She came around the desk and got down on the floor beside him, and her knees told her about it. The tattoo was faded to the gray-blue of an old vein, and the skin had stretched since a puppy had grown into a dog, and the sevens were hard to tell from ones. But it was there. Three digits, two digits, four digits. Two four seven. Six two. Eight eight one nine.
Nobody at intake had found it. Toomer knew why. They had been taking in thirty dogs a day, forty dogs a day, and the intake form had a line on it that said TATTOO Y/N, and somebody had written N on Sunny's in a hurry because it was the fourth of October and there had been eleven more dogs in the hall behind him.
She stood up. She went back around her desk and sat down and put both hands flat on the blotter.
"It's him," she said. "That's her dog."
Pinckney Prioleau did not argue. She gave him that. He sat back in the rocking chair and looked at the ceiling, at the water stain from August that had grown a new ring since the storm, and he took a breath and let it out.
"All right," he said. "All right. Then I suppose the question is a legal one, and I suppose I had better ask it, since I am the only lawyer in the room, even if I have been retired for six years. Miss Gadsden, you're seventeen?"
"Yes sir."
"The dog would have to be reclaimed by an adult. By your mother."
"Yes sir."