The Finders

by Jeffrey B. Burton

  “Mace.” Kippy’s face hovered over me. “Are you awake?”

  “Of course I’m awake,” I said, slurring, my brain detached as though I were speaking in the third person. “I got shot, Kippy.”

  “I know, Mace,” Kippy replied. “The doctor said you’re going to be okay.”

  I looked at her several seconds or maybe a decade and finally said, “You have the prettiest eyes.”

  “Yes, two of them,” she said. “I came here to let you know that we have your dogs. Okay?” Kippy nodded her head as though to prod me along, to help me grasp her talking points. “Wabs and I sprung them from Lansing PD earlier tonight.”

  The clock on the wall read quarter of twelve—whatever quarter of twelve meant—and I did my best to focus on what Kippy was saying to me but she seemed to be floating in and out of a dark tunnel, or maybe I was the one floating in and out of a dark tunnel. Not long after Detectives Hanson and Marr had left, the hospital had upped my pain meds and/or given me something to help me sleep.

  Eventually I said, “Are the girls okay?”

  “They were spoiled rotten, Mace. They even got to eat people food.”

  Eventually I said, “Fucker tear-gassed Vira.”

  “She’s fine. I called a vet and they told me what to do. Wabs held her while I rinsed her eyes with saline.” Kippy stared into my face to see if anything she was telling me was getting through my medicated skull. “And I used up that entire bottle of doggie shampoo you had under your laundry tub scrubbing it out of her fur.”

  Eventually I said, “How did you get in my house?”

  “We’re cops, Mace.”

  The red flag cut through my grogginess. “But he knows where I live,” I said to her. “And the bastard wants me dead.”

  For some reason this notion struck me as funny as hell and I cackled like a chicken—louder and longer—until I caught sight of Kippy gazing down at me without the slightest hint of a smile. After my cackling stuttered and came to a stop, I spent another decade telling her about the watcher in the woods from last week, and how I knew for a fact it was the same man hiding in the pines at Gomsrud Park.

  “Don’t worry,” Kippy said after piecing together my semi-coherent ramblings. “If anyone tries to break in, Wabs will shoot them in the face. I’m heading back to your trailer now and the squad car will be sitting in your driveway all night.”

  “Kippy?”

  “What, Mace?”

  I forgot what I wanted to tell her, but eventually I said, “Can I drive the squad car sometime?”

  “Sure, Mace, but it’s time for you to go back to sleep. Okay?” she said. “I just stopped by to let you know the dogs are safe.”

  I don’t remember if I did but I’d like to think I thanked her, and then I said, “Kippy?”

  “What, Mace?”

  “The prettiest eyes.”

  CHAPTER 36

  Three days had passed since the shooting.

  After spending the bulk of a second day at Community Hospital being poked and prodded and fed pills, Detectives Hanson and Marr got me into a three-bedroom, split-level safe house in Park Forest. Hanson had stopped by every evening to fill me in on the day’s investigation. His briefings didn’t take long, unfortunately, but at least he brought pizza.

  Now if I could only talk him out of pineapple toppings.

  Then, the next morning, Kippy brought Sue and the ladies over. I blinked back tears when the kids showed up. I hugged them with my good arm, shook paws, scratched ears and chins, and then ushered them into their new playground; the safe house had a spacious backyard surrounded by chain link. All the jostling with the dogs hurt like hell so I verbally thanked each officer a baker’s dozen times or more.

  Even Wabiszewski gave me a soft pat on my good shoulder in salutation.

  The wound wasn’t deep; the projectile only absconded with a teaspoon of flesh. I’d been lucky, according to one of the surgeons who told me I could have been stabbed in the armpit with a knife and then bled to death or choked on my own blood. The doctors had cleaned the wound, sterilized it, stitched me up—thirty stitches not counting the liquid skin adhesive—and pumped me full of antibiotics. For being so lucky, my entire left side throbbed with every bump or jolt or beat of my heart. And unlike the heroes on TV, I doubted I’d be good to go after a short commercial break. The bandage had been replaced this morning. The doctor wanted it kept dry another few days before I could begin washing it with that strange-smelling liquid soap they’d provided.

