U Is for Undertow

behind.”
    “Matters not,” he said mildly. “What’d she want?”
    “Nothing. Surprise, surprise. She handed over a batch of letters she came across when she was cleaning out Grandfather Kinsey’s files. Some were letters Grand wrote to Aunt Gin and some she sent me. I haven’t read all of them. I mostly skipped around, but I picked up enough to know she was doing her best to maneuver Aunt Gin into surrendering custody. You can imagine how well that went down. Aunt Gin apparently read the first and sent the rest back unopened. Grand retaliated by hiring a private detective to spy on us.” I paused, correcting myself. “Well, ‘retaliated’ might be too strong a word. She wanted proof that Gin wasn’t a fit guardian.”
    “By fair means or foul?”
    “That’s about it. Her hunch was that Aunt Gin was gay and she figured if she could prove it, she’d have enough leverage to bring her to heel. Didn’t work out that way.”
    “This was all in the letters? I can’t believe she’d spell it out.”
    “She was too clever to do that. Among other things, Tasha came across invoices from the PI Grand hired. I drove to Lompoc yesterday and talked to him. He’s a nice guy though not inclined to confide. Dang. I had to pry the information out of him, but he finally told me what she was up to. He persuaded Grand that Aunt Gin was straight, which was always my perception. Grand dropped the matter and that was the end of that.” I lifted a finger. “I do harbor a tiny flicker of doubt. On a hunch, I asked him if he’d lie about it. I was curious if he was fudging for my sake, trying to make Aunt Gin sound better than she was. He deflected the question and responded with something else. I’m not saying he lied, but there was something he wasn’t saying. It may not mean anything, but I’m not a hundred percent convinced.”
    “Not much in life is a hundred percent.”
    “You have a point.”
    “So now what? I’m assuming this precludes your going to the big family do at the end of May.”
    “Probably. I haven’t decided yet.”
    Rosie appeared at the table to collect our dessert plates, and we set the subject aside until she’d gone off to the kitchen with her tray.
    “Now tell me about work. Last I heard, you were asking William for a bar rag to clean off a dog tag that smelled like dead rat.”
    “Oh, man, you’re really out of date and I apologize. Not to put too fine a point on it, but to all intents and purposes, I’ve reached a dead end.”
    I started with Diana and Ryan’s revelation about Michael Sutton’s birthday celebration at Disneyland and then went back in time and talked about my drive to Peephole and the conversation I’d had with P. F. Sanchez, who’d eventually given me the information about the veterinarian who’d put his dog down. I went into some detail about the shed at the rear of the clinic where euthanized animals were left for pickup by animal control. I also told Henry about Deborah Unruh and the four-year-old, Rain, who’d served as the “practice child.” I went on to fill him in on Greg and Shelly, and my interview with her son, Shawn, who’d assured me the two of them weren’t involved in the kidnapping scheme because they’d left the state by then and were working their way north to Canada. The recitation took the better part of fifteen minutes, but I felt I’d summed it up admirably, even if I do say so myself.
    Listening to the story as I relayed it to him, I could still see a certain logic in play. My prime assumption had been wrong, but there were pieces that still intrigued me, even at this late date. Ulf, the wolfdog. The similarities between the two crimes. The ransom demands that totaled forty grand. I couldn’t see the links, but they had to be there.
    Henry seemed to take it all in, though I have no idea how he managed to keep the players straight. Once in a while he’d stop me with a question, but in the main, he seemed to follow the narrative. When I finished he thought about it briefly and then said, “Let’s go back to the conversation you had with Stacey Oliphant. What makes him so sure the kidnappers were amateurs?”
    “Because they asked for chump change, to use Dolan’s words. Both thought it was odd to ask for fifteen grand when they could have asked for more. Stacey figured if they’d been professionals, they’d have ramped up the demand.”
    “Must not have been chump change to them. If they were rookies, fifteen thousand