Puppy Mills, Puppy Kills (Animal Instincts Book 3) Read online

  Puppy Mills, Puppy Kills

  Animal Instincts, Book 3

  Chloe Kendrick

  Copyright © 2014

  Published by: Rascal Hearts

  All Rights Reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  For questions and comments about this book, please contact us at [email protected]

  Book Cover By: Rosy E. Fisher

  Table of Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 1

  The stench bit like a pit bull. The foul odor overwhelmed and engulfed me, making me struggle for each breath. There was nowhere I could go to get rid of it. I held a napkin over my nose and mouth that I’d taken from my car, but that didn’t help much. There was nothing I could do to escape it. I knew that these clothes would go in the trash when I got home – and that was saying a lot for me.

  I was watching a stack of dog crates being moved, one pen at a time. The pet containers had apparently been there for some time, as some of the wires had rusted through and connected with the adjacent crates. Men on ladders tried to extricate one crate at a time, handing it down to the men on the ground without scaring the dogs any more than they had been frightened already.

  Under the crates was the muddy mix of feces and urine that comes from letting dogs do their business inside of their crates. Most trainers, which includes folks like me who talk to pets, will tell you that dogs don’t want to do their business where they sleep. Who can blame them? I don’t want to do that in my bedroom either.

  They only do it out of necessity. Spending 24 hours a day in captivity would qualify as a necessity.

  Now I was watching not one crate, but by my math, 56 crates, seven rows by six crates tall, of caged dogs, who likely hadn’t been out to use the restroom since no telling when. They ranged from older dogs who sat hunched in a corner to puppies who bounced at the noise and number of people around them.

  Most of them were breeds that I normally didn’t see. There were some of the larger hounds, along with some of the less-well-known terriers and other categories. The thing is that you couldn’t really tell the breed without a bar of soap and a bucket of water. Most of them were covered in dirt and I didn’t want to know what.

  So why was I here? It wasn’t for the view, and this was not my favorite way to spend a Monday morning. That much was very clear. The police had thought that I might be of service. They’d located, and I don’t know quite how, the human remains under a stack of dog crates at an Amish farm about 100 miles southeast of Toledo.

  The police had apparently seen the barn repeatedly as they scouted for a missing person over the past few weeks, but it had been an anonymous call that had instructed them to look in the barn.

  The first patrol cars found the crates of over 50 dogs stacked high on oneside of the barn and immediately thought of the recent spate of articles about me and talking to animals. They had 50-some witnesses to a potential crime, and they wanted to get their statements.

  My first thought had been to decline. I’d seen enough of those weepy pet rescue commercials to know that I was not going to be okay with this. However, business had been slow the past two weeks, and I needed a paying job. Finally, money won out over emotion, and I agreed to go down to the farm and do my thing.

  Standing in the stench-filled barn, I knew this was going to be a loss. I wasn’t going to be able to read anything from these animals. First, they were scared, hungry and filthy. When you wanted for basic comfort, the typical pet reads were not going to be visible. They’d be scared and unlikely to do much more than quiver and shake.

  Beyond that, many of these animals had been debarked in the most inhumane way possible. I’d heard about this from some of my friends who deal with pet rescues. The dogs are debarked by scratching their vocal chords with nails to keep them silent. Fifty barking dogs were obvious. If the dogs were debarked, they would be invisible on any of the farms in the area.

  Though from what I knew of regulations regarding puppy mills and dog sales,this type of farm was still legal in Ohio. It was the only state east of the Mississippi to allow dog auctions, which brought sellers from every state in the area to sell dogs quickly at auction to the highest bidder.

  Even though puppy mills were legal, it didn’t mean that the conditions these animals lived in was anything approaching safe, clean or humane. The dogs I watched now were walking crab-legged out of the cages, which likely indicated that they’d never been outside of the cages before. They trembled at the sight of grass and dry ground.

  Since the case was outside of the Toledo environs, I didn’t know any of the officers who were here this morning. Many of them seemed to be most concerned with staying clean, but in the current conditions, it would be impossible.

  I picked up a puppy that might have been a Jack Russell, but turned out to be an underfed Corgi, the same breed as my Bruno, who was anything but underfed. The dog had clumped feces and fleas in its hair and looked up at me with eyes that made me want to cry and donate every last cent to Sarah McLachlan’s organization. I could be a softie when the cause was right.

  Nobody from the police department bothered with me much yet. They were still looking for the body under the cages. Until they had a crime, they really didn’t have a need for witnesses or for someone who could talk to those witnesses.

  For those of you who haven’t heard of me, I work as a pet communicator. I talk to dogs, cats, parrots, and other domestic animals. For a fee, you can learn what your pet really thinks about you and your home and your pet food. I own a small owner-operated business in Toledo, but in the past few months, I’ve had more success than I can handle. I was involved in two murder cases, both which involved me communicating with pets. When the pets helped me learn who the murderer was, the press had a field day with me and provided me with more coverage than my little business could handle.

