CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Well, well, well,” Jessica said. “The plot thickens.”
Faith raised an eyebrow but kept her eyes on the road as she exited the freeway. “How so?”
“It looks like Dr. Elliot lost his practice about two weeks after that article was published. It seems people didn’t take too kindly to the idea of a veterinarian advocating for euthanasia.
His contracts were all canceled, and his clients dropped him.
At least five of them paid the breach of contract fees without protest. One chose mediation but settled three weeks later. ”
“Damn. Talk about a fall from grace.”
“A serious one. The breach of contract fees should have been enough to pay his bills for a while until he got on his feet, but the damage to his reputation is probably permanent.”
“People don’t like people who don’t like dogs,” Faith agreed, parking in front of a small but nice-looking single-story ranch home on the northern edge of Plano.
She stepped out and led Jessica and Turk to the door, scanning the house’s exterior as she did.
The lawn was overgrown and sported several patches that were covered with weeds, some of them several feet tall.
Dirt covered the house, and while the paint wasn’t peeling yet, it was clear that no attention had been given to the place for some time.
These not-so-subtle signs indicated someone who had given up. Another way to put that was someone who had nothing to lose and might not be deterred from taking out his anger on the people he blamed for losing everything.
“No dog,” Jessica observed. “One wonders why a man who didn’t love animals pursued a career in animal behavior.”
“Money, probably,” Faith guessed. “That Dog Whisperer guy is a multimillionaire with acres of land in Los Angeles County.”
“That Dog Whisperer guy absolutely adores dogs,” Jessica reminded Faith.
“Touché.”
Faith knocked on the door. Turk stood in between the two human agents, alert as usual with ears up, eyes forward, tail switching slowly back and forth.
The door opened a moment later, revealing a man in his late forties who had dyed black hair in a thick ring around a head topped with a shiny bald crown.
The hair that remained was bushy and unkempt, and a thick gray stubble sprouted from the base of his neck halfway up his cheekbones.
His eyes were bloodshot, the reddened sclera surrounding pupils that looked as dark as the hair.
He wore a bathrobe that thankfully covered a white t-shirt and a pair of long, baggy boxers that hung to his knees.
The faint scent of body odor wafted off him, not quite enough to be unbearable but hinting that it was heading that direction.
Interesting that he would dye his hair but make no other attempt to care for his appearance.
“Dr. Marcus Elliot?” Faith asked.
The man blinked at them. Then he laughed, a loud, staccato bark that caused Turk’s tail to stop swishing. He looked at Faith incredulously. Faith had no explanation to offer.
He lifted his hands to his eyes and got his giggles under control. “Oh, man. Oh, that’s funny. Let me guess. You think I killed Sarah Garrett, Matthew Brooks and Linda Hale.”
Faith raised an eyebrow. “We had some questions to ask about that, yes.”
He giggled again. “Oh, boy. All right. Come on in.”
Faith shared a look with Jessica. Marcus—and that’s definitely who this was—seemed a little too… cheerful.
“Come on in,” he repeated. “Your K9 will kill me if I try anything, right?”
“We’d like to avoid a physical confrontation,” Faith replied, stepping warily through the door.
Turk definitely wouldn’t kill Marcus. If he became a threat, Turk was trained to subdue him and hold him until Faith could place him under arrest. K9s weren’t used to kill people.
“Oh sure, sure. Yeah, I’m not going to do anything. Don’t worry. I’m probably the only Texan who doesn’t own a single gun.”
He laughed again, stumbling through a living room strewn with food wrappers, mail, napkins, and other things that made Faith wary of stepping through it, even in her boots.
Marcus dropped onto a couch behind a coffee table piled high with empty alcohol bottles. Alcohol and manic depression went very poorly together. Faith was having an easier and easier time imagining Marcus acting impulsively and rage-killing the people he blamed for putting him in this position.
She chose to stand in the relatively tidy foyer while Turk gingerly moved through the trash, sniffing for anything that might connect Marcus to the crime scenes.
“Okay,” Marcus said. “Ask away.”
“Well,” Jessica said. “Since you brought it up, why don’t you just tell us. Did you kill the victims?”
“Nope.”
“Figured you’d say that,” Jessica said drily. “Why don’t you tell me about your relationship with the three?”
“I didn’t have one. I interacted with all three very briefly—a little less briefly with Sarah Garrett—and that was it.”
“Let’s talk about that,” Faith said. “According to Sarah, you threatened her.”
Marcus giggled, briefly this time. He rubbed his eyes again. “Yeah, she would say that.”
“What would you say?”
“I told her that I was going to push for legislation that would require everyone involved in healthcare decisions for dogs to receive veterinary training. I pointed out that would disqualify her and others like her, and she took that very poorly.”
