The Darkest Evening of the Year

Brown eyes the shade of weak tea. His most distinctive facial feature was his receding chin.
    People didn’t merely look over him or past him; they looked through him.
    In his line of work, invisibility gave him an advantage. He was a private detective.
    Redwing had a respectable lock on her back door, not the crappy hardware so many people depended upon, but Vern finessed through it in less than a minute.
    Her kitchen was a cheerful white-and-yellow space. Only a year ago, Vern would have envied her this cozy little home.
    Now, in his other life, he owned a sleek modern house on a bluff overlooking the sea. He no longer envied anyone.
    The Department of Motor Vehicles and the Internal Revenue Service believed that Vernon Lesley lived only in a one-bedroom apartment in a depressed neighborhood in Santa Ana. They had no clue that, under the name Von Longwood, he enjoyed a much larger life.
    Von Longwood had never applied to the DMV for a driver’s license and had never paid a dime in taxes. He left no footprints for the authorities to follow.
    After pulling down all the blinds in the kitchen, Vern stood on a dinette chair to search the upper cabinets. Gradually he worked down to the lowest doors and drawers.
    He took care to put everything back as he had found it. His client did not want Amy Redwing to know that her home had been searched.
    Usually, when he conducted an illegal search, Vern liked to use a toilet, use it thoroughly, and leave it unflushed. He thought of it as his signature, the way Zorro slashed a Z in things with his sword.
    With no other indication that the house had been violated, the owner would have to assume that he himself had left a full bowl.
    In this instance, Vern intended to leave no calling card. Even if Redwing were disposed to think that she had forgotten to flush, the reaction of at least one of the dogs would probably make her suspicious.
    Vern didn’t like dogs, largely because he had never met one that liked him. People stared right through Vern, but dogs gave him long hard looks and invited him to examine their teeth.
    In high school, he had been blessed with a rat named Cheesy. A good rat made an excellent pet, affectionate and cute. He and Cheesy had shared many good times, uncountable confidences. Such memories.
    Off the kitchen lay a half bath. Vern resisted the temptation of the toilet.
    He found nothing of interest in the bath except his reflection in the mirror. He paused to smile at himself.
    For most of his life, he had not been charmed by mirrors. In fact he had avoided them.
    These days, however, facing a mirror, he didn’t see Vernon Lesley. He saw that lovable rogue Von Longwood, who had a thick head of hair and blue eyes.
    In the kitchen again, he sorted through the pizzas, the packages of vegetables, and the containers of ice cream in the freezer. In the pantry, he checked the contents of every box that Redwing had opened, to be sure that it held what the exterior advertised.
    When someone wished to hide mementos of another life, they often secreted the evidence in places that, to an inexperienced searcher, would seem to be unlikely repositories. Consequently, he made sure that the box of crackers actually contained crackers and that no tub of chocolate-caramel or strawberry-swirl ice cream contained instead a trove of old love letters.
    He wasn’t literally searching for love letters. In Amy Redwing’s other life, she evidently had not been lucky in love or happy.
    By contrast, as Von Longwood, Vern had enjoyed sex as often as four times in one day, and his fabulous sports car could fly, as could Von himself.

 
    Chapter
17
    R enata referred to them as ghost dogs because they were as yet mere shades of the dogs they should have been.
    They had been breeder dogs in a puppy mill, housed inhumanely, fed inadequately, and treated cruelly.
    The females had been bred at their first heat—usually at six months—and then twice a year. After two or three years, if the stress of their situation prevented them from going into heat again, they would have been shot or abandoned at a county animal shelter.
    In this case, the puppy mill had been raided and closed. Eleven female and four male breeder dogs were confiscated. Too sickly and fearful to be fit for adoption, these dogs faced imminent euthanasia.
    Golden Heart had taken all fifteen and had brought them to the Hammersmith place, known in the organization as Last Chance Ranch.
    Two males and three females had been