  All that publicity had led to more work for me, including this current case, which appeared to be a heartbreaker. For the moment, I’d be safe, because when a dog is scared to death, it will only react in its most primal instinctive mode. So it won’t think about what’s going on around it. The dog will just want to meet its most basic needs. They would need time to clean, feed and socialize these pets before I could get a word out of these animals.

  So I wasn’t too worried that I’d be asked to perform today. Mainly I was an observer. Despite having worked with the police in Toledo, I hadn’t gotten used to the sight of a corpse, so I tried to focus my attentions on the underfed Corgi instead of the rapidly growing pit of mud and feces that was under a section of cages.

  The police had already ruled out the owner of these dogs. He was standing in the corner, being restrained by two members of the local police force. For an Amish guy, he knew a lot of curse words, which I won’t repeat here. The general gist of the conversation was that the police had no reason to be here, despite the warrant, because he had done nothing wrong.

  Since I knew I would be asked to deliver some answers at some point and because he was standing in the far corner of the barn, I decided to start by talking to the farmer. He seemed to be the most likely suspect for this crime. The body was on his land in
his barn and under his crates. However, my instinct told me that the case couldn’t be that easy or else the police would not have asked me to consult on the location of the corpse.

  At first, the farmer thought I was a member of the police, but given that I was wearing jeans, a shirt missing two buttons, and a leather jacket I’d scored at a lost-and-found, he soon realized the error of his ways.

  I introduced myself and stuck out my hand. “I’m Griff Fitzpatrick,” I offered. “I’m here to –”

  The man waved away my hand and looked like he might spit at me. “You’re the whacko who thinks he talks to pets. You people have medicine for that, you know?”

  “For pets?” I asked, trying to play it cool.

  “No, for people who think that animals can talk. They’re just livestock like any other animal on this farm.”

  I put a hand over the Corgi’s ears. “Don’t let him hear you say that. You’ll hurt his feelings.”

  “It’s a her, dumbass,” said the amiable farmer. I wasn’t even going to try to excavate enough of the grime to try to tell for myself. I opted to just take him at his word. Even so, if he knew that much about them, it made me wonder why he didn’t take care of these animals.

  I was saved from having to answer by the arrival of multiple rescue groups. The farm had been found to be in violation of the health code in terms of the treatment and processing of the animal feces, even if the animals’ treatment was not in question. The police had called in rescue groups from Toledo and Cleveland, knowing that no one group could process all of these animals.

  I recognized Allison from Saved by the Bell, a Toledo rescue organization that I’d done work with before. She approached me with surprise. Allison was a nice looking woman for her type. She was out to save the world, as though Saved by the Bell was her opening salvo in her quest to make people nicer to animals and nicer to each other. She’d only been with the rescue group a few months. Before that had been another equally earnest young woman who had wanted to save all the dogs in Toledo.

  Today she was dressed down, likely knowing what she’d find here. She was wearing an older pair of jeans with faded patches at the knees and frays around the bottom. Her t-shirt shouted her organization’s name and purpose across the front of it. Even though fall was quickly approaching, she wasn’t wearing a jacket. Her brown hair was pulled back in a ponytail that seemed to pull her facial skin too tight. It looked painful.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked suspiciously.

  I had done a few of my pet communications for her in the past few months, but she was always suspicious. She kept trying to uncover my secrets in order to label me a fraud. She was one of those women who would have wanted to check the magician’s pockets to see how a trick was performed. I kept her at a certain distance, so that she didn’t see how my tricks were performed.

  Some of that suspicion came from my rejection of her suggestion that we go out sometime. I try not to mix business and pleasure or anything with pleasure, so I had kindly told her no. Her attitude had not been pleasant after that. She’d grown suspicious of my work, and her tone was always curt and to the point.

  “The police wanted me to be here to question some of the animals, just in case they find a body here.”

  “Is that how they came across this place? A murder?”

  “Only an alleged murder at this point. They’re still trying to clear off enough of the crates to start digging. I think they’re having a raffle to find out who gets stuck with that job.”

  She looked over to the barn where animals were being removed and the stench of dirty animals and animal excrement was extremely potent. I’d always heard that dead bodies had a particularly nasty odor, but it would be a rumble here for these smells to battle it out.

  “Someone ought to kill the person who ran this place,” she said, oblivious to the fact that the farmer was standing a few yards away. “I don’t know how they live with themselves.”

  I nodded, but didn’t say anything. The filthy Corgi had decided to get between my jacket and shirt and curl up. While she was happy, the stench was enough to even keep Allison at a distance.

  I heard a shout from inside the barn, and I went to go check out what was going on. Given that I was supposed to be working, I felt it best if they actually saw me pay an interest in the crime.

