Rachel Alexander 03 - A Hell of a Dog

lied.
    She was looking up at the stage.
    “He’s so good at this. Listen to him, Rachel.”
    “And you will have to keep reminding your clients—once will not be enough to say it,” Chip was saying, “that when they allow an aggressive dog up on the bed or couch, the message the dog receives, loud and clear, is, We are equals. It’s far more appropriate for the aggressive dog to have to work for what he gets, to live in a no-free-lunch culture, because if he keeps getting the wrong message, the message that he rather than his owner is in charge, eventually his aggression will be impossible to contain.”
    Betty was lying down, her pretty paws hanging off the front of the stage. Every once in a while she’d close her eyes. But you could tell she wasn’t asleep. Her breathing pattern never varied.
    I closed my eyes too, listening to the sound of Chip’s voice but not his words. One of us was imitating behavior, too, the behavior of a professional colleague, blending in, acting like part of the group while carrying on some sinister project at the same time.
    I knew how the passkey was stolen without Mercedes seeing anyone near the cart. The thief was short enough not to show when he or she was on the far side of the little wagon that held all the cleaning supplies, the free bubble bath, and the key that fit every lock in the hotel. It was a piece of cake for me to figure out how. Now all I needed to know was who: Who had sent the dog to steal the passkey, who had unlocked the door to the roof, whose aggression had become impossible to contain.
    “He seems at ease in front of an audience. I don’t know why he doesn’t do this more often.”
    “Well, after this experience,” I said, looking up at Chip on the stage, “nothing personal, Sam, but I wouldn’t count on him ever doing it again.”
    “He may not be the only one,” she said. She was picking the red polish off her nails. Little chips of it, like flakes of dried blood, were all over her skirt



GOOD BOY, I SAID

    I waited for Chip at the back of the auditorium, watching him taking people’s hands as they spoke to him, looking at them as if each were the most important person on the face of the earth, and he had nothing more urgent to do than listen to their concerns.
    When he finally got away, we left the empty auditorium and took the dogs across the street to the park.
    “Something really strange is going on this week.”
    “Tell me about it,” Chip said.
    Dashiell had turned to look at me for direction. I nodded my head to the right, and he ran ahead off the path and into a copse of trees.
    “I wish I could. That’s the problem, I have all these pieces of information that don’t fit together.”
    “Wouldn’t that indicate that there are still pieces missing?”
    I thought about that. “Okay, suppose we don’t rule out any-
    thing that happened,” I said. “What do we know? Three men have been killed, all after their ideas on dog training were expressed. Alan hadn’t delivered his talk yet, but with Alan, it was coming out of his pores. Everyone knew how he worked, and they all hated it. In addition, he insulted everyone he could, given the constraints of the short time he had in which to do so.“
    “What about Rick and Martyn?”
    “You know how dog people are—love my method, love me. If the opposite was true in Alan’s case, why not for Rick and Martyn? They surely had their detractors too.
    He nodded. “And Boris. You think Sasha protected him, or he’d be dead, too? And that I’m next?”
    “There’s one more element here that I discarded with Sam’s encouragement.”
    “Ah, sex rears its ugly head.”
    “Precisely. Each of the three victims spent the night before they were killed having sex.”
    Chip looked puzzled, and then he began to laugh.
    “And you think I might be next on the killer’s list?”
    I nodded.
    “Did I miss something, Kaminsky? Did you molest me in my sleep? I hate when that happens.”
    “In your dreams, Pressman.”
    “Then why do you think Tm in danger?”
    He’d stopped walking and had turned to face me, the humor now gone from his eyes.
    “Because we’re the only ones who know for sure what we did.”
    ‘To the best of my recollection, we didn’t do anything.“
    “Okay, then we’re the only ones who know for sure what we didn't do.”
    “And we can’t exactly advertise it, can we?”
    I shook my head. “Who would believe us?”
    “Not the cops,” he said. “I’m sure