The Girl in the Green Raincoat Read Free Page B

description—silvery gray, green collar and leash still attached. The coat was clearly custom-made. Doggie couture, how decadent. Whitney’s family might have been wealthy, but they weren’t given to flash .
    “I found this one rooting in my garbage yesterday. I was going to advertise, but you can take her, seeing as how you know who the owner is and all.”
    “We don’t—” Crow began.
    “You take her,” the woman repeated, placing the dog in Crow’s arms, where it writhed and snapped. “My children wanted to keep her, but I know that’s not right, even if she doesn’t have a tag on that fancy collar, or an ID on the little coat. You take her. ’Bye!”
    “No, Mommy!” a girl’s voice shrieked. “Don’t give Scooby away!” Other voices joined in and the scene quickly escalated to a three-ring tantrum, with children throwing their bodies around the living room in heaving despair.
    “Please,” the woman hissed, “take the dog.”
    Whitney thought she heard the woman mutter “And God help you.” The poor thing definitely seemed overwhelmed. But surely that was because of her children?
    “Mission accomplished!” she said to Crow. “What was it you wanted to talk about?”
    “Maybe later,” he said, with a backward glance at the house. The children’s piteous screams were still quite audible. “Let’s go settle the matter of Tess’s ’satiable curiosity.”
    “She’s always been a little like the elephant in Kipling,” Whitney conceded. “And now she sort of looks like him.”
    “Well, it’s clear why the dog was abandoned,” Crow said a day later as he cleaned up yet another mess made by the Italian greyhound. Esskay and Miata looked on in disgust.
    “Abandonment is one theory,” Tess said. “But let’s not rule out the possibility that this dog killed her owner and buried the body in the park.”
    In the twenty-four hours since they took possession of the greyhound, it had: relieved itself in the house six times, attempted to steal food from Esskay and Miata, chewed on one of Tess’s Uggs, and all but consumed the paperback of The Daughter of Time . It had also snarled at Crow and tried to bite him when he attempted to separate the dog from the Ugg. They had borrowed a crate from a neighbor, but getting the dog into the crate was no small feat, and once in, he would soil it, flying in the face of everything Tess thought she knew about dogs.
    “A rescue group might be able to put us in touch with local breeders, and breeders could tell us if they’ve recently placed a dog in the area,” Crow said as he abandoned all pretense of luring the dog into the crate and muscled him in, only to have it nip at his arms and face. “It’s worth a try.”
    “So is exorcism,” Tess said.
    Even as she spoke, her well-trained thumbs had found a local rescue group for Italian greyhounds on her iPhone’s Web connection and a single tap dialed the phone number. The rescue group coordinator gave her a list of East Coast breeders, while warning darkly that this problem child sounded like the work of someone unscrupulous, a puppy mill that wouldn’t be among her contacts. But after four phone calls—and four earnest lectures on the special needs of Italian greyhounds and how different they were from their larger racing cousins—Tess found an upstate New York breeder who had placed a dog in Baltimore several weeks ago.
    “It was a sweet dog,” he insisted, “normal as pie.” He gave Tess the name and number of a local man who lived on Blythewood Road, which lay east of the park and therefore just outside Tess’s search grid. It was a grand street, one of the nicest in all of North Baltimore, the kind of place where dogs might wear designer raincoats. She was pleased at how neatly everything was falling into place. Perhaps she could do her job from bed after all.
    “May I speak to Don Epstein?” Tess asked when a man answered the phone.
    “You got him.”
    “My name is Tess Monaghan and