Gun Shy Page 9

  I shook my head. Aside from the fact that I hate doing police work—the last time Cisco and I had assisted in a police search I had stumbled over a body with its face blown off and I still wasn’t over that one—this was an easy call. “The kid’s scent is all over the car and all around it. Cisco’s not discriminating enough yet to ignore that find and understand that he’s supposed to go after another one. It would just be a waste of time. You’re better off waiting for Hank to get here with the bloodhounds.”

  Hank Baker was my team leader and the real expert when it came to search and rescue. The fact that he lived two hours away, however, meant that the best I could do when things got complicated was to try not to contaminate the trail too much before he arrived.

  Buck nodded, squinting back down the slope. “We popped the trunk,” he said. “There are a couple suitcases, a wheelchair and a service dog harness. We’re not going to move anything until the state crime lab van gets here, but it looks like enough luggage for a couple of weeks, maybe more. The backseat is full of groceries—dry goods mostly, cereal, coffee, paper towels, sodas; the kind of things people bring with them to a vacation house. The bags were from a Publix outside of Mount Pleasant. What the kid didn’t eat, the varmints got to. Looks like a chipmunk’s picnic in the backseat.”

  “No dog food?”

  He shook his head. “Not even an empty bag.”

  “So when Jeff didn’t have the brand he was looking for, he must have decided to go someplace else for it.”

  “Where else is there?”

  I shrugged. “No place around here. But lots of places in Asheville.”

  Buck looked skeptical. “Come on, honey, that’s over an hour away. Who drives that far on a vacation for dog food?”

  I said simply, “Someone whose life depends on their dog.”

  He didn’t look convinced. “This is not exactly on the way to Asheville.”

  I said, “Right. You’d have to be pretty lost to end up this far off the highway looking for a pet store.”

  “Or pretty scared.”

  I lifted an eyebrow questioningly.

  “You’re thinking dog food, I’m thinking homicide,” Buck said. “A guy who has just killed his wife is a lot more likely to run his car off a dirt road in the middle of nowhere than a guy who is on his way to Asheville for dog food.”

  I was about to point out the flaw in this logic when there was a shout from below. Buck turned and I hopped to the ground, moving for a better look at the activity down below. Cisco followed, tail held high and waving. He barked a greeting to two of the familiar faces who, after another moment, started up the hill toward us, a leather satchel held in careful balance between them. As they grew closer, I could tell they were struggling under the weight, trying not to let the satchel hit the ground. Buck scrambled down the slope to help them up the last few yards.

  “What’s the deal?” I heard him say. “I thought we weren’t moving anything until the crime techs had a go at it.”

  “Sheriff’s orders,” said one of the deputies, breathing hard as they reached flat ground. “Said we ought to secure this in a patrol car until the van gets here.”

  “What’s in it?” Buck asked.

  Instinctively I slipped my hand through Cisco’s collar and took a few steps backward as I had an awful thought about what—or who—might be in the satchel. Too many gruesome crime movies, I guess.

  Without another word, one of the deputies flipped the latch on the bag, and the two men spread it open between them by the handles. I couldn’t help myself. I looked.

  The bag was filled with gold coins.

  Chapter Eight

  “Well, quite a day’s work, all in all, I would say,” remarked Maude, lifting her teacup to me in a small salute. “You resolved the identity of a dead woman, opened a homicide investigation, tracked down the rightful owners of a valuable service dog, found a lost Boy Scout and discovered a bag full of treasure. Nicely done. Nicely done indeed.”

  “Not to mention cussing out my new neighbor and alienating one of the richest men in the Southeast,” I pointed out. I sat back in my chair and swung my feet up onto the battered hassock in front of it, affecting an attitude of smugness. “Not bad at all.”

