Part 4
Dean wrote the name, then loosened his grip on the pen. He asked what could be confirmed, repeated the answer, and put a small question mark beside Malcolm’s roadside account.
Then he opened his laptop.
Vellora’s website offered sunlit lawns, neat fencing, and puppies tumbling around a flowering planter. A silver-haired man smiled beside a small dog on the home page. Everything suggested a business conducted at the pleasant pace of a family porch.
Rookie slept against Dean’s shoe, one paw laid over his nose.
Dean enlarged a photograph of the grounds. There was no way to tell whether Rookie had ever played on that lawn.
The man in the pictures was Russell Dempsey, sixty-two, the owner. Public records and community photographs showed a familiar local benefactor: donations, fundraisers, handshakes. Further checking established that Travis was his son-in-law.
Dean shut the laptop before his thoughts could turn those facts into something they weren’t.
When he called Celia, her first question was whether he was planning a drive to Georgia.
“I looked at the distance.”
“Delete the route.”
“I didn’t say I was going.”
“Dean.”
He leaned against the counter. “What do you suggest?”
“Someone who asks questions for a living. Records and witnesses, not a confrontation at a gate.”
Lydia knew a reporter named Bridget Navarro. They met the next afternoon at a café near the marina. Bridget, forty-six, put a weathered shoulder bag on an empty chair and ordered coffee before opening a notebook.
She gave Dean time to sit down.
“Start with something you can document.”
He told her about finding Rookie, the examination, the tattoo, the temporary placement, and Travis’s visit. Lydia supplied the owners’ permissions and the records she’d collected. Dean gave Bridget Malcolm’s name and made clear what the fisherman hadn’t claimed to know.
Bridget drew columns across a page. She entered the tattoo under confirmed facts and the roadside sighting under witness accounts. Several items went beneath unanswered questions.
Lydia watched the pencil move. “Does that mean there isn’t enough?”
“Enough to ask better questions,” Bridget said. “Not enough to decide the answers.”
Over the following days, she called families, checked consent, compared records, and tried to trace suppliers. Some stories that initially seemed connected weren’t. A sick puppy’s paperwork led to a different breeder. A date discrepancy remained unexplained but could have been clerical.
Other documents showed links among stores in South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida and transport companies that had moved dogs from Vellora.
Dean wanted every call to advance the work. Bridget would sometimes call simply to tell him a lead had failed.
“That’s useful, too,” she said after one such conversation.
“It doesn’t feel useful.”
“Imagine putting it in print and discovering afterward that it was wrong.”
He had no answer for that.
One evening, Bridget called about a former employee.
“Nadine Sutter handled office records. She may understand the identifiers.”
“Will she talk?”
“She’s deciding.”
“Why?”
“Because this could affect her life, Dean. Not just the company’s.”
Nadine was fifty-nine and lived alone outside a small Georgia town. She had left Vellora with bills still arriving and acquaintances who knew exactly where she’d worked. When Bridget first contacted her, she refused to discuss it.
Bridget explained the families’ questions, suggested legal advice, and left her number. Two days later, Nadine called back.
They met in a public library’s small conference room. At Nadine’s request, Dean wasn’t there.
Nadine wore a cream cardigan and tortoiseshell glasses. A canvas document bag rested against her chair. She kept one hand on its strap while Bridget set a recorder on the table and asked permission to use it.
“I did invoices,” Nadine said. “Schedules. Entries. I wasn’t in charge of the dogs.”
“What would a normal workday involve?”
That question got her speaking. She described transport lists, group identifiers, and individual numbers. The letters identified Vellora’s system; the remaining digits referred to an intake grouping and a particular animal.
Bridget showed her the photograph of Rookie’s ear.
Nadine took off her glasses and put them on again.
“I know that format.”
“Could another business use it?”
“Possibly. The format alone wouldn’t prove anything.”
Nadine took an older batch ledger from the bag. She had lawfully retained it among her employment papers. Rookie’s identifier appeared beside an age and description that fit the puppy in Bridget’s photograph.
Bridget asked how the copy could be authenticated. Were there corresponding transport records? Could an original be located? Who had entered the information?
Nadine’s grip loosened on the bag.
“I wish those had been the questions at work.”
