Dog Bless You by Neil S. Plakcy Page A

woods.
    Friar Lake was turning out to be a lot wilder than I’d
expected. I walked back to the dormitory building, where I noticed a broken window.
I looked through it to a narrow monastic cell. The Benedictines hadn’t left any
furniture behind, so the only thing in the room was a closet with an open door.
It was going to take a lot of imagination and hard work to make this place into
a comfortable retreat. All the emptiness continued to spook me and I turned
back to where I’d seen Lili.
    She was still there, aiming her camera at the stark
outline of the wrought-iron spire against the bright blue sky. She snapped a
final shot and stood up as my cell rang.
    “Hey, Tony. We’re up at the abbey. We’ll meet you back
down at the lakefront.”
    I felt silly as I walked beside Lili to the car, tiptoeing
over the gravel to avoid cutting my feet. Rochester greeted us as if we’d
abandoned him, and I had to push back against his snout to keep him in the rear
seat.
    As I pulled up next to Tony’s unmarked sedan, I got a
good look at him. He hadn’t changed much in the months since we’d last met; he
was still tall and dark-haired, in his late forties. He had light-green eyes,
which were arresting in combination with his brush-cut dark hair. They gave him
a look of intensity that I was sure suspects found unsettling.
    Lili and I hopped out of the car, once again leaving
Rochester behind. He barked out his resentment as I introduced Lili.
    “Pleased to meet you,” Tony said, shaking her hand. Then
he looked to me. “Where’s the body?”
    “Around by the lake,” I said. Lili and I led him through
the muck, around the corner of the house. I’d have to wipe down my bare feet
again, but at least the grass was soft and spongy. I pointed. “It’s pretty
mucky out there. Be careful.”
    Tony looked down at his black dress shoes, and I think
that’s the first time he realized that I was barefoot.
    “Crap,” he said. “I usually keep a pair of boots in my
trunk but the sole started separating so I had Tanya take them to the
shoemaker’s to be restitched.”
    I’d heard about Tony’s wife when he investigated a
murder at Eastern during the winter, but I had never met her. I knew she was a
nurse, and that he had a young son. But we’d never become friends, the way I
had with Rick.
    Tony frowned as he bent down and took off his shoes and
socks, then rolled the legs of his black dress pants up to the knee. He looked
so comical I had to struggle not to laugh. His top half didn’t match the bottom
at all—a perfectly pressed dress shirt, with a red and blue striped tie held in
place by a diamond clip, contrasted with the little-boy look of rolled cuffs
and bare feet. He walked through the muck, and I could hear it squishing under
his feet.
    He pulled a small digital camera from his pocket and
took a number of photos, as Lili and I stood in the background and watched him
work. When he’d covered all the angles, he put the camera back in his pocket
and withdrew a pair of bright blue rubber gloves. He slipped them on and crouched
down next to the upturned hand, which reminded me more and more of something
from a low-budget horror movie.
    Tony gingerly scraped away dirt covering the
skeletonized arm, digging deeper the farther back he went. When he reached the
shoulder, he gave up and stood. He peeled the gloves off as he walked back to
us.
    “I get a bad a feeling about this,” he said. “Looks
like a body dump to me. How long did you say the property was abandoned?”
    “The Benedictines moved out about three months ago,” I
said.
    “Finding an unidentified grave on a property where
there’s a regular cemetery is suspicious enough for me to order an exhumation,”
he said. “I’m going to have to isolate this area and then make the arrangements
with the ME’s office. This is going to be a big headache, you know that?”
    “Sorry,” I said. “Can’t you just call the Benedictines
and see if anyone in the order