Paws before dying

them, the oldest one and this one you ran into, Dale, and they’re a pair of prizewinners.”
    “So what was the, uh, domestic altercation? They were fighting with each other?”
    “The basic scenario is that they hang around there, and they make a lot of noise and throw some bottles, and then the neighbors call the old man. And he shows up, and there’s a lot more noise, and someone calls the station.”
    “And then there’s heavy competition about who gets to go and intervene in a fight between a man and his two muscle-bound teenage sons. I’ll bet that was a lot of fun.”
    “I just love domestic situations,” Kevin said. “Wife calls because her old man’s beating her up again, and when you get there and drag him off her, the next thing she does is grab a frying pan and bring it down on your head.”
    “So did anyone get hit with a frying pan?”
    Kevin stuck out his lower lip and shook his head. “Cooled off now. The oldest kid shaped up. Went to some community college, and then he turned yuppie and drives around in a Corvette instead of a truck that says he sells plastic cups.”
    “So, you see? Willie wasn’t really involved in that. Anyway, let me tell you the rest.” I did. I finished with the blurred photograph Jack Engleman had shown me. “But they didn’t know she took it,” I said. “It was taken from inside. From the angle you could tell it was from an upstairs window. And she wouldn’t have confronted them with it. Obviously, she’d been reading about that case—you remember—and what she wanted to do was accumulate evidence, pictures. Hey, you know what I wanted to ask you? Jack mentioned the autopsy. Do you know what it showed? I mean..."
    “Pacemaker,” he said.
    “I know that.”
    “Yeah,” he said. “And I heard... Saporski says it showed, uh, burns.”
    “From?”
    Kevin shrugged.
    “Right after Rose died, I asked Steve, because I had a sort of nightmare picture, like those scenes in the movies, of people in the electric chair. Anyway, I had this horrible image of her being burned to death. But he said that as far he knows, it doesn’t do that, or not usually. Jesus. Was it...?
    Kevin shook his head. “On her right hand. Two marks. Two burn marks on her right hand.”
    “From what? Look, I am so tired, but tomorrow or whenever, I have to tell you... It’s basically about the pacemaker. First of all, these people who live across from the park swear that lightning didn’t strike there, and so for a while I thought... The point is that pacemakers have something to do with radio signals, don’t they? There’s another house, right across from the park, where there’s one of these electric fences to keep the dog in. Not the wire ones, you know, to keep cows in. The wire is buried. You can’t see it. And basically, it works on radio waves. They’re picked up by a gadget on the dog’s collar. So I wondered if, somehow, that could’ve been... I mean, if lightning didn’t strike, maybe what got to the pacemaker was something from that fence system, a radio signal. Electric storms interfere with regular radio, right? You hear static and all that. So it occurred to me that if that fence thing malfunctioned or whatever, it might’ve interfered with the pacemaker. The signals that were supposed to go to the dog’s collar somehow reached her pacemaker. But that wouldn’t leave marks, obviously. I don’t see how it could bum. Could it?”
    But Kevin was more interested in protecting Leah than in explaining the marks on Rose’s body. “Has this Johnson kid been after Leah today? He been calling?”
    “I don’t think so,” I said. “I don’t know.”
    “Well, tell her if he does, hang up. Look, Holly, we’ll follow this up, but the God’s honest truth is that maybe nothing’ll turn up. Between me and you, a hell of a lot of the time, there’s not a damn thing we can do. And tell her if he calls, hang up.
     

Chapter 17

     
    ASIDE from some deep reflex yawning, I was okay the next morning and, in fact, got up early to walk the dogs before the day really heated up. Then I packed the car. A sanctioned obedience match stands midway between a fun match and a trial. Consequently, people drag along only the minimum equipment, about half the paraphernalia they take to shows. You see the usual folding chairs and coolers as well as some crates, cages, and crate dollies, but especially because an obedience match has no breed rings and no electric hookups, people