Lost Dog (A Gideon and Sirius Novel Book 3) (13 page)

CHAPTER 17

MAKING A COLLAR

Sleeping through the night is something I rarely do. In the words of Rodney Dangerfield, “I don’t know how to sleep. I know how to pass out.” Exhaustion had made me pass out.

Lisbet had left me a note on the kitchen table saying she had an appointment and would talk to me later in the day. She signed it XXOO but didn’t stop there. The impression of her lipstick brightened the stationery, and my day. Next to her note, a bowl of her healthy cereal sat alongside a bran muffin. As I took a seat, Sirius joined me.

“Nice try,” I told him. “Lisbet wrote that she fed you and took you out for a little walk.”

I took a bite of the bran muffin. Lisbet was always extolling its virtues, talking about how her favorite local bakery sweetened its muffins with applesauce. After what felt like a few minutes of chewing, I was able to swallow.

Sirius was still waiting me out, so I gave him half the bran muffin. It took him a second to inhale it.

“Lisbet says that these muffins are low in fat and cholesterol, and high in fiber, magnesium, phosphorus, and manganese.”

What she hadn’t said was that they tasted like cardboard. Sirius finished the rest of the muffin. As he ate I thought back to how I’d told Langston Walker that Lisbet was doing her best to make me eat healthier. It still seemed almost incomprehensible to me that he was gone.

Out of respect to Lisbet, I made it halfway through my bowl of puffed whole-grain cereal before disposing of the evidence.

“Don’t tell,” I said to Sirius.

As early as it was in the day, I was already feeling the weight of the Heather Moreland case. That’s how it is when I’m working on something that matters to me. I get obsessive, and I want answers. The weight of a case is something I can’t shake. I feel it in my gut sitting there like an undigested meal. It’s a pressure that keeps growing, and the only relief comes from getting answers. I was hoping Sergeant Reyes had some of those answers, or at least updates.

My call to Reyes went through to his voice mail, and I wondered if that was his way of reminding me that officially I was just a cop trying to reunite Heather with her dog.

There it was—that weight in the gut. And I couldn’t even blame Lisbet’s cereal or Langston’s death.

I took a quick shower and put on fresh clothes. Lisbet allows me a drawer in her place, as well as some closet space. On my end she has pretty much taken over the guest room closet and drawers. When Lisbet does the laundry, she uses things like conditioner and dryer sheets. I sniffed approvingly; Sirius sniffed approvingly. I thought of Angie and wondered how she was doing; I thought of Angie’s mom and wondered how I was doing making headway into her disappearance. That pressing weight I was feeling told me things could be going better.

“Office,” I said to Sirius.

My partner eagerly followed me to the car. He knew “office” was Central Police Station in downtown Los Angeles, where I have my work cubicle. Officially, Sirius and I only report to the Chief of Police. At the time the Chief and I came to that understanding, I was offered an office in the Police Administration Building. In a rare show of wisdom, I knew it would be a smart career move to distance myself from the brass. Central is only a mile away if the Chief needs a face-to-face. Luckily, he doesn’t feel the need to meet with me very often.

The drive was the usual stop-and-go, but I was glad on this commute there was more go than stop. It’s not usually that way. As Sirius and I made our entrance into Central, Sergeant Perez decided to serenade us with the song “Puppy Love.” There were two problems with his rendition: he only knew the first line, and he couldn’t sing worth a damn. Perez is the watch commander of the station; his service stripes, or what cops call hash marks, put his long seniority at LAPD on display.

Sirius wagged his tail at the sergeant’s musical greeting. My partner is fond of Perez. There’s no accounting for taste.

Other than Perez, there were only a few cops at the station. Everyone was out in the field. Sirius and I offered up our greetings to those who were there, and then I settled into my cubicle. My wish for solitude wasn’t granted. Perez came back and joined us, but luckily it wasn’t to sing another verse of “Puppy Love.”

“Too bad Captain Becker isn’t here,” he said. “I know she wanted to talk to you.”

“About what?”

“One of our fair citizens had a complaint about you.”

Perez’s deadpan expression and delivery always makes it difficult to tell if he’s on the level or if he’s pulling your leg.

