Under the Dog Star: A Rachel Goddard Mystery #4 (Rachel Goddard Mysteries) Read online

  “They said he was hurt,” Vicky told Tom, her voice thick with tears. “I called 911. I wanted to go to him, I’m a nurse, I thought I could help, but Beth wouldn’t let me. She said it was too late.” Vicky couldn’t control the sobs that wracked her frail body.

  Tom turned his attention to Marcy. He knew she was around eleven, but she looked a couple of years younger. She was one of the Halls’ three adopted children, a mixed-race girl with brown skin and curly black hair. Tom, whose Melungeon heritage showed in his dark olive skin, coal-black hair, strong nose and cheekbones, couldn’t help feeling a kind of kinship with her, but he doubted she saw him as anything but a frightening adult in a uniform.

  “Marcy, would you come over here and talk to me for a minute?”

  She shot a wide-eyed glance at him, ducked her head, didn’t move. Her rigid posture made Tom think of a trapped animal steeling itself for an attack.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “I just need to ask you a couple of questions.”

  “Marcy, for heaven’s sake,” Vicky Hall snapped. Regaining a degree of composure, she sniffed and swiped tears from her face. “Do as you’re told. Come over here.”

  “Mrs. Hall—” Tom caught himself. Vicky Hall was distraught. She didn’t know how she sounded. Right now she might not be capable of considering how Marcy felt after seeing her father lying dead with his throat torn open. Ignoring the mother, he spoke quietly to the daughter. “Marcy, can I ask you some questions?”

  She nodded without looking at him.

  “Answer Captain Bridger properly,” Vicky told her. “Say Yes, sir.”

  “Yes, sir,” the girl whispered.

  “And speak up,” Vicky said.

  Tom kept his own voice gentle. “Did you see any animals down by the woods?”

  Marcy started to shake her head, then glanced at her mother and murmured, “No, sir.”

  “Is your father’s dog okay? Did he come back to the house with you?”

  “Thor?” Vicky exclaimed. “Oh dear lord. I haven’t even thought about him. Where is he? What happened to him? Marcy, answer me. Where is Thor?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “We’ll find him,” Tom said.

  He heard Brandon clomping down the stairs, and he rose when the deputy returned to the living room with Beth trailing him. Brandon set the phone, the kind with a built-in answering machine, on a console table and plugged the line into a jack underneath that Beth pointed out.

  “Are you sure you want to hear this again?” Tom asked Vicky.

  With her lips pressed together in a grim line, she straightened her back and nodded.

  Gordon Hall sounded calm at first. “Hey, honey, Thor wants to nose around for a while, so we’ll stay out another fifteen or twenty minutes before we turn back. I don’t want you to start worrying about us.”

  Vicky whimpered and buried her face in her hands. Beth rushed to the sofa and wrapped her arms around her mother. Marcy had retreated to a corner, where she stood with shoulders hunched and arms straight at her sides.

  The call didn’t end with Hall’s message for his wife. A brief silence followed, then Hall exclaimed, “What the hell?”

  His voice grew louder. “Where did you come from? What are you doing here?”

  Animal snarls and barks erupted into the quiet. Gordon Hall yelled, “Shit! Get away! Get off!”

  No human voice, responded.

  The growling and snarling sounded like an escalating dogfight.

  “Thor! Good god—He’s going to kill my dog! Stop it!”

  The next sounds were muffled, indistinct, as if Hall had dropped the phone into the leaves and it was kicked around in a scuffle. Gordon Hall screamed, a piercing cry of terror. The answering machine cut him off.

  In the sudden silence of the living room, Tom cleared his throat. “Beth,” he said, “did you hear or see another person or an animal when you went outside to look for your father?”

  “No, I didn’t see anything,” she answered without looking at Tom. She focused all her attention on her mother.

  “Was your father’s dog there with him?”

  “No. I don’t know what happened to him.”

  “Well, then,” Tom said, stuffing his notebook into his shirt pocket, “we’d better try to find him. He could be hurt.”

  Vicky moaned. “Thor wouldn’t have left Gordon. That dog worships him. He would’ve tried to protect Gordon. He might have been hurt, but he still would have chased after—” She stood abruptly and wobbled on her feet. “We have to find him. Gordon would never forgive me if I let Thor die too.”

