Chapter 5: Two Owners on the Chip

The sheriff's deputy had stood in the seed room with me for ten minutes the night before.

He looked at the sawed padlock and the pried floorboard and the boot prints in the dust.

"Anything valuable in the box?" he asked.

"I never opened it. Pearl kept it locked."

"Then I can't tell you what's gone."

He took a photo of the prints, wrote a report number on a card, and said someone would call.

Nobody had called by Thursday morning.

I drove down to the clinic with the number in my pocket and Pearl's phone in my bag.

Whoever took the box had forged her name on a lien and then dug up her floor, and I was sure it was the same hand.

Melanie Lindner brought her dog in at nine, and I was the one who got called to the exam room.

I stood in the hall with my hand on the door.

The clinic owner looked at me.

"I can give her to another tech," she said. "You don't have to."

"It's a burned paw," I said. "The dog didn't do anything."

I went in.

Biscuit lay on the steel table with her tongue out and her tail thumping, glad to see anyone.

Melanie sat on the stool beside her with her hands between her knees.

"I asked for you," she said. "Is that awful? I wanted to say sorry again. Not in a kitchen with him in the doorway."

"It's fine."

"You hated the kitchen too."

I almost smiled.

I unwrapped the gauze from the dog's front paw and found a pink, healing burn the size of a quarter.

"This is healing nicely. Keep it dry. Let me scan her chip, so I can update your file."

The scanner beeped.

I read the screen once and then again.

Owner one: Melanie Lindner, Lindner Ranch.

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