All Shots

for her if she needed to call me. We agreed that she’d let me know immediately if Strike returned. I promised to do what I could to find the missing Siberian.
    Pulling out of Mellie’s driveway, I saw that the official vehicles no longer blocked the street. A small group of people had gathered on the sidewalk, but I had no desire even to pass by and drove in the other direction. Preoccupied with Mellie, I’d managed to blot out the image of the body on the tiles. It now returned to me. She had had my slim build. Her hair had been medium length, its color a pale brown with maybe a hint of red, a familiar shade, one that occurs in golden retrievers. Or so my father has always insisted. It is, in other words, the color of my own hair.
     

CHAPTER 6
     
    As soon as I got home, I called Francie to tell her about the murder and to inquire about Mellie’s safety. Our conversation was brief. “Mellie won’t open the door to strangers, if that’s what you’re worried about,” Francie assured me. “And she has good locks. Once Mellie masters a routine, she follows it. She always locks up. I’ll break the news to her about what happened. She won’t see it on the news. She watches TV, but mainly sitcoms and children’s shows, a few animal programs, and she doesn’t listen to the radio. Or read the newspaper, of course. News upsets her. Well, it upsets me, too. She can read, sort of, but she doesn’t. I mean, she can print her name, and she can read words on signs and packages, stuff like that, but that’s it. I wondered whether she might like reading children’s books, but I tried a few, and I got nowhere. I’m sure she had unhappy experiences in school. The printed word makes her feel inadequate. In any case, one of us can always stay there tonight. Sorry, but I have to run.” Her tone suggested urgency. “Our preschool is a media-free zone, and one of the toddlers keeps showing up in a Thomas the Tank Engine T-shirt.”
    Cambridge. It’s worse than D.C.—one political crisis after another. Just let Thomas the Tank Engine chug his media-laden way across the city limits, and we’ll face inevitable assault by the armies of Batman, Superman, the Power Rangers, the entire cast of Toy Story, and that notorious antifeminist empress herself, Barbie, who’ll wear either her Joan of Arc outfit or her cute little U.S. Marines uniform, but will waste precious hours deciding between the two, thus giving us time to erect our fortifications of anatomically correct and racially unidentifiable dolls, unembellished blocks, Lincoln Logs, LEGOs, unpainted wooden trains, jars of finger paint, pads of blank paper, and other toys designed to challenge the imagination, boost IQs, and instill in our children the extreme tolerance for unrelenting boredom so vital to success in today’s academic world.
    It was now quarter of five. I placed quick calls to the animal control officers of Cambridge, Arlington, Somerville, and Belmont, on alt of whose voice mail I left my name, my phone number, and the message that a female Siberian husky had been lost near Rindge Avenue in Cambridge. Since Strike had been missing for only a short time, it was premature, I decided, to post flyers and to enlist the aid of the world’s greatest finder of lost dogs, the Internet. As we say here in Cambridge, think globally, act locally.
    Instead of cooking, I ran down the street to Formaggio, a gourmet shop principally renowned for delicious cheeses from all over the world but also notable for fruits, vegetables, and flowers and for rotisserie chicken that has the distinction of not tasting like those freeze-dried poultry strips sold as dog treats. I arrived home to find Kevin Dennehy at my back door. For a person with red hair, blue eyes, fair skin, freckles, and a friendly manner, he is remarkably reminiscent of a silver-back male gorilla. He has the same massive build, including the muscular shoulders, and he sometimes lets his arms swing down as if he were contemplating quadrupedal locomotion, but the main point of likeness is Kevin’s peculiar ability to combine an air of authority with an attitude of curiosity. Kevin would strangle me for describing him as cute, but cute he can be.
    To my amazement, Kevin skipped his usual formulaic greeting (“Hey, Holly, how ya doing?”) and said, “Christ, am I glad to see you. I thought you were dead.”
    “Reports were greatly exaggerated,” I said. “Kevin, I have to feed the dogs, and then I have