by Paula Munier
Susie Bear plopped back down as well. Troy frowned at Mercy but handed his dog another fry anyway.
“That’s enough,” he told her. “I happen to like fries.”
“I can’t help it if your dog knows an alpha when she sees one.”
“Very funny,” he said with a laugh, and set about systematically destroying the rest of his burger and fries.
She focused on her food and they ate in silence under the watchful eyes of their four-legged friends.
“I don’t believe in coincidence,” Troy said finally.
“Neither do I.” Mercy tapped the surface of the table with her index finger. “Someone took good care of that baby.”
“Yeah, right up until they left her in the woods to die.” His voice was calm but there was a note of disgust there that cheered her.
“Maybe.”
“Hail Mary pass theory again?” Troy turned his attention to his milkshake.
“Maybe they didn’t leave her to die but to be found.”
He stopped midslurp. “By you?”
“By somebody.” She thought about it. “It is a holiday week. Maybe they figured someone was bound to come by sooner or later.”
“Seems risky. The Lye Brook Wilderness is not nearly as popular as the national forest it borders. Why not pick a more well-traveled route?”
“I don’t know.” She took a bite of her burger. “But some of us hike there regularly anyway. Maybe they knew that.”
The warden considered this. “No evidence of a struggle.”
“And they left diapers and bottles and formula and wipes—everything she’d need, at least in the short term.”
“Yeah.”
“Elvis and I have hiked up to those falls nearly every morning since spring. We leave at dawn and take the same route, more or less. We don’t usually see many people on the way up because it’s so early. But we glimpse more people later on the way down. Sometimes with babies. Not often. But it does happen from time to time.”
“Just because you don’t see them doesn’t mean they don’t see you. Especially if they’re off-trail.” He seemed to be warming to her theory.
“True enough.”
“We’ve got the baby clothes and the carrier. Maybe that will give us something.”
“What about baby footprints?”
“There’s really no database,” he said. “But we can check the birth records from around six months ago, when the doc says she was probably born.”
“I could take her,” she said. “I mean, instead of her going to Child Protective Services.” Which was ridiculous, since she didn’t know that much about babies.
He eyed her with surprise. “That’s not really how it works. But I suspect you know that.”
“I did keep this baby alive until you came along.”
“You saved her life,” he said. “No question about that. And maybe her mother was counting on that.”
They both fell silent at that.
Finally Mercy spoke. “If her mother left her there for me and Elvis to find, then she must be in trouble.”
“Which leads us right back to the bones and bombs.”
“But you said there were no bombs.”
“I said they didn’t find any explosives.”
“But they did find something.”
“You never give up, do you?” Troy looked at her with a mix of admiration and annoyance.
She didn’t say anything. Just waited him out.
“I couldn’t tell you at the crime scene. Too many people around.” He paused. “I probably shouldn’t be telling you now.”
“But you will.” She leaned toward him. “You know you want to.”
He stiffened, and she laughed. To his credit, he laughed, too. “They found traces of PETN, a chemical compound often found—”
“Often found in explosives,” Mercy interrupted. “Yeah, I know.”
More important, Elvis knew. As a sniffer dog, he was trained to find weapons and to detect a number of explosives odors. When he alerted to a scent, that scent was typically gunmetal; detonating cord; smokeless powder; dynamite; nitroglycerin; TNT; RDX, a chemical compound often found in military-grade explosives; TATP, used in peroxide-based explosives; and PETN.
PETN stood for pentaerythritol tetranitrate, a powerful explosive similar in structure to nitroglycerin and used by everyone from miners and the military to terrorists.
“Of course.” Troy looked over at Elvis. “That explains why he found the PETN. But it doesn’t explain why he found the bones.”
“Susie Bear found the bones.”
“But Elvis was there, too.” He frowned. “Is he trained to find cadavers?”
