Read Rachel Alexander 04 - Lady Vanishes for Free Online Page A

pair of shoes,” he said, turning my shoe over, shaking his head. “Do you want me to toss these?”
    “No. I’ll give them one last walk,” I told him. “For closure.”
    On the way home I stopped at Beverly Hill’s Laundro-mutt to see if anyone had a puli bathed recently. No one had.
    At Pet’s Kitchen, Dashiell put his paws up on the counter, and Sammy inserted a doggie bagel into his mouth. We both listened as Dashiell crunched, a viscerally pleasing sound, as basic as it gets.
    I asked my question. Sammy shook his head. No new customer with a puli. But he promised to call, just in case.
    When we got home, Dashiell hit the water bowl in the garden big time, then crashed at the base of the oak tree, too tired to make it into the house. I went inside, dropped the shoe box on the table, and snagged the cordless phone and the directory, calling the rest of the grooming shops, same question: Someone new come in with a puli to be bathed?
    “Saw the sign,” one guy said. “Didn’t see the dog.”
    “Too bad.”
    “Good luck, lady,” he said. ‘Tough thing, losing a dog like that, never knowing what happened to her.”
    I left my number, just in case.
    I sat on the steps, the phone in my hand, thinking about the bunchers—people who steal pet dogs to sell them to laboratories to be experimented on—but I thought they mostly worked the ’burbs, taking dogs off porches and out of yards, dogs left outside when the owner wasn’t home, trusting dogs, lonely dogs, easy as pie to steal.
    Lady wouldn’t have been out alone.
    And the door at Harbor View closed and locked automatically. You couldn’t leave it open if you tried, not unless you put something in front of it to hold it open. Surely someone would have noticed, had that been the case.
    I looked up the animal shelters and called those, too. Sometimes even when you report a dog lost, the report gets lost, falls through the cracks, and when the dog comes in, no one puts two and two together, gets it back where it belongs. But no, no pulis had come in. And when I asked if there’d been an unusual number of thefts reported, I was told no, there weren’t, not this summer.
    “Thefts in the city usually take place in Central Park, or Riverside,” a man with a gravelly voice told me. “Owners have the dogs off leash and get involved in a conversation, they turn around, seems like a minute later, the dog is gone. Last time we got a lot of those calls,” he said, “was last fall, Riverside Park, mostly way uptown, near the university. Nothing recently.”
    Dashiell had rolled over onto his side and fallen asleep, his head resting on one of the exposed roots of the tree. I sat there, the directory on my lap, just thinking. Then I got up, switched directories, got the residential one. When you don’t know which pieces of information are significant, you need to gather them all; as my erstwhile employer Frank Petrie used to say, you never know.
    I looked up Harry Dietrich to see where he might have been headed the last time he left Harbor View. The Upper East Side. Park Avenue. Where else would a rich man live?
    Had he been heading north, toward the subway? Had he heard the wheels of the bicycle bumping over the broken sidewalk? Had he turned around, curious?
    After a moment, I looked up Eli Kagan, because knowing more is always better than knowing less, and besides, I was too hot to climb a flight of stairs and take a shower. No Eli Kagan in Manhattan. Either not listed, or in another borough. I’d find out tomorrow.
    Sitting there, not wanting to move, I looked under W next. There was a Venus White right in the neighborhood, at the Archives, the pricey rental building that formerly housed the Federal Archives, with a gym, a supermarket, a dry cleaner, and a catering place on the ground floor. The building was bounded by Christopher, Greenwich, Barrow, and Washington Streets—an easy walk to work, nice, open views, maybe even a river view, just like at work.
    I