by Hammond, T.
“Team Red, huh?” Lt. Mercer, mused.
“Yeah, because Red and his Peeps sounds like the name of a fourth-rate boy band, don’t you think Teresa?” My dog asked innocently.
“Shh,” I shushed at the not so innocent dog at my side.
“What did he say this time?” Bas asked with a smile in his voice.
I contemplated if it was even worth repeating and finally said, “Mr. Smarty Pants was suggesting that Red and His Peeps just didn’t sound right for our group name.”
Colonel Spencer chuckled, “Sounds like the name of one of those punk bands or something.”
Red’s laughter filled my mind and I added, “Red was thinking along the same lines.”
“Okay, I have to admit, I find the idea that the dog can talk to you is outrageous,” Lt. Mercer admitted. “I keep expecting someone to jump out with a camera and scream, Gotcha!”
“I have to agree,” Lt. Osborn seconded. “In fact, I wonder that you are so casual about this, Sir.” I assumed the statement was directed towards the senior officer. “You are not one to be taken in by whimsical fancy.”
Colonel Spencer chuckled. “I had a heads-up before lunch, and I may have suggested to a certain canine that tail swats to the knee caps of a rude lieutenant could prove amusing entertainment throughout the meal. There was no way an ordinary dog could have understood that request and continued to focus on one individual for the length of time Red did. I have been watching the dog act and react with people for the past hour, and I have to tell you, I’ve seen some pretty compelling things that convince me we have a very special dynamic going on here.”
“We are prepared to try and convince you…” I started.
There was a knock at the front door. I heard Ken’s chair scrape away from the table, as he got up to answer.
“Really?” I asked. “We have over a dozen drones flying over the property and twice in one day, someone makes it to the door without us having a warning?”
David chucked on my left. “It’s just Gil, I saw him on my tablet’s video feed, and he texted me he was coming up the drive.” He squeezed my fingers. “Sorry, Sweetheart, I should have mentioned it. You were relaying Red’s comments, and I didn’t want to interrupt.”
I flipped my hand over so that our fingers interlocked and brought his hand to my mouth so I could kiss his knuckles to acknowledge the apology.
I could hear Red dancing around in the foyer as he went to greet our guest.
“Did you know Gil was coming over today?” I asked David, as Bas made quiet introductions and explained what was going on.
“As soon as I saw his Explorer coming up the driveway, I remembered he was coming over to do some tracking tests with Red,” David said. “He may actually have a few ideas on what we can do for the colonel and his group.”
Gil pulled out a chair on the other side of Bas, and thanked Ken for a coffee mug. “Hey, Teresa. David.” He greeted.
“Hi, Gil. We were just getting ready to see if we could convince the lieutenants of Red’s abilities. I think we have the colonel in the bag,” I teased.
“Well, I can add a glowing testimonial that these two are phenomenal,” Gil said.
I heard Red add, “Hear that Teresa? We are Phenoms!”
There are times when I ignore the dog. Now, was one of those times.
Gil continued, “Red has a great nose for distinguishing between scents. When you add this to his ability to relay nuances or detect things we can’t find through DNA sampling, he is priceless. One simple example is that he can tell if a scent is male or female. He can smell a lie, although, I suspect that is enhanced by his observation of body language.”
“He’s got me there,” Red admitted. “Sometimes I notice the body language first, so I concentrate more on the smell to back up the observation.”
I relayed Red’s comments. Gil affirmed that during the testing he had been aware Red paid as much attention to his surroundings as he did to the trails he followed. “Red was complaining, just the other day, Gil, that the tracking tests are a bit boring because he can follow your, big-ass shoe prints, so he doesn’t need his sense of smell.”
Gil chuckled evilly, “Oh, the challenge is accepted, Red. The next tracking course won’t be so obvious.”
Red relayed a yawn, and I heard his body thump to the ground. “Yeah, whatever, Narco Boy. I could find you blind folded after going thru a skunk trail.”
I laughed, as I told Gil the dog’s thoughts. “You should be careful with the boasting, Red. Narco Boy is pretty devious,” I warned.
“Teresa, even with the skunk odor, I can still track through the smell. I don’t like it, and strong odors are distracting, but I can do it. And, there is always some visual signs I can find if my nose is uncertain. I am so not worried.”
“Our boy is feeling pretty cocky, Gil. He either has talents we haven’t recognized yet. Or he severely underestimates you,” I teased. “In fact, he sounds almost disdainful.” Never hurts to prod Gil to surpass expectations, I thought to myself.
“How long have you been working with Teresa and Red, Gil?” The colonel asked.
