Doggone, If This Isn’t a Case for Suzy Burk, Pet Detective

With only Jim Carrey’s “Ace Ventura” as a reference point, I thought pet detectives were products of fiction. But there in front of me was Suzy Burk’s business card: “Suzy the Retriever: Practice Limited to Missing Canines and Felines.”

And there was Suzy herself, seated across the table and discussing her latest case--a missing 10-month-old beagle named Alice.

I asked for the details. “It was the 11th of July, Friday, between 1:30 and 2 p.m.,” Suzy said, reviewing her sheaf of notes. “The subject had just had a bath and so was not wearing the collar that responds to the underground perimeter barrier that gives her enough of a shock to keep her within the property.”

A member of a breed notorious for its “escape” mentality, the beagle dashed off to a local Boys and Girls Club, then to a nearby park, Suzy said. “The escape scene wasn’t too far from the incident scene,” she said, referring to the spot where two women and a San Diego County sheriff’s deputy collared the friendly pup. The deputy then made a fateful mistake: Instead of taking Alice to a shelter, he gave her to one of the women with the admonishment: “Give it a good home.”

Alice’s owners, Chris and Cathy Caradine of Solana Beach, have forgiven the apologetic deputy for his blunder. But that hasn’t brought Alice home.

“She’s like our baby,” Cathy said. “It’s not just the emotional attachment, but the feeling of having something stolen or taken from you. We got her from a Missouri farm that specializes in hunting beagles. It wasn’t just a dog we could replace. She was important to us. It took me two or three weeks until the tears dried up--every time I saw her toys lying around. . . . I left her bed in her usual sleeping spot.”

Suzy got the case a week ago, after overhearing Chris Caradine lamenting the loss to someone else while in an auto parts store in Laguna Beach. “Serendipitous with a capital S,” is how Suzy described their meeting. Suzy was wearing a T-shirt sporting the name of a dog food company and told Chris she’d overheard his tale and that she had a long history of finding missing pets.

“She just seemed to have insights into things I hadn’t thought about,” Chris said. “She seemed to know what she was talking about.”

Besides, he said, “to be honest, it’s like we tried everything else and haven’t had any luck.”

Suzy got the case on Aug. 13 (“about 6 p.m.,” she said). The trail was a month old.

Suzy said the deputy described the woman believed to have Alice as “age 30 or less, 5 feet 4 inches or a little more and about 125 pounds. And she was real cute. Those were his words. She had a tight top on, red lipstick and red nail polish.”

The deputy remembered the woman saying she lived in Orange County. She drove a late-model two-door Nissan or Ford Probe, red in color. Immediately after getting Alice, the woman went to a nearby pet store and bought a matching red collar and leash.

Suzy is calling her, “the woman who loves red.”

The pet store clerk, “a young lad named Jason,” got the impression the woman, who paid cash, hadn’t previously owned a dog, Suzy said. “That’s good evidence, good data.”

Suzy is operating on the theory the woman has kept the dog but probably didn’t license her. Most pet owners don’t, she said, until caught by police. Unlike Chris, who has spent hours canvassing Orange County shelters, Suzy is concentrating on veterinary hospitals, assuming the new owner would be curious about the dog’s health.

Suzy showed me a sheet of paper with three page-length columns listing vets in upper middle-class Orange County areas that she thinks the woman might live in. “Yesterday, I called over 60 vets in the Newport Beach area,” she said. “Tomorrow, I’m going to South County.”

She will canvass specific neighborhoods, in the hope that neighbors have noticed a new beagle on the block. “I’ve had it work before,” Suzy said. Children are especially attuned to new animals in a neighborhood, she said.

A resident of Washington, D.C., Suzy, 45, said she’s staying with friends in Orange County on a temporary basis. I wasn’t completely clear on what jobs she has had, but she said her background is in engineering and that it was a research project years ago on missing pets and owners that got her into the detective business.

“I hadn’t heard of anyone else doing it, but it turns out there was. This was way before the [“Ace Ventura, Pet Detective”] movie. It was in the early ‘80s in Cambridge, Mass.”

She admitted she’s not actively in the detective business these days but said she’s had several hundred cases over the years. She puts the chances of finding Alice at more than 50%.

“There’s a 95% chance she’s still living with this woman,” she said. “I think she lives in an upper middle-class neighborhood and is still the owner of just one pet. I got the idea she didn’t have children but has a husband. I think she’ll buy the kind of dog food you buy in pet stores. I think I’ll check with pet stores and see if someone has mentioned buying food for a beagle.”

She didn’t set a fee, saying she isn’t interested in the $300 reward. “I’m not a bounty hunter. Each case is a custom thing, but like with these people [the Caradines], I spent one night on their carpet, camping there. Then, I go where I need to go. I’m about as flexible as you can get. Very often, I get to know them [the pets] even though I’ve never seen them face to face. I feel I know Alice very well now. Although it’s less important to know her behavior to a T, because she’s probably not at large.”

Chris Caradine isn’t worried about the open-ended arrangement. “Honestly, I don’t know a whole lot about her, but I have a good feeling she knows the right approach to take. Basically, we want our pet back and are willing to try the next step. I didn’t even know about pet detectives. We even thought about hiring a private investigator, but the price would be out of this world, so we said, ‘Let’s not even think about that.’ ”

Suzy, who said she tries “not to be unrealistic,” about her work, remains quietly optimistic.

“I’d like this to be an odyssey with a happy ending,” she said. “That’s what I’m seeing.”

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by calling (714) 966-7821 or by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or by e-mail to dana.parsons@latimes.com