Soul Search: A Zackie Story

by Reyna Favis

  Once we secured a parking space, I popped open the trunk and handed Cam a safety vest with reflective strips to wear over his jacket and found some eye protection for each of us. Digging a little deeper, I found a flashlight and handed that to Cam as well. I put on a high vis orange jacket with reflective strips, grabbed my ready pack and started moving some of the contents to a fanny pack. Being careful around the cast, I helped Cam put on the backpack and locked it down with some strap adjustments. I next placed the GPS in one cargo pocket and the radio in the other and then strapped on my helmet, so I could go hands-free using the headlamp. Strapping on the fanny pack, I adjusted the weight so that it was secure on my hips. Hopefully, this arrangement would allow both of us to carry the weight of necessary items in a way that would cause the least amount of distress to our healing bones. While I checked my headlamp light, I asked, “What are you going to do about Zackie’s harness and lead?”

  Improvising, Cam grabbed an LED armband for jogging at night and affixed it to Zackie’s collar. “That’ll do. And by the way, if anyone asks, she is a scent discriminating trailing dog who works off lead.” He winked and then examined his arms. “Check me to make sure my cast is adequately disguised by the jacket?” I thought we passed muster and it was unlikely that anyone at incident command would even notice that we had injuries and turn us away as the walking wounded. Even though neither of us was in that bad shape anymore, it would be unconscionable if we became liabilities during the search and distracted workers from the real subject. We both did some experimental maneuvering to make sure we would hold up if we had to walk a few miles over rugged terrain. Satisfied that we were physically able, we presented ourselves at the trailer to sign in as an available resource.

  Until we were tasked, we waited with the other searchers in staging. Among the people milling about, I recognized Bill Fry from the search for the autistic boy and approached him to find out any additional information about the current subject.

  Bill remembered me and shook my hand. “Her name is Amy Turpin. She normally runs trails here in the early hours of the morning before work, but her company announced a reorganization today and she got some bad news. When she didn’t return home at her usual time, her fiancé became worried that the job loss had hit her pretty hard. She’s had a history of depression, but had been taking meds and coping all right up until now, at least according to the fiancé. Anyway, he tried her cell and got no answer, so he started calling friends and driving around to the places she frequented. He thought she might have gone running to work off the stress, so he headed here and found her car. It was locked up tight and her cell was on the passenger seat.”

  Cam looked troubled. “Wouldn’t she normally take her cell with her when she went running?”

  Bill nodded. “Yeah, the fiancé said she had an arm band that she stuck it in, so she could listen to music while she ran.”

  “Okay, so she’s a possible despondent.” I blew out a sigh. “Does anyone know if she owns a gun and maybe took it with her?”

  Bill shook his head. “No, no gun that we have to worry about.” Bill paused to unwrap a protein bar and took a bite before continuing. “The cops unlocked the car, but didn’t find a suicide note. Right now, they’re running hasties on the trails to see if they can find her and they sent another team to a high point with a scenic view, in case she took a leap. A bunch of other teams are sign cutting along the road to see if she went in to any of the trails from the road.”

  Cam glanced at Zackie. “Were they able to establish direction of travel with any dog teams?”

  Bill shook his head again. “Not yet. We had a few air scent dogs respond, but no trailing dogs yet. You’re trailing, right? They’ll probably task you next to see if you can do that.” Thrusting his chin at Zackie, Bill asked, “Will it mess up your dog having all the searchers walking around over where Amy might have walked?”

  Cam shook his head. “No, we train for contamination. We do exercises like having her follow a specific scent through a high traffic area, like a Walmart entrance. She has to work through all the other old and new scent from the hundreds of customers and follow only the correct scent.” Bill’s eyes widened and he nodded, clearly impressed by this ability. “But if someone has been in the car touching things, that will likely have contaminate scent articles for the subject. We would need to negative her off of that person, so she can rule out their scent when she starts her trail.”