The detective was thoughtful for a moment, “I think it’s close to three months now. Mike Stephens, Detective Stephens, met them at a park when there was a missing child. They were able to half-convince Mike they could probably help the police department. I had set up a test, asking Red to place an item on a specific person’s chair; we had switched the chairs around before Team Red arrived so the chairs weren’t at the correct desks. We figured if Teresa or David was trying to direct Red based on the desk name plates, we’d expose them right away.” Gil paused to laugh quietly to himself. “It was the craziest thing to see the dog moving the chairs around to the proper desks. There was no way for Red to have done that without him being cognizant of the instructions, and relying on his sense of smell to match the chairs with the proper desks.
“Since that time, we have used Red to go through cold case evidence, as well as evidence on current investigations. Most significantly, he can distinguish one person’s blood from another’s - we had no idea his nose would be that fine-tuned. In a few cases, all he could tell us was that the same scent was on unrelated, separate crimes, helping us link them; this is important when we don’t have any forensic evidence at all. He’s able to tell us if there is more than one perpetrator, or the sex of the perp. It’s been amazing to learn what dogs are capable of, yet I also recognize that Red has a higher intelligence than a regular canine. It’s my guess his reasoning ability is closely tied to Teresa’s thought process, although, I have no way to prove that.”
“Wow,” Lt. Mercer said. “This is amazing stuff. What I find remarkable, is that his success seems to be measurable. Have you had success solving any of those cold cases?”
“Only one so far,” Gil admitted. “There’s not a whole lot of manpower to spend on ten-year-and-older cases, when we have so much current stuff to handle. But, we assign each person in the office one of the cold cases that Red has flagged. Each officer, or pair of officers in the instances where Red has linked two cases, work on their cases between current assignments. It involves a lot of reviewing old evidence, so its time consuming and often redundant. We are pretty hopeful about the two cases he’s managed to link up for us.”
“Just before you arrived, Teresa was telling us Red has the ability to prioritize. How does that work?” Lt. Osborn asked. This was his first contribution to the conversation, I had almost forgotten that he was present. “And, how would you measure something like that?”
“I can’t say it’s something we focused on measuring; although, it is very consistent in much of the work we have done already. One example would be when we asked Red about identifying a person in a line-up based on the scent off a bloody towel,” Gil explained. “We had picked up the towel at a crime scene a couple weeks earlier. During a breaking and entering, the perp sustained an injury on a glass window, then used a kitchen towel to clean up.
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“Oh!” Red said, scrambling to his feet and placing a paw on my lap. “I remember that one! That was the case last week.”
“Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s the one he’s talking about,” I agreed.
“I am brilliant!”
“I have to agree. That was actually one of your better ideas, Gil.” David said, and scratched Red’s ears.
“Oh, yeah, David… right there. Ohhhh.” Geez, Red sounded like a cheap porno flick. I grinned, as I imagined David’s amusement when I told him about this doggie soundtrack later.
“As I was saying,” Gil continued, “we brought in a suspect while Red was at the police department on an unrelated evidence review. When I saw Red in the processing area, I asked him if it were possible to determine from sniffing a towel, if it belonged to our suspect.” Gil paused for a moment to sip on his coffee.
“Not only was Red able to tell us that it wasn’t our suspect’s blood, he was able to tell us the blood on the towel belonged to the guy’s wife. The wife was there to accompany her husband, only, she wasn’t a suspect. We had no way of holding her, or of getting a DNA sample.”
I could hear Red dance in a circle as if chasing his tail, “This is the best part!”
I chuckled at my dog’s antics, and David started to laugh at my side. “I take it, he likes this story?”
“Oh yeah. He’s so full of himself right now, I can barely stand him,” I smiled indulgently.
“Red informed us the wife was on her period, and would probably be needing to change her feminine napkin (Nope, not the words Red used- some things I just can’t repeat), and we could probably get the DNA from that,” Gil explained. “You just can’t teach a dog to think of something like that. We had a couple female officers empty all the trash receptacles in the women’s bathroom on that floor, and we drew out the questioning on the husband for another hour; and sure enough, she finally went to the ladies room to change out her pad. We had two female officers follow that chain of evidence to the lab, and we were able to arrest her a couple days later when the results were in.
“A lot of things had to fall into place to make this work,” Gil continued. “What was brilliant was Red’s understanding of what we needed, and his ability to make a suggestion based on what he knew. The strength of the scent evidently told him she was wearing a pad. He was intelligent enough to realize what we needed for DNA, and offered a suggestion. Even if she had used a tampon, there would have been DNA on the applicator we could probably have used.”
David chuckled, “Red managed to gross out every male officer on the floor with his idea. Dog’s just don’t see blood or body fluids through the same lens as people.”
“True,” Gil said. “But, Ash, the lab tech simply adores him.”
“And Gil, absolutely adores Ash, the lab tech,” Red tattled.
“Really?” I said. “Gil and Ash, huh?”
“What’s this, Gil?” Bas asked in a teasing tone. “Are you sweet on Ash? You got good taste, my man. She’s a beauty.”
“Geez, I just can’t keep things private around here,” Gil groaned, dramatically.
