It must have been neat and tidy, even pretty, before someone had killed all the dogs and left. The gates of eight of the kennels had been ripped off their hinges and thrown willy-nilly. Some of them could have been rehung with new hinges, but some of them were badly damaged. One had been crumpled into a ball.

In front of the kennels, eight dogs lay on their sides, each with a single deep wound that had laid open their necks. I recognized the dog that had put his head on my knee and blinked back tears.

“I hate it when the dog dies at the end,” said Gary, his voice tight. He slapped the chain-link wall of a kennel. “I tore up my copy of Old Yeller and threw it away.”

Lucia didn’t flinch at the noise, just rubbed her dead dog’s uncropped ears.

Adam gave me a sharp look, like there was something I wasn’t seeing. I looked again and drew in a breath. The dogs were laid out, staged just like the women Guayota had killed. But this staging wasn’t for us, there was a formality here, each dog in front of its kennel.

Innocent sacrifices.

I called Kyle’s number.

“What?” he asked. The foggy connection told me that he was on his Bluetooth connection and driving. He should have already been at Honey’s.

“Did the Canary Islanders sacrifice dogs to Guayota?” I asked. “And why aren’t you already at Honey’s?” The dead dogs and the state of Lucia’s bedroom made me sharper than I should have been.

“First,” said Kyle grumpily, “we are very nearly at Honey’s. We’d have left sooner if I hadn’t had to figuratively hold the hands of one of my clients whose soon-to-be-ex wife called and said she was sorry for all the times she slept with other people and couldn’t they reconsider their marriage. The answer to that one is no, by the way, because she darn near drove him to suicide once, and he’s a good man and deserves better.”

“Okay,” I said. “What about the dogs?”

“I know they used to sacrifice goats to Achamán,” he said. “One of the guided tours we took mentioned it. I don’t know anything more.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I’ll see you both when we get to Honey’s.”

I looked at the dead dogs again. They still looked like sacrifices to me. Witches drew power from pain and suffering, but also from death. Gary had said that Guayota needed a source of power. There had been dead dogs among the bodies I’d discovered out in Finley, too. But I didn’t think Guayota had made sacrifices to himself.