  Maude still likes to take an afternoon tea break, although during the busy time of the year she doesn’t often get to do it. I prefer cocoa, myself, and even though I still had several hours worth of work waiting for me in the kennel, I felt I deserved a celebratory cup. We had a fire going in the fireplace, the dogs were sprawled out in their various favorite places and even Hero had been persuaded to leave his crate and come lie beside my chair. Cisco, who was gnawing on a hard rubber bone on the other side of my chair, was the picture of contentment. At four thirty in the afternoon the sun had already begun to drop behind the mountain, and the room was bathed in a pleasant dusky glow. It was one of my favorite times of day.

  I said, sipping the cocoa, “What kind of person keeps a bag of gold coins in his car, anyway? It’s like something out of a fairy tale.”

  The police were not releasing the fact that a bag of coins had been found in the car trunk until the state investigators gave them clearance, but telling Maude was not the same as telling the media. Unless my uncle ordered me directly not to do so, I always felt free to discuss cases with Maude.

  “I doubt very seriously whether he was accustomed to carrying around a bag of gold coins,” Maude pointed out. “Obviously he, or she—let’s not forget the car was registered in her name—intended to do something with them. And since gold is internationally negotiable, I suspect that what he intended to do was to leave the country.”

  “He sure picked an odd starting point. We aren’t exactly next door to an international border.”

  “Perhaps he was on his way to the airport when the car crashed. Asheville has international flights, and the logic might well be that security would be less intense at a smaller airport.”

  “Makes sense I guess,” I agreed. “Of course, you’d have to connect through Atlanta to go anywhere, but if you checked your baggage through to your final destination you might have less trouble getting through security in Asheville.”

  “Certainly the wait time is less, if time was a consideration.”

  “True enough.”

  I reached down absently to scratch Hero’s ears, and Cisco looked up alertly.

  “Is the theory that the poor man is injured or dead?”

  “They didn’t find any blood in the car,” I said. “But I can’t think of any other reason why a man would walk off and leave a bag full of gold coins. He may have tried to hike back to the road and gotten lost. After all, if a Boy Scout can get turned around just a few yards off the trail, a city slicker from Charleston wouldn’t have much of a chance. Hank and the bloodhounds will be out looking first thing in the morning.”

  “I’d like to know what he was doing out there in the first place. That old road isn’t easy to find.”

  “Well, if we knew that, I guess a lot of questions would be answered.”

  Maude frequently brings me homemade goodies. My favorite are her blueberry scones, but running a close second are the tea cakes that were arranged on a china plate with a paper doily and set on an end table carefully out of reach of curious dog noses. Cisco watched intensely as I reached for one, and didn’t stop watching until I had consumed every morsel.

  “There’s still a lot about this that doesn’t add up, though,” I said. “I wish your friend Letty would call back. It sounded as though she knew the Whites personally.I’ll bet she could answer a lot of questions.” I had told Maude about the overseas phone call she had missed, and I had also told Uncle Roe that Letty Cranston could be found in Crete. Of course the fact that she had lost the connection before leaving a return phone number did not make her any easier to track down.

  “Oh, bloody hell,” Maude said abruptly, and I looked at her in surprise. “Speaking of missed phone calls, in all the excitement I completely for
got. That fellow from Coastal Assistance Dogs returned your call. I told him about the incident this morning with the gunfire, and he seemed most concerned. He wanted to talk to you personally. He said he’d be in the office until five.”

  I hurried to find the number and place the call.

  It was put through immediately, and Wes sounded relieved to hear from me. We talked for a few moments about the jumping-through-the-window episode, and I assured him that there was no serious physical injury. But I knew that his concerns about the dog went beyond the Lab’s physical well-being.

  “I’m sure I don’t have to tell you that this kind of behavior is deeply alarming,” he told me. “Even a one-time occurrence can make the dog too unreliable to be returned to service.”

  My heart sank. My instinct was to make excuses for Hero—he had just been through a terrible trauma, he was stressed both physically and mentally and if this had never happened before, surely he deserved a second chance. But by force of will I kept my mouth shut. This man was the expert, not I. And people’s lives really were at stake.

  I said, “If you can’t take him back into the program, what will happen to him?”

