by Susannah
"Shiiiit," says the officer, who finds his voice first.
I'm silent, still a little stunned—and feeling guilty because identifying hazards for the dog team is my job, and I didn't see this one in time.
A middle-aged man in running gear emerges from the shadows, his movement a little cramped, a little crablike, like he's not sure whether he wants to own up to this or not. There's a lot going on in his face. He doesn't have a leash, but it is his dog inverted in the grass, and there's a police officer with us who may or may not write a citation about the incident.
"Sorry," he murmurs, as he takes his now-simpering dog by the collar. The dog has his tail between his legs, his mouth also open in an apologetic grin.
"Better get control of your dog, sir," says the officer.
Man and dog slink off together.
"That was ... that was... something, Johnny," I say, inadequate, in my mind years away from having that kind of confidence with a dog.
Johnny stands up, Buster rises and gives himself a little shake, and we are back to work.
By midnight, we have all gone out to multiple sectors. The closest have been cleared, farther ones have been searched, and the dogs have demonstrated interest in only two areas. Buster paused in the doorway of a local school building, and a few blocks away three of the dogs in blind verification all exhibited significant interest near a bus stop beside a busy road. Nothing across the street. Nothing at the nearby convenience store. The police ask us if this abrupt loss of scent indicates the woman got on a bus, and Fleta tells them that any number of factors could cause scent to disperse on a busy road. That she got on a bus is certainly possible. But there has also been foot traffic, car traffic, radiant heat, the day's earlier wind. It would be great to be able to say that when scent stops beside a road it's certain a missing person left by vehicle, but we cannot claim that absolute. The dogs jointly indicate that Miss Celeste was here. What we also know is that from this point, the dogs have nothing else.
Operating across several scenarios, the police will pursue the bus possibility further, while search management has developed sectors even farther from the neighborhood, including target areas where local buses might stop en route. We're about to go out again.
"How long will you search?" asks an officer.
"Until you tell us to stand down," says Fleta. "We're prepared to search as long as you need us."
The crowd too is steadfast. The gathering at the house has diminished only slightly. Neighbors sit in the grass or on the edge of raised flowerbeds. Nora stands alone beside her mailbox, head bowed, her arms folded across her stomach as though it hurts. I can hear the rasp of Aunt Charm in the huddle somewhere. Miss Celeste's husband is nowhere in sight. A few neighbors come forward toward the dogs, asking to pet them or to help them in some other way, wanting news. Bottles of water are poured into dog bowls, pressed into our hands. One nice fellow tells us he's hidden a pizza just for the dog team in his car.
"She's dead, isn't she?" I hear Nora say to a policeman. She has said it to several neighbors, to a couple of us, less a question as time passes and more like a truth she needs to acknowledge. The late hour and the dogs' return have discouraged her.
"Ma'am..." he says, shaking his head, then stops when another officer runs up to him, murmuring something. They walk away together, then come back with quick steps, not quite a run. "We've got her," he says quietly to Nora, who is now supported by friends who've rushed forward, but the words and his changed, relieved posture snap the news across the lawn. The crowd converges where they stand.
"Alive," I hear Nora say to the friends who are holding her.
"Of course she is," says Aunt Charm. She says it to those standing nearest, but loud enough to give Nora a little smack.
Alive, but in what condition? Even the authorities aren't sure, but they do know she's coming here.
It takes half an hour for a police car to arrive, and Miss Celeste has an audience when she is handed carefully from the vehicle into the headlight beam of a waiting ambulance. The dogs' heads instantly come up, and their tails wag. They do not have to be told. This is their person. Oh, definitely their person. She does not appear to see them, but they strain where they stand, wuffling pleasurably. Handlers exchange glances. Miss Celeste is too frail for a meeting, and the dogs remain where they are. Their partners bend quietly to them and praise. "Good that," they say, crackling open sleeves of beef jerky. "Good dog!"
Word travels fast: Miss Celeste had indeed caught a bus to a shopping center miles away. From there the driver had reported her disorientation and continued on. But before the bus dispatcher could communicate a description and location to police, she had vanished again. Further details are fuzzy. There had been at least one, possibly two car trips afterward. A Samaritan finally left her where he thought she wanted to go: an elementary school in an adjoining suburb. The police of that town found Miss Celeste lying on a stone bench in the doorway, wearing her coat, purse at her side, clutching a sack lunch—a peanut butter sandwich and apple juice. Now she appears pale and bewildered, but she is smiling a little as she stands in the light, nodding politely to the surround of loving strangers.
"Goddamnit, Mom," says Nora, like a tenderness. She throws her arms around her translucent mother and weeps, rocking her, one hand covering her eyes, the other clutching the brown paper bag.
13. THE SEARCH YOU'RE CALLED OUT TO
DOG TEAMS ARE RARELY the first emergency response resource on the scene. For us, most pips of the pager represent a chronology—someone has been determined missing, caregivers, family, and friends may have searched first, perhaps for hours, before calling 911. Police or firefighters (or both) arrive and make the search an official incident and, having deployed according to their own procedures and having not located the victim, call additional resources if available: air support, ground-walking search teams, and dog units. This chronology may seem agonizingly slow to anxious families (and to dog teams themselves—fresh scent is always better), but many searches result in possible crime scenes that should be overseen by law enforcement before additional resources could contaminate the environment.
