Cadaver Dog (4 page)

Angie set up his distraction training in a controlled environment by doing it all in the warehouse. She conducted the training after his meal to reduce the temptation to eat. The first training session, she set out a plate with nothing more appetizing than boiled noodles. No spices, no sugars, no extras of any kind. Just cold, boiled noodles. With him on lead, she worked him through his basics: sit, down, and stay. And Murder sat for her, but his head was turned to the side to stare at the plate of noodles.

“Murder, eyes on me,” she said. Murder looked back at Angie, then back to the plate.

She walked to his side and had him sit there. Now, he would need to practically twist his head over like an owl’s to stare at the plate.

Murder twisted his head not completely unlike an owl, which was astonishing and perplexing to see all at the same time.

The next day, she tried a plate full of tofu. The next day, dried squash. She learned that no food was better or worse than another. Murder would attack a head of lettuce with the same gusto and verve as he would for a bag of chips. Even a bag of celery was enough to pull Murder away from his obedience. When Murder showed her that he had zero capacity to stay in front of a hotdog, she went as basic as she could get:  sit.

There were two schools of thought on how to break Murder from his distraction. One was negative reinforcement. The other was positive reinforcement. She knew of trainers who would use shock collars to break a dog from a distraction. She even bought one once, but the package stayed unopened in the storage room. She never could wrap her conscience around the concept. Angie knew that meant she would need more than three to four months to prepare him for field work, but that was her decision.

She still worked Murder on trails, but on small ones where she made certain there was no chance he would encounter food. From her experience, the best way to overcome this obstacle was to ignore it when it came to his “work,” the tracking of wasps. Her goal was to focus him on the trail until he was so eager to complete his task, he would ignore everything else.

It wasn’t always a positive experience.

One time in the woods, she sent him out to find the wasp. Murder went straight up to the tree that the wasp was hiding behind, then made a 90-degree turn like his body had come upon an invisible wall. Nose to the ground, he ran deeper into the woods and away from his target, with Angie yelling after him. Murder showed her where some hikers had been walking through her property. More importantly, he showed her the wrappers of the cereal bars they had been eating.

Rather than raise her voice, she held out the stuffed chicken he loved so dearly. From the dirt and wrappers, Murder looked up at her curiously, though he did not stop feasting on the remains of apple-flavored cereal. While he watched, Angie placed the stuffed chicken in the backpack she had been carrying.

Suddenly, Murder raised his head up off the trail. In Angie’s mind, Murder had a distinct “What you talkin’ bout, Willis?” look. Angie turned and walked away.

A few seconds later, Murder followed her, dancing lightly underfoot. She ignored him.

She walked back to the wasp trail. Murder was watching her forlornly, like the middle kid in a game of keep-away, where the object being kept away was a prized baseball. She didn’t need to command him to sit.

“Find buzz.” Murder looked at the tree where the wasp was hiding, then back to Angie, like the whole thing was a trick.

She waited.

Murder got up, walked toward the tree, then looked back at her anxiously.

“Get to work.”

He nosed around in the dirt. Started to turn back toward the cereal bars, then looked up at Angie forlornly like a whipped and beaten dog. When he did find the wasp, Angie praised Murder like he had just won Westminster as she handed him the stuffed chicken. Murder did not let go of it the rest of the day.

A few days after her breakthrough, Angie was up early collecting the supplies she needed for training Murder when her phone rang. “Shit,” she said when she recognized the NYC area code. Angie knew she owed the police department a status on their dogs, especially why they were late. She clicked Ignore and let the call go to voicemail. She was training, after all, and she didn’t take calls when she worked dogs. She would call them back after she finished training.

Angie still wore her thickest working gloves when she directly handled the wasp. Her skin broke out in gooseflesh as she gently tied a rope around the crimson wasp’s thorax. The body was drying out and becoming brittle. She would have to ask Dr. Saracen for another sample before long. She really, really didn’t want to do that.

Once the knot was tied, she took a break. She always needed a moment to collect herself before handling the wasp. She came back a few minutes later and moaned as she lifted the lifeless body out of the box and set it aside. She had laid a white washcloth underneath the wasp, and she tied that to a rope, too. Angie hated that a dead wasp could have such power over her. She was sure it was the red and black striping, but there was also something about the ungodly weight of it in her hands (no bug, even a desiccated one, was supposed to feel that heavy) and the cold sharpness of its exoskeleton.

She left the box in the warehouse storeroom and carried the wasp’s carcass out to a different field. She dragged the washcloth with the wasp’s scent about forty yards through pine needles, over rocks, and between trees, then tied the dead thing to a tree branch. The wasp hung about five feet above the ground. Then she put up the washcloth, brought out Murder, and commanded him to find the wasp. “Find buzz,” she told Murder.

The blue-and-black head nodded slightly, then charged into the field. His nose hit the ground where she had rubbed the wasp scent a little more than elsewhere, then he moved into the woods. He quickly found the wasp, then came back for his chicken. Angie smiled for an hour.

That night, a pair of headlights rose out of the darkness and came to a stop in front of her house. Murder had already started barking before the vehicle arrived. The dog scooted to Angie’s side. She took her rifle out and waited for the knock.

“Angie, you in there?” a voice came from the door as he knocked. The voice was as smooth as Angie’s was rough. There was a natural lilt to it that made people relax when he spoke. It was her father. He was tall and lean like Angie, with silver hair. He was bow-legged, so his feet set a little farther apart. He had a gait as easy and comfortable as his voice.

Murder barked perfunctorily while wagging his tail. No dog could resist her father.

“Some guard dog you are,” she grumbled. “Come on in, Dad!” she yelled to the door.

“I come bearing gifts.” He opened the screen door.