  “Oh, we have a list of highly qualified applicants waiting to adopt one of our retired service dogs,” he assured me. “Very often they can be placed as a pet with a member of the deceased’s family.” He hesitated. “But in this case I see there is only the husband and a father.”

  I said, “The husband still hasn’t been located.” And because I thought, on behalf of Hero, he had the right to know, I added, “There’s a possibility he might not be, um, able to care for a dog.” This was true, whether he was found injured, dead or guilty of murder. I could sense the puzzlement in Wes’s silence but didn’t feel free to elaborate.

  He said, “I found a volunteer who can pick Nero up on Saturday, but I could arrange to be in your area later next week. I’ll be driving back from Atlanta. I’d like to evaluate Nero myself, and then I could bring him back with me. I know it’s an imposition to ask you to keep him—”

  “Not at all,” I assured him. “He’s really no trouble. I like having him around. And now that I know about his noise phobia, I’ll definitely keep him closer to me. I got your fax of his list of commands, and I can keep practicing with him. Do you think it would be okay to take him out in public some?”

  “That would probably be good for him,” Wes said. “Just be sure he minds his manners, and don’t let him get away with anything a service dog shouldn’t be doing.”

  “I don’t think that will be problem,” I said, looking across the room at those sweet liquid eyes gazing at me from the floor.

  “I can’t tell you how much I appreciate this, Miss Stockton. I’ll be in touch.”

  Maude was clearing away the tea things as I returned. “I take it we have a boarder for a little while longer?”

  I nodded, snatching another tea cake before she removed the plate. “He wants to come down and get the dog himself next week. That’s fine with me. I always wanted to train a service dog. I mean, I know that’s not what I’m actually doing, but just taking him through his paces is fascinating to me.”

  Maude cast a skeptical glance in the direction of Hero, who had not once moved from the place I had assigned him on the floor by my chair. “I don’t know, my dear. He still doesn’t look like he’s quite up to being put through any paces.”

  “His heart may not be in it, but he’s too well trained not carry out his commands. Watch this.”

  I snatched one of the napkins from the tray Maude was carrying and dropped it on the floor. “Hero,” I said. “Take.” I pointed to the napkin.

  The Lab pushed to his feet, ambled over to the napkin, picked it up off the floor and returned to sit in front of me. “Good,” I told him, and held out my hand. “Drop.”

  He released the slightly soggy napkin into my hand. I praised him and ruffled his ears. He seemed to tolerate, rather than appreciate, my affection.

  Maude said, “Very nice. Now if he would just do the dishes and tidy the kitchen before he goes to bed, we’d be all set, wouldn’t we?”

  “Well, I don’t know about the dishes, but he can at least lock up and turn off the lights for us. Hero, door.”

  Hero trotted toward the front door, jumped up and clawed at the doorknob until he turned the deadbolt and it locked into place. I clapped my hands and exclaimed, “Good boy! Now, lights.”

  For a moment he was confused, since he had only recently learned where the light switch was in this house. Then he located the white switch plate on the wall by the door, leapt up and pawed the switch off. The two table lamps that were controlled by the switch went off and the room was left in dimness. I exclaimed again, “Wonderful! Good boy, Hero!”

  Cisco, alerted by the enthusiasm in my voice, got up and looked around expectantly for the treat that usually accompanied that level of vocal enthusiasm. In his mind, all things good in the universe centered around him.

  “Very clever,” agreed Maude, still holding the tray. “I don’t suppose he could, er . . .” She gestured to the light switch with one shoulder.

  Heady with my own power, I said, “Hero, lights.”

  Hero jumped up and pawed the light switch again.

  A golden blur charged across my peripheral vision, accompanied by a snarling, sharp-voiced bark that was so outrageous coming from my mild-mannered golden retriever that at first I didn’t recognize it. Cisco leapt on Hero and knocked him to the ground, and the whole world erupted into a confusion of rolling yellow dog bodies and furious vocalizations. Majesty sprang to her feet and started barking; the two Aussies charged forward, excitedly cheering the combatants on; the tea tray clattered as Maude set it aside and moved quickly to grab the collars of the nearest dogs.

