Kindle Edition
Amazon
Category:
Action/Thriller
ISBN-10: 1544784066
Type: Fiction
Copyright: August 21, 2017
ISBN-13: 9781544784069
Price: $3.99 (eBook)
Meet cadaver dog Juliet, the perfect pet for private detective Roger Bowman. Mystery fans and dog lovers will particularly enjoy this entry in the series.
German shorthaired pointer Juliet returns for another featured appearance in her latest mystery novel, Abra Cadaver. Juliet demonstrates her new abilities as a cadaver dog, which makes her the perfect pet for private detective Roger Bowman. The setting is a winery in a small town in Northern California’s Central Valley. Roger is hired to find a husband who goes missing a few days after his wedding. And the reader is off on another suspenseful case that will entertain mystery fans, dog lovers, and wine aficionados. Like all the Roger and Suzanne novels the language is clean, the sex is offstage, and the books can be read in any order so readers can begin the series with this novel. Free from KU/KOLL.
Excerpt
“We have to start somewhere, Bruce,” I said. “According to our client, the last time anyone reported seeing Wally alive was at the winery the same day he disappeared. Let’s assume he was killed here at the winery or on the grounds outside of it somewhere, and they hid or buried his body in the vineyard.”
Bruce made a crude sketch of the winery grounds, more than 300 acres, on the table in front of him. “This is a lot of ground for Juliet to cover. Let’s make a few assumptions to make the odds better of finding Wally’s body if it’s laying somewhere out there. How big is he, Roger?”
“About my height. He’s big, I’d guess he weighs about 250 or 260.”
Bruce pointed his pencil at the shapes of the buildings near the front of his sketch. “If he was killed at the house or the winery and someone wanted to hide his body, he’d be quite a load to carry any distance. Let’s set up our first search grid by assuming the body is hidden somewhere near the buildings. There’s some open space around the buildings and paved drive where he might have been buried that I’ll have to run Juliet over to get to the fields that need to be searched. But my best guess is that if there’s a body out there it’s concealed by a couple of rows of grapes or some kind of structure.”
He picked up a ruler and drew several straight vertical lines through the buildings that passed through the sketched areas of grape vines in front of and behind the buildings. Then he drew a series of horizontal lines a few inches apart, perpendicular to, and passing through, the first set of lines. The result was a regular grid with the house and winery at the center and several acres of grapes on all four sides of the buildings within the area covered by the grid.
“I drew this sketch roughly to scale,” Bruce explained. “I’ll be working Juliet over this entire area today to see if she can find a dead body that nobody, especially the deputy sheriff, turned up when they did a casual look around the open area between the winery and house and along the driveway. I’d guess Juliet and I should end up walking a couple of miles through the grapevines and cover something like 20-30 acres of this grid this morning. It’s going to be a lot slower going than what you saw in the park. Would you like to join us?”
“Sure,” I replied. “I love watching her hunt.”
Bruce explained what we’d do first. “We’ll start with the cleared area between the house and winery. I don’t think we’ll find anything there. The Sheriff would have checked out any areas that looked freshly dug up. But, just in case, we’ll let Juliet’s nose confirm that for us. I don’t think it will take more than ten minutes to rule out that possibility. Then we’ll start searching the grid.”
We’d been walking back and forth with Juliet between the house and the winery for less than five minutes when we were accosted by the tall thin man I’d been introduced to at the wedding as Wally’s brother Francis. I don’t think we exchanged more than half a dozen words during the wedding or after.
“What’s going on out here? You know you’re trespassing, don’t you?” Sherry’s irate brother-in-law asked in a demanding tone.
“The owner of this property gave us permission to exercise our dog out here in the fields,” I replied quickly and pointedly. Bruce caught on immediately that I was going to take the lead in this conversation.
“I’m the owner of this property and I didn’t give you any such permission,” he huffed. “Wait a minute. I saw you at the wedding, didn’t I? Who are you and what are you doing here?”
“You’re not the owner of this property and I don’t need your permission,” I replied curtly. Sometimes people make mistakes when they’re angry so I thought I’d deliberately irritate Fortune and see what happened.
He was too smart to fall into that trap. “I’m sorry, I should have recognized you sooner. You’re Sherry’s friend from Los Angeles, aren’t you? She told me you’d be staying here at the house with her. Perhaps you can introduce me to your friend here.”
“Bruce, this is Sherry’s brother-in-law Francis. Francis, meet my friend Bruce.”
“Call me Frank, please. All my friends do,” he said heartily. “I handle all of Wally’s legal affairs.” We all shook hands.
“I guess I’ll get back to work now. I was just bringing the monthly accounts up to date.” He headed back into the winery. Bruce, Juliet, and I continued walking out into the vineyard with Juliet.
Bruce took the lead. He had entered GPS co-ordinates onto his search grid sketch and used then to guide us as we walked back and forth through the vineyard. Juliet bounded ahead of us casting right and left through the gaps between the grape vines on either side of the paths we walked on. It was easy walking for us on the narrow aisles between the rows on either side. Narrow paths to facilitate pruning and picking the grapes ran parallel to each row, with the long dimension of the rows broken up by perpendicular paths between groups of rows to further facilitate inspection, pruning, and harvest of the grapes during the growing and harvesting seasons.
Large thick trunks of mature grapevines emerged from mounded earth along each row. Coming off each of the trunks at regular intervals were branches that had been trained along wire trellises. The ripening grapes hung in clusters from the neat lateral branches, which were partially shaded in regular patterns by systematically pruned leaves at the top of each plant. Drip irrigation systems of rubber tubing went from end to end of each mound to save precious water in drought-conscious California.
Juliet checked back with Bruce every five minutes, so we had a very good idea of where she was at all times. She was amazingly quiet as she ran through the grapes, so the frequent check-ins were an essential part of the dog’s routine to keep us near her at all times.
We could look down whatever row we were walking through to see most or all of the way to the end of the row. However, the rows were close enough together and the grape leaves thick and abundant enough to make visibility to the sides of the rows we walked past practically impossible. The same dense canopy of leaves atop the grapevines would have made an aerial search of the property fruitless, both literally and figuratively.
We were walking along a row running parallel to the winery and perhaps eight or ten rows deep into the crosshatched grid of growing grapes. I could feel myself being watched from the winery, most likely by brother Francis. There wasn’t anything I could do about being visible from the winery as I was a couple of feet taller than any of the grapevines.
We’d been searching with Juliet for almost an hour. Bruce looked up from his sketch and checked his GPS co-ordinates again. “If I had the body of someone I’d killed in the winery to get rid of, my best guess is we’d find it out here some time in the next half hour or so.”
It actually took exactly 34 minutes by my watch. Juliet barked twice and went on alert about twenty feet to our left. We were there less than a minute later. A freshly dug mound of earth broke up the regularity of the mound directly in front of the imaginary line from Juliet’s tail to her nose, which was about six feet away from the freshly turned dirt.
It probably didn’t matter to Juliet’s nose that the water drop by the helicopter in distress had not only washed the grapevines in this row but had also flushed enough of the soil from the base of the vine to expose the freshly dug earth so we knew precisely where to dig for the body. The next few steps would wait until the technicians who would collect samples from the crime scene arrived, but there was clearly a cadaver under there to be dug up. It was an odds-on bet we’d found the remains of A. Wallace Fortune.
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