To Sketch a Thief by Sharon Pape Page B

her hand, marveling at how much more coherent Tina sounded. She was still speaking fast, but certainly within the normal range and she was actually pausing for punctuation. There was every reason to believe that her phone call had been a simple aberration brought on by stress.
    Rory unlocked the door and ushered her and Hobo inside. Apart from her desk and chair, the office was furnished with a small, brown leather love seat and matching armchair that sat at right angles to one another with a glass and chrome side table between them. The walls were painted a soft cappuccino and were bare except for her framed PI license and an eight-by-ten close-up of her with Mac at the circus when she was eight years old. She’d debated displaying something that personal in an office setting, but decided that the only criterion that mattered was that she wanted it there. Although there were still odd moments when looking at the picture made her sad, she’d mostly come to a place where it just stirred up sweet memories and buoyed her spirits.
    Hobo immediately made himself at home on the love seat, curling up with a grunt. Based on the fur Rory had seen on Brenda Hartley’s couch, he was clearly accustomed to the finer things in life. He was going to need some retraining if she decided to keep him, or other, less dogfriendly clients would wind up with ninety pounds of drool and fur in their laps, and she might well lose their business.
    Tina passed up the armchair and folded herself into the narrow space beside the dog. “I hope you’re going to keep him. You are going to, aren’t you?” she asked, stroking his back as she spoke. Hobo sighed contentedly.
    “I’m not sure. He’s a lot of dog and even though I have an office right here, I’m not always around.” Plus, Hobo and her ghost hadn’t hit it off very well. But she refrained from saying that aloud.
    “Maybe you should take him,” Rory suggested, feeling an unexpected tug at the thought of losing him. That did not bode well. If she kept him much longer she’d be hopelessly bonded to him. “He seems really happy to be with you there,” she pointed out with as much enthusiasm as she could muster.
    “The trouble is I have twelve dogs now and there are more on the way.”
    Rory didn’t know how to respond to that. Maybe Tina wasn’t quite so sane after all.
    “I’m a breeder.” Tina laughed. “I’ll bet you were thinking I was a nutcase. Like some old spinster lady with a hundred cats. Of course I’m not old, at least not by today’s standards, and I’m not a spinster, and I don’t particularly like cats, but you know what I mean.”
    Rory tripped over her words as she tried to assure the woman that she’d thought no such thing. If she’d been prone to blushing like her mother, she would have been beet red by now.
    “Not to worry,” Tina insisted, explaining that she enjoyed watching people’s faces when she told them how many dogs she had. Sometimes she even fudged the number to get a better reaction.
    “So you breed Maltese,” Rory said, recovering her poise. It didn’t take a detective to figure that out, but Tina seemed impressed anyway. “Did Brenda Hartley buy her Maltese from you?”
    Tina bobbed her head. “I’ve bred some champions. I used to do the whole show circuit thing too. It just got to be too hectic and time-consuming. So now I mostly stick to breeding them. I still get a kick when I hear that one of my pups has won a show. The truth is,” she said, lowering her voice as if she were afraid that someone might overhear her, “they always feel like they’re mine, even after they have another home. It’s actually a bit hard for me to part with them at all. But if I didn’t, I think my husband Joe might just walk out the door and never come home again.”
    Rory squelched the desire to whisper back that she was pretty sure Joe wasn’t hiding out in the bathroom or the garage with his ear to the door. Instead she said, “Why don’t