  But the other wound, the real one I worried might never heal, was my sense of guilt over the death of Officer Roderick “Rod” Ennis. The man had single-handedly saved my life. If Officer Ennis had taken a leisurely stroll on his way to the clearing, I’d be a dead man. If Officer Ennis had decided to scroll Facebook as he waited for LPD’s finest to arrive at Gomsrud, I’d be a dead man.

  Rod Ennis had interrupted my murder.

  I’d read the officer’s obituary. Repeatedly. The man had a two-year-old son with another on the way. A couple of kids would never know their father and a wife would never see her husband again. It’s irrational—I understand that on some gut level—and maybe it’s a form of survivor’s guilt as Kippy had pointed out when she’d brought the dogs over.

  “You were a victim, Mace,” Kippy had told me. “Officer Ennis would know it’s not your fault. It’s the son of a bitch in the ski mask, Mace … and we’re going to catch him.”

  When I had shared the news of Vira’s having had another episode after her discovery of Weston Davies in the clearing at Gomsrud Park, and her ensuing warning of a monster hidden among the pines, Kippy took it in stride. A case could be made that she was a bigger disciple of Vira’s mysterious abilities than I; after all, Kippy had seen her in action first. However, Officer Wabiszewski was a tougher sell. He’d been struggling with Vira’s unique skill set and hadn’t quite advanced beyond the doubting Thomas phase. Fortunately, however, Wabiszewski was a skeptic on most matters. He didn’t appear to have a lot of trust in anyone not named Kippy Gimm or Dave Wabiszewski.

  In fact, Wabiszewski looked about the room after my tale of Vira’s Gomsrud warning and said, “We can’t go running to Detective Hanson or his partner, Detective Marr, and, when they ask how you knew Weston Davies’s killer was lying in wait to polish you off, tell them we’ve got this clairvoyant dog. ‘No shit, Detective Hanson, really, little Fido’s right out of The X-Files—she has second sight or ESP or maybe she even knows God—and that’s how we knew about Nicky Champine and North Mayfair and the prick in the woods.’”

  We absorbed Officer Wabiszewski’s analysis in silence.

  Wabiszewski went on, “Listen, I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t seen in person what went down in North Mayfair. We can buy it maybe, maybe not, but how do we convince an assembly of high-ranking cynics without getting our asses tossed in Lakeshore?”

  Chicago Lakeshore was the city’s major psychiatric hospital.

  “Look,” I said, picking pages off the printer Hanson and Marr had helped me lug to the safe house and bringing them to the kitchen table, “here’s some stuff I got off the internet, and we all know how everything on the internet is true.” I’d read an article once that recommended beginning a presentation with a joke or some kind of lightheartedness. Unfortunately, Kippy wasn’t guffawing and Wabiszewski didn’t appear to be rolling in the aisle, so I continued. “It all makes for an intriguing read but it’s kind of awkward to talk about, you know, out loud and in front of people—I feel as though I should check myself into Chicago Lakeshore … but just bear with me.” My homework assignment had been short and sweet—to try and figure out Vira’s special ability. “We’ve already touched on mediumistic sensitivity, where some folks are highly sensitive and can serve as conduits for psychic communication. But there’s also a phenomenon known as clairolfaction, which is a form of clairvoyance. It’s where a person is able to access their mediumistic ability through their sense of smell.”

&nbs
p; Wabiszewski smirked.

  “Okay, okay,” I said, a palm in the air. “I know it sounds as though I’m talking out of my ass, but remember, we’re talking about a dog … and dogs in the normal world already have this absurdly powerful sense of smell.”

  “I smell dead people,” Wabiszewski did a passable imitation of the clairvoyant kid from The Sixth Sense.

  “Shut up, Wabs,” Kippy said. “Vira’s a cadaver dog. It’s what she does.”