At first, she said, Vellora had seemed to be what Russell described. Visitors met puppies near the office. He talked about careful breeding and family homes. But schedules multiplied. Additional buildings appeared in the records. Numbers passed across Nadine’s desk that didn’t resemble a small household operation.
“At the busiest times, including the associated places, I thought it might be around four hundred dogs. I can’t tell you the current number.”
Bridget wrote that qualification down.
Nadine had also seen medical forms prepared before the examinations they appeared to document. When she questioned it, she was told the office was getting ahead of the workload. Some dates were later corrected. Others remained difficult to reconcile.
“I kept assuming there was a part of it I didn’t understand,” she said. “That somebody above me had it straight.”
She rubbed the bridge of her nose.
“Then I noticed I’d been making that excuse for months.”
She had resigned. Until Bridget called, leaving had been the extent of her action.
“Am I responsible?” she asked.
Bridget put down her pen. “I can’t answer a legal question for you. And I can’t promise that giving information protects you from consequences.”
Nadine stared at the tabletop.
“But the records can be checked. You can help make that possible. Talk to an attorney before deciding how.”
Nadine agreed to seek advice and provide relevant material through appropriate channels.
Before they left, she identified another concern: inspection and administrative approvals bearing the name Curtis Latham. He was an official assigned to certain reviews in the area. Nadine didn’t know whether he’d knowingly done anything wrong. She knew only that some approvals didn’t line up with dates she had entered.
Bridget recorded precisely that.
When she later shared an authorized summary with Dean, he stood beside his kitchen window holding the phone.
“Four hundred?”
“Her estimate. Historical, not a current count.”
He watched Rookie turn twice on his towel and settle.
“What help does she have?”
Bridget paused. “Nadine?”
“She’s scared. Is somebody making sure she has advice?”
“I’ve urged her to get an attorney.”
“Good.”
“You’re not asking how fast she can hand over more papers.”
Dean looked down at the puppy. “I’m trying not to turn people into assignments.”
The next morning, he passed the information to Simone Avery, the investigator coordinating local inquiries. At forty-four, Simone had the measured voice of somebody who didn’t need volume to maintain control.
She explained the jurisdictional boundaries. The kennel was in Georgia. Some sales and transports involved other states. Records had to reach agencies with the authority to assess them.
“And the official?” Dean asked.
“His name appearing on questionable documents is a reason to examine those documents. It doesn’t establish misconduct.”
Dean nodded. She hadn’t offered a timetable, and he made himself leave without demanding one.
Rookie’s cough was easing. With improved health came socks carried triumphantly out of reach, kitchen towels disappearing across the floor, and a squeaking toy deployed during telephone calls with remarkable accuracy.
Sharp metal sounds still frightened him.
Celia advised patient, gradual adjustment, never flooding him with noise or dragging him out of hiding. Dean listened, though once, when a neighbor dropped a metal bin lid, his own first impulse was to check every entrance.
He had taken a step toward the window when he saw Rookie crouched under the table.
Dean stopped. After a moment, he sat on the kitchen floor.
The puppy stayed hidden. Dean let the sounds of the house continue around them: the fan over the stove, a passing car, his own breathing settling. Eventually, Rookie crawled out and put his chin on Dean’s knee.
Dinner waited until they were both ready to move.
Later, a message appeared from Dr. Peter Voss, a counselor Dean had seen several times after leaving the service. Dean had stopped going before he’d found a way to explain much of anything.
A few days earlier, after a difficult night, he’d asked whether they could talk again. Peter had respected his preference to arrange a call.
There was an opening the following afternoon.
Dean held the phone, composing an excuse. Rookie arrived with a toy and dropped it on his boot.
Dean erased the excuse and accepted the appointment.
Across town, Bridget was checking her messages before closing her laptop. An anonymous post had begun spreading. It used an old photograph of Dean in uniform and accused him of taking someone’s puppy to manufacture public sympathy. Replies questioned his service and his motives. No ownership evidence accompanied the claims.
She preserved the post and called him.
Dean answered with Rookie asleep against his ankle.
“Bridget?”
“I need you to hear this from me,” she said. “Someone’s publicly accusing you of stealing him…”
To read the rest of the story – CLICK the NEXT button 👇👇👇