“Hey, that’s you! You’re the chick dating that guy with the dogs who’s killing homeless people!”
“What? No!” she gasped.
“Yeah, I seen you on the news!”
Other people turned to stare, including the man counting his coins. “You should be ashamed of yourself,” he said.
And then pandemonium broke loose. People surrounded her, asking questions, shouting, pressing close. Someone shoved a pen into her hand and begged for an autograph. An old lady hit her with an umbrella.
Cindy backed up until she ran into the man in front of her, who pushed her into the arms of the man behind her.
Someone waved a fist in her face. She screamed. A manager appeared, pushing his way through the crowd and shouting for quiet. He reached Cindy, glanced from her to the tabloid cover still clutched in her hand, grabbed her elbow, and pushed her toward the exit. “You’d better leave. This crowd’s not in a friendly mood.”
She let him walk her outside. “My groceries,” she protested.
“I’m sure you can get someone else to pick them up for you,” he said, unable to hide the sarcasm in his voice.
“I’m not his girlfriend!” she snapped.
“Whatever. I don’t really care. I just want order in my store.”
Cindy pulled free of his grasp and then saw she still held the paper.
“Keep it,” the manager said, backing away with his hands raised.
“But I didn’t pay for it.”
“Just take it and get out of here,” he insisted.
A couple of people came out of the store looking their way, and Cindy decided it was a good suggestion. She turned and ran to her car. She peeled out of the parking lot and didn’t look back.
It was still dark when Jeremiah got up. He felt much worse, and his body ached from head to toe. His stomach, which usually wasn’t affected by anything, had gone into spasms, and he felt nauseous. He threw on sweats and grabbed his keys. It was time for a trip to the drugstore.
He walked outside, locked his front door, and then turned around. He froze. Something wasn’t right. The hair on the back of his neck stood on end as he scanned the small yard slowly. Finally, he saw something out of place, a lump by the hedges close to the sidewalk.
He thought briefly about returning inside for a kitchen knife. Instead he crouched low and made his way toward the lump, eyes probing the darkness around him. Nothing moved in the inky blackness, and as his eyes adjusted, he realized that the lump was the body of a man.
He knew instinctively who it was before he saw the man’s face. The homeless man from the park stared back at him with eyes that had seen their last. Jeremiah glanced around, but the German shepherd was nowhere to be seen.
The man had been shot in the left side of the stomach. It looked like he had done what he could to stop the bleeding, but with the location of the wound he would have only had about fifteen minutes before the toxins from the ruptured spleen and appendix killed him. He couldn’t have traveled very far at any rate.
He knew where I lived. He was coming here. Jeremiah realized he should have been more careful at the park, followed the man, or at least made sure he hadn’t been followed on his way home.
He only had about thirty minutes of darkness left; he would have to move fast. Jeremiah went back inside, yanked open a kitchen drawer, and pulled on a pair of disposable gloves and grabbed a penlight.
Back outside he knelt beside the body and committed it to memory, the way the limbs were angled, the drape of the material, everything, so that he could put it back the way he had found it.
He started with the obvious, pulling the contents out of front and back slacks pockets and the single shirt pocket. A piece of paper with the address of Pine Springs Veterinary Clinic scribbled on it, a fistful of dog treats, and a wallet came under his scrutiny. He shone the light through the piece of paper with the address of the veterinary clinic but couldn’t detect anything else. Was the dog there? Was he sick? Jeremiah sniffed the dog bones, which appeared to be exactly what they seemed to be. He slid one back into the man’s pocket, and then broke it open, careful to snap it off-center so it looked like an accident and not a deliberate break. Breaking it in the pocket ensured that crumbs were there, where they would be expected, and not on the lawn where they wouldn’t be. Jeremiah shone his penlight into the pocket and examined the center of the broken bone, but it seemed ordinary.
Next he moved on to the wallet. There was a driver’s license, expired by two years, bearing the name Peter Wallace. There was also a Pine Springs library card, the address of the local homeless shelter scribbled on a piece of paper, and a grocery store club card.
He put everything back and then checked for a locket, ring, or watch. The man didn’t have any jewelry on him. He slid his hands along the clothes, squeezing, to see if anything was hidden in the linings. Finally he removed the shoes and examined them thoroughly. He even checked to see if the heels had false compartments. He couldn’t help but smile to himself. How very Maxwell Smart, but hey, it’s a good hiding place for a reason.
Satisfied at last that there was nothing on the body that could link the man to him, Jeremiah slipped the shoes back on and then took a couple of minutes to rearrange the body and the clothing until it was exactly as he remembered it.
He made it back inside just as the sky began to lighten. He coughed hard and his stomach twisted more. He had to get the flu medication soon.
He removed the gloves, returned the penlight to its location, and grabbed a pair of scissors. He walked into the bathroom and cut the gloves into tiny pieces into the toilet, flushing at intervals. Finally the gloves were gone.
He returned the scissors to the kitchen drawer, looked himself over, and took a deep breath. It was time to make a decision. Sooner or later neighbors would be leaving their houses and one of them was bound to spot the body and raise the alarm. As sick as he was, he could just go back to bed and wait for the police to come to him, where they would discover him bewildered and feverish.
