Shattered Secrets (Cold Creek #1)(49)
“Yes. Anything to help. And I feel safest when I’m with you.”
He looked at her. Their gazes locked for a moment until he turned back to the road again. He started to say something, then evidently changed him mind as they passed Dane’s house and headed for hers.
Tess glanced in the rearview mirror at the pet cemetery, but her gaze caught the snarling expression of the dead pit bull on the backseat as if it were chasing them.
*
Gabe didn’t like leaving Tess alone, even in broad daylight, but after dropping her off and looking around her house inside and out, he drove alone to Dane’s. After he parked, he had to wait for him to finish with a client. Jim Cargrove, the town banker, had brought in his new Great Dane pup to be neutered.
“Best breed around, Great Danes,” Dane said, making a lame joke when he saw Gabe sitting in his waiting room after Jim had left. But Dane’s eyes widened and his head jerked when he saw the stuffed pit bull in the next seat.
“Got a few minutes?” Gabe asked.
“A few. Busy day. My office is just down the hall where—”
“Mind if I just step in here with you instead?” Gabe asked and, without permission, the dog under his arm, entered an examining room. He quickly scanned the open shelves, but most were hidden behind cabinet doors.
“Just curious, Dane. When you knock a dog out for something like neutering, what do you use? Just straight ether or something else?”
“Things are a little more sophisticated than that today. Ether use began in the Victorian age. A variety of anesthetics are available now for animals, and certainly for people.”
“I had a friend who just had a colonoscopy, and they gave him Versed, some kind of amnesiac. I guess with animals you wouldn’t use something like that.”
“Hardly. It was probably a sophisticated cocktail of drugs your friend had, and Versed was a part of it. We don’t need or use such drugs for animals, only painkillers, not ones that kill the memory. So, where is this going?”
“Obviously nowhere,” Gabe said, noting that Dane showed no particular reaction to the mention of an amnesia drug. “I actually came today to tell you someone’s been harassing Tess Lockwood by putting one of John Hillman’s taxidermy dogs on her back porch. It belonged to Jonas Simons. I just wondered if you ever treated this dog.”
“The Simons boys—all three of them—don’t get their dogs treated, neutered, nothing, though I have sewn up a couple of wounds from fights they had with coons.”
“Or fights with each other?”
Dane shrugged and looked away. He started to straighten items on his counter, dropping scissors into some sort of sterile bath, his rubber gloves into a waste bin he opened with a foot pedal. He let the bin slam closed.
“I don’t know about the dogs fighting each other,” Dane said, obviously trying to keep his temper in check. That’s the way Gabe liked it: let them get riled.
“But,” Dane went on, gesturing more broadly as if that would convince him, “I did not harass Tess Lockwood by putting a mounted pit bull on her back porch, if that’s what you’re implying. Sheriff, are you still on a mission to pull me into her case, or any of the others? You know I had an alibi from when Teresa Lockwood was taken, so give it up.”
“I know both you and Dr. Linda Stevens said you were going to see her and that you arrived, visited awhile and headed back. A single witness, a friend or more than a friend.”
“Just leave her out of this! And Marva said you went to see her at the spa. Make a case, Sheriff, or get out of my life. Unless you have a search warrant, and want to go looking for lost little girls in these drawers or cupboards, get out of my examining room!”
“Thanks for your cooperation, Dane. I’ll be seeing you,” he said, and walked out.
*
After Gabe called Tess to tell her to be ready in half an hour, he walked into the police station with the pit bull in his arms. He put the dog down on Ann’s desk.
“You tagged this and entered it in evidence,” he said, “but forgot to tell me who owned it.”
Her cheeks colored. She didn’t meet his eyes, staring at her computer screen as if she’d read her next words there.
“If you mean it might belong to my brother, I wasn’t sure. Lots of people have pit bulls.”
“Recently dead ones mounted by a local taxidermist? I hear his name was Sikkem.”
“I thought it might be, but I wasn’t sure. You don’t hire me to solve cases. You didn’t ask. You haven’t asked me anything of importance lately.”
He ignored that barb. All he needed was her brothers tampering with Tess’s confidence, complicating his investigation by leaving terror presents on her back porch.
“Are we adversaries now, when I need my entire staff to pull together at this time—all times, Ann?”
“I don’t want to be your enemy. You’re the one backing off, getting confused, getting too close to a witness and victim.”
“She’s helping me. I have to be able to trust you.”
Ann started to say something else but shut her mouth and bit her lower lip.
Keeping his voice calm, Gabe gave her instructions. “Please phone Jonas and tell him I’d like him to stop by my office before work tomorrow morning. Ann,” he added, putting his hand around her wrist as she started to write that down as if she would not remember it, “I’d like for us to be friends.”