“Is that what I think it is?” Angie asked.

“Pizza from Del Greco’s.” He placed it on the table where she was writing logs. “Bought it a little less than an hour ago.”

She shoveled a wedge of pie into her mouth and savored the bite. Her taste buds languished over the combination of pepperoni and sausage and Canadian bacon in her mouth.

“It’s just pizza, Angie.”

“It’s never just pizza, Dad.”

She went to the kitchen and filled up some plastic glasses with water. Her father took a polite swallow and asked, “How things going up here?”

“Actually, I’m doing some really interesting work with Murder.”

Her father reached down and scratched the dog under his chin. The dog leaned into his touch. “Murder. Why do you call him that again?”

“I found him out on the road under a bunch of crows, and a group of crows is called a murder. You know this, Dad.”

He placed his hands on the dog’s spine and began to roll his palms in a soothing motion. Murder stopped moving, even wagging, and savored the massage the way Angie savored her pizza. “Guess I needed some reminding,” her father said. “Every once in a while, we all need some reminding, Angie.”

“What’s this about?” She put the pizza down cautiously. She could smell a reprimand faster than her dogs could smell a bear in the woods.

He let go of Murder’s spine, and the dog thumped his tail beseechingly.

“Those bomb dogs were due back to New York yesterday.”

“I just need more time. They have to be perfect.”

Her father never raised his voice. He didn’t have to. Even in argument, he was the calm waters. “No, they don’t. They have to be serviceable. And if they aren’t serviceable, that’s on you as the trainer.”

“Look, I don’t want to return a dog that is going to miss a bomb and get a building blown up or false alert on somebody’s bag.”

Her father looked around the room, then to Angie and Murder. He was divining the truth the way he always did, taking observing the situation and inferring from it. He was better at it than most, though he didn’t need to be Sherlock Holmes to read the clues scattered across his daughter’s home. He could always see through her.

“You must be working a lot with Murder if he’s in here with you.”

“I am. But it’s not getting in the way of the other dogs.”

“Angie, you’re drilling down into this dog the way you always drill into the thing that most interests you. You get it from your mom. Now, that can be a good thing. But sometimes you got to concentrate on what makes you money, and that’s bomb dogs. Each one of those is worth fifteen grand.”

“There will be more money.”

“It’s not just about money, Angie. It’s about being true to your word. It’s about shaking somebody’s hand, looking them in the eye, and doing what you say you’re going to do.”

Angie put her pizza down and started outside, Murder at her heel. (Murder licked his lips at the pizza but followed Angie. He was getting better.)

“Come on,” she told her dad. “I want to show you something.”

She led him to the warehouse and opened the storeroom. Pulled out the box and popped open the lid. Her father leaned over and looked at the giant wasp. His jaw slackened with a mix of surprise and disgust.

“That’s one of the bugs, isn’t it? I’ve only seen them on TV. I’ve never seen them up close.”

“I have, and I have the bite to prove it.”

“I did see Animal Control take down a zombie last week. It pulled one of the officer’s arms out of his sockets.”

“I’m training Murder to track them.”

Her father considered this, then said, “I want to see it.”

“I don’t know about this, Angie,” her father said. He was wearing the old working hat he kept in the back of his truck. Strapped to it was the dead wasp.

“Wasps hang onto the skulls of dead people. I have to test Murder on a trail where the wasp isn’t dragged around. He has to learn to air scent the wasp.”

“No, I mean I’m not sure I can do this.”

“We all have to make sacrifices for the training, Dad.”

He turned his flashlight on and headed into the woods.

Angie waited twenty minutes, then tied a light stick and a GPS unit to Murder’s collar. “Find buzz,” she said, and Murder dropped his chicken and jumped into the woods. Angie picked up the chicken, stuffed it in her back pocket so it was hanging by the plastic head with the body dangling loosely. Then she followed after her dog.

Five minutes in, Murder came to his first obstacle. Her father had clearly skipped over a large log (she could see his bootmarks where he landed in the dirt on the far side of the log), but the wasp’s scent didn’t show a step-by-step pattern of where it had gone, so Murder started pacing back and forth. Angie pointed to the ground on the far side of the log and said, “Check here.”

Murder woofed his thanks and pressed into the woods. For an hour they moved back and forth, circling several trees and passing several false trails that Murder breezed by without hesitation. Angie was feeling good about Murder’s progress, but thought he should have caught up to her dad by then. How far had the old man gone?

She heard the burbling of the creek bed. They had come to Cryer’s Creek. She checked Murder, but he showed no signs of exhaustion or frustration yet. The dog got to the rocky banks and worked up and down the creek bed. The water whirled around sharp boulders. She could practically predict where the scent was eddying based on the currents. Angie had crossed the creek many times in her days, especially in daylight. When the sun was out, the creek was inviting. But at night time, the creek was like a bulge in a jacket that could be something nonthreatening or a gun, you didn’t know which.

Angie considered whether Murder was off her father’s trail, but the dog seemed certain that he was going in the right direction. He was running back and forth up and down the creek bed. There was scent everywhere, and Murder was trying to figure out where her father crossed. One thing was certain, though. He had crossed here.

Angie checked mud or sand where boot prints may form, but her expectations were low. The creek was mostly pebbles and river rocks. As she thought, she found no prints. If she had more time, she knew she could still check for impressions in the rocks, but it was night and she was working her dog. She didn’t have time to study the slight shifts in rock.

Then Murder jumped into the water. He cantered to one side like a ship listing, but once he got to the far side, he bounded back to the trail and ran into the dark. Angie verified their locations on the GPS and entered the water. Of course it was just deep enough to go over her boots. The cold mountain water awakened her senses and was a cool refresher in the dry heat of June. Also, it reminded her that it was late.