Play Dead (25 page)

“Sorry I snapped at you. Some bastard
barely missed killing one of my dogs.”

George held up his palms. “Hey, don’t
think twice about it. I understand completely. Are all of your dogs okay?”

“It appears so,” I answered, but once
again, was confronted with the thought that, if George Haggerty was the killer,
I’d just done him the favor of letting him know that his plan had failed. He
would have already gathered that much from what he’d overheard, though.
Extending that rationale, I added with considerable pride, “My German shepherd
not only didn’t eat the meat herself, but guarded it so the other dogs wouldn’t
eat it.”

“I’ve never heard of a dog refusing to eat
meat. How did you train her to do that? And why?”

“Back when she was a puppy, there were a
few reports of dog poisonings in the papers. I worried that, since her breed
occasionally gets bad press, she might be a target someday.” Not to mention the
fact that my own dogs had been my “proving ground” for work with others’ dogs
and therefore were trained in all kinds of potentially useless ways. However,
this being one of those rare opportunities when I’d actually been
asked
to
blow my own horn, there was no sense in my deliberately playing off-key. “I
just used my usual basics—sound aversion if she started to eat something
I hadn’t offered her and positive reinforcement when she did as instructed.”

“Huh,” George said, casting a long look
Rex’s way before returning his gaze to me.

I forced myself to work with George and
Rex as best I could manage despite the tremendous distraction. Rex was making
considerable progress. By George’s asserting himself as alpha dog, Rex was
beginning to accept basic commands and was allowing George to leave the house
for brief periods without whining. Nevertheless, my thoughts and my heart were
elsewhere. Afterwards, I drove home as quickly as rush hour traffic would
allow.

Mom showed me the hunk of hamburger she’d
collected from the portion of the yard that Pavlov had diligently been
guarding. The two of us agreed that the meat indeed had a characteristic smell
to it—antifreeze. She’d brought the dogs in, and we kept them in the
kitchen with us while we watched for signs of their having consumed any. The
dogs were fine. Mom and I were nervous wrecks.

We took out our fears and frustration in
the good ol’ method that has stood the test of time among dysfunctional
families the world over, yelling at each other. Mom would no doubt have
recalled our conversation differently, yet the fact was,
she
started it.

Just after we’d relaxed enough to take
seats at the small, oak kitchen table, she said, “I thought you were trying to
keep Sage’s location quiet. How could the hateful, cowardly scumbag even know
Sage was here? Did you tell your customers I had the dog?”

“Of course not, Mother! How stupid do you
think I am?”

She tightened her jaw. “I don’t think you’re
at all stupid, Allie. Just so stubborn that you get in over your head.”

I furrowed my brow and glared at her. “If
I’m stubborn, guess which side of the family I inherited it from?”

“In my case, it’s known as determination.
And believe you me, I’m determined not to let anyone get within ten feet of
these dogs again.”

“Good. Which is why we need to move out of
here for a while. We should all just...move into a hotel or something.”

“Allie, that’s ridiculous! What kind of a ‘hotel’
would accept a collie, a German shepherd, and a cocker spaniel?”

“I don’t know,” I snapped. “There has to
be some fleabag place around here somewhere.”

Mom crossed her arms and glared. “This is
my home, and I won’t be chased out of it.”

I clicked my tongue. “God, Mom! If I had
said that, you’d accuse me of being stubborn, and you’d be right! Now that you’re
saying it, you’re merely ‘acting determined’!”

She maintained her cross-armed
countenance. “Call it what you will,” she answered in clipped tones. “In any
case, I’m not leaving my house. You can take Doppler and Pavlov and go, if you’d
like.”

“You’ve got to listen to me, Mother!” I
rose for emphasis and leaned against the kitchen table to stare into her eyes. “The
killer’s after Sage. That’s his one link to the murders. We have to go
someplace. What would have happened if I’d kept Pavlov with me this afternoon?
Sage would have eaten that poisoned meat and possibly died.”

