Free Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) by Neil S. Plakcy

hanging behind her. “Cobra venom is a powerful neurotoxin that acts as a painkiller when administered in small quantities. We used to use it to treat something called an acral lick granuloma. You have a dog, don’t you? Collie or golden retriever?”
    “A golden. How did you know?”
    “The fine hairs on your slacks. At a glance it looked like one of those two breeds.” She looked up. “Imagine your dog gets a tiny sore, say on his paw, and he licks it. Putting medication doesn’t help, and it starts to spread, and the skin around the area gets thick, scarred and irritated. That’s an acral lick granuloma.”
    “Yuck.”
    “It’s very tough to handle. You end up with little pockets of bacteria, broken hair follicles, plugged and scarred oil glands and dilated and inflamed capillaries. If you surgically remove them, the dog just licks at the sutures or incision line after the surgery heals and creates a brand new granuloma right where the original one was.”
    “Sounds terrible.”
    “It is. Some theories say that the dog’s focus on licking it is psychological, and today vets prescribe anti-anxiety drugs to stop the licking, and antibiotics to clear up the sores. But back in the day, we used cobra venom to numb the nerves and shut out the pain.”
    I shivered, thinking what would happen if poor Rochester ever had one of those. I was sure it would drive both of us crazy.
    I picked up one of the puppets. It looked like a plush gray crab with a starfish attached on a long, nobby cord. I thought Rochester would destroy it in about sixty seconds.
    “I keep those around in case I need an extra brain cell,” she said, holding another of them up to her head and wiggling it so the starfish part bobbed up and down. She turned the label toward me. “See? It’s a brain cell.”
    “I could use a few of those myself.”
    “I use it in class. This is e-coli,” she said, holding up the fuzzy oval with the tentacles. “And these? They’re gonorrhea microbes.” She showed me a handful of little fuzzy blobs with eyes. “You don’t want to have these hanging around your system.”
    “Certainly not.”
    “Where were we? Oh, cobra venom. Your victim might have used cobra venom in the past for a problem, and still had some around her kennel.”
    “Not my victim,” I said. “Just a kind of – victim.”
    I thanked Dr. Conrad. “I’ll bet if you were teaching here when I was a student I’d have liked science.”
    “Back when you were a student the kids came to college better prepared,” she said. “But thank you for the compliment.”
    On my way back to my office I called Rick. “Did you find any cobra venom at Rita’s farm?”
    “When we did the search we didn’t know the cause of death. I need to get back up to the farm later.”
    I told him what I’d learned from Jackie Conrad. “Rita probably had some of the venom in her kennel. Want Rochester and me to meet you there?”
    Rick groaned. “Come on, Steve, you’re not a detective.”
    “But you know Rochester has a unique talent for this kind of thing. And don’t you want to get this case solved?”
    I waited. It was almost like I could hear him thinking through the phone. Finally he said, “Nobody else can know about me taking you out there.”
    “Of course not. And it’s not an active crime scene any more, right? You’ve already been through the place.”
    “I’ll meet you at five-thirty. We should still have enough light.”
    I started to say something else, but he said, “You should hang up before I realize what a dumb idea this is and change my mind.”
    I did what he suggested.
    Green Hall was at the far side of the campus, near the football stadium, and since it was such a nice afternoon I took a detour in that direction. I felt guilty that I didn’t have Rochester with me; I rarely took a walk without him. But this once I’d let myself get away with it.
    One of the guys in my dorm freshman year was a football recruit, and many of from