He shook his head. That would only delay his trip to the drugstore. Better to take charge of the situation. He slipped his cell phone into his sweats’ pocket, grabbed his keys, and headed out the door, exactly as he had earlier that morning.
He locked the door, turned, glanced toward the body, and yelled, “Hello?”
He walked slowly toward the body. “Excuse me, are you okay?”
He picked up his pace until he stood over the body. “Are you—”
The nausea he had been fighting for the last hour finally overcame him. He spun aside and fell to his knees, vomiting in the bushes.
When he was able to straighten up, he pulled out his cell phone and called Mark. The detective answered on the second ring.
“It’s Jeremiah. I just found a body. Outside my house, 31 Oak Street.”
“I’ll be there in ten. Don’t touch anything.”
“Okay.” Jeremiah stayed on his knees for a few more minutes before stumbling to the porch to sit down, shoving keys and cell phone into his pockets.
True to his word, the detective pulled up quickly, beating the squad cars by a good thirty seconds. He parked in the driveway, blocking in Jeremiah’s car. Seconds later he crouched next to the body in nearly the identical posture that Jeremiah had taken.
Jeremiah watched as officers cordoned off his yard. So much for keeping a low profile in the neighborhood.
Finally Mark crossed the lawn to sit beside Jeremiah on the porch. “Heck of a lawn ornament you got for yourself. Did you know him?”
Jeremiah turned and looked the detective straight in the eyes and lied. “No. He does look a little like a guy I saw in the park Saturday playing with a German shepherd.”
Mark sighed. “A dog? Are you sure?”
“I remember the dog, but I couldn’t swear that this was the same man.” Jeremiah said, keeping his voice even.
“There weren’t any German shepherds at the charity event,” Mark said.
r /> Jeremiah shrugged. “I don’t remember seeing any there. I don’t know what to tell you.”
“Any idea how he might have ended up in front of your house?”
“I wish I knew.”
The detective looked at him shrewdly. “You seem to be pretty calm for a guy who just found a body in his yard.”
Jeremiah shrugged. “Thanks to Cindy I had to get used to bodies popping up in strange places.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“But it was a shock.” He jerked his head toward the bushes. “I vomited.”
The detective grunted. “Happens to the best of us.”
Jeremiah noted the unconscious grouping of himself with the detective and his colleagues in the simple word us. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t draw attention to it.
“He was shot,” Mark said.
Jeremiah frowned. “I didn’t hear anything like a shot.”
“There’s some blood up the street. He was probably shot elsewhere and walked or dragged himself this far.”
“Why didn’t he just call for help or ring someone’s doorbell?”
“We’re checking to see if anyone else heard or saw anything. Maybe he tried but your neighbors didn’t want to open the door in the middle of the night.”
“To die for the want of a phone, that’s tragic.”
“He would have died anyway, where he was shot. Nothing anybody could have done for him.”
“In a strange way that makes me feel better.”
“Yeah, you’re off the hook, Rabbi. Even if you had heard something, you couldn’t have saved him.”
Jeremiah took a deep breath. “What do you need from me?”
“The usual, unfortunately.” Mark pulled a notepad out of his coat and poised a pen over it. “So when did you find him?”
“About three minutes before I called you. I threw up in between.”
“Tell me what happened.”
Jeremiah took a deep breath and told the revised version of the story. Mark didn’t question any of it. He watched other officers examining the scene and the body as Jeremiah talked. The one named Paul pulled the piece of paper out of the shirt pocket with a pair of tweezers and brought it over to show Mark.
“Pine Springs Veterinary Clinic,” Mark read.
“So this might have been the guy with the dog,” Jeremiah said.
“I think we have to operate under that belief for now,” Mark frowned. “This week it seems like everyone has a dog.”
“More like everyone has lost a dog.”
“True. You ever have a dog, Rabbi?”
“When I was young, my family had a mutt. Good dog.”
“Yeah, I just got a dog for my wife yesterday. It was that beagle from Friday night that didn’t get adopted.”
“Must have been meant to be yours.”
“I got to admit it kind of seems that way. I’ll tell you, Rabbi, I’m not a big believer in destiny or divine plans or anything, but I really feel like that dog was waiting for me.”
“Then that’s what is important. Focus on that, and don’t worry so much about whether or not it is true,” Jeremiah advised.
“That what you do? Focus on your tradition, your rituals, and not worry so much about whether or not it’s true?”
White hot anger poured through Jeremiah, and he nearly struck the detective. He stopped himself just in time with a jerk and squeezed his eyes shut as he tried to regain mastery over himself. Stress and illness, that’s all it was. He couldn’t let them get the better of him. He couldn’t let them ruin everything he had worked so hard to build. The neat web of lies and half-truths so carefully constructed could still unravel in a heartbeat if he wasn’t careful. Very quietly, struggling still to control the rage that burned within him, he answered, “No. I know that Adonai exists.”
He opened his eyes and found Mark staring at him. “Are you okay?”