“Not exactly. That is, I don’t know,” she said. Like all military working dogs, Elvis was trained as a patrol dog, to guard checkpoints and gates, detect intruders, secure bases, apprehend suspects, and attack on command. But beyond that, most military working dogs were specialists; they were trained to sniff out drugs or cadavers or explosives. For Elvis, it was all about explosives. At least that’s what Martinez told her.
Troy stood up, gathered up the litter of his meal, and dropped it all into the trash can that flanked the picnic table. Turning back to face her, he placed his large hands on the table and leaned in toward her. “What does that mean, exactly?”
Elvis promptly sat up and growled. Susie Bear reacted, too, lumbering to her feet and facing off with the Belgian shepherd as if to say, Dude, what’s up.
“It means that I don’t know.” Mercy stood up, too, and steadied the shepherd with a pat on his head. “Not for sure.”
Troy leaned back, straightening his spine and standing up. He looked like cops looked when you lied to them. Unimpressed.
“What kind of dog handler are you?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
“I’M NOT A DOG HANDLER,” Mercy said.
“But you said you were an MP.” He looked confused now. “And that checked out.”
She sat back down, silent. Elvis stayed on his feet. So did Susie Bear.
“I’ve got work to do.”
“Please sit. Let me explain.” She gave the hand signal for down again, and both dogs obliged. Troy did not.
Mercy would have to tell him everything, like it or not. She didn’t want the warden to lose confidence in her. Or Elvis.
He glanced at his watch. “You’ve got five minutes.” He sat back down and folded his hands on the table.
“Thank you.”
Troy waited. The dogs waited. All three pairs of brown eyes on her now.
Mercy looked past them all, out over Lillian’s potager garden. “I was an MP stationed in Afghanistan. The only female MP at the base. So in addition to the usual convoy duty, I also conducted searches of female suspects and helped train female Afghanis for law enforcement.”
“And Elvis?”
“He was one of the sniffer dogs attached to our unit. Martinez was his handler.”
At the sound of his handler’s name, Elvis sat back up again, ears up. Troy noticed, and Mercy noticed his noticing.
“Sergeant Juan Miguel Pedro Martinez,” she said. “From Las Vegas, by way of the Mezquital Valley in Mexico.”
“What happened to the sergeant?” Troy’s voice was quiet and respectful.
“He died in action.” She reached down and placed her hand on Elvis’s fine head. “One year ago tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry.”
“His team was en route to a village that intel told us had been infiltrated by the enemy,” she said. “I went along to search the women. We got ambushed on the way and needed to move to a more defensible position. Our only way out was under fire, through a couple of miles of poppy fields. In Afghanistan, poppy fields were usually rife with homemade explosives—crude but deadly.”
“Not good. I did a tour in Afghanistan. Plenty of poppy fields.”
“So you know,” she said. “Elvis guided us through the fields to a stronger location, where we at least had a chanc
e. But then word came down that we’d stumbled into a nest of high-value targets. We needed to take them out in an ambush of our own. As soon as we breached the perimeter of the compound, we came under fire. We fired back as we raided the compound, with Elvis going into the largest of the structures and alerting to an IED immediately. This allowed us to secure the building and move on to the others. Elvis kept on working and alerted to an underground arsenal with dozens of AK-47 assault rifles, multiple pressure plates, and nearly a hundred pounds of explosives.”
“Elvis did good.”
“He did. Martinez was so proud of him.” Her hand was still on the shepherd’s handsome head. The feel of his silky fur on her palm steadied her. “The explosives team took over then, and he and Elvis left the building to help conduct an outdoor search of the compound. A sniper took him out. They dragged him to safety, but there was only so much the medics could do. They had to get him and the rest of our injured out of there. Elvis helped the team establish a safe zone where the helicopter bound for the hospital unit could land.”
Mercy hesitated, and removed her hand from the shepherd’s head with a final scratch of his ears. She folded her arms around herself, suddenly cold. “They got him out of there, but it was too late. He died on the operating table.”
“And then you and the dog came home.” There was a question in his voice.
“I was sent home to recuperate from my own injury.” At the look on Troy’s face, she was quick to reassure him. “I’m fine.”
