The Beast on Her Leash novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Leash on the Porch
On the eleventh anniversary of her parents' deaths, Willa starts work for the killer's brother, who throws a dog leash at her feet, and then sees a clipping of the crash pinned over his table.
Eleven years to the day after Lyle Crowe killed my parents, I knocked on his brother's door.
It was a converted boathouse on the Allegheny River, with a porch built out over the water.
Nobody answered.
I knocked again, and a dog the size of a pony pushed his nose against the screen.
He was grey, old, and missing half of one ear.
He looked me over, sighed, and lay down across the doorway.
A man's voice came from the dark inside.
"Moose, move."
Moose did not move.
The man stepped over him and shoved the screen door open with his boot.
He was the biggest person I had ever stood next to.
He was easily six foot five, with white-blond hair past his collar, a short pale beard, and a fresh cut through one eyebrow.
His grey T-shirt was on inside out.
He took in my braid, my canvas jacket, and the clipboard under my arm, and his mouth curled.
"So you're the dog trainer."
"Willa McCabe," I said. "Your aunt told me eight o'clock."
"It's seven fifty."
"I was told you'd be up."
"I'm up."
He reached behind the door, took something off a nail, and dropped it at my feet.
It was a leather dog leash, cracked and worn pale at the loop.
"You'll want that," Bram Crowe said. "My brother says I come with one."
I knew the joke before he finished it.
Lyle Crowe had hired a real dog trainer to handle his grown brother.
He had been telling it at dinner tables all over Pittsburgh for a week.
I did not pick the leash up.
I knew Bram's file better than he thought.
He was twenty-five, with two assault arrests and a broken jaw left behind in a Sharpsburg bar.
Both charges were gone within a week, because his brother's lawyers made phone calls.
I had read it all in a retired detective's kitchen, between a juice box and a cold coffee.
What I did not know was why a man built like a grain silo looked at me as if I held the knife.
"That's Moose's leash," I said. "It's cracked at the loop. He'd chew through it in a minute."
"He doesn't pull."
"Then it's a decoration."
"It's a joke."
"I got the joke." I pushed my glasses up with one knuckle.
"It's a bad one, I'm not laughing, and I'm not putting anything on you."
His eyes narrowed.
"Here's how this works," I said. "I signed a contract with your brother on Monday."
"Congratulations."
"It has one clause I made them write in. Either of us can end it any day, for any reason, with one week's pay."
"Either of us."
"You can throw me off this porch right now. I'll walk to my car and Lyle will still pay me."
He glanced at the river, and then at the big white house on the hill above us.
"My aunt asked you to come," he said.
"Your aunt asked you to give me a week."
"She did not use the word asked."
"No, she waved a cane at me."
Something at the corner of his mouth twitched, and he flattened it at once.
"You won't last two days," he said.
"Then you'll be rid of me by Friday."
I should say plainly why I was there.
I was not there for Bram.
Bram Crowe was the only door in his brother's life that Lyle's lawyers had left unlocked.
I was twenty-seven years old and out of other doors.
On the night of October 14th, eleven years ago, a red tow truck rammed my father's car into a stone wall on River Road.
Then it drove away.
My mother and father were both dead before the ambulance came.
The police called it a hit-and-run with no suspect.
The only witness was a boy who phoned 911 and then vanished, and nobody ever found him.
Everything I had learned since then pointed to the Crowe yard.
Every road to the Crowe yard ended at a man who smiled for newspapers.
So I stood on his brother's porch and waited.
Bram stared at me for a long moment.
Then he stepped aside, one inch, which for him seemed to be a speech.
"Fine," he said. "Two days. Come in and look at what you're going to fail at."
I went in.
Moose got up with a groan, followed me, and lay down on my left foot.
The room was one big space with a kitchen along the back, a cot, and a rack of weights.
His boots stood in a line by the door.
It was cleaner than I expected.
There was a bowl of water on the floor and a second bowl beside it, both full.
"He likes you," Bram said, without any pleasure.
"He likes my foot."
I turned to set my clipboard on the table, and I saw the wall above it.
A single newspaper clipping was tacked there with a yellow pin.
The paper had gone brown at the edges.
I read the headline from across the room before I understood what I was reading.
COUPLE KILLED ON RIVER ROAD.
Under it was a small grainy photo from the funeral.
A girl of sixteen in a borrowed black dress stood between two closed caskets with her hands at her sides.
I knew the dress, because it had been my aunt's, and the shoulders were too big.
I knew the girl.
The pin had left a ring of rust on the paper.
Somebody had kept it on that wall for a very long time.
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