“It has not been a good morning,” Jeremiah said. He let his breath out slowly, and when he looked Mark square in the eyes he had regained mastery of himself. “And, frankly, I’d rather go back to bed than face the rest of the day.”
“I can respect that.”
Mark’s phone rang. The detective took one look at the caller display and groaned.
It was just after six-thirty in the morning when Cindy rolled her cart to the checkout stand. She wore a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes and intentionally avoided looking at the magazine rack that had caused such trouble the day before.
Fortunately, there were few shoppers that early, and the cashier stifled a yawn and looked bored as he scanned Cindy’s items. With a sense of accomplishment, she paid and wheeled her cart outside. She breathed a sigh of relief as the cold morning air hit her. She had done it. She had successfully bought the things she needed for Thanksgiving and hadn’t started a riot.
She turned her cart toward the parking lot and froze. The coin counter from the night before was taping up a sign on one of the light posts. It was none of her business, and she certainly didn’t want him recognizing her. She tried to look away but couldn’t. When he had finished and moved toward a different post, she read the word “Missing!” hand printed at the top of the paper.
She wheeled her cart over to read the rest. The man’s dog was missing. A sick feeling twisted her stomach.
She didn’t want to face him, but she had to know. “Excuse me, sir.”
He turned. “Yeah?”
“When did your dog go missing?”
“Last night while I was here. I had him outside, and when I came out he was gone.”
She didn’t remember seeing any dogs outside the store when she went in or when she left. She licked her lips. “How long had you had him?”
“Since Friday.”
Friday. She knew the man looked familiar. She was sure she had seen him at the charity event. “Have you called the police?”
“No. Do you think I should?”
“I do. In fact, I’ll call for you,” she said, grabbing her cell phone and calling Mark.
“Don’t tell me you’ve found another body,” the detective said without preamble.
“No, but there’s another stolen dog. I’m with the owner right now outside of Ron’s Grocery on Fifth.”
“I’m a bit busy here, but I’ll be there as soon as I can. Meantime I’ll send someone over.”
“Thanks.” She turned back to the homeless man. “The police are on their way. They’ll help you find your dog.”
“You sure?” He looked uncomfortable.
“I’m positive,” she assured him. “Let me put these things in my car, and then I’ll wait with you.”
By the time she had stashed her groceries and returned to the sidewalk in front of the store, a patrol car was pulling up. Vince and another guy got out. Vince saw her and smiled and headed her way.
She pointed toward the man with the missing dog, and the other officer immediately walked over to him. “Sir, your dog is missing?”
“That’s right.”
She slumped in relief. The police would help him, so she didn’t have to. Now, too, if he recognized her, hopefully, he wouldn’t make a scene.
“How are you?” Vince asked as he stopped in front of her.
“I’ve been better,” she admitted. “How about you?”
He shrugged. “A little disappointed.”
She raised an eyebrow.
“I was sorry when I realized you didn’t want to go out with me,” Vince explained.
“Excuse me?”
“The speed dating thing. I put you down but didn’t get a match.”
“Oh, sorry,” she said, feeling herself turn red. “You seem like a great guy, it’s just—” What could she say that wouldn’t sound lame?
“Is it the uniform? Some women don’t want to get involved with guys on the force because they’re afraid something might happen to them on the job.”
She nodded, relieved. “I’m really risk adverse, and you’re right, dati
ng a policeman is not without huge risks.”
He shrugged. “That’s cool. Good thing to know about yourself. Lots of people don’t know how to play it safe, when to just stay home and do the smart thing. Nothing to be ashamed of. You won’t get hurt that way.”
Somehow she didn’t like it when he said it like that. The vague, unsatisfied feeling that had been growing for a while twisted harder inside of her. Sure, playing it safe could keep her from getting hurt most of the time, but not all of the time. And maybe a little risk now and again was a good thing.
She bit her lip before she could say something rash. “I guess you’re right,” she said, forcing a smile.
She turned to look at the other two men, eager to change the subject. “I hope you can find his dog.”
“Me too. I don’t know what kind of world we’re living in when people steal someone else’s dog. I mean, I can’t even imagine.”
“I know. Who would do such a thing?”
“And why?” he asked, scratching his head. “It’s beyond me.”
“Well, hopefully, they’ll catch whoever is behind all of this soon, before any more dogs go missing or anyone else gets killed.”
“So you have any theories?” he asked, dropping his voice.
“No, why do you ask?”
He shrugged. “You’re the one who thwarted the Passion Week killer. I figure your theories are worth listening to.”
She shrugged. “I had a lot of help on that one.”
“Yeah, I guess so. Okay, so did you see this guy’s dog?”
“No,” she admitted. “I was here last night, but I didn’t see him. I don’t know if that’s because he wasn’t here or I was just distracted. I didn’t know the man had lost a dog until I saw him putting up the flyer this morning.”
“So what can you tell me about last night?”
She crossed her arms, took a deep breath, and recounted the story.
Vince whistled at the end of it. “Brutal. You know, you ever have something like that happen again, you call the police.”
“I will,” she said.
“So you and Joseph?”
“Are just friends.”
“Just asking,” he said with a smile.