Three days later she knocked on Marcus’s door carrying a covered casserole dish wrapped in a clean kitchen towel. She was smiling the tight, satisfied smile she used when she believed she had already won. “I made extra,” she said. “Thought you might be lonely without that dog of yours.”
Marcus almost closed the door in her face. Something in her eyes stopped him. He took the dish because refusing would have given her another story to tell the neighbors. She did not leave. She stood on the porch while he carried it to the kitchen counter and lifted the lid.
The meat was dark, shredded, seasoned heavily with garlic, rosemary, and something sweet that almost masked the underlying smell. It looked carefully prepared. It looked like the kind of dish a neighbor might bring after a death in the family.
Karen’s voice came from the open doorway, calm and clear enough for any neighbor walking past to hear.
“That was your dog.”
Marcus did not move for several seconds. The words hung in the air between them like smoke. He looked at the casserole. Then he looked at Karen. She was still smiling, waiting for the reaction she had imagined for days.
“I poisoned him first so he wouldn’t suffer,” she continued, as if explaining a reasonable household decision. “Then I cooked him properly. You should be grateful. Most people wouldn’t have bothered with the seasoning.”
Marcus set the lid back on the dish without speaking. He walked past her to the front yard, took out his phone, and called the police. While he waited he opened the security app. The side-gate camera had recorded everything. Karen entering his yard after midnight three nights earlier with a plastic container of meat. Karen carrying Cooper’s limp body through the gate an hour later, the dog’s head hanging, the black fur unmistakable under the porch light. Karen returning to her own garage with a large black trash bag that shifted as she walked.
The officers arrived in under ten minutes. They took the casserole as evidence. They took Karen into custody on the porch while she was still insisting she had done the neighborhood a favor by removing a sanitary problem. One of the officers, a young woman named Rebecca Shaw, looked at the camera footage twice before she spoke. “She brought him the body,” Shaw said quietly to her partner. “Cooked.”