Bloodlines

from?”
    Kevin nodded, hesitated, and said with no expression in his voice or on his face, “Rinehart. Rinehart Pet Mart.”
    “Christ.”
    “Yeah, like they were cars. I wasn’t going to tell you that.”
    “But you did,” I said. “Hey, Kevin, I’m really sorry I yelled at you about the, uh, rape business. I was wrong. I mean, actually, I was right to begin with. About you. What I said tonight was unfair. I am really sorry.”
    “Hey, forget it.”
    “Thank you,” I said. “So tell me. If this kid Patty knew about Diane and Simms, and all the other people who worked there knew about it...?”
    Kevin smiled. “Yeah. Numero uno. John Sweet. The hubby. Home watching TV. No phone calls, no visitors, no nothing. First at the scene. Cannot wait to get us out of there so he can open up shop.”
    “So the question really is whether Diane’s husband knew about Simms. Could Patty or someone have told him?”
    “Not a chance.” Kevin shook his head. “At least in my opinion, not a chance. And he didn’t spend a lot of time there. Yeah, it’s possible he overheard someone saying something, or maybe he just got suspicious.”
    “Maybe just the way you did,” I said. “Maybe he wondered about why she was staying so late to wash the Puppies when she could’ve gotten someone else to do it in the morning. Or maybe... Kevin, you found material evidence. Maybe John Sweet found something, too.” I hate to embarrass Kevin, but I asked, anyway. “Kevin, where did she keep her diaphragm?”
    But Kevin didn’t even turn pink. “Like I told you before, she did all the work. Very systematic. Businesswoman type.”
    I interrupted. “Well, where?”
    “In a manila folder in a filing cabinet in her office,” he said. “Right where it belonged. Alphabetical order. Under D.” A look of wonder filled Kevin’s broad face. Imagine a double-size, red-haired Irish-American Jean-Paul Sartre confronting a raw sense of being. “Like I keep saying, Holly, in this job, you wait long enough, you run across everything.”
     

22
     

     
    When Steve arrived at midnight on Tuesday, I was asleep. He let himself in. At breakfast on Wednesday morning, I thought about telling him what was going on, but decided against it. Dragging him to a pet shop had been okay, but hauling him into this mess of puppy mills and brokers? Those bastards couldn’t operate without shady veterinarians to certify the health of sick puppies they’ve never even seen. I wanted to keep Steve completely away, totally protected.
    As soon as Steve left, I called Bill Coakley and offered him five hundred dollars in cash for Missy’s return. The amount—roughly four hundred and ninety dollars more than I could afford—was probably a hundred dollars less than Edgar Sievers had paid for her at Puppy Luv. Now that Missy was no longer a cute little baby, though, her market value as a pet had probably plummeted to one or two hundred dollars, assuming that someone would buy her at all.
    But what was Missy worth as a brood bitch? She was eight months old, due to come in season any day now. A puppy mill operator would probably consider her a better deal now than she would have been four or five months ago because she could be bred almost immediately. He’d be spared the expense of keeping a puppy bitch alive during those useless months before her first heat. He? Or possibly she} Did Janice Coakley actually breed any of those puppies she claimed were all hers? I was relying on Gloria Loss to find out. But Janice Coakley wasn’t the only Westbrook connection. Bill Coakley, her ex-husband, was pretty close to Your Local Breeder, and Rinehart’s dual dealership was within walking distance of Bill Coakley’s. On Sunday evening, shortly before Diane Sweet’s murder, Walter Simms, who worked for Rinehart, had made a delivery to Janice Coakley at Your Local Breeder and had then driven to Puppy Luv, where he’d made his usual double delivery to Diane, Janice’s sister. Well, so what? The valentine in Diane Sweet’s window? Love is a warm puppy. Also, it was none of my business what consenting adults chose to do with one another in the privacy of their own grooming areas.
    So, as I’ve suggested, the network of relationships involving Janice Coakley, Bill Coakley, Joe Rinehart, Diane Sweet, and Walter Simms wouldn’t have concerned or worried me if these people had dealt only with one another and with inanimate objects. If Rinehart had brokered nothing other