Potash growled. “You said yes to him, you deal with him.”
“I have rules,” I said again, though I knew it would mean nothing to Potash. I stared at Boy Dog, panting placidly on the floor, then looked up at Potash. “We’ll give him back.”
“She won’t take him back.”
“Then we’ll…” I hesitated, knowing that anything I said would put the dog in danger. Put him out on the street? Leave him tied to someone else’s door? Send him to a pound? My rule said to avoid animals, but the purpose behind it was to protect them. I couldn’t let myself hurt an animal, even through inaction. I’d hurt too many people that way already.
“I’ll call the animal shelter,” said Potash, “but you keep him in here until they come.”
“Wait,” I said. “We have to give him to someone who wants him.”
For the first time, his facade cracked and he stared at me in a grimace of complete confusion. “Why?”
“Because I won’t let him get hurt.”
“The shelter won’t hurt him.”
“But they won’t help him either,” I said. “I have rules.”
He stared at the dog a minute. “So what do you want to do?”
I want to hit this dog with the sharp edge of a shovel until I can’t recognize it anymore. I closed my eyes and breathed. “I want to put an ad in the … I don’t know. No one reads the paper, and I don’t use the Internet. Craigslist? Is that a thing?”
“Yes, that’s a thing. You don’t have your laptop?”
“I leave it at work.”
“That’s not the point of a laptop.”
“Do you have one?” I asked. “Or a phone?”
“Not a smartphone.” He stepped backward into the hall. “We’ll post an ad tomorrow. I’m closing this so he can’t get back out.”
“Okay—” I started, but he shut the door, and I heard his footsteps walk away. I looked at the dog. “Hey.”
It didn’t respond.
“I don’t want to hurt you, okay?” I’d had him here before, and he’d been fine. It was only a few hours, though, and this would be all night. I sat back down, watching Boy Dog like I expected him to attack, or turn into a bowl of flowers. He looked back, mouth open, panting softly. “How’d you get your name?” I asked. “Why Boy Dog, instead of … anything else in the entire world? Everybody has a reason.”
What did Mary Gardner do that she didn’t have to do?
4
I caught Agent Ostler in the lobby of the building where we rented an office. “Children are weak.”
She looked at me a moment. “Is this something you need to talk to Dr. Trujillo about?”
“No,” I said, “it’s about Mary Gardner. She targets children because they’re weak. She needs somebody weak.”
“She kills the terminally ill; they’re all weak.”
“But children are weaker,” I said. “Not just physically, but their immune systems. They haven’t been exposed to as many diseases as adults, so they haven’t built up the antibodies to fight them off. Children recover from disease more quickly because they’re resilient, but they’re also far more likely to get sick in the first place. That’s how she does it.”
Ostler started walking again, forcing me to hurry to catch up. “Are you suggesting that she’s the one putting these children in the hospital in the first place? That would mean contacting them months or even years before they die; we have no evidence for that kind of behavior.”
“That’s not what I’m saying at all,” I said, following her into the elevator. “I’m saying we have it backwards. We thought she was taking something from the children, whether it was their health or their healing power or whatever, which is why she gets healthy and they die. But why does it have to be so complicated? How do you take ‘healing power’ from someone? It doesn’t make sense.”
“None of it makes sense,” said Ostler. “They’re supernatural creatures who don’t follow any rules.”
“But they do,” I said. “They always do, whether we understand those rules or not. And the simpler answer is always the best. Mary Gardner isn’t stealing some kind of healing power, she’s targeting already-sick children and giving them her own illnesses.”
Ostler turned to me, paying real attention for the first time that morning. “That would mean…”