The China Dogs (19 page)

Chunlin feels himself redden. “Yes, General.”

“Good.” He pulls the door open and holds it for Chunlin to pass through. “Can I give you a lift, Minister? I would hate anything to happen to you as you head home.”

67

Historic District, Miami

G
host can't sleep so he runs.

His big feet slap out echoes down deserted streets where many have only just gone to bed and where it's still too soon for early risers to break out of their dreams.

The rhythm feels good. Hypnotic. Energizing.

His long legs strike a mechanical pace down the silent sidewalks out to the Freedom Tower at Miami Dade College and back again.

After the ten mile, hour-long jog he soaks in the shower. The pulse of hot water on his face and head stokes his engines and he feels ready for the day.

He towels dry and dresses in a cool brown linen and silk suit with light brown shirt and tan loafers, no socks. When he's done, he sits in the kitchen and checks his e-mail and phone messages.

No word from Zoe.

She'd promised to mail him some research that she'd done and she hasn't. He's sure she must have gotten his late night text.

Now he regrets sending it. It was foolish and weak.

He reads the morning newspapers online and for breakfast cooks an egg-white omelette and forks it down with freshly squeezed OJ and thick black Colombian coffee. In the background is the constant chatter of CBS news. Like the print press, the bulletin is packed with stories about the dog attacks, about increases in strays on the street, and there's a couple of people from an animal shelter in the studio with a pair of cute pups to adopt. The shelter owner says the stray problem has become so bad that they're full-to-bursting and will have to euthanize any animal brought in if they don't find a home for it within twenty-four hours. The studio fills with aaws and sighs.

Just after seven Ghost switches the set off and heads to the office.

The cleaners have been in, but the section being used as an Incident Room still stinks of burritos and beer. It used to be a crash area for cops working overnight shifts, and he guesses the smells will never go away.

He logs on to his computer and sees there have been two more dog incidents overnight. A tax official in Santa Rosa got bitten to death in his sleep. Fortunately for his wife, they'd had a falling out and he'd been banished to a spare bedroom. She managed to get herself and their child out of the condo before the Yorkshire terrier could attack them.

A Yorkie?

Ghost takes a minute to check the size of a terrier. From memory he knows it as a “toy” dog. A tiny, scraggy runt of a thing. The detail he finds online confirms it. They are tiny. Six to nine inches tall and only about seven pounds in weight. He can't begin to think how a dog that small could become that dangerous.

The other incident seems more plausible. Over in Marion a stray bulldog has attacked a group of people coming out of a nightclub. It killed a twenty-six-year-old man and injured two women in their twenties.

Ghost sits back and weighs it all up.

From what he's seen on the news and the statewide incident log in front of him, there have now been close to thirty dog bites and fifteen fatalities in Florida in the last three days. He walks over to a large electronic operations board in the corner of the room—the type that allows you to write on it then prints copies of whatever you've scribbled. You can also call up Internet pages and download data from police servers.

He splits the screen and on one side makes a list of the fatalities, starting with the most recent.

Sunny Budrys—Santa Rosa, Florida

Ken Egan—Marion, Florida

Fran Ennis, Josh Whitting, Clive and Susan Dixon—Merritt Island

Officer George Jennings —Montgomery Correctional Center, Jacksonville

Ellen McGonall, Pete and Lizzie Cooper—Lake Jackson

Kathy Morgan, Matt Wood, Alfie Steiner—Key Biscayne, Miami

On the other side of the screen he calls up a large map of Florida and marks in the locations of the attacks.

There seem no obvious geographic connections.

He ponders them again.

Santa Rosa is about as far north and west as you can get, while Merritt Island and Key Biscayne are a long way south and east. Jacksonville is back north and east, Marion more north and central, and Lake Jackson central but a bit south of Marion.

He takes a felt pen and marks them in.

They still mean nothing.

