“That call. I don’t know what to make of it.” I told him what had been said.
He called Frank, and told him that I had been threatened by a former LPPD cop. I grabbed the phone away.
“Not exactly, Frank.” I thought a verbatim recitation of the call would calm him down, but Frank was as unhappy with Houghton as Jack was.
“I’m going to go over this guy’s background with a microscope,” he said. “And I want Rachel to tell me where she found him. I want him watched.”
“But the department would have checked him out when he signed up, right?”
“Very thoroughly,” he agreed. “But five years ago, when Houghton joined the LPPD, the name Nick Parrish didn’t mean anything to us, so there could be a connection nobody saw back then.”
Ben came by on his way home from work.
“Do you remember those videotapes of Bingle’s training sessions with the search group?” he asked.
“Yes, the ones I brought to you in the hospital. You left them here after you stayed with us. Do you want me to get them for you?”
“Yes, please. I’ve watched the ones I have at home so often I could narrate them for the blind.”
I got the box of tapes from the garage. “How is everything going?” I asked when I came back in.
“Fine — in fact, you should see the place now. I’ve made a few changes. Why don’t you and Jack come over this afternoon?”
Jack was agreeable. We followed him over to the house. I was amused to note that rather than going in through the front door, the first place he headed was to the backyard, to see Bingle.
We followed him through the back gate, where he came to a sudden halt. I nearly plowed into him.
“Bingle?” he said.
The dog wobbled up on all fours, then lurched forward. He fell flat, but got up again, standing unsteadily, looking woozy. He whined softly.
“Hey,” Jack said, “looks like somebody’s busted into your garage again.”
Ben ignored him. We ran to the dog run. Ben opened it and hurried inside.
“Oh God, Bingle!” Ben said, running his hands over the dog as Bingle collapsed in a heap. “Are you okay? Are you okay, Bingle? Shit! How do I say that in Spanish?”
By then, both Jack and I had crowded into the enclosure with him. I figured Bingle’s understanding of Spanish was great for any number of dog commands but probably didn’t extend to conversation. All the same, I understood Ben’s panic, and told him, “¿Estás bien, Bingle?”
He asked it, and when the dog just lay there, Ben looked anxiously at me.
I glanced around and saw Bingle’s dish, which had a little food in it — the food was still moist. I picked up the dish. “Don’t you usually take this away after he’s eaten?”
“Oh Jesus — I didn’t put that in here! I haven’t fed him yet this afternoon. I — I think someone has poisoned him.”
“Let’s get him to the vet,” I said. “We should bring the food with us, too.”
I drove as fast as I dared. Ben sat in the back with Bingle, talking to him, petting him. When we arrived, Bingle was hurried into an examination room.
Jack used his phone to call Frank and tell him what had happened, and mentioned the break-in. “No, we didn’t even have time to look around inside the house.” He looked over at me, then said, “That’s probably a good idea.”
When he hung up, he said, “Frank’s going to try to get a unit over there right away, just to make sure no one else goes in or out, but they’ll wait until Ben gets there. He’s going to go home and make sure Deke and Dunk are okay — just in case . . .”
“Just in case this is Parrish’s doing. Of course it is.” I got up and paced. “Still, I think Parrish has a personal dislike of Bingle. He threatened to shoot Bingle when we were up in the mountains.”
Ben was in with Bingle and the vet for a long time; Frank came by while we were waiting.
“Deke and Dunk are okay,” he said. “I’ve put them inside with Cody and warned the surveillance team about what happened at Ben’s place.”
Ben came out, walking like a zombie. He sat down next to me, said hello to Frank, then told us that the vet had emptied Bingle’s stomach. “They said that he didn’t seem to have eaten much. But . . .” He lowered his head into his hands. “It all depends on what it was that they fed him.”
“Is there any way to find out?” I asked.
“Probably not in time. He checked the food, it looked as if there was some sort of powder in it; mostly it was blended into the food, but sort of haphazardly. It wasn’t anything caustic, but that’s all we know right now. They want to keep him here — keep him under observation.”
Frank said, “Mind if I talk to the vet?”
“Not at all. I need to get back to the house, to see if they left any sign of the poison . . .”
“A unit’s there waiting for you,” Frank said. “Just show them some ID.”
“A unit?”
Jack’s mention of the break-in had apparently never registered with him. We told him about the broken garage door.
“If you don’t mind waiting for me,” Frank said, “I’d like to be there when you walk through. I’ll only be a minute.”
He came out carrying a bag which held the dog food bowl.
There was a crime scene unit on hand — they greeted me by name — and much more investigative power than most citizens would get for a burglary call, but this break-in had merited special attention. Nick Parrish or his accomplice might have paid this visit. The police were giving the place a thorough inspection, looking for trace evidence, hoping to find something that might help them identify that accomplice or lead them to Parrish. Ben, who had numbly walked past the destruction in his living room, underwent a change when he discovered the empty plastic medicine container on the kitchen counter.
“Codeine!” he shouted, just barely restraining himself from touching it before Frank needed to warn him. “Codeine! I have to call the vet!” He started to reach for the phone, thought better of it, and momentarily looked lost.
Jack pulled out his cell phone, pushed a button to recall the most recently dialed numbers, found the one he wanted, and handed the phone to Ben.
Ben told the vet what he had learned, then looked at the bottle without touching it. He read off the dosage level, then said, “I just had it refilled over the weekend. It was for thirty capsules. I hadn’t taken any of them yet. They’re all gone.” He looked over at the dog food can on the counter. “I think just about half of one can . . . almost thirteen ounces. Three hundred and sixty-one grams. It looks as if he didn’t eat much of it. At that level . . . yes, I understand. Yes, a big dog, but not an adult’s body weight.” He listened for a while, then said, “Yes, I’d appreciate that.” He wrote down a number.
He hung up and said, “All thirty at once is a heavy dosage — enough to kill him.” His voice caught, but he went on. “They can’t tell how much Bingle ingested, because it wasn’t distributed evenly through the food. But he thinks that it probably wasn’t so much, because Bingle seems to be doing better.”
Later, Frank asked him, “What’s on these videotapes — the two that really got smashed?”
“They’re training tapes. When the Las Piernas Search and Rescue group gets together — including the cadaver dog team — we tape our sessions.”
“So these are tapes of Bingle?”
“Bingle and the other dogs and their handlers. David is in most of these. I’ve been watching him and Bingle. I’ve only been to one session so far. The other handlers tell me that it’s a two-way learning process, that Bingle is already trying to work with me, trying to read me as much as I’m trying to read him.”
“These are the original tapes?”
“Yes, although David made copies for the other members of the group.”
“Do you have a roster for this SAR group?”
“Yes.”