I did something I normally don’t do; I made breakfast. I flipped some pancakes, fried some bacon and treated Medusa to some of my special toast that I slather in real Wisconsin butter and top with cinnamon sugar; my grandmother’s recipe.
I poured us both a cup of coffee and added a shot of Martel Cognac. Bear was sitting by her side looking at her with his woeful St. Bernard eyes. She couldn’t resist. She kept feeding him pieces of her bacon.
Bear farted.
“Most dogs bark when they beg, he farts.” She gave him more bacon.
“Ewwww, he stinks.”
“Yes, he does. That’s what happens when you feed him table scraps. I’ll take him outside.”
I led Bear out the back door. He looked back at Medusa. I pushed him out and closed the door behind him.
I could hear him whine and scratch at the door. I ignored him.
After we cleaned up the dishes, I poured another shot of Cognac in our coffee and we retired to the living room and sat down on the couch in front of the fire.
The sun was coming up and melting the snow. I hoped the temperature would stay above 32 degrees for a few days.
I put my arm around her.
She sighed and put her head on my shoulder.
“I’m gonna go take a hot shower. It’s like a normal shower, but with me in it.”
“Mind if I join you?”
“I was hoping you would.”
When the hot water was finally gone, we got out and started to dry off.
I asked her, “How did you get in this racket? Private detective work, I mean.” She smiled.
“I was enrolled at Georgia State University, at night, I worked part-time jobs waiting tables in some of Atlanta’s finest bars. There I met a man who offered me a job working in Christopher Kane’s Law Offices. I didn’t know it at the time, but Christopher Kane had tracked me down. I found out later, the reason he tracked me down was because I am his daughter. He had a fling with my birth mother, his sister-in-law, Hilga Haller, and knocked her up. They decided not to tell the sister, his wife Helene. Hilga had me and immediately put me up for adoption and returned home to Wisconsin.
“I started by learning the job of a law clerk. One day a client of Christopher’s, a Bail Bondsman, needed some work done finding a young woman who failed to show up for her court date and skipped on her bail. Christopher asked me to see if I could find where she went. I found her and talked her into turning herself in. That impressed Christopher and from there I became a skip trace professional.
“It wasn’t long before I started doing skip traces for some of the Bail Bondsmen in Atlanta and Christopher and his partners began to use me for the majority of their investigative work. I was good at it and I knew Christopher was proud of me; and not just because he gave me a nice raise, but, by the way he looked at me. I could see it in his eyes. I wanted to please him, to make my father proud, so I worked hard; harder than anyone else.
“I was in the office, working late when he called from Hogansville, a small town located southwest of Atlanta. He asked me to pull some files for him that were located in his private office. His client was the mayor of Hogansville who was accused of illegal gun sales; he was nothing but a gun runner, running guns for Darrell Mason throughout the southern part of Georgia as well as the panhandle of Florida. He was one of the many mayors in south Georgia that Darrell Mason had on his payroll. The papers Christopher wanted were in the file cabinet behind his<