“And Elvis?”
“He was never really the same again. They sent him back to the defense contractor, but I’d promised Martinez I’d take care of him myself. So I bullied them until they let me have him.”
“His family didn’t want the dog?”
“He was born here. But his parents were not. They worked in Las Vegas in the hotels. Undocumented workers. When they lost their jobs, they had to go back to Mexico. They’re still there.”
“You were obviously very close. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
“We weren’t supposed to be together. Non-fraternization policy, you know.”
The game warden nodded.
“So we kept our feelings to ourselves.” Mercy willed away the unshed tears gathering in the corners of her eyes. “As long as we were deployed together.”
Elvis moved his nose onto her lap. Mercy turned away from Troy. She cupped Elvis’s dark muzzle in her hands and looked into the dog’s deep brown eyes. “We were going to be married as soon as our assignments changed. He put in for a transfer to train dog handlers at Lackland. He was so good with the dogs and the handlers, it was just a matter of time before they sent him to Texas. He insisted we wait until we could do it right.”
Mercy released the shepherd and looked up at Troy. “And now he’s dead. Nothing right about that.”
“I’m sorry,” he said again.
“So I’m no dog handler.” She stood up abruptly. “Elvis is stuck with me, and I’m learning as fast as I can.”
“That explains all the training.” Troy came to his feet and reached over to pat Elvis’s head. “It’s not easy to take on a dog like this, who’s already bonded so tightly with his handler. He’s a lucky dog.”
“It’s the least I could do. But I’ve had help. My grandmother, of course. And I’ve been working with him one on one, the way Martinez used to.”
“That’s great. Do you do agility training with him?”
“Not beyond the usual obstacles on the trail. You know, jumping over logs, streams, whatever’s in the way.”
“You might want to try Two Swords K-9 Training. Jake over there works with a lot of dogs like Elvis. Susie Bear loves it.”
Mercy knew that agility training had been part of the Malinois’s training at Lackland. “I’ll think about it.”
“We’d be happy to take you guys over there anytime.”
“Thanks. He might like that.”
Susie Bear barked as if she knew what they were saying—and maybe she did, or maybe she just wanted more fries. They both laughed. Mercy divvied up the rest of her french fries between the two dogs and ditched her own mess into the trash bin while Troy checked his messages.
“Time to go,” he said, his face hard with an emotion she couldn’t quite name. But whatever it was, it wasn’t good.
“What’s wrong?”
“The baby’s gone.”
CHAPTER NINE
THE CHILDREN’S WING OF THE NORTHSHIRE MEDICAL CENTER was on the third floor. Troy and Mercy stood in a small office decorated with the same bright and cheerful jungle murals as the rest of the ward, interviewing head pediatric nurse Anne Dougherty about Baby Doe’s disappearance. He’d warned Mercy to let him handle the questioning, and she’d complied, more or less.
But so far they’d gotten nowhere. No one knew anything or saw anything.
Troy was frustrated, but he hoped it didn’t show on his face as clearly as it did on Mercy’s. Even her freckles looked angry now, dark dots against pale skin flushed with impatience.
“There’s a security code to get into the ward,” she was saying to the nurse, although it sounded more like an accusation. “How could anyone get in?”
He cleared his throat, a signal to Mercy to back off.
“Yes,” said Anne. “There is a security code. But one of our seriously ill patients took a turn for the worse, and we had to admit several young people injured in that big accident on Route 313. Much more coming and going than usual. Whoever took her must have slipped in then.”
Troy nodded. “I heard about that.”
“Terrible.” Anne folded her hands into the pockets of her scrubs. “We were focused on getting everyone in and evaluated and treated as quickly as possible.”
“Understood,” he said. Anne was an implacable middle-aged woman with kind eyes and a firm manner clearly designed to deal with young patients and their worried parents. Mercy may not have been Baby Doe’s mother, but she sure acted like she was. Troy wondered how someone so tough on the outside and yet so soft on the inside ever survived combat. But she had.
