by Jan Burke
Tap-tap-tap. What the hell were those fingernails made of—iron?
He sighed and rolled down the window. She grinned and leaned in, folding her arms over the sill, thrusting her breasts toward him. Despite the fact that the mid-September weather was a little too cool for it, she was wearing her usual ensemble, a skimpy black swimsuit top and pair of tight faded denim shorts that barely covered her ass. It was probably an appealing outfit the first time she wore something like it forty or fifty years ago. She was still slender, but Ben figured she must have spent most of those decades in the sun, because as far as he was concerned, these days she just looked like beef jerky in a bikini.
“I’m in a real hurry, Alice,” he said brusquely, leaning away from her. “Mind stepping back from the truck?”
“Hello, Professor!” she said, as if he hadn’t spoken. She flipped her straight, shoulder-length hair—with a slight green tinge from the chlorine in her pool—away from her face and looked back at the bloodhound and the German Shepherd. “Hi, Bingle! Hi, Bool! Going on a search?” He knew where her own searching eyes would look next, and felt himself tense. Someone unaware of her particular proclivities might have mistaken the direction of her gaze. But Ben knew she wasn’t staring at his crotch. She was staring at his lower left leg.
He was grateful that he had jeans on today, not because they hid the prosthesis he wore, but because he knew that Alice was hoping to catch a glimpse of the point where his left leg had been amputated below the knee.
“Ben, why don’t you come over for a swim?” she said, still not looking at his face.
“Alice!” he shouted.
She blinked and shook her head, as if he had awakened her from a trance.
“I have to leave right now,” he gritted out. “Immediately. I’m in a hurry.”
“Okay. Well, come on by later.” She took one step back.
He wasn’t going to waste this chance. He put the truck in reverse, glanced behind him and backed out. He drove off, not looking in the rearview mirror until he was sure he was too far away for her to run after him. She stood motionless in his driveway.
He noticed Bingle watching him from his crate. The dark, longhaired shepherd (shepherd and some other breed—no one was quite certain of the mix) was cocking his head to one side.
“I don’t know what to do about her, either, Bingle,” Ben said.
Bingle—whose first of three owners had named him Bocazo, Spanish for “big mouth”—began to answer at length with a series of sounds that Ben was convinced were an attempt to imitate human vocal tones.
Bool thumped his tail against his own crate. The bloodhound was an amiable fellow, not half as bright as Bingle, but nevertheless excellent at his work. Together, there were few search situations they couldn’t cover.
That was thanks to David, he knew. Ben had taken over the handling and training of the dogs after his close friend and colleague, David Niles, had been murdered by the same man who had left Ben an amputee. Ben was adjusting to life with a prosthesis—he had returned to work, was active, was in a great relationship with a woman who also trained search dogs. But David’s death still haunted him.
No day passed without a reminder of him. The dogs were the strongest reminder, of course. David had survived a childhood of physical abuse—in part, he had told Ben, because the aunt who raised him after his abusive father’s death had interested David in training dogs. David used his knowledge of dog training and anthropology for volunteer search and rescue work, and for cadaver dog work—to search for the missing, or their remains.
Ben never started a search without thinking of David, and of all the work David had put into these dogs, all the affection he had given them. Ben didn’t believe he had David’s capacity for forgiveness, but continuing David’s work was important to him, a way of saying David’s work had mattered. And despite the inherent stress in trying to find missing persons before they came to harm, Ben found he enjoyed the search and rescue work.
He glanced at the directions Frank Harriman had given him and forced himself to concentrate on the job at hand. Frank Harriman and his wife—Irene Kelly—were among Ben’s closest friends. Frank had called a few minutes ago to ask Ben if he would bring his search dogs to a neighborhood about seven miles from Ben’s home.
“We’ve got a homicide, a male in his late thirties,” Frank had said. “Turns out he was a widower, raising a kid on his own. We’re just starting to work here, but we can’t locate the boy. There are some indications that he might have been taken from the home, maybe even injured. We want to find him as soon as possible, of course, and I thought you might be able to help out.”
* * *
“YOU SAID HIS NAME IS Alex?” Ben asked, studying the boy’s photograph.
“No,” Frank said. “Lexington. Neighbors call him Lex or Lexie. Think you’ll be able to help us out here?”
“Hope so,” Ben said absently, not looking up from the photo. A skinny kid with straight blond hair, a crooked smile, and dark circles beneath his blue eyes looked back at him. “You have anything more recent? In this photo, he looks as if he’s younger than eight—five or so, maybe.”
Frank shrugged. “Neighbors say he looks like that one, that he’s small for his age. You know how it is with searches for kids—they change quickly, but the parents don’t take as many photos once the kids are school age. And it doesn’t look as if Toller was exactly staying on top of things here, does it?”
Ben looked toward the body of Victor Toller, which lay facedown on the living room carpet, in a north-south position, so that his head was not far from the front door. Toller was a little over six feet tall, big-boned, with thick arms and broad shoulders. And a skull that had taken several crushing blows during a struggle that had left its mark on the living room.
Ben noticed a shotgun propped near the front door. “I take it the gun hasn’t been fired?”
