Doghouse (16 page)

“Not really.”

There was a loud thump, and Georgie abandoned them both, trotting off into the kitchen. Parsifal let out a high-pitched yip, but stayed with the humans, leaning against Ginny's ankle and tripping over her bare feet.

“I see he's made himself right at home. Good to see you've made it clear that it's only temporary.”

“Oh shut up,” she muttered, reaching into her pocket and tossing a treat onto the floor for the puppy, who fell on it with the grace of a greased penguin. “What's gotten into you,” she called to Georgie, heading into the kitchen after her. “You better not be into the garbage again!” Teddy followed, leaving Parsifal gnawing on his treat.

When he walked into the kitchen, he started to laugh.
Georgie had her nose pressed to the window, and on the other side, sitting on the fire escape, was Penny.

“Is that—” Ginny said, gesturing helplessly at the window.

“Yeah,” Teddy said. “She came with me—and then abandoned me at the door. I guess fire escapes are more to her taste than elevators.”

Ginny shoved Georgie aside and opened the window just enough to let the small cat slip inside. Georgie lowered her head and allowed the tabby to touch noses, then Penny twined around the dog's legs, tail erect and quivering slightly. “These two,” Ginny said, “I swear . . .”

And then there was a scrabble of claws on the floor, and Parsifal skittered into the room, tail wagging and eyes bright. Penny took one look and hissed, and the puppy thumped his backside down on the floor as though he'd been slapped, looking mournfully at the other two animals.

“Penny, that's not polite,” Ginny said, but Teddy laughed. “One cat to rule them all . . .”

“Do not get your geek on my dogs,” Ginny said. “Dog.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I'm not keeping him. Sorry, Parsi.”

“Your objections are getting weaker, and they weren't real strong to start, Mallard.”

“They're not objections, they're facts. This is a one-dog apartment, and a scruffy terrier isn't the image I'm looking for.” She glanced down. “Sorry, Parsi. I'm sure with a manicure and a wash-and-set you'll be fabulous.”

Parsifal ignored them, his eyes still downcast, waiting for Penny to let him get up again.

“C'mon, my stuff's in the living room, might as well get comfortable.”

They left the animals in the kitchen sorting out their pack hierarchy issues, and went back into the main room, settling on the sofa. Teddy was starting to feel more comfortable in her living room than his own apartment, which was a sad commentary.

Of course, she also had more comfortable furniture. He sank into the sofa with a groan of comfort. Definitely getting older.

“Before we even start talking about the fire, and what it might or might not mean,” he started, “I called a friend of mine last night.” He put his coffee mug down on the table after looking in vain for a coaster. “She works for the city attorney's office.”

Ginny took her usual armchair, curling her legs up under her. “Useful friend to have.”

“Not really.” He made a face. “Friend of my sister's. I have a strong suspicion she was told to keep an eye on me.”

He couldn't blame Ginny for snickering. It probably sounded ridiculous, a man his age being monitored. But explaining would require explaining his family. He'd managed to avoid doing that for years, and wasn't about to start now. Not even to Ginny.

“Anyway, I asked her, in a roundabout way, if she had any dirt, confirmed or otherwise, about the owners of the boxing gym, the place where Deke tried to beat the answers out of another guy. Because I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something seriously hinky about the place. I
mean, yeah, the guy Deke tried to shake down's obviously connected somehow, since he gave me a name, but maybe there was a
reason
the guy who knew that name happened to be there? Especially since all the tenants of those rental properties also had a connection, however brief, to the gym?”

“What?” She sounded pissed that she'd missed that. He managed not to grin too smugly. “Oh, did I not mention that?”

“Connection how? And what did you find out?” She put her own coffee mug down, gesturing for him to stop with the suspense and get on with it.

