Rachel Alexander 05 - The Wrong Dog

with the bomb dogs, work most people found terrifying, work he claimed was much safer than being on the street in a uniform waiting for some fourteen-year-old with a gun to send you to your maker just to see what it felt like.
    “Marty, it’s Rachel. It’s about the Gordon case. There’s something I thought—”
    “That was you?”
    “What do you mean?”
    “Burke and Burns have been, oh, never mind. I should have known. Rachel, don’t tell me you actually believe the younger bully was cloned from the older one?”
    “What do you think I think?”
    The cloned bull terrier was on the other end of the run, being chased by Dashiell and three other lustful males.
    “That’s better. If I knew it was you they were talking about, I would have told them, ‘Hey, guys, forget about it. She’s just pulling your leg,’ So, what’s up?”
    “The apartment was released yesterday, Marty, and I took the dogs there. I wanted to look through her stuff, to see if she’d made any kind of arrangements for them.“
    “Find anything?”
    “Not yet. But there was another pet in the apartment.“
    “The iguana?”
    “You know about that?”
    “You’d think, with what those guys see, well, what’s the big deal, Godzilla’s in the bedroom.”
    “Marty, she’s only fifteen or sixteen inches long.”
    “It figures.”
    “Luckily, the neighbor who owns her came to pick her up this morning. I thought I was going to have to find a home for her, too, but Sophie was just baby-sitting the iguana to pick up a little extra money.”
    “Which neighbor?”
    “One flight up. Look, Marty, the reason I called, you can get a pretty nasty case of salmonella from an iguana, sometimes even fatal. It probably wasn’t that. I mean, I’d seen her earlier that day and she didn’t look sick. Still, I thought maybe someone should mention this to the ME, but I didn’t want to call Burns or Burke directly because—”
    “Gotcha. I’ll walk this in to them, let them take it from there.”
    “Thanks, Marty. Like I said, it’s probably nothing, but I figured it’s better to call than not.”
    I called Dr. Maas’s number, got a machine, and left a message, though I doubted the doctor would call me back. I’d have to try again, and again.
    There were eleven people in the run, not counting me. I had Herbie’s picture in my pocket, but before showing it around, I wanted to see for myself if any of these people were a match. To be sitting here now, you’d have to be unemployed or have unconventional work hours, not a nine-to-five. Coming with Dashiell during the day, I’d met artists, writers, and would-be actors who had jobs waiting tables at local restaurants later on in the day. There were seven women sitting around the periphery of the run, and four men. But no Herbie.
    One of the guys was Asian. I’d seen him come in right after me, with a little sesame Shiba Inu. One of the guys was black. He had been here when I arrived and I didn’t know which dog was his. There was an old guy with his coat buttoned wrong, wearing a knit hat. He kept running over to his dog, a small, white mixed breed and telling her she was doing something wrong, like the nervous parents at the playground on the opposite side of the park. The fourth guy seemed a little overdressed for the run. He might have been a lawyer or a stockbroker, taking his dog for exercise before going in to the office. His hair was gray at the temples, neatly combed, and he’d had a shave before coming. Not so for the guy with the hat, gray stubble all over his face. He probably hadn’t brushed his teeth either. And lucky me, I was about to find out.
    He shook his head when I showed him the picture.
    “Never seen him.”
    “You’re sure?”
    “What are you, deaf, lady? I said I never seen him. Not here. Not there,” pointing toward the small brick buildings to the south of the run that housed the bathrooms, “not anywhere.”
    “You’re here every day?”
    “Twice a day,” he said. Then he was off. “Phoebe, Phoebe, none of that now. You’re making a scene.”
    There was a pregnant woman reading on the next bench.
    “Are you a cop?” she asked when I showed her the picture.
    I shook my head.
    “Then what’s it your business if I know him or not?” You’ve got to love this city.
    “Look,” I said, “I’m a friend of his ex-girlfriend, who just died and—”
    “Like I need to buy into this stress?”
    The two older women talking to each other on the