“No, not recently. It’s loaded, though. Neighbors say that was always there.”
“Christ, with a kid that young in the house?”
“He wasn’t anybody’s idea of Mr. Responsible, it seems.”
Ben glanced around the room. He doubted it had been orderly even before Toller met his fate. It reeked of booze and cigarette smoke, mixed with the rancid scent of cold greasy food. Empty bottles could be found on almost every flat surface. A quick glance at their labels showed that Toller’s tastes seemed to have varied from vodka to beer and cheap red wine.
Crumpled paper wrappers, plastic foam hamburger boxes, and other scattered “to go” containers made up a monument to meals purchased at drive-up windows. A chair not far from the body had been knocked over. There were bloodstains on it.
There were bloodstains consistent with Toller’s head injury, apparently delivered by the heavy fireplace poker being photographed by an evidence technician. Ben could see blood and hair on it. He glanced across the room, and saw the rest of the set of tools near the fireplace. There were no ashes in the fireplace.
Ben said, “You think his attacker probably dropped him where he stood?”
The evidence technician looked up, first at Ben, and then at Frank.
“It’s all right,” Frank said to the technician. “He’s authorized to be here. This is Dr. Ben Sheridan. He’s a forensic anthropologist, but he’s also a search dog handler. He’s going to help us look for the boy. Ben, this is Mark Collier, one of our crime scene specialists.”
Collier nodded. “Good to meet you. Look up on the ceiling and this nearest wall—judging from the spatter patterns, someone swung hard, connected, then stood over him here and made sure he was a goner. You should show him the boy’s room, Frank. Dr. Sheridan, if I can be of help, let me know.”
“Who found the body?”
“Toller has a hunting buddy who came by for him about five this morning. Got a little worried when he saw the car here but didn’t get
an answer, so he looked in the window and saw this.”
Frank carefully led Ben down a hallway—both of them doing their best not to disturb another technician, who was trying to raise prints from the hall door. “Note that there are no visible bloodstains leading away from the body or on the hall carpet up to this point,” Frank said, as they reached a bedroom door. “So, my guess is the same as yours—Toller didn’t get up again after he received that blow. But what worries me is that there are some bloodstains in the boy’s bedroom, and some blood drops leading from here.”
Ben saw crime lab markers near a few blood spots on the hall floor. He bent closer, and saw that they were slightly elongated, as if whoever was bleeding was moving. He looked toward the end of the hall, where sunlight came in through the barred window of a door. “That leads to the backyard?”
“Yes.”
“Why the bars? Is there some treasure in the kid’s room?”
“Far from it. Take a look,” Frank said, gesturing to a doorway to the left. “At first glance, I wondered if this room was some sort of guest room. Didn’t seem lived in. Especially not by a boy. Toller had a gun collection in his own room. I suspect that’s what the bars were for.”
When he looked in Lex’s room, Ben agreed—it didn’t look like a child’s room at all. No toys were visible, just a few school books, aligned with the corner of a small desk. No posters or pennants on the walls. No radio, no CD player. No computer or electronic games. Not so much as a teddy bear. Another crime lab worker was photographing the two exceptions to the orderliness—the shattered glass of a picture frame and bloodstains on the pillow of the otherwise neatly made twin bed. Some of the shards of glass from the frame were bloodstained, too. In the photo, a thin, dark-haired woman held Lex in an affectionate hug. “Is this the boy’s mother?” Ben asked.
“I don’t think so. Neighbors say the mother was blonde, and died about four years ago. When I described the woman in the photo, they told me she’s probably his aunt—his mother’s sister. She was over here last night, and two of the neighbors heard loud arguing.”
“You’ve tried to reach her?”
“Pete just talked with her.”
“So does your partner think the boy could be with her?”
“She says no, but Pete’s still not sure about that. With the blood you see here—you can understand why I’d like to have Bingle and Bool go through the place.”
“Yes. I’ll start with Bool. Is there a laundry hamper here?”
There were socks and underwear in the hamper, along with a pair of pajamas. “Anybody else touch these clothes today?”
Frank asked Collier, who said, yes, there was a preliminary look through the hamper—the outfit the kid was last seen wearing was not with the other laundry, so they were assuming he was still in his jeans and T-shirt.
“Why don’t you pre-scent the dog with that bloody pillowcase?” Collier asked.
“Because I don’t know that the blood is the child’s.”
“Oh.”
“Maybe the bathroom—”
“Looked like somebody had washed up in there,” Collier said. “Towels were a little damp. May have bandaged a wound—there were fragments of gauze in the wastebasket.”
Ben raised a brow and turned to Frank. “Toothbrush or fireplace poker—you want the child or the suspect?”
“Both, but the boy is our first concern.”
“Toothbrush it is, then,” he said, and went into the bathroom. He used gloves to take the child-sized toothbrush from its holder and placed it in a plastic bag. They walked out to the shady spot where another officer—a dog lover who had worked with Ben on previous cases—was keeping an eye on the crated dogs.
Bingle greeted him with a little song of anticipation, perhaps already smelling Toller’s body. Like Bool, Bingle was trained in cadaver work, and probably thought this would be an easy day’s work. But it was big, drooling, sweet-natured Bool he’d work with first today.
