Mutts & Murder: A Dog Town USA Cozy Mystery (14 page)

“I need to see her,” I said.

“Well, you’re just gonna have to wait on that,” he said. “The officers are speaking to her right now.”

If that was true, then I was suddenly very, very angry with Louise.

I’d always told her never to speak to the cops without a lawyer present. I knew from my years as a crime reporter that cops, though required by law to ask suspects whether they wanted a lawyer, often found loopholes and scared their suspects into talking to them without one. Lou was a smart cookie, but her natural trusting ways could be her undoing when it came to this.

Not that Lou had anything to hide. But I knew how cops operated. And I knew that depending on their working theory, Lou might just be in their line of fire.

“No,” I said, sternly. “I need you to go get her now.”

He pointed to a chair in the waiting area behind me.

“Take a seat Miss Wolf.”

I felt my ears grow hot with anger. This guy seemed to get his kicks from telling me to wait.

“That’s unacceptabl—”

But just then, I heard the sound of voices coming from down the side hallway. I leaned back, seeing Lou walking toward me. A couple of cops were walking alongside her.

She looked scared.

I left the desk and rushed up to meet her.

I was halfway there when I recognized one of the officers.

Son of a b…
I thought.

She saw me and smiled, but that frightened expression was still on her face.

“Just what in the hell is going on?” I said, addressing her as much as the officers.

She came up and hugged me tightly.

My eyes fell on Lt. Sakai. He could only meet my stare for a couple of seconds, looking away.

I probably would have been horribly embarrassed at seeing him after the night before if I wasn’t so pissed off at what was going on.

“Let’s just get out of here,” Lou said.

She looked like she’d been crying.

A fiery rage welled up in the center of my chest.

I glared at the lieutenant, suddenly wondering what he was really doing the night before. Had he actually run into me on those quiet neighborhood streets by chance? Or had it been deliberate?

Had he been watching me? Had he been watching Lou?

I knew Sakai hated reporters. But he was crossing a line with this.

“Tell me now what’s going on,” I said, staring at him.

“I can’t tell you the details, Winifred,” he said. “It’s an ongoing investigation.”

“Bulls—” I started saying, but then Lou nudged me toward the door.

“C’mon, Freddie,” she said. “I just want to get out of here.”

I wanted to go over there and teach the lieutenant and his Jell-O gut partner a lesson or two, but the desperation in Lou’s voice made me rethink that line of action.

She looked like she might start crying again if we didn’t get out of there soon.

My sisterly duties got the better of me, so instead, I settled for a sharp glare aimed at the lieutenant and a promise to myself that I wouldn’t let him get away with whatever game he was playing at.

Chapter 35

Lou lit another cigarette and nervously paced the back deck of
The Barkery
in the hot afternoon sun.

Lou didn’t normally smoke. But sometimes when stress got the better of her, she’d pull out the pack of cigarettes that she kept hidden in the glove compartment of her car and light one up. Right around the time our mom was diagnosed with cancer, Lou had picked up quite the habit. But lately, it was rare to see her with a cigarette dangling from her mouth.

Today, though, was turning out to be a day worthy of a couple of smokes.

I sat on the wooden picnic bench, watching her. Inside
The Barkery
, Pete and Milo were serving the last few customers before closing up for the day.

Lou seemed better now than she had earlier at the police station, but she still looked shaken. Her normally perfect mane of blonde hair was out of place and frazzled, and she kept wiping her hands off on her jean shorts like she couldn’t get them to stop sweating.

“Let’s go through it all again, okay?” I said, doing my best to keep a calm and collected voice. Though calm and collected was the exact opposite of what I was feeling inside.

Inside, I felt like a raging volcano looking for an outlet to erupt. I was livid with Lt. Sakai for bringing Lou in the way he had and scaring her. And with myself, for acting the way I had the night before with him. Like a sloppy gal who couldn’t hold her liquor.

Lou let out a big plume of smoke, and then started pacing more rapidly.