“Her and others like her?”
“Selfish bleeding hearts,” Marcus explained. “People who can’t stand the thought of a dog in pain and so force them to continue living in pain.”
“So, you don’t believe dogs can be rehabilitated?” Faith asked.
“Some can. Younger dogs or dogs that have experienced only mild abuse. Dogs that weren’t abused but perhaps weren’t socialized or exercised well.
Older dogs that have experienced severe trauma can’t ever be truly rehabilitated.
Canine minds don’t work the way human minds do.
Humans can overcome post-traumatic stress to a large degree, but we can do that because we have very advanced minds that can separate a problem from our emotions.
Not easily, of course, but we can do it.
With help, we can identify which of our emotions are valid and which are trauma responses that serve no useful purpose.
That allows us to control our behavior and live normal lives despite PTSD.
It even provides us a path toward overcoming that disease.
“Not so dogs. Much as we like to imagine that dogs are highly intelligent beings, the reality is that they’re just animals.
They can’t understand why they feel a certain way.
They just feel that way. Effective behavioral conditioning is just designed to help them feel differently.
It won’t implant some abstract understanding of where their feelings come from and why.
When a dog is damaged badly enough, they are, I’m sorry, damaged too badly to recover. In those cases, euthanasia is humane.”
He lifted his hands and let them drop. “But no one wants to hear that. They just get angry, call you names, insist that you’re an asshole, and then campaign to get you blacklisted.”
“Do you believe the victims campaigned to blacklist you?” Faith asked.
“Sarah Garrett did. She reported me for my ‘harassment’, and the veterinary board took her at her word for it. Then they framed me as a violent dog-killer and shut down my practice.”
“You must have been very angry.”
“I didn’t kill them,” he replied.
“Can you prove that?”
He laughed again, but there was an edge to it this time. “Am I not innocent until proven guilty?”
“Of course,” Faith replied. “But someone’s guilty, and right now, we have evidence of conflict between you and the victims. We have a motive, we have someone who—forgive me—is showing signs of instability, and we have three people dead in two days.
If you have a way to clear your name, then we’ll stop wasting our time talking to you, but short of that, I am frankly looking at a growing body of evidence to suggest that you’re our guy. ”
Faith watched him and Turk both closely as she said that.
Turk remained cautious but not particularly excited.
He had stopped looking for clues in Marcus’s house too.
Marcus, for his part, reacted with a little fear but mostly irritation.
He sighed and said, “Well, I spend my nights at a hookah lounge in downtown. The Rajah’s Den. ”
“A hookah lounge?” Jessica asked incredulously.
“It’s very relaxing. It’s also the only place I can interact with other human beings without them looking at me the way you two are.
Judge me if you want, but if any of your victims died at night, I was probably smoking flavored tobacco and boring some poor girl with a lecture on the psychology of domestication. ”
Faith looked at Jessica, who sighed and stepped outside to call the hookah lounge. Faith remained, and when her partner was outside, she said, “Matthew Brooks was killed in the morning. Around seven-thirty yesterday morning.”
Marcus lifted his hands. “Can’t help you there. I haven’t been up before nine in four months. Can’t prove that, though. No security cameras here, and the neighbors here aren’t the type to know or care where their neighbors are at any given time.”
Faith watched his eyes flick back and forth. She suspected there was more than alcohol in his system right now. The right kind of stimulant could cause temporary blackouts where users became violent without remembering the incidents upon coming down.
But now she was grabbing at straws. When Jessica returned and confirmed video evidence of his alibi, Faith knew they had exhausted this lead.
Still, they had one more shot in the dark. She pulled a notepad from her pocket and jotted down his name along with the date and time. Then she extended the pad to Marcus. “Would you mind signing this to indicate that you’ve talked to us? It helps me keep track.”
Marcus took the notebook absently and scrawled a signature underneath. He started to hand it back, and Faith asked, “Print and date too, please.”
He giggled softly and printed his name and the date. He handed it back to Faith, and when she saw the shockingly dainty, well-organized handwriting, her last bit of hope dissipated. This was nothing like the heavy-handed scrawl of their killer.
“Thank you for your time,” Faith said. “We’ll keep in touch.”
“Sure. I’ll be here.”
They left him on the couch, bloodshot eyes staring vacantly at the television mounted on the wall of his living room.
Faith felt deflated. It wasn’t common to be without solid leads at this point in the case, but her focus was intermittent at best, and this killer was moving lightning fast. If she couldn’t bring herself to a hundred percent soon, then it was all but guaranteed that they’d find another victim with a note attached to their mutilated corpse.