Bride & Groom

Bonny Carr with amitriptyline. Dr. Laura Skipcliff had been a noted anesthesiologist. Victoria Trotter had published a tarot deck with illustrations of dogs and a companion book to be used in what the paper called “fortune telling.” Bonny Carr had been an expert on treating trauma in dogs. And so on. The police were, as usual, pursuing their investigations.
    The second article was more interesting than the first. Its material had been provided by a panel of local mental-health professionals assembled to advise Massachusetts law enforcement personnel and the general public about serial murderers. So far, the panel’s work seemed to have consisted of providing psychosocial profiles. According to the article, the typical serial killer was a white male between twenty and forty years of age who came from a dysfunctional family and had a history of abuse. He usually killed his victims near their homes or workplaces. In most cases, there was a cooling-off period between homicides. Serial killers were socially isolated men given to daydreaming and compulsive masturbation. They experienced delusions of grandeur, depression, and feelings of failure, as well as—gulp—difficulty in accepting criticism and a sense of mistreatment. I was chagrined to realize that with regard to such experiences, published writers had an awful lot in common with serial murderers.
    The sidebar consisted of reasonable advice that most of us, especially women, had already taken. Throughout Greater Boston, women had installed new outside lights, set up buddy systems and phone checks with friends, and made arrangements never to be outside alone at night. I didn’t own a personal alarm device, but a lot of other women had bought them. As to the recommendation about getting a big dog, I’d done that in duplicate long before the murders. Attitude was said to be important: Like other women, especially women whose work had anything to do with dogs, I was trying to remain calm but alert. Morale mattered, too: Unlike some other women, I had not been terrorized into locking myself up in the protective custody of my house.
    Just as I was reminding myself of reasons to feel optimistic about the capture of the serial killer, the principal such reason, Kevin Dennehy, showed up at my back door. He looked tired, but issued his invariable greeting: “Hey, Holly, how ya doin’?”
    “Fine, Kevin. I’ve been reading the papers, and there’s something I want to ask you. So, how do these experts know that serial murderers engage in compulsive masturbation?” Kevin’s face turned as violently red as his hair, but he made a grand recovery. “They get acne,” he said, “and then they go blind. Give me a cup of coffee, and I’ll tell you all about it. It’s wicked technical. The first thing we do is look for guys with zits. And then—”
    Five minutes later, Kevin was seated at my kitchen table drinking the promised coffee and fooling around with Rowdy and Kimi. Although his professional life was devoted to enforcing the public law, he was chronically guilty of breaking my personal laws pertaining to behavior with my dogs. I knew of his crimes not only because I’d caught him perpetrating them a few times, but because Rowdy and Kimi unintentionally snitched on him by begging him for food and drink, and by knocking up against him and issuing play-growl invitations to engage in rough games. Never, ever would the dogs have deliberately betrayed Kevin. Being dogs, they were incapable of lying, but if they’d suspected that their truth-telling would get Kevin in trouble, they’d have done their best to prevaricate. They simply adored him.
    “I knew Bonny Carr,” I told Kevin. “Not well. She gave workshops about treating traumatized dogs. I went to one a few years ago.”
    “Is there a dog owner in the Commonwealth that you don’t know?”
    “There are thousands. But I do know a lot of people who work with dogs. Or write about dogs. Or show. Train. Do agility. But Bonny Carr wasn’t really a dog trainer, and she didn’t show. I went to the workshop because I thought I might write about it.”
    “And did you?”
    “No.”
    “For no good reason.”
    “On the contrary. For an excellent reason.”
    “I gotta drag this out of you?”
    I drank some coffee. “No. It’s... I’m embarrassed. And kind of ashamed. Because I told you that I really didn’t like Victoria Trotter.”
    “And you didn’t like Ms. Carr any better.”
    “There’s more