“I found an outgoing call on his cell,” Frank said. “Nine minutes. But I can’t get ahold of the cousin.”
A piece of the case fell into place.
“Frank,” I said. “The strips of bamboo. I know what they are.”
CHAPTER FORTY
“Animal burial shrouds?” Frank said, repeating my words. He sounded dubious.
“The minute you mentioned the animal tranquilizer,” I said, “I realized why the strips are so small. They’re not for humans, Frank. They’re precut for cats and dogs. They come in kits.”
Mavreen Isiah had told her sister that the man in the sketch was doing something through back channels. That people who needed things came to him. Like illegal backroom medical procedures.
Or medication.
“Are you near a computer?” I asked.
“I’m in the hospital lobby,” Frank said. “But I have my laptop.”
This was why Frank had wanted to go back to Shilo. Not just because of leads in the area. He’d wanted to be close to Richie.
“The area we circled on the map of Shilo,” I said. “Look around Alantay Medical Group where Mavreen worked. I think you’ll find an emergency animal clinic.”
“Our guy’s a vet?” Frank asked.
“More likely some sort of tech.”
“I see one business,” Frank said. “Let me get over there in person. Call you from it.”
I hung up and turned, my reflection catching in the darkened second-story office window. It was night. Out the window, a water feature above a small pond shot a spray twelve feet into the air, but it blew toward the building, soaking the lawn. Around it were plantings in concentric circles: wild olive, greenheart, and Chickasaw plum, all covered in rain.
Should I have gone back and stayed with Richie? If Frank were not here and I was the team lead, would I have known to do this?
I picked up the missing persons file that Detective Johnson had handed me. Odette Nell was twenty-four and white, with an athletic figure and a thick jawline. In both her pictures, she stared, unsmiling, arms crossed, dressed in a lacrosse shirt.
A single sentence that Shooter had uttered when we stopped at the Jacksonville office came to mind. That the women were of a particular type.
I glanced from picture to picture. Each of our victims had strong, almost masculine faces. Wide in the nose or mouth, just like Shooter had noted in Jacksonville.
The phone rang. Frank again. “This place is small, Gardner,” he said. “Mom-and-pop operation. It’s just the owner and office manager at this hour. They just finished up some emergency medical procedure on a dog.”
I checked the time: 9:23 p.m.
Richie only had until morning.
“They recognize the sketch?” I asked, hoping to finally ID the man we’d been calling El Médico.
“We’re in luck there,” Frank said. “Donald Dom. Went by Donnie.But the owner said the guy would hardly respond to it, and after everything that went down, it turned out not to be his real name.”
“What’s ‘everything that went down’?”
“The owner and his wife came in one morning,” Frank explained. “Their entire drug supply was gone, along with every ounce of xylazine. Surgical instruments. Anesthesiology equipment. They called the police. Had to shut down for a month.”
So now we had our medical connection. “Whenwasthis?”
“May 14, 2019,” Frank said.
This was before the deaths of Araceli Alvarez, Melanie Nelson, and Julie Gilliam, all of whom could have been anesthetized with xylazine. It also predated Dog’s death.