“What did I supposedly do?”

“It isn’t what you did, but what you said. You remember a few weeks back when you ticketed some lady for talking on her cell phone while operating a vehicle?”

I did remember. If the woman hadn’t been violating almost every law known, I would have ignored her. Detectives don’t like handing out tickets. That’s the job of traffic cops.

“I could have written her up for speeding, texting while driving, talking on her phone while driving, and negligent driving,” I said. “She was actually putting on lipstick while talking and texting. And get this: since her hands were occupied, she was controlling the steering wheel with her legs. Vishnu would have had trouble doing as many things as she was.”

“That’s what you remember?”

I shrugged. “That’s about all there is to remember. As I recall, she tried to talk her way out of the ticket and act all flirty, until I made it clear that wasn’t going to work.”

“Now you’re getting warm. This lady even tacitly admitted to Captain Becker that she was playing up to you. But she said that still didn’t give you the right to say what you did.”

“Remind me what I said.”

“Does this ring a bell? This lady is probably batting her eyelashes at you. One of her blouse buttons might have even magically disengaged itself, as they frequently do whenever there’s a prospect of a ticket. And she says breathlessly, ‘I didn’t think L.A. cops gave pretty women tickets.’ And you replied, ‘We don’t.’ And that’s when you handed her the ticket.”

It had been a hot day, and I’d been provoked. I wished I hadn’t said it, but now I remembered that I had. “She wasn’t batting her eyelashes, but she was kind of lisping.”

“We don’t,” said Perez, laughing.

He tried to give me a high five, but I ignored him. He tried the same tactic with my partner. Sirius is more polite than I am, and gave him five.

“We don’t,” said Perez again. “I think the captain was on that call for fifteen minutes. And when she hung up, she said something about having to deal with another Detective Sirius situation.”

I had hoped the captain would have forgotten about that incident. A few months earlier, “Detective Sirius”—or someone writing a report using his name—had sent a letter to the public defender representing a lowlife I’d arrested. The lawyer had wanted “Officer Sirius’s” account of the situation leading up to the arrest.

“Hey, Gideon,” said Perez, “what do your dog and your phone have in common?”

I shook my head.

“They both have
collar
ID,” he said. “Get it?”

“I wish I didn’t,” I said, and waved him away.

He didn’t leave quietly. “We don’t,” Perez said again, and laughed all the way back to his desk.

After making quick work of messages, mail, and email, I began studying my case notes on Heather Moreland. Reyes still hadn’t called me back; I hoped he had more on her disappearance than I did. Even though I’d never met Heather, I had this sense of knowing her and wanting the best for her. After everything she’d gone through while growing up, Heather deserved a happy ending, the kind reserved for old Disney movies.

Given my few options, I called up Katie Rivera.

“Any news?” she asked, sounding slightly breathless.

“That’s what I was going to ask you.”

I heard her let out some disappointed air. “Everyone around here is sort of in a state of shock.”

“What are they saying?”

“They’re hoping Heather’s absence is some kind of misunderstanding,” she said. “No one could imagine anyone wanting to hurt her.”

“Not even Emilio?”

“Only a few of us are aware of what’s going on in Heather’s marriage, so it isn’t like everyone is pointing a finger at him.”

“Did Heather ever indicate to you she might be seeing someone else?”

“No, she didn’t. And I’d be shocked if that was the case. She would have told me.”

“Is it possible that Heather didn’t confide in you about everything?”

“Let’s just say I would be surprised if she kept any secrets from me.”

“So you don’t believe she had some kind of secret life?”

“If I wasn’t so upset, I think I’d laugh at that,” said Katie. “Like I already told you, Heather was Pollyanna, but in the best sense of that word. It’s not that she didn’t know there were bad things and bad people out there, because growing up she experienced both of those things, but she chose not to let any of that color her thinking.”

“Emilio’s therapist seemed to suggest that Heather was an enabler when it came to his behavior, and that she might even have initiated his physical and sexual abuse.”

“The only person I know who would believe that is Emilio.”

“The therapist indicated that since her father was an abuser, she might have been looking for the same in a husband.”

