He got up and crossed the room to a carved oak breakfront he was using as a catchall—keys, junk mail, tools, paperbacks, a silver tea set with the creamer missing. He picked up a framed color photograph, looking at it for a moment before he crossed the room again and handed it to me. “That’s the two of them.”

I angled the photo to eliminate the glare. Liam must have inherited his mother’s coloring. Unlike his father, he was dark-haired and dark-eyed. He did have his father’s physique in a lighter body style. He wore a black leather jacket, jeans, and black boots. He was hunkered beside the young dog, which stood facing the camera with a wary air of intelligence. He looked like a German shepherd except that his torso was slimmer and his legs were longer. His coat was medium length and appeared rough, a grizzled black with layers of gray near his head. The mask of white across his face attested to the strong genetic presence of wolf.

“He’s beautiful. The name, Ulf, as in ‘wolf’?”

Flannagan smiled. “Liam came up with that. He was just a little fluff ball when he got him. Six weeks old. Even as a pup, he was a handful. I never once heard him bark, but when he howled, even as a baby, it would raise the hair on the back of your neck. Dog like that is always testing—the more wolf, the more testing. Liam was alpha male, which meant when he died, no one else could really handle the dog.”

“So he reverted to you?”

“That’s about the size of it. Wolves are pack animals. They have a clear social structure. There’s only room for one leader, and it better be you. You want alpha status with a dog like that; you have to teach him he’s subordinate. You don’t play tug-of-war with him. He doesn’t sleep on your bed. You go through the door first and he eats when you say so and not a minute before. With Liam gone and me stepping in after the fact, there was no way the dog would accept me as dominant. I tried to treat him as Liam had, but he wasn’t impressed. He put up with me. Beyond that, he obeyed if he felt like it, and the rest was my problem.”

“Must have been a strange relationship.”