  It was over in a matter of seconds. The Lab yelped and Cisco gave a final series of hell-houndish vocalizations. I shouted, “Cisco, leave!” and the moment he turned his head I grabbed his collar and marched him silently out of the house and into the backyard, where I exiled him behind a locked dog door.

  By the time I returned, Maude had my other three dogs in their crates—a testament to her efficiency and smooth handling skills—and Hero was cowering under a table.

  “Damn,” I said. My heart was thundering in my chest. “Damn, damn, damn. Is he hurt?”

  “Not even a speck of slobber on him,” replied Maude mildly. “It was all talk.”

  But whether he was injured or not, I knew the kind of psychological damage that could be done to a dog who has been attacked by another dog. Something like this could turn a formerly social dog into an aggressor, or trigger a fear of others of its own kind that could last a lifetime. As if the poor thing hadn’t been through enough. The fact that my dog had been the aggressor . . . My Cisco who had actually attacked a service dog who was performing his duties . . . I could hardly get my mind around that. I just couldn’t believe what I had seen.

  “What in the world got into him?” I demanded shakily. I sank to the floor beside the table where the Lab was hiding and dug into my pocket for treats. “I’ve never seen anything like that in my life. Cisco isn’t aggressive! What happened?” I realized that I sounded like half the clients who came to me wanting me to “fix” their aggressive dogs. The one thing they all had in common was denial. But this was Cisco!

  “Calm down,” Maude said in that same easy, matter-of-fact tone she used to calm spooked animals. “You’re not doing this fellow any favors by shoving cheese into his face. Leave him be.”

  She was right, of course. My body language radiated tension, and I was crowding a dog who already felt trapped. I left a few tidbits on the floor and moved away several feet, consciously trying to relax my shoulders.

  “He’s jealous, that’s what it is,” I said. I deliberately forced my voice into a close approximation of Maude’s calm tone. “I’ve been paying too much attention to Hero, and this is Cisco’s way of trying to eliminate the competition.”

  “Do
gs don’t have secondary emotions,” Maude reminded me. “More likely, he saw Hero’s jumping behavior as a threat, and he was defending himself—or you.”

  I knew her explanation was the most logical one, and I wanted to believe it. But it’s hard not to anthropomorphize when your dog does something as shocking and as completely out of character as Cisco had just done.

  Maude said, “Hero, here.”

  Hero left the shelter of the table and came to her, his tail low but wagging. She stroked his ear. “Let Cisco in on a lead. Likely he’s completely forgotten the whole thing by now.”

  I did as she requested, and of course she was right. The two dogs sniffed noses, wagged tails and lost interest. Hero went to his crate, and Cisco looked up at me as though wondering why he was on a leash inside the house.

  “Just watch them for a while,” Maude advised. She unsnapped Cisco’s lead and he went back to his rubber bone. “They’ll be fine.”

  But for the first time I began to feel as though five dogs inside the house might be too many.

  Chapter Nine

  After that unsettling incident I was supersensitive to the possibility of another, and when I was awakened by the sound of violent barking before daylight the next morning, I shot out of bed and was halfway down the stairs before I realized that the noise couldn’t possibly herald another dogfight: All the dogs were crated except Cisco, and he was right on my heels. I made my way groggily down the remainder of the stairs, quieting the dogs with a sharp word. Of course, quieting a herding dog is more easily said than done, and since most of the barking was coming from the two Aussies and the collie, all I got was an occasional break in the chorus.

  In the spates of silence I was able to discern what had set them off in the first place—the grinding sound of heavy-equipment engines as they rounded the curve in the road at the end of my drive. Standing on tiptoe to look out the high glass window in the front door, I could see the flash of headlights from the highway—two, three, four big trucks lumbered their way up a grade that rarely saw more than a dozen vehicles of any description each day. Who in the world would be transporting heavy equipment along this little-used road at five forty-five in the morning?