All Shots

why motorcycles? Damn! I’d sent the biker, Adam, in search of the other Holly Winter, but she’d been so unpleasant to me that the incident had slipped my mind and I’d neglected to ask her about him.
    “He had nothing to do with us,” I told Rowdy. “He was here by mistake.”
    Unless... unless the murdered woman had, in fact, begun to assume my identity? Or the identity of the other Holly Winter? Unless she’d passed herself off to Adam as one of us? You have something for me. That’s what he’d said. I had a vivid memory of the view through the glass door into the kitchen where the body had lain. Someone, presumably the killer, had trashed the house in search of something. And found it? Failed to find it? And was still looking? You have something for me. The same thing he’d been seeking in Dr. Ho’s house?
    Whatever it was, I didn’t have it. Furthermore, I knew nothing about it. At bedtime, I let go of what Rita would have called my “pointless obsessing” by surrounding myself with dogs. Rowdy slept on the bedroom floor under the air conditioner, which I’d turned on to provide white noise; Sammy was in his crate; and Kimi spent the night next to me on the bed, her spine to mine. It’s possible, I suppose, that eight hours of close contact with Kimi’s backbone cured me of my bout of spinelessness. For whatever reason, I awoke in the morning feeling calm but also feeling eager to do my part to figure out what the hell was going on, my part being, of course, to trace the identity of the blue mala-mute. Fortunately for Phyllis Hamilton, my eagerness did not prompt me to call her at seven A.M. when the dogs and I got up; since she’d been at the shows all weekend and had had a long drive back home to Pennsylvania, I decided to wait until at least eleven. At ten, however, just after I’d ordered a credit check, she called me.
    When we’d exchanged greetings and congratulations on the weekend’s wins—Heart had gone Winners Bitch on Sunday—I filled Phyllis in on the circumstances surrounding my curiosity about the blue malamute.
    Phyllis said, “Well, I can get you started. I knew there was something about her that was ringing a bell. I was thinking about her on the drive home. She has the look of the Snosquall dogs. But Minnie Wilcox stopped breeding... oh, it must be six years ago.”
    “I’ve heard the name,” I said.
    “And Debbie Alonso. You might have run into her. She’s in Illinois.”
    “Crevasse?” I should perhaps point out that I was not asking whether Debbie Alonso had fallen into one. Rather, I was confirming that Crevasse was Debbie Alonso’s kennel name.
    “Yes.”
    “Is she still breeding?”
    “No. You know, Holly, I’ve been thinking it over, and I think that maybe now I’m the only one actively breeding with blue in the lines. Not that I breed a lot. But maybe I’m the only one.”
    “You’re the one everyone thinks of,” I said. “Maybe because you show a lot. And win!”
    “They both showed, but they weren’t around here. They were in Illinois. They bred some nice dogs. And then there was Graham Grant. You know about him.”
    “There was some kind of scandal. A couple of years ago? Some of his dogs ended up in rescue. That’s all I remember.” Phyllis sighed in a way that expressed sadness and disgust. “Debbie took back the dogs he got from her, and I think she took Minnie’s, too, but rescue helped with the ones he’d bred himself. You probably met him at the National in Massachusetts.”
    National: Alaskan Malamute National Speciality, an annual all-malamute dog show, the yearly gathering of our clan.
    “I met hundreds of people there,” I said. “I don’t remember him.”
    “Oh, Grant was a charmer! And he had nice dogs. Well, he would. Snosquall and Crevasse lines.”
    “Did he belong to AMCA?” The Alaskan Malamute Club of America is our national breed club, membership io which is a sign of reputability. Among other things, you have to be sponsored by two established members, both of whom have to have known you for at least two years and one of whom has to have visited your house.
    “Oh, yes. As far as anyone knew, he was a responsible breeder. Well, he was, I think, until his marriage fell apart, and he got into some kind of financial trouble. By the time people realized what was going on, his dogs were in terrible condition. Filthy. Starving. Debbie Alonso knows all about it. She was furious.”
    “What happened to