  “You stay here,” Tom said. “We’ll look for him.”

  Vicky took several deep, quavering breaths, pulling herself together. “All right. Thank you, Tom.”

  For the next few minutes, they searched for the shepherd, Brandon looking in the house and Tom outside. The dog wasn’t there. The crime scene team had arrived, and Tom asked them to look for Hall’s cell phone in the leaf litter around and under his body.

  When Tom returned to the living room, another of the Halls’ adopted children had appeared. David, Marcy’s teenage brother, stood against a wall next to his sister, with his fists jammed into his jeans pockets. Like Marcy, he was a good-looking kid, but a sullen, watchful expression spoiled his handsome face.

  The only Hall children missing were an adult son who lived in Florida and a daughter who was away at medical school.

  “Were you here when it happened?” Tom asked David. “Did you go outside?”

  “I was asleep,” the boy mumbled. “I woke up when the cops got here.”

  Hadn’t he been awakened by his mother’s screams? Tom knew teenage boys could sleep as if drugged, but wouldn’t the unfamiliar noise of a crisis in the household penetrate that fog? It seemed odd, but Tom didn’t see that it mattered, so he let it go.

  He told Vicky, “I’ve called for more deputies, and they’ll look for your dog in the woods. If he’s there, they’ll find him. Is Thor aggressive? Has he ever bitten anybody?”

  “No, never. He looks ferocious, but he’s just a sweet old pet. I’m sure he tried to protect Gordon, but he’s got hip dysplasia, and I don’t think he could even protect himself.” Vicky raised wet eyes to Tom. “We’ve seen that pack of wild dogs around here a couple of times. Do you think they could have ganged up on my husband and killed him?”

  Tom hesitated, wondering how she could have missed the implications of what was recorded on the tape. The animal sounds hadn’t been made by a whole pack of dogs. Hall hadn’t screamed at a pack of dogs. First, he’d sounded surprised to find somebody, another person, on his property. Then he’d begged that person to call off a single dog. The intruder remained silent and let the animal attack. Tom glanced at Brandon, who looked back with a frown. He’d reached the same conclusions.

  “The medical examiner will have to give us the exact cause of death,” Tom said. “I’d rather not speculate.”

  But he was certain of what he’d heard—somebody had murdered Gordon Hall, using a dog as the weapon.

  Chapter Three

  Tom returned home at six in the morning, when Rachel was finishing her breakfast cereal at the kitchen table. Taking in his chin stubble and bloodshot eyes, she said, “You’re going to get a little rest now, I hope.”

  “Afraid not.” He leaned to kiss her, then patted Billy Bob, who had trotted into the kitchen to greet him. “I just want to shave and grab something to eat before I head back. The sheriff’s coming in for a meeting about the case, and he sounded cranky as hell on the phone.”

  She knew she’d be wasting her breath if she argued in favor of a nap before he went back to work. “Sit down and have some coffee. I’ll make you a hot breakfast.”

  “I’ll just get some cereal. You don’t have to cook for me.”

  “I want to, okay? Sit down before you collapse.” Rachel rose, poured a mug of coffee for him, and began pulling together breakfast ingredients. While a skillet heated, she
cracked a couple of eggs into a bowl and whisked them with a fork. “So, was it murder?”

  “Yeah, I think it was. The weirdest one I’ve ever seen. It looks like somebody set a dog on him, then stood by while it killed him. Tore out his throat.”

  Tom’s words sent a chill through Rachel. “That’s horrible. Just one dog? And somebody was with it? You’re sure?”

  “It wasn’t the feral pack, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

  Thank god. She dropped a pat of butter into the skillet and it landed with a sizzle. “Well, that’s good. If anything about this could be called good.”

  “I think it’s only a matter of time before they hurt somebody, though. You and Holly had better get moving if you want to save them.”

  Surprised, Rachel said, “So you’ve changed your mind about that?”

  “I want to prevent a tragedy. After seeing what one dog did to Gordon Hall—” Tom shook his head. “I’d hate to think what a pack of them could do to a kid.”