“I told you, Freddie,” she said. “I was here at
The Barkery
, making up a fresh batch of cupcakes when a cop car pulled up out front. I recognized Sam, and I just thought they were here to grab a couple of pastries. But then they came in and told me that they needed to ask me some questions, and that it’d be best if I could come to the station with them.”

I bit my lip.

“Why didn’t you ask for a lawyer, Lou?”

She shot me a sharp glance. I’d already asked the question, but felt the need to ask it again.

“I told you. I had nothing to hide.”

“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “You still ask for a lawyer. Always.”

She let out a sigh and sucked on her cigarette.

“Well, hindsight’s 20/20, isn’t it?”

I didn’t mean to be scolding her about it again. But I was worried.

“Okay,” I said. “Tell me again what they said in the interview.”

She sighed.

“They asked me again about the day Myra died, about when she stopped into
The Barkery
. They asked me what she ordered and who else was here that day.

“Then they started asking me about how long I’d known Myra for and how I felt about her as a person and…”

She trailed off. She looked at me with large, deer-in-the-headlight eyes.

Then she stopped pacing and abruptly took a seat across from me at the picnic bench.

“Freddie, there’s something I haven’t told you.”

I felt a rock in my stomach as she looked at me. My hands were sweating too, I realized.

“Then tell me,” I said, my voice trembling slightly.

Like me, Lou had never cared much for Myra.

But I never thought she’d do anything… anything to—

“I wrote a letter,” she said, stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray on the table. “After Mom’s funeral? When she didn’t show up or send any condolences of any kind? I wrote her a letter.”

I waited for her to continue.

“And I might have said some pretty mean things in it,” she said. “I might have called her a bad name or two. I might have… threatened her. But that was really wrong what she did, Freddie. After all mom gave that school. And Myra couldn’t even pretend to care that she died.”

I furrowed my brow.

“But if you wrote her a letter like that, then how come she kept coming back to the bakery?”

Lou shrugged.

“‘Cuz she wasn’t going to let that get in the way of her daily red velvet cupcake,” Lou said. “Because that’s the kind of person she was. I think she was a sociopath who didn’t care what others thought about her.”

Lou sighed.

“But the point is, I think the cops found that letter at Myra’s house,” she said. “And I think that letter, combined with their timeline of the poisoning led them to think…”

She trailed off.

Lou didn’t often get scared. She was a strong woman. In that sense, she took after our mother.

But I could tell: this had really gotten to her. She was really shaken up.

I pat her on the hand and she swallowed hard.

“It’s just that…
The Barkery
is practically my reason for living, Freddie. And even though this is all a big farce, when it gets out that I’m being accused of poisoning one of my customers, the business is just going to…”

A solitary tear spilled down her cheek.

I sprang to my feet and came around the table. I embraced Lou as a few more tears brimmed over the edges of her big blue eyes.

“It’s going to be okay, Sis,” I said. “All right? We’ll figure this out. They didn’t arrest you, so they don’t have anything but a theory right now.”

I pulled away. She was nodding and wiping at her face.

“Nothing’s going to happen to
The Barkery
,” I said. “I promise you.”

She didn’t say anything for a long while. She just looked tired and worried. Like a woman who expected the worst.

Usually it was Lou who took care of me.

But this time, I knew I had to step up.

I was going to do the cop’s job for them: I was going to find out who killed Myra.

And I was going to make Lt. Sam Sakai pay for scaring my sister like this.

Chapter 36

The newsroom was hot and stuffy and quieter than a grave that Saturday afternoon. The only sound throughout the whole building was the persistent whirring of the ceiling fan, droning along like it had nothing better to do.

The Chronicle
’s headquarters was in an old brick building that had been built around the turn of the last century. And not much had changed since. It was hot during the summer, and cold and damp during the winter. The air duct had a persistent moth problem, and every once and a while dead bugs would tumble down from the ceiling. Sometimes, when they fell on Rachael’s desk, she’d let out a terrified, high-pitched scream: something that annoyed just about everybody within a mile radius.

