Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

following me in, to see if she was home.”
    “Burke asked me the same question.”
    “What’d you say?” he asked, probably thinking he was glad he wasn’t the one who had to talk to the cops about a cloned dog.
    “I considered lying, for simplicity’s sake. But I decided against it.”
    “Too immoral?”
    “Too impractical. One way or another, you always get caught and then you’re in worse shape than if you’d told the truth in the first place.”
    He pulled his nose out to an imaginary point in front of him.
    “Yeah—that, too. Lie to the cops and you lose the chance to grow up to be a real boy.”
    Blanche was whining in her sleep again. I began to gently scratch the back of her head and neck.
    “So you told him why Sophie hired you?”
    “I did.”
    He whistled.
    “Worse than you imagine,” I told him. “Burke wrote it all down, then he looked at the uniforms who’d heard the whole thing. His smirk was a mile wide. ‘You may hear from Officer Lamb,’ he said, ‘DOC.’ ”
    “ ‘Department of Cloning?’ I asked him. ‘Yes, ma’am,’ he said. ‘Been through this before?’
    “Then before I had a chance to answer him, he turned to one of the uniforms, young, blond guy with a sparse mustache, probably thought it made him look older but it had the opposite effect. ‘Joey,’ he says to him, stretching it all out, you know what I mean? ‘You know what the clone calls the original?’ So this kid Joey, he shakes his head. Then Burke says, ‘Ma-a-a-a.’ I tell you, the way the three of them laughed, you’d think it was the funniest thing they’d ever heard. Watching them laugh, I thought, Good. If they think it’s all a joke, they’ll leave me alone and I’ll be able to do what I’ve been paid to do without interference. Burns want to know anything else?”
    Mel nodded.
    “He made some phone calls. I’m not sure what they were about. You know how they talk, everything’s a number—I got a six-oh-six, I need a three-nine-two, shit like that. Then he wanted to know if I knew the names of any of Sophie’s friends or family. I told him I didn’t, that most always when I came, only Bianca was home and she never said much. Did you ever notice, cops have zero sense of humor when they’re interrogating you?”
    “Unless you mention cloning.”
    “What else did they ask you, Rachel?”
    “If we’d come together. I told him we met here by accident. Then I asked him if it would be okay for me to find the person who gave Bianca to Sophie, a woman named Loma West, because Bianca was supposed to be a seizure-alert dog and wasn’t doing her job.”
    “What’d he say?”
    “He said he’d let me know. He said he wouldn’t want me to waste my time duplicating any of the work they were going to do. Everyone’s a comedian.”
    For a moment, I wondered if the vets’ jokes had been any better. I’d have to ask Chip.
    “There’s nothing funny about this. Sophie’s dead.”
    “You’re right. I guess they do that... Well, they see this kind of thing a lot more than the rest of us.”
    “She loved her life as much as anyone does.”
    “Of course she did.”
    “She was looking ahead, that’s why she wanted Bianca. You’ve got to look ahead.”
    I nodded, not sure where he was going with this. “That’s why she taught Bianca what she did. She figured it was better than nothing.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “When she saw she wasn’t alerting, she decided to teach her to fetch the medication.”
    “No kidding? I thought she always carried it with her.“
    “Not at home. She said Blanche would alert her and then stick to her like glue and not leave for anything. So she taught Bianca to get the pills from the top of the night-stand.”
    “That must have been something to see.”
    “Did you ever see her have a seizure?” he asked.
    I shook my head. “Did you?”
    “Once—a bad one. I was so scared. I thought with all that thrashing around she was doing, I’d get my teeth knocked out.”
    “Were you able to help her?”
    He looked funny. Guilty, maybe. He’d probably stayed back until the seizure was over. Maybe he’d even thought it was contagious.
    “I wrapped her in a blanket so she wouldn’t get cold. Then I called nine-one-one. But by the time they got there, she was awake. She looked sort of stunned. I didn’t know if she even knew who I was. In fact, when the paramedics came in, three men and one woman, they started asking her all kinds of questions, like