"He's eleven," I said. "He's got bad hips. He's on medication. He's never been in a kennel without one of us since he was eighteen months old."
"Pack his meds and his food," she said. "Write down his dosing. I'll make sure the shelter vet sees it. You can visit. Thursdays and Saturdays, ten to four."
I packed his things in a canvas tote bag. His carprofen. His joint chews. Two days of food measured out in freezer bags, which felt absurd, because I didn't know how many days it would be. His blanket, the old brown fleece one that had been on the foot of our bed and then the foot of the hospital bed and then the foot of my bed. I put Royce's old leash in the bag too, the leather one with the brass snap, worn black where Royce's hand had held it for seven years. I don't know why. I wanted something of his to go with him.
Rook went to the truck without any fuss. Of course he did. He had ridden in a hundred trucks. He jumped up into the dog box on the second try, with the officer's help under his back end, and turned around inside and looked out at me through the grate, calm and interested, as if he were going to work. That was the worst part. He thought he was going to work.
When the truck turned the corner at the end of Sandpiper, I went inside and sat in the hallway under the framed one-dollar bill of sale and called my daughter in Denver and could not say anything at all for almost a minute. Megan kept saying, "Mom? Mom?" and I kept opening my mouth and nothing came out.
What I didn't know that morning, and what I found out much later from a report I wasn't supposed to see until the case was over, was what Officer Ybarra did before she came to my house.
She went to Candace Vreeland's front walk first. She took a statement. Then she took photographs of the deposit at the foot of the steps, with a scale ruler beside it and a timestamp, from four angles. She put on gloves. She collected two samples into sterile specimen containers from the kit in her truck, sealed them, labeled them with the date, time, location, and her initials, and filled out a chain of custody form for each, which she signed and Candace signed as a witness. She bagged them and put them in a cooler in the truck, and when she got back to the county shelter that afternoon, after she'd checked Rook into a run at the far end of the quiet ward and handed his blanket to the kennel tech herself, she logged the samples into the evidence refrigerator in the back office, which nobody had used for anything but rabies heads in about three years.
She'd also, it turned out, gone back to the pond path and the Brecks' lawn and the mailbox island, and taken photographs and measurements of where the earlier deposits had been, and collected one older, desiccated sample from the mulch near the bench with the brass plaque that Neville from Crestline swore had been reported but never cleaned up.
The report has a line in it that I've read probably fifty times. It's in the section labeled Officer Observations, typed in the flat, careful language of county paperwork. Morphology of samples inconsistent with stool of subject dog as observed at owner's residence. No visible hair present in any sample (subject dog is a heavy-shedding breed). Undigested corn kernels present in Sample 2. Subject dog's prescribed diet contains no corn. Recommend species confirmation.
VII.