Susan Conant - All Shots

A DOG LOVERS MYSTERY

THE BERKLEY PUBLISHING GROUP Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephens Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)
Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand
(a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)
Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

This book is an original publication of The Berkley Publishing Group.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the authors imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental. The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party Web sites or their content.

Copyright 2007 by Susan Conant.

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
The name BERKLEY PRIME CRIME and the BERKLEY PRIME CRIME design are trademarks belonging to Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Conant, Susan, 1946
All shots / Susan Conant.1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN: 1-4295-5610-2
1. Winter, Holly (Fictitious character)Fiction. 2. Women dog ownersFiction. 3. Dog
trainersFiction. 4. Cambridge (Mass.)Fiction. I. Title

PS3553.O4857A79 2007
813'.54dc22 2007020308

To Lynne and Dan Anderson
in memory of their beloved Stocker,
Ch. Grey Czars Blue Chip Stock
(December 31, 1993August 2, 2006),
the perfect malamute.

Many thanks to Alaskan malamute Benchmark Hearts Desire and to Hearts devoted breeder-owner-handler, Phyllis Hamilton, for appearing in this book. Special thanks to Phyllis for talking with me about blue malamutes. I am also grateful to the late Jim Hamilton and to his delightful blue malamute, Benchmark Excalibur, called Steely Dan. Thanks, too, to my own malamute, Django (Jazzlands Got That Swing); to his breeder, Cindy Neely; and to Roseann Mandell and Geoff Stern; and to Jean Berman, Jessica Fry, Loulie Kent, Pat Sullivan, Margherita Walker, Anya Wittenborg, Suzanne Wymelenberg, and Corinne Zipps.

I returned home on that wet September afternoon to find in my driveway a Harley-Davidson Screamin Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glide, a luxury road machine with power, pizzazz, and personality. It was outfitted with a myriad of snazzy features and accessories: heat shields, foot-boards, hardbags, compartments, racks, carriers, and a heavily padded seat with backrests for both driver and passenger. The chrome and the silver and the black leather glistened in the mist. The beast had a tinted wind deflector for a forehead, a big headlight muzzle, and for eyes, smaller lamps so clear and alive that they almost seemed to return my gaze, thereby confirming my sense that the two of us, the Harley and I, had not simply met before but knew each other in some deep and even mystical way. My soul mates, you see, are Alaskan malamutes, the ultimate canine touring models, Heavens Devils, all power, pizzazz, and personality, the Screamin Eagle Ultra Classic Electra Glides of purebred dogdom. Even so, what in Hells Angels was this vehicular malamute doing in my driveway?

My name is Holly Winter. I live at 256 Concord Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. ZIP code: 02138; the right one, as its said, presumably by virtue of being shared with the alma mater of Ted Kaczynski, whose name is intoned in awed tones around here not because he was the Unabomber but because he was a Harvard math major. After all, how much intelligence does it take to be a psychotic multiple murderer? But to graduate from Harvard with a degree in mathematics? That takes brains. Cambridge, my Cambridge.

The Harley had a Maine license plate. I grew up in Gods Country, the beautiful state of Maine. My father and my stepmother lived there, but Buck and Gabrielle never left home without their dogs, so the bike definitely wasnt theirs. I ruled out my husband on the grounds that he, too, would never buy a vehicle that failed to provide room for his dogs. Besides, he was canoeing in the Boundary Waters of Minnesota. With him were two of our five dogs: Lady, his pointer, and India, his German shepherd bitch, bitch being a good, clean word in the dialect of the dog fancy, meaning, as it does, female, unless preceded by the words son of a , in which case it means the same thing in the dog world as it does everywhere else. So, as the owner of the Harley, Steve was out. A Harvard classmate of my cousin Leahs? A few Harvard students had motorcycles, the men presumably to show that Harvard men could be real men, too. And the women? In a few cases, maybe to prove the same thing. Leah, with her red-gold curls, wouldve looked even more spectacular than usual on the Harley, but she, too, wouldve rejected any mode of transport that excluded big dogs, and in any case, she was chronically broke.

So, when I let myself into the kitchen, I half expected to find Leah there with a classmate whose early and middle adolescence had been exclusively devoted to conforming to the highest expectations of the Harvard Admissions Committee and who was now staging a belated, if normal, adolescent rebellion by becoming the reincarnation of James Dean. My cousin was, however, nowhere in sight. Seated at my kitchen table was a big, tall, handsome man with strong features that made him look like Michelangelos statue of Moses and thus like Charlton Heston as Moses, too, but with the broad forehead, the oversized eye sockets, and the prominent nose of the marble version. The biker lacked the horns of Michelangelos Moses, of course, and if he was playing Moses at all, it was a beardless Moses at age thirty or so, a Moses with dark curly hair. Its possible that my brilliant dogs discerned the resemblance. Having evidently cast themselves as the children of Israel stunned by the wondrous sight of the tablets, Rowdy and Kimi had prostrated themselves before the man, which is to say that they were on their backs with their white tummies exposed and their white snowshoe paws waving in the air. The pose ordinarily represents nothing more than a demand for a belly rub, but its important never to underestimate Kimi, whose accomplishments in a previous existence probably include a degree in mathematics from that place down the street. In fact, my first thought about how the biker had entered my house was that Kimi had let him in. Impossible! It was, I feared, remotely possible that she had figured out how to open the back door, but I was sure that she hadnt learned to unlock it. My second thought was that the uninvited visitorintruder?had found the key that I kept hidden under one of the trash barrels. Equally impossible. Absolutely no one but me knew about it. Even Steve didnt know.