by Alex Kava
Uphill it was impossible to determine where the stream began. The fog was too thick. But one thing she knew for sure—it didn’t look like it would be slowing down to a trickle anytime soon. As if to emphasize that fact she heard a low rumble of thunder in the distance. She could feel Dr. Gunther staring at her. The guardsmen waited patiently for her reply and instruction.
“We’ll wait for Mr. Creed and his dog. If they can give us a smaller area to search, we’ll still need to stop the water or divert it.” She sought out Ross’s attention. “There must be some sort of equipment you have available that can send the water in a bit of a detour?”
He held up his cell phone and said, “I can check.”
“Yes, do that, please.” Then to Dr. Gunther, O’Dell pointed at the tent and said, “Let’s take a look at the remains that are not underwater.”
The older woman nodded and started a slow limp in that direction. Ross finished his text and followed. O’Dell fell into step alongside him this time.
“You’ve seen these remains?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Her title is agent,” Dr. Gunther corrected him without turning to look back.
Ross looked to O’Dell and she simply ignored the comment and continued, “What equipment do we have to recover this body?”
“I was told to bring shovels and trowels. We have tarps and several body bags.”
O’Dell heard Dr. Gunther making a tsk-tsk sound while she shook her head. Obviously she was not pleased. Again, Ross noticed and his eyes darted back to O’Dell, looking for instruction or absolution. She wasn’t quite sure which.
O’Dell ignored the woman’s reaction a second time and simply trudged through the mud. She had brought her own backpack with items she’d anticipated needing, including a digital camera, rubber gloves, and evidence bags. She imagined Dr. Gunther’s satchel held whatever she expected she’d need.
All four sides of the tent were screened in. Ross unzipped the door and held the flap open for the two women. The floor was uneven ground—or rather tamped-down mud—but other than removing the bigger pieces of debris, O’Dell imagined the rescue crew had left the scene the way they’d found it. The guardsmen had pitched the tent as carefully as possible so as not to disturb what was covered by a tarp in the center of the area.
Dirty water pooled between creases in the black plastic. Underneath, O’Dell could see additional pools. The body and tarp had been left in the rain until the tent could be set up.
O’Dell shrugged out of her backpack, found her digital camera, and took a few shots of the scene before they disturbed it. Then she nodded for Ross to remove the tarp.
He lifted the corner, slow and easy, folding it over to let the water run off and away. The pile of dirt underneath looked unremarkable, pocked with rock and gravel. The hole was only a foot in diameter. Even with the screened walls it was difficult to see because of the thick fog and cloud cover. Dr. Gunther pulled a flashlight from her satchel and turned it on. As Ross uncovered the hole, she shot a stream of light into the shallow depths.
She stopped at the blue-gray skin washed clean by the rain before the rescue crew had covered it. At first glance O’Dell didn’t recognize that it was part of a face until the light flicked over the chin, lips, and then an eye looking straight up at them.
“Oh, my good Lord,” the woman said, taking a step back so quickly she almost stumbled.
O’Dell reached out to help steady her, but Dr. Gunther waved her off again. This time she looked embarrassed about her reaction. O’Dell watched her take a deep breath, then step forward. She moved in closer, pointing the beam of light back down the hole. And before she could control it, O’Dell saw her wince.
At that moment all O’Dell could think was that this was not going to be quite as simple as Benjamin Platt had made it sound.
30.
Creed led Grace directly to the old woman’s chair. Made her sit in front of it. He wanted her to focus on him instead of all the different sounds and smells inside the house.
He gave her a few minutes to glance around. An ear twitched toward the ticking of the grandfather clock. Her head jerked when an appliance’s motor kicked on in the kitchen. Finally she settled down, shifting her weight and looking up at him.
He took the quilt gently from the recliner and held it in front of her nose, offering it to her for inspection. She sniffed at it and he let her put her nose inside the folds. There was a faint medicinal smell and Creed had no clue if that would help or hinder. Individualized scent was always tricky.
Like he had told Vance earlier, although Grace had proven herself in finding a variety of scents Creed had asked her to search out, she wasn’t trained as a trailing or tracking dog. Those dogs—usually bloodhounds—were trained to sniff a particular item or article of clothing that belonged to a specific person, take in the tiny particles of human tissue or skin cells cast off by that person, and then go search for that specific scent. Yes, Grace could rescue lost people, but she did that differently.
Grace was able to rescue the lost by picking up traces of human scent that drifted in the air. The same scent that all humans give off. Throw in some extras like universal body odors from fear, anxiety, and perspiration. Maybe even blood. Grace didn’t look for any specific person. She simply searched for human scent.
One of the reasons this worked was because people tended to get trapped or lost in remote areas. So if Grace picked up human scent in the woods, she searched for the cone of air, an area with the most concentrated scent. She zeroed in on where it was the strongest, and usually the person was nearby.
In this case, the forest around Mrs. Hamlet’s house was already filled with human scent from those who had been trying to find her.
“Grace,” Creed said, and waited for her eyes. He held up the quilt and very slowly said, “Hamlet.”
He put the quilt aside, then waved for her to come smell the chair. She stood on her hind legs, sniffing. He patted the seat and allowed her to jump onto the recliner.
