Terrier Terror, page 8
I raised my hand. Davis grimaced at me, which I decided to take as an acknowledgment. “Mr. Miller, it really isn’t a good policy for us to spread fake rumors. There hasn’t been an arrest, so if people believe that there’s some drugged-up man with a knife on the loose in the immediate area, they’ll stay away. We’ll lose our audience as well as our attendees. We might as well cancel the show.”
“Good point,” Davis said. “We need to, er, change that message. Let’s tell everyone we heard that the police just arrested a druggie lowlife.”
“Let’s just tell them that we don’t know anything more than what was released by the police in the media,” Baxter stated firmly.
“Brilliant idea, Baxter,” Kiki declared. She turned to face her father. “Let’s do what Baxter says. People do get killed, after all. It’s not like we’re going to be dealing with a stabbing epidemic, or anything.”
“Okay. Fine.” Davis sighed, handed the microphone to Kiki, and sank his hands deeply into his pant pockets. “Everybody out there okay with that?”
A general smattering of concurrence arose from the fifty or so attendees.
“Well done,” Baxter whispered in my ear.
I looked at him, sincerely unsure of myself. “Really? Everything that’s happened in the last twenty-four hours feels...loony tunes.”
“Someone getting killed is of course way beyond the pale. These pet-show events are always in a state of chaos. Pet shows are the new zoos.”
The next morning, I drove in with Baxter to the Fort Collins Fairgrounds. I wanted to stay close to him, afraid for both our sakes that more chaos was to come. The news stations were reporting that Cooper had been designated as a “person of interest.”
With Baxter absorbed in answering one phone call after another from worried dog owners and dog lovers, I set out to get a look at as many dogs as I could on the fairgrounds. I loved being at dog shows, seeing the various beautiful animals looking their best. For my money, no human’s head of hair could match the luster and hue of a well-groomed Irish Setter. I’d been starting to picture myself with a pet Setter in my future.
Despite Davis’s oration yesterday, I was quite certain Terrington’s murder would be the constant topic of choice from now on. The show started tomorrow and lasted until Sunday night, when we could all pack up and go home.
The park itself was filling with trailers. This was the preferred method for show-dog owners to travel in style, enabling their entire families and their dogs to make the trip in a portable home. Weather permitting, many of the show rings were outside, so the dogs could merely trot ten or thirty yards from the trailer to the site of their competition. There were already plenty of dogs in the main building. Many of the old-guard dog owners were so used to the benched competitions, they were turning the main hall into a de facto bench competition, with the owners and handlers socializing and bringing dog beds and crates with them.
The groomers had already set themselves up in the designated room and were working on their clients’ fur, nails, and teeth. This was a space in which the childish aspect of sense of humor came out; the sight of dogs with curlers and hairpins in their fur always made me chuckle.
As I strolled around, I was pleased to see that there were several families with children here, looking at the dogs. Apparently the horrible news about Terrington wasn’t spooking potential attendees.
As I entered the Terrier section, a blonde, overweight woman dressed in all plaid—including her headband—rushed up to me. “Miss, do you work here?”
“Sort of. I’m going to be—”
She grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward a Westie that was fast asleep. “You need to tell us something. Why is Richard Cory out like a light? I can’t even wake him!” She lifted him out of his crate and held him in front of her as if she was presenting me with a tray.
“Allie Babcock,” someone called. I took a quick look and saw Valerie. She was holding a lovely Westie—not Sophie Sophistica—but I needed to concentrate on Richard Cory. I promptly took note of his slow breathing and gently pried an eyelid open. His eye was black—one large, dilated pupil.
“He’s been drugged,” I said.
“Somebody must have given him a shot! Who would do something like this?” She cradled her dog to her chest and whirled around. She looked at Valerie to one side and a woman I didn’t know to the other. “One of you two did this!”
“No, I didn’t,” they both cried.
“You can’t possibly suspect I would drug one of my dogs from my own stable!” Valerie continued. “I would never hurt a dog.”
