“Hold on a second,” I said. “This Donnie Dom—he worked full-time at that vet?”
“Yup.”
I paced the small office in Lucas Beach. “So before 2019, he might have been stealing xylazine from them without their knowledge.”
“Possible,” Frank said. “What are you thinking?”
“Offerman,” I said, referring to the retired FBI agent who first traveled to Shilo to assist on the case. “He came into Shilo in May of 2019. There was probably a lot of press coverage about the cops and the FBI. Maybe Donnie had been stealing the xylazine all along and got spooked.”
“Decided to take the whole lot of what was left?” Frank finished my thought. “Clear out the vet?”
“Frank,” I said, “how long did this Donnie guy work there—before the robbery?”
“Little over a year.”
This matched my theory and allowed him access to the drug,going back to the first two women who had been reported missing in October 2018.
“And their description of him?” I asked. “White? Thirtyish?”
“They thought thirty-five,” Frank said. “Believed he was from the Daytona area.”
Daytona was minutes from Lucas Beach, where I was.
“They said he was the clinic’s go-to for euthanasia,” Frank added. “Patients loved him. He did home visits. Even offered to bury the pets for customers.”
“Thirty-six inches apart,” I said to Frank. “It’s a burial standard for pets.”
I thought of the statistics of young men who had abused and practiced their crimes on animals before moving to humans. Ted Bundy. David Berkowitz. Jeffrey Dahmer.
“I need to look through everything again with this new information in mind,” I said. “Did you check on this Donnie guy’s name?”
“Police did after the robbery at the animal clinic,” Frank said. “The name was bogus, but I’ll have our people run it again, just to be safe. Then I’ll stay near the hospital until patrol finds Dog’s cousin.”
The hospital.
“Frank,” I said. “How is Richie doing?”
“Not well,” he said. “His grandfather is flying in. I’m meeting him within the hour.”
I hung up, and a new reality set in. We could find El Médico. Even figure out what Richie had been injected with and still not save him. This is why Frank had been growing frustrated. Patterns and puzzle solving… sometimes it wasn’t enough.
“Screw that,” I said aloud.
I stared out the window that looked over the back lawn of theLucas Beach PD. During the conversation with Frank, I had taken a dry-erase marker and written the wordsvet medicineon the glass.
I studied the words, mentally cataloging every deadly medical-grade drug or gas used in a veterinary setting. Nitrous oxide. Phosphine gas. Injectable antibiotics used to treat farm diseases.
“Talk to me, rook,” I said, knowing Richie had found something that we still hadn’t.
I recalled the conversation with Richie about Florida and California. The farm country where he’d grown up east of San Diego.
Central Florida was more rural than many people realized, and the more farm animals a veterinary practice treated, the wider the variety of drugs they had on hand.
Desperate times, I thought.
I called Frank back, and he picked up on the first ring.
“Frank,” I said. “Have you left the vet’s office yet?”
