Page 14 of Death on Gallows Path

It wasn’t that I didn’t believe her about the author client, but there was something in her voice . . .

A conversation with Kit surfaced in my memory about moral injury, psychological harm when a person witnesses, fails to stop, or participates in something that goes against that person’s conscience.

Something like Clara seeing a dog not being treated properly.

Before I could pursue that now on the phone, Clara said, “You know how when you get a new car or you’re shopping for one, you suddenly see them everywhere?”

I didn’t see the connection to what time we were going to the dog park. However, this seemed like a safe topic, with no apparent connection to dognapping.

“Um, I haven’t bought a new car in a while.” My sedan was bought used when I moved here, with my priorities being reliable and not noticeable. If I’d suddenly noticed more of that model it would have been a failure.

“Me, either,” she said. “The van is ancient. But it’s an actual phenomenon. In fact, it’s called the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon.”

“Have you been talking to Kit?” I asked. My great-aunt knew terms like that.

“Yes. But not about this. I was talking to another of my authors and this came up.”

“Okay, so two guys named Baader and Meinhof noticed lots of cars like they’d bought—”

“Oh, no. It wasn’t like that. They didn’t notice cars at all.” She paused. “At least not that I know of. I suppose they might have, but that’s not how it happened.”

“They weren’t studying something or other and came across this?”

“No. They led a 1970s terrorist group in Germany.”

I parted my lips to ask another question, then closed them. Whatever I asked she’d answer, but that might not be the most direct route to a real answer. “Tell me what you’re trying to tell me, Clara.”

“The Baader-Meinhof phenomenon got its name in the mid-1990s, when a guy in Minnesota named Terry Mullen wrote a letter to the local newspaper.”

Do you know how much I wanted to ask what this had to do with a German terrorist group from two decades earlier, much less noticing cars, and even more much less how it connected to our going to the dog park early?

My exercise of restraint deserved an Olympic gold, one each from the Winter and Summer Games.

“Terry Mullen said he’d been discussing the Baader-Meinhof Gang from twenty years earlier with a friend one day and the next day there was an article about the gang, when it hadn’t been in the news at all for years and years and years. He called it the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon and it caught on. Probably because everybody’s experienced it, like with cars.”

“Uh-huh.” That’s all I allowed myself. I was thinking it should have been called the Terry Mullen phenomenon, but, remember, I was restraining myself.

“It’s also called the frequency illusion, because it’s not that the thing actually happens more frequently than it did before — the number of your particular kind of car being on the road or mentions of an old terrorist group — it’s that you notice it. They think that’s because our brains prioritize recent information, like what kind of car we bought or are considering, and that’s what makes us notice similar ones.”

“Okay,” I said slowly. That was interesting. And I had to give her credit for getting from the 1970s terrorist group to the 1990s Minnesota letter-writer to noticing cars, but the leap to here and now . . .

“When I drove into town this morning—” She is much more of a morning person than I am. “—I saw the gray-haired man from over to our left at class, the one with the little black dog. I mean, I’ve seen him in town before, but this time I remembered him because of class last night. And then when I got near Shep’s, I saw that guy who owns Lucifer.”

“Damon Swindell,” I said.

“Uh-huh. And he was talking to this woman — not anybody from class. The way they were standing . . . Well, I wondered . . . Though they weren’t super blatant.”

“Like that look between him and Zoley Georger?”

“More obvious than that. Much more. She was standing in the open car door and he had one hand on the door and another on the roof, like another ten inches and they’d be in a clinch. She was all for it, too. And here’s the most important part. There was a guy watching them, standing where they couldn’t see him easily. I couldn’t see much of his face, but the cords on the side of his neck were standing out the way they do when some people are angry.”

So Damon Swindell, came to training with his wife last night, exchanged a certain kind of look with Zoley Georger before dismissing her ploy that she needed his physical support, then was near-clinching with a third woman the next morning, while observed by a guy who’d appeared Not Happy.

Having wound through the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon, past the gray-haired man from class, and into the center of Haines Tavern, Kentucky, I was as sure as I could be that Clara’s primary motive for going now was that Donna would be at the dog park.

Donna knew a lot about people in North Bend County, especially the dog owners.

“How much earlier do you want to go to the dog park?” I asked.