“You know better than that, Gil. The dog repeats everything. He couldn’t keep a secret if his life depended on it,” David laughed.
Chapter Seven
The group of us sat around the table for another fifteen minutes or so, leisurely sipping coffee and munching on home-baked cookies.
“When you and Red are talking, is there a limit to your range? Does he just fade out until you can’t hear him?” Lt. Osborn asked.
“The communication seems to work more like a phone call does. We have reception whether Red and I are separated by two feet or twenty. When we get about thirty feet apart, it’s just like the call drops. I hear him just as clearly when he’s across a room, as when he’s resting his head on my lap. Since he speaks to my mind, he can multi-task; it’s not like he has to stop and vocalize. For example, when he was growling at Devon earlier, we were able to carry on a conversation.” I took a gulp of my coffee then, canted the cup towards David to silently ask for a top-off.
“Red’s hearing is good enough, I don’t have to speak loudly to get his attention. I combine speech and our version of sign language, since I never know if he’s looking my way.”
“Actually, when I hear you start to talk, I look over to see if you’re speaking to me. I can hear you talking over a distance, better than I can one of the guys,” Red commented.
“I didn’t know that,” I said, surprised. This had never come up before.
When I relayed this tidbit to the group, Lt. Mercer suggested, “Women have higher pitched voices. The vocal range may have something to do with why he can pick your voice out easier.”
Gil agreed that was probably the case, and volunteered to check on a dog’s hearing range. He was no longer a K-9 handler in his duties with the SPD, but he still worked with the dogs peripherally, in particular, with Red; he tried to keep up to date on tracking ideas, evidence handling, and general canine behavior and biology to be a better policeman.
“On that subject, Gil, do dogs see better than humans?” I asked.
“I’ll have to give you one of my no, but yes, answers,” He chuckled. “First off, I’m sure you already know that dogs are color blind.”
“They see in black and white?” Lt. Osborn asked.
“No,” Gil corrected. “Dogs are color blind, like people who are color blind. They can’t see in shades of red or green. Most of what they see is in muted shades of yellow and blue. If you were to look up color blind on the internet, you’d see dogs have a very limited color spectrum. Secondly, dogs don’t have the same visual acuity that humans have – maybe only thirty or thirty-five percent. I’d have to look it up to be sure.”
“So, you’re saying, compared to people, dogs are near-sighted?” Bas asked.
“Yep, pretty much. On the flip side, they have better eyesight than humans in dim light, so I would venture to say their night vision is superior. They also detect movement better than people, so they would be faster to see something camouflaged than you or I would.”
“I am a noble nocturnal hunter,” Red said with pride. “All the better to lay my trap for unwary cats.”
“Aw, come on Red, enough with the cat trapping. The neighbor’s cat is awfully sneaky. You may have a predisposition to hunt at night, but it’s gonna take a great idea to catch him.”
Again, with the evil chuckle. “Her. But, I have come up with the idea of the perfect cat trap,” Red boasted.
“We already told you, we won’t help you make a cat trap,” David reminded him. “And I’ll remind you that you are not allowed to hurt her.”
“The only thing that I’ll hurt is her pride,” my dog said, smugly.
“I like that no cat will be harmed in the execution of your plan, Red. Which brings me to a question of my own… What do you plan to do with the cat if you catch her?” My mind went off tangent with mental thoughts of a cat trying to tear its way out of a burlap sack.
“How much postage do you think I need to mail her to the Catskill Mountains?”
The what? Postage? “You can’t mail a cat!” I objected, very strenuously, I might add.
“I don’t see why not. If no one opens the box then the cat will be both alive and dead- no harm, no foul.”
“Alright, who is half-ass teaching Red about quantum physics and Schrödinger’s Cat paradox?” I asked the room in general. I was so tempted at this point to just bang my head on the table top, but a clearer head prevailed (I didn’t want to slosh my coffee). I repeated Red’s reasoning out loud to let everyone know the level of insanity to which my dog had sunk.
“Uh, that would be me,” Ken admitted. “I wasn’t teaching him about it, I was doing homework for my science class, and Janey and I were discussing the Schrödinger’s Cat theory. We were also talking about the Catskill Mountains, too. My mom lives there, and we are thinking about a trip back east to visit my family over the holidays.�
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Sigh. “Red, you know Schrödinger’s Cat is just a scientific theory, right? You can’t really mail the cat, it would die in the box. If you catch the cat, you can’t hurt it, so that means you can’t mail it.”
“Maybe we can give her to Gil? He’s already got one cat, we may as well just load him up with one more. Besides, Molly likes cats; as far as I can tell, that’s the only thing wrong with her,” Red said, referring to Gil’s Golden Retriever.
“The cat isn’t ours, Red. We can’t just give her to Gil, we can’t give her to anyone, she’s already owned by the neighbor.”
“But she keeps coming into MY yard,” Red complained, channeling his inner two-year-old.