Frank held the toothbrush bag while Ben put on a daypack with water and other basic supplies for the search. He clipped a small two-way radio on his belt, gave the other one to Frank, and put Bool in his working harness. The harness was necessary for any control over Bool—and for the safety of both Ben and the dog. Once on the trail, the big bloodhound would become oblivious to everything but the scent—he’d walk out into traffic if he was trailing someone who had stepped into the street. David had once told Ben of a time when Bool had been following the trail of a lost hiker, and had gone halfway over a cliffside before David managed to haul him back—the hiker, it turned out, had fallen to his death at the same spot several hours earlier.
Ben wasn’t very optimistic about what they’d find in this type of search environment today—concrete and asphalt wouldn’t hold the scent the way a more natural environment would. But Bool had surprised him before.
“Since we’ve got blood drops in the hallway leading toward the back door,” he said, “let’s start on the back porch.”
Frank had done search work with Ben in the past, and knew that his role would be that of “second man.” Ben would be focused on the dog, while Frank followed at a short distance to ensure Ben’s safety. He’d keep a clear view of the search terrain, call for backup if needed, and take control of the dog if Ben was hurt. With luck, he’d also have the role of helping Lex Toller once he was found. If a suspect was with Lex, Frank would be the one to apprehend him.
When they reached the Tollers’ back porch, Ben took the plastic bag from Frank and removed the toothbrush. Making sure the dog had his nose directly over the bristles, Ben said, “Find ’em, Bool!”
With Bool, this pre-scenting—giving the dog a “sample” of Lex’s scent to work with—was essential. The dog put his nose to the porch and immediately caught a trail, almost pulling Ben off his feet as he headed to the side of the house. From there, he quickly found a small opening and was ready to burrow under the porch before Ben called him back and praised him.
A burly uniformed officer who had been watching them with some curiosity said, “He’s not under there. That’s one of the first places we looked.”
“You looked under the house?”
“Yes, sir. Figured if he was scared, that’s where he might hide. I didn’t crawl, but I used a flashlight—”
“Let’s take another look,” Frank said.
“Hold Bool,” Ben said. “I’m in jeans, you’re in a suit. Let me crawl.”
“There’s no one under there,” the officer said again.
Frank said, “Maybe you should be the one to crawl.”
“I’ll go,” Ben said again, to the officer’s relief. “I took up anthropology knowing I’d get to play in the dirt.” He took a flashlight from his pack and got down on his stomach.
When the leg of his jeans pulled up enough to reveal his Flex Foot prosthesis, he heard the cop say, “Oh, Jesus, fella, here—let me do it. I didn’t know you were a cripple.”
Ben looked up at Frank with a look of mock horror. “I’m a cripple? When did that happen?”
Ignoring the officer’s flustered attempts to explain himself, Ben put his head through the opening, which looked just wide enough for his shoulders. Bool whimpered, wanting to follow.
Ben didn’t immediately go farther. He could see that someone else had already crawled there.
“He might not be in here now,” Ben called to Frank, “but he’s been here. The dirt’s soft under here, and I can see hand and footprints. Not big enough to be a man’s.”
They seemed small even for an eight-year-old, he thought. He tried to avoid the boy’s path. The prints seemed to be both coming and going, but he wasn’t sure. There were also stains in the dirt that might be blood. Brushing aside thick cobwebs that hung from the joists, he made slow but steady progress. Finally, beneath the front of the house, the trail came to a halt. There was a
hollowed out place, a small burrow roughly a yard long and eighteen inches deep. He pointed the flashlight into it and drew in a breath.
“Frank,” he said, using the radio. “He’s not here now, but I think he has been. And I’ve found his toys. Come around to the foundation vent at the front of the house. You can see it through there.”
* * *
FRANK BROUGHT BOOL BACK TO his crate before heading to the side of the house. He then crouched down and looked into the vent, which was missing its cover—assuming that one might have once been on it. Ben’s flashlight illuminated the hollowed out space in the dirt. In addition to a red lunch pail and Thermos, he saw a neatly arranged collection of toys and other playthings—miniature cars, a bag of plastic toy soldiers, a flashlight, a grass-stained baseball, a toy periscope, a mirror, a magnifying glass, and two model airplanes that had seen better days.
Frank looked into Ben’s face and saw the question that was on his own mind reflected there: what kind of life had this child lived here, if he hid with his toys beneath the house?
“A periscope, flashlight, mirror, and this—” Ben said. He held up an index card that someone had laminated in plastic. A handwritten cheat sheet for Morse code. “Everything a secret agent—or a kid hiding from his dad—needs.”
Frank looked at the houses across the street. Several could be seen from the crawl space vent, including the Kendalls’.
His cell phone rang. He saw his partner’s number on the display. “Pete? What’s up?”
“Anonymous call just came in saying the kid is alive and well in the woods near Lake Arrowhead. Location was fairly specific, but I thought you might want to know. San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department is already on the way up there.”
“A call.” Frank rubbed his hand over his forehead, thinking about what Pete had just said. “This hasn’t been out on any media yet, right?”