  “Wikipedia also coughed up some interesting information.” I shuffled my stack of sheets to another page with my good hand and began, “Retrocognition is when a person has knowledge of a past event, but could not have learned about that past event via ordinary means.” I paused a second, shrugged, and then dropped my stack of sheets onto the kitchen floor. “Look, I feel as though I should be humming the theme from The Twilight Zone, so let’s return to the land of the living. Training dogs is what I do—day in and day out. That said, Vira is the smartest, most-intuitive dog I’ve ever trained. The girl communicates with her eyes and, hell, her entire body better than any mime I’ve ever seen,” I said. “She recognizes voices and seems to comprehend more words than I do. This is miles beyond discerning gestures or being able to follow some simple pointing. And we’re fluent in each other’s cues. Vira can read my face, she can tell if I’m sick, she knows my moods—and I can be a moody son of a bitch.”

  “Most dog owners would say similar things about their precious little Fido or Rover,” Wabiszewski said.

  “But Vira is off the charts; she’s a freaking genius.”

  “So forget supernatural; rather, she’s a canine Madame Curie?”

  “I don’t know. Intelligence ultimately boils down to brain size relative to one’s body size—that’s why having a brain one-fiftieth the mass of our bodies puts us at the top of the food chain,” I said, amazed I recalled the fraction. “But dogs are no slouches either, their brains are at a ratio of 1:125 the mass of their bodies, and that holds true across all breeds. Most other animals would be in special-ed classes compared to dogs.”

  I could tell I was losing them in the math. “I have a final thought, though, and you two were there that first evening in Granger’s garage—maybe there’s some kind of uptick in neural activity or canine IQ or whatever caused by suffering heavy trauma at such an early age.”

  Wabiszewski smirked again.

  “You know her best, Mace.” Kippy stared my way. “No more BS. What is Vira’s special gift?”

  I had trouble making eye contact. Perhaps an extended stay at Chicago Lakeshore would be for the best. “Scent DNA.”

  “Scent DNA?” Wabiszewski said, his face scrunched like wrinkled laundry.

  “I tossed and turned last night, couldn’t sleep a wink, and it came to me around three a.m. Murder’s an intimate act, right? And killers leave all sorts of DNA that the CSI teams sort through. Now stick with me a second here. Why wouldn’t there be scent DNA—some kind of scent aura—left at crime scenes as well? Of course there would be. In terms of the Velvet Choker Killer, Nicky Champine had Kari Jo Brockman in his basement for three months. Ultimately, he’d strangled the poor girl and stuffed her in his trunk. And Nicomaine Ocampo’s son, John Jr., stabbed his mother to death in their kitchen.” I took a second to catch my breath. “Now Vira—and maybe all HRD dogs—receive this avalanche of stimulus, this smorgasbord of scent data, but she’s kicking it up to the next level. Seriously. Vira visits a crime scene and then attempts to process this smorgasbord, to perform some kind of forensic analysis on the various smells and odors—the scent DNA—and decode them.”

  We chewed quietly on this morsel before I continued.

  “I need a Stephen Hawking or someone light-years smarter to explain what I’m getting at, but the scent receptors in a dog’s nose are beyond amazing. You want supernatural—these scent receptors are supernatural and they enable dogs to identify thousands and thousands of different smells and, in Vira’s case, I think she interprets these odors. She makes links, she makes relationships … connections—she connects the dots,” I said. “So do I think Vira is some kind of ghost dog? Hell no. Vira’s just Vira—she’s the LeBron James of cadaver dogs.”

  CHAPTER 37

  “Why does it always have to be Hawaiian?” I asked as politely as my taste buds would permit. The two CPD detectives and I sat at the safe house’s kitchen table eating pizza with paper plates and plastic forks. The dogs were all in other rooms. I think even they’d gotten tired of the same scent night after night.

  “He’s screwing you with Canadian bacon and pineapple every evening?” Detective Marr said.

  “Hey,” Hanson said, plopping a third slab onto his plate, “the man who buys the pizza gets to pick the toppings.”

  “But the Department’s picking up the tab,” Marr replied.

  I looked at Detective Hanson.

  “Okay, the man who physically picks up the pizza and brings it to the safe house gets to pick the toppings.”

  CPD’s policy of my not ordering food to be delivered to the safe house had been explained to me. They didn’t want me handing out this address to anybody, not even my parents. I considered myself lucky they allowed Kippy and her partner to swing by now and again. In fact, those two would be arriving any minute, hopefully with more beer. “You tell the kid what that lady at Silver Years said?”