“They all, within the past ten years, had a membership at the gym. Which really isn't that much of a coincidence, since if you're a serious boxer or ex-boxer who doesn't want to be working alongside some hipster, your choices are probably limited. But what made it
very
interesting is that, according to my source, the owner of said establishment, one Samuel Donner—presumably the Sammy for whom the gym is named—had a bad and very illegal habit of running fight clubs out of his back room. Or rather, it's not so much the fighting that's illegal as the sizable number of bets being placed on such fights. The state bans all amateur gambling, so I'm betting none of this was ever reported to the IRS. . . .”

Ginny blinked at him, and he could practically see the bits fall into place the same way they had for him. Probably better, with whatever she knew adding to the puzzle. That was why they worked so well together, why he kept
coming back for more: because he could feel the energy building, even as her brain attacked the new information. He knew his strengths, but he also knew his weaknesses, and one of them was that he was, at heart, lazy. It took someone else lighting a fire under him to get him going. And Ginny, he'd discovered, was the best kind of match.

“Once you get your fingers dirty, it's easier to shove all the way up to your elbows,” Ginny said. “I'd bet that it's a pretty quick jump from arranging fighters to beat the crap out of each other to getting dogs to do the same. Especially . . . if he's taking money in from the bets, you can be sure the fighters wanted a cut, too. But dogs . . .”

“Dogs are cheap,” Teddy agreed.

“Especially if they're stolen,” Ginny said thoughtfully.

“What?”

“This morning, when I took Thing One and Thing Two for their walk, I talked to a guy who was walking his dog, an ex-cop. The guy was, not the dog. Although . . . beside the point. He warned me about leaving them tied up unattended, that the number of dognappings around here has gone up recently. I don't know if he's right or just paranoid, but . . . he was talking about people stealing them for illegal lab testing, but what if someone's stealing them for dogfights, too? The research I did, that's a thing. People's pets end up in the ring, after they're treated badly enough to make them vicious.” Parsifal ran into the room, clearly looking for people, and she scooped the puppy up onto her lap, cuddling him. “Who does that sort of thing, Tonica?”

He had no answer to give her.

“So you think maybe someone's got a dognapping ring for a dogfighting scheme, and was stashing them in Deke's basement?” He made a face, aware of how insane that sounded.

“It would explain the dogs being brought back and forth—in after they're stolen, then out to . . . you know.” Labs, or dogfights, or some other fate that probably did not involve a loving home and chew toys.

“But why store them at all?” Teddy asked.

“Do I look like a dognapping mastermind?” Her hazel eyes widened in exasperation. “I don't know. But someone
was
.”

Ginny with her teeth in the facts was a fearsome thing to behold.

She ticked off those facts on her fingers, tapping each blunt-filed nail with her thumb. “So now we have a potential cause, a potential suspect, and a potential connection linking all of these things to Deke.”

“And, if this fire turns out to have been arson in fact, we have actual cops actually interested in the potential suspect—or suspects,” he pointed out. Their gazes met, worry shared. “We need to be careful, or Deke's back in it again. Even if they don't like him for the bad guy, they'll still pull him in for questioning if he knew what was going on. And you know how that will end.”

With Deke pulled back into the system, no matter how innocent he might be. Zimmerman might have his heart in the right place, but once wheels started turning, Deke could easily get crushed underneath.

“Which means keeping our connection to him out of any poking around we do.” Ginny tapped her thumb and forefinger together, and then flicked them out, as though getting rid of a disliked thought. “Insurance claims. Those should be easy enough to lay hands on, at least, compared to anything else. That plus the crime report should give us an idea of the cause, if nothing else.”

“I doubt we'll be able to get anything from the insurance company right away, no matter what contacts you pull,” Teddy pointed out. He'd had to fill out a few dozen insurance claims over the years, and he knew that even a house fire didn't get done in any hurry, especially when not much of value was lost. And if there was a pending investigation . . . “So in the meanwhile, we follow up on the dogs?”

Ginny stroked Parsifal's fur, pursing her mouth in thought. “The first rule of research is start where you have an in, and see where it goes. Assuming we're not going to confront the guy your informant gave us . . . ?”

