Bones ik-7 Page 5

  “Like what?” Andy asked.

  “Maybe they’re a way of keeping score,” I said.

  “The number of victims?” David asked. “Maybe. Or maybe the coyotes are part of some warm-up ritual, a preparation for a kill. Or maybe when he couldn’t find the kind of victim he was looking for, he killed a coyote.”

  “But that would mean they’ve been there a long time,” I said. “They would have been in worse shape.”

  David nodded. “Unless he’s treated them with some sort of chemical to help preserve them — that’s the sort of thing Ben is probably trying to determine.”

  Bingle’s ears suddenly went up, his posture rigid. He sniffed the air, then moved into a protective position near David, hackles raised. “Tranquilo. I’m okay, Bingle,” David said. The dog looked up at him, then sat at his feet.

  Soon we saw what Bingle had heard and scented; the four guards and Parrish joined us, and not much later, Flash and Bob Thompson. Ben Sheridan came strolling along last of all, not greeting any of us, lost in thought.

  Thompson looked at his watch and gave an exasperated sigh. “We’ve only got a couple of hours of daylight left. Can we make it to where the grave is before sunset?”

  “Certainly,” Parrish answered.

  He led us down a steep path through dense woods, to a small pond. Thompson was marking it on his GPS when Parrish said, “No, no, not here.” He moved off in another direction, back through the trees, crossing a stream, and after wandering through the forest, brought us to a long meadow.

  “Not here, either,” he said, and led us off again.

  I asked Thompson what position he was reading on his GPS and doublechecked it against readings I had taken with my compass. I was about to tell him what I had learned, when David called to him.

  “Bingle is showing some interest in that last meadow,” he said. “It’s worth spending more time there—”

  “We’ve marked it on the GPS,” Thompson interrupted. “I’m giving Parrish one more chance. We can go back to the meadow if he misses on this last try.”

  “Look at the map,” I said, showing him the markings I had made. “He’s taking us in circles. That ridge he’s walking toward is the one with the coyote tree on it.”

  “Yes, he’s had his little fun and games,” Thompson said. “I’ve told him this next place had better be it, or the whole deal is off.”

  We crossed the ridge again, on a narrow path some distance from the coyote tree, and moving downhill again we found ourselves in another long, narrow meadow. It was nearly dark by then; the air was cold, but still.

  “This place gives me the creeps,” Manton said.

  “Never mind that,” Thompson said. He turned to David. “What does the dog say?”

  “Conditions aren’t good to work him,” David answered. “If we get a breeze, I can tell you more.”

  “Parrish — exactly where in this meadow did you bury her?” Thompson asked.

  “Exactly? I’m not sure. But that’s why you brought the dog, right?”

  Thompson’s eyes narrowed. He looked ready to deliver Parrish a beating. He clenched his fists, then turned from Parrish, pacing two stiff steps away before saying, “Make camp here. We’ll look for her in the morning.”

  And so we all went to work setting up tents. No one spoke much that night; there was none of the joking or camaraderie of the evening before. Bingle stayed with David, which was all right, I wasn’t going to sleep. I’m sure I’m not the only one who lay awake that night, thinking of Julia Sayre being marched to this meadow, forced to dig her own grave. Not the only one, I’m sure, who thought it was worse somehow that Parrish had transformed this paradise into her hell.

  And I’m sure I’m not the only one who wondered just how far away from us she lay.

  7

  WEDNESDAY MORNING, MAY 17

  Southern Sierra Nevada Mountains

  Just after dawn the next morning, I went for a short walk, telling Manton, who was on watch with Merrick, which direction I planned to go. I hadn’t hiked far when I found a shallow cave, not quite ten feet deep. If it had ever been the lair of an animal, it had long since been abandoned. There was nothing in the way of a cache of food or a nest, no scat, no bones of smaller prey, no bits of fur. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that the cave looked a little too clean. No animal I could think of would leave so little evidence of its residence there.

