All Shots

number that begins with an area code I dial all the time: 207. Maine. A mechanical voice informs her that she has reached the number she just dialed. She hangs up.
    She then turns to Google.
    Google. The World Wide Web. Fondness for it. We have more in common, she and I, than I like to admit.
    She first does exactly what I’d do—she enters the 207 number—but gets no results. Her next try—Maine meth OR methamphetamine—yields many results, in fact, a plethora. She opens a few Web pages and scans for information. Like me, she is a fast reader, in part because she skims material that she already knows. For instance, she doesn’t need to read every word about Maine’s long border with Canada. She changes her search: dogs meth OR methamphetamine. Here, I cannot refrain from pointing out that using the operator OR between synonyms is unnecessary and, to my eye, clumsy. I’d use a tilde: dogs ~meth. But no one is looking over her shoulder. Specifically, I’m not. In other words, we are not competing. Still, what she discovers is something I could have told her, namely, that drug dealers have been known to smuggle their goods through U.S. Customs in the digestive tracts of dogs. And, as is incidental to her search and to my story, in the innards of human beings, too.
    She picks up her phone and calls the police.
     

CHAPTER 27
     
    When I got home, another fragment fell in place. Strike. Mellie had been told that the dog’s name was Strike. She’d also been told, as far as I could tell, that Strike was a husky and that she had been spayed. If I wanted my dogs to respond to names other than their real ones, I’d pick names that sounded at least somewhat similar: India would pose a problem, as would Rowdy, but Lady could become Baby, Kimi could be Ginny, Sammy could be Ranny. Miss Blue. Strike. Streak. Indeed, Blue Streak. Grant’s kennel name? Rhapsody. Her registered name? Rhapsody’s Blue Streak. I’d have put money on it. I’d have lost. I took a quick look at the Alaskan Malamute Registry Pedigree Program and practically hit myself over the head. I should’ve known! I, who considered myself an expert on canine nomenclature, had failed to predict the perfectly predictable, which was that in registering his dogs, his malamutes, the world-class woo-woo-woo- ers of the dog world, he’d substituted—you guessed, huh ?—woo for blue. The dogs he’d bought from Minnie Wilcox and Debbie Alonso bore their kennel names, Snosquall and Crevasse: Snosquall Rhapsody in Woo and Crevasse Midnight Woo, as I’d have discovered if I’d searched for owners named Grant instead of for dogs with blue names. How like me to have focused on dogs rather than on people! How stupid! Anyway, the dogs of his own breeding included Rhapsody’s Sky Woo and Rhapsody’s Rhythm N Woos. Rhapsody’s Woo Streak wasn’t in the database, which had information on dogs that had been bred and had thus had their names published in studbooks, and dogs with names published elsewhere. Lots of malamutes weren’t in the database. The absence meant nothing. Streak was Rhapsody’s Woo Streak. I finally knew who she was.
    She’d been bred by Graham Grant. And owned by...? She’d been tagged with my name. At the risk of immodestly expanding on a matter I’ve already touched on, I have to say that in the world of purebred dogs and especially in the world of malamutes, I am someone. I write for Dog’s Life. My articles have appeared there and in other dog magazines. I wrote the text for a book of photographs of the legendary old Morris and Essex dog shows, I’m the author of a book called 101 Ways to Cook Liver that’s mainly about training with food, and Steve and I were the coauthors of a soon-to-be-published dog-diet book called No More Fat Dogs. I showed my dogs, I posted to all of the e-mail lists about malamutes, I did malamute rescue, and in short, I made my presence known. Anyone with malamutes could have known who I was. Graham Grant and I had evidently met at an Alaskan Malamute National Speciality. I didn’t remember him, but even if he’d forgotten meeting me there, he simply had to know my name. When he’d gotten himself in trouble and disappeared, he’d abandoned his dogs. All of his dogs? So it was assumed. It seemed possible that he’d taken one with him, a puppy, an especially promising puppy: Rhapsody’s Woo Streak. Had he sold her to someone? Had someone stolen her from him? The murder victim, the unidentified