“He doesn’t seem to have factored in Heather’s response to Emilio’s controlling ways and his abuse. She ultimately decided she couldn’t forgive him for what he had done.”

“You don’t think Heather could have liked bondage or engaged in sadomasochistic behavior?”

“That doesn’t even remotely sound like her.”

“What can you tell me about her sex life?”

“Heather wasn’t a prude, if that’s what you’re asking. At first her relationship with Emilio was all that she could have wanted, but then he started trying to control her, and matters got worse from there.”

“Was she afraid of Emilio?”

“I think it was more of a case of once burned, twice shy. She’d suffered enough abuse to not want any more. Imagine having her childhood. Heather was forced to be all grown up by the time she was eighteen. By then she’d seen her mother murdered, her father imprisoned, and her brother die of an overdose. After what she went through as a child, I don’t think she was afraid of anything.”

Katie took a moment to consider what she was saying, and then said, “Except one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“Heather’s mother was mentally ill. From what Heather remembers, her mother’s condition grew worse over the years. It scared her to think she could end up like her mother. Heather said her mother was probably schizophrenic and was always seeing and hearing things that weren’t there.”

I wrote down,
Depressive Disorder?
My bout with PTSD had acquainted me with phrases like that. If Heather had suffered some kind of breakdown, that might explain her absence. She could have gone off the deep end.

Katie told me she was late for a meeting but said I could call her later.

I made a second call. Emilio wasn’t nearly as charitable as Katie and wasn’t happy to hear from me.

“I’m on the job,” he said. “You cops have already gotten me on my boss’s shit list. Don’t call me at work.”

“Let’s talk after work, then.”

“Let’s not. I’ve been advised not to talk to you. Hell, even that other cop who talked to me said I didn’t have to talk to you.”

He hung up on me before I even had a chance to say, “Temper, temper.”

Other than Angie, Heather had no family. I decided to hold off interviewing Heather’s friends and coworkers in lieu of organizing my case notes. Most young cops don’t bother with paper, doing everything on their computers, but I’m a great believer in scribbling. Scratching and doodling has a way of clearing my mental logjams. I could use a little magic.

I wrote
Angie’s trail
underneath my entry of
Depressive Disorder?
Then I drew a map from Burbank to Sherman Oaks, with some of the landmarks in between. What was it that had brought Angie to my neighborhood? Was it mere chance? And was it only self-preservation that kept her away from the freeways?

Google Street View took me in and around Burbank. From Heather’s house I followed several street routes to my neighborhood. Even though I was using my fingers to travel the ten miles, it still seemed like a long way. The pads on Angie’s worn paws told me she’d walked even farther than that. What had her nose been telling her? I suppose it was possible that fear had been driving her. Although thunderstorms are rare in Southern California, when they occur dogs frequently panic. During
Sturm und Drang
I’ve seen some dogs in panicked flight, fleeing with no regard as to where they were going. Over the last decade I’ve been involved in two rescues of soaked and shivering dogs trying to distance themselves from the roar of thunder.

Another entry:
Did something spook Angie?

When I tired of navigating Google Street View, I decided to tap
Pluto the dog
into the search engine. The cartoon images of Pluto didn’t look all that much like Angie. I read through Pluto’s film biography; he’d been in more films than most A-list actors. His 1941 film,
Lend a Paw
, had Pluto saving the life of a kitten put into a bag and thrown into a river, and I was reminded of Sirius running to Angie’s aid.
Lend a Paw
had been dedicated to the Tailwagger Foundation, a group that I knew was still providing treatment to sick and injured animals around the globe. It is mostly the fault of uncaring humans that dogs and cats end up in dire straits; luckily there are good humans who try to counterbalance the bad.

Every few minutes I found myself checking the time. Finally, I called Sergeant Reyes and again got his voice mail. I tried to take the high road, hoping that would help my chances of his calling back.

“This is Gideon,” I said, “still waiting for your call. If your gout is bothering you, I’d be glad to help with any legwork you might have in the Moreland case. Call me.”

I continued with my scribbling. For some reason I kept hearing Perez’s punch line about what your dog and phone had in common: collar ID. I suppose it was better than hearing his version of “Puppy Love” polluting my thoughts.