Free Shepherd's Crook by Sheila Webster Boneham

for corporations choosing to set up shop in Indiana. Because they’ll want to come here for the uneducated work force . I was about to turn the radio off when the next story made me turn the volume up instead.
    â€œA Nevada man, Ray Turnbull, was found dead at a property belonging to Collin Lahmeyer of Fort Wayne on Sunday morning.” I registered the owner’s name even as I listened to the rest of the story. Collin was a member of Tom’s retriever training club, and his family owned another property where the group trained frequently. It was also a property where a murder had occurred the previous August. Collin couldn’t be happy about having another man die violently on his property.
    The announcer’s words brought my wandering thoughts to heel. A Nevada man? Until that moment, I’d had no idea where Ray was from, but that seemed odd since he had been working on and off for Evan and Summer for at least a couple of years. Surely he had a house or apartment or something near the Winslows’ farm. Wouldn’t that make him an Indiana man by now? “Police say that preliminary evidence suggests that Mr. Turnbull died of asphyxiation, and suicide is suspected.” The reporter, who sounded very young, went on. “Some sheep also disappeared earlier from the same location, but police wouldn’t say whether the two incidents were related.”
    I turned the radio off and thought about what I knew and didn’t know. Ray was from Nevada. Some faint memory made me think that Summer was from somewhere out west, but I wasn’t sure where, or even why I thought I knew that. I did know that she came to Indiana originally to go to Purdue, where she had earned a degree in animal sciences. Her diploma, issued four years earlier, hung in her office at the farm. Evan was a Hoosier, born and bred. He grew up on a farm near Bluffton, about thirty miles south of Fort Wayne. Had Ray and Summer known each other before they landed in the Midwest? And who were the two goons in the sloppy suits who were hanging around on Sunday? They didn’t fit in at a dog event, and the encounters I saw between them and Evan and Ray didn’t exactly smack of friendships.
    My thoughts were spinning like circus Poodles by the time I pulled into the field and parked my van near the arena, now free of ropes and tents and dogmobiles. So this is Collin Lahmeyer’s property . I wondered whether Tom knew that. Surely he would have told me if he did. A black sedan and small red Honda sat side by side at the end of the arena, but no one seemed to be around. I got Jay out and attached the longline we use for tracking to his collar. No point using his tracking harness, which is designed to allow the dog to pull when he’s following a scent. We would be searching, not tracking, because I had nothing with Bonnie’s scent to get Jay started. If Drake or Leo or Pixel went missing, I could tell him to find them by name and he would track the familiar scent, but he knew Bonnie only for quick doggy hellos. I would have to trust that if he sensed her where I couldn’t see her, he’d let me know, as he would with any animal. I shut the van, buttoned the top button on my jacket, and wished I’d brought a hat or earmuffs to cut the wind.
    â€œOkay, Bub, let’s see if we have any better luck today.” Jay bounced up and down a couple of times, and then trotted about twenty feet ahead of me, keeping the line loose. He had his nose to the ground and began weaving left and right and back again across the roadway, pausing to check occasional clumps of grass before moving on. He took his time with a large rock, hiked his leg on it, and moved on.
    As we proceeded, I watched for places where a smallish dog might hide, but I didn’t see any likely spots. If Bonnie were injured, she would probably try to hole up somewhere. If she were frightened, there was no telling how far she might have run. She