“Besides, if someone did this to make your dog too sleepy to compete, why would they do it now? The competition doesn’t start for another two days,” the other woman pointed out.
“Richard Cory!” I shouted, testing his ability to respond. He opened his eyes, gave a little whimper, and went back to sleep. “He’s at least coming around a little.”
“Thank goodness!” The plaid-dressed woman gently put him back in his crate. “We need to get to the bottom of this. Immediately.” She put her hands on her hips and eyed Valerie.
“Don’t look at me like that! I was never even near your dog.” Valerie pointed at the camera in its dome above us. “There are only two security cameras in this entire building, and that’s one of them. Hopefully it’s up and running right now. Allie, go look at the recordings. The culprit has to have been caught on the camera.”
“Right,” I said. “I’ll get Baxter to give me access to review them.” I headed to his office and went inside. To my pleasant surprise he was shutting his computer and slipping it into his desk drawer.
“Hi, hon. I was just about to call you.” He rose and locked the desk. “Do you want to head outside with me? Davis asked me to make sure all the trailers are parked within the designated areas.”
“That has to wait. We need to look at the recording of the camera in aisle nine—where most of the smaller Terriers are. Someone drugged a Westie.”
He gazed at me for a second or two. “Okay. Let’s change my question. Would you like to walk indoors with me, while we head to the security room? I need to examine a camera recording.” He unlocked the desk and grabbed his laptop. “Might as well bring this. I’ll want my own copy of the incident, regardless.”
Chapter 9
Fifteen minutes later, we had a partial answer to what had happened to Richard Cory. While the plaid lady and Valerie were engaged in conversation, a boy, somewhere around the age of ten, grabbed the dog out of his crate and sat down on the floor with him. When the boy realized his mother was starting to enter the aisle, he pushed the dog off his lap and hopped to his feet. Mother and son continued down the aisle, the son taking one long look back before he left the camera’s viewing range. Meanwhile, Plaid Lady grabbed her phone from a pocket in her skirt as if it had just rung. She promptly covered her free ear and strode out of the camera’s range without a glance at the empty crate. The third Westie owner arrived, spoke to Valerie, and the two of them walked away. Several minutes later, Kiki appeared, carrying the groggy-looking dog. She looked to both sides, checked his name tag, then put him back in his crate, which had the name “Richard Cory” in large black letters.
“Jeez!” I grumbled. “Look at how Kiki’s gawking from side to side. She’s hoping nobody sees her.”
“Jim?” Baxter said to the security guard. “Copy this section of the recording and send me a video.”
“Will do.”
“Let’s head to my office,” Baxter said to me. He grabbed his phone and a few moments later said, “Kiki? Can you come to my office, ASAP?”
With Baxter’s long strides, I was taking two steps to his every one. He glanced back at me and said, “She’s on her way.”
He held the door for me and followed me into his office.
“I think I should sit in the back of the room,” I told him, “so that I’ll be out of Kiki’s direct line of sight during your conversation.”
He shut the door behind us and watched me move one of the two chairs. I sat down.
“This is going to be interesting. Even though Kiki was acting guilty, I doubt she did anything intentionally. The dog had been wandering around, unsupervised.”
“Yeah, but how could he have been drugged accidentally?” Baxter rounded his desk and sat down, struggling a bit with his creaky metal drawer as he stowed his laptop once again.
“Some dogs love to eat tissues. My top theory is that Richard Cory could have found Kiki’s purse and eaten a small tablet she’d folded into a tissue.”
“Have you ever seen that happen?”
“Not personally, but I’ve heard about it.”
The door opened with no corresponding knock. “Hello, my dear,” Kiki said, entering the room. She spotted me, and her smile faded. “Hi, Allie. Is this about Richard Cory?”
“Yes,” Baxter replied.