“Not until we know more, no.” He was determined about that. “And we're waiting on your informant for that, right?”

“Right. Well, other than the potentially evil podiatrist, Williams was our best in, seeing if the vet community had any alerts, but we already tapped that and came up dry. So who else might know about missing dogs, or a potential dogfighting run on the area?”

Teddy rubbed his eyes, then ran his hand over the top of his head. “You think it's time to talk to our friends down at the shelter? See if they have a line on things?”

“Maybe.” Ginny made another scrunched-up face. “Yeah. Flip a coin to see who has to talk to them?”

They'd solved the shelter case, but nobody there had been particularly happy with what they discovered—the petty theft they'd been hired to uncover had turned out to be the least of it. They probably wouldn't get thrown off the premises, but they weren't going to be welcomed with open arms, either.

“Sure.” He reached into his pocket to get the coin he always carried with him.

“Yeah, forget about it, I know about that coin of yours,” Ginny said. “I'll do it. I should rebuild fences, and I'm going to be taking Parsifal down there, anyway, eventually.”

He raised his eyebrows at her. “Are you?”

“Don't start that again. Why don't you adopt him? Your hours aren't any crazier than most people's; he'd adapt. And you'd have a running companion.”

“Yeah, with those legs?”

“So you could carry him. Like weights!”

He rolled his eyes, and she held up her hands, indicating that she would drop the topic if he did. He sighed, and nodded. It was rare he could hold something over her like this, but it really wasn't fair: she was obviously getting attached to the little furball and didn't feel she could keep him. Teasing was fair game, but not when it hurt.

Teddy put his coffee mug on the table. “You know what, this is stupid. We'll both go. This is business; we work better as a team—you distract them with annoying questions,
and I charm them into telling us what we really wanted to know.”

She rolled her eyes at his description of their working process, but didn't disagree.

Georgie hadn't
wanted to go back into the Old Place. The last time she had gone in there, bad things had happened. She'd been left with other dogs, and her humans had been attacked, and Penny had almost gotten hurt, and now the sharp smells of the cages and the things they used to keep it all clean made her want to stiffen her back legs and not let them go in, not let them leave her sight.

“Georgie?”

Ginny's voice was questioning, not angry, not yet, but the rising voice that meant Georgie was doing something wrong.

Georgie let her leg muscles relax and followed at Ginny's heel, like a good dog. She let them leave her in the room with the carpet that smelled of too many other animals, where there were too many strangers. She put her head down on her paws and didn't whine when they left the room with another human, even though she knew she was supposed to be with them. She had to trust her humans. And she had to pay attention to what happened around her, be alert, see everything she could see, smell everything, and
remember
it. Penny said so. Anything could be important.

Georgie could do this. She could watch, and she could smell, and she could listen, and she'd remember, all of it, to tell Penny.

She wished they hadn't left Parsifal back home, though. She wasn't good at worrying about two things at once.

“Misappropriated dogs?
I'm afraid it is a problem, yes. Medical labs willing to cut corners, unscrupulous backyard breeders, even the occasional pet hoarder . . . We try to screen everyone who adopts, as Ms. Mallard knows, but it happens.”

Much to their surprise, Este Snyder, the director of the shelter, had agreed to speak with them. Ginny wasn't sure if the woman no longer held a grudge about what they had uncovered about the soap-opera-worthy goings-on there, or if she was professional enough to let it go for the moment and would go back to shoving pins in voodoo dolls after they left, but she welcomed the help.

They were seated in the back room office, still as paper-cluttered as it had been six months ago. Ginny noticed that the photos that had been there previously were now missing, and decided not to ask about anyone else they had met during the case. She would rather be thought rude than step into the middle of something messy. Again.

“If people know about this,” her partner asked, “why—”

“Why isn't something done?” Este sighed. “You can make something illegal, Mr. Tonica, but you can't always stop it. Especially not when there is money to be made. And people . . . there are many people out there who don't see dogs and cats as having actual emotions, don't feel any obligation to the creatures we've domesticated.”