Burning Man (2 page)

As we passed by, both men inched away from Sirius, allowing us a wide berth. Fellow officer or not, my partner was a close relative of the wolf, and he did have big, bad teeth.

At the entryway I told Sirius, “
Setz
!” His body language showed me his unhappiness with the command. Every week, handlers practiced exercises called long sits and long downs, training designed to try our charge’s patience. It was the dog’s job to assume the designated position and wait for hours if necessary. Sirius would stay put even if he didn’t like it. Inside, I could see that evidence techs were already working the scene, and from past experience I knew they preferred dog hair to not be a part of their trace evidence.

“
Bleib
!” I told Sirius, the German command to stay. He deflated and made a sound somewhere between an exasperated sigh and a moan that voiced doubts about my decision-making ability. The sound was familiar to me. I was known to make similar noises when given orders by superiors that didn’t know their asses from a hole in the ground. I liked to think I could make that distinction. My partner’s eyes tracked me, hoping for a reprieve, until I disappeared inside.

Crime scenes are normally handled in very deliberate fashion, but the nearby flames had everybody jumping. Two detectives from Homicide Special, along with a crime scene unit, were working the family room. Anything that might have a connection to the Santa Ana Strangler had the highest priority in town.

One of the suits recognized me and came over. I seemed to remember his last name was the same as some Ivy League school. Brown, I thought, or Yale.

“Cornell,” he said.

On a multiple-choice test I would have gotten it. “Gideon,” I said.

As he wrote down my name, Cornell said, “Where’s the mutt?”

At another time I might have told him it wasn’t my responsibility to know where his wife was, but not now. The room was already tense enough.

“Front door,” I said.

He gave a quick, preoccupied nod. “We’ve gathered some clothing and other items the suspect came in contact with. We want your dog to get a nose full of eau de bad guy and see if he can pick up on his scent. We’re pretty sure he’s still in the canyon. The SOB must have known we’d try to seal off the area. I’ll bet you dollars to cents he snuck out of the brush and set that house fire as a diversion.”

The family room had a view out to the canyon, but at night it was like looking at a sea of black. The nearby fire hinted at the expanse of foliage in the ravine, but the light from the flames didn’t penetrate far into the brush. A sudden flare of light in the darkness caught my eye; moments later there was a torching of undergrowth and shrubbery.

“I’ll pass on that bet,” I said. “Apparently one diversion wasn’t enough.”

Cornell turned to see what I was pointing at and then cursed. We watched the wind begin to whip up the flames. Both of us knew we were looking at a tinderbox. Under these conditions it was likely that dozens of homes would soon be in jeopardy.

“He must have brought some kind of accelerant with him,” I said.

In a wishful voice Cornell said, “Maybe, if we’re lucky, he’ll burn up in his own hell.”

From what I knew of the Santa Ana Strangler, his crime scenes were very organized. If this was the Strangler, he would have planned for an escape route even under extreme conditions.

“He would have expected a call to go out for dog teams,” I said. “He set the fire to discourage pursuit and eliminate the possibility of being tracked.”

“That’s probably not the only escape plan in his bag of tricks,” Cornell said. “At one of his other crime scenes a fire was also set and a witness described a fireman that was never accounted for.”

It would be easy for a sooty firefighter to make his escape with all the chaos going on. Only seconds had passed since the canyon fire had been lit, but I could already see the orange glow spreading. The tracking conditions were already poor and would only get worse.

LA’s K-9 units have weekly field exercises where officers take turns wearing padded bite suits and acting out the role of bad guy. Whenever the chief trainer for Metropolitan Division puts on his bite suit and calls for a dog to be unleashed, he always shouts one particular line from Shakespeare’s
Julius Caesar
.

I voiced the same line: “Cry ‘Havoc!’” I said, “And let slip the dogs of war.”

Cornell gave me a look. “Huh?”

“If my partner is going to have any chance of picking up the scent, we have to act now.”