  I decided to ask J.C., the ranger, about it when he caught up to us again. It also occurred to me that Parrish could have made use of this place, and if so, the experts in our search group might be able to detect traces of his activities there.

  I began to feel uneasy, and try as I might to chalk it up to another round of claustrophobia, I knew that wasn’t the case. I hurried outside and went through the routine of using the compass and altimeter to calm myself down. I made a note of the cave’s location and headed back to camp.

  Although it was still early when I returned to the meadow, most of the others were up and about. Manton was studying a photograph of a blonde with shoulder-length hair, holding his thumb over part of the picture.

  “Your wife?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “She’s pretty.”

  “Thanks.”

  I started to walk away, but as if it had just occurred to him, he said, “Hey, you’re a woman . . .”

  I turned back to him. What woman can resist responding to that observation? You always know what’s coming next. Its equivalent is, “Hey, you speak Urdu, translate this.” On behalf of your Urdu-speaking sisters, you listen.

  “Tell me something,” he continued. “You think her hair looks better like this?”

  “Your thumb’s in the way.”

  “No, that’s where she cut her hair, just before I came up here. Pissed me off. We argued.”

  “Let me see,” I said, and he handed it to me. I studied it for a moment. “She’s pretty either way, don’t you think?”

  He took the photo back. “Yeah, I guess so. I guess I just need to get used to it.” He yawned. “Nothing I can do about it now.” He moved off to his tent.

  Several yards away, Ben and Andy stood on top of a large, rounded boulder. Both were using field glasses; Andy pointed down the field, seeming to indicate a particular location, and Ben focused his binoculars in that direction. They then lowered their binoculars and made markings on a piece of paper. As I watched, this process was repeated several times.

  I moved closer to them. Andy saw me and called out a greeting. “Come up here,” he said. “I’ll show you some of the signs we look for.”

  Ben was obviously displeased with this suggestion, and walked away before I reached the boulder.

  “Here,” Andy said, handing me his binoculars. “Look out over there, just to the right of that tree.” He waited while I located the place he was indicating. “What do you see?” he asked.

  I studied the meadow, which sloped gently upward from where we had camped. “Mostly grass and wildflowers,” I said.

  “Is the grass all the same height?”

  I studied it again, more carefully this time, then said, “No! There’s a patch of shorter growth.”

  “Right,” he said. “It might be shorter because it’s newer. We found several places like that in this meadow, and mapped them out. We’ll need to take a closer look to get an idea of what caused the growth to be different there.”

  “Is that where David will search with Bingle?”

  “Maybe. Usually he likes to start by giving Bingle a chance to sniff around on his own, without any guidance from us — see if he gives an alert.”

  “Like he did at the coyote tree?”

  “No — not exactly. Bingle gives a very clear signal when he smells human blood or remains. He’s trained to look specifically for human rather than animal remains. The way he reacted to the coyote tree — I think he was just upset.”

  “I don’t blame him.”

  “Me
, neither.” He was quiet for a moment, then said, “Anyway, Ben and I will be checking out the places where the plant life is disturbed while David works with Bingle. Any number of natural factors can cause a change in plant life, of course, but I think one or two of the areas we want to look at are typical of burial places.”

  “Typical?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

  “Studies have been done about how serial killers choose special burial places for their victims. Despite his claims to the contrary, we think Parrish knows exactly where to find the victim’s grave. Ben thinks Parrish likes to stage things precisely — and dramatically. Detective Thompson and Ben agree that Parrish has probably revisited the burial site; he most likely chose a site that he could find again and again. Ben said it would help Parrish relive the pleasure of the kill.”

  “The pleasure . . .” I shook my head.

  “I know,” Andy said, grimacing. “Ben says we have to try to think of this the way Parrish would, if we want to find her.”

  “So what would we look for, then? Some sort of landmark?”