  Two officers were standing alongside the pit of mud and slime where the cages had been. They stood back from the hole, but two other men had stepped in closer. They were dressed in haz-mat uniforms replete with masks and breathing apparatus. I couldn’t say that I blamed them. I would not want to climb into that mess unless I absolutely had to.

  The first man into the pit pulled out what appeared to be a shoe, covered in filth. He went back and began to pull out what appeared to be bones of some sort. The second man was gagging into his suit and had to leave the area.

  Chief Barton, the man who had asked me to come down, stepped over to where I was standing. “This might not look like the television shows, but it’s our reality. We don’t have the time to dry this mud out, excavate the bones, and see what else is in there. We’re on a tight budget, and we’re going to pull out what we can find.”

  I nodded. I recognized that life wasn’t like TV. In my own experiences with the police, they’d never been as scripted or dapper as they were on the boob tube. Of course, they didn’t have a network behind them and didn’t get a script complete with an ending provided.

  “I understand,” I said, feeling nothing more was needed. He was trying to justify his small staff and their work methods, but this was small-town Ohio. I doubted that the governor had set them up with a state-of-the-art forensic unit.

  The man in the haz-mat suit pulled up some more bones and a crew of men put them into bags, still dripping with ooze. The smell was horrendous.

  I noticed that Allison had not come into the barn. She was busy talking to one of the other rescue women; they appeared to be discussing the best way to segregate and move the animals. Neither of them wanted to cage these animals again, so soon after they were allowed to walk freely. It would be inhumane.

  However, neither of them wanted to allow seven to fifteen un-collared and unleashed dogs, covered in filth, to wander around in their cars while they tried to return to their respective shelters.

  My own little mascot was still curled up between my shirt and jacket and showed no signs of moving any time soon. Given my own disinterest in my grooming for the most part, I didn’t care about the dirt or smell.

  The bagging of the bones continued. Other than parts of a human, I saw another shoe and an unidentified object come up as well. The pit was a treasure chest of items, and yet an ideal hiding place. I couldn’t think of any person in this barn who would have climbed in there for anything short of a homicide.

  The pulling continued, and I opted to wait. For one, I was loath to hand over my companion to one of the rescue organizations. I had a niggling thought that if I waited long enough, they might leave and I’d be “stuck” with the little girl. My rational side pointed out that having one of the dogs from the barn could help in terms of gaining access to people and places that I might not otherwise have. However, my emotional side knew that I was going to think she was adorable once I cleaned her up.

  I’ve always had a side of me that is drawn to saving things. I’ve seen what happens when things are not saved; they’re discarded, neglected, thrown onto the rubbish pile of forgotten memories. I didn’t want to be like that. I knew that I couldn’t save a pet with every case that I took; my house would soon be overrun. I had two pets already. They could be a handful, but I figured one every once in a while wouldn’t hurt.

  The other reason that I wanted to stay was I wanted to see how many people were in the pit. The anonymous caller had indicated that one person had been hidden here, but people who didn’t have to be held accountable could be wrong.

  I wasn’t sufficiently strong in anatomy to be able to tell leg bones from arm bon
es, but I did know that people had one skull per person. So I waited to see how many skulls they would drag from the muck.

  I waited until the man in the haz-mat suit had stopped going in again. There was only one skull, so presumably one victim. The pieces of the person were bagged and sent off in an ambulance. I thought it ironic, since there was no way to rescue the person who was taking a ride in the ambulance. He – or she – was far too gone for that.

  The scene had started to clear out a little. Chief Barton took a look around and headed over to me again. “Most of the work is done here. You can go home now. In Toledo, you can find the dogs at Saved by the Bell and Second Chance Dogs. They both took about 15 of the mutts. You won’t have to drive down here again unless you have something to share with us that can’t be told over the phone.” We worked out a rate and a timeline, and he handed me his business card. I tucked that into my wallet and started away. I’d been dismissed, and I wasn’t sure I would have a client out of this case from the dismissal he’d just given me. He’d given me a small fee up front, but now I worried that the police wouldn’t be wanting me.

  “What are you doing with that dog?” he asked.

  “Oh,” I said, pretending to be surprised. “I’d forgotten all about her. I guess I’ll take her home, get her cleaned up, and see what she has to say. She had been in the stack that covered the pit where you found that body. So maybe I can get something out of her, once she’s feeling better.”

  The chief had one of the officers write me out a receipt for the dog, and I headed back to my car. She still hadn’t moved, and I checked from time to time to ensure that she was still breathing.

  The farmer caught up to me just before I reached my car. “What are you doing with Number 32?” he said with a plaintive cry in his voice.

  I was really impressed how he’d gone all out in naming these animals. Number 32 was such a unique name for a pet.