Many of our team's calls occur late in the evening—some for immediate deployment, others (particularly when the victim is believed deceased) for early morning deployment the following day. The pip and its text message are cryptic, with little information beyond the nature of the victim—missing toddler, Alzheimer's walk-away, suspected drowning—and the search location. When the pager goes off, we respond immediately to the team manager if able to search.
Because these calls frequently come late at night, a first priority is to have a pager with a sound so distinctive it's likely to wake us. Salespersons are never quite sure what to make of me every time I buy a new cell phone (several of mine have come to grief in the water on searches). My priorities are odd. I need a phone large enough to hang on to, ideally with an available rubber cover—Day-Glo orange would be a plus—and I'll always trade sleek and pretty for solid and sturdy. But I also spend a lot of time reviewing each prospective new phone's standard ringtones, annoying other customers by repeatedly beta-testing an electronic version of The 1812 Overture at max volume next to my head as I lean over a counter, feigning sleep.
Would that wake me up? I wonder, and move on to the next phone, which lacks The 1812 Overture but may have the advantage of a particularly discordant Beethoven's Fifth. Dit-dit-dit-BLAAAAT!
My current phone is set to a pager ringtone that while melodious, goes on a long, long, long time, then follows with a nagging pip every few minutes if you fail to acknowledge the text. Though Puzzle is unmoved, something in this pager's electronic song rouses and infuriates the Poms, who bark as it plays. And plays. And plays. If the song doesn't wake me, the little dogs certainly will. Bonus!
The pager supercharges all activities that follow. When I was first qualified to go on searches, I made the mistake of preparing to deploy in tidy stages. It was an organized process, like an
aircraft checklist, but too slow, and without a dog I still took twenty minutes or so to get out of the house, assuming I started off in pajamas and half-asleep. ("What's your best bare-ass to haul-ass time?" a colleague on another team once asked me. His own best time was astonishing, though his teammate did confide that the guy showed up to one search with his shirt on backward and Scooby-Doo boxers showing out of his unbuttoned trousers.)
In those early days, I was eager to better my time out of the house. Eventually I learned that I could call in my response to the team manager at the same time I put on my uniform, an exercise of balance and coherence. I would shimmy into the T-shirt with the phone in my left hand, then speed dial while I balanced on first one leg, then the other, pulling on my pants with the phone cradled beneath my chin. Lean against the bed, still cradling the phone with my jaw, pull on, lace, and strap down boots. By the time I had the boots on, the call had rung through and I'd have hands free to copy more specific instructions not available on the text message. This call-and-dress method has served me well in following years, as long as my foot doesn't somehow get caught in the pants. The unbalanced fall, the hot language, the dropped phone easily adds another two minutes to my departure.
Hair in a ball cap, glasses on, and I'm ready to load a little cooler with ice, water, and a couple of breakfast bars in case the search gets long. My gear is already in the car trunk—I never take it out except to repack or restock.
This all assumes a call-out in warm weather. Winter calls, with their necessary thick socks and long johns and turtlenecks and long-sleeved T's—and Thermos of hot cocoa for the rehab period—add time. But I keep my search clothes ready in one place. The cocoa and the Thermos are in the same cabinet, the electric kettle just three steps away. My best clock out of the house, sans dog, is eleven minutes—curiously, a winter search with the added clothing. Worst (a fall in tangled pants, failed speed dial, misplaced car keys) is about twenty-eight minutes, which may not seem too bad until you realize that most calls are to a location involving at least a half-hour drive at civilian speeds—we have no lights and sirens—and a slow departure plus drive-time means that you don't get in the search field for an hour or more. If the missing person is presumed alive and weather conditions or his own health is precarious, that hour comes at a price. Regretting the Keystone Kops quality of some of my late-night departures, I trade notes with teammates and try to learn from their strategies—particularly the dog handlers, who have to not only get themselves out the door, but also get their dog and the dog's fresh supplies out too.
Some of the dogs help at this, and some hinder. Max and Fleta's partners Mercy and Misty react immediately to the sound of the pager and the putting on of uniforms, blocking the door to prevent Fleta and Max from leaving without them. Jerry's Shadow gives him room to maneuver, but he notes that she pays attention to his changed movements. When she's on the way to training, she lies quietly in the back of the SUV, but while on her way to searches, Shadow senses Jerry's different energy; she hangs her head over the seat at his shoulder, as if scrutinizing the route, as if to ask, "Are we there yet?"
We are sure the dogs know the sound of the pager and anticipate what's coming next.