  “Exactly. Anything that would help Parrish find the site again.”

  At that moment, Ben called to Andy, so I gave Andy’s binoculars back to him and thanked him for the explanation. As I walked back toward the camp, I noticed that Bingle and David weren’t in sight. Bob Thompson joined Ben and Andy.

  I heard Bingle give a single, happy bark from somewhere in the woods. I looked for the dog and found him pacing back and forth before David, hardly sparing me a glance, focusing his attention on his owner, who was opening one of Bingle’s equipment packs. David called a greeting to me, then commanded Bingle to sit. The dog immediately obeyed, but it seemed to be taking all his self-control to do so. His body was taut, his eyes watching David intently. His ears were pitched forward, his cheeks puffing slightly with excited breaths.

  David smiled at me. “Don’t you wish you felt this way about starting your workday?”

  He pulled out a leather collar and Bingle’s tail began swishing rapidly through the pine needles beneath it.

  “For him, it’s play. Just a big game. His favorite game.” He replaced the bright-colored nylon collar Bingle had been wearing with the leather one.

  “¿Estás listo?” he asked the dog. “Are you ready?”

  Bingle got to his feet and barked.

  “Can I join you?” I asked. “Or would it be too much of a distraction to Bingle?”

  “No, he’s used to other people being with us. When my group of handlers trains together, we always have at least two people out with the dog. On most searches, there are detectives or rescue personnel or other people around. Bingle has learned not to be distracted by them.”

  As we walked with the dog to the edge of the meadow, Bingle’s attention was so focused on David, I was afraid the dog would walk into a tree.

  “Great conditions,” David said to me. “See how the grass in the meadow is moving?” He took out a small, rounded plastic object and squeezed it. A small cloud of fine powder puffed from it, and he studied its movement as it drifted by.

  “Nice breeze, coming right at us,” he said, pleased. “Moist air. Let’s try to get some work in before it gets too warm. ¿Está bien, Bingle?”

  Bingle barked sharply in impatience.

  “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” David said.

  “Rowl, rowl, rowl,” the dog answered, in near-perfect imitation.

  “¡Busca al muerto, Bingle!” David said, sweeping his hand out in a flat and low motion. Find the dead.

  The dog took off in a weaving pattern, not running full bore but moving in his steady, long-legged pace, David not far behind him. I was a close third.

  Sniffing the breeze, Bingle stopped every now and then, sometimes doubling back a short distance, but almost always moving forward. David spoke to him, encouraged him as he made his way through the meadow.

  I kept watching, puzzled. This search method seemed to be all wrong, at least according to all the movies I had seen — which usually portrayed dogs tracking escaped convicts. How did he know what to look for? Or where? Bingle’s nose was up in the air most of the time, not down on the ground. And he wasn’t baying. He was zigzagging quietly through a field, obviously pleased to be at his work, but not giving any indication that he was close to finding anything.

  After about twenty minutes, David gave Bingle a command to rest, and gave the dog some water. When I caught up with them, I took out my notebook and the one item of special outdoor journalism equipment I had packed — a waterproof pen. I asked David about Bingle’s style of searching.

  “The baying business is basically Hollywood, trying to combine a foxhunt with a manhunt, I suppose,” he said. “Bingle barks more than the average search dog, mainly because I let him — some handlers consider it a sign of poor training to let a search dog bark. They only want the dog to bark when he finds a missing person alive. There’s a lot of religion out there when it comes to handling dogs, if you know what I mean. I suppose if you had one that barked all the time, he might, oh, scare a lost child, for example. And if you’ve got a police dog trailing a killer in the woods, you don’t always want the dog to alert the criminal to your presence with a lot of baying and barking.

  “But Bingle isn’t a police dog, and most of the people he looks for are dead. I guess I figure I know Bingle — and he’s got a personality that needs to let out with a bark every now and then. He’s a talker. None of the cadavers has complained about it yet. And if I ask him to work silently, he’ll do it.”