But I didn’t have much time to think about the building’s bad cooling system or Rachael’s disproportionate fear of insects that afternoon. Because I had a giant stack of dog board hearing transcripts on my desk that I was only one quarter of the way through, and a killer to find.

I took a sip of my iced coffee and tossed another stack of papers into the “read” pile that I had set aside on one end of my desk.

The newsroom was completely empty. Scott had the Saturday shift, but he was out covering some event at the Dog Mountain Historical Society. Meanwhile, Kobritz was editing remotely from home. Meaning that I was all by my lonesome for the time being.

The dog board hearing notes made for droll reading. Most of them had to do with owners whose lack of good disciplinary measures led to their dogs damaging property. A few of them had occurred after the owners were ticketed multiple times for not keeping their dogs on a leash. Occasionally, someone had been bitten by a dog. But for the most part, none of the dog board’s rulings were significant enough to warrant anybody wanting payback by poisoning Myra. People had received warnings and fines, but thus far through my reading, not a single dog had been taken away from its owner or put down: despite the fact that those were common threats Myra made at the hearings.

I sighed.

The notes were full of jargon, too. Making them even more tedious to read than they already were. I had yet to gain any valuable information from any of them. And more than that, my story sensor, the sense I relied on to help me sort through this kind of nonsense, was dead in the water.

I had the feeling that nothing fruitful would come from any of this. But I had to keep going. I had to keep trying for Lou.

While studying one particularly boring file concerning a dog and a damaged mailbox, my mind started drifting.

I closed my eyes for a second, trying to imagine the way
The Barkery
looked that day when Myra came in for her usual cupcake and latte.

If the cops did indeed think Myra was poisoned by something she ate at
The Barkery
, then it stood to reason that somebody else there could have done the poisoning. Lou said Myra had eaten half of her cupcake and drank her coffee alone at a café table in the dog-designated patio area. Which meant somebody could have slipped something into either one of those items without her knowing about it.

It had been crowded that afternoon. I hadn’t spent much time looking around at the other customers while I ate my Caesar salad. I’d been too busy talking to Lou and sparring with Myra over the dog board article to notice much else.

To notice a killer.

I broke out in goose bumps, even though it was hot in the newsroom.

The killer could have been sitting right by me that afternoon, and I wouldn’t have known a—

I jumped as the grey phone on my desk let out a sharp ring.

I stared at it for a long while as it kept ringing, wondering just who would call me at the newsroom on a Saturday afternoon.

I had the feeling I should let it just go to voicemail, but before I knew it, my hand had reached over the stack of dog board hearing notes, and I grabbed it right before the caller was sent to voicemail.

“Hello?” I said.

“Winifred?”

I recognized the voice right away and I immediately regretted answering.

Sometimes my curiosity got me into trouble.

“How’d you know I was here?” I said.

It hadn’t been lost on me that he’d gone back to calling me Winifred instead of Freddie. 

“A guess,” he said quietly.  

“What do you want?”

There was a pause on the other side of the line. Maybe he was surprised at the harshness in my response. But that’s what he got for dragging my sister to the police station and scaring her the way he did.

Though when I asked, Lou had stoutly defended Lt. Sakai, saying that he’d been cordial and professional with her. It had been his partner that had been rude – needling her and asking questions that implied things that weren’t true.

But I didn’t quite believe Lou’s version of the interrogation. I knew Sakai was probably just playing good cop to his partner’s bad cop in the interview.

There was no response from the other side of the line.

“Well?” I said, getting madder with each passing second.

“This morning, with your sister? It had nothing to do with me running into you last night,” he said. “I just needed to tell you that.”

I did some pausing of my own. Unsure about how to respond to that.

It probably wasn’t true, anyway. He was probably just saying that as a way to regain my trust. Working some sort of angle that was going to end with Lou getting arrested for a murder she didn’t commit.