Josef Gunther — “The Empty Leash” (Missing Pet)

 Josef Gunther — “The Empty Leash” (Missing Pet)

Josef Gunther preferred the early hours, when the city was still deciding what kind of day it would be. He kept a small office above a bakery on a side street and answered the telephone himself. Most of his work involved people who had lost something they could not report to the police without answering questions they preferred not to answer. This morning the something was a dog.

The woman who sat across from him was precise. She gave the dog’s name, breed, age, and the exact minute it had disappeared from the courtyard behind her building. She had already checked the usual places. Neighbors had seen nothing. The leash was still hanging on the hook by the door.

Gunther listened without interrupting. He had spent years as a military policeman before the work became something else; he still noticed what people left out. The woman did not mention a recent argument with her husband. She did not mention that the husband had left for a business trip two days earlier and had not called. She did mention that the dog had been a gift from her husband’s sister.

He walked the courtyard that afternoon. The gate latch worked. The paving stones showed the usual scuffs. Near the rear wall he found a single dark hair caught on a splinter of wood—too coarse for the woman’s own coat, too fine for the dog. He followed the alley behind the building until it opened onto a wider street used by delivery vans. One of the van drivers, questioned while he loaded bread, remembered a man in a dark jacket carrying a covered basket the size of a medium dog. The man had paid cash and asked to be dropped near the old freight station.

Gunther reached the station as the light was failing. The platforms were empty. Behind the last shed he found the basket, empty, and the dog’s collar on the ground beside it. The tags were still attached. A short distance farther, under a loading ramp, the dog itself was waiting—unharmed, damp, and annoyed. Someone had fed it and left a bowl of water.

Gunther sat on the ramp until the dog stopped growling at him. Then he walked it back through the streets to the woman’s building. She opened the door, saw the dog, and put a hand on the frame to steady herself. Gunther gave her the collar and the short note he had found folded inside the basket: the sister’s handwriting, a single line saying the dog would be returned when the sister’s brother answered his telephone.

The woman took the note without reading it aloud. She paid Gunther in cash and closed the door. From the street he heard the dog’s nails on the floor and the low sound of a voice speaking into a telephone. He walked back toward the bakery. The case was finished. The rest of it belonged to the people who had started it.