  “Okay, so no baying. But how will he ever find Julia Sayre’s scent? You never gave him any article of clothing to work with, or—”

  “If you ever meet Bool, my foolish bloodhound, you’ll see a tracking dog. I’m not saying that Bool never uses air scenting — he does, but primarily, he’s tracking. He spends lots of time with his nose on the ground. He was born with a truly amazing sense of smell — probably better than Bingle’s. Unlike Bingle, though, he’s not what you’d call smart. I’ve got to keep him on a lead, or God knows, if the person he was trailing happened to have fallen off a cliff, he’d follow the scent right over the edge. He becomes nose-blind.” He paused, smiling wistfully to himself.

  I thought about the times my own dogs had relentlessly pursued some interesting scent, which usually resulted in holes in our backyard or knocked-over trash cans. “You’re searching areas that might include crime scenes,” I said. “I suppose the cops can’t just let every clown who thinks Fido is pretty clever put his pet on a leash and come on down to snoop around.”

  “Right. Fido and his master are likely to destroy evidence — not to mention dozens of other legal and health problems. Search dogs are working dogs, and the handlers and their dogs all go through lots of training. It’s ongoing, and requires years of work — but it’s more than work. It’s a bond, it’s learning to read your dog, it’s — well, it’s hard to explain. Bool and Bingle work differently.”

  “Different in what ways?”

  “Bool needs to be pre-scented — given something of the victim’s to smell. He tracks that scent, nose to the ground. Bingle is primarily an air-scenting dog, and he is specifically cadaver trained.”

  “Which means?”

  “Every individual human being gives off a unique scent — with the possible exception of identical twins. Otherwise, we each have our own. We give off this scent because every minute, every living person sheds an estimated forty thousand dead skin cells, called rafts, that carry bacteria and give off their own one-of-a-kind vapor.”

  “Even if you bathe and use deodorant?”

  He smiled. “No getting away from it. You can mask it from your fellow humans, but not the dogs.”

  “Okay, but what if I’m not near the dog?”

  “Let’s go back to the rafts. Every minute, these tens of thousands of rafts come off us like a cloud, surrounding us and drifting away from us as we move, with the heaviest concentration very near us. As we move, it spre
ads into a wider and wider cone — that’s known as a scent cone. As they drift, some of these rafts will catch on other objects, especially plants.”

  “And Bingle smells the rafts?”

  “Yes. A dog’s nose is literally a million times more sensitive than ours for some scents. And it’s thought that their brains process scent information in a different manner than our brains do.”

  “So he can follow this cone of scent?”

  “Yes. He’s also trained to find the scent of human blood, body fluids, tissue, skeletal remains, and decomposing remains. And he can find any of these things in minute amounts.”

  “I know I’m going to hate myself for asking this, but how were you able to train him to find bodies — to teach him what a dead body smells like?”

  “In this line of work, I have access to bones and other biological material from cadavers. But some trainers use a synthetic chemical that’s made just for the purpose of training these dogs.”

  I couldn’t hide a look of disbelief. “Fake cadaver smell?”

  “Yes. Different formulas for different levels of decay.”

  “Not the kind of thing you’d want to accidentally spill on your carpet, I suppose.”

  He laughed. “No, but Bingle might not mind. Dogs aren’t bothered by what we think of as horrible odors. To them, the worse it smells, the more interesting it is. And for Bingle, that smell is associated with praise — finding it brings a reward.”

  “But even decaying bodies must smell — well, unique, right? Because of the varying conditions they are left in, if nothing else — out in forests, in deserts, underwater—”

  “Sure, to some extent. He’s not trained for one smell alone, of course. Best of all, Bingle has a couple of years of experience, so he knows what it is he’s looking for. Bingle’s nose is sensitive enough to find a single drop of blood. You let him sniff a car, he can tell you if a body has been in its trunk.”