  As Bill predicted, we were soon called to the table and assigned a task to establish direction of travel. Cam was eager to start, so rather than take the time to pick up scent from the subject by incubating gauze pads on the car seat, he announced that he would scent her directly from the seat. He asked for the police officer and anyone else who might have been inside the car, so Zackie could negative their scent. The man assigning tasks called out for Officer Creighton and within minutes, a tall woman in uniform approached the table. She had wheat blonde hair and piercing green eyes that missed nothing. When I looked at her, the words ‘strong,’ ‘capable’ and ‘Amazon’ came to mind. Cam explained what was needed and the officer confirmed that she was the only one to access the vehicle and it had been secured since that access.

  We all walked to the vehicle together and asked the officer to open the door, since her scent was already on the handle. While I turned on my GPS, Cam reached down to turn on Zackie’s jogger lights and then asked the officer to present her hands for Zackie to sniff. Pointing to the driver’s seat, Cam then told Zackie to take scent and then gave her the final command to find the subject. Zackie began following the scent and we took off behind her, thanking the officer for her help as we left. As we walked away from the floodlights of staging, we each turned on our light sources and kept a sharp eye on Zackie’s red blinking light.

  Following Zackie, we went towards the far corner of the parking lot and to the blue trail head. She paused for a moment to spy us over her shoulder and then took to the trail. She kept up a good pace and we did our best to keep our balance as we traversed a field of jiggly rocks on the path. Our lights helped, but they could only illuminate a short distance in front of us, so we were constantly surprised by the treacherous footing. Thankfully, Zackie was mindful not to lose us in the dark and would frequently pause, waiting for us to catch up. It was cool and I sucked in and out the tangy scent of wet earth as I panted with the effort of moving uphill. After only a tenth of a mile on the trail, I was dripping sweat and thinking of peeling off the jacket. Just as I was about to ask for a halt to accomplish this adjustment, Zackie shot into the woods on our right. Finding the deer path she followed, we went in after her, forcing our way through the brush. I scanned the area for the blinking red light on Zackie’s collar and froze as I caught the muzzle of a revolver in the light of my headlamp. Cam touched my arm in warning and we both stood stock-still.

  “Call your dog off.” The man with the gun was dressed in camo and carried a large bowie knife at his belt. He kept the handgun trained on us. “I’m not going to ask you again.”

  Cam’s voice was steady as he called Zackie to him. “Zackie, come.” She stood directly in front of the man with her nose in the air, scenting him. At the command to come, she looked back at us and then back at him. She did everything except to jump up and touch him with her front paws to tell us that this was the scent from the driver’s seat. Cam nodded to her and tried again. “Zackie, come.” This time, she looked at us with her ‘screw you’ face and sneezed her objection. “Sorry, she’s not as well trained as she might be.”

  The man didn’t answer, but the muzzle lowered towards Zackie and I heard a deafening bang at the same time that my eyes registered a brilliant flash of light that was synchronized with the flare from the muzzle. Zackie must have phased out and then back in again faster than I thought was possible and the bullet passed harmlessly through the air where she had been before she reappeared. “What the hell! That was point blank.” Twigs snapped as the man took a step forward to shoot
her again. In that same moment, Zackie lunged forward to meet him and her teeth clamped down on the wrist of his gun hand, grabbing not the flesh, but a silvery white substance that she pulled and stretched before letting it go. The man collapsed and the substance retracted back into his body.

  Zackie trotted back to us and acted like she had finished her assignment. She fully expected us to compliment her on her find. I stared, my eyes wide and my breath coming fast. “What the fuck was that, Cam? Is he dead?”

  Cam exhaled loudly and then took a deep breath before he answered. “She could have killed him. She could have yanked his soul right out of his body. When they take him to the hospital, they’ll find a perfectly natural explanation. Maybe a cerebral hemorrhage or heart attack.”

