All Shots

into him there. I don’t care where he is as long as he doesn’t have dogs.”
    “Do you remember who saw him?”
    “Sorry. Someone told someone who... one of those things. This was maybe a year ago, anyway.”
    After that, we talked about rescue for a while. As soon as the call ended, I refilled Sammy’s toy and called Debbie Alonso. The conversation was brief. Debbie had nothing good to say about Graham Grant. In fact, it sounded to me as if she was so furious at him that she could barely talk about him at all. His kennel name, I learned, had been Rhapsody. His wife was about his age, in her late thirties, Debbie thought. She certainly wasn’t in her early twenties.
    Feeling discouraged, I made two calls intended to cheer me up. The first was to Steve. Amazingly, I reached him. Just as amazingly, his cell phone didn’t quit, so we had a long talk, during which I told him about everything except the murder and associated horrors. He’d be home on Saturday, and especially because we couldn’t count on being able to reach each other by phone, I didn’t want to worry him. Instead, I told him about the rally run-throughs I was going to the next evening, rally being a fun variety of obedience. Instead of performing a fixed set of exercises on the judge’s orders, the dog and handler move through a course marked by signs. Each sign represents an exercise, sometimes a simple one like Halt, sometimes a more complicated one that involves, for example, heeling in a pattern around traffic cones. Anyway, a few months earlier, I’d had a flare-up of ring nerves, and although I was feeling almost ready to show again, I was still concentrating on lighthearted dog sports and avoiding competition obedience, which was formal, serious, and nerve-wracking, mainly because I made it that way. Run-throughs, I should add, are just what they sound like, opportunities to practice for trials under similar conditions but without actual competition and without scoring that counts. The run-throughs were taking place on the green of a suburban town. A pleasant evening spent playing with Rowdy was just what my healing nerves needed. Heeling nerves. Sorry. Punning is an affliction, presumably one with a neurological basis. Anyway, Leah and I were taking Rowdy and Kimi, and I was looking forward to time with Leah, too. I’d talked to her on the phone a couple of times, but I missed having her live with us.
    My second cheer-myself-up call was to Gabrielle. I simply wanted to hear her voice, which, I was increasingly forced to recognize, always felt more maternal than my own mother’s ever had. Force of habit, which is to say, the habit of addressing golden retrievers, had made Marissa sound like my handler and my breeder, as she was, of course, but my stepmother sounded like a mother and nothing more. Fortunately, it was Gabrielle and not Buck who answered, and she was filled with yet more excitement about drug enforcement and, in particular, about the DEA agent, Al, who was becoming a friend of hers. I was anything but surprised. Knowing my stepmother as I did, I expected to find that Al would be joining us for Thanksgiving dinner at her house in Bar Harbor and that Gabrielle already had a list of suggestions about what Steve and I should give him for Christmas. I’d have bet anything that Gabrielle had invited him to use her guest cottage whenever he liked and to spend his next vacation there. So, I let Gabrielle’s comforting warmth soothe me and paid little attention to the particulars about the latest complete stranger she was welcoming into our family. Out of the corner of my ear, I heard that the DEA confiscated all sorts of marvelous things. Raids yielded luxury vehicles and first-rate sound systems. Suspects were known as “subjects.” Al sometimes went undercover. I knew that if he ever did anything iffy or odd or obnoxious, Gabrielle would tell me about it before adding in tones of shared affection, “But that’s just Al. You know what he’s like.” If he did something truly egregious, she’d advise me to think of him as a difficult relative. She’d say it before I’d even met him.
    But that’s just Gabrielle. You know what she’s like.
    Yes, wonderful. I felt equally certain that my honorary cousin-to-be returned Gabrielle’s affection. For obvious reasons, everyone loved her.
    Although Gabrielle’s chatter should have been an effective lullaby and although I had all three malamutes with me, I still felt