The Sinclair police force isn’t large. Most of the officers former frat boys and two-year college coeds straight from being your typical campus drunkards and *****, the ones lucky enough to avoid one too many DWIs and able to stick it out through police cadet training. They were young, white and gifted with two-dimensional thinking. Two female officers, Stephanie Humbert and Regina Fassbinder, were assigned to the Randall killings. They didn’t have a clue where to begin their investigation, other than with the anonymous reports of a large dog in the vicinity. This struck Fassbinder, a pretty strawberry blonde, as similar to a case she’d read about in the paper.
Sitting with Humbert in the back booth of a diner, she mused that maybe the dog had crossed the state line and was now roaming the suburbs.
Humbert scoffed, “Come on now! How big a dog we talkin’?”
“Not a little dog—big enough to eat a woman’s leg off. That’s big enough to tear Mrs. Randall to pieces.”
“And tear his head clean off? Come on now!”
About the woman whose leg had been eaten; there was a mystery. The body had disappeared from the large New York City morgue after the coroner himself had been torn into pieces so small and messy they had had to mop up his remains and store them in Ziploc bags. The detectives assigned to the case had had nothing to work with besides the rumor of a large dog either, and were in fact having troubles of their own and were presently on official leave of absence. One of the detectives, Ron Capshaw, took his in great stride. Having just lost his wife in a tragic shooting incident, he had proposed to a female officer and gone off to Atlantic City to be married. The other detective, Jake Knudsen, did not sit so easily with his virtual suspension. When he heard that a large dog might be responsible for the mauling of the New Jersey couple in their home, he drove out to see just what the hell that was all about.
He arrived in the small town and went into the precinct. There is only one precinct in all of Sinclair, and the desk sergeant on duty told him that officers Humbert and Fassbinder were out on patrol. They weren’t detectives. Sinclair detectives were apparently far too busy to be bothered with reports of prowling dogs; even, or especially, if the dog in question was capable of dismembering a grown woman and decapitating a grown man. He saw the police car parked in front of the diner and went in. Seeing the officers sharing a salad, he walked over and sat. “Ladies,” he said. “Name’s Knudsen, Detective, NYPD. I hear you got a problem wit’a dog.”
Both women looked at him bewildered.
“What’d you say?” asked Humbert the skeptic.
“A dog. We got a case in New York. A dog,” he started again when Fassbinder jumped in.
“Ate that woman’s leg off! I read ‘bout dat!”
Knudsen was pleased but didn’t show it. He wasn’t that pleased. The waitress came over and asked if he’d like to see a menu.
“Sure,” he said and she showed him one. “Gimme a burger, no—make it a salad.” He then turned to the officers. “I’m kinda off meat.”
“What about this dog?” Humbert chimed.
Knudsen leaned in on them, saying hushed, “’Tween you’n’me, there ain’t any ******* dog.”
Humbert sat bolt upright and shouted, “Ain’t none! Well, how do you explain…?”
“Pipe down, Stephanie,” Fassbinder scolded mildly. “Let him explain.”
Knudsen, leaning back took a pack of smokes from his vest pocket and tamped it on the back of his fist. Both women scowled as if at the thought that he might light up, which he did. He wagged the match out and dropped it on the floor. He didn’t care whether there was no smoking. He didn’t give a good ******* whether there was no ****** old ladies and shooting smack. The old rules no longer applied. The ‘dog’ had changed all that.
