she said, “I’m not sure. Liam said that they needed to talk to me. Since Hannah is picking me up and will drop me off at home, I won’t need you to wait on me. You can make the pharmaceutical order before you leave today.” Her response seemed to appease Annette, and they chatted amiably the rest of the way to the clinic.
An hour later, she smiled at the little boy who rushed into the examination room with his father, an excited German shepherd puppy bounding around, straining on his leash. “Oh, what do we have here?” she asked.
“We got a new puppy!” the little boy called out loudly, his hand rubbing the puppy’s head.
His dad chuckled while shushing his son. “Jonny, you don’t gotta shout the house down. Use your inside voice.”
“Sorry,” Jonny whispered. “His name is Bosco.”
“Well, let’s take a look at him,” she said, kneeling onto the floor, her hands moving over the wiggling dog. The puppy was adorable, and she could not help but laugh at the enthusiastic antics as it jumped around. She examined the ears, eyes, mouth, teeth, and then moved to its body, checking its bones and fur. “He’s got a nice double coat. Where did you get Bosco?”
“We found him,” Jonny’s dad replied. “He looks like a purebred.”
Her gaze shot up, seeing the pride on the man’s face. She knew that purebred German shepherds could go from as low as five hundred dollars to two thousand.
Before she had a chance to say anything else, Jonny’s dad added, “He’d been running through our fields for a couple of days, and I thought he must belong to someone. Then Jonny fed him, and he ate like he was starved. Been with us for the past week.”
“Oh… um...”
“I know, Doc Collins. You’re going to ask why we didn’t try to find an owner, but we did. I made some calls, put up some flyers, but nothing. No one’s claimed him. Someone told me that there was a fancy big-dog breeder about forty miles at the north end of Acawmacke County. I made a call to check if they’d lost a puppy.”
“What did they say?”
He rubbed the whiskers on his chin and scrunched his nose. “I think I insulted them. Told me they’d never be so careless as to lose a puppy.”
“Who was the breeder?”
“Let’s see… Bender. That was the name. Bender.”
Standing, she made notations in Bosco’s chart, twisting her head around as Susan walked in to assist. Looking back toward Mr. Tolson, she continued, “I’m going to scan him to see if he has a chip. That would make sense if he was someone’s pet.”
She ran the chip reader over the wiggling dog from nose tip to tail, trying to ignore the way Jonny’s face held worry. Nothing. Turning back to them, she shrugged. “Well, if someone did lose him, they didn’t have an identifier chip inserted. If he was from a breeder, he certainly would.”
Taking the papers from Susan that Mr. Tolson had given when he first came in, she glanced through them. “I estimate him to be about nine weeks old, and with no background information, we’ll give him vaccinations. And then you can come in four weeks after that.”
Susan held the puppy while Samantha administered the injections. With a final rub down, she said goodbye to the Tolsons. As soon as they left the room to settle their account with Annette, she turned to her assistant. “Have you ever heard of Bender breeders?”
Shaking her head, Susan looked up from the papers she was filling out. Catching Samantha’s gaze, she cocked her head to the side. “Suspicious?”
“I don’t know,” she said, shrugging. “Bosco seemed active, alert, happy to play with Jonny. The next time I go to the shelter, I think I’ll ask them about this breeder. Bosco seemed purebred, although… well…” Giving her head a shake, she continued, “There are people charging a lot of money for them when they’re nothing more than puppy mills. If their business isn’t legitimate, it might be why they lied and said the dog wasn’t theirs. Better to take the loss than have someone snooping into their business.”
Before she had a chance to ponder breeders anymore, she was called into the next exam room. By the end of the day, she finally had a chance to settle into the chair in her office and pulled up her computer. A quick Internet search gave evidence to a website for Bender’s Breeding in Acawmacke County. She was surprised,