He adds the main nonfatal bites, the ones that needed surgery and resulted in dogs being destroyed. Big crosses now highlight Cape Coral on the southwest coast, Port St. Lucie back on the eastern seaboard, and Ghost—his namesake county, back up on the northwest tip.

Still nothing.

He goes back to his desk and e-mails a friend in the national crime statistics department to see if any other states are experiencing sudden rises in dog-related injuries and deaths, then goes back to the map.

The spread of locations irritates him.

If they were rape or murder scenes, he'd speculate on where the offender might strike next. Orlando. Tampa. Fort Lauderdale. The Everglades. Daytona Beach.

Those would be the most likely places. They are all tourist magnets, big centers with shifting populations made up of every nationality you can name.

He figures that for some reason the dogs have avoided these spots. But that doesn't make sense. There are more of the animals out there than in any other parts of Florida, so if there's a random virus, it should be showing in these places rather than down in Key Biscayne and remote places like that.

Jacksonville too.

He looks at the correctional center and sees it's way north of the city center, out past the airport in Four Creeks State Forest. Jacksonville itself is the biggest city in Florida, with more than three-quarters of a million people living there and another half million within easy commuting distance.

But aside from the incident at the prison—no dog deaths or even bites.

The more he looks at the puzzle the more puzzled he becomes. In the hope of finding a little clarity, he focuses on the breeds that caused fatalities.

Bulldog

Yorkshire terrier

Labrador

German shepherd

Rottweiler

Wirehaired pointer

Pit bull/Staff mongrel

Aside from the Yorkshire they're all big dogs. From previously Googling the Yorkshire terrier, he already knows it's Miami's second most popular dog, just behind the German shepherd and ahead of the rottweiler.

His mailbox pings and he gets almost a childish rush of excitement when he realizes it's a note from Zoe.

Sorry didn't reply last night. Fell asleep after having drunk too much!

Attached is promised research, hope it helps.

Jude is away for a few days—how about I cook dinner for say 8pm?

Z

He mails her back.

Thanks for attachment. Dinner sounds great.

Have a good day x

Before hitting Send, he deletes the kiss. Then adds it again. Having put one on the text he sent last night, he thinks it would now be strange to leave it off.

Time slips by. Around 9:00
A.M.
the office starts to fill up. First in is Sergeant John Tarney, a mountain of a twenty-eight-year-old, transferred from SWAT. There's not a better guy to have riding shotgun on a hairy late-night bust, but he's barely sociable before noon. JT needs coffee, pints of it, before he can even grunt out a good-morning.

Forty-two-year-old, Bella Lansing manages a brief hello, before darting to her desk and applying the makeup she rushed out of the apartment without putting on. She came into Special Ops from Vice, where she was a sergeant facing a disciplinary charge for kicking a pimp in his testicles after he asked her if she had a daughter he could have sex with.

Ghost grabs the empty coffee cup off his desk and heads to the pantry just as Annie Swanson appears from the main corridor. Gwen Harries is less than a yard behind her.

All the good feeling from his morning run completely disappears.

A CIA agent breathing down his neck is the last thing he needs.

68

Police HQ, Miami

A
nnoyed at being distracted from his research, Ghost settles Gwen Harries in a meeting room while he quickly pushes a pile of tasks his team's way.

He asks them to chase up the crime statistics center for a reply to his early morning mail. Then he wants them to contact the FBI and the National Criminal Justice Reference Service and compile an overview of all dog attacks in the last month and last six months. Next on their to-do list is contacting animal shelters, health services, and the National Centers for Health Statistics at the CDC, the Centers for Disease Control.

Having given his not inconsiderable orders, he reluctantly rejoins the CIA agent and puts down a printout of the map of Florida that he'd been working on. “This shows all the major dog-related attacks. Anything jump out at you?”

She holds it by the corners, as if doing that somehow focuses her concentration. “They're all over the place. Like a damned epidemic.”

Ghost winces. “Not really. If this were a virus like rabies then it would spread in local clusters—animals passing it in their saliva to other animals they come into contact with and humans catching it through bites. You would see two, three, four incidents all within walking distance of each other.” He taps the map. “Miami is the only place we get any cluster.”