  Rachel nodded. The less she said about the planned rescue operation, the less likely Tom was to withdraw his support. Pouring the eggs into the skillet, she asked, “How can you be sure someone was controlling the dog that killed Dr. Hall?”

  She listened with growing horror to his description of what was on the answering machine tape. Setting his plate of eggs and toast on the table, she said, “Why kill him that way? Practically everybody in Mason County owns a gun. Shooting him would have been quicker and easier.”

  “I’ve been wondering about that,” Tom said. “I think the person who did it might be hoping we’ll blame the dog pack and not recognize it as a murder.”

  “Who could hate Dr. Hall enough to do something that vicious?”

  Tom gave a humorless laugh. “Remember I told you my mother was head of the nursing staff at the hospital? Some of the stories she told about him—Believe me, there’s no shortage of people with grudges against Gordon Hall.”

  ***

  Rachel had just stepped through the front door of Mountainview Animal Hospital when she saw Holly Turner, her young assistant, taping a new missing dog notice on the wall of the waiting area. Rachel moved closer to examine it. The poster showed a color photo of a young beagle, rising on his hind legs with an orange rubber ball in his mouth. “Oh, no. Not Jazzy. He’s just a puppy.”

  “Poor little thing.” Tears pooled in Holly’s blue eyes. She was a beautiful young woman, Melungeon like Tom, with olive skin and long black hair, but when she was upset her lower lip trembled, red blotches appeared on her cheeks, and she looked years younger than nineteen.

  The new poster made an even dozen notices on the wall. Purebreds and mutts, big and little, young and old, the dogs had all disappeared from their owners’ yards in the past few weeks.

  “I’ll bet somebody’s stealin’ those poor dogs,” Holly went on. “And they’re probably sellin’ them to some awful lab that’s doin’ experiments on them. I don’t believe for one minute they’re all runnin’ away from home to join that wild pack. That’s just crazy talk.”

  “I don’t believe it either,” Rachel said. “It’s awfully suspicious that so many pets have disappeared so close together. I wish it hadn’t taken so long for a pattern to emerge.”

  “What are we gonna do about it?” Holly blinked away her tears, her face transformed by a new focus on action.

  “I don’t know yet, but we can’t stand by while this keeps happening. We have to do something.” Right now, though, they had other dogs to worry about. “Did you hear about Dr. Hall?”

  “Yeah, somebody called Joanna real early this mornin’ and told her.” Holly now roomed with Joanna McKendrick, owner of a horse farm where Rachel and Holly had shared a cottage until recently. “She thinks those wild dogs did it, and she thinks they’re killin’ all these pets too. She’s goin’ off to Kentucky today to deliver a horse, and she’s takin’ both of her dogs with her cause she doesn’t think they’d be safe here. But I don’t believe a bit of that. I’m real afraid people are gonna hunt the wild dogs down and kill all of them.”

  “Tom wants us to go ahead and start trapping them, and I agree with him. Do you have any pens ready yet at the McClure place?” Holly was creating an animal sanctuary on the property she’d inherited from an aunt, but construction had begun only a month before.

  “The men just got one big section finished. The indoor shelter’s not ready, but we can go ahead and put some dogs in the pens. They’ll be okay until the weather turns real cold. I’m gonna move into the house with Grandma, and I’ll help her take care of the animals. Let’s do it. Let’s start tonight.”

  “It won’t be easy,” Rachel cautioned. “They’ve become very wary of people. We can’t expect to get more than one or two at a time, and some nights we won’t catch any.”

  “You can do it, you and the dog warden, I know you can. And do you think you can you get Captain Bridger to do somethin’ about all these pet dogs gettin’ stolen?”

  “I’ll try, but I don’t know if he’ll have time right now. The Sheriff’s Department may be too busy during a murder investigation.”

  “This is just downright crazy, you know? Pet dogs disappearin’ and wild dogs runnin’ loose, and now Dr. Hall gettin’ killed by a dog. What’s goin’ on around here?”