“Uh oh.” She plopped down in the chair, as if fatigued. “I was so hoping nobody heard about that. I tried my best to keep it on the down low. Nobody happened to be looking when the little guy came running up to me, so I slipped him back into his crate. He was exhausted. I know I should have reported it, but with everything already going so terribly with the Terrier class once again, I didn’t want anyone to panic and start pointing fingers.”
“Somebody appears to have given Cory a sedative,” Baxter said.
“Oh, no! I found the little dear in my office, sleeping on the floor.”
“You just said he came running up to you,” Baxter noted.
She glanced at me, then made an almost comical grimace. “I was trying to glaze over things. He was sound asleep. Is he doing better now?”
“Yes,” I said. “He woke up for a moment when I called his name. But it was really obvious that he’d been medicated. That’s not the kind of thing his owner could fail to notice.” Way to stay out of the conversation, Allida, I chastised myself.
She sighed and shifted her gaze to Baxter. “It was my fault. I take Xanax. I don’t want that to get around. I swear I didn’t give it to the dog, but...my purse was open on the floor by my desk. When I looked through my purse, I realized my tissues had been torn up, and I was missing half of a pill. I was hoping I’d find it someplace on the floor. But no such luck.”
Baxter glanced at me. “That’s precisely what Allie thought had happened.”
She raised her chin as she looked at me. “I wish you’d warned me,” Kiki said.
“Warned you?” I snapped. “About pills I didn’t know you were taking? And brought in a purse I didn’t know you’d placed on a floor? In a dog-accessible area I didn’t know existed?”
“Well, somebody’s sure touchy,” Kiki grumbled.
Oops. An unplanned outburst, I told myself. But then, nobody could have kept their mouth shut under the circumstances. At least I’d stayed seated and gripped the chair. As opposed to hurling it at her.
“I’m so sorry, Baxter,” Kiki said in a babyish voice. “To my credit, I did already enter the incident in my log book. In case the owner grew concerned.”
Kiki’s main job at the dog show was precisely that: she maintained a historical log of all incidents that were reported throughout the event. Technically, the dog show ran from Friday through Sunday, but the FCDC allowed their members and entries to be present today.
“We need to talk to Davis,” Baxter said.
“I wanted to keep my father out of this,” Kiki said with a groan. “He doesn’t even know I take meds for my anxiety.”
“Be that as it may, we don’t have any choice,” Baxter said. “A dog getting drugged by a stranger is way too serious. This leaves us open to all kinds of negligence charges.”
Kiki opted to call her father herself and ask if we could get him up to speed with what she called “a minor mishap that involved my purse.” Davis would probably assume a dog had chewed up her purse.
Shortly after the three of us arrived at Davis’s office, Kiki drew her dad into a conversation about the name “Richard Cory” and its probable origins from the Simon and Garfield song—neglecting to mention its origination in a poem by Edward Arlington Robinson. Baxter interrupted and gave the salient details of the Xanax being ingested, at which point, Kiki grabbed the reins from him and talked at length about how she had left the purse in her office and had taken just a tiny dose because of her stress at hoping she could live up to her dad’s expectations despite the death of the state’s best-known dog presenter, and how she’d needed to get water from the water fountain across the room, and so on. All told, her description took longer than it would for both Sophie and Dog Face to complete five or six agility courses.
Davis was not an especially easy man to talk to. He always took a defensive stance. This was no exception. After merely staring at us one by one, he said, “Okay, look, Baxter. This is precisely the type of thing I entrusted you to handle.”
“What is?” Kiki interrupted. “The Richard Cody incident? Because you’ve got to admit, Terrington Leach getting murdered is way above Baxter’s paygrade. That’s a police matter. And one dog accidentally getting drugged is peanut dust in comparison.”
Davis grabbed his coffee mug as if he were strangling someone’s neck, then said, “I’d like to talk to Baxter in private.”
I rose. Kiki stood up, too, and said, “Okee dokee. By the way, Dad, Baxter had nothing to do with either of those things and had no way to prevent them. If you fire him you’ll look like you picked on him to protect yourself.” She struck an almost childish pose as she waved at him with one hand on her hip and a big smile. “See you later.”