Harries sees what he's driving at. “And that was right at the beginning. The earliest incidents were here. Maybe there was contact between the Miami dogs or the Miami owners with people or dogs from these other places dotted all over the map?”

“You mean like a dog show?”

“Could be. Maybe your ‘pretty secretary' could check for us?” The emphasis conjures up all manner of critical undertones.

“Annie's a
detective
, not a secretary.” He tries not to be annoyed by the crass remark and refocuses on the board. “Contact from a show, or such like, would account for the spread, but it still doesn't explain why there's only one incident in places like Santa Rosa and Marion. And why there is only one in Jacksonville.” He draws a big circle around the area with his finger, “There's almost a million and a half people in this area, but just the one incident at the jail.”

“So we can probably guess it's not passed from dog to dog.”

It's Ghost's turn to go on the offensive. “Shouldn't you guys be consulting health experts—in both the animal and human world—to work out what the hell is going on here?”

“We are. I heard this morning that the dog files have been kicked upstairs. Some bigwigs in Washington are scrutinizing the cases.”

“About time.” He leans over her map from the opposite side of the table and points as he talks. “Orlando, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and the Everglades will be hit next.”

“Why so?”

“Just because they haven't been so far. If this is the epidemic we both fear it is, then I bet my badge they're next.”

69

Police HQ, Miami

A
pack of killer hounds gathers around the edges of Ghost's desk, murderous rottweilers, Alsatians, pit bulls, Labradors, and even that tiny terror, the Yorkshire terrier.

In a spread of ten-by-seven color prints they don't look so dangerous. By now he can match every jaw to every victim, and his imagination has repeatedly revisited the awful last moment of each and every life.

He's still shuffling through the postmortem and toxicology reports on both dogs and humans when his desk phone rings. It's the captain's secretary, Patsy Howell, a pasty slab of a woman in her forties with skin like lard and a heart of gold.

“Ghost.”

“Hello, Lieutenant, he's back. I just spoke to him and he says he can give you five minutes but it has to be now.”

“Thanks, Patsy, I'm on my way over.”

She's not finished. “Just so you know—he's in a bad mood. A very bad mood.”

“Great.”

He hangs up and hurries down the corridor to the captain's block.

Patsy looks up knowingly from her desk. “Good luck,” she says, and tells him to go straight in.

Ghost opens the office door and catches Cummings bent over his cluttered desk devouring a giant
frita—
a massive bun with a beef patty, shoestring potatoes, a field of lettuce, and half an onion spilling from it.

The big captain looks up without even a flicker of shame, “Sit down, Ghost—and make this quick. Aside from some serious eating I need to do, I got the freaking chief of police wanting me in his office in two hours' time. Christ knows what bad news he's been cooking just for me.”

Ghost pulls up a chair and can't help but shoot a disgusted look at the grease and barbecue sauce dripping onto the splayed wrapper beneath his boss's chin.

“What?” He drops the burger and glares at him. “You're about to tell me how many calories it has? How bad it is for me? Don't even think of it. You start behaving like my wife and I swear I'll punch you out. You know what I had for breakfast? That crap that rabbits have.
Oats.
She made me eat
oats
and sultanas. Jesus Christ, a man can't start work on a bowl of rabbit food.”

“Apparently not.”

The captain wipes his mouth with a white paper napkin and guiltily wraps up the burger. He takes a cool slug from a bucket of Coke then sits back. “So what's so important that you want to make my shitty day even shittier?”

“Dogs. And not the kind that come with ketchup and mustard.”

“Very funny.”

“We need to do something about these attacks. If we don't take proactive measures then a lot more people are going to die.”

Cummings can't believe he's being troubled with this crap. “Ghost, what is it with you? You see problems everywhere—that's
your
problem. Listen, for decades people have been dying from dog bites. There's nothing new in that.”