All Shots

EMTs’ offer but had the emergency blanket clenched in her hands, where it did nothing for her violent trembling.
    The narrow street was even more crowded with official vehicles of all kinds than it had been on the day I’d discovered the body of... Holly Winter. Ambulances had made screaming departures with Grant and Calvin, who’d both been alive but might get to the hospital DOA for all I knew. I can’t say that I particularly cared. All I wanted was to go home, but the gridlock made it impossible to leave in the van, and I had no other way to transport the dogs. Also, I couldn’t desert Mellie. Neighbors kept asking her to stay with them, but so far, she was insisting that she wanted to sleep in her own bed. On the topic of neighbors, the sight of so many people milling around and standing in groups, together with the misleadingly festive illumination from the cruisers and the lights of every nearby house, created the impression of a late-evening block party minus the food and fun.
    “Shit,” Holly said stiffly. “Needless to say, I am very sorry.”
    “Don’t say bad words,” Mellie told her.
    “There’s nothing needless about apologizing,” I said. “Apology accepted. Your teeth are chattering. I think you should wrap that emergency blanket around your shoulders. Or I’ll get you a regular blanket from my van. Maybe you should go to the hospital. The EMTs offered to take all of us. Or to one of the neighbors’ houses. You’re shaking.”
    “It’s a normal physiological reaction to stress,” she said. “No one said it was abnormal,” I pointed out.
    Mellie responded better than I did. With her rosary still in her hand, she put her arm around Holly and said, “Everybody feels sad sometimes. And angry.”
    “I’ll be fine once I understand exactly what happened.”
    “Now you understand what didn’t happen,” I said. “That’s a start. My husband and my father and my stepmother and I are not engaged in some conspiracy to use dogs as body packers. That’s the term. Smuggling drugs in the intestinal tracts of dogs. Or people.”
    “Drugs are bad,” Mellie said.
    I said, “But I can see... well, some of the pieces you put together are right. Sort of. Maine does have a long history of smuggling. Pirates. Prohibition. But why would anyone use body packers? The border with Canada is mostly wilderness, and the coastline, I happen to know, is three thousand four hundred seventy-eight miles long. I had to memorize that in school. I do come from Maine. You got that right. And Gabrielle, my stepmother, does own a wood lot where someone was growing marijuana. But not Gabrielle. And when you saw me with Kevin Dennehy, you misinterpreted what you were seeing. Kevin is my next-door neighbor.”
    “The databases—” she began.
    “The house belongs to his mother, and the phone is in her name. They live on Appleton Street. You were at my house. You know that it’s on the corner of Concord and Appleton. Kevin and I have been friends for years. That’s all. And Kevin is the last cop in the world to take bribes or cover anything up.”
    “The Maine Drug Enforcement Agency is worried about methamphetamine,” Holly said.
    “Maine’s favorite drug is marijuana.”
    “Maine is considered to be a potentially ideal environment for manufacturing methamphetamine,” she said pedantically. “And there’s a market. It’s mailed from Arizona. Southern California. That’s where Holly Winter was from. Arizona. I talked to her father. He said that Holly was in Maine.”
    “I heard that Grant was in the Southwest,” I said. “They must’ve met there. They went to Maine. They were dealing drugs. You got that right, too.”
    “Not really.”
    “And Calvin was involved. He’s from Maine. His accent? Down East. So, Holly obviously found him more attractive than Grant. Who wouldn’t? And she put Grant in the hospital and took off with everything he had. His dog, his truck, his money, his meth. And she stayed in touch with Calvin. But you know, in a way, you were right about body packers, except that she didn’t use dogs. She used dog toys.”
    “Strike can’t have her toys,” Mellie said. “They can make her sick. And don’t talk to anybody! A bad man wants to hurt Strike.”
    “The bad man can’t hurt her now,” I said. “He can’t hurt anyone anymore.”
    “And she stole my identity because... what could be easier than stealing the identity of someone with your own name?”
    “She