Rottweiler Rescue by Ellen O'Connell Page A

but other than what she had already told me, which certainly confirmed and intensified the impression of Jack Sheffield I’d gotten from Carl Warmstead, Dorrie didn’t reveal anything significant.
    “Come on,” Dorrie said. “I’ll show you our kennel setup, and you tell me if one of our people left a gate open and let the dog out by accident.”
    Curious, I followed her through the building, past several rooms with workmanlike setups for grooming, all of which had dogs standing on grooming tables being worked on. Big and small, wet, dry and fluffy. The grooming business was flourishing. The sight made me grateful I’d stumbled into a breed that was if not quite as much of a dog grooming dream as a Boxer or Doberman, darn close.
    At first the kennels themselves seemed ordinary. We walked down an inside corridor with dogs in chainlink kennels on one side. Like most kennel setups, the runs went through the wall to the outside, and there was a sliding door in the wall which could be lowered to keep each dog in or out as necessary for cleaning.
    Dorrie took me through a door to the outside and I saw the layout of the kennel area as a whole and was impressed. We were in an open courtyard with long lines of kennel runs on three sides. The center of the courtyard was lawn edged with a wooden fence that kept the three small dogs playing there with a young kennel worker from seeing or getting near the kenneled dogs around them.
    “Oh, that’s great!” I exclaimed. “Do they all get some play time out here every day?”
    “No,” Dorrie said. “Some owners want it and some don’t. To be safe, most dogs have to go out alone, but those three live together. It costs extra because it’s labor intensive.”
    Maybe so, but how nice for those dogs who got the extra. Somehow I had faith that Dumpling was going to be out romping on the grass every day during her stay.
    “The thing is,” Dorrie said, “if one of us took a dog out, this is where we’d take it. And if we left a kennel gate open inside, the dog would still be inside, raising hell up and down the line of kennels, but inside. If we left the gate to a kennel run open on this end, same thing, but the dog would be out here. To let a dog loose on the road, you have to take it out of its kennel and then take it through doors to get out of the building. You’d pretty much have to do it on purpose.”
    “Can you go directly out that way?” I asked, pointing to a door in the wall that was the fourth side of the courtyard.
    “Yes, the fire department made us put that in for an emergency exit. You can’t get in here that way without a key, but you can get out. We’ve got a fence and another gate out there so there can’t be any accidents.” She walked over and opened the door so I could see the fence and gate.
    Looking over the setup I didn’t see any way a dog could escape to the road accidentally.
    “Did Jack train his dogs here?” I asked.
    “Sometimes, but it starts the kenneled dogs barking, particularly after hours when nothing else is going on. He’d go out to the parking lot in front most of the time.”
    “Is there lighting out there at night?”
    “You bet,” Dorrie said. “We always leave it pretty well lit, and there are extra lights Jack could turn on.”
    “What about the gates to the road?”
    “They’re to keep people out when nobody’s here, not to keep anything in. Anybody who came in would open them and leave them open.”
    “Keys?”
    “He had keys, he had to, but so did some of my senior staff. And me. And my husband.”
    “So they didn’t really point a finger at anyone specific, just said it had to be someone from the kennel?”
    “She was kenneled here, it was our responsibility, we should have kept it from happening.”
    No wonder Dorrie was bitter.
    Behind me I heard an angry male voice, “What the hell are you doing? I told you not to talk to anyone about that bastard or that damn lawsuit!”
    I turned to see a large,