Bug Man Suspense 3-in-1 Bundle (63 page)

“You sure know how to walk quietly,” Nick said.

“I heard you stomping through my woods a mile away,” she replied. “I didn't need a dog to find you.”

“That's what my girlfriend used to say.”

The witch just looked at him.

“It's a joke,” Nick said. “Don't witches like jokes?”

“Funny ones.”

Nick glanced down at the dog; the animal looked about as impressed as her master. “What's your dog's name?” he asked.

She glared at him. “Why do you want to know that?”

“I just thought—”

“No one knows her name but me, okay?”

Nick shrugged. “Whatever you say.”

“Are we going to do this or not?”

“Sure,” he said, pointing to the area around them. “We think the graves are probably—”

“Just give me a general search perimeter.”

Nick raised one eyebrow. “
Search perimeter
—is that witch talk?”

“Are you going to make wisecracks all night?”

“Probably—but I'll be happy to get out of your way and let you get to work.”

“Good. The sooner we get started, the sooner I can go home.”

“Where do you want me?”

“Just stay out of our way.”

“Should I stay downwind or something?”

She looked at him impatiently.

Nick nodded. “Out of the way—got it. This is the search area here; any unexcavated ground is a possible location for a grave.” He moved off to the side and watched.

The witch and the dog moved to the approximate center of the unexcavated area. She walked without any sound at all.
No wonder
, Nick thought,
she's still barefoot
. She pointed at the ground a few yards away from her, and the dog immediately trotted to that spot, turned, and sat down. The witch stood motionless for a moment, then lifted her face to the moon. She slowly raised both arms in front of her with her palms facing up as though she were carrying an invisible load of firewood, then moved her arms up and down a little as if she were testing its weight.

Now she began to walk in circles, making the same lifting motion as she went. It looked silly to Nick—like an outfielder waiting for a pop fly to drop out of the air. After a minute or two she stopped and looked at each arm, turning it back and forth as though she were admiring a new bracelet. She shook them a little and looked at them again.

She slowly lowered herself into a quarter-squat and then rose again, staring straight ahead; she did it over and over until Nick thought she looked like a horse on a merry-go-round.

Now she extended both arms out to the sides and lowered her head as if she were studying her feet; her hair draped down around her head like tinsel from a Christmas tree. She shook her head a little, making her hair dance about—then she stopped and waited. A few seconds later she repeated the ritual again.

Finally she turned to the dog, snapped her fingers, and wiggled one of them. The dog immediately came and stood facing her, attentively awaiting her next command. She knelt down and took one of the bandannas from her neck; she held it open and showed it to the dog, then tied it around the dog's neck and straightened it a little. She waited for a moment—then suddenly clapped her hands together and looked at the dog with a wide-eyed grin. It was the first time Nick had seen the woman really smile, and it caught him a little off guard. Still, it looked good on her.
Maybe if I wear a bandanna
, he thought.

The moment the witch smiled the dog became eager and excited, bobbing its head up and down and shifting its weight back and forth between its three legs like a runner before a race. She reached out with both hands and grabbed the dog by the fur of its neck and pulled it toward her. She rolled onto her back and dragged the dog on top of her, and the two of them lay there playing together in the dirt.

Nick suddenly became aware that his mouth was hanging open and he was squinting hard, though there was barely enough light to see.
What the heck is she doing?
It looked like some kind of bizarre ritual— worshipping the moon and then cross-dressing with the dog. Nick began to wonder if he'd made a big mistake. Maybe the woman actually took this “witch” thing seriously—maybe she was trying to call up the spirits from their graves or something.
Terrific
, he thought.
I traded a dog without a nose for a woman without a mind.

Now the witch got up from the ground and straightened herself. Her demeanor had changed; there was no longer a smile on her face. She snapped her fingers and pointed down and the dog immediately returned to its place by her side. She pivoted and started off briskly as though someone had called to her from across the field, and the dog followed close beside. At the southeast corner of the unexcavated area she stopped and turned, facing the open field. She waited until the dog took a sitting position, then snapped her fingers and dropped her arm to her side. The dog seemed to tense, anticipating something—then the witch made a motion like someone tossing a horseshoe and the dog took off like a shot.

The dog moved quickly at first, darting back and forth just as Bosco had done—but after a few moments she began to slow down, and the area that seemed to interest her became smaller and smaller. The witch walked along beside the dog, circling her, studying her, bending down or squatting from time to time to get a better look at the dog's face. Less than five minutes passed before the dog slowed to a standstill. She lowered her head and sniffed at an area no more than one square foot in size—and then lay down.

The witch immediately called the dog away from the area and pointed again at the ground by her side. When the dog returned to its sitting position she waited a few seconds, then made that tossing motion again. The dog quickly retraced her steps, sniffed at the same area, and lay down again. The witch knelt down in front of the dog and studied her face. She held up both hands and made a shrugging motion, as if she were asking the dog for some sort of confirmation; the dog didn't move. Then Alena broke into an ecstatic grin, as if she had just learned that she won the Virginia lottery—and she pulled the dog on top of her again and they again began to play.

After a few minutes she stood up and looked across the field at Nick. “Are you expecting me to remember where they all are?”

Bingo!
“Hang on a minute—I'll be right there.”

Nick ran to the tech tent and grabbed a handful of wire flags, then hurried across the field to the witch and her dog. “Where?” he asked.

“Where she was lying.”

“Are you sure?”

One dark eye glared at him from behind the curtain of hair.