  I rubbed my face and got a grip. Reaching for my GPS, I marked where we were and then grabbed my radio. “We need to call this in. They must have heard the shot.” As I contacted command to give a report and our location, Cam rolled the man over and checked for a pulse and breathing. He gave me a thumbs up and I began manufacturing a story for IC. “Yes, a man with a gun. He tried to shoot us, but the shot went wild and then he collapsed. Send a medical team and a rescue team with a stokes basket. Stand by for our coordinates.” That done, I handed the radio to Cam, so he could give an update on the subject’s condition.

  While we waited for the teams to make their way to us, we dug the tarp out of Cam’s pack and collected leaves to serve as insulation between the tarp and the ground. We placed these under the man to keep him from losing body heat to the cold ground. Cam then inspected the man with his flashlight before covering him with a mylar blanket. “He’s got blood on him and it’s not his.” Sweeping the light, he focused on the knife. “There’s quite a bit on the knife.”

  I looked at Zackie and then looked back at the man. “Zackie said she was following his scent, so he must have been in the car. Do you think he grabbed Amy and drove her here?”

  Cam sighed as he squatted down to look closer at the blood. “I think he killed her. There’s an awful lot of blood.”

  As if on cue, the radio crackled and one of the hasty teams made a request for law enforcement to come to their location. They would never report finding a body over a radio, since anyone could be listening to the frequency. They would use their cell phones and call IC to tell them what they found. I strongly suspected that they found Amy’s body.

  # # #

  Hours later, near dawn, we were still in staging as the police asked their questions and gathered their evidence. We and the hasty team who found the body had been interviewed by the critical incident management team shortly after we returned from the trails. They told us that we could attend a debrief in the next few days if we felt stressed by what we experienced. We were handed cards with contact information in case we needed to talk about things sooner. The critical incident team assured us that our reactions were normal and gave us a list of symptoms to watch for over the short term. I read over the symptoms and found that I’d been identifying with nearly everything on the list for years. Nothing different here. I tucked the card in a shirt pocket and forgot about it.

  We were asked to stay put, so the police could get statements from us. While I made my statement to the police, Cam put Zackie back in the car to let her doze and to keep her out from under foot. While Cam answered their questions, I sat around feeling increasingly restive as I waited for them to finish with us. Fortunately, someone had the decency to bring in food for the searchers during the night, so we at least had slices of cold pizza to soothe ourselves as we waited to be released.

  “You were crazy lucky.” I looked up to see Officer Creighton standing over me. “Do you mind if grab a slice?”

  I pushed the pizza box closer to her and she sat next to me on the ground before taking a slice. “Either I was lucky or the shooter was incredibly unlucky.”

  Chewing slowly, she looked at me. “No, you were lucky. I’ve never heard of anything so freaky. Just as he’s about to shoot you, he has an aneurysm. That just doesn’t happen.” She shook her head in disbelief.

  “I guess it gives me a story I can tell for the rest of my life. I’m Fia, by the way.”

  Wiping her hand on her slacks, she extended it toward me for a shake. “Jill.” Jill went back to demolishing her pizza and spoke between bites. “I wish everything in life turned out that good.”

  “Tell me about it.” I picked off a pepperoni and popped it in my mouth. “I am spared a gunshot wound, only to face unemployment. The fun never stops.”

  “What did you used to do?”

  I explained to Jill how I cobbled together an existence with an assortment of odd jobs and she nodded approvingly. “It worked okay for me for a while, I guess.” Looking around, I spied a carton of water bottles and got up. “I’m getting some water. Do you want some?” She nodded her thanks as I handed her the bottle and sat down again.

  Jill took a long pull on the water and then wiped her mouth. “Maybe you should contact this business I know. You’ve got bloodborne pathogen training for search?” I nodded. “That’s good. You’ll need that… You’re probably not squeamish, right?” I rolled my eyes and shook my head. After everything the dead have shown me, I could definitely say it took a lot to gross me out. “So, this business does crime scene clean up. It pays well, but the hours can be kind of random. You’ll probably spend your life in a hazmat suit if you want to do this for a living.”