Sirius was on a thirty-foot lead. His nose was to the ground and his body language told me that he had the scent. Handlers like to describe the way a dog tracks in missile terms: Sirius had the target on his radar. Whether he’d be able to close on that target and stay on the scent was another matter. The air was smoky. A wet cloth covered my face, but Sirius didn’t have that luxury. He needed his nose fully functional, which meant he’d have to endure the smoky conditions without any buffers.

We entered the brush, following a trail into the canyon. The fire was about a hundred yards away, but it felt closer than that. The swirling winds were hotter now. I could hear the hunger of the fire as it feasted on the undergrowth. The snapping and crackling of the dry chaparral, and the gusting of the wind, filled the natural amphitheater with whistling and howling. Anyone sensible would have retreated from the chorus of hell. It’s not natural
to walk toward fire, but that was where my partner was leading me, and he was doing that because I asked it of him.

The fire was unchecked; firefighters weren’t yet ready to take on the canyon’s blaze. With every step I remembered why I had never wanted to be a fireman. My wet mask wasn’t stopping my throat and nose from hurting, and the smoke was making my eyes tear. Most of the time I walked with my eyes shut, trusting to the senses of my partner. I was used to playing blindman’s bluff with Sirius. Part of our K-9 exercises involved blindfolding handlers and then ordering our dogs to track. The training gave the dog the confidence to lead and the handler to follow. We were a team forged over thousands of hours of working together, and the death of the woman we both loved.

I made encouraging sounds. Sirius was no bloodhound, but his sense of smell was still about a million times better than mine. LA police dogs do a lot of cross-training, and tracking was a frequent exercise.

“
Such
!” I encouraged, using the German pronunciation,
tsuuk,
and telling Sirius to track or find, but even more often than that I said “Good dog” or the German words of praise “
So ist brav.
”

In stops and starts, we continued into the canyon, the elusive scent drawing us forward. We traveled on anything but a straight line. Sirius tugged me one way and then the other. Most of the time his nose was to the ground, but sometimes he raised it up and sniffed the breeze, doing his best to pick up the scent over the smoke that filled the air. He seemed oblivious of the nearby fire; I was anything but.

We navigated our way through patches of laurel sumac, lemonade berry, and sagebrush. With the Maglite I tried to sweep the area to avoid yucca and patches of cactus and jumping cholla. Sirius forged his way through thick patches of chamisa, and I followed him through the obstacle course.

The wind was driving an ever-more-muscular fire. Embers and sparks were being lifted and sent sailing. I raised my head and
watched as hundreds of cinders came parachuting down around us. Most of the fiery offshoots were burning out before hitting ground, but I could see a few were getting footholds. Soon I’d have more than one fire to worry about.

No one would fault me for calling off the search. It was possible, maybe even likely, that if we kept going the fire would outflank us and cut off our escape route. And yet I was sure if we didn’t continue the Strangler would get away, and once free he would kill again and keep killing. The Strangler was twisted, evil, and smart; in short, law enforcement’s worst nightmare. There had been few breaks to come out of his cases; this was our chance to nail him.

Sirius sneezed, and without thinking I said, “God bless you.” My partner acknowledged my words with a little wag of the tail and then he put his nose back to the ground and started sniffing. He wasn’t thinking about quitting. Judging by the bounce in his step and his vigorous pulls on the line, he was locked on his target.

I took the leash in one hand, and with the other I pulled my Glock G28 from my holster. The glow from the fire allowed some limited visibility, but it was still difficult to see because of the curtain of smoke hanging over the canyon.

Sirius started tugging harder and making excited sounds that indicated he had the suspect on target lock. I was tempted to release the missile, but that would have violated protocols. Sirius wasn’t the only one that had been trained. The department had pounded it into our heads to announce our presence and the imminent threat we presented. Opposing lawyers always argue that police dogs are just as much of a weapon as a firearm. Most of LA’s canyons have squatters, transients, and undocumented workers that throw their bedrolls down in the midst of the brush. It was possible, with the smoke and bad conditions, that Sirius had mixed up the Strangler’s scent with some other human’s. As unlikely as that was, I couldn’t take a chance.

I reined Sirius in and huddled with him in the darkness, making us as small a target as possible.

“K-9 unit!” I shouted. “Come out with your hands up or I’ll send the dog!”