“Maybe so, but that was before I fully
understood the danger Sage was in. Now that I
am
fully aware, I can
protect him.”

I sank back into my chair, suspecting that
my arguments were only forcing Mom to dig her heels in more. When could this
have happened? Pavlov had acted normally when I let her out, and she has such
an exceptional sense of smell, I highly doubted the meat was here when I
dropped her off late morning.

If worse came to worst, we could always put
the dogs in a kennel, but the thought of the dogs exposed to tons of
contaminants and unable to exercise properly was truly unpleasant. Plus, Sage
would also be vulnerable to the killer in a kennel, and he’d be totally out of
our range of influence. In any case, I needed to mend fences with my mother, as
fencing was about all we had going for us in the way of protection.

Forcing my voice to sound as relaxed as
possible, I asked, “Did you see anything at all around the time the meat must
have been tossed over the fence?”

“I didn’t see anything, but, come to think
of it, there was a strange door-to-door sales call. It was from some man who
claimed to be selling ‘organic dog food,’ which he claims he ‘makes fresh and
delivers to your doorstep.’ I told him I wasn’t interested, and he left.”

I tensed with alarm. “That’s too much of a
coincidence. Maybe he was going to try to poison Sage in person, then when you
wouldn’t let him in, he tossed it over the fence. What did he look like?”

“He was a big, strong guy. Mid thirties or
so. Wearing a bad-quality hairpiece. German accent.”

“A hairpiece?” I repeated.

“Looked as though he’d bought it off an
Elvis impersonator. Phony sideburns, the whole nine yards. He kept insisting if
I’d just let him demonstrate, I’d see how much the dog loved his product.”

“Wait a minute. If he was the killer, he
had to know that Sage would start barking at him. Did Sage, or either of the
other dogs, see him?”

“No. They were all in the backyard when he
came to the front. I remember one thing. He was wearing really strong cologne.”

“Maybe he was trying to disguise his scent
from Sage. Did you get his card or a brochure?” Mom was already shaking her
head, so I continued, “Was he driving a company car?”

“No, just a plain, white four-door.”

I grabbed my head in frustration, mostly
to stop myself from reaching across the table to grab my mother. She’d teased
me about my fears regarding a white car, then she missed our best chance to
identify it! “Mom, a
white
car? Didn’t you get the license plate or
anything?”

She shook her head. “I didn’t make the
connection then. I was tired. I’d just gotten home, and it was broad daylight
and everything. I didn’t think there was anything sinister about him—just
one more pushy door-to-door salesman. He said his name was George Heidenburg.”

George Haggerty was my only bald client
who might be inclined to wear some sort of toupee. The names were bizarrely
similar. But there was no possibility of the Georges being one and the same.
George Haggerty had been with me when the salesman was visiting Mom. Besides
which, it now dawned on me that during my last conversation with
my
George,
I’d stupidly blurted out that Pavlov had protected Sage from the tainted meat.
If this bogus salesman worked for George Haggerty, I’d given them instructions
on how to pull off their nefarious plan. Mom was right! I was every bit as
stupid as Mom claimed she didn’t think I was!

Returned to my previous level of anxiety,
I renewed our argument regarding how we had to hide our dogs, and preferably
ourselves, too. Mother retorted that she would “sooner keep watch over Sage
with a rifle in her hands” than move into a hotel or a friend’s house.

“In that case,” I argued, “I’ll just move
Sage to a friend’s house.”

“No! The poor dog has been orphaned twice.
It would be too traumatizing to Sage after all he’s been through.”

“After we get him back, I’ll work with
him. That is my job, after all. Remember all that stuff you told Joel Meyer
about my being ‘worth every penny’ I charge, ‘and then some’?”

“Oh, please.” She flicked a hand at me. “That
was a prospective customer. I’m your mother.”