  I hesitated for a moment, but then looked her in the eye. “I hate to admit it, but this might be my dream job. Where do I sign up?” Some of my confession was bravado, but I was still surprised to hear myself say this. I might be desperate for a job, but in the very recent past, I would have gone screaming into the hinterlands at the thought of deliberately going into a situation where the dead were likely to be lurking. Props to Cam and Zackie for bringing me this far this fast. From a practical standpoint, when I thought about the work conditions, this job might actually be tailor made for me. If I wore gloves all the time, no one would bat an eye.

  Jill took out a pad and a pen from her shirt pocket and wrote down a number. Tearing out the sheet, she handed it to me and said to mention her name when I called. She next handed me a tissue and told me to wipe the sauce off my face before she got up and went back to work.

  # # #

  Days later, the full extent of the tale started to emerge as we talked to other searchers and read the newspapers. The shooter was an ex-boyfriend. After finding out that Amy was affianced to someone else, like most deranged ex-boyfriends, he decided that if he could not have her, no one could. He became fixated on no one having her and devised a plan to grab Amy from the parking lot of her work place. It was coincidental that he did this on the same day that the layoffs were announced, convincing the searchers that she was a despondent and completely befuddling the lost person profile. After shoving her in the trunk, he drove her car to the state park and forced her up the blue trail and then into the woods. He tied Amy to a tree and slashed her throat, covering himself in her blood in the process. He was on his way down the trail with the intent of moving her car at the same time Cam, Zackie and I were heading up the trail, unknowingly following his scent. Once he realized that the parking lot was lousy with search and rescue, emergency medical services and law enforcement, he went off trail and thought he could bushwhack his way out and avoid notice. He did not count on scent betraying his location to a search dog. Panicking at being discovered, he must have decided that after having already killed one person, a few more dead people on his conscience would make no real difference to him. If not for Zackie, we would have joined Amy on the other side.

  As soon as we were certain that the police had completed their investigation of the crime scene, we made plans to return to the state park to look for Amy. After such a violent death, we were sure that she would be unable to move on and would need our help.

  Cam sent an e-mail to one of the guys on the hasty team and explained that he was put
ting together a canine search report to submit to his SAR chief and needed some information to better understand his dog’s behavior during the search. If the guy could give Cam the coordinates of where the body was found, it would be possible to reconstruct the shooter’s movements and maybe what Zackie did would make sense. The guy replied minutes later with the coordinates and wished him luck with report writing.

  Armed with the exact location, we returned to the state park and hiked up the blue trail to the point where the shooter dragged Amy into the woods. Within seconds of going off-trail, the temperature plummeted around us and a weak sobbing echoed in the woods. Triangulating on the sound and using the GPS to get us closer, we eventually came to the tree where Amy met her end. Crime scene tape still surrounded the area and there was a telling stain on the tree bark. As Zackie approached the tree, a woman dripping blood from her throat emerged from behind it. Clots of blood hung from her lank brown hair and her wrists bore the burns from struggling with the rope. Amy had suffered enough.

  “It’s all right now, Amy.” Cam approached her slowly, as if she were a fawn that might spook and bolt into the forest. “We’re here to help.”

  CHAPTER 18

  Hannah lay in a fetal position, clutching her belly and curling herself around Zackie. The last round of treatment had been delivered the previous day and things were not going well for her.

  Lucas sat near the bed, bowed with his elbows on his knees and his hands clasped. “The second day is always the worst. She’ll rally soon.” His voice was low and even he didn’t sound convinced. Cam and I nodded dumbly, not sure what to say. Pity welled up in me as I looked at the two of them. There was a real devotion between Lucas and Hannah and if circumstances had been different, they would have had a long and happy marriage. It was odd that I could recognize this truth, while at the same time have such strong feelings for Lucas. I really am an idiot some times.