“Right.” Nick pushed a flag into the ground to mark the spot—it felt so good. “Good work—keep going.”

“I will, as soon as you get out of the way.”

“Sorry, I forgot—the distracting scent.”

“You're not distracting her,” she said. “You're annoying me.”

Nick continued to watch as the witch and her dog combed the field. They worked with remarkable speed and efficiency. Nick checked his watch; on average the dog was locating a new grave every ten minutes, and Nick kept trotting back and forth across the field to mark the spot with another red flag. She was finding so many graves that at first Nick wondered if the dog was making it all up—just picking up a general graveyard smell and sounding the alarm every few yards or so. But as Nick added each additional flag, he observed its position relative to the others, and there was no denying it—the flags were aligning in a definite grid pattern. The pattern was becoming so obvious that Nick could actually anticipate the location of some of the graves—and the dog did not disappoint. She found them all one by one, filling in the grid like a man working a complex crossword puzzle—and she did it all with three legs and a nose.

Nick was beginning to understand now. What looked like meaningless hocus-pocus at first was slowly beginning to make sense to him; there was definite method to the witch's madness. Whenever she snapped her fingers the dog seemed to come to attention. It seemed to be some sort of operant signal, as if to tell the dog, “Pay attention! What comes next is a command.” The commands themselves were remarkably subtle: The barest lift of a finger or flip of a wrist sent the dog racing off in a different direction or called it back again. Sometimes she communicated with just a tilt of her head or a slight change in facial expression—the sort of signals a man might easily miss, but the dog never missed a single cue. They communicated without a spoken word, and the effect was eerie. It was almost as if they could read each other's minds—at least that's the way it would appear to any casual observer. “The witch can talk to animals,” the deputy had told Nick, and he was right—almost. It reminded him of something he had read once from Arthur C. Clarke: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Nick shook his head.
No wonder they think she's a witch.

He thought about Marge and Bosco again—the shouted commands, the constant piercing whistle—and he wondered if Bosco was a little slow or if this dog was just a genius. Maybe Bosco was like a confused child with an overbearing mother who kept screaming commands until the child just shut down in frustration. Maybe the difference was talent or maybe the difference was training, but the difference was obviously there—the two dogs didn't belong in the same category. Bosco may have had all the right papers, but this three-legged mongrel seemed to have powers that bordered on the supernatural.

Nick looked at the witch.
Maybe it's not the dog.

By dawn the dog had found almost thirty graves, arranged in a neat geometric pattern with a straggler or two on each side—
probably latecomers
, Nick thought. The first rays of golden sunlight streamed down the valley from the east, illuminating the little red flags like licks of fire. The witch led the dog around the perimeter of the graveyard twice more, but the dog found nothing else.

“What's going on here?” a voice called out.

Nick turned and looked. Marge was approaching from the parking lot with Bosco on a short leash. She was glaring angrily at the witch and her dog—and at the field of little red flags.

“I requested a second dog team,” Nick called back.

“May I ask why?”

Nick rolled his eyes. “I was hoping that between two dogs I might get one nose.”

“That isn't funny, Dr. Polchak.”

“Nobody thinks I'm funny,” Nick said. “Is it me or is it just women in general?”

On the opposite side of the graveyard the witch heard the voices and turned. She immediately commanded her dog to take a sitting position beside her, then lowered her head until her eyes disappeared.

“I was hired to do this job,” Marge said. “Who is
that
?”

“
That
is a dog trainer,” Nick replied. “You can tell by the dog.”

“What in the world is she dressed for? I assumed you wanted a professional.”

“I'm not looking for a cadaver dog with fashion sense,” Nick said, “I'm looking for a cadaver dog that can actually find cadavers.”

“Which I was in the process of doing.” Her dog now spotted the witch's dog; he began to emit a high-pitched whine and strain at the leash. “King—
stay
!”

“Your dog failed to find anything,” Nick said. “You told me there might not be any more graves here. I can't just take your word for that—it takes a second dog team to confirm a negative finding. C'mon, Marge, this is standard procedure and you know it.”

“
She
is not ‘standard procedure.' Where in the world did you find her?”

“What difference does it make? She knows what she's doing—and apparently so does her dog.” He made a sweeping gesture at the grid of red flags behind him.

Suddenly the dog jerked harder, yanking the leash from Marge's hand and racing across the field toward the witch. “
King!
” she shouted again, but the dog paid no attention to her. She squinted at Nick. “Anybody can stick a bunch of flags in the ground.”

“Twenty-nine flags—that's twenty-eight more than yesterday.”

“And how many of them will turn out to be false positives?”

“We'll find out when we excavate,” Nick replied. “At least we have something to excavate now—that's more than we got from Bosco.”

“His name is not
Bosco
,” she growled, and brushed past Nick in the direction of the witch.

Nick turned and followed her; the last thing he wanted was a confrontation between Marge and the Witch of Endor. Somebody was likely to get mauled—and based on his track record with these two women, it would probably be him.

On the other side of the field the witch watched warily while Bosco came bounding playfully toward her. She held her right hand palm-down above her dog's head, and the dog sat frozen beneath it. As Bosco approached she turned sideways and stepped between him and her own dog. He tried to go around her and she repeated the maneuver, blocking the dog's way over and over until it finally gave up and stood motionless, staring up at her in confusion. She pulled the hair back from her face and looked down at the dog, establishing eye contact; she snapped her fingers once and then placed an index finger on the dog's haunches and gently pushed down.