CHAPTER ELEVEN: WHAT THE PAPER COULD NOT SHOW

Bell examined the unsigned authorization while Ortiz asked Carol to move away from the entrance.
The county investigator, a woman named Serena Walsh, joined them under the pavilion.
Walsh had spent the morning comparing animal identification photographs with the facility’s files.
She was plainly exhausted and plainly unwilling to leave before she understood what had happened.
“We’ve found enough inconsistencies to suspend today’s adoptions,” she told Daniel and Amy.
“Can you stop the animals from being transferred?” Amy asked.
“We can issue a hold on animals whose ownership is disputed while we follow the applicable procedures.”
“What about the others?”
“We’re examining those files individually.”
Amy didn’t like the distinction, but Daniel appreciated that Walsh was not promising what she couldn’t legally deliver.


They needed to distinguish people who had surrendered animals voluntarily from those whose consent had been invented.
A rushed blanket assumption might harm the innocent animals and their new caretakers as much as it helped the victims.
Walsh asked Carol whether the printed authorization represented an isolated mistake.
“There are others,” Carol admitted.
“How many?”
“I don’t know what happened after they left my hands.”
“How many did you mail?”
“Nolan brought me a stack every Monday.”
“How large a stack?”
Carol pressed her lips together.
“Sometimes three, sometimes ten.”
Amy looked stunned.
“For how long?”
“Seven months.”
The magnitude settled over the group.
Six envelopes were only the first set of suspicious letters identified by postal investigators.
There might be far more customers who had accepted a refund, signed a waiver,

or simply believed an animal had been surrendered by someone else.
Bell asked how Carol had become involved.
She said Nolan had first approached her when she complained about a loose dog that Meadow Haven staff had walked near her driveway.
Instead of arguing, Nolan offered her a part-time position answering neighborhood concerns.
Carol had liked the attention and the authority that came with the work.
She enjoyed telling dissatisfied customers that the matter had already been reviewed.
When Nolan asked her to mail follow-up forms from her house, she accepted without asking why a commercial kennel needed a volunteer’s residential return address.
“And when people denied signing the forms?” Walsh asked.
“He told me they were trying to get money back after leaving their animals with us.”
“Did you believe him?”
“At first.”
“When did that change?”
Carol looked across the pavilion at an elderly man holding a photograph of his missing spaniel.
“When a woman came to my door with a cat carrier and asked me where her mother’s cat had gone.”
Daniel recognized the description of Tessa.
“You told her to leave,” he said.
Carol nodded.
“Because Nolan said he’d already placed the cat.”
“And you believed that?”
“I was afraid he had.”
Walsh stepped between them before the exchange became an argument.
“You can explain your knowledge in a formal interview.”
Carol nodded and wiped her hands on her cardigan.
She had given the inspectors documents, but she had not yet explained what she had done to the people receiving them.
That explanation would come later, without Daniel needing to shout it out of her.