“Grace.” He waited for her to look up at him from her new perch. He tapped the arm of the chair and said, “Hamlet.”
Her nose went to work on the fabric from the creases to the tufted buttons on the back where he could see a treasured strand of hair had snagged. When she was finished she jumped back down to the floor and sat down.
As a test he unsnapped the leash from her vest. He pointed at the door on the other side of the room, the entrance they had come in. The same door that Mrs. Hamlet would have left through.
“Go find Hamlet, Grace.”
She took off across the room but skidded to a halt on the polished wood floor. She turned around, nose in the air, and headed back toward him. She stopped at the coffee table, her nose twitching. Then she sat down and looked up to find his eyes. It was her alert. Her way of telling him that she had found what he had asked for.
Then he noticed the TV remote and a wad of used tissues on the tabletop. They probably belonged to Mrs. Hamlet. But it wasn’t what he was looking for. He couldn’t reward her even though these items most definitely had the same scent on them. He didn’t want her to find Mrs. Hamlet’s things. He needed her to find the old woman.
Creed held back a sigh of frustration. The throbbing at his temple had changed to a continuous dull beat. Maybe this would never work.
31.
Creed snapped the leash back in place. Last month at the Atlanta airport Grace had alerted to cocaine stashed in plastic bags and stuffed into jars of peanut butter. He knew she could do this if he could figure out a way to tell her what it was he wanted her to find. He decided to start at the last place they knew Mrs. Hamlet had been.
He led her through the door onto the front steps. Because of the debris in the yard he hated to take her off the leash again. He dug into his daypack and pulled out a retractable lead that would give her twice the roaming d
istance. Grace was watching him closely. She knew he also kept her pink elephant in that same pack.
“Grace, find Hamlet.”
She looked back at the door, as if to say that Hamlet was inside. Creed didn’t flinch. When he wouldn’t indulge her with even a glance back, she started sniffing the air again. He knew he was asking a lot. Mrs. Hamlet’s scent had been washed away by downpours and blown around since she stepped out two nights ago.
Grace tugged at the end of the leash. Creed felt his adrenaline kick in when she took a turn to the right, a hard right. Mrs. Hamlet was right-handed. This was a good start.
He saw the group on the lawn start to move toward him and put up his hand to stop them.
Grace strained hard now. She was pulling in air at a rapid rate. But she was keeping close to the side of the house. He kept his eyes on her paws, watching for glass or pieces of metal. She was following a narrow gully that the overflowing gutters had created between the foundation of the house and the beginning of the lawn.
At the corner of the house Grace took another hard right. She picked up her pace, skittering in the mud. There was more debris in the backyard than the front and Creed tried to slow her down.
The woods began about fifty feet from the back of the house. Fragrant bushes lined the yard, creating a natural barrier. In the fog it was difficult to see anything beyond them. The thick bushes had also acted as a stopgap for the floodwater that had come through earlier, gathering pieces of debris left behind. He worried that the grass held equal amounts of foreign objects that could pierce Grace’s pads. His boots crunched glass and a knot tightened in his stomach.
Grace stopped suddenly, interested in something stuck in the bushes. She looked back at him and sat down.
Another alert.
He took a closer look and saw a couple more wadded tissues pierced on the prickly bush. To anyone else they’d simply look like garbage, but Grace insisted they were “Hamlet.”
Creed glanced back toward the front of the house. Vance hadn’t allowed anyone to follow. He remembered the daughter had found the front door open. The search party had spent hours going up and down the neighborhood and, from what Vance had told him, they had ventured into the forest that started across the street and at the end of the cul-de-sac. They had tried to track the footsteps of an elderly woman who had come out her front door on a dark and stormy night, thinking that she had gone looking for her daughter who hadn’t come home.
They had done their best to guess the mind of someone old and confused with dementia. Had they looked in the backyard, they would have seen what Creed saw now—nothing.
“Good girl, Grace,” he told her in an even tone and not the excited, high-pitched one he used when she found what they were looking for. Still, her eyes left his to glance at the backpack where she knew her pink elephant was waiting.
“Grace,” he said, and her eyes came back to his. “Find Hamlet.”
She stood up and sniffed at the tissues. Glanced up at him.
They could have blown there from anywhere, even if they had belonged to Mrs. Hamlet. Just when Creed thought they were at a dead end, Grace’s nose started twitching. And once again she tugged and strained, pulling him toward the thick barrier of bushes. She turned right and led him along the row. At the end she took another right and headed back toward the house. Before she got there she stopped in her tracks.
Her tail stood straight out. No motion. Ears perched forward. Nose up, twitching and sniffing rapidly. She turned right again but didn’t go far. She circled and stopped. But she wasn’t finished.
This time she took off and raced for the back line of bushes. She pulled Creed through a narrow gap where the branches didn’t touch her but scraped and scratched at his jeans and snagged his shirt, ripping it before he could set himself free. On this side the grass ended and mud greeted his boots, sending him sliding. He kept his balance even as the forest floor sloped down. Grace didn’t slow a bit.