  Hanson finished chewing. “The kid’s got enough to worry about.”

  “You know I’m right here, don’t ya?”

  Hanson looked at me and said, “When the shooter called Silver Years the first time—with that bullshit ruse about finding his mother a place to live—the director jotted his name down on her calendar.”

  “And?”

  “He told her his name was Reid Mason.”

  “Good to know my murderer’s got a sense of humor,” I said, pushing my half-eaten first slice aside. I was no longer hungry. “I train dogs, and I try to help you guys out whenever stuff pops up, and now I’m walking around with this giant bull’s-eye on my back.”

  “See what you did?” Hanson said to Marr. “You got him all riled up.” He turned back to me. “As long as Marr and I aren’t the killer, you’re safe here. You even got your girlfriend stopping by.”

  “She’s not my girlfriend.”

  “Well,” the detective replied, “that’s a damn shame.”

  “I’ve canceled all my training classes. If anyone calls me with work, I have to say no,” I said. “As of now, I’m down to six hundred bucks in the bank.”

  “We should set up a GoFundMe page,” Marr said. “A picture of you and the dogs with a note: Please don’t let us get murdered.”

  “That’d probably go viral?” Hanson said.

  “If I do the page, kid, can I have ten percent?”

  “Sure,” I said, unsure if the two detectives were joshing or not. “Anything new today?”

  “This should cheer you up,” Hanson said. “When I was talking to that lady at Silver Years, she told me the guy on the other end of the phone had a white voice. I’m sure her hearing my black voice clued her in. I don’t know if I should be insulted or not.”

  “You’re too old to be insulted,” Marr said and turned to me. “It’s too bad you don’t have midget feet.”

  “Why?”

  “You’re a size nine and nine’s the same size shoeprint they got from the dirt in that strip of woods by your house. They also got a size nine from the soil around the pine trees at Gomsrud.”

  “Is there anything you can do with that?”

  “We’ve got some photographs and casts from the impression,” Marr replied, “but I don’t think our perp’s dumb enough to hang on to any designer boots he wore to a double murder.”

  “Look, kid, I know this sucks out loud for you—it’s a kick in the nuts—but believe me, you’re the first one I’ll call if anything breaks,” Hanson said. “We’ve interviewed and re-interviewed Nicky Champine’s neighbors. No one remembers there ever being any oth
er cars parked in Champine’s driveway or on the street in front of his house besides that Pontiac of his, which he always kept in the garage. We’re fingerprinting every square inch of his rambler. But having ruled out Champine’s prints and his kid’s, your prints, the prints of the female victims,” the detective shook his head, “that’s looking to be a dead end.”

  “Something’ll pop soon,” Marr said. “A cop was killed, and though we do our best to solve all murders, this cuts close to home. If it makes you feel better, when we get him—and we’ll get him—it’s fifty-fifty he comes out feet first.”

  “It’s not just us,” Hanson added. The two were tag-teaming to lift my spirits. “This is front burner if you’ve been watching the headlines. We’re working with Lansing PD, with their detectives. Even the FBI, their Chicago field office, has offered to help.”

  “Of course all those guys are a bunch of pussies,” Marr said, “but they let us use their database.”

  “Can’t they do that profiling thing?” I asked.

  Marr thought a moment and said, “You want a profile, kid? White male between thirty—’cause of experience, ’cause of what we’ve seen him do—and sixty. I go with sixty because I’m fifty-five and I’d be a hell of a serial killer if I put my mind to it. Our guy appears to be average height, average weight, hell; he’s even got an average shoe size.”

  “Fifty-fifty on him having served in the military based on the skill with which he used both the gun and knife.”

  “And he’s a cunning son of a bitch,” Marr continued. “Look how he put all of these pieces together in order to lure you out to Gomsrud. I’d even toss in that he’s a college grad, just for shits and giggles.”

  I made no comment.

  Detective Hanson finally said, “And killing’s easy for him.”

  “Yes,” Marr replied. “Killing is easy for him.”

  “You know it’s a popular misconception that African Americans aren’t serial killers,” Hanson said, switching topics. “That’s simply not true—we hold our own.”