Kiki and I gazed at each other as I shut the door behind us. “Why were your pills in a tissue in the first place?” I asked. “Wouldn’t it be more sensible and easier if you kept them in the bottle?”
She spread her arms. “I know that now. But I don’t bring my prescription pill bottle with me. I’m always worried my dad or somebody will see it and think badly of me. If I didn’t worry about stuff like that all the time, I wouldn’t have to take Xanax in the first place. Now would I?”
“Apparently not,” I replied. “But Baxter would have been better off if you’d told him right away what had happened, instead of trying to cover up the whole thing.”
“I didn’t want him to have to get involved. I had the best of intentions, Allie.” Once again, she spread her arms dramatically. “Someone has to have his back.”
I balled my fists. “Baxter and I have each other’s back. Always.”
She snorted. “According to Marsala, not to mention Terrington himself, Terrington was bragging that you were going to be his next conquest.”
“If that’s truly what he thought, he was badly mistaken.”
“And yet you had a date with him at the Brunswick Café.”
“For coffee. I wanted to ask him about the rumors about bribing judges. Some people claim he’s been a part of that for several years.”
“Which is only partially true,” Kiki said. “It really isn’t literally bribery. It’s just...influencing human nature. Playing the game to your advantage.” She paused and grinned. “You look so surprised. I’ve been in this world my whole life...the dog-show circuit. It’s how the game is played. Terrington knew the game better than anybody. Cooper didn’t stand a chance of showing a winning dog. Not if he’d been handling Rin-Tin-Tin.”
Feigning naivety, I said, “I don’t understand what you mean by ‘playing the game.’”
“It’s a bit like the way record labels used to get extra play time for their artists’ singles so they’d climb the charts faster. The elite dogs and their top-shelf presenters constantly put themselves in front of the judges’ eyes. They buy ads on social media, with the dogs’ pictures. And they get a buzz going. They get friends and employees to catch the judges’ ears. ‘Isn’t Rover a perfect specimen? He’s heading to Westminster next, you know. Such a treat for us to have Rover here in Fort Collins first. Why, he’s positively canine royalty. And so on and so forth. It’s not like money changes hands. Well, not counting the ploy of giving to the judges’ charities.’”
“Surely most judges know better than to fall for mere gamesmanship, don’t they?”
“Most of them probably think they do. But in their hearts, they’re big dog lovers.” Kiki shrugged. “They can’t help but develop a fondness for the dogs they see the most often. And, let’s face it, it’s all so subjective. Also, success breeds success. A judge hears a particular dog won best in show at two previous competitions. He can’t help but be impressed.”
“You’re right,” I conceded. “That’s part of the reason I’m so fond of agility competitions. They’re judged on easily measurable standards.”
Kiki gave me no reply, but her knowing smile was just short of a sneer. It seemed to me that there was no point in pressing the issue. Especially considering I would be handling three different dogs in agility. It was best for my peace of mind to believe the competition would be unbiased.
Baxter emerged from Davis’s office and strode toward us.
“Dad didn’t fire you, did he?” Kiki immediately asked.
“No. We merely talked about security issues. And about our helping owners to reassign the dogs Terrington was going to present.” He shifted his focus to me. “Davis is going to talk to Richard Cory’s owner himself. He’s going to comp the entry fee she paid for him.”
“Has he already found substitute handlers for Terrington’s clients?” I asked, “as well as Cooper’s?”
“Cooper had a light load this year...just five, counting the three Terriers,” Kiki said.
“That’s odd,” I said. “As manager of the Terrier class, he wouldn’t have been allowed to show Terriers. I assumed he had mostly non-Terrier clients.”
“Clients had been dropping him like flies,” Kiki said. “That’s probably why he killed Terrington Leach. The guy had been badmouthing Cooper something fierce at last year’s show, and he’d doubled down all this year.”