I fisted my hands. The heck with “mending
fences.” I know when I’ve just been insulted! “Which means that you know me too
well to give me any credit?”

“I didn’t say that. Sage is my dog now,
and I’m not going to let him out of my sight.”

The words had a chilling effect on me.
They were the exact same ones Dennis Corning had used when advising me how I
should treat the collie. “Mom, moving Sage could prove to be the only way to
keep him alive!”

“Don’t you use that tone of voice to me,
young lady!”

Oh, good Lord!
My teen years all over again. Was this
nightmare never going to end?

“I am going to stay in my own home and
watch Sage and that’s final.” She rose from the table.

When my mother says, “that’s final,” she
means it. Short of kidnapping Sage myself, all I could do was vow to help keep
watch over both Sage and Mom, and to step up my own pace toward doing anything
I could to help the authorities solve the crime. “What did the police say when
you called them?” I asked.

“Oh, shoot!” She snapped her fingers. “I
never did get around to doing that, I was so concerned with watching the dogs
every second.”

I sighed and grabbed the phone. The
Boulder Police had been very professional and courteous in their dealings with
me, and yet I had a hunch that they’d concluded I was an utter flake. By now,
they’d likely tagged me The Dog Lady, intent on sticking my nose into their
investigations.

A female answered the nonemergency number
I’d called.

“My name’s Allida Babcock. Somebody tried
to poison my dog. I need to speak to someone assigned to the Beth Gleason
murder case.” There was a pause, which I interpreted as confusion over my
request, so I quickly added, “My dog was a witness to the murder.”

“I see. Just a moment, please.” Her voice
had an overly animated lilt to it, which indicated that I might as well have
claimed there was a spaceship on my roof. Nonetheless, I eventually reached an
officer who agreed that a trip out to Berthoud was warranted to collect the
hamburger as evidence and interview my mom.

An hour later, Mom gave the same
description of the dog food salesman to the uniformed officer that she’d given
me. Unfortunately, since the salesman had been standing on one of the porch
steps but she couldn’t say for certain which one, she was only able to give a
range of height within six inches—between five foot ten and six foot
four. The description was so vague—especially since it appeared that his
hairpiece was a deliberate disguise—it could have been most any youngish,
Caucasian man.

I had so many unanswered questions. Why
was Sage’s dog food tainted? What was Beth’s relationship with Hannah Jones?
Who was driving this white car that kept showing up? What was Bill Wayne really
searching for in my room—and was his search somehow related to the
murders? I felt as though I could jump out of my skin, and yet there was
nothing I could do.

Of my own personal list of possible
suspects, Chet Adler was so remarkably tall that I very much doubted she could
mistake him for possibly five-ten. That left Dennis Corning, Alex
Ferron—aka The Man Formerly Known as Keith Terrington—Bill Wayne,
George Haggerty, John O’Farrell, and Joel Meyer—but only if he’d shaved
his beard today, which seemed unlikely. Because I couldn’t believe Alex was
involved, that left Dennis, Bill, and John—provided there was one man,
acting alone, who’d committed the evil acts, and that this was not a completely
innocent door-to-door salesman. And, anyway, an “innocent door-to-door salesman”
was an oxymoron.

It was after seven
p.m.
Mom and I ate dinner, but now that she was used to me
as a house guest—after all of one day—she agreed to let me cook, so
I made lemon chicken and rice. Both the chicken and the rice were dry and unexciting.
Though our antagonism toward each other had, thankfully, faded, my thoughts
were in such turmoil that I was lousy company.

If only I could explore the link between
Hannah Jones and Beth Gleason, I thought, pushing some grains of rice around my
plate. But how could I, when all that remained of the link was the collie? A
second connection between the two women occurred to me then—one that was
so obvious, I was tempted to whack myself in the head.

“Mom, do you know anything about this
cooking class that Hannah Jones used to teach?”

Mom peered up from her plate at me. “Why?
Looking for guidance?”