Animal Appetite

some major issues with authority.”
    “He’s a cop,” I reminded her. “He’s supposed to have authority issues.”
    I weaseled the truth out of Steve when I took the dogs to his clinic to update their kennel-cough immunizations and accidentally overheard a whispered conversation between the two young veterinarians he’d hired the previous summer.
    I confronted Steve. “They think it’s very peculiar,” I told him, “and somewhat repulsive. What I think is that it’s irreverent, disgusting, and highly unsanitary. So what the hell is it doing there?”
    At first, Steve tried to convince me that the carcass in his cold-storage area was the remains of a client’s beloved pet deer. Pot-bellied pigs, he maintained, were on their way out. The trendy new exotic pet was—
    I interrupted him. “Venison? Since when do you hang the body of a pet and let it ripen?”
    I got the whole story out of Steve. The only meditation Kevin had engaged in had been premeditation: He’d made sure that Rita hadn’t actually known any of the people at the retreat center in the Berkshires. Furthermore, just in case he returned with a deer, he’d made a secret arrangement with Steve to share the venison in exchange for storage space, and Steve, who was leaving for Minneapolis, had enlisted two of his vet techs in the conspiracy. Kevin’s mother, as I've said, won’t allow meat in her house. His plans in place, Kevin had taken off for a week with some police-academy buddies at a hunting camp in northern Maine.
    The part that astounded me was the deer. “Kevin? Steve, I’d’ve bet anything he couldn’t get through Bambi dry-eyed.”
    With a guilty look, Steve mumbled, “His friend Phil shot it. But don’t mention it.”
    “Of course not,” I promised. “Who am I to sever the bloodied knots of male bonding?”
    Bonding reminds me: Oscar Fisch? The recovery movement? Dogs? Survivors? The inner child? The canine inner child? Well, when I mailed that package to Oscar Fisch, I knew it was a long shot. I mean, when Oscar stopped in to order me to quit harassing Claudia, his irrational fear of Rowdy and Kimi was palpable. There was Oscar’s antidog wife, too. But who could be scared of a retired racing greyhound, for heaven’s sake? As for Claudia, the sanctuaries of dog worship teem with interfaith marriage, and it was even possible that if Oscar converted, she might eventually realize that if there’s one creature on earth that’s the true survivor of financial exploitation and abuse, it’s a greyhound that failed as a moneymaker on the track and would have been put to death if it weren’t for the greyhound rescue movement.
    Oscar read the book I sent: Adopting the Racing Greyhound. Instead of phoning me about it, he sent a note to say, as one says in the recovery movement, that he heard me. “I am convinced,” I wrote back, “that the best therapy for the child within is the dog without.” Although Francis Avenue is only a pleasant walk from my house, especially pleasant if your walking companion is a greyhound, Oscar also mailed me a snapshot of Melody, as his new greyhound is called, together with a long letter all about the letter he and Claudia had sent to Shaun McGrath’s family.
    Claudia, I reflected, made a habit of marrying men who put their sentiments in writing. I wished I’d asked Randall Carey how he’d gotten hold of the note that Jack Andrews had obviously intended for Tracy Littlefield, the supposed suicide note in which Jack had actually announced his decision not to pursue the “lost cause” of making a champion out of a dog that no judge cared for. My guess was that Jack had just finished writing his note to Tracy when Randall Carey arrived in his office. If so, the last words Jack ever wrote had been meant for her: “Your disappointment is my only regret. Love, Jack.” I reminded myself to make sure that Tracy saw Jack’s note.
    The second letter found with Jack’s body had, I was certain, been written to Randall Carey himself. Remember?
     
    It is unfortunate that society judges some weaknesses more harshly than it does others. Far from desiring to create an embarrassing public furor, I am eager that what must now transpire do so as privately as possible.
    With regret,
    John W. Andrews
     
    My hunch was that Jack had mailed it to Randall Carey just after their meeting on the Friday before the murder and that Randall had received it the day he killed Jack. Or maybe, mistrustful of the