  Rachel had no answer. Something strange and frightening was happening in Mason County that nobody had put a name to yet. She scanned the missing dog posters, all of them showing happy, pampered animals. Their owners were searching for them, comforting crying children who missed their pets, offering rewards for their return. At the same time, a pack of dogs that had once been pets roamed Mason County, scrounging for food and struggling to survive after being dumped like garbage by their owners.

  Rachel thought she understood dogs as well as anyone could. She doubted she would ever understand people.

  ***

  Tom played the answering machine tape three times for Sheriff Toby Willingham but couldn’t get him to focus on its meaning. “Can’t you hear what the rest of us hear?”

  Dr. Lauter and animal warden Joe Dolan, seated at the conference room table with them, looked as exasperated as Tom felt.

  “All I know is, my phone started ringing before six o’clock this morning,” the sheriff said from his place at the head of the table. He looked ill, his skin pasty and his hands trembling, but he’d come in to make sure Tom got something done about the feral dogs. “People want those damned animals rounded up before they kill somebody else.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Toby,” Dr. Lauter said, “how many times do we have to tell you the dog pack didn’t kill Gordon Hall? Just wait and see, the state medical examiner is going to agree with me—the wounds were inflicted by a single animal.”

  “Look at the pictures.” Tom opened a folder and began laying photos of Hall’s body in front of the sheriff.

  Willingham drew back and averted his eyes, his face screwed up in disgust.

  Joe Dolan, a wiry young man with freckles and bright red hair, blew out a noisy breath and shook his head at the sheriff’s reaction.

  “Will you please look at the pictures of the victim, sir?” Tom said. “There are no wounds to support the theory that he was killed by an entire pack of animals.”

  “Then it was one dog that’s part of the pack.” Willingham shoved the photos toward Tom without looking at them.

  God damn it. Tom bit back angry words and snatched up the pictures.

  “That’s not real likely, Sheriff,” Dolan said. “One dog attacking and the rest of them just standing by. Or one dog from the pack going off by itself and doing something like this. That doesn’t sound like pack behavior to me.”

  Willingham pointed a finger at Dolan. “Don’t try to get off the hook. This is your fault, young man. If you’d stayed on top of this when people started dumping their animals here, it never would’ve gone this far.”

  Dolan’s cheeks colored, his freckles disappearing in the flush of red
. “I’m one person, Sheriff. I’m the whole Department of Animal Control and there’s a limit to what I can do. I spend half my time getting coons and possums out of people’s chimneys and garages. You want me to do more about those dogs, you’ll have to get me the funding to hire a team.”

  “My deputies are going to be the team on this.” Willingham shifted his glare to Tom. “I want this to be top priority, and I don’t want you to quit until every damn one of those dogs is dead and gone.”

  “I’ve got a murder to investigate.” Despite his effort to sound reasonable, Tom couldn’t keep the sarcastic edge out of his voice. “You want me to put dog-catching ahead of that? I don’t—”

  “Wait a minute here,” Dolan interrupted. “Sheriff? You want us to kill them? What if some of them turn out to be pets that went missing lately? How are the owners gonna feel if deputies shoot their dogs without giving them a chance to go home again?”

  “They’ve gone wild,” the sheriff said. “There’s more of them every day, and they’re a danger to our citizens and their livestock. We wouldn’t have any debate about shooting a pet that was rabid. These dogs are every bit as dangerous.” He leaned his palms on the table and pushed himself to his feet. “Get rid of them. That’s an order.”

  The sheriff hobbled out, his shoulders stooped. Tom heard him coughing in the hallway. The old man ought to be at home in bed instead of at headquarters interfering with everybody else’s work.

  Dr. Lauter threw up her hands. “Honestly, Tom, I don’t know how you put up with Toby. I certainly hope you plan to ignore him and treat this as a murder investigation.”

  “Of course I do.” Tom looked across at Dolan. “You’re in charge of rounding up the dogs. I’ll give you whatever manpower I can spare, but it won’t be the whole department.”

  “Just remember I’m not shooting any dogs, and I won’t stand by while anybody else does.”

  Tom waved that aside. “We’re not going to kill them. You know what Holly Turner’s doing with the McClure property?”

  Dolan nodded. “Sure, I helped her plan the layout. But there’s only one row of pens that’s ready.”