In seconds the canopy above cut their light. The fog seemed to come alive, moving between the trees like smoke in the wind. Dampness settled around them. Branches dripped. The smell of earth and pine was overwhelming. Yet Grace’s nose continued to work the air.
Creed glanced back up to get a sense of how far they had come, and he could no longer see the bushes that separated the Hamlet backyard from the forest. He knew that Grace was still leading him toward the right but it was subtle now. None of the sharp turns like in the backyard. He was starting to get concerned about how deep they were going. His head hurt. The cut above his eye throbbed a new rhythm of pain. Already he felt that his sense of direction was slipping away.
He wanted to reel Grace in. Take a break. Get both of them some water. Before he had a chance to do any of that, Grace skittered to a halt. She sat down and looked up at him, her eyes finding his.
Creed’s pulse was racing, his breath uneven. His eyes darted around the area. The fog was thick along the floor of the forest. He squinted but all he could see were trees, downed branches, a pile of rubbish, leaves and pine needles, thigh-high shrubs, and vines growing from trunk to trunk. He scanned higher, looking for more tissues stuck in branches, pieces of fabric, anything that could have once been Mrs. Hamlet’s.
He glanced back down at Grace and she was staring at him hard. False alerts weren’t uncommon. It happened. But not with Grace. He saw her eyes slip to his daypack. She was ready for her reward, getting impatient.
Creed took another look around, this time turning slowly and trying to take in the surroundings in small clips. The throbbing over his eye was causing it to twitch. Maybe it and the fog were making him miss something. He could feel Grace watching him.
Then suddenly she stood back up and casually strolled over to the pile of rubbish. It looked like someone’s garbage dump with twigs and vines growing over it. There were pieces of cardboard, an old sofa cushion, cans and bottles, a tangle of rope and wet newspapers, along with other unrecognizable musty throwaways.
The tang was a mixture of smells, one of which could be human decomposition. Was Mrs. Hamlet’s body buried under this pile of garbage?
That’s when something stirred beneath that mess.
Creed jerked back a step, but Grace’s tail started wagging. She stuck her nose into the pile and a hand nudged its way out, reaching to touch Grace.
Creed dropped to his knees and started grabbing at pieces, pulling and tugging. Grace licked at the dirty fingers. Before he finished uncovering her, the old woman shifted from lying on her side. She was filthy—mud streaked her face. Strands of garbage dangled from her hair. Her clothes looked like part of the rubbish and so did her small body of bones.
She sat up on her own without Creed’s help. He didn’t want to alarm her by touching her, so he tried to use his eyes to look for cuts and blood. He scanned her arms and legs to check if he could see any bones protruding.
“Mrs. Hamlet, are you okay?”
It seemed like a silly question to ask a woman who had been under a pile of rubbish for two nights.
Her eyes were bright and anxious and didn’t leave Grace as she petted the dog with muddy, blue-veined hands. She stroked her from head to tail over and over.
“Aren’t you the prettiest thing,” she cooed, and Grace continued to wag, even forgetting about her pink elephant for the moment.
Then suddenly the old woman looked up at Creed as if she’d only just noticed him. “What in the world took you so long?”
32.
Daniel Tate lay on his belly and watched from inside a bent metal air duct. He was proud of how quietly he had moved in the dark, the night vision goggles providing him views that the intruder didn’t have beyond the stream from the handheld strobe light. Only one time did the metal creak beneath his weight, and he worried that it might crash down. The spaceman below didn’t seem concerned, glancing up only briefly before going back to his mission
.
Tate’s first thought when he saw the oversized white suit was of a spaceman, because it covered the trespasser completely from the hood and glass shield all the way to the black rubber boots and gloves. But he knew it was a hazmat suit.
If he pushed back the paranoia and anxiety that pounded in his chest, Tate could almost convince himself that the spaceman wasn’t there to destroy him. Instead, he seemed more interested in the battered metal cabinet and the black suitcase he’d found in the rubble.
The spaceman set the strobe light on a pile of debris where he could work with the light shining down. He opened a combination lock on the metal cabinet. Carefully he reached around inside until he found what he was looking for. Then his focus turned to the black suitcase.
Several times the spaceman tried to lift the suitcase, but it was too heavy. He then tried to drag it but there was no clear trail. The case made it only a foot or two before getting hung up in debris.
From his perch, Tate noticed digital numbers flashing on the side of the case, and a small red light blinking like the suitcase had a pulse. The spaceman fidgeted with the digital numbers, making them tick up and down until there was a loud click. With the click the light changed to green and the spaceman was able to open the lid.
Tate wanted to squirm and reposition himself to see over the man’s shoulder. He was soaking wet with perspiration, hot from being inside the metal air duct. Still, he wanted to see what was inside the case. But in seconds the spaceman took what he wanted, stuffed something into a case of his own, and snapped the suitcase shut. Both cases lit up, each with a pulsing red light and with the same freaky rhythm that made them seem as if they were part of the same living organism.
Then the spaceman did something Tate didn’t expect. He set aside the second case. Then he shoved the metal cabinet until it toppled on top of the first one. The cabinet’s contents fell out, metal striking metal and glass shattering, burying the case.
