Bloodlines

dogs—”
    “Well, you better believe the puppies need a bath when they get there.” You may have observed that I have a slight tendency to preach about the evils of pet shops. I’d always gone easy on Kevin, though. No matter how emphatically I’d damned the puppy mill industry, not the puppies, Kevin would somehow have felt that I was bad-mouthing Trapper, his late and very deeply lamented dog, who’d come from a pet shop. “Pet shop dogs come from puppy mills,” I said. “The puppies come from mass breeding operations, and then they’re sold to brokers, who are the people who make the big money in this, and they’re shipped all over the country.’ He ate some chicken and said dismissively, “Yeah, yeah, like on that Connie Chung thing, but not Puppy Luv.”
    Connie Chung’s exposé of the puppy mill industry, “The Price the Puppy Pays,” was on TV a couple of years ago. The only thing wrong with the program was the title. The ones who really pay the price are the stud dogs and the brood bitches. The puppies get out.
    “Oh, come on,” I said. “Puppy Luv’s no different. Yeah, maybe now and then they buy from a few local people, but that’s the exception. If you saw Connie Chung, you already know that.”
    He speared a piece of chicken and pointed his fork at me. “You’re wrong.”
    “I hate to tell you, but I’m not. Look, the thing is that the dogs aren’t responsible. I’m not blaming them. And there isn’t necessarily anything wrong with them. It’s a matter of probabilities. If you buy from a pet shop, the odds are against you. With Trapper, you lucked out. But the fact is—”
    “Naw, it’s not that,” Kevin said. “Puppy Luv gets them from here.”
    “If here is Logan Airport,” I said.
    “Naw. That’s what Diane Sweet was doing last night. She was getting a delivery from a local guy. The guy brought the puppies, and he left, and she never got to wash them. This is a local guy.”
    I’m hard to convince. “Well, then, it was a local distributor,” I said, “someone who picked them up at the airport and took a cut of the profits. Just because she didn’t go to the airport herself...” I’d been cutting big pieces of chicken and swallowing them whole, unchewed and thus untasted, or that was the idea. A raw lump seemed to stick in my throat.
    “Like I said, Holly, local dogs.”
    “Did you see their papers?” I rested my fork on my plate and drank some wine. “Kevin, are those puppies all right? You know, a lot of the time—”
    “Here we go again,” he said. “Like I told you, the puppies were all over, and the whole place is the worst mess you ever saw. The material evidence is... it’s the lab’s mess now, and it’s going to take weeks. But it’s all under control, and the dogs are all right. And do me a favor and don’t ask if your malamute’s there, okay? It’s there, and it’s not going anywhere, at least not until our guys have finished.”
    “Did I—?”
    “You didn’t have to,” he said. “Aren’t you going to finish that?”
    A lone chicken thigh remained on my plate. “I’m getting pretty full.” I faked a martyred smile. “And you didn’t give yourself very much.” Before he could object, I stabbed the thigh and transferred it to his plate. “Kevin, uh, Diane Sweet was strangled?”
    “Manual strangulation. But now it looks like it was a definite second choice. You know these, uh, what do you call ’em, dog beds. Big pillows, wrapped in plastic, like that dry cleaner’s stuff, and it looks like what happened was that the perp grabbed one of them and held it over her face and started to smother her. One of these, uh, dog beds is missing the plastic, and the M.E. says there’s traces of this, uh, plastic film in her mouth. And a piece of it got caught on one of her earrings.”
    “But...?”
    “Too slow, and he got tired of waiting. Or she fought harder than he counted on. This was a young, healthy woman. She dug in her fingernails. There’s plastic under them and on her face and around the head.”
    “But, Kevin, wouldn’t it be harder to strangle her? Without the dog bed over her face, she’d be able to see. It just seems... I don’t know. Without something over her face, wouldn’t she sort of have more leverage?”
    “Yeah, but she’d been fighting him off. She couldn’t have had much strength left. It was an awful way to go. Pretty woman, hard worker. It’s a damn shame. She never should’ve been there