Groomed For Murder: A Pet Boutique Mystery by Annie Knox

she talked tough, but I could still see the sadness of that old wound hanging over her head.

CHAPTER
    Seven
    R ena, Sean, and I must have made quite a sight as we traipsed down Maple Avenue. Rena walked Daisy, who was doing the sniffing dance with Hetty Tucker’s greyhound (soon-to-be groom-hound), Romeo. Sean struggled to keep hold of the antsy greyhound while still tugging along his own lethargic basset hound, Blackstone. And, of course, my Packer was leaping in crazy twirls trying to get everyone’s attention at once. The dogs were all so interested in one another that we moved at a snail’s pace down Maple, past Dakota Park, through the historic Birch Mound neighborhood, and eventually up Walking Bird Lane to Badger Lake and the old Soaring Eagles Adventure Camp.
    By the time we approached the site where Hal Olson was building his vacation community, I think the humans were all ready to drop the leashes and let thedogs fend for themselves. Sean had taken to cursing under his breath, tiny Rena—whose stride was so much shorter than the rest of ours—was panting softly, and I was clenching my teeth in annoyance.
    “Dogs! Enough!” I said, trying to inject my tone with as much steel as I possibly could.
    Surprisingly, all four mutts turned their faces up to mine with comical expressions of wide-eyed wonder, as though they’d forgotten there were people involved in this walk at all.
    We all stood there, a frozen tableau, getting our respective minds back on track.
    “Well,” Sean said, “what now?”
    “I don’t know,” Rena responded. “I guess we look around.”
    “For what?”
    Rena and I shrugged in tandem.
    “Ahh,” Sean said with a little laugh. “Like Justice Stewart on obscenity: we’ll know it when we see it.”
    Rena and I looked at each other. She frowned and raised her hands in the universal expression for “What the heck?” I frowned and shrugged in the universal expression for “I have no idea.”
    Sean started to laugh, and his laughter grew until he’d plopped down to sit on the ground, Blackstone crawling into his lap as if on cue. “Lord love a duck,” he said. “We have absolutely no reason to be here, do we? I mean, what could we possibly find that is at all relevant to Daniel’s murder just by meandering around the work site?”
    “Maybe nothing,” I conceded, “but you never know.We’re talking about Hal Olson here. Not exactly a master criminal. He’s a manipulative womanizer who plays fast and loose with ethical norms, but he’s not very discreet about his exploits.”
    “But that’s exactly it. Hal is not a master criminal. How could he be responsible for Daniel’s murder? Heck, Hal wasn’t even at the party.”
    “One step at a time,” I said. “I just know that if we figure out what Daniel was writing his story on, we’ll figure out why he was killed . . . and then it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to who killed him.”
    Sean heaved a sigh. “All right, then, let’s see what there is to see.”
    Leading the dogs, who were now much more subdued, we skirted the fence surrounding the construction site and picked our way through the debris to see what Hal was building.
    I knew they were building condos, but the terrible sameness of all the units hit me only when I saw them in person. I suddenly understood Richard Greene’s frustration that these cookie-cutter buildings would obscure the view of the lake from every other point along the shoreline.
    “Hmmm,” Sean muttered.
    “What?”
    “Most of the people who can afford waterfront property like this expect high quality. This house wrap they’re using is the most cut-rate stuff on the market.”
    Rena stopped in her tracks, her Doc Martens kicking up a little cloud of dust. “How on earth do you know that?”
    Sean smiled like the cat who ate the canary. “I’m a man of many talents.”
    “Right.”
    “Oh, fine. My cousin Bubba runs a construction company just outside of Oxford. When I was doing