn’t need to share that.
“Excellent. And those big suckers in the flower bed along the porch?”
“Rhododendron. That was close enough to count. The bratwurst could still be yours. What are those plants with the long stems and puffy explosion of flowers at the end, kind of like lavender Q-Tips?”
“You got the first part right. Want a second chance, or do you want to settle for kibble for dinner?”
Atticus scratched me behind the ears and smiled. “That’s right. Smart hound. Brats for dinner tonight. Okay, it’s nose time. I want you to go first up to the door, trying to pick up everything you can, and then if something turns out to be amiss, maybe we’ll be able to attach those smells to something later. We don’t want to contaminate what’s there by walking all over it first.”
“I think the word you want is gestalt.”
“Let’s talk about sirloins instead of snacks if we can solve this. Take your time, file everything away. It might be important.”
Sirloins, plural, are some of the world’s most powerful motivators. It provides me a clarity and purpose like almost nothing else. I’m not really a scent hound, I’m more of a sight hound when it comes to hunting, but that doesn’t mean I can’t tell a cheesesteak from roast beef. So I put my nose to the narrow concrete walk and paced up to the porch steps, where we heard a dog begin to bark inside—the Boston terrier, no doubt.
“Oh, that’s a relief,” Atticus said. “If the Boston’s here, then he obviously hasn’t been abducted.”
“Yes, but we’ll go ahead and knock just to make sure, and tell her Delilah is worried about her.”
He stepped past me, no longer worried about contaminating smells, and rapped smartly on the door, sending the Boston into a frenzy inside.
“Ms. Boone-Sutcliffe?” Atticus called. “I’m just checking to make sure you’re okay. You don’t even have to open the door. Delilah Pierce in Washington is worried about you. Just tell me you’re all right and I’ll be on my way. Maybe give her a call.”
The Boston continued to bark and nobody shushed him. No muffled voice called to say they were coming. Atticus knocked again. We got plenty more barking, but no human. I tried to come up with a harmless explanation.
Atticus switched to mental communication since the lady might come to the door and hear him. Hmm. Maybe, buddy. But I’m more worried, not less. Can you smell anything through the door that seems wrong?
I hadn’t thought of trying that. I padded forward and snuffled at the door jamb, and then at the weather strip along the bottom. Something came through. Dog, of course, and tea and bacon and probably illegal amounts of cinnamon apple potpourri. But also decay.
You’re sure?
Yeah, but Occam’s Razor says it’s probably the lady.
He didn’t answer me but instead looked around to see if anyone was watching us. The street was quiet at the moment, no cars passing by, no joggers or bicyclists either.
I’m going to cast camouflage on us and break in just to check. I want you to stay near the door so you don’t leave many traces. Try not to shed. This might be a crime scene.
Just think tidy thoughts. Or we might be tracked down by CSI: Portland.
No idea. But every city has a crime scene investigation unit. Actually, now that I think on it, I’m going to take the time to bind your hair to your body and mine as well. We definitely don’t want to leave any traces here.
Atticus did a bunch of his Druid stuff then, speaking in Old Irish,
Okay, here we go, he said. Remember the Boston will be defending his home turf and might not be polite at first, so be patient with him until I can get him calmed down.
I said.
You mean something like a hundred and twenty pounds. Cows are not a unit of measurement.
Just watch the teeth, all right? Bostons have very strong jaws and necks. It’ll be tough to shake him off if he gets hold of something.
Atticus paused before opening the door, scanning the street one more time, and waited for a car to pass by so that they wouldn’t see the door seem to open and close by itself. Once it was clear, he told me to move fast, and we slipped inside. Atticus dropped our camouflage as soon as the door closed, and the Boston was waiting. He barked once and flew right at my face, teeth bared. I turned my head, lifted a leg, and pawed him aside so that he missed and wound up with a mouthful of wooden floor. Undeterred, he scrambled back up to lunge again, and I had to use my other leg to slap him away twice more. That gave Atticus time to form a bond with him and calm him down. I don’t know what he was saying mentally, but he spoke out loud, too, because it helped a little bit and let me know what was going on.
“Hey, hey, it’s all right. We’re here to make sure Verity is okay. We’re not here to hurt her or you. Is she all right? Where’s Verity?” He squatted down on his haunches, staring intently at the wee doggie, who truly did look like a prize specimen of the breed. Sleek black coat, milky socks on his paws and white fur on his chest, a sort of white racing stripe running down between the eyes and then spilling down either side of his nose, giving him white, whiskered chops that lacked all the slobber one normally gets from an English bulldog or a boxer.