The Poms have learned that the pager's long chime means I'm going to be moving through the house very fast. Excitable Whisky likes to stand in the hallway and bark Wow! every time I pass through a doorway, which feels like my own private cheering section. The other dogs tend to stand off to the side silently, watching my back and forth like polite observers at a tennis match. Not yet certified to deploy, in the early days Puzzle also watched from the back of the couch, then would cheerfully move to her crate when I gave her the "House, house, house!" command, curling up in it and waiting for her peanut butter Kong. But she has since learned that the pager means search gear she recognizes, gear I frequently wear at training, and as she approaches certification, I see her expression change when I gear up and do not ask her if she's ready to go to work. She's made the connection. Sometimes, Puzzle gives me a baleful look as I gesture her into the crate, turning her nose up at the Kong. Sometimes, she gives me the look, adds a mutter, and then flops down in the crate with an elaborate sigh, turning her back my direction. Go ahead, her sullen posture suggests. Search without me. And good luck with that.
The road to a search has its own surprises. A fair percentage of the time we begin the drive out and the pager pips again, indicating the missing person has been found—a turnaround/stand-down page—which is universally good news but can do strange things to your biochemistry, the earlier flush of adrenaline now with no place to go but home. On one pair of back-to-back searches, I got to exactly the same place on the freeway when I heard the pip of the turnaround page. Two night calls. A turnaround page at exactly the same place on the freeway. What are the odds? I drove home calculating whether this might influence the likelihood of my getting struck by lightning or winning the lottery. So far, neither has happened.
I've never known a colleague to grumble about the interruption of a callout followed by a subsequent stand-down page, but we trade a few stories afterward. Without the hard activity of a search, blazing out the door only to return minutes later can take a bit to unwind. One colleague plays solitaire on the computer. Another watches Fresh Prince reruns in the small hours. I sometimes weed the rose garden at two in the morning beneath the light of a security lamp hanging off the garage. There's a strange Proustian moment of connection every time I prune back the mint growing among the roses. I now associate the dark, fresh scent of crushed chocolate mint with the good word that a toddler missing from a lakeside home—feared abducted, feared strayed, feared drowned—had been found asleep in her parents' laundry hamper before we got there. Two years have passed since that callout, but I think of that little girl every time I pinch mint for iced tea. She would be four now, or five, and I wonder if her nap in the basket has turned into the kind of family story that will be told on holidays, told to her fiancé and eventually to her children, just as she remains a figure on our side of the narrative—as a late-night call, a missing child in winter, an early find— alive —and a universal reprieve.
Some morning deployments tell a different story, particularly on weekday mornings, when a close search location can still take an hour or more to reach. One drowning call on a lake across the Metroplex was challenging enough to reach as depicted by map, the route served by a spider web of freeways that tapered off to county roads that fed to undeveloped residential streets that wound down to gravel paths and a boat ramp. Teammates were heading in from all directions (not one of us lived close to the search site), and on that particular winter morning every major freeway had a problem of one kind or another, from overturned eighteen-wheelers to burning cars to spilled green stuff from a produce truck made slick as it was overrun by traffic. Most of us left home before 7:00 A.M. for a 9:00 A.M. deployment. But by 8:45, we were all immobile and scattered wide across the two cities, unable to contact the officer leading the search, who was probably already on-site, and whose cell phone seemed to be out of range. Crazy-making conditions, but as I crept over the glaze of smashed tomatoes that had caused a few cars to spin out and into each other, I was grateful this was a recovery call for someone long deceased rather than a call for another strayed child or missing elderly patient, where every minute lost to traffic was potentially fatal.
Sometimes we have a little help getting there. Several years ago, a traffic jam on the major artery leading to the site of a search for a missing second-grader threatened to slow our arrival by an hour or more. Somehow local police got word and intervened, leading three cars of us out of the congestion via the shoulder of the freeway, one police car ahead of us and one behind as we drove in trail, passing a mile or more of motionless vehicles. So many frustrated drivers shot the bird at us as we passed that my memory of that drive bristles, as though the long row of cars had quills.
The dogs in general seem to handle the journey better than we do, perhaps b
ecause they're free of the deeper implications of each call. But no mistake, they are intensely aware of the job they are heading to. Some dogs take the travel a little harder than others, the adrenaline rushing straight to their digestive systems, resulting in nausea or diarrhea, or both, conditions they seem to shake off once on-site.
A handler acquaintance from another team once told me the story of his first dog, a chocolate-kiss-colored Lab, who would lie quietly in his crate on the way to training, but behaved differently on his way to searches, where he would stand in his crate and nuzzle the catch that latched the door shut—repetitively, rhythmically, bang-bang-bang —so much so that sometimes he emerged from his crate with the skin of his muzzle rubbed bare and bloody. By the time he retired, the old Lab, a veteran of many searches, had a callous on his nose. How did he know? the handler still wonders. Why did he only bang the crate on callouts? The gear was the same, the crate was the same, the car was the same. The only difference was the beep of the handler's cell phone and his own hasty motions to get them out the door. And of course, we both hazard, the changed scent from a human who just got a biochemical jump-start in the middle of the night.
Some searches are short. We've had a handful of them in the history of our team. Jerry, first to arrive on a morning search for a missing adolescent believed suicidal, was briefed on the boy's description, the chronology of his previous actions and his current disappearance, and the cryptic messages the boy left across the sidewalk, words that could be variously interpreted as a suicide note or an homage to a popular rap song of the day.
