“I don’t know.”

“Maybe somebody hooked my keys out of my purse. It wouldn’t be that hard to do. Somebody could have come in while I was at the Poodle Factory, got ahold of my key ring, had a locksmith copy everything, then dropped the keys back in my bag.”

“All without your noticing?”

“Why not? Say they swipe the keys while they’re inquiring about getting a dog groomed, and then they come back to make an appointment and return the keys. It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“You leave your bag where anybody can get at it?”

“Not as a general rule, but who knows? Anyway, what the hell difference does it make? We’re not just locking the barn after the horse has been stolen. We’re checking the locks and dusting the bolt for fingerprints.” She frowned. “Maybe we should have done that.”

“Dusted for prints? Even if there’d been any, what good would they have done us? We’re not the cops, Carolyn.”

“Couldn’t you get Ray Kirschmann to run a check on a set of fingerprints?”

“Not out of the goodness of his heart, and you can’t really run a check on a single print unless you’ve already got a suspect in hand. You need a whole set of prints, which we wouldn’t have even if whoever it was left prints, which they probably didn’t. And they’d have to have been fingerprinted anyway for a check to reveal them, and-”

“Forget I mentioned it, okay?”

“Forget you mentioned what?”

“Can’t remember. Well, let’s just-shit,” she said, and moved to answer the phone. “Hello? Huh? Hold on, I just-shit, they hung up.”

“Who?”

“The Nazi. I’m supposed to look in the mailbox. I looked, remember? All I got was my Con Ed bill and that was enough bad news for one day. And there was nothing in the slot at the Poodle Factory except a catalog of grooming supplies and a flier from one of the animal cruelty organizations. There won’t be another delivery today, will there?”