Over the crackling fire, I tried to hear or see any signs of flight. There was no answer to my summons. I called out again, this time in Spanish. My bilingual attempt also met with silence.

My right hand rested atop the crest of my partner’s neck. Sirius’s hundred-pound frame was tensed and ready to go. I never liked sending him into the unknown, but that was sometimes part of the job.

“
Still
,” I whispered, telling him to be quiet in German.

As silently as we could, we closed in on a formidable stand of chamisa. The thicket was a perfect spot in which to hole up, offering up a barrier to anyone seeking entrance. As we crawled closer, Sirius began doing his pointer imitation. He knew where his prey was. We moved another five feet forward. I wanted to be as close to my partner as possible when I sent him in. You never let your partner hang out to dry.

We stopped and listened. Growing ever closer was the raging fire. It was difficult hearing anything over its roars. I raised myself from a crouch and gave the command that Sirius had been waiting for: “
Geh voraus
!” Go ahead!

Sirius charged into the undergrowth. I saw a blur of black and tan, and then out of the darkness it looked as if there was a rapid blinking of red eyes. I threw myself to the ground; someone was shooting at us.

“
Fass
!” I screamed. “
Fass
!”

People are always surprised to hear that police dogs need to be taught to bite. Thousands of years of domestication and breeding have taken the bite out of Bowser, but by using bite suits and training, and essentially making the biting into a game, K-9 handlers can reverse a dog’s inhibition to biting humans. I was calling for Sirius to bite. If there’d been a command to tear off
the Strangler’s head, I would have been shouting for that. My partner heard the urgency in my voice and tore through the chamisa.

More shots rang out, at least a half dozen in rapid succession, and then I heard a man screaming “Call him off! Call him off!”

By the panicked quavering of his screams, I knew he was being shaken around like a rag doll. I had been on the receiving end of attacking police dogs dozens of times, and I was always glad that the padding of the bite suit was between their teeth and me. It was a humbling—and frightening—experience to be in the grip of those jaws.

The shaky screams grew even louder. The man was afraid he was going to be eaten alive.

“
Pass auf
!” I shouted; Sirius was now being told to guard.

The screaming stopped but not the whimpering. Sirius would stay clamped down on the suspect and not let him move.

I patted around for the dropped Maglite and found it. Only after starting to rise did I realize that blood was flowing down my leg. “Shit,” I said. I was hit. The adrenaline that was still pumping had masked the pain. That wouldn’t last, I knew. I was afraid of what the light would reveal and started sucking down air. What I saw made me breathe a little easier. The bullet had struck my upper thigh but missed my femoral artery. There was plenty of blood, but I didn’t appear to be in any danger of bleeding out. I took a few measured breaths, fighting off light-headedness. My partner didn’t need me fainting.

With an effort I got to my feet and then started limping forward. I shone the light into the brush and caught the glint of Sirius’s eyes. Further maneuvering of the light showed that Sirius’s jaws were clamped down on a wrist. His captive’s face was so white as to appear spectral. Even the thick smoke couldn’t cover the man’s stink. Sirius had scared the shit out of him.

I moved the light back to Sirius’s eyes. There was something wrong. His eyes weren’t sparkling.

“T-tell your dog to let me go,” the man said. “There’s been some kind of mistake here. I’m a firefighter.”

He moved his shoulders to show off his fireman’s slicker. I said, “Shut up.”

I fought through the brush, ignoring the inconvenience of my leg. Branches grabbed and clawed at me; I took them on in a frenzy of panic, and what I couldn’t push through I snapped away, finally making it to Sirius’s side.

My praise sounded so inadequate: “Good boy.”

He was hit in several places but responded to my words with a wag of his tail. I tucked my flashlight under my arm and kept my gun up and ready. I scratched Sirius behind his ear where he liked it best and my fingers came back bloody.

“Your dog broke my arm I think. It hurts like hell.”

I didn’t reply other than to put the light on the suspect and then scope out the area around him. Sirius’s attack had knocked his gun out of his hand, but not before it had done its damage. I pushed aside some brush and pocketed the weapon.