“Have we spoken to everyone on duty?” He stepped forward, taking back control of the interview. Mercy stayed where she was.
“Everyone but Mary Hodges,” said Anne. “She left her shift early to go on vacation. Before we knew that the baby was gone.”
“Where?” asked Troy and Mercy in unison.
So much for letting him run his own interview, he thought.
Anne checked her watch. “She’s on the Long Trail somewhere between here and Canada by now.”
“We’ll want to talk to her as soon as we can.” He wrote down Hodges’s cell phone number as Anne dictated it. “Let’s see the room where the baby was staying.”
“Of course.” Anne led them out of her office and down a long hall lined with patient rooms on one side and offices on the other. All the doors were painted bright colors, reminding him of the poster of front doors in Dublin that hung framed over the table in his grandmother Maeve’s kitchen. She was his only Irish relation in a sea of Yankee forbearers who dated back to pre-Revolutionary days—and she never let him forget it.
The baby’s room held a single white metal adjustable crib and the usual medical paraphernalia, overseen by a tower of tan and orange giraffes nibbling at the leaves of green acacia trees painted on the walls. A cheerful room, despite the hospital smell and the disheartening fact that its occupants were always sick children.
The crib was empty and unmade.
“Everything here looks like hospital issue,” he said.
“Yes,” confirmed Anne.
“What happened to the backpack carrier?” asked Mercy. “And the baby’s clothes? The teethers?”
“We keep the patient’s personal belongings in here.” Anne opened the small closet at the side of the bed. “Nothing here. Whoever took the baby must have taken the baby’s things as well.”
“Sounds like a domestic snatch,” said Troy. “So she’s p
robably physically safe, at least.”
“We’ve got to find her,” said Mercy.
“We will,” he said. “Starting with an AMBER Alert.”
* * *
MERCY WAS NOT happy when Troy sent them home. Nothing she could say could talk him out of it. He kept telling her to get a good night’s sleep and they’d touch base in the morning. Which she knew was cop code for “You’re just a civilian, let us pros handle it.” She didn’t expect to hear from him any time soon. So she’d have to carry on herself, with Elvis as her right-hand canine.
The search for whoever had left the baby in the woods had turned up nothing, and odds were whoever had the baby now was long gone from southern Vermont. But she still had to try.
She turned the Jeep into the long drive that led up to the old log cabin on the hill. The small house—originally a hunting camp—sat on fifty acres of forest land fronted by a stream that ran along the back of the barn. She’d bought the property when she came home from Afghanistan, drawn to its Lincoln Log charm and desolate isolation in equal measure. Here she hid out with Elvis and an assortment of noisy birds, aggressive squirrels, wild turkeys, hungry deer, and the occasional black bear for company. And she liked it that way.
The wild turkeys were the ones most likely to overrun the property. Several fearless fowl cluttered the drive now, unafraid of the vehicle and its passengers. Even Elvis didn’t scare these guys. He’d befriended the tough birds on that first day the cabin was theirs, somehow knowing they were here first and belonged here. But he did not extend that same courtesy to the other little critters on the property, which scrambled whenever the Belgian shepherd showed up.
She angled the Jeep around the turkeys and pulled up to the side of the cabin, parking by the old stone wall that separated the front yard from the driveway. She grabbed their packs and trudged to the back of the vehicle, opening the hatchback for a very animated Elvis. The dog leapt out and streaked straight for the front door. He seemed as happy to be home as she was. It had been a long day, and they were both tired.
She followed him through the weathered rose arbor and up the worn granite path through the garden that led to the wide south-facing front porch, where you could sit in one of the rocking chairs and watch the sun rise over the mountains to the east at dawn and set over the mountains to the west at dusk. When she’d first come back from Afghanistan, she’d spent a lot of time rocking on this porch, staring out at the mountains. Her only enhancement to that splendid view was a flagpole and an American